A Maw Worth Fighting For: A Rogue Trader Campaign Journal

[The Glyphstone]

So I've finally managed to score a live game group after what feels like way too long of PbP-only gaming, and I was considering writing a campaign journal to share the crazy exploits of the group. After one session, I think this was a very good idea - I'm going to have to have somewhere to share the insanity.

These are the voyages of the starship Insert Ship Name Here...

Yeah. It's going to be that kind of game. No one could think of a good name for our starting ship (an extremely fragile Havoc-class raider with a pair of Sunsear Laser Batteries as its main armament), until it was proposed by yours truly that the ship never actually got named when it commissioned; a paperwork error got the forms stamped and sealed and bonded before anyone realized the name of the vessel hadn't been assigned. Ten thousand years later, the Administratum still hasn't caught up to this bureaucratic snarl.

Anyways, our cast of heroes...anti-heroes...Okay so we're all a bunch of freaks and psychos.

Spoiler: The PCs

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-Moi, Malakai the Explorator. Born downwind of the toxic slag pits of the forge world Hesh, Malakai is big. Really big. Ogryn-sized big, with the Brute and Hulking mutations (bought both via Contaminated Environs and Tainted origin paths). He was in fact mistaken for an Ogryn at first, conscripted into the Skiitari, and when he was given Bone'ead surgery the cortex implant raised him from human intelligence to superhuman intelligence instead of the expected Ogryn-to-human boost, the first of a chain of errors and somewhat questionable decisions that ended with him as an initiate in the AdMech. His dream is to be one of the Tech-priests who go full Robocop, replacing all of his tainted mutant flesh with nice shiny holy bionics one Acquisition at a time.

-Xanatos the Navigator. With an Unnatural Visage and Regeneration (rolled crazy well on the Navigator Mutations chart), he's basically Voldemort with a third eye of doom. Not as fleshed-out, but is apparently from a Renegade House on the outs with certain factions of the Inquisition, which will lead to Hilarity because our raider is apparently a decommissioned Inquisition fleet unit in addition to being ancient and incredibly fragile.

-Horatio the Seneschal. A new player to the system and universe, but one who's embraced it whole-heartedly with a smooth-talking con man capable of spinning the most ridiculous stories out of thin air then backing them up with equally ridiculously low Interaction rolls. He is the only character with any Interaction skills trained, or a Fellowship above 30.Unfortunately, he's also made of tissue paper, and has a hair-trigger temper that sets him off into a fury whenever he thinks someone is insulting him.

-Ghost the Arch-Militant. A sniper from Catachan, more or less Budget Sly Marbo. The player for this guy was very sleepy and left about half an hour into the session, so he never really got any face time. But he's also low-Fellowship with remarkably high Insanity for a starting character, just shy of his first trauma threshold.

Spoiler: Session 1.1: Port Wander

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No one wanted to be the Rogue Trader, so he was made an NPC who we met at the improvised start of the adventure (Into the Maw from the core book, so no spoilers plox). A utter fat slob, summarized as Baron Harkonnen on a bad day, and very much down on his luck due to catastrophic mismanagement of the dynasty's assets over the past few generations. Being his loyal and trusted officers - or at least the ones with the right combination of expendability and competence - we're sent down to Port Wander to look for interesting quest hooks Profit Factor opportunities.

Even before we hit dirt, we get a mysterious com transmission from a man who says he used to work for the RT's father, and insists we should come meet with him. This version of Port Wander we walk through apparently has never heard of the Inquisition, with vendors openly selling xenos relics and preserved xenos trophies/body parts, but no one accosts us (yet), and we find this mysterious contact in a run-down beggar's shack. He gives us a mysterious black pebble that contains the coordinates of a lost pirate cruiser loaded down with unimaginable wealth and treasure; unfortunately, a cyber-raven swoops down and steals it before he can explain further. Everyone gives chase, but when we return to the central market area, a gang of armsmen appear from the crowd and start trying to gun us down.

A somewhat comical fight ensues. Being effectively immune to small-arms fire with Toughness 60 and Armor 7 across most of his body, my Explorator tries his best to body-block the more fragile party members while repeatedly failing to hit with his boltgun. But with assassins on all sides, they can get around him and start shooting the squishy party members instead. One bullet sends Horatio into Critical Damage, which is not a good start, but then the assassins decide to throw a smoke grenade at us. Between the screaming civilians running in all directions and the smoke, no one can hit anything with any degree of accuracy except Ghost (run as an NPC since we needed his firepower) methodically shooting enemy legs off with his bolt pistol. Malakai gets frustrated and closes to melee with his power axe; he misses, but having the eight-foot-tall cyborg charge screaming out of the smoke cloud waving a giant axe is apparently more than that goon's paycheck covers and he flees. The Navigator runs out and tries to Lidless Stare a goon, fails, and eats a full-auto burst that puts him into Critical Damage too, while the Explorator goes axe-rampage on another thug. This one also decides to bolt, but Ghost finishes him off with a double Righteous Fury bolt shell.

Spoiler: Session 1.2: Alas, Horatio

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Now the Arbites show up. As we (well, two of us) are the only ones standing, they arrest us on general principle, after our two casualties wake up from accumulated Fatigue. At the Arbites precinct, the chief arbitrator demands an explanation for our mayhem and murder and heaps of corpses. Explorator Malakai is happy to volunteer a download of his cortex cogitator's recording of the incident, which at least proves we didn't shoot first, but this is where Horatio starts to improvise, by hitting on the Judge in the most incredibly sleazy way you can imagine...Horatio's player is having a blast, but the -20 ad-hoc penalty to Charm is well deserved. Naturally, he rolls under a 10. Doesn't quite literally Charm the pants off her, but he follows up with another sub-10 Blather and a sub-10 Deceive while spinning a long story about how the black marble (which was recovered out of a dumpster somehow) was actually a long-lost family heirloom of our Rogue Trader, traditionally skipped across the surface of a lake on any planet the dynasty fleet visited, only to be lost years ago and just now recovered. After identifying the dead assassins as the armsmen of a Rogue Trader Fel, who is apparently our BBEG, we get our marble back and return to the ship. Being psychically charged somehow, we take it to the NPC Astropath onboard, who identifies it as containing a astropathically encoded map to where the lost treasure ship can be found.

But our ship's data-cores don't have detailed knowledge of the Koronus Expanse, so we need to return to Port Wander to find/buy/steal some. Horatio decides this is the perfect time to go trawling for info in the dirtiest, dingiest, most seedy bar on the Port (direct quote); this turns out to be an Undercity 'club' with openly mutant 'dancers'. The drinks at the bar are poured out of adamantine bottles and melt holes in the floor when they are spilled - Navigator Xanatos takes one sip on a bet and spends a few rounds in an impromptu Shock seizure. But more ridiculously good rolls ensue from the silver-tongued Horatio, dropping a stack of Thrones on the bar and asking about where he can buy the best maps of the Expanse, so the bartender (who apparently has a tentacle) gives him directions to some sort of undercity black market.

The session ends there, having already been thoroughly derailed from the printed adventure thanks to Leisure Suit Seneschal. Next week should be a doozy.

[MachineWraith]

Awesome! I'm always on the prowl for a good Rogue Trader campaign journal. Leisure Suit Seneschal is spectacular, by the way!

[Destro_Yersul]

I've read stories of the RT Into the Maw intro adventure being run in a few different places. It's always fun to see each party take it gloriously off the rails in an entirely different way.

[The Glyphstone]

Well, this week was a doozy. Gonna need to get my thoughts in order.

So we kicked off this week on our way to the black market, where we could find ourselves a map-maker. The NPC was easy enough to locate, an old drunk ex-Navy officer in a stall. He was asleep and very drunk, so some minor shenanigans ensued to wake him up before we could dialogue. The Seneschal explained that we wanted a good map of the Koronus Expanse, and offered to pay a lot of money, but the guy didn't want money apparently. Nor did he want a job, but what he did want was to have a shipment of crates clandestinely delivered to the outlaw settlement of Footfall. Since it was apparently on our way anyways (?), we agreed and he gave us a map.

This is where the Seneschal immediately starts insisting that we should betray our new contact to the Arbites, and turn him in for smuggling. This is in spite of us not having yet completed our mission, with no way to verify the accuracy of the map, not even knowing what is in the crates or if they are illegal at all. He also more or less thinks he is the Rogue Trader - not entirely unjustified since he basically takes the in-story role of representing the NPC RT's authority - but this week he's so blatant about it that he comes off more like Seneschal Starscream. But the rest of the party talks him down, and we load up the crates without incident. Sure enough, the map-maker meets us at the landing bay after we finish the load and gives us the 'other half' of the map. He apparently still trusts us too much, but the Senschal grumbles anyways.

Now the fun begins, because we start our first Warp Travel segment. Navigator Xanatos rolls amazingly well to find the Astronomicon, getting us to our destination in 25% of the time it normally takes, but this is still a few weeks of warp travel, which means multiple Warp Encounter rolls. So of course, the first roll we get is a Demon Incursion, and naturally it manifests somewhere in the Enginarium. Everyone saddles up to go demon-hunting, while the Seneschal very sensibly hides underneath his bed and waits for us to either report back or die horribly. With the Navigator as a psychic auspex, using Psyniscience to track the warp disturbance left behind, we isolate the demon to a storage room. It proves to be a Flesh Hound, and leaps to the attack - I toast it once with the heavy flamer, but it knocks me down and goes after the Navigator instead. He takes a nasty hit, but then the Arch-Militant lines up a kill-shot with his new Solo Boltgun (swapped for the Needle Rifle in between sessions). Every other Warp Encounter roll is almost as bad - no more demons, but it seems like everything else happens, including a psychic madness plague that wipes out a third of our functional Crew, and forces us to drop out of Warp mid-space to do emergency repairs.

Completely coincidentally, there happens to be a distress beacon nearby, for a pilgrim ship that was attacked by pirates. Being the loyally genre-blind players we are, we go investigate to rescue them for favor and profit, and walk smack into a pirate ambush. Our Raider finds itself sandwiched between two other Raider-class ships, and we turn to engage the closer of the two. I fail to Aid the Machine Spirit. The Navigator fails to guide our aim with Psyniscience. The Seneschal babbles encouraging nonsense over the intercom and bolsters our crew's motivation to not get killed by Pirates. With the first ship at almost point-blank range, the Arch-Militant fires and scores maximum hits on both Sunsear Batteries, in one massive linked salvo of 8 hits. Even with the enemy void shield, the 7 hits that go through strip the enemy's Hull Integrity to -5 instantly, effectively hulking it and setting stuff on fire. This prompts an immediate surrender offer from the other pirate; intact, but out of range for now, and we outrange them. Some excellent rolls ensue, and when the dust settles, we've conscripted our surviving attacker as a Warranted privateer under our Rogue Trader's command (i.e. ours). Now our fleet measures 2 ships, and we proceed to Footfall.

On Footfall, we arrive and arrange for the crates to be given to our contact...but first, the Navigator has decided to be curious what is inside them. The rest of us want nothing to do with our suspicious cargo, so he sneaks behind our backs and opens a crate.

It is full of books.

...

He takes a book and opens it.

...

It turns out to be a very powerful tome of daemology, so potent that it triggers an immediate Perils of the Warp check, and the Navigator is bodily dragged into a Warp portal. The rest of us come back and find him missing plus a book disturbed next to the open crate. I as an Explorator couldn't care less about a book, the Seneschal just wants to get paid, and the Arch-Militant can't read, so we shrug and assume the Navigator will show up again eventually and we don't want to know anything about what might or might not have happened here. Instead, we go shopping, but since no one can make a Scrutiny check to save their lives, we totally fail to find even Scarce-grade items, despite looking hard enough that we have to test Upkeep. Luckily that passes, and we have nothing to do but wait 7 weeks for our Navigator to reappear, having gained a bunch of Corruption and his first Minor Mutation. Luckily, he passes his Malignancy tests and his Mutation is Grotesque, deforming his face and skin to become reptilian and scaly. Since he wears a mask anyways to hide his third eye, no one even notices the change. Some shenanigans occur with ensuring our tame pirate captain stays loyal, but eventually we are ready to continue pursuing the plot. Alone again, we continue to the coordinates of the Golden Pride or whatever the treasure ship is called, emerging in an empty system. No sign of the treasure hulk or our rival's cruiser, but a nearby planet has life signs and possible xeno ruins to loot. So we detour there, and send down scouting parties. They are promptly ambushed, die screaming, and we go to investigate. Orks are waiting, and we end right before combat.

[Blackhawk748]

So you guys got SHip 2 as well? Nice. When we got to that we saw AMBUSH stamped so hard on that area that we went in slowly with all weapons at the ready. We blinded the first ship, which then spent the rest of the combat moving slowly forward, and turned the other ship into a flaming wreck.

After that we had our RTs sibling go over and Take command, and we shuffled a bunch of crewmen around.

Oh and a thing you guys need to remember, you have Naval Arms-men, a lot of them. Have fun with that.

[The Glyphstone]

We were genre savvy about the ambush, but since no one has Scrutiny trained, we bombed our Detection roll to spot it in-character. Luckily it was decided that one-shotting the first raider and effortlessly blocking the weak fire of the second was sufficiently intimidating to force a surrender, at which point we re-negotiated and got the captain to sign on as a Warranted privateer to our dynasty on the spot.

[The Glyphstone]

And the grand conclusion of our introductory adventure!

Spoiler: 'Ere We Go, 'Ere We Go

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The orks in question prove to only be a small scouting/raiding party of five, and we more or less steamroll them with a single spray of bullets and promethium. Thus emboldened by our success, we press on into the ruins, eventually coming to a fork in the passageway. Down one path is the sound of gunfire and shouting - both humans and orks, and the humans aren't one of our armsman groups. So naturally we investigate, and end up on a balcony overlooking a group of soldiers wearing House Fel colors and one mysterious woman, fighting a larger band of orks. No one, least of all the Seneschal and Navigator, had forgiven Fel yet for the ambush in Port Wander, and the debate was whether we should just walk away or just rain fire down on everyone involved; after a short debate, it was decided to leave the woman and her guards to their fate. If they came after us later, they'd be weak and we would kill them anyways.

Instead, we find the Star Mirror, a giant xenos artifact that is all shiny and reflective. For some strange reason, the Navigator is reluctant to touch it. The Seneschal tries to convince my Explorator to touch it instead, but despite offering 'a dozen barrels of oil', receives only a stony silence in return. Attempts to make our Arch-militant touch it instead also fail, so he bites the bullet and goes on a wondrous psychic journey - completely failing to take this opportunity to make a "it's full of stars" joke, but we can't have everything. We get he location the Righteous Path. We also get noises of another group of orks coming from behind a barricaded door to one side, and decide we should take them out to cover our rear before leaving. This....turns out to be a mistake.

Spoiler: In Which We Are Too Stupid To Die

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Everyone is braced with Delays or Overwatch to squash the xenos coming through the door. We're expecting a group of five, maybe ten. We get forty orks instead, led by the Warboss of the entire tribe, but by this time it's too late to extract. Rather than do a turn-by-turn playback, it becomes a long grinding slog of killing Orks with autofire and regular fire, against slowly losing wounds in packets of 2s and 3s; despite being Pinned by Suppressive Fire, the mob just advances regularly. When the Warboss enters the fight, he takes out 2/3 of my health in a single Power Claw attack. Spending Fate to heal means his second swing drops me to 2, then we spend a few turns ineffectually trying to melee each other while the rest of the party desperately pours fire into his back. Two characters are again in Critical Damage - Navigator and Arch-Militant this time, and I'm ready to drop from the next successful hit, when the Seneschal finally plants a hellgun bolt into the back of the Warboss's head and blows it clean off. Demoralized, the rest of the Orks flee and we manage to extract.

This was apparently a scripted 'run away' fight, meant to set up the next adventure, but we didn't pick up on the clues. Since we survived a battle intended to be unsurvivable, we received a 500pt bonus XP award, and continued on the plot.

Spoiler: The Righteous Path

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Back on our ship, we lick our wounds and heal during the multi-day journey to the asteroid field containing the treasure ship. It's not hard to find once we get there, being gigantic, but is in very poor shape. Nonetheless, no one is there to contest our arrival, and some grandiose speeches are made to no one in particular about our right of salvage. This time, we go down in person with the first wave of guards, exploring somewhat aimlessly till we find the bridge. Some of the systems are, surprisingly, still functional, but before we can tamper with anything we are interrupted again. The mysterious woman from the surface, now sporting a nasty scar on her face, has two hulking battle servitors. This time, no one even gives her a chance to do or say anything - three encounters with someone obviously working for Hadarak Fel is enough. Also, our ship is under attack. Combat ensues, and for the first time, the Navigator succeeds in landing his Ebb And Flow power to snare and slow the miniboss. Our Arch-Militant was rolling awful all game, but now luck changes and he scores a near-max damage hit. Being unable to Dodge thanks to Navigator stare, her arm is blown clean off her body in one hit and she dies of shock for the most hilariously anticlimactic boss fight ever. Her servitors shut down on her death, and we leave them for later salvage.

Instead, we board the Insert Ship Name Here, and begin our space duel against the Fel Hand. The Hand is larger than us, and better-armed with a Lance, but we are more maneuverable. This proves to be rather irrelevant, as we exchange ineffective long-range fire and eventually close to near point-blank range, where our two ships spend five or six turns ineptly failing to inflict any damage while spiraling around each other via Come To New Heading orders like a pair of WW2 planes dogfighting. It takes a turn for the worse when Fel gets back-to-back Lance strikes, taking away 12 and 11 of our 26 total Hull respectively, but then our luck finally changes again as we land a full linked salvo of lasers into him - he's not noticeably damaged, but the free Critical Hit we get sets his Lance on fire. Without it, he can't really hurt us, so another few turns of ineffectual dogfighting goes through before we hit again. This time, we get his maneuvering thrusters, which turns out to be a kill-shot; unable to steer, Fel plows head-on into a massive asteroid and explodes.

After all the dust settles, we walk away with 9 Profit Factor, another 625 XP with the bonus for killing Lady Ash/Haradak Fel, and a hulked-but-repairable Grand Cruiser hull that we successfully talk the GM into making a sort of unofficial meta-Endeavour. He'll be running the first book of the Warpstorm Trilogy next, but we can make hunting down components to restock our new grand cruiser a persistent side quest that'll last most of a campaign. Everyone is now Rank 2 +125 XP, and we're looking forward to finally getting interesting abilities. And loot of course, because we are the crew of a Rogue Trader.

[Blackhawk748]

Nice, my party killed Lady Ash during the Ork Fight, cuz my Ork Kommando turned himself into their Nob Obviously i took them with me onto our ship.

[The Glyphstone]

I tried to use Tech-Lingua to mess with the servitors, but was told they were under 'psychic influence' and thus un-hackable. So I had to settle for missing with my bolter once before the fight ended.

[Blackhawk748]

I tried to use Tech-Lingua to mess with the servitors, but was told they were under 'psychic influence' and thus un-hackable. So I had to settle for missing with my bolter once before the fight ended.

Sad, could you at least go back for them and hack them later?

[The Glyphstone]

Sad, could you at least go back for them and hack them later?

Yeah, they're available to loot later, but I didn't have time to do the reprogramming on the spot. I'll want to strip the flamer off the first one, the other one had a Heavy Bolter and is fine as-is.

[Blackhawk748]

Yeah, they're available to loot later, but I didn't have time to do the reprogramming on the spot. I'll want to strip the flamer off the first one, the other one had a Heavy Bolter and is fine as-is.

You dont want a fire spewing death cyborg???

Spoiler: Reaction

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[The Glyphstone]

You dont want a fire spewing death cyborg???

Spoiler: Reaction

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My character is an eight-foot tall Explorator with a Heavy Flamer. I AM a fire spewing death cyborg, and a better one.

[Blackhawk748]

My character is an eight-foot tall Explorator with a Heavy Flamer. I AM a fire spewing death cyborg, and a better one.

.....this is true and valid.