Team Dynamite in Koronus!

By Svarte Hanske, in Rogue Trader Gamemasters

Team Dynamite is just the term I use on my group of players since they love blowing up things...

For the moment there are four characters:

Emma Vorgen, arch-militant.

Brandis, arch-militant.

Kara Mordred, explorator.

??, void-master (he is either pondering about a name still or haven't yet told me what it is).

Kara Mordred has travelled all the way from Ryza because of her (insane) vision that out there, out in the Koronus expanse, there are the key to unlocking unknown power and bring peace to humanity! She is a tad mad, but she also cares for both people and machines.

The three others have a similar story which starts with an rumour that goes like this:

High Admiral of the Calixis sector was out "sailing" with his battlecruiser when some ork-pirates attacked him. They almost made a dent in one of the admiral's ships before the orks were blown asunder, but it made the admiral annoyed. He pulled in some favours and made the Imperial Navy and the Imperial Guard assault 'Undred 'Undred Teef with several hundred thousand men!

The result however was lots of fat orks and several hundred thousand dead men. Emma and Brandis served together, but got separeted in the chaos. Emma used a nearby Vox-caster to call for help, if anyone would help her. She had hid and most everyone around her was splattered. Brandis ran over to the landing area and hid there, with the hope he could get a lift out. So did many others, which attracted lots of orks. A captain aboard a smaller Imperial vessel got cold feet, and something cold and hard against his head, as his press-ganged crew mutinied and took charge of the ship. They made a heroic rescue of as many guardsmen they could before taking off, warping away ASAP. They argued about where to go, but it ended up with being Footfall where much of the crew and the wounded jumped ship. The rest took off in the stolen ship and wanted to live fat as pirates, until some navy vessels found them shortly after and blasted them to bits. The void-master was one of the mutinies, and most of his gear is loot from imperial navy officers.

A little problem: Emma's transmission was picked up by several ships, including the imperial navy... She is considered a deserter, a traitor and a criminal! The others will surely be considered the same if officials understand what they were involved in.

On Footfall, there was a Seneschal named Macharius that was looking for new spectacular shipmembers. The hulking brute Brandis (he is a mutant) seemed like an interesting choice, as Brandis is about 2 to 3 times stronger than the average man. Macharius met with Brandis, which eventually led him to the other player-characters, and soon understood that these guys could really help his branch of the Dynasty prosper and that they were more or less on the run. He offered them a chance to get away under the protection of his Dynasty and join him in a voyage beyond the Imperium.

Kara was met with The Black Brotherhood soon after her arrival at Footfall, demanding that she paid tribute for walking on their turf. She didn't comply and was shortly after rescued by Brandis that had just bought himself a chainaxe and found this an opportunity to test it. After a conversation, Kara asked where she could find a ship's captain. "Why don't you just come with me?" Brandis said, maybe because Kara was a) female and b) rather merciless with the aforementioned bandits. Unfortunately The Liege of Footfall's security force apprehended both Kara and Brandis, while they were standing over the bandit corpses, talking. Long story short, they got out of trouble after agreeing to a "trade" with Vladaym Tocara, promising to bring him a cargo of xeno artefacts within 6 months or Footfall would become hostile to them should they ever come back.

More follow shortly!

The crew started on Lure of the Expanse, and I'll try to keep out spoilers.

Kara Mordred met with the captain, and seeing her as a bright explorator, she was soon after accepted. Captain Macharius needed some competent tech-people. He also gave the new crewmembers a challenge: If they could succeed where his spies could not: Find out what all the different rogue traders are doing in Footfall, since so many of them are suddenly there...

This was when Kara got the idea to maybe go find an Adeptus Mechanicus-temple, ask if they got surveillance of the docking bays etc and see what info they could gain from that. Unfortunately Kara's player rolled 100 to find the temple, so I thought some fun could be gained from it: Kara did find a temple, with a similar symbol as Adeptus Mechanicus, just with a tearful/bleeding eye in the middle of a cog, not a skull... They went up to the temple door, used tech to open it and peeked inside. It was not giving Kara any Mechanicus-vibe she had felt before! About 20m ahead a huge Dreadnought stood, pointing a heavy bolter at their position! "Lets get out of here!" was the general idea. "so, uh, that was not the temple... but what was it?" "beats me! Don't want to find out!"

Some time later, after much trouble, they find out about an auction and that they must bid with something extraordinary. "I got it! The dreadnought!" "what?! us and what army?" "yeah, lets make an army!" "lets get meltabombs!" "no! don't destroy it! we must give it away intact!" "we can probably talk the adeptus mechanicus into helping us get rid of a rival!"

Soon after: The session of roleplaying game had escalated into a game of 40k strategy-game.

Mission objectives: Get hold of the dreadnought!

They managed to get hold of 60 kroot mercs, 40 other mercs, 200 sailors from their crew, and bought lots of common and average availability weapons, the best weapons they could get hold of in such a short time. A few heavy stubbers where the best they got besides lasguns. The Mechanicus contributed with 5 techpriests and 20 guys to guard them, plus 2 battle servitors. Everyone got frag grenades and smoke grenades.

Plan: The kroot should sneak as close as they could, pop the smoke grenades and start climbing the walls and take out the gunners on the top of the building, while the rest were supposed to stay alert and keep the dreadnought busy until the techpriests could "hack" it.

3 hours later, lots of dead humans, all the kroot was splattered and some severely injured player characters: Success! The dreadnought had an injured right arm after a sneaky meltashot from behind.

The bid was accepted and the race was on!