OK, any of the scurvy crew of the Thors Redemption reading this, please clear off, you'll only ruin your own fun.

Ok, they gone?

Good.

My players are going through Lure of the Expanse at the moment. They are in the Pocessional of the Damned, having just got the co-ordinates they needed from the Eldar beacon/temple/thingy. As they prepared to leave, they picked up on Augurs a space hulk that seemed remarkably familiar. Although looking much older and massively damaged in battle, it is quite clearly their own ship. Perhaps pulled here from the future by the weirdness of the Processional, perhaps someother bizarre explanation.

My problem comes from the fact that when i told them this (I'm the GM) I intended it as a moment to highlight how freaky the Processional is and how ghosts, weirdness and evil rules. It did indeed scare a few of the characters. However, now the Rogue Trader PC wants to go over to it and poke around. I hadn't anticipated this (foolish me).

Now i'm scratching my head. What might they find? What caused the destruction of the ship? How far from the future has it come? Will they find their dead selves? Will they get to loot their own bodies?

Beyond all, i want to play this as pure horror, something to get them some insanity points (and hey maybe a corruption point or two) and generally freak them out. I've been impressed by the brain storming sessions on this forum before and now i'd like to hear any cool ideas you might have for ghost ship boarding, anything cool i could have onboard, any good ideas for what they might encounter?

I absolytely love your idea, Gribble. I did something like this on my DH-campaing, when during the exact first mission, the PC:s (who were onboard their Inquisitor's ship) heard and saw some weird ghosts, and for a moment, it seemed that the ship was under attack, and was about to get destroyed.. Well, if we had finished the campang, the last mission would have included the destruction of the same ship, with same things happening again..

But: for your game. One striking ide would be that at least some NPC/PC would be still alive, and would be fairly insane (at least when he meets him/herself), and would try to prevent the future things from happening ("Better to die here than suffer all what I have gone thorught!"). Also, it might be nice to the PC would do couple fairly accurate predictions about the future.

Also, if you have detailed the ship's interiors well, make some changes to them or show some repairs done to the Ghost ship, and sometime, when the real ship takes damage, say that "oh, that window get's smashed.. like it was at the ghost ship".. Also, the Ghost ship might sport different components (althought heavily damaged, and possibly not-salvageable?), and you could offer these components to them at some time? Basically, allow the PC:s to notice that they are walking on the same path with the ghost ship.. Of course they might do the smart thing, and turn away..

But one thing for sure: leave the final cause of the ghost ships destruction unknown.

One nice thing might to be have them find the trophy room of the ship mostly intact. Have various trophies from future adventures as well as just odd random things. Maybe you'll find a great way to use them. Or better yet use them as red herrings. If the PCs call you on them hey they changed the future due to their knowledge.

Another possiblity is the ship isn't their future ship. It's a possible future, a ship from an alternate reality or even a warp spawn possible them....

PS- Don't over look the possiblity for the PC's evil twins. If there is a PC who is rather amoral or ruthless then he is a prefect candidate for this. Having become so insane he'd kill his past self to for his stuff or position. If this is the RT it's even better. Of course said PC is insane, corrupt or daemon tainted....

Or if you've got the right player who is greedy enough or enough of a power gamer. Let him play his future self after having deposed his current self. Of course the future self is daemon tainted, has a pact with a daemon with a rapidly approaching time limit (the daemon in the present senses the link created by the deal in the future, but is planning on collecting in the past...) or xenos/inquisitorial conditioning. Just make sure that the PC has suffered some form of mental trauma so he can't remember the the future very clearly....

Alternately, have if the party has already had several adventures, particularly space battles or warp mishaps, have the ship not be from the future, but from the past. Let them find their past selves that failed and are struggling to survive and looking for a way to escape. Have the ship damaged beyond repair by something they narrowly avoided earlier.

To be even creepier, have the inhabitants refer to the fact that the players aren’t the first alternate version of the players to board the ship. That they have, infact, done this before, or will do it.

Ran the ghost ship last night.

In the end i settled on the following.

One of the original crew in the future, got stung by some kind of Yu'vath device design to turn enemy soliders into warrior slaves. This crew member (the arch militant, a chap called George Havok) then, over the course of months, sprouted warp tech augmentations including a really nasty warp cannon. He goes mad and kills most of the crew, keeping some alive and transforming them to form a support system for himself.

When the PCs board the ghost ship, they make it to the bridge and find a recording device on the command throne still recording audio. Replaying the message, they hear Lord Captain Helsen (one of the PCs) bitterly lamenting the death of his crew and his own impending doom at the hands of the Yu'Vath afflicted arch-militant. He drops a few eye openers including mentioning his daughter to another PC, a PC he then claims is now dead. The PCs then hear evil Havok (as my players nick named him) arrive and kill future Helsen.

They decide to head to the Plasma Cathedrals that house the ships 12 reactors. Down there they find in the first of the 3 cathedrals, a techpriest, wired to the vaulted ceiling, with all kinds of cables, datafeeds and power lines running into him. He is covered in palm sized runes that glow like hot coals. He doesn't seem to be pleased to see them, raising the radiation shielding on one of the reactors and firing it up. The PCs leave before he cooks them.

The second cathedral has a vast mound of flesh on the floor, covered with a patchwork of waxy black carapace, tubes and cables, like an HR Geiger drawing. This mound of flesh has a round maw the size of a table and roars at them but doesn't do much else. Disturbed, they leave and head to the final cathedral. At this point the groups techpriest wants to rig the reactors to blow, the ship has been defiled, and he believes a plasma funeral pyre would best suit the ships warlike spirit.

In the final cathedral, the PCs find the remains of 100 techpriests, no flesh or bone remains, just piles of their implants amid the tattered remains of red robes. The groups techpriest gets to work setting a reactor to overload. At this point, evil Havok arrives, foreshadowing his entrance by slaughtering some house troopers the PCs had left guarding their path back.

An epic battle follows, with Evil Havok (and his vile Yu'Vath warp shield) soaking up tremendous amounts of damage, vaporising another squad of house troopers and injuring his past self, before the less-evil-but-still-pretty-evil Havok and the groups Battle Psyker put him down in close combat. His remains disappear with a warping of space. The PCs leave with all haste.

In the course of their explorations my players cleverly thought to raid the navigators occulum, discovering a hugely mutated and very dead navigator (turned into some kind of huge worm creature) and getting a copy of the navigators charts (clever players). They also retrieved the bony foot in a boot that was all that remained of Captain Helsen and used gene-sorcery on their medicae deck to identify it as his.

All in all, rather satisfying and I got to plant all kinds of plot hooks to dust off later including

- The planet Doom, where arch militant Havok is stung by the Yu'Vath Bee drone

- The future existence of the daughter of Helsen and Sylvatica (the dynasty's Senechal and loremaster).

- The possible massive mutation of their navigator Sargo Bellsamus (which would be bad, my PCs love him)

- The possible future acquisition by Helsen of a pair of very fine boots.

Gribble_the_Munchkin said:

That made me laugh!!

Sounds like a very fun game!

Actually I had another thought - in my game I keep trying to convince our navigator to gene-alter himself to mutate into a void whale... perhaps the dead worm thing was just the old cocoon and the future navigator is out there as an evil space beastie?