So, my first time running an rp for a group of this size, bare in mind there is a mixed level of lore knowledge in this group and a few things that won;t make sense later might be due to slight inconsistencies on character sheets that sometimes had to be rectified half way through.

Dramatis personae:

Sebastian: Horribly scarred captain of the ignoble Q Ship, the DeLancie's Providence, goes everywhere, and I mean EVERYWHERE in an ornate suit of power armour with a blank reflective faceplate, suffered horrible wounds when a substandard plasma weapon backfired on him. Consequently this rogue trader does not TOUCH anything not of best quality. Possibly addicted to xeno-tech rejuvenant drugs cooked up in part by Putus, in an effort to rebuild his face.

Viktor: A former PDF commander whose impressive combat skills led to Sebastian essentially purchasing him from his PDF regiment for Xenotech Baubles.

Zlad: A 700+ year old certifiably insane Mechanicus priest who ideas on xenotech has essentially rendered him persona non grata on most forge worlds. Primarily ended up on the DeLancie as an alternative to having it's implants ripped out one by one while it slept by more dogmatic members of the Cult Mechanicus

And no, we do not currently know its gender.... and it doesn't remember either....

Lelu: A hiver with implanted arm swords and a terrifying cache of weaponry, among the only members of the rogue traders personal crew who can hold a diplomatic conversation and understands the meaning of the word charm, also handles the ships accounts....

Putus: Born and raised on the DeLancie with a natural gift for technology, divided his youth between brewing illegal chem's on ship, crawling through the ships maze like internal systems, giving him a unique view of the ship, his induction to the cult mechanicus put an end to his illicit activities and instead rededicated to the biologis arm of the machine cult, personal attaché to Sebastian when having to deal with the mechanicum.

Revan: With eyes black as void and a soul to match this magisterial mage is not a woman to cross, born and raised in the finest Calaxian Navis Nobilite family, this woman has an unhealthy leaning towards the warp... even for a navigator...

The DeLancie's Providence: Centuries old workhorse for the shadier side of cold trade merchant houses in the Calaxis sector, this vessel has some serious teeth for its size and profile including some of the finest illicit xenotech weaponry, while the crew live in practical luxury and would fight to the death to protect it, beyond the standard hidden weapons the cargo holds the ship sports a primitive ratcheted together lander bay to allow rapid and impressive egress and arrival on primitive worlds.

Disclaimer:

Having read through a number of FFG's role play's rules have been cherry picked from different systems. Due to this MishMash of rules and occasional GM fudging activities may happen in this recount that weren't technically possible but received executive approval through article 7 of the treatise on rule of cool.

Two steps into hell...

We begin are adventure shortly after the Rogue Trader has received his warrant of trade, the noble house of his birth deciding it was time he went out and forged a name for himself... as far away from imperial space as possible. The DeLancie has been released from its cold trade duties and sent beyond imperial space to reconnect with worlds long lost to the Imperium. Gathering its supplies the DeLancie rips open a passage to the immaterium and sets course for the last stop off station before heading out into the unknown. The short well known route results in only minor warping of the ships gravity plating, little more than an inconvenience considering the how bad it could have been. The DeLancie bursts back into realspace relatively close to its target destination, an abandoned mechanicum station now inhabited by scavengers, dregs and desperado's and barely self sustaining, it is however a fantastic place for illicit trade.

The ship hails the station

The vox remains silent

A flurry of activity on the bridge as crew men take their position on board, the arch militant calls shotgun, quite literally on the ships weapon systems, the hulking spider legged form of a demented explorator hunkers down by the augury systems while its slightly more coherent colleague assumes flight control, being the only member of the crew capable of doing so, Sebastian paces impatiently near the command throne while Lelu repeatedly tries to raise the station on Vox, Revan, her duties of navigation complete, has gone for a nap.

While no discernible sign of activity from the station is forthcoming over vox, the augury systems briefly report two energy signature contacts near the stations location, in response the DeLancie attempts to run silent, cutting main thrust and relying on inertia to carry it closer stealthily... the 2 mile long starship kind of stealthy....

A series of cat and mouse scan/run silent results in the Q ship closing on what used to be the station, it having been carved in half by weapons fire, from the wreckage come to ork pirate vessels, and I kid you not the conversation between the DeLancie and the Orks

Lelu: Who goes there?

Orks: WHHHAAAAGGHHHTTT?!?!

Orks: WAIT.... UMIES!!!! STAND TO AND URRRR GIVE US UR GUBBINZ OR WE'LL KRUMP YA

Orks: AKTUALLY, WE'LL TAKE YOUR GUBBINZ AN KRUMP YE'Z ANYWAY

Sebastian: FINE, ITS KRUMPIN TIME!!!!!

Both ships spent two turns closing before they can hit each other, opening salvoes do a considerable number on the first ork pirate ship (Best quality shard cannons hurt) and ork return fire..... was fired by orks.... The following round the rogue trader orders some fancy flying, turning slightly to the right in the hopes of getting around the cumbersome forward facing ork weapons, this kind of works as the ork ship adjusts angle and instead of going past the Q ship, slams into the side of it and begins boarding....

I gave the players an option at this point, fight of the boarders yourself or let the crew handle it...

So naturally they pile into the cargo hold currently serving as an impromptu bridge between the two ships. The hold has become a full on war zone, bolted down shipping crates serving as cover between multiple skirmishes between boarders and crew, shoota vs blowtorch, choppa vs oversized monkey wrench. The party happen to spot the ork with the biggest hat and naturally assume him to be leading the boarding party. The ork Nobs yes lock with where Sebastian's eyes would have been, they share a moment of forbidden understanding before the Nob yells

“I WANT DAT UMIES SHINY HAT!!!!”

The two run across the cargo hold at each other while the 6 orks surrounding the nob focus on the remaining players. Initiative results in the navigator (Done with her nap) marching forward impressively and tossing aside her silk headscarf and exposing the orks to the lidless stare, one ork claws out his eyes in horror while the other rips his own head off... then the navigator collapses from fatigue... Putus sweeps his hellgun across the room and take a full aim action for next turn, Zlad, having temporarily forgotten it also had a hellgun runs straight at the orks yelling an incomprehensible battle-cry in half binary... and comes to an abrupt stop one metre in front of the bemused ork freebootaz. The Ork nob hefts his kustom shoota and... rolls a 99 to hit, throwing his precious down so hard to the ground it shattered, Viktor puts a plasma bolt squarely into an ork but to his surprise it largely shrugs it off and charges Zlad, handedly cutting off one of its 8 spider servo legs, a second ork flails unimpressively with his choppa while the third opens fire on Sebastian making impressive plinking noise off the Rogue Traders Power Armour. The ork, seeing an easy target opens fire on the unconscious navigator, but... well ork shooting y'know? Not to be outdone by the orks ineffectual shooting the Seneschal put several bolt rounds into surrounding cargo containers and the explorator's servo skulls largely zip around annoyingly putting on a las-pistol light show... ambience...?

Round two started worse for the players as an ork backhanded Zlad with a choppa hard enough to knock the explorator out putting a second party member effectively out of the fight. Putus struck back one for the mighty power of guns, felling the plasma burned ork and putting some damage on another with a 3 round hellgun burst, in revenge for the perceived kill steal, Viktor finished off the hellgun wounded ork with plasma to the face and drops another ork, Sebastian and the ork Nob duel, both doing little actual damage due to Power armour in one case and sheer toughness bonus in the other. The Seneschal puts down the final ork freeboota in a storm of bolter fire leaving just Sebastian and the Nob locked in combat.

Round three and the two melee powerhouses continue to bounce off each other armour, the rogue trader gets a good hit in but the orks HP is just too high... until the Seneschal finally getting a good initiative roll turns the Nob to jam...

This surge from the captain and his staff further inspire the crew in the cargo bay to fight harder combined with the morale damage of seeing the boarding party leader turned to a fine green mist breaks the back of the ork boarders who retreat to their vessel, the deck evacuates as blaring klaxon's warn of the impending de-pressurization of the cargo bay, the team pile back into the bridge to take back control of the starship combat, minus Zlad and Lady Revan who are unceremoniously dumped in the medicae bay on the way to sleep off the fighting (And broken arm and mild concussion in Zlad's case) Thanks to Putus' heroic piloting and fate point usage the two ships separate from each other, the captain orders a target lock on the second ork vessel and Viktor opens fire with the Shard cannon, critically hull breaching the raider.... rolling 1d5 for the amount of components destroyed he rolls maximum.... combined with an earlier focused augury success the gunner takes out all 3 weapon systems, life support and the engines, after totting up damage the ork raider is utterly de-crewed....

Well crap

The damaged raider that boarded earlier, sensing the battle has turned and that, this was in fact NOT a humble merchant ship as advertised charges its jump engines, next combat turn Viktor misses with the shard cannons, much to the rogue traders impotent fury the raider rips open a hole to the warp and slides through, threats of eventual retribution echoing down the vox.

Due to the losses incurred by both the players and their ship they searched the station wreck and ork raider for survivors and scrap metal to effect repairs, gained some profit factor, repaired the gaping hole in the cargo hold and began healing Zlad. The limited survivors from the station were only two glad to fill in the crew gaps the ship took during the fighting, all in all the ship would survive as would the players, we called first session their and doled out XP.

Second session will be coming shortly

By the way an internet cookie to anyone who gets the ship name joke

Edited June 7, 2016 by danp164

Second Session

A Snowballs chance in hell

So freshly recovered of fate points, mostly recovered of hull points and entirely recharged of health points our ignoble adventurers strike out on the actual mission they were given in the first place, to re-establish imperial contact and control with a system known as “Kraken's Call”

Now I just want to put here that I felt sorry for our dear navigator, this trip was to an unknown location using sketchy maps at best that hadn't been verified in decades and after informing the crew that by her estimate the trip should only take about 2 months in the warp... there was a feeling of lynching in the air. While the navigators estimate proved wholly accurate (With judicious use of fate points) and the trip went by largely uneventful (More fate points) having barely avoiding a warp storm (Last of the fate points) its fair to say the ship and its crew made the transition back to realspace somewhat... drained but importantly intact!

The hustle and bustle of post warp jump affairs on the bridge mainly amounted tot he rogue trader repeatedly demanding to know what was in the system they had just jumped to and Zlad repeatedly bashing the augur screens to be able to answer him whilst Putus cried quietly in a corner for seeing his ship so thoroughly abused. 3 Planets and a sun made up the system of Kraken;s Call and an odd unidentified object at the edge of the augur array, assuming this mission to be of some urgency (Partly because I informed the players out of character that while they had only been in warp for 2 months, 1 years had passed in real time) the captain ordered best speed tot he nearest planet to investigate why they hadn't called the Imperium in the previous two hundred or so years. Upon close inspection they learned three things about the planet known hereafter as “Snowball”

1. 
   

   The planet was quite literally covered in ice and snow

   
   
   
2. 
   

   Vox signals, though unclear, were coming from the planet and seemed to be in low Gothic

   
   
   
3. 
   

   The large warp storm occupying the planets super-continent and slowly growing

   
   
   
   
   

As the vox signals were evidently moving away from the storms the crew assumed that the planet had NOT fallen under the sway of chaos and so paged the navigator to make a rare presence on the bridge to give her professional opinion on the warp storm, using her knowledge of the warp and third eye she deduced that the storm was not of natural (Using the term lightly) origins but showed no obvious taint or sorcery. Deciding that the vox communications likely belonged to someone Imperial and that re-establishing contact with them would technically be completing the mission for the administratum and allow the looting of the rest of the system to begin apace the crew piled into a Valkyrie and set off to met the locals

The locals, as it happened were techno barbaric nomads living on enormous ancient crawlers whose basic systems they barely understood by this point and seemed to be evenly split on seeing the explorers as saviours come to rescue them, or representatives of the disaster that led to their current predicament. It was decided (Unanimously) that Lelu would be the face of contact for the locals as the gun wielding sociopath, three eyes mutant, power armour wearing scarecrow or either of the explorator's might not have had the desired “Were here to save you” effect.

Tracked by autocannon's as the bird landed the group disembarked onto an open landing bay surrounded by a crowd of people whose desire to rend them limb from limb and steal their lander was curtailed only by the ordnance present on the Valkyrie. The elected leader of that particular convoy greeted them as if they were straight from his dreams of salvation, only to almost collapse when Lelu informed him they were not in fact here to save anyone and were unaware from the get go that anyone required saving to begin with. After deciding between the group that the best course of action was to move the people to another planet, one without warp storms, then fix the warp storm issue, the situation darkened somewhat. You see the locals expected salvation or evacuation, the explorers proposed leaving to scout the other worlds then returning to pick them up.

This did not

Go down

Well

After barely and I mean barely avoiding a riot a new deal was struck, half the party would remain on the crawler, attend a feast meet the locals and such, while half the crew would scout the storm then they would meet up, let cooler heads prevail and decide on the best course of action. Lelu stayed as the groups official face, Sebastian stayed to keep the official face intact and Zlad stayed to... well Zlad stayed as well.

So our intrepid Arch Militant picks his away team, which consisted of saying he needed the cogboy and the wyrdboy and throwing them in a Valkyrie (To be fair at this point the Cogboy was the only one other than Sebastian who could actually fly the lander) and they set force to storm chase a warp storm. After numerous near misses from environmental hazards sometimes via fate point usage the advance party spot the source of the problem, or at least a clue.

The back end of an imperial ship sticking out of the planet like a spire to the heavens around about the centre of this continent sized storm. After a few scrapes on piloting tests when trying to park a lander sideways on a ship facing straight down in a cargo bay not designed for landers resulted in only the weapons being sheared off the wing the group disembarked... kind of. Before the roleplay began I had sat down with both our power armour players and discussed exactly what their suits could do, one of these abilities involved built in magnetic boots. This became extremely useful as the cargo hold of imperial ships do not function safely at a 90 degree angle. This did not however help the Arch militant who unlike the navigator wasn't a hiver either and had no acrobatic skills this meant with some rope the navigator could get around with relative ease, the explorator stuck tot he wall like spider man and the Arch militant dangled like a fish on a line...

It wasn't all to be chocolates and roses for the navigator however as his dark sight mutation allowed him to see perfectly the inquisitorial signs plastered all over the cargo hold. They were in the hold of a crashed black ship...

The navigator, notably disturbed by this turn of events relayed in information to the darkness blinded, height fearing arch militant dangling on a rope over an indeterminably long drop into oblivion, he was similarly not best pleased. The explorator on the other hand was ecstatic, not only a ship but an imperial ship he could commune with. So ecstatic he tried communing with the cargo bays door controls before being reminded it was just a door switch, it understood open and close.

Meanwhile

After numerous feasts and algae soup over the 3 weeks now since the advance party had left Zlad had made great leaps into understanding the crawlers hydroponic farming system, Lelu had gleaned all the information she could and Sebastian had decided that the scouting mission had taken two damned long and ordered Zlad to rig a vox signal powerful enough to reach the ship to order in another lander to find out what the hell had happened. It turns out around 200 year ago a great black iron beast had fallen out of the sky and crashed into the planet, the dust kicked up from the crash had blotted the sun out long enough to cause the mother of all ice ages. This was one problem, however in addition to that shortly after the crash a second great storm had gathered around the crash site, this rapidly growing unnatural storm destroyed both the bodies of cities and the minds of men as it grew forcing the population to go mobile on the first crawlers, 200 years later the warp storm was threatening to overrun the entire planet so needed sorting.

Back on the black ship the advance party began their explorations encountering no resistance but strong surveillance from mutated nosferatu like being clothed in rage, after what seemed like days chasing shadows the advance party decided to head to the bridge so the Cogboy could commune with the machine spirits as to what befell the ship. Arriving at the bridge, deserted of course Putus attempted communion with the ships great spirits... it as a short chat

The bridge could give him no answers save a reason for its addled condition, all the ships cogitators were non functioning save for 6, those 6 were currently located near the warp drive and were devoted solely to its operation, with the understanding that the warp storm and functioning warp drive may be connected the party set off for the drive section.

Meanwhile

Having being rescued by crewman on a spare lander and taking 6 members of the crawler with them as a show of good faith Sebastian decided it was time to apply some lateral thinking to the problem, you see Gellar field's create a bubble of real space when we travel through the warp (He explained to the explorator) so if we force the Gellar field on and drop the ship over the warp incursion, the Gellar field should plug the gap. Any normal member of the cult mechanicus might have argued the insanity of descending in a 2 mile long ship through atmosphere with the Gellar field up to try and cork a warp storm. Zlad was is not a normal member of the cult mechanicus. This plan ended unsuccessfully when the Gellar field began to overload from the strain. With nothing else for it the Rogue trader decided if you wanted something done right, throw more bodies at the problem, Grabbed Zlad and Lelu and took off in another lander. Having gone straight down from orbit the reinforcing party landed fairly promptly, early enough to stop the advance party from going further without them while Sebastian chewed them out over the vox for being gone for a month, something they were not aware of.

But something wicked this way came

Similarly to Putus, Sebastian had little trouble traversing the wall/floor of the cargo hold, although had to contend with one extra problem, the ship board mutant cannibals were hungry, a group of them began rapidly climbing the walls to get to the group while a second group simply observed them curiously. Sebastian stormed down to meet the climbing freaks while Zlad and Lelu provided fire support via bolter and hellgun, first round of combat the 2 watching cannibals failed their psychic test, Sebastian killed a crawler, Lelu killed a second, the second combat turn proceeded much the same with one exception, one of the psykers cast dominate on Zlad successfully, it promptly dropped its hellgun, which clattered almost a 100 feet straight down and drew its power axe, on the third turn Lelu put down the last crawler and Sebastian fired on the psykers, Zlad on the other hand hit Lelu with a power axe, dropping her to 4 HP in one blow. Luckily Sebastian rolled highest initiative the next round and crossed off the psyker controlling Zlad. That distraction out of the way the reinforcements, now down one gun and almost one player met up with the advance party who were largely doing fine. They met up at the room before the warp drive generator.

I should point out retrospectively that the player controlling Putus had stated on more than one occasion suggested that shutting down the ships plasma reactor as a better plan than trying to attack the warp drive which had boss room written all over it, unfortunately he had to call it a night just before the “Boss room” so the party went with “Lets kill the boss” this will come back to bite them in very short order.

Sebastian led the march into the drive room, around the room were linked 6 cogitators directly to the main warp drive, their sole purpose regulating the ships titanic power output and feeding it safetly to the drive, in the centre of the room stood the “Boss” now as a good GM I had a monologue prepared for this and everything, knowing this Sebastian promptly walked up and non-chlantly cut its head off

I grinned evily, deciding not to roll defence as the psyker attempted puppet master on Sebastian, which failed despite the negative representing the fact the psyker at this point was just a force of will powered by an entire warp storm an therefore was physically invulnerable. This did not stop them trying. Due to circumstance I allowed the psyker to use powers once per turn as reaction and once as full action, when his action cam around I decided to focus an easy if less destructive target, I dominated the navigator and promptly had him unleash his adept level lidless stare on his own party. The attack pushed Zlad almost into critical damage, knocked out Putus and knocked the navigator out from fatigue. Sebastian figuring that if cutting the psykers head off wasn't going to work decided to attack the next logical target and opened fire on the cogitators. The psyker's head stopped laughing and warned them to stop, the party was understandably disinclined and all opened fire on the cogitators halting the flow of power to the warp drives and sealing the storm...

Bad news

That titanic level of energy being used to fuel the warp drive for so long was now going nowhere and was in fact accumulating in the main plasma reactor.... over-accumulating. Discretion being the better part of valour the arch militant and rogue trader slung the incapable of walking crew members of their shoulders and pegged it for the cargo hold, after lamenting how Putus had damaged a lander coming in Sebastian inflicted the same damage to his lander leaving in a hurry unfortunately the first lander had to be left behind as no conscious could fly it.

In a cinematic escape worthy of a Michael Bay film the lander ascended the atmosphere just in time to see birth of a second albeit short lived sun on planet “Snowball” the 2 mile deep detonation of a ship sized plasma bomb caused massive tectonic shifts and the sudden release of all that superheated gas on the local environment of snow and ice resulted in a 60 foot tall tsunami spreading across the whole planet and breaking the super-continent up into a series or archipelago's. Planet snowball is hereafter referred to as Tropicanna.

A few things to wrap up before the session closed, the issue of the 6 survivors from Tropicanna who had just witnessed the exterminatus of their world being formost amongst them. After much debate as to how to silence these refugee's the Rogue Trader once again took charge.

He spaced them

“I ain't going to prison” He said sagely in attempt to excuse the act. The great Tsunami dies down relatively quickly and left a series of half submerged cities that predated the crashed imperial ship but that would come after a month of rest and relaxation on what was now prime real estate and one hell of a holiday destination.

You know the sad thing? The really sad thing?

While drinking margaritas on the new beach one of the explorator's lamented a lack of readily available ice.

Too soon guys...

Too soon.

Third Session

Fish Food

So we re-join the intrepid crew of the DeLancie's Providence shortly after their first foray into planetary redevelopment. Having spent a bit of rest time to recover their wounds, take advantage of the lovely new beaches and get their bearings the crew decided it was time to try a bit of looting. Packing into the 3 ^rd Valkyrie out of the 5 they had available the crew set down on a ruined but structurally sound sky scraper which now jutted only barely out of what used to be a city and was now an ocean. Kitted for war the party began moving down the largely demolished building, ruined floors creaky girders and old cabling were a constant concern but on the subject of loot the building was frustratingly lacking. The top 10 floors covered before the landscape changed rather abruptly, the stairway descending into the first flooded floor with a very large hole in the building descending down through the flooded building. A few more structural tests from the cog twins judged the building to still be largely safe despite the aggressive remodelling, though nothing gave a good reason for the large deep hole cored through the skyscraper.

Then the calm water began to froth. The Seneschal deserves special mention as she alone decided immediately that being in the frothing water might prove hazardous to her un-armoured health and moved back up the stairs, the rest of the crew pushed on right into a horde of warp mutated killer eels who had made this skyscraper their home, the low armoured Viktor took the first bites, his legs savaged and toughness reduced as their needle fangs broke off in the wound further lacerating him from the inside. Deciding discretion to be the better part of valour the brave navigator sprinted across ruined desks like spiderman, calling on his youth travelling the dangerous spires of a hive world and kept his psychic ass out of the water leaping to safety with the Senechal who had decided copious amounts of bolter fire solved MOST problems. Putus swung his power axe back and forth bisecting eels but their were simply too many. Sebastian struck upon a better use of his time, lifting both Zlad and Viktor up in the air and slowly carrying them both, he made it half way to safety before the eels fell on him to, ripping through his armour and tearing at his legs, the irate tech priest Zlad swinging its axe like a maniac trying to get at the eels while verbally objecting most verbosely to being carried like a supply satchel. Sebastian crashed to the safety of the stairs on his knees depositing his crew member slick with blood, water in the room now a stunning shade of claret with all the bloodshed. Putus lurched through the blood red tide swinging his axe back and forth till he hit safety but not without also loosing a chunk of his leg to the voracious horde. The room and walls slick with the stench and colour of blood the horde, unable to feast any longer rescinded below the water. In that moment of relief. The building shook violently

Release the Kraken

The quakes cause unknown the group in a bad state Sebastian decided to cut the field trip early and ordered the crew back to the lander through the creaking, quaking building an order whose haste was only reinforced as large armoured pinkish tentacles burst from the water ruined floor.

The eels had not made that nest.

The group ran as best they could taking the stairs two or three at a time, half running half being dragged at times as the creature grasped blindly around the stairs hunting their bleeding casualties, collapsing into the Valkyrie as the roof heaved up as was torn asunder by an enormous mutated half armoured octopus and a heavy large fanged maw, number of difficult piloting tests later that led to the Valkyrie being thrown at a building, being grabbed by tentacles (Which other crew members were hacking off through the door with power weapons) while Sebastian and Putus tried to line up shots for the Valkyrie's missile pods, hammering it fleshy mass with missiles the final shot however went to the navigator's hot shot las-pistol... HE FINALLY REMEMBERED HE HAD A GUN.

The salvage operation went... quickly, Sebastian authorized a quick once over of the nest to collect samples, such sample included 3 egg's presumably from the Kraken. Its fair to say this cause some minor disagreement, the Senechal wants to sell the eggs, the Rogue Trader wants to weaponise the Kraken and Zlad.... is treating it like a puppy/goldfish hybrid...

During the healing process a worrying trend in reports became clear to both Lelu and Putus, a number of supplies and work crews were going missing on board the ship. Quickly checking to make sure Zlad wasn't cannibalising the crew and or ship Putus checked the reports, feeding them through his calculus-logi upgrade to try and determine a pattern in the disappearances to near the cargo bay the orks used to board the ship months ago. This news did not go down well with Sebastian or Viktor, who rounded up some of his recently trained (Press ganged) security force as well as the rest of the players to the cargo bay. The largely deserted cargo bay had been hastily repaired since the boarding action still vented sporadic puffs of oxygen into the void, the power systems were on low from the wiring damage giving terrible lighting among the locked down cargo containers. A quick check of a few containers led to one that smelled TRULY unpleasant. Security popped the door open and out tumbled a number of throat slit corpses of former crew men.

Going Kommando

Out of the corner of her eye Lelu spots movement over the other side of the bay, the group stampedes after the whatever it was just as Viktor reminisces about legends of sneaky orks he had heard from passing guard regiments. Sebastian forces open the closed door the shape fled through and stomps down the darkened passage, straight over a tip wire attached to a frag grenade. Sebastian was thrown across the corridor and needed some first aid from Viktor who promptly sent two security men to sweep ahead (To eat more grenade traps ) Security defused the next trap before coming across another sealed door, the group caught up and debated upon their next course of action, should they breach the door, go around the door or just open the door. They debate this long enough for Zlad to decide to go through the ventilation system, triggering another trap that ripped open the upper air ducts followed by an explosion that shook the ship. Much yelling for status reports on the cause of the explosion and much panic cut through as Putus noticed an active vox signal not linked to the ship or the crew and eavesdrop on a unit of ork Kommando;s hidden in the ship.

Lelu took the vox and demanded who it was only for the Kommando to demand who she was...

It turns out the kommandos had been left after the boarding retreat and had been hiding on the ship ever since, scavenging supplies and killing work crews to stay out of sight and have currently holed up in a Valkyrie, the large explosion being a section of the lander bay door now exposing the landers to hard vacuum. The orks gave their demands, descend back to Tropicanna whereby they would leave via the lander... peacefully. Failure to comply would result in the kommandos unloading the Valkyries missiles into the ship. Reactions were... unusual. Sebastian sent Putus to walk outside the ship and assess the damage, him being the only other person with a void sealed power armour while Sebastian waited by the internal door to breach with his power armour and void suit equipped security and Viktor, the idea was to hit the Valkyrie from both sides while slowly dropping towards the planet bursting into the hanger and opening the Valkyrie door to expose the kommandos to hard vacuum. The plan worked for the large part, Putus reconnoitred the bay and made sure the Valk was pointing towards the ripped open hanger door not the internal door so the breaching team could get in and open the door before the orks new and therefore fired the Valk's missiles. Upon reaching the Valkyrie and opening the door, the orks triggered a kitbashed teleporter sending them hopefully planetside.

Sebastian, assessing the level of damage to his beloved ship decided it was time to return to Imperial space for repairs. 1 Tortuously long warp jump later (Which should have only taken a week) out popped the providence in close proximity to Port Wander in a sector that had apparently been falling apart. Once docked the crew updated the ships market databases and news systems and finds that all was not well

1. They had been gone for over a decade

2. The ork pirate captain that escaped had raised a whole pirate fleet

3. The frequency of pirate raids had strained the local navy to breaking point

4. Merchant houses were refusing to ship goods for fear of them being raided

5. The local economy was in freefall

6. A number of planets were without food due to shipping issues

After vigorously blaming Viktor for the ills of an entire sector Sebastian docked the ship and began sourcing repairs.

The crew will be here for a while.

Spoilers for next time:

Zlad tries to raise a killer warp kraken as a single parent

Lelu gets mugged pursuing Xenotech for Zlad

Sebastian tries to get the ship fixed faster

Sebastian gets figuratively mugged for having a working, armed ship with a cargo bay

Putus and Viktor divide their time trying to keep Lelu and Sebastian alive

Lady Revan hunts through the ship for possible daemon possession after spending so much time in the warp*

*Every warp jump thus far has taken over a month.....

Edited July 17, 2016 by danp164