(As part of character creation in Rogue Trader each character chooses a career path, this includes home-world, primary motivations, what jobs they have had, why they chose to explore the stars ect. this basically encourages players to write back-stories for their characters. this group went wild with back-stories. the players never read each other's back-stories. only i read them all and they had invented some very similar things in their pasts... I tell you this so you will understand the madness that was the second session becuase some players reacted rather... strongly to things...)
SESSION 2!
Fennick describes going into warp. He says that there is a brass servitor (zombie-robot-cyborg-butler) that has a giant red button on it's back, pressing this button send the ship into the warp. Fennick describes his captain's throne and gives a speech before slamming his fist into the giant button...
The Joanna slips into the yawning maw of the warp hopefully heading for the independent outpost known as Footfall. All the windows are bolted shut, security is tripled and in the holy engineering bay thousands of tech priests burn incense and chant the 95 rights of maintenance from page 276 of the blessed tome "Fusion plant operator's manual 2nd edition". Maccabeus, the ships missionary, encourages sinful crew-members to burn themselves alive in-front of the ship's auto-temple, intending to keep the fiery pier burning until the ship exits the warp. Fennick locks himself in his quarters with his autobiography and a pistol. Everyone holds their breath, because just outside the hull of the ship, held at bay only by the protective energies of the geller feild, writhes the viscous un-reality of the warp. Any moment deamons could tear through the hull. Even a momentary power failure could cause the geller feild to fail and the ship's innards could become an Escher painting, a horror of non euclidean geometry. The ships thousand year old machinery strains and hundreds of crew die simply attempting to avert complete mechanical failure. The halls echo with fearful voices mumbling prayers.
The Navigator Gabriel Uhl, the only crew member able to look into the warp and not go instantly mad, guides the ship through the chaotic currents. I tell him that he feels something familiar clawing at the back of his mind just to freak him out.
perhaps Uhl was distracted by this (or perhaps he simply has awful luck and cant roll dice to save his life) because he totally failed every navigation roll and the journey quickly took a bad turn. The players groaned as I joyously opened the lovely navigation error charts. On the third day the Joanna slammed into a pocket of warp turbulence and the entire crew became plagued with nightmares and madness. I told them all that they felt a nasty demonic kind of dejavu and Maccabeus threw more crew on the fire as moral dropped into dangerous levels (78%/99%).
On the sixth day Gabriel steered the ship into a reef of spectral hatred and the shadows aboard the vessel sprang to life crawling into the machinery of the life sustainer. Maccabeus lead priests with incense and flamethrowers to purge the systems and succeeded, at the cost of losing the life sustainer plant entirely. The combat was short and sweet. Fire kills everything the rogue trader.
On the ninth day, as the ship filled with bad air, and crew suffocated in their sleep, Gabriel Uhl attempted to accelerate there journey by catching a strong warp current. This endevour resulted in a time dilation. Everyone of the crew experienced a day worth of time every second. Men, who took minuets to suffocate experienced years of agony. It took hours to stake a single step. Weeks passed in the time it took to sip water from a cup. Needless to say moral plummeted further still as the crew found themselves prisoners in their own skin.
Finaly it came time to translate out of the warp into real space. Uhl rolls and fails again. The players start talking about the characters they will replace these with when they die, as i joyously open the book to the "inaccurate warp translation" table. A couple rolls later and the Joanna pops into reality in the middle of nowhere, hanging in the empty space between worlds. The players are relived, they might have appeared inside a sun or deep in an alien ocean. this was just nowhere.
Fennick, who has just left his quarters for the frst time orders the auger array to scan the area. a couple excellent rolls later i say
"there is nothing for billions of kilometers in any direction except a small transport 200km off the port bow"
Then:
-Fennick asks for a telescope and looks through it at the ship. it is very far off but i describe what he can see. "it looks like a small black transport"
-Fennick's player says "I stand at the window and i dont move" then PM's (private messages) me and asks "is it what i think it is?"
- i say nothing
- maccabeus: what is it captain?
- "The ship turns slightly in your direction" i say as i PM Gabriel uhl and say "you hallucinate an old man in a row boat whenever you look in the direction of the small ship"
- gabriel uhl screams "guys we gotta run!"
- maccabeus: what is going on!
- Fennick: continues to stair then asks "when will it be close enough for me to see hull markings"
- 10 Kilometers i say
- Gabriel still yelling: "guys turn around right now we are fucked! so fucked! run!"
- Chronarch: "what the hell did i miss??"
- |Gabriel argues with everyone demanding that they run, fennick stares waiting for it to get closer
- I move the token closer
- Maccabeus: we are like 3 times the size whats the deal
- Gabriel UHL: I cant tell you just run!!
- I move the token closer
- Chronarch: should i be readying the ship's weapons?
- closer
- Fennick stares
-100km i tell them the class of the ship
- 70km Chronarch attempts to hail them
-50km i tell gabriel Uhl in a PM that he can see the old man in the boat smiling
- 20km Maccabeus uses the sensors to scan for life. gets one reading that says zero life signs and one that says 200,000 life signs
- Maccabeus PM's me and asks "is this what i think it is?"
-i say nothing
-10km.
-Fennick rolls a scrutiny test and is able to examine the ship. i say "it is what you think it is fennick, Gabriel you see the whites of his eyes. could you both roll fear 4 checks
now a fear test can ruin a character, drive him mad, make him pass out, commit suicide, die of a heart attack ect. a fear 4 test is mega bad and when they hear this chronarch and maccabeus freak out
-Fennick fails his fear test but still doesn't do to bad, the fear chart says he must run away from the source of the fear and he cant stop until it is gone he cannot fight it
- gabriel also fails, he gains tons of insanity points and also must run away
- Fennick orders the ship to turn around and run,
- Gabriel Uhl begins strapping himself into the navigator's chair and yelling into a brass tube that they have to go back into the warp
- Maccabeus argues that they can fight the ship but no one listens, as he looks out at the black ship he sees a giant eye blink somewhere on the hull of the strange vessle and he rolls a fear test
- maccabeus succeeds and keeps pressing for a violent solution
- chonarch runs down into engineering and manages to succeed some very dangerous rolls to boost speed
- the black ship gains on them
- Space combat starts, piloting rolls, tech use rolls, tons of engineering rolls, a couple broadsides later
- the black ship gains
- Moment of truth arrives. the black ship will have them in boarding range next round
- Fennick runs across the bridge to the brass servator and slams his fist into the button that would plunge the ship back into the screaming vortex of the warp and away from the vessel that pursues them
- "Nothing happens" i say. and the players say what?!?! what do you mean?!?!
- chronarch remebers that he disabled the servator so that this would never happen
- they have one action left before the ship makes contact
- one clutch tech use test by chronarch re-enables the servator and the wretched Joanna gets sucked into the warp.
we end the session with the description of the black ship hanging in the blackness of space, the camera zooming out slowly while the voice of an old man whispers a nursery rhyme about three blind mice. the black ship dispersal in a red flash.
END OF SESSION
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