Five, Six, Seven

Over the past few weeks, I've been running my group through the fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons playtest. I will admit that I was not optimistic as I hated D&D4 and while I've enjoyed playing Pathfinder, it's more complicated than I like. I appreciate the retroclones for how they've opened up old-school gaming to a new audience, but most of them have mechanics or assumptions that I find difficult to accept; the notable exception to this is James Raggi's Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which I've mentioned before. It has the simple mechanics I prefer, but introduces a number of welcome tweaks to the basic D&D system, making it close to my perfect version of The Game.

All that said, D&D5 has impressed me. It has the same kind of mechanical simplicity as Basic D&D, so I can run it without breaking my brain, but it also seems -- the character generation rules have not yet been released for testing -- to provide enough complexity on the characters' side to keep my players -- who missed the mechanical options of Pathfinder when we played LotFP -- interested and happy. It does have some problems -- player-characters are perhaps too tough at first level, and spells are a bit erratic in terms of power; sleep in particular is either useless or overpowered, depending on the target -- but it's a first draft playtest, so such glitches are to be expected. My big fear for the final published product was that it would add more and more complicated parts to keep the D&D3 and D&D4 fans on board, but recent comments by Mike Mearls have suggested that a simple and streamlined core rules package is a goal for the design team, so I have high hopes. If all else fails, we'll just carry on playing it using the playtest documents!

Also on the way -- but arriving much sooner -- is the sixth edition of Warhammer 40,000. I entered the Games Workshop Hobby™ during the Rogue Trader days, but the boxed second edition of 40K was the one I played the most. I stopped playing with the release of the third edition, in part because I disliked some of the rules changes, but for the main part because of my two armies -- a Genestealer Cult and a small Ork force -- the first was invalidated by the edition change -- although an army list was later published in the Citadel Journal -- and the second was rendered unplayable by the game's general reduction of points values. I did pick up the fourth edition second hand but never played it, and the fifth passed me by; from what I can tell, the latter releases have been minor tweaks and polishes of the third, and as I never much liked that ruleset to begin with I haven't been moved to get involved again. The modern game looks absurd to my old eyes, with so many vehicles crammed on to a table that's far too small for them -- back when I played, the only vehicles available were the Rhino and the Ork Battlewagon -- making it look like a game of Space Marine played -- to paraphrase John Peel -- at the wrong scale. As such, unless the sixth edition brings revolutionary changes to the mechanics, I doubt that I will be signing up, but even so I've found myself interested in playing the game again.

Part of this is due to gaming at Stuart's place; while I've been enjoying our fantasy and historical battles, the Grim Darkness of the Far Future™ has always been where I've felt most at home. Part of it is to do with recent nostalgic discussions with friends who either play or used to play, and part is in discovering people like Warhammer Joey, who show such an honest enthusiasm for the game. I'm sure the announcement of the sixth edition had something to do with it too, even if I never buy the thing.

So I've decided to dip my toe back in and put together a small 500 point force. I'm going to go with the Eldar, as I had an Epic-scale army but never got a chance to see them in action in 40K; no one I knew had an Eldar army and they always seemed rather neglected by White Dwarf. I'm going to make no effort whatsoever to make it a competitive army and the troop choice will be made on the basis of the models I like, which in most cases means the older pre-third edition designs. I tend to have a 40K craving once or twice a year that comes to nothing and this one may also fizzle out, but we'll see.

Of all upcoming gaming releases, the most exciting for me has to be Call of Cthulhu's seventh edition, which I believe is going to be getting a preview -- if not an actual release -- at this year's Gen Con. I suspect it won't be too different to the previous six editions, but I've heard that the new rules will have some innovations; much as I love the game, it could do with a bit of mechanical tweaking in places, so I'm keen to see what the writers do in this regard. I own two previous editions and don't need another one, but I'm on board anyway, because it's one of my favourite role-playing games.

All in all, I have plenty to look forward to in terms of gaming in the next few months, but I'm a little wary of the effect all this will have on my bank balance!

Absolutely Nothing!

Yesterday Stuart posted some musings about wargaming, and it got me thinking about the fine art of pushing little tin lead white metal soldiers about a table.

As a teenager I did a fair bit of wargaming, although it was all of the Games Workshop variety, aside from one afternoon playing The War Machine mass combat rules from the D&D Rules Cyclopedia. I have a poor head for tactics, one that borders on the comedic -- some of my opponents might say moronic -- so I was never much good at these games; I won my first game of Warhammer Fantasy Battle with a bold undead cavalry charge and thrashed a GW staff member at a display game of the then-new Epic 40,000, but aside from a long unbeaten run at Warhammer 40,000 -- because Genestealers were very, very broken in the first two editions -- that was the extent of my success as a general. Even so I still had great fun playing, before rising costs and rules changes -- in the case of 40K a combination of both, with the increase in the basic army size in the third edition -- pushed me out of the hobby.

Also, if I'm honest, I'm rubbish at the painting. I have a smidegeon of artistic talent, but I can't transfer that to the painting of figures to save my life. My neon pink Genestealer Cult is an embarrassment to this day.

So that's why I don't play these games any more, despite there being a sizeable community of tabletop wargamers here in Brighton. I'd love to play, but I can't afford an army and even if I could, it would look like a four-year-old painted it. A blind four-year-old. With no hands.

Even so, Stuart's post woke my long-dormant love of wargames, and so I did some poking around. Even after being out of the hobby for over a decade, I knew enough to know that Warmachine is a popular alternative to the Nottingham hegemony, and I've seen some of the models in use in our various role-playing game campaigns, so I know that they're well designed bits of kit. The game is based around small warbands -- just like the Warhammers back in the day -- which might make the painting a bit less painful for me, and the game's emphasis on the mechanised warjacks with infantry as support reminded me of the Workshop's Space Marine, my favourite of all their wargames, despite being no more successful at it than anything else.

Then I saw the cost of the models, comparable to GW's pricing but for even less stuff, and that killed my interest in Warmachine. Maybe if I win the lottery. In the meantime, the world is spared my neon pink Cygnar warjacks.

So that was that, but then for some reason the Dreaded and Unmentionable D&D4 popped into my head, perhaps because it's often criticised as a wargame masquerading as an rpg. I don't think that's entirely fair, as it's more that the strong emphasis on the combat system makes it very easy to ignore everything else, but it did get me wondering about what could happen if one embraced that criticism and played D&D4 as a wargame.

The first step would be to create an interesting battlefield, with lots of environmental features to add some tactical flexibility to the game. Pits, areas of difficult terrain, things to climb on, and so on, nothing too unfamiliar to the average wargamer. After that's done, there seem to be two options:

• Classic Mode in which one -- or more -- player creates a party of heroes and pits them against a monstrous force. This would be D&D4 as written, more or less, only there'd be no plot or role-playing, as the emphasis would be on the battle, which has the handy side-effect of heading off the problem of the fight taking up the entire session, as so often used to happen.
• Total War in which the players decide on an XP budget as described in the DMG, then buy monsters -- which need not be actual bug-eyed beasties -- and set them against each other. This version would feel much more like a traditional wargame.
  

I don't know how exciting it would be, or if D&D4's mechanics are too involved and complex for a wargame, but based on my experience of it, I don't see why it shouldn't work. This is more or less what the Dungeon Delves book does, after all, it's just less honest about it.

On the Boil

I can't recall ever having so many gaming projects on the go at once. Back in my wayward youth, I'd concentrate on one game or setting for months, before moving on to the next game and doing the same, all of which often came to naught as the group decided to play something else anyway. I'm sure this is not uncommon within our hobby.

I am working on three unrelated projects at the moment, but on the plus side, much of the work is already done for two of them:

• Our Pathfinder GM has expressed a desire to experience the game as a player for once. In fairness, this situation has arisen because he's always so full of enthusiasm for running his latest idea for a D&D-variant game, so we let him get on with it. Even so, I've volunteered to run a scenario so he can try the game from the other side of the screen; I have chosen Paizo's Carrion Hill, which is rather appropriate, as whenever I run something it seems to end up as Call of Cthulhu, and now I have an excuse.
• In the summer, I finally got a chance to run an Eberron game, albeit using Savage Worlds as the ruleset. At some point in December, I'll be running the sequel to that: Savage Eberron II: The Jewel of Galifar. Most of the work is done, but I've taken Stephen King's advice and have put the scenario away so that I can come back to it with fresh eyes in a few weeks. My plan is to run these once or twice a year, as a series of linked adventures, but not quite a campaign.
• Most recently, I've been brainstorming ideas for a return to my Rogue Trader game. I now have a good outline for the plot of the next chunk of the campaign, which will be a bit more linear before returning to the sandbox of the first "season". Players being the special snowflakes that they are, I expect it to be nowhere as direct a journey as the word "linear" implies.

In other news, we hit seventh level in our ongoing Pathfinder campaign last night, although since I've been blessed by Nurgle I decided to stay away and play via Skype. Which was fine until the camera cut out at their end and the microphone cut out at mine -- so I could only hear them and they could only see me -- and communication consisted of me attempting to figure out what was going on from their discussion and holding up handwritten notes to the camera in response.



From what I could tell things got a bit hairy, with at least two characters into critical condition -- perhaps Stuart can provide a more detailed synopsis -- but the party emerged from the troll caverns victorious and with a sizeable haul of treasure, including a +2 thundering great sword for Stuart's barbarian Artemisia, further nudging her towards the Weapon of Mass Destruction prestige class.

For the Emperor! (and Charity!)

I wouldn't normally use the group blog for selling something, but this is in a good cause.

In celebration of the upcoming Deathwatch Space Marine rpg and the new Storm Wardens Space Marine chapter introduced within, a group of gaming bloggers are putting together a complete Storm Wardens army for the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop wargame, and then are giving it away in a charity raffle.

To enter, just go to this post and donate as much as you like, via Paypal. $1 gets you one raffle ticket, you can buy as many as you like, and all proceeds go to Doctors Without Borders.

These guys, and this competition, are in no way affiliated with the Brighton Gamers group, or myself, but I thought it was a good project, and one worth mentioning to others.

Rogue Trader Session 15: Part 15 of a 1-Part Limited Series

Characters:

Aphesius Alesaunder, zealous yet charming missionary of the Imperial Cult. (Manoj A)
Mordecai the Cautious, twin-hellpistol-wielding weapons monkey, sent to the newly-acquired Thunderhammer to make sure all is shipshape, since David was off buying a car or something. (David)
Maximillius XVIII, tough-as-nails tech-priest from a death world. (Ben F)
Octavius Sol, seneschal and quartermaster. (Stuart F)
Triptych, mutant navigator and his harem. (Ric R, playing from Manchester, via Skype)

---

As a group, we had decided that we'd had fun with Rogue Trader, but that it was perhaps time for a change. With plenty of plot threads still to finish, we decided to call this the end of the first "season", to use US TV terminology, and revisit the game later in the year. In the meantime, there was the small matter of the infestation of the walking dead at Jameson's Hollow.

It was a bit of an experimental session, with the group entering the twenty-first century by using Skype to have Ric join us for the finale, and in that spirit, I designed a little mini-game to handle the battle against the undead hordes. Running it as a series of fights would have been a grind, and we'd already done a big battle on the bridge of the Thunderhammer, so I didn't want to go over old ground in our last session.

Instead, I designed a modified exploration challenge. There were three known groups of survivors on the station, and each group would be at 50% strength by the time the players got to them; this survival rate would be modified up or down by 10% depending on the results of five skill rolls per group. If the players went after one group at a time, any failures would also count against the other two groups, but if they went after all three groups, they would have to split the party. Any skill could be used in the challenge, as long as the player could come up with a good in-context reason, or even better, narrate the skill use.

Ben burned a fate point in order to rescue the third group without having to make a test, then the team split, with the priest and the militant going after the second group, while the rest of the team went after the first lot. Through some clever tactical nous, some stealth, and a bit of shooting, the two teams got to their destinations, discovering hundreds of exhausted people, shivering in the dark. Aphesius and Mordecai found that many of their group were injured, which slowed down the evacuation, which in turn led to more of the Risen catching up with them; they had a choice between letting the dead pick of the stragglers, or stopping each time to fight off the attackers, and in a rare moment of altruism from the priest, they did the latter.

Over at the other side of the void station, the rest of the team found their group of survivors apparently held hostage by the former astropath of Jameson's Hollow, now quite dead, but still somehow in control of his psychic abilities. A short battle followed in which the dead psyker was killed once more, his death unleashing a torrent of warp energies which twisted reality in the immediate vicinity, plunging the area into unnatural darkness, and allowing some daemonic presence through just enough to whisper blasphemous secrets directly into the minds of the explorers.

Even so, the explorers returned victorious, rescuing the vast majority of the survivors before turning their new chemical weapon on the station, melting the dead inside as they did the crew of the Thunderhammer. As a result of their success, they were able to negotiate an exclusive deal with the authorities, barring any Rogue Traders other than themselves and Moullierre from using the station's facilities.

They then headed to their holdings in the Mianded system, to fill out their crew and get some shore leave, before returning to pick up Moullierre and her alien husband; both Aphesius and Sol attempted to charm Moullierre, hoping to gain some kind of advantage, but the canny Trader got the better of both of them. The party then headed to the Soangre system, where the Eldar had told them they would find a way for him to contact his people. Sure enough, suspended in space at the mid point between the system's binary stars was a shimmering portal, something Triptych knew was akin to a Warp tunnel, but at the same time not. It was also far too small for either of the explorers' starships, but would accommodate a shuttle. Their xeno prisoner indicated that this portal would lead them to their destination, and with considerable reluctance, the team got in a shuttle with the Eldar, with Moullierre and some hand-picked troops in the other, and headed for the portal.

As Triptych, at the helm, guided their craft through the unnatural passage in space-time, their vox units crackled into life, with a message from the Banshee bridge crew alerting them to the presence of other starships in the system. Before they could respond, their momentum carried their shuttlecraft through the portal and into the unknown.

Which is where we left it. Perhaps we will return one day to discover what's on the other side of the portal, and perhaps not; there is always a hint of sadness when a campaign comes to a close, but we got fifteen sessions out of what was only supposed to be a one-shot, so I can't complain.

Rogue Trader Session 14: Death by Pointy Stick

Characters:

Aphesius Alesaunder, zealous yet charming missionary of the Imperial Cult. (Manoj A)
Mordecai the Cautious, twin-hellpistol wielding weapons monkey, sent to the newly-acquired Thunderhammer to make sure all is shipshape, since David was off buying a car or something. (David)
Maximillius XVIII, tough-as-nails tech-priest from a death world. (Ben F)
Octavius Sol, seneschal and quartermaster. (Stuart F)
Triptych, mutant navigator and his harem. (Ric R)

---

This is quite a long one. We played for an extra hour, but barely any of it was scripted, as the players spent most of their time pursuing their own schemes. They're also a cautious lot who like to cover every eventuality before they take action, so there's always lots of planning and dealing going on at the table, and I don't have to do anything except listen. This game has been easy, and a lot of fun, to GM for that reason.

The duel of honour between Octavius Sol and Imperial Commander Ernst Kruger would begin at 06:00 hours, and already there was a palpable buzz aboard the ragtag fleet of refugee vessels surrounding the Risen-infested void station of Jameson's Hollow. While Sol busied himself with practising his mêlée skills, the rest of the gang set about stacking the odds in favour of their seneschal. Maximillius created a small hidden poison dispenser which would attach to Sol's spear; the hope was that since it was a weapon of xeno design, such an addition would be difficult to spot. He also met up with some of the Banshee's underdeck scum and purchased a cheap home-made version of the combat drug Frenzon, just to give Sol a further edge in the fight.

Meanwhile, the priest studied the rules of a formal duel and also tried to uncover any particular weaknesses Kruger might have, and which they could exploit. It was discovered that the Commander was a solid, even boring, man, devoted to military service, but with a strong sense of honour; it was this stability which led to him being assigned to the frontier outpost in the first place. He was also discovered to be an orphan, adopted into the Kruger family, but Alesaunder did not have the time to turn up any more on this line of enquiry. As one last action, the priest made it clear to Kruger's men that any attempt to interfere in the duel would not be appreciated, and that he had two starships bristling with weapons with which to make the point, if necessary.

The hour of the duel arrived, and the explorers arrived at the makeshift arena constructed within one of Moullierre's vessel's cargo holds to discover a sizeable crowd. A twenty metre square area at the centre was roped off, and the audience sat around this on barrels, cargo crates and anything else they could find. Another area was roped off for the assembled dignitaries and nobles; present was their own Trader Locke, Aurelie Moullierre the host, and Kruger's second-in-command, Augustus Schtolnik. Zarak was not present, and Triptych discovered that the suspected Inquisitor had been found dead in his room on Moullierre's vessel earlier that morning, a victim of poison.

(This poison was created by the explorator and administered by the seneschal, at the very same dinner at which Sol and Kruger had the argument which led to the duel. Triptych was not aware of this plan, however, and Ric played his reaction as genuine shock and surprise.)

Alesaunder accompanied his cousin Sol to the ring, and used his considerable social skills to not only whip Sol up into a frenzy, but to also distract and demoralise Kruger; Sol was already under the effects of Frenzon as well as the still-unknown influence of the alien spear, so the players hoped that they'd done enough, as the odds were very much in favour of the military man. Alas, Kruger fumbled his roll to resist the taunting, which changed everything.



Sol, in a murderous rage charged the Commander, who seemed to just stand there with a look of confusion on his face. The first blow was but a scratch, shaving off a slice of Kruger's ear, but a second pierced his thigh, blood welling from the savage wound. Watching from behind the rope barrier, Alesaunder was surprised to discover one of the red-robed figures from his dream standing beside him, apparently enjoying the duel; a discussion followed, in which the figure made another offer of power and immortality to the priest, mentioning that Aphesius was of particular interest to them, as the explorator and navigator were barely human, and that Sol "belonged to another".

Meanwhile, Triptych was scanning the crowd with his Warp eye, on the look out for baleful energies, and spotted the hooded figure talking to the priest. Recognising the figure from the description Aphesius had given him of the dream, Triptych pushed his way through the crowd to tell Moullierre that there was a Warp entity on her vessel.

Sol jabbed again at Kruger, who again failed to put up a solid defence, and this time the alien weapon sunk into the muscles at the Commander's shoulder, rendering his left arm useless. Sol felt some force empowering him, something other than the combat drugs, something which seemed to fill him with energy and in a blur of speed he made a second attack, once more to Kruger's leg, this time shearing the limb completely. The crowd gasped in surprise as the military man fell to the ground and blood gushed all over the deck. Triptych shuddered as he saw his seneschal surrounded by blasphemous xeno energies no one else could see.

The red-robed figure was overjoyed by this display of violence, which perhaps contributed to Alesaunder once more rejecting the offer. With a shrug, the figure claimed that he had "other options", walked into the middle of the expanding pool of Kruger's blood, and with a salute to the priest, sank into the pool as if it had real depth. Meanwhile, the Commander had begun twitching, but before anything could be done to prevent his rise from the dead, Sol screamed that same unnatural scream the explorers had heard on the bridge of the Thunderhammer and brought the spear down through Kruger's chest and into the deck plating underneath, with a shower of eldritch red sparks. Those who were present at the spear's discovery couldn't help but note the similarities.

Shocked by this series of events, the crowd dispersed, and the explorers warily approached the howling seneschal with an eye to calming him down. Many minutes later, Sol came to his senses, with little memory of the duel, but a feeling of elation flooding through every fibre of his being.

After a brief detour to see for themselves whether Zarak was indeed dead, the explorers returned to their ongoing plan to turn the situation at Jameson's Hollow to their advantage, offering to clear the station of the Risen in exchange for exclusive access to the station's facilities. Kruger had not been keen on this suggestion, seeing it as dishonourable at best and blackmail at worst, but with him out of the way, the team hoped that Schtolnik would prove more open to the plan. He did, although it seemed more through weariness than anything else, and so the explorers moved forward with the next stage, which was to find out more about the Risen before they attempted to rescue the survivors still on the station.

To do this, they met again with the Eldar held captive in a secret part of Moullierre's vessel. He again repeated his offer to go to his people and ask for assistance, in return for his freedom from his prison. Although they still did not trust the alien, the explorers felt that he was their only option to find out a way to stop the undead plague, and so tentatively agreed, on the grounds that they would accompany him to his destination. They also convinced Moullierre to allow her husband's freedom, although she too insisted on accompanying them, albeit in their vessel, as she wasn't keen on her "in-laws" discovering her. With the bare bones of an agreement in place, the team decided to first rescue the survivors on the void station, and returned to their ship to formulate a plan.

Rogue Trader Session 13: Come Dine With Me

Characters:

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

Full house again!

---

On the battle bridge of the Thunderhammer, the explorers fought a horde of undead crew members, while a hulking figure they took to be the captain, Telemon Maul, waded through the mêlée towards Octavius Sol, having issued a formal challenge to the seneschal.

Perhaps it was decided that the dead have no need for honour, or perhaps the priest simply did not care, as he fought his way to Sol in order to aid his ally in the duel. Meanwhile, the rest of the team fought the massed dead, Maximillius swinging his power axe to and fro, lopping off limbs and heads as he went, and the Banshee's elite guardsmen turning their flamers on the shambling dead, their aim guided by their faith in the Emperor, as well as the commands of the battle-hardened Mordecai. The navigator Triptych fared less well, suffering a grievous wound as a lucky knife strike took him in the belly, spilling his innards across the deck. If it were not for Triptych's mutant healing abilities, he would have died there and then, lying amongst his own intestines.

(To run each of the zombies individually would have fried my brain, so I instead ran the mob as one creature with multiple attacks. It had 300 Wounds, and was capable of three attacks against each player-character per round; reduced to 200 Wounds, it would only be capable of two attacks, and once down to 100, it could only attack each character once per round. This was an experiment, but it worked out well, and I'll be using it again.)

Sol found himself struggling to harm his opponent, even with the strange spear he'd rescued from the Eldar ruins, but death seemed to have made the captain sluggish and clumsy, and his attacks went wide, allowing the seneschal and priest to wear him down, with Sol striking the final blow, an attack so brutal it split the captain in two; at this point Sol uttered an inhuman cry, chilling the bones of everyone present, and the seneschal wondered what kind of influence the alien weapon had over him.

Eventually the battle was won, and the explorers found themselves in control of the bridge, but there was still the pressing problem of the 95,000 dead crew members roaming the halls of the Thunderhammer. Checking the logs, Maximillius discovered that the ship's drives had suffered some kind of malfunction while in the Warp, flooding the vessel with deadly radiation, killing many, and allowing them to rise as the restless dead. Outnumbered, the survivors were picked off one by one, before making a final, and apparently futile, stand on the bridge. A number of plans for cleansing the ship were considered, and most rejected as being too impractical, until the explorers hit upon the idea of unleashing some kind of toxin which would destroy biological material. The tech-priest made some quick calculations and came up with a suitable formula and, making contact with his deputies aboard the Banshee, gave them the instructions to mass-produce the toxin. The process would take three days, which matched up well with the distance between the two starships. Now, all they could do was wait.

The Banshee arrived with the bio-weapon, as well as the news that the suspected Inquisitor Zarak had moved to the Rogue Trader Aurelie Moullierre's vessel, the Dark Filament; this concerned the explorers, as they suspected that Zarak was working against them in some way. That would have to wait, however, as they had a job to do. The Thunderhammer's life support systems were loaded with the toxin, and the ship was flooded with the deadly concoction; a day or so later, and the chemical had done its work, melting the dead crew into a greasy mulch. Maximillius vented the poison into space and recycled the ship's atmosphere, making it safe once more for the living, and the explorers set about transferring enough crew from their vessel to operate the massive battleship.

They sent a vox cast to the Dark Filament, informing those present that the Locke dynasty had claimed the Thunderhammer as salvage, and requesting a crisis meeting with Moullierre, Imperial Commander Kruger, and Inquisitor Zarak. A sumptuous banquet was prepared aboard the Banshee, and the dignitaries were made comfortable as talks began on how to deal with the undead menace. In the background, the explorers arranged to have refugees from the abandoned void station moved to the Thunderhammer to serve as temporary crew, and Sol had Zarak's meal poisoned with the same toxin used to deal with Flavion so many months ago, an act he kept secret from his fellows. It was perhaps a prescient move, as Zarak greeted the explorers with a smile, which further convinced them that he was up to something.

It seems that whenever the player-characters get into tense negotiations like this, everything goes wrong, and they start making enemies. Perhaps informing Kruger that they wanted control of his station in exchange for the release of their new bio-weapon was not the best tactic, as the noble became enraged with such double-dealing in a time of crisis and called the explorers' honour into question, which then enraged Octavius Sol, who called for a duel. Kruger agreed, and stormed out of the negotiations, returning to his temporary base aboard Moullierre's vessel. For her part, Moullierre seemed to be amused by all the testosterone floating about, but also asked the explorers if the rumours she'd heard about the alien ruins they'd discovered were true, and that they had explored an Eldar temple. When this was confirmed, she asked them to meet her aboard her own vessel at midnight, before returning to the feast.

After the meal, and with negotiations stalled, the explorers got in contact with Augustus Shtolnik, Kruger's second-in-command, to discuss the details of the duel. Shtolnik informed them that the fight would take place aboard the Dark Filament, and that it would be to the death, although they would be allowed to choose the weapon used. Perhaps under a xeno influence, Sol chose the spear, and went to his quarters to practise.

Leaving the seneschal to his training, the rest of the team headed over to the Dark Filament as requested, and suspecting a trap were surprised to find Moullierre waiting for them alone. She had each of them swear an oath of honour to not reveal what they would see aboard her vessel, and then led them through a warren of passages into the depths of the ship. There, hidden behind a number of secure doors, they were shown a single dirty cell in which was chained a humanoid figure, clearly malnourished and mistreated. As their eyes adjusted to the gloom in the unlit prison, they recognised the figure as one of the treacherous Eldar, and Moullierre introduced it as her husband, before leaving them alone.

The Eldar captive listened as the explorers explained what they had seen on Zeesol, and he confirmed that they had destroyed one of his people's temples. He also told them that the Eldar knew a thing or two about death, and that it sounded like the door between life and death had been opened, which was allowing the dead to return from beyond, hence the current plague. However, he also informed them that we was no expert on such matters, although he could find such experts. The price he gave for such aid was, of course, his freedom.

Rogue Trader Session 12: Never Trust a Priest

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)

Full house! Ding!

---

Aphesius and Mordecai stood above the bloody remnants of Telemachus Locke, the son and only heir of their Rogue Trader, but the guards they'd brought with them were busy subduing the cultists, and the cultists were busy being subdued, so no one else had yet discovered the cult leader's true identity. So they quickly hid the incriminating medallion, and turned a flamer on the corpse, proclaiming that such heretics should be burned, particularly as they'd not yet solved the problem of the rising dead. In order to deflect attention away from the cult leader, the priest ordered that the remaining cultists should also be executed, and with some reluctance, the guardsmen unleashed fiery death upon the restrained death cultists, most of whom accepted their demise in a state of religious ecstasy.

The cult leader's assistants were led away for interrogation, and through the application of violence (Mordecai) and weird psychic manipulation (Triptych) the team discovered that the cult was being led by someone they called the "boy king", and that he had come to them during that period when the Banshee was lost in the warp for two hundred days; the explorers wondered whether some malign daemonic influence may have infiltrated the ship during this time in the empyrean. They discovered more about the cult's beliefs, but could not pin them down as true heresy, as the cultists seemed to believe that they were worshipping the Emperor in his aspect as a being hovering on the border between life and death. At this point, Aphesius made an executive decision and declared the cult heretical, which just so happened to tie in nicely with his previous order to have them all burned to death.

There followed a sequence which touched my cynical GM's heart, as the players began conspiring against each other. This was a great bit of roleplaying, as the players were all aware of Telemachus' death, but only the characters of Mordecai and Aphesius knew, so they decided to keep the truth from their comrades. Aphesius went to Locke, spinning a tale the boy had not attended his spiritual lessons for a number of days, and the Rogue Trader tasked him with finding Telemachus, who'd undoubtedly just gone exploring in the lower decks again. Then the priest and the gunbunny began planning to arrange evidence to support their version of events.

During the night, Aphesius was woken by a knocking at his door, and answering, he found himself looking out on a vast plain of bleached white skulls stretching out as far as the eye could see, with foreboding black storm clouds boiling in the sky ahead. He attempted to return to bed, but found that the door was now behind him, and locked. Not only that, but he turned to find himself facing eight red-robed figures, who all spoke with a single voice, acknowledging his killing of their champion, and offering the priest the chance to take his place. Aphesius was briefly tempted, but his faith returned to him, and he uttered a prayer to the God-Emperor, which seemed to break the illusion, and he found himself back in his cabin, drenched in sweat.

The next morning, the priest mentioned his dream to his companions, and Triptych's long study of the esoteric meant that he found some elements of the dream familiar, but he could not quite place them. In the meantime, Aphesius arranged for Telemachus' medallion to be "discovered" in a service duct, and we had some more good roleplaying, as Ben, playing an explorator with a fanatical desire to uncover hidden truths, decided to investigate further, and found that the only person to go anywhere near the duct in recent times was the acolyte Aphesius had sent to "discover" the medallion. Already suspicious of the preacher, Maximillius kept his discovery to himself for the moment.

The group approached Locke and revealed that they had discovered a death cult aboard the ship, that it was probably a front for worship of the Ruinous Powers, and that the cult had likely killed Telemachus, although no body had been found. They gave Locke his son's medallion, and left the noble to his thoughts, turning the Banshee towards Jameson's Hollow in order to answer the distress signal they had received previously.

Arriving in-system, their auger arrays picked up a small flock of vessels in orbit around the void station, including the Dark Filament, the ship of Rogue Trader Aurelie Moullierre, with whom they had an alliance. They also detected the Thunderhammer, the vessel of the military minded Telemon Maul, hanging back at the edge of the system, apparently without power. They got in touch with the Dark Filament, and were surprised to have the call answered by Kruger, the commander of Jameson's Hollow. He revealed that the station had been abandoned due to the swarms of living dead, and that the survivors were packed into the vessels in orbit; the priority was overcrowding and resources, and Kruger requested that the Banshee help to lighten the load a little. The explorers were reluctant to let a bunch of refugees on board, and asked to speak to Moullierre, who seemed pleased to see them. Remembering how well she and Locke got on, the explorers suggested that she come on board the Banshee, in the hopes that she might be able to cheer up the distraught Trader. They also asked about the Thunderhammer, and discovered that no one else had noticed its presence; the explorers were immediately suspicious, and decided to check out Maul's vessel for themselves.

They sent the Banshee to meet up with Moullierre, and took a shuttle full of troops out to the Thunderhammer. Inching closer, they detected that the ship was active, but seemed to be on silent running, waiting for something. As they approached even closer, the cruiser's array of weapons came to life, and Triptych found himself having to weave the shuttle through a hell of plasma lances and explosive ordnance, a hair-raising few minutes, if the mutant navigator had hair of course. The shuttle docked with the vast ex-naval vessel at a point which Maximillius guessed was close to the command bridge. They found the corridors of the ship quiet and empty, and advanced carefully, getting to the bridge without challenge, that is until they opened the blast doors. Inside, milling about without apparent purpose, was a throng of walking corpses, all clad in flak armour, and wielding automatic weapons and monoknives, a shock to the explorers, who had expected to see more of the feral dead they'd encountered elsewhere. Slumped in the golden command throne at the centre of the bridge was an unmoving figure clad in the flak armour of an Imperial military officer, but the explorers had little time to pick out further details as the horde of dead surged to the attack.

The explorers and their soldiers opened fire, but a mêlée soon ensued, with the slashing and stabbing of monoknives met with close range pistol blasts and the bone-cracking thud of rifle butts. In all this, Sol and Mordecai attempted to pick off the figure in the command throne, but the mass of ornamentation and technology provided cover, and they could only score glancing hits. As the combat escalated, the figure rose from the throne with a painful slowness, smoke rising from the few hits which had been scored, and looked at each of the explorers, before turning to the sensechal. Raising its arm, the figure pointed its power maul at Sol and bowed its head, a gesture the seneschal recognised as a formal combat challenge. Then the figure began wading through the mêlée towards Octavius Sol.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...