The Ministry of Blades : The Pyramids of Hertfordshire, episode 2

Prentiss dodges a mummy; April accelerates its collapse.

Played

25th March 2010.

Dramatis Personae

Miss Constantina Spit - a Rebellious Debutante.
Captain Benson Curruthers - a Military Policeman.
Jack Prentiss - a Dodgy Pedestrian.
Miss April Sharpe - a Self-taught Inventor.
Rodney Marsh - a Partially-reformed Thief.

Plot

As Lady Antonia headed off to locate the verger to inform him of the grave robbery, the rest of the team slowly became aware of a throbbing vibration in the ground and of a green glow from above the hill. With the fog and mud making it impossible to make out much in the way of details, they investigated, heading back up to the woods in search of clearer air and firmer ground.

Prentiss pressed on ahead as the main group got caught up in mud and a tangle of roots and, separated from the rest of team, found himself confronted by a strangely-aseptic smelling figure. Turning his torch on the figure's face, he found himself confronted by a horrific sight: a dry, crumbling, parchment-like visage wrapped in yellowing bandages. Panicking as the figure took an ungainly swipe at him, he hit at it with his cudgel and ran back to the group, nearly toppled by a powerful blow as he went.

Miss Spit magically-illuminated the scene as he returned, immediately regretting it as the creature lumbered into view, now clearly identifiable as an animated Egyptian mummy. Marsh was immediately immobilised by the shock, but the rest recovered and a confused battle ensued. Prentiss let fly with his blunderbus and Curruthers leapt forward with his swordstick, stabbling it through the chest. Marsh recovered from his bout of sickness and ran around to attack from behind with his daggers. Nobody seemed to have much effect, as blades slipped easily through the bandaged without disturbing them and bullets passed through with little impact, until Prentiss realised that fire might work. He opened and emptied a cartridge of black powder over the creature, just as Miss Sharpe finally got her mysterious weapon to work, discharging a corrosive substance at the mummy. This reacted with the creature's preservatives and it caught fire, encouraged by the black powder. A second blast put it out of the running for good, although Miss Sharpe's weapon then promptly failed with a spectacular shower of sparks and a worrying grinding noise.

Notes

Making up for the previous session's lack of action, this was basically an all-out fight. The mummy had the upper hand until the players figured out how to damage it, whereupon it went down quite fast. This was basically the plan. I had no urges to fudge the dice rolls, which was quite pleasing!

Rogue Trader Session 11: Interview With The Zombie

Characters:

Aphesius Alesaunder, zealous yet charming missionary of the Imperial Cult. (Manoj A)
Mordecai the Cautious, newly-promoted weapons monkey. (David)
Maximillius XVIII, tough-as-nails technician from a death world. (Ben F)
Octavius Sol, seneschal and quartermaster. (An NPC this week, as Stuart F was off exploring the Emerald Isle)
Triptych, mutant navigator and his harem. (Also an NPC, as Ric R was trapped in the hellish dimension known as Manchester)

---

Last time, the explorers had been witness to, and a possible cause of, a bizarre Warp event which saw the dead rising from the grave. Concerned for their holdings, and curious as to how widespread this effect was, the team decided to head for their stronghold in the Mianded system. Arriving there, they discovered that the restless dead were a problem here too, but due to the way the population of the hive city of Antiriad interred their deceased, in vast sealed catacombs beneath the city, large scale damage had been averted for the time being. Even so, their majordomo Falcone was pleased to see them arrive to take charge.

However, their minds were more on experimentation than liberation, and the team set about a plan to capture one of the dead for study, before realising that there was a more efficient, not to mention safer, alternative. So they pulled a prisoner from one of Antiriad's prisons, strapped him down, killed him, and waited for him to reanimate. The unfortunate criminal did indeed soon return to a cursed half-life, and the priest Alesaunder began his interrogations, but even his vaunted social skills were not up to the task of communicating with the creature, which though not mindless, seemed set on breaking free of its bonds and attacking its captors.

On a hunch, the explorers took the creature to the Banshee, and dropped into the Warp, at which point the demeanour of the undead thing changed. Its hostile urges seemed to abate somewhat, and its previous personality surfaced, enabling communication at long last. The team discovered that the dead hated the living, envying and hungering for their life-force, but nothing the explorers had seen suggested that there was any transfer of life energy between the dead and their victims; it seemed as if the attacks were motivated by nothing more than an atavistic sense of spite. The dead criminal also told Alesaunder that there was nothing after death, that even existence as a cursed thing was better than the oblivion beyond, and that even the light of the God-Emperor did not shine into the darkness found there. The priest held to his faith, and shrugged this off as another example of the dead's spiteful nature.

Alesaunder called some of his priests to his side in order conduct a ritual to exorcise the undead blasphemy, during which one of his deputies reported that a couple of priests, Douglas and Turner, had not been attending services as regularly as their brethren. The high priest was disturbed by this display of lapsed faith, and set to investigating the matter. He called Douglas to his offices, and found the cleric to be nervous and agitated, clearly distracted by something. Alesaunder turned this to his advantage and quickly broke the man, discovering that he and Turner had found another of the ship's priests, Persaud, wandering the lower decks despite being quite dead. Uncertain of what to do with their brother-priest, they had locked him in a storage room, and went there on occasion to attempt to lay his spirit to rest.

Persaud had been beaten to death, his skull and hands smashed, his jaw broken, and his neck snapped, and was in no condition to communicate, even while the Banshee was in the Warp. He was assigned to give services to the inhabitants of one of the lower engine decks, and the explorers focussed their investigations there, pulling in the chief, a grizzled engineer named Serafina. She told them that she knew nothing about Persaud's death, but she knew of a cult that had sprung up among her people, one that Persaud may have been investigating, although Serafina herself had overlooked the group since their work had not been affected by their new religious leanings. Alesaunder saw this as heresy, and had the chief dragged away for re-education.

Mordecai roughed up some of the local crew members and got the location of the cult's meeting place, a basic mess hall, and Maximillius set up hidden surveillance in the room. For his part, Sol attempted to shadow one of the suspected cult members, but was spotted, his elaborate finery sticking out like a sore thumb in the dark and greasy underdecks, and the crew member fled. Despite this, the cult meeting went ahead, with a number of crew members packed into the tiny meeting room while a short robed figure with a deep gravelly voice pontificated on the subjects of death, how death is a sacred gift, and how these creatures returned from beyond death were a blasphemy to be destroyed utterly, with as much violence as the faithful could muster.

The explorers launched their attack at this point, sending in troops armed with stun batons to pacify the crowd, while the team themselves went after the cult leader. As they fought with the panicked crowd, the cultist fled to a side door which had not shown up on Maximillius' plans, and seemed to be cut off from his control, so the explorator was not able to lock it remotely. Mordecai took aim with his twin hellpistols and caught the cultist in the calf, slowing him down, and giving the priest a chance to catch up. Alesaunder put the barrel of his boltgun against the neck of the hooded figure and ordered him to yield, but with a snarl, the figure leaped for the door. A burst of automatic fire from the boltgun shredded the head and upper torso of the cult leader, and the remnants slid to the floor.

While the guards rounded up the last of the cultists, Mordecai rushed over to the leader's remains, intent on restraining them before they rose again. As he rolled the corpse over, he saw that underneath the robes, it was wearing a medallion inscribed with the symbol of the Locke dynasty. Not only that, but the leader's relative lack of height was discovered to be due to him being but a child. With a sinking feeling, the team realised that they had just executed Telemachus Locke, the son and heir of their own Rogue Trader.

This year, Salute happened to happen again!

This last weekend, Salute happened to happen.

As usual (or as usually as I can manage) I prodded along with a friend and walked around... and around.... and around.... and around! After a few hours, sore feet, a sore wallet and a huuuuuuuuuuuuuge grin!

You see... I am not into Wargammes. I have tried a couple of them and I feel most of them are just glorified sets of chess and soooooooo slooooooooooowwwwwwwwwww to advance I can alsmost feel the years getting heavier as the game progresses. Also I don't have the patience (or the talent!) to painstakingly paint all the figurines and create all the diorams. So wargames have little to offer me.

So why do I go, you'll ask.... No?... you weren't wondering?.... Oh well.. I'll tell you anyway.

Until this year there were two reasons. This year, there are three!

The main one is that I LOVE the atmosphere. Most of the people there are true profesional anoraks and mega geeks with few hours of sun exposure, a distinct disregard for champoo and glasses that should be in a museum for the retro lover. In short, their appeareance could do with a make over so radical Ken Wok would die to attempt. Quite frankly there were a few that, if I had seen them sitting on a bench in a park, I would have thought they were homeless.

Yet, it is the friendliest and kindest atmosphere one can think of. Make the slightest comment and people will be only so happy to chat to you. Surprisingly enough, though, if you talk to them, they actually listen!

Also love to see the dedication and conraderie in their gaming associations. It is amazing how they get together, set up the games, paint together, play together (monkey business or otherwise!) and in general have a rich and fulfilling social life that plenty of people in the "real world" who snear at us for being gamers would envy. As a people observer, for me it is a true feast.

Second reason are the traders. Although there is the internet shopping experience and now we have a couple of shops in Brighton that sell games and are getting better and better stocked all the time, it is great to have so many traders and see games I didn't know existed, or just be able to grab the box and feel it. Maybe even make use of the previously mentioned atmosphere and friendliness to ask someone about the game and get an opinion. Makes for a much better shopping time alltogether!

The third reason I have found this year is the second hand counter. Some 30 feet of tables full of goodies people want to sell at prices that are extremelly affordable. Bought a game, still sealed, at 1/2 price and if I had had more money, I would have spent even more in more games (maybe a good thing I didn't have more money!). All and all, I am one game short of my board gaming budget for the year ahead. As soon as I get Horus Heresy, I will have enough games to keep me busy until Xmas.

So for all those reasons I loved Salute.

Now.. is Salute a great show?.... err... no.....

Sorry guys.

Salute is a show made by amateurs and for amateurs. That has its charm, no doubt, and it is remakable that it is bigger than GenCon ever was in the UK, but it doesn't make for a good show. The distinctive lack of big sponsors is heavy on the pocket to buy tickets. £11 is a lot of money that would be better spent in a game. For the amount of traders they have, I would expect to pay £5 to get in. Funnily enough, if WOTC, Games Workshop, Paizo and people like that were present, I would be happier to pay more money.

Also it is a one day show, which means you have to be VERY careful with what you spend your time doing. Choose the wrong game to play (wrong in the sense that you'll end up not liking it) and you'll have wasted hours (one or two maybe) you could have spent playing something you'd enjoy. So not enough time to play enough games.

Would making the show a two day event make sense?.... well.... yes if you're going to play games. If not, no point. Would I pay £22 to get in during the weekend?.. indeed not! There are train and tube tickets to add to that too!

I guess they need to diversify a bit. Bringing more CCGs (I mean some!) would be a good thing to attract more public. Maybe more RPGs too... but then, we have Dragonmeet for that, I guess. Maybe something to tell them at some point!

Still. A very well spent day and a worthy trade show that left everyone excited by the end of the day (and that was measured by the faces I saw and conversations I heard in the train...).

Next year, more please!!!!!!

Paco.

The Ministry of Blades : The Pyramids of Hertfordshire, episode 1

Curruthers meets a detective; Marsh trips over a corpse.

Played

11th March 2010.

Dramatis Personae

Lady Antonia deVore - a Heavily-armed Aristocrat.
Miss Constantina Spit - a Rebellious Debutante.
Captain Benson Curruthers - a Military Policeman.
Jack Prentiss - a Dodgy Pedestrian.
Miss April Sharpe - a Self-taught Inventor.
Rodney Marsh - a Partially-reformed Thief.
Mr Erasmus Rooke - the Boss;
Mr Hinton Waldrist - a Ministry Observer.
Detective Alton Barnes - of the Yard.
A Carriage Driver.
A Corpse.

Plot

Fresh from their triumph over the Highbury Horror, the team were briefed for a new mission that would take them out of London. Rooke tasked them with investigating some strange events taking place in and around the village of Aldermansford in Hertfordshire. A series of strange lights and glows had been seen above the woods to the north of the community, usually accompanied by low frequency vibrations. Occasionally, when the lights were quite bright, human figures were seen moving through the mist between the trees.

The team were to meet to catch the noon train from Euston to Berkhamsted. Marsh arrived late and they only just caught the train. As the train entered rural Hertfordshire, Marsh began to claim that the whole place smelt funny.

Arriving in Berkhamsted, they rode a carriage to Aldermansford itself, a small village built around a millpond and set under a forested hill. On the way into the village, they passed Avery Manor, the residence of Sir Upton Scudamore, Bt., and noted the presence what appeared to be a half-built pyramid behind it. The driver commented that Sir Upton was a bit eccentric, but very generous to the village.

Having scared off the local children by attempting to talk to them, the invstigators took up residence in the four rooms they had booked in the Hangman's Dance, the local coaching inn. While everyone else got settled in, Prentiss and Curruthers decided to visit the local Ministry observer, Hinton Waldrist, who filled them in on the details of the mystery. The weird phenomena consisted primarily of bright blue and green glows in the night sky to the north of the Manor. Those living or walking in the area had reported a low throbbing noise that sounded like the “chanting of the sacraments at the church of a Sunday morning, as heard from several hundred yards away”. Bright lights had been seen shining out of the woods covering the hills in the north of the estate, broken by shadowy figures moving about within them. Waldrist had a number of theories as to their origin, mostly revolving around ancient ruins that may have been associated with fairies.

They also learnt about the recent murders of Ansty Coombe, one of the estate gamekeepers found near the pyramid, Maggie Burton, a young local woman who appeared to have died gathering flowers in the woods, the Reverend Harold Norris, a visiting clergyman staying at the Parsonage and found in the Manor's ornamental lake, and Coney Furlong, a poacher found in a ditch in the woods. All had been beaten to death with a couple of heavy blows within the last couple of weeks. Scotland Yard had sent a detective to investigate.

Marsh and Miss Sharpe, meanwhile, descended to the bar where Marsh became aware of the presence of Detective Alton Barnes of the Yard, the man who had finally ended his criminal career. Knowing that Barnes had wanted to see him hang, Marsh decided to try to avoid him. Curruthers and Prentiss rejoined the group for dinner, filling them in on their discoveries. Curruthers decided to have a brief chat with Barnes, policeman to policeman but learnt nothing new: Barnes was investigating the murders and considered the lights to be a local fairy tale.

Later that evening, the team headed out to see what they could find and in the hope that the lights might decide to manifest. Trudging up into the woods at around 10 pm, they encountered a thickening fog and Marsh, attempting to move quietly away from the rest of the team in case of an ambush, became separated from them. They only became aware of his location when he tripped over a corpse and screamed. Gathering around, they noted that the corpse looked like it had been buried in a coffin for several months (being relatively dry, with little sign of insects) and was wearing good boots and a suit, implying it had had a funeral. Once he had finished bringing up his dinner, Marsh mused over the possibility of taking them, but decided they were a little too rotten.

The investigators looked around for drag marks and found none, but did note a single set of boot prints leading up the hill from the graveyard. Following them back, they found a grave that looked like it had been opened from the inside. Lady Antonia decided to inform the verger, in spite of the time, that one of his graves had been robbed.

Notes

The mystery begins!

This was a very talky session, setting the scene for the later investigations and (I hope) horrors. Aldermansford is supposed to resemble one of those Miss Marple-type murder locations and is deliberately set on the edge of the ‘Avengers Triangle’. The lights in the woods are inspired by those torch and aliens scenes in the X-Files.

Marsh's connection with Barnes was not planned, but was one of those spur-of-the-moment ideas that just seemed to make sense. Tripping over the corpse was the result of yet another fumbled roll.

Rogue Trader Session 10: Death Space Doom

Characters:

Aphesius Alesaunder, zealous yet charming missionary of the Imperial Cult. (Manoj A)
Mordecai the Cautious, newly-promoted weapons monkey. (David)
Maximillius XVIII, tough-as-nails technician from a death world. (Ben F)
Octavius Sol, seneschal and quartermaster. (An NPC this week, as Stuart F was off trying to solve the Greek debt crisis)
Triptych, mutant navigator and his harem. (Ric R)

---

Last time, the crew of the Banshee had investigated a strange complex hidden beneath the surface of the rocky methane-rich world of Zeesol Sextus. Finding all manner of weird gribbly stuff down in the tombs, for tombs they seemed to be, the team decided to touch nothing, and return to the ship to plan their next move. Having slept on it, they returned the next morning to continue their investigations.

Triptych's affinity for the Warp, a result of centuries of selective breeding, led to him discovering that the entire complex was shifting and changing at a level beyond normal human perception; reality itself seemed fluid, which explained why they had often found themselves going around in circles the previous day. With a firmer grasp of how to get around the place, the team set about recording and collecting the contents of the tombs. They tested the strange portal a few more times, and considered the potential danger in sending a volunteer through, before deciding on the safer option of sealing a camera inside a spare void suit helmet, and sending that through instead. The helmet returned, encrusted in a thick frost, but otherwise unharmed, and the team sat down to watch the resulting film, a sanity-shaking experience that reminded Triptych of looking into the Warp itself.

Moving on, the team decided to try to claim the strange alien spear they'd discovered and, fearing that the skeleton through which the spear was thrust would jump up and attack them (as if!), they first turned their flamers on the room, immolating everything except the spear itself, which remained not only unharmed, but also at the exact same temperature at which it had been before the flame-happy priest decided to "purify" the chamber. The spear was lodged deep in the ground, and the whole team pitched in to tug it free, before handing it to Triptych. Wielding the spear made him feel fast, agile and powerful, but lacking skill with such weaponry, he passed it to Sol, who took it without comment.

Heading to the wraithbone room, they took a small sample, and returned to the Banshee. There, the wraithbone seemed to have a strange effect on their astropath, Ezekiel, driving him into a paranoid rage in which he threatened them a number of times and more or less turned into a bearded, paraplegic Gollum. Now, Ezekiel is not the friendliest of folks at the best of times, but this was enough to spook them, and the team returned to Zeesol Sextus and put the wraithbone sample straight back where it came from. Dissatisfied with what they had discovered thus far, and convinced that there was something else hidden in the star system, they decided to split up.



Aphesius, Mordecai and Maximillius stayed behind on the planet with a work crew, intent on scavenging the strange alien metal they found throughout the tomb complex, while Triptych took the Banshee on a mission to scout the other worlds in the system. Sol went along without comment.

The scanning mission turned up nothing of interest, but the workers on the planet were quite industrious, pulling down the massive alien structures, clearing the wraithbone from their hollow cores, and getting the metal frames ready for transport. They also ran into something in the tombs, something fast and stealthy. Then a couple of soldiers went missing. Now very spooked indeed, all personnel were pulled out of the underground chambers, and explosives were set off, collapsing the entrance under tonnes of rubble.

Which is when a psychic scream erupted from within the planet, causing headaches and nosebleeds among the crew at the site.

Ten minutes later, the scream hit the Banshee, with similar effects.

It took three days for the ship to return to Zeesol Sextus, by which time the crew camped out on the surface were jumping at every shadow, and were convinced that something was moving about underground. On their return to the ship, it was discovered that something was moving about in one of the storage bays, the one in which they were keeping the alien skeleton they'd found on a previous occasion. Sure enough, upon opening the bay, out came a shambolic monstrosity, a shapeless pile of bones with apparent murderous intent, but after a round of fast shooting, and a bizarre mêlée charge from Sol and his new alien spear, the creature fell back into its component pieces.

(What happened here was that I pulled a fast one on the players, and put them through James Raggi's excellent scenario Death Frost Doom, which is technically for D&D, but has too many good ideas for me to ignore. Now, I did modify it quite a bit, and there's as much of Hamilton's The Reality Dysfunction and Russo's Ship of Fools in there as there is the original adventure, but there's enough that I should give credit where it is due.)

Their Rogue Trader called for a meeting to discuss recent events, while Maximillius busied himself with turning the alien metal into armour plating for their Rhino APC, as well as suits of light but strong armour for the group. It was decided that they would get in contact with Jameson's Hollow before they chose their next move, and their astropath received an ominous message from the void station, claiming that the dead had risen, and that urgent assistance was required.

The Ministry of Blades : The Highbury Horror

Marsh provokes a brawl; April gains a stalker.

Played

25th February 2010.

Dramatis Personae

Lady Antonia deVore - a Heavily-armed Aristocrat.
Miss Constantina Spit - a Rebellious Debutante.
Captain Benson Curruthers - a Military Policeman.
Jack Prentiss - a Dodgy Pedestrian.
Miss April Sharpe - a Self-taught Inventor.
Rodney Marsh - a Partially-reformed Thief.
Mr Erasmus Rooke - the Boss;
A Large Gentleman.
Another Large Gentleman with a Short Temper.
Assorted Pub-goers.

Plot

It was three months after the case of the Temple Vampire. Following a dressing-down over their precipitous conclusion to the case, Professor Wyntermere and Doctor Crabb had temporarily withdrawn from active service, leaving Marsh and Lady Antonia to babysit a quartet of junior agents through a series of basic surveillance and information-gathering tasks.

Their latest mission took them out to Highbury, where there had been reports of a brutal individual of great stature terrorising the local inhabitants. Several women had gone missing and the Metropolitan Police, as usual, were at a loss to stop the attacks. The Ministry was taking an interest because the descriptions of the attacker bore a great resemblance to the perpetrator of the Hyde Attacks a couple of years before. The team were assigned to survey the situation, gather intelligence on the attacks and, if possible, identify the attacker so that a task force could remove him from the public arena.

After briefly exploring the area, the team decided to try asking the locals what they knew. Spotting a public drinking establishment on a nearby corner, they divided into two teams: Miss Sharp, Prentiss and Marsh would enter the bar, while Miss Spit and Captain Curruthers would ask questions in the more genteel surroundings of the lounge. Lady Antonia decided this was not the place for an aristocrat and remained outside, prepared for trouble. Things went well for half an hour or so: buying the occasional drink, Curruthers, Miss Sharpe and Prentiss spoke to a number of the clientele, while Miss Spit rapidly found herself at the centre of a group of admirers. Marsh toyed with starting a game of chance, then decided on a more direct approach, asking if any large ugly types had been seen in the area: at this point, it all went downhill, as he found himself standing next to a large ugly gentleman.

Lady Antonia was briefly shocked by the sound of breaking glass, then realised that Marsh had joined her in the street. The rest of the team decided discretion was the greater part of valour and they met up to compare notes. Four attacks had taken place in an area a quarter of a mile square, all but one fatally; the lady in question was in shock and seeing no-one, but had spoken of being grabbed by a large, well-dressed man with calloused hands. All attacks had taken place late at night and had involved individuals, except in one case where a couple was murdered.

The team decided to try to lure the attacker out to see if they could identify him and divided into three teams: Miss Spit and Curruthers, Miss Sharpe and Prentiss and Lady Antonia and Marsh. In each case, the female member walked apparently alone while her colleague followed at a discrete distance. The plan worked: Miss Sharpe was promptly grabbed from within a shadowed alley by a huge figure. She screamed for help and pulled out her pistol as Prentiss rushed to the rescue; the others, all operating on nearby streets, also raced to the scene. Miss Sharpe was finding that her pistol was having little effect, the bullets getting lost in her attacker's voluminous cloak, while Prentiss began trying to club him over the head. Marsh arrived and laid into him with his knives, before Curruthers and Lady Antonia were able to take potshots with their own weapons.

The attacker proved to be incredibly tough, but eventually they brought him down through sheer persistence, drugged and cuffed him and then dragged him back to the Ministry. By the time they had arrived, the attacker had mysteriously shrunk and was now a scrawny young man. Prentiss remarked that he had seen something similar before and Mr Rooke confirmed that there had been a small number of sightings of creatures bearing similar abilities and appearance to the mysterious Mr Hyde of several years previous. The monster was taken away for examination and the team commended for their success, before being asked to return the following morning for their next briefing.

Notes

This mission was intended to perform the same role as the battle with the rat-men at the beginning of the Temple Vampire: shake-down the new characters and give the new players a chance to get used to the combat system. The investigation seemed to get a little involved as I was expecting the team to explore the streets first and just get attacked, but the final version allowed for another classic Marsh foot-in-mouth incident so was a definite improvement. The new characters got a chance to show what they were made of and establish their personalities, but as usual, the fight went on slightly too long, partly because I forgot the monster was an Extra, rather than a Wild Card, and gave it too many wounds.

I'm getting better at this, though!

Rogue Trader Session 09: These Are My Investigating Feet

Characters:

Aphesius Alesaunder, zealous yet charming missionary of the Imperial Cult. (Manoj A)
Mordecai the Cautious, newly-promoted weapons monkey. (David)
Maximillius XVIII, tough-as-nails technician from a death world. (Ben F)
Octavius Sol, seneschal and quartermaster. (Stuart F)
Triptych, mutant navigator and his harem. (Ric R)

Yep, a full house. Yay!

---

Ever since the explorers stole the star charts from Jameson's Hollow, the Zeesol system had been calling to them. It had been sealed by order of the Inquisition, and the explorers assumed that the whole sector had been declared off limits for a thousand years as a result of the discoveries made there. That's the kind of thing that really messes with a player's head, as they are simultaneously torn between investigating the big blinking plot hook, and leaving it well alone for fear of losing their character to some blobby alien thing.

It perhaps did not help that I suggested they all watch Alien before the session.



The session began with the team, the Rogue Trader Horatio Locke, the Probably-an-Inquisitor Zarak and his ogryn henchman, and twenty hand-picked guards packed into a couple of shuttles and dropping into the methane-based atmosphere of the planet, where they found their craft buffeted by storms, although the vessels suffered only light damage. Reaching the surface, they had the increasingly-fragile Locke do his I-claim-this-planet thing, before packing him back into a shuttle and sending him back to the mothership. Their sensors had indicated that most of the planet was barren, with the exception of one large structure, shaped like thorns or talons bursting through the surface of the world, and surrounded by a ring of smaller structures.

These smaller bits turned out to be flat slabs of rock, each carved with a sequential number. Guessing that they had discovered gravestones, the explorers dug up the earth nearby and, sure enough, discovered a skeleton laid out with respect, but little ceremony. While pondering all this, the explorers were surprised by a figure stumbling out of the storm, creaking and wrapped in rags. Taking charge of the guardsmen, Mordecai fired warning shots at the shambling thing, and ordered it to stay back. Perhaps it did not hear, did not understand, or did not care, as the shape stumbled on, and the team this time fired at it, and when it still came on, they shot it into tiny little bits, then turned a flamethrower onto the twitching remains for luck. When the no-longer-shambling thing had cooled down enough for the player-characters to investigate, they discovered that what they'd killed was an Imperial servitor bearing the markings of the Inquisition, and that it was thousands of years old. Pondering its value (negligible after their onslaught) and significance (plenty), they headed to the "claws" looming over the site, and discovered that between them was a large hole in the ground, and a path spiralling into the darkness.

"It's a dungeon!" said one of the players, I think Manoj, and how right he was. The explorers discovered a labyrinthine complex below the surface of the planet, some sort of crypt filled with the bones of sentient species, all shelved and arranged with meticulous precision. They also discovered some sort of dark chapel complete with skulls hanging from iron chains and odd murals depicting the torture and murder of various beings; the way the murals shifted in the torchlight had a profound effect on some of the group, and they felt their sanity being chipped away.

The first casualties of the expedition occurred as the explorers discovered a room containing some sort of pit. Triptych used his Warp sense to detect a strange taint surrounding the pit, and concluded that it was some sort of tunnel through the Warp itself, although this discovery was too late for the two guardsmen who'd already blundered into it, drawn by an eerie psychic presence. Still desperate for whizz-bang teleport technology, the group pondered the possibility of harnessing/stealing the warp-pit's powers, but not even the combined knowledge of Maximillius and Triptych could begin to figure out how to transport a literal hole in reality to their ship, so they moved on.

After picking their way through more bone collections, they discovered a locked chamber containing a single skeleton pinned to the ground by a large iron spear. The spear was alien in design, and the worldly and knowledgeable Octavius Sol guessed that it was of Eldar origin; the spear was hot to the touch, even through the thick padded gauntlets of their void suits, and seemed to cause a buzzing, whining sensation in the minds of those who held it. There was a bit of disagreement here among the group as some wanted to take the spear and others wanted to leave it where it was, mainly because they were worried that it was pinning the skeleton down for a reason. In the end, the cautious members of the crew won out, and the group moved on once more.

As they started to reach the end of their reserves of oxygen and battery power, the explorers found a large chamber filled with a bone-like honeycomb substance, which Sol identified as wraithbone, a psychic building material, and proof positive that the whole place was some kind of Eldar temple. Triptych's Warp sight was employed once more, to discover that the Warp taint felt throughout the entire complex originated from the wraithbone in the room, and all present noticed that Zarak, the creepy official they'd brought with them from Jameson's Hollow, and whom they all were convinced was an Inquisitor in disguise, was taken aback by what he was seeing, his impassive attitude dropped for the first time since they'd met him.

Convinced that there was more to be discovered, but wary of their depleted supplies, the team decided to head back to The Banshee to plan their next move, and that's where we left it.

The Ministry of Blades

The Movie Pitch

Steed and Mrs Peel meet Dracula.

The Elevator Speech

Agents of a secret government agency use magic, gadgets and fisticuffs to battle the forces of darkness in the fog-shrouded streets of Victorian London.

Tone

Pulp horror, with strong helpings of fisticuffs, weird science and stiff upper lips.

System

Savage Worlds.

Player Character Roles

Junior agents of the Ministry of Blades, officially known as the Esoteric Research Office. Agents are drawn from all walks of British society, but all have been exposed to the horrors of the night and have not only survived, but have shown courage in fighting back.

Adversaries

Vampires.
Werewolves.
Distorted products of twisted science.
Ghosts.
Sinister criminal-types.
Fiendish foreign agents.

Locations

Assorted evil-infested locations across London and the British Isles, including:
Sewers.
Rookeries.
Mansions.
Dimly-lit streets.
Museums, cathedrals and other historic buildings.
Occasional forays into the wider Empire and world.

Appendix N

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (comics rather than the movie).
Sherlock Holmes.
Dracula.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
The works of Edgar Allan Poe.
The Avengers (television).
Adam Adamant.
Doctor Who.
Castle Falkenstein.
The Brothers Grimm.

---

The initial idea for this came from an organisation briefly described in the Victorian Age Vampire Storyteller's Handbook, but rapidly evolved into a Victorian-era cross between the Avengers, James Bond and Dracula. I prefer it that way (they probably ship the emotionally-damaged off to a small village in North Wales)... The game style itself is very cinematic, I'm trying to encourage over-the-top action (players will not be penalised if they fail to achieve something spectacular) and ridiculous coincidences (the players can use Bennies to adjust the plot - although not at this stage of the campaign). Rules additions are coming from Rippers, the Savage Worlds Victorian horror campaign, and Thrilling Tales, Adamant Entertainment's pulp supplement. I'm not sure whether this counts as "Gaslight Fantasy" or "Steampunk" but I'm happy with either appellation; I'm terming it "SteamPulp" as that seems to reflect the more action-oriented approach I'm taking.

The format of this summary was inspired by posts on I waste the Buddha with my Crossbow.

The Story So Far

The details of the team's first mission and their encounter with the Temple Vampire can be found on the links below:

Welcome to the Ministry
A brief introduction to the Ministry of Blades, as delivered by Major Keithley.

The Temple Vampire, episode 1
Lady Antonia has a bite; Dr Crabb meets a new patient.

The Temple Vampire , episode 2
Professor Wyntermere and Dr Crabb go for a coffee; Marsh meets a lady of the night.

The Temple Vampire, episode 3
Professor Wyntermere catches some ruffians; Lady Antonia blows them away.

The Temple Vampire, episode 4
Dr Crabb conducts an interview; Marsh plays the mime.

The Temple Vampire, episode 5
Marsh tracks a vampire; Curruthers sets it alight.

Rogue Trader Session 08: Gothic Shopping

Characters:

Aphesius Alesaunder, zealous yet charming missionary of the Imperial Cult. (Manoj A)
Mordecai the Cautious, newly-promoted weapons monkey. (David)
Maximillius XVIII, tough-as-nails technician from a death world. (Ben F)
Octavius Sol, seneschal and quartermaster. (Stuart F)
Triptych, mutant navigator and his harem. (relegated to NPC status, as Ric R was unavailable)

---

In the previous session, the navigator had some trouble getting the starship Banshee through the Warp, and a journey which should have only taken a few days instead took almost a year in real time. So when the characters returned to the Imperial base of Jameson's Hollow, they found that much had changed in their absence, and they became the subject of a fair bit of staring and muttering. Their bruised and battered Rogue Trader, Horatio Locke, took them aside and gave them ominous instructions that sounded somewhat like a set of final requests. He wanted them to come up with plans to deal with the rival Trader Appollonius Gil, the chief suspect in the numerous assassination attempts they'd survived, and he also requested that they keep a closer eye on his son Telemachus, as he was now the key to the survival of the Locke dynasty.

At Jameson's Hollow, the crew tied up some final bits of business, then went shopping; the side-effect of making Profit a primary game statistic is that whole chunks of play become about buying and selling stuff. This is fine, as it's quite easy on the GM, but we had a new player this session, and I was worried that it would be a bit baffling for him, a fear which turned out to be unfounded. It certainly doesn't help that the acquisition rules are spread across three different pages in three different parts of the book; again, Fantasy Flight Games need to tighten up their editing and proofreading. The player-characters again attempted to secure a teleportarium, but the rare technology remained beyond their grasp, so they bought a host of baubles and trinkets instead. They also picked up the astropaths they'd requested, three junior psykers who were rather wet behind the ears. A flurry of paranoia broke out as the crew pondered whether they had in fact ordered two telepaths rather than three, and whether the third might be yet another assassin attempting to worm their way onto the ship, but the purchase orders couldn't be found, and they decided to let it go, which is of course exactly the kind of opening a GM relishes. In the time they had been lost in the Warp, the three astropaths had been looked after by the station's priest, a jocular fellow named Menelaeus, and in return, he asked the player-characters to look into the disappearance of the Rogue Trader Caxton van Meenan; while no friend of the Trader, Menelaeus informed them that van Meenan was a fellow man of the church, and so he felt it was his duty to discover his fate.

They met up with the Jameson's Hollow astropath, in a bid to discover whether he could be persuaded to put aside at least some of his loyalties to the Empire and let them in on some of the private communications passing through the station (in Warhammer 40,000, interstellar communication is conducted via psychic contact, as it's the only reliable faster-than-light medium); the discussions ended on an ambiguous note, although the player-characters felt that he could be eventually persuaded, and did get him to agree to training one of their new astropaths.

The player-characters then went to visit the station commander, Kruger, to catch up on the latest news. Kruger's joy at seeing them alive seemed genuine, and he updated them on the current political landscape in the Kasterbourous sector, while also acknowledging their latest claims. They discovered that Caxton van Meenan had headed off into the unexplored northern half of the sector, and that the station received a psychic message from the Trader a few weeks before, a distress signal claiming that his ship was being destroyed by an unknown force. Van Meenan's last reported position was a system with an orange star, and the player characters identified a few potential candidates based on the starmaps they'd stolen from Jameson's Hollow. There followed a brief discussion in which the crew pondered searching for van Meenan, but decided that there was nothing in it for them, and chose instead to head for the Zeesol system; this had been marked on their charts as being sealed by the Inquisition, and they suspected that whatever was discovered there was the cause of the whole sector being abandoned thousands of years beforehand. Players being players, they headed there almost immediately.

Rogue Trader Sessions 06 and 07: Calling Inquisitor Marple!

Characters:

Aphesius Alesaunder, zealous yet charming missionary of the Imperial Cult. (Manoj A)
Maximillius XVIII, tough-as-nails technician from a death world. (Ben F)
Octavius Sol, seneschal and quartermaster. (locked away in darkened, smoky rooms negotiating trade deals, due to Stuart still being Down Under, fending off various deadly vermin every time he needs a loo break)
Triptych, mutant navigator and his harem. (Ric R)

---

You get two updates in one this time, as I moved house in there somewhere, and so didn't get internet access until after the second game. Right, so after the previous session, I did my usual thing and planned the next game based on what the players had expressed interest in doing, as per Ben Robbins' sandbox advice; this has worked well so far, but to paraphrase a better writer, no scenario survives contact with the players.

They decided to head to the Exurack system, as the notes on their map suggested that there were possibilities for mining there, and they sensed an opportunity for profit. Arriving there without incident, they ran into the Rogue Trader Aurelie Moullierre, a personality they'd encountered back in the first session and with whom they'd gotten along quite well. As such, they didn't try to snatch ownership of the system from her, but instead met with her and discussed an alliance, ever-mindful (or perhaps just paranoid) that another Trader, Appollonius Gil, had launched an assassination attempt against both themselves and Moullierre, also back in that first session. They came up with a non-aggression pact, promising to aid each other in defending their respective holdings, and also agreed to help her with her current problem, the rescue of an orbital platform that was slowly sinking into the surface of one of Exurack's gas giants.

I'd come up with a clever little subgame here, complete with a suitably old-school d10 results table and the like, but the players came up with another solution, in hindsight a far more obvious one, and because I'm a firm believer in a "Yes, but..." style of running a game I could not really deny them their plan. So we played through a fairly dramatic sequence in which Maximillius led a team of engineers out onto the surface of the orbital platform to manually repair its stabilisation boosters, while surrounded by the vicious winds of the gas giant. There were a couple of hairy moments, and Ben decided to burn a Fate Point to rescue a technician believed lost to the storm; so far the players have only burned these points to save others, not themselves, although they've not been in any truly tough fights yet. I need to fix that.

Anyway, this was a short session, as it was a Sunday night, and there were only two players. We ended with a plan to transport some representatives of the Imperial merchant guilds to the Mianded system, to look over the mining facilities there, and in game mechanics terms complete the trade objective they needed to gain some profit. A bunch of pompous merchants and minor nobility all cooped up on a long voyage? Sounds like a murder mystery to me, so that's what I threw at them when we met up a week later. I worked up some character sketches to help the players keep everyone straight, and gave them a chance to interact with the merchants for a bit before the journey proper began, during which they quickly developed, as players do, distinct impressions of who was to be trusted, who was to be leaned on, and who was probably a Chaos cultist.

The general point of this expedition was for the players to impress these merchants with their wealth and competence, and so get them to sign up for a trading agreement; I simulated this with a sort of numerical attitude tracker, similar to the one from the Rogue Trader core rules. If the players did well, then they'd adjust the merchants' attitudes in their favour, and if things went wrong, the tracker would get adjusted back the other way. Things, of course, went wrong. There was the murder, which got the merchants uppity, half scared for their safety, and half scornful of the player-characters' ability to look after their guests. This got worse as the players started to drag the merchants and their attendants into interrogation rooms, but eventually they uncovered the killer, who claimed to be in the employ of the aforementioned Gil, his mission to sow exactly this kind of discord and damage the player-characters' reputation. Their Trader, Horatio Locke, called a council, in which he made the decision that they could ignore Gil no longer, and tasked the player-characters with formulating a plan to deal with him.

The players did well to turn the situation around, implicating the rival Rogue Trader, and putting a number of points in the plus column, adding more as they singled out certain traders for more intimate negotiations, and in one case, blackmail; there were cheers at the table as the socially awkward and half-mechanical explorator managed to somehow seduce one of the merchants by impressing her with his mastery of beverages. It was at this point that a second incident occurred, as another attempt was made on the life of Locke, in which he was trapped in a vacuum and slowly suffocated. The Rogue Trader survived, but only just, and the player-characters discovered that the culprit was the same engineer who'd been rescued in the previous session, which led to some musing on the use of Fate Points to save NPCs who would then return the favour with attempted murder. They also discovered the engineer's corpse, all folded up and stuffed in an overhead service locker; they recovered camera footage which showed a hulking humanoid doing the deed, but not enough detail was visible to make an identification, and a search of the ship turned up nothing.

No further incidents occurred on the way to Mianded, and the player-characters completed their trading objective, collecting a healthy bit of profit. On the way back, they popped in to an unexplored system, finding a ruined settlement roughly eight thousand years old, and a mass grave filled with the bones of large beings each roughly the size of an ogryn. They spent a couple of days collecting archaeological data, and then headed back to Jameson's Hollow, but the Astronomican was obscured for some reason, and Triptych had to navigate blind, resulting in a long jaunt in the warp, during which the ship was haunted by ghosts and a bout of insanity swept through the crew. They arrived back at Jameson's Hollow to find that almost two hundred and fifty days had passed in real time, and that's where we left it.

Ia Ia Fhtagn!

Masks of Nyarlathotep to be rereleased in 2010!

Huzzah!

Rogue Trader Session 05: A Game of Thrones (But Mainly Assassinations)

Characters:

Aphesius Alesaunder, zealous yet charming missionary of the Imperial Cult. (Manoj A)
Maximillius XVIII, tough-as-nails technician from a death world. (Ben F)
Octavius Sol, seneschal and quartermaster. (hovering about in the background, as Stuart F has fled to the Antipodes)
Triptych, mutant navigator and his harem. (Ric R)

---

Last time, the player-characters had assassinated the unpopular ruler of the Mianded system, and I got the distinct impression that they had decided to crown his enemy, Kaltos, despite the general populace seeing him as a terrorist. Well, the session started off going in that direction, anyway...

This was a bit of an odd session for me, as I was all set for a quick resolution to last week's action, then moving on to another part of the sandbox. Instead, the players stuck around and spent the entire session getting involved in some proper Machiavellian scheming. They started off by encouraging an official period of mourning for Flavion, at the same time secretly encouraging the disenfranchised to make their opinions of the deceased lord known. Then they had their Rogue Trader come planetside to declare the return of the Mianded system to the Imperial fold, an event which prompted Flavion's loyal guard to come out of hiding to attempt an assassination. This was foiled by some smart thinking by the players, as well as a heroic camera opportunity from the priest as he abseiled out of a shuttle into hand-to-hand combat with the assassin; the guard had been softened up by some freaky mutant mind mojo from Triptych, but the navigator chose to conceal his involvement.

The player-characters then arranged for Kaltos to come to Antiriad in order to take the throne, which was, of course, a trap. They convinced Flavion's guards to do the deed, and promptly betrayed the assassins by gassing them into unconsciousness once Kaltos had been killed, plausibly expressing regret that they weren't in time to save the visiting lord. Knowing that a handful of assassins had never come forward and were still at large, the player-characters then made it seem that not only did Kaltos survive the attack, but that he was going to be formally accepted as ruler of the Mianded system by their own Rogue Trader at an exclusive social gathering; these details were leaked to the remaining assassins through secret back channels the player-characters discovered through a drug-assisted interrogation of the survivors of the Kaltos assassination. They then emptied the planet's prisons, dressed the criminals up as the upper crust of Antiriad's nobility, and brought their ship, the Banshee into a low orbit directly above the party location.

The decoys dressed up as Kaltos and the Rogue Trader were both killed during the dinner as the remaining assassins revealed themselves, at which point the player-characters ordered the Banshee to fire its massive space lasers at the party. The weaponry, not being designed for such use, lacked accuracy and power, but still managed to raze the building to the ground, as well as a number of surrounding, and occupied, dwellings.

So, yeah, shock and awe.

Satisfied that they'd made their point, the crew of the Banshee left a garrison to watch over things until their return, then hopped back into the Warp for the journey back to Jameson's Hollow, to sell the robots they'd captured a while back.

This was a very easy session for me to run, as the players ran away with their ideas, heaping on twist after twist, and all I had to do was sit back and let them know which skill rolls to make. So I didn't get to use my new spangly starship combat system (hint: I stole it from another game), and the crew haven't gone anywhere new, but that's fine, because we're having fun with the sandbox style of play, something I think none of us have done for years.

Rogue Trader Session 04: Yojimbo in Space

Characters:

Aphesius Alesaunder, zealous yet charming missionary of the Imperial Cult. (Manoj A)
Maximillius XVIII, tough-as-nails technician from a death world. (Ben F)
Octavius Sol, seneschal and quartermaster. (left on the ship, as Stuart F was not present)
Triptych, mutant navigator and his harem. (Ric R)

---

Well, I've discovered that the Rogue Trader starship combat rules are not right for me. There's too much emphasis on exact positioning, and with the movement rates of the starships, it's clear that you need a big table in order to run starship combat as written. There are guidelines for a more abstract approach, but they're too abstract even for me, taking out the complicated bits of the system but also taking out the fun bits, de-emphasising starship combat to the point that it's almost not worth doing. I think there's room for middle ground, and I have been putting together some ideas for a system that is loose and abstract enough to save headaches, and has the required detail to make differences in ship capabilities significant. More on that later.

Anyway, when we last left the crew of the Banshee, they had just pulled out of the Warp into real space, only to get hit by something large enough to knock out the ship's shields and set off every alarm on the vessel. There followed a short (and to my mind, unsatisfying) space battle between the Banshee and two opposing forces as it became clear to the crew that they had stumbled right into the middle of some local conflict. They used the superior firepower of the Banshee to force a ceasefire and one side fled towards one of the system's three stars. The player-characters then followed the other side back to their homeworld of Antiriad.

Antiriad turned out to be a small hive world, a warren of urban development spread across almost the entire surface of the planet, with a prominent yet modest Imperial governor's palace. Here the explorers met a warm welcome, but also noted a heavy emphasis on security, with plenty of guarded checkpoints passed on their way to meet the so-called "Imperator of the Seven Systems". They met this Imperator, a man named Flavion, in his private chambers, as he was apparently far too corpulent to get out of bed. Although they were disgusted by this individual, and noted how nervous his staff were, they nonetheless befriended him, discovered more about the conflict into which they'd dropped, and promised to help, in return for Flavion's aid in bringing the system as a whole back under Imperial rule.

Later, the explorers ventured into the city to find out more about the system, and discovered that Flavion was a fickle and unstable ruler, a paranoid man with strange tempers who had no qualms about making people disappear. They also discovered some of the history of the system, noting that the centuries-old conflict apparently stemmed from a succession crisis following the death of Arthur/Arturus (both names appeared in the histories), the last legitimate Imperial governor. This did not tally up with Flavion's stories of "dissidents" and "terrorists", so the player-characters told the fleshy giant that they were going to scout out his opponents' forces and check their strength, in anticipation of the coming assault.

Instead, they went to visit the opponents on more peaceful terms, finding that the homeworld had been abandoned, and the people had fled to another planet where they hid below the surface in a series of natural caves converted into a fortress. There they met the leader of these hardy exiles, a stark and practical military-minded man named Kaltos, who claimed to be the descendant of the true rulers of the system. The players took an instant liking to Kaltos, and with him formulated a plan to assassinate Flavion through poisoning, allowing Kaltos to take the throne.

Now, there wasn't supposed to be such a clear goodie/baddie dichotomy in this scenario, and there was a "third way" written in my notes, but the players went their own way and didn't encounter it. This is fine, as I write these star systems as mini-sandboxes, detailing the planets, locations and important individuals, but steering clear of plot, as I've come to realise that players make their own plots. Still, the players' choice to back Kaltos will have repercussions as they discover what kind of king they have made, and how the people respond to a man they think of as a terrorist being put on the throne.

When preparing the scenario, I created a situation where the players would have to step into a local conflict and make some hard choices, and only at the table did I realise, when Ben pointed out that it felt like a western, that I'd basically dropped them into Yojimbo. I created the two warring dynasties and the relationships between them using the Renegade Crowns sourcebook for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, partly because I wanted to try out the systems in that book, but didn't have a WFRP game in which to try them. It will come as no surprise that there was much I couldn't include, but on the whole it worked quite well as a way to create a framework of personalities and relationships that I could then modify and personalise.

War Made Easy

As promised, here's my quick and easy replacement for the rubbish Rogue Trader mass combat system, which should work with any rpg.

Now, the best way to handle mass combat in an rpg is to simply do what makes for the best story; abstract everything but the players' actions and use the space between their combat rounds to explain what's going on on the rest of the battlefield. Perhaps the GM wants to add a bit of uncertainty to the battle, or to reflect the players' effects on the wider conflict; that's where this system comes in. It still sits in the background, but also outputs enough data to give an uncertain GM pointers on how to describe the battle. It takes about ten minutes to do, and is probably best done before the battle begins, which might necessitate a small break in the action.

Step 1:
Get the statistics for the most common type of fighter on each side. If there is a disparity in army sizes, then you might need two from army A for every one from army B, but the idea is to get the numbers down to the smallest possible. Don't worry about champions, artillery or other special units right now; we'll factor them in later.

Step 2:
Run a number of rounds of fighting between these combatants, using the rules of your chosen rpg as standard, except for damage. No one gets killed or knocked out here, you're just determining who does the most damage, so tot up the hit points or damage levels, or whatever. The side that does most damage wins the round and scores a point. You'll want to do a few rounds of this; I'd suggest eleven as a good number, but any number is fine, although an odd number is probably best.

Now you have the basic shape of the battle, and the points total should tell you which side wins, and by how much. It is worth coming up with some narrative at this point, to explain how army A suddenly caused so much damage when they were getting beaten last turn, and so on.

Step 3:
This is the GM fudging bit. Any special abilities, elite units, champions, air support, etc. come in here. For every one of these which you think will have an effect on the battle, add an extra point to that side's total. If the players have come to you with plans for the battle beforehand, then these too may affect the score.

You are now ready to go back to the table.

Step 4:
Run your rpg session as normal, with the battle going on in the background. If the players are keeping tabs on the battle, give them occasional reports on how things are going. If the players are actively involved, then let them affect the battle score you worked out earlier. So if one player-character is wading into the opposing forces with his axe, run a duel between himself and one of the opposing troops; if he wins, add a point to his side's total. If another player-character is shouting orders over a loudspeaker, have her make some kind of command skill test, and depending on how well she does, add (or subtract!) points from her side's total. The highest total wins the battle, simple as that.

And that's pretty much it. It's not a perfect system, but it's both robust and loose enough to do the job. And of course, if you don't like the resulting data, then chuck it out and do what makes for the most entertaining story. That's the best way to do it, anyway.

Update: Fellow Rogue Trader GM Witchfinder General has come up with a much more elegant approach to the same problem.

Rogue Trader Session 03: God is Dead

Characters:

Aphesius Alesaunder, zealous yet charming missionary of the Imperial Cult. (Manoj A)
Alfonso de la Creme, weedy and nervous priest-in-training. (also Manoj A)
Maximillius XVIII, tough-as-nails technician from a death world. (Ben F)
Octavius Sol, seneschal and quartermaster. (Stuart F)
Triptych, mutant navigator and his harem. (Ric R)

---

Well, we didn't use the battlemat. Everyone seemed more keen on keeping the game in our imagination, and one of the players confessed that it was something of a reaction to all the D&D4 we've been playing of late, which more or less requires battlemaps. I came up with a hybrid solution; behind the screen, I had a small-scale map which I was going to transfer to the battlemat, but in the end I just marked the positions of players and opponents on this mini-map, which was enough to let me visualise the action for the players, without the confusion of last time.

As it was, the main thrust of the session were the negotiations with Clarius, all of which were contained within one room. There were a couple of players outside Clarius' temple with shuttles full of troops at the ready, but the fighting in the streets was all done in abstract, based on a little mass combat system I devised myself, after discovering that Rogue Trader's was rubbish; I consider this somewhat ironic given the game's origins. I'm going to give the system a polish and post it here a bit later on, as it's essentially system neutral and should work with any rpg with a combat system (which is everything except the He-Man rpg).



So they arrived to discover that the duplicitous mechanoid had brought most of the children of the city into the temple, to act as human shields and make a direct attack much more difficult. There's nothing like a bit of NPC peril to force the players into roleplaying! The negotiations went well, and they even got Clarius to soften his antagonistic "get off my planet" stance, and agree to something more reasonable. I was interested to see where this compromise might go, but once again, a fight broke out.

The human shields were supposed to make the fight tougher on the players, but Ben's explorator had whipped up some grenades which would disrupt the robots' circuitry; I didn't want to call these "EMP grenades" because that's too high-tech for the setting, but it turns out that they used to exist in the wargame, as "haywire" bombs, so that's fine. These, combined with good attack rolls by the players, and atrocious rolls by the robot priests, led to the fight coming to an end pretty quickly. At one point, one of the guys outside turned their shuttle's lascannons on the temple doors, sending shards of molten metal spinning into the panicked crowd. Ric asked to burn a Fate Point here to avoid civilian deaths; by the rules-as-written, burned Fate Points are used to save the player-character from certain death, but I ruled that this would also be a suitable use, if uncharacteristically heroic for the 40K universe.

As the smoke cleared, the team secured the disabled robots, calmed the crowd, and investigated the temple, discovering that underneath the stone construction, there was an ancient machine, some sort of atmosphere processor, explaining how the area around the city remained fertile despite the arid conditions on the rest of the world. They failed to discover any control mechanism for the robots, so the source of their heresy remained unknown. "Clarius" turned out to be identical to the other robots, and the explorator conducted a holy rite to access the robots' memories, discovering that they took it in turns to be the high priest, adding to the mystery of just who exactly was in charge.

After leaving a garrison of troops to maintain order, and some of the crew to maintain the processor, and if possible expand its abilities, the players moved on. They sent an astropathic message to the explorator's Machine Cult to let them know about the robots, which combined with everything else they'd achieved, was enough to complete an endeavour (a profit-based sidequest in the RT system), so they collected three Profit points to add to their stash. Players being players, they're already thinking of horrible game-unbalancing things on which to spend this wealth.

They decided to head to Mianded, a system at the heart of a network of warp routes, and so a handy trade hub if it could be secured for their dynasty. The warp travel was difficult, and the navigator was visited by the spectres of his dead parents, killed years before by a chaotic warband. They were pleasant enough for ghosts, chatting to him as if everything was just dandy, despite looking just as they did when he discovered the bodies. Upon arrival at the system, the ship didn't want to leave the warp, or perhaps the warp didn't want to let go of the ship, resulting in a rough re-entry into normal space somewhere in the Mianded system. The crew breathed a sigh of relief, but then the ship was rocked by a massive explosion, setting off all sorts of alerts and alarms, and the bridge crew reported that something had crashed into the Banshee...

Rogue Trader Session 02: Biker Robot Priests!

Characters:

Aphesius Alesaunder, zealous yet charming missionary of the Imperial Cult. (Manoj A)
Maximillius XVIII, tough-as-nails technician from a death world. (Ben F)
Octavius Sol, seneschal and quartermaster. (Stuart F)
Triptych, mutant navigator and his harem. (Ric R)

---

After the events of the previous session, the players had access to a database of navigational information, which gave them an advantage over the other Rogue Traders, who would be navigating blind. After some poring over the starmaps, and a brief discussion on whether they should try to follow the Trader they suspected of attempting to assassinate their lord, they decided to head to Ansobe in a two leg journey, stopping off for a quick look at Bedaho on the way.

Last week, I gave them a map of the local systems and astronomical phenomena; the amount of useful material on the map depended on how well they did in repairing the data console they discovered, and they did very well so got pretty much everything. I think the players enjoyed the experience of looking over the map and deciding where to go, which is exactly the kind of sandbox-style play I am aiming for with the campaign design. I have mapped out the sector and at each point of interest I've got a brief summary of what can be found there; I've not gone into too much detail, as I've discovered that I'm quite comfortable with improvising, and I find that a few starting ideas give me enough to work with, while too much detail is a waste, as I end up forgetting bits, even if I wrote it myself. I'm always a bit concerned that players might be annoyed to discover that they're playing something that's being made up on the spot, but I think this is a decent balance.

On the way, some of the crew reported a ghostly presence in the forward decks, so the team went to investigate, discovering that a massive amount of damage had occurred to the ship, with torn bulkheads aplenty, and the front of the vessel open to space. They also ran into an apparition bearing an uncanny resemblance to the ten-year-old son of their Rogue Trader, only grown up and in his twenties. This encounter turned out to be spooky but harmless, with the damage to the ship proving to be part of the illusion, and the party spent the rest of the trip pondering its meaning. Upon arrival in the Bedaho system, they detected an Imperial beacon on a jungle planet which had been marked as a death world on their map. There was a bit of argument over whether to investigate the dangerous planet, but after the ship's psyker picked up a large and intelligent psychic presence on the surface, they decided to leave it for later and move on to Ansobe.

There they discovered Ansobe Secundus to be an arid world with a single settlement of just over 100,000 inhabitants, apparently at an industrial level of technology and with a surprising level of fecundity in the surrounding farmland, given the environment. Descending to the planet in shuttlecraft, they were met by six cloaked figures riding motorbikes (it is Warhammer 40,000 after all) who introduced themselves as the priesthood of the planet and asked the players to leave. There then followed a very odd negotiation in which the players seemed to be pulling in two different directions, and which ended, of course, in a firefight. The priests turned out to be robots (it is Warhammer 40,000 after all), which I don't think are in the current 40K game, but used to be back when I first started, so I decided that they themselves were ancient and valuable artefacts, worth quite a lot if retrieved whole. This of course had the players worried about damaging their opponents. As it happened, the weaponry they had wasn't quite powerful enough to do much more than scratch the robots (that said, I think I may have been applying the armour penetration rules incorrectly) but they used some clever stunts to deal with most of the priests, although one escaped to the city.

I'm not a big fan of using miniatures in roleplaying games, and we managed to get through the combat without them, but it did feel a bit loose and ragged around the edges, especially with missile weapons and vehicles thrown into the mix. As such, I think I'm going to give the battlemat a go next time we play, just to see how it plays, and then as a group we can make a decision on which method we prefer. I have already decided to use miniatures for space combat, as the Rogue Trader system is focussed on movement and positioning, and I think it will help to have that visualised at the table, rather than in our heads.

In the aftermath, they kidnapped a local farmer and took him back to the Banshee for interrogation, which proved easy as he was terrified by the very idea of being in space. They discovered that the city was built around a large central temple, and that the head priest Clarius was rarely seen. They then attempted to contact Clarius himself, guessing that if he had robots working for him he must have a working radio, and managed to arrange a meeting the next day at the temple, although Clarius insisted that this time, the players come alone.

And that's where we left it. Next week, we'll play the meeting with Saint Clarius, and find out his connection to the robot priesthood.

Rogue Trader Session 01

Characters:

Aphesius Alesaunder, zealous yet charming missionary of the Imperial Cult. (Manoj A)
Maximillius XVIII, tough-as-nails technician from a death world. (Ben F)
Triptych, mutant navigator and his harem. (Ric R)

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My group found itself between regular games last night, and I've been itching to run a game after only playing for months, so we decided to try out something new, and I dusted off the copy of Fantasy Flight Games' Rogue Trader I'd picked up back in October. It's a space trading rpg based on the Warhammer 40,000 universe, with a ruleset derived from one of my old favourites, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. I've played, but never run said ruleset, so I was a bit wary, particularly as the rulebook is a bit of a mess, full of vague writing, contradictory rules, and an unwritten assumption that the reader is familiar with the contents of an errata produced for FFG's previous rpg, Dark Heresy; there are whole sections of the book which make little sense unless used in conjunction with that errata, which strikes me as an odd approach. I decided to persevere however, as I've always liked the space trading genre, but found Traveller to be a bit stuffy, so the heavy metal excesses of the 40K setting appealed much more.

The players' experience of the setting ranged from complete unfamiliarity, through a broad dislike, to some vague memories of playing the wargame a decade or so ago, so I knocked together some basic fluff on the setting and sent it out via email before the game. They all got the hang of things pretty quickly once they figured out that it was essentially a game of lords and vassals... IN SPACE! I thank the group's experience with Pendragon for this, as the two games differ in the details, but are more or less about the same thing.

We started off with designing the players' starship, the Banshee, although as I recall, this is a shortened version of the ship's real name, which runs to something like fifteen words. The rules for this are a bit dry, reading much like an accounting exercise (although much less so than the Traveller equivalent), but the players all seemed to have a lot of fun with it, and spent about an hour and a half tweaking the Banshee to perfection. Then we headed into the game proper, as the team and their (NPC) Rogue Trader ventured into a new and uncharted area of space looking for opportunities for wealth and fame.

A local space station commander invited them to a feast thrown in their honour, at which they met the local representatives of the church and the Imperial Inquisition, picked up some rumours about other Traders and lost starmaps, and managed to foil an assassination attempt on their Trader, all before dessert. They followed this by interrogating the assassin, and the on-paper-socially-inept techie character got right to the heart of the matter with some inspired guesswork from his player, getting the name of the assassin's employer almost immediately. I would have run this as an extended series of skill tests, but Ben cut through everything with his direct questions, and there seemed little point to follow through with the mechanics; roleplaying beats dice-rolling! Not quite satisfied, the team's priest charmed the Inquisitor they met at the feast and convinced him to question the suspect; when the team saw what was left after the "questioning", the navigator freaked out, and the priest only managed to stay calm by reciting a litany to the God-Emperor.

Seeing enemies around every corner and in every shadow, the players retreated to the Banshee, and the next day returned to the space station in search of the rumoured starmaps, the acquisition of which would make the exploration of this new area of space much easier. They discovered a long-abandoned navigator temple, containing ancient technology which turned out to be some kind of navigation database, and began work on transferring it to their ship in secret. They were briefly interrupted by the strange mutated guardian of the temple, a chaotic combat intensified by some failed fear and insanity tests, as well as getting used to the way Rogue Trader handles initiative and combat rounds. Despite the fiddly bits, the combat went quite quickly, and the monster was torn to pieces by a critical chainsword swipe from the priest, without causing much damage at all to the party; I had designed the encounter to be a little soft, as I didn't want anything too complex in the first session, nor did I want any player-character deaths so early on, but even so I think it was a bit too easy. After the fight, the players sneaked the database on to the Banshee; now with a complete map of the sector, and revenge and profit on their minds, they are deciding where to go next.

We finished late, and were quite tired by the end, but everyone seemed to have good fun with the game, and I was asked to run it again this coming weekend. I'm still not won over by the system, which seems unnecessarily complicated in places and clever and elegant in others; I kept thinking how much easier it would be to run the whole thing under Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying ruleset, but there are lots of bits of the game we haven't tried yet (starship combat for one), and I'm determined to give it a fair try. I'm sure the system's eccentricities will be less jarring given time.

It desperately needs an errata though.

Three Things I Have Learned From D&D Fourth Edition

I pretty much bypassed Dungeons & Dragons during my gaming "upbringing". My original group played a bit of everything, but mostly Shadowrun and Call of Cthulhu. We did have a brief go at AD&D2, running through the first book of Night Below, and we played a couple of sessions using the "Black Box" basic D&D set, and it was this version of the venerable game which caught my attention more than any other, although we never played it again after that.

My current group plays the fourth edition of D&D quite a lot, and while I enjoy it well enough, I do find myself longing for a simpler, more pure version of the game, and I keep thinking back to that black box. Of course, it is unavailable now, except through eBay and the like, but there is Labyrinth Lord, which is more or less the same thing (albeit based on a slightly earlier version), and completely free too. I've talked about the game before, but that was more of a discussion about mechanics, and today, I'm more interested in the more philosophical side of things, specifically how my experiences of the newest edition of D&D would now affect my appreciation and play of an older version. So here are three random musings of that nature.

1: Interesting Locations are Important
Fourth edition emphasises combat environment right from the outset, with player-character abilities often involving moving opponents from square to square, or making use of different kinds of area effect and so on. This isn't hardwired into the rules of older editions in the same kind of way, and as such, I think it can be easy to assume that it can't be done, and to thus overlook the importance of the shape, size and nature of the battlefield. So if I ran or played LL now, I would take time to created unique settings like this, and even though there are no pushing or pulling powers in the rules, they are a light enough framework that nothing breaks if a players wants to, say, forego damaging an opponent to instead push them down a hole.

2: Different Monster Roles are Important
This is related to the first point, as the older editions of the game gave, in most cases, a single block of statistics for each type of opponent. There would be one type of orc (AC: 6 HD: 1 Damage: 1d6), and that again makes it easy to just fill dungeon rooms with identical versions of that orc. Fourth edition makes a big effort (too much perhaps, forgoing the elegant third edition concept of the template in favour of a completely new stablock for each type of each monster) of showing how that same group of orcs can instead be made up of front-line bruisers, nimble archers and lightly-armoured skirmishers, and it is a good reminder that there is no reason at all why this cannot be imported back into an older version of the game.

3: Different Mechanics are Important
This is the biggest epiphany for me. For the longest time, I did not like the percentage-based thief skills of older editions, or the way finding secret doors varied based on class, and so on. As such, the universal mechanic approach of third and fourth editions appealed to the neat freak in me. Then I had a conversation with another gamer about how fourth edition perhaps goes too far in this other direction, and almost flattens the class differences out; what I came to realise was that although the specific mechanic will vary between a fourth edition At-Will fighter power and a fourth edition At-Will wizard power, they're both At-Will powers, and they both have the same kind of effect on the opponent. In an older edition, the fighter rolls a d20 to do what she does (hit an opponent, mainly), the wizard usually doesn't roll at all to use his abilities, but has a learning/resting sub-game built into the class, and the thief gets to bust out a whole different set of dice to use her skills; I had previously seen this as untidy, but now I understand it to have a positive effect on the game, because it emphasises the different roles and abilities of the classes at a more emergent level than raw rules mechanics. In other words, these are opportunities for the player themselves to do something unique at the table, rather than have the class differences be relevant only in the imagined space of the game.

None of these are rule changes as such, although the first two do lead to a bit of tinkering with what is already there, and I think that, for me, they would enrich the playing of something like Labyrinth Lord, capturing what I like about fourth edition and combining it with a ruleset which is much more to my tastes.