The blind jump was harrowing. The players didn't know how long the voyage would last and every three days a new roll was made on the wonderfully cruel warp encounters chart. To summarize the trip in short: it was brutal. half a dozen demons invaded the ship, the life sustainers were still busted and nasty air was suffocating the lower decks, moral kept dipping lower along with the crew population and worst of all the crew developed a warp plague.
In one of the expansions to rogue trader is a chart for warp journeys and one of the really bad results is called a warp plague (or something like that) the result doesn't say specifically what the plague does, it just suggests that is is super nasty and horrible. Luckily in my files i had tucked away a chart for generating super weird fantasy diseases and the one i generated happened to have three stages...
so as the players fought not to become lost in the warp or suffocate or get torn to pieces by beings of un-reality; as the players rollplayed arguments and attempted to figure out why everyone panicked so hard last session; as they all suffered nightmares, gained insanity points and corruption and began to doubt that any of there characters would get to achieve anything before they starved or went mad or suffocated in space. I quietly began spreading the ridiculous and awful disease through the ship's crew. day.... by day.... by day.
STAGE 1: infection. freshly infected become disoriented and begin having short lapses in memory, often becoming lost. these infected become more and more needy and often ask for assistance from others. This is vital to the spread of the disease.
After two weeks the wretched Joanna finally managed to pull itself into real-space and out of the screaming hellscape that was the warp. celebration was short lived as the randomly generated star system the crew found themselves in was no happy place to be. A giant black metal object sat in the system's center where the sun would have been. wrecked ships were orbiting this metal sphere being slowly drawn in and crushed against the sphere's metal surface. Moving through the system carries with it the constant threat of being grabbed by enormous artificial gravity riptides and dashed against the sphere.
Near the point where the Joanna entered the system was an enormous vessel of Xenos origin that looked more like a hulk than a ship. This Ship, according to the augers, was packed with life-signs.
STAGE 2: The infected forget their own identities and become disoriented, their flesh becoming fluid and reforming so that they appear attractive to uninfected that see them. This is the infectious stage of the plague. Anyone that offers help or advice or sympathy to the infected must succeed a toughness check to resist the warp born, psychic plague. Luckily for the player characters; they have been executing crew at random all the way through the warp and haven't needed to test for the plague yet.
The Joanna's crew decided to experiment with the teleportarium and attempted to teleport one of the life-signs from the hulk into the Joanna. They roll on my custom teleporter mishap chart and the result is that the teleport is a success... exept they dont knnow where on board the joanna they managed to teleport the creature. This creature was a kind of weird two legged mouth with no eyes, similar to the creatures in the movie Tremours 2. This bizar Xeno would stalk the ship for many sessions and over time would become known among the crew as "the Space Chicken" but at this point no one knew what it was or where they sent it..
With the space chicken walking the halls, the plague silently spreading, the gravity sphere passively pulling the Joanna to it's doom and the ship teetering on the edge of mutiny, augers pick up an active imperial space station in a stable orbit on the far edge of the system, and The Joanna beats to quarters. Fennick doesn't see a space station, he dosnt see salvation, or respite, the opportunity to put in and repair, or a chance to find out where in the universe his blind jump has taken him, all he sees is loot. Loot and Glory.
Some Leary rolls are made as the Joanna takes the most direct route to the station and passes close to the mysterious sphere but all is fine.
Soon the station was looming and Fennick had organised every able bodied man and woman into battalions. Just as the Station sends out a hail The Joanna flips on it's hymn casters. Trumpets and pipe organs and choirs singing dirges in high gothic fill every radio wave making transmissions of any sort impossible, and cutting off the station's chance to call for help. Fennick takes the microphone and with the symphony behind him he gives an impassioned speech which probably lasted 2 minuets but could be surmised as "I am Fennick markus havershund the IX, .... ect. ect. and if you surrender all your valuables quickly we will do you the honor of killing you quickly."
Shuttles zoom out of landing bays, ten thousand dis-organised crew attempt a synchronized breach and clear of a station twice the size of the Joanna without the ability to communicate. becuase of the incredible symphony playing on every frequency.
Stage 3: Once an area develops a critical mass of Stage 2 infected, they begin to stick together, there liquid flesh merging until they become great blobs of warp spawned muscle and bone. These Wretched hulks ooze about for a few days killing and breaking anything they can find while eating as best they can until at last its flesh falls apart and it dies. Luckily for the Joanna, the infection was not yet at this stage and the shuttles filled with tightly packed crewmen did not congeal into a soup of screaming figures and blood.
That wouldn't happen until next session...
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