Any players in my campaign reading this, please bugger off right now - I will be irked if you find out about my plans in advance again.

The crew of the Rose Tattoo have entered an system swarming with alien vessels, although none are apparently warp-capable, and discovered a human-made ship in orbit around the main planet. As commentators elsewhere, and players speculate -

"Could that be the new ship the players wanted?"
"No. It would be the Vessel of Rogue Trader Bel Ingeneri, the Sycorax . Personally, I'm concerned about a vessel named after a Witch who was so powerful that "she could control the moon", enslaved the spirits of an entire island and raised her son in the worship of a dark god."

The player is quite right, I did steal the name from The Tempest , but only because I liked the sound of it. Any suggestions I how best I could twist this expectations, preferably into something even more horrible than they fear? As they'll discover, The Sycorax is in terrible shape - apparently they ran into something so terrifying they fled into the Warp despite the fact their Gellar Field generators were wrecked. I know what that something was, but I'm not telling them until they encounter it themselves. I'd prefer ideas related to Ingeneri's backstory, which apart from a suspicious interest in heretek, and the way the Zaythi want to lynch him as a arch-thief and defiler, is almost entirely up in the air

As for the gaming session itself, a possibility would be to run the vessel as a classic haunted house, similar to Ice Station Mara in Dark Heresy's Haarlock Trilogy. Outwardly, nothing's wrong with the vessel except for its state of disrepair, but when the players are deep inside the vessel, and preferably completely lost, its warp-taint manifests and various horrible things start to happen. After all, jumping into the Warp without a Gellar Field is (a) patently suicidal, and (b) can affect a ship quite profoundly.

Of course, players probably won't descent into the bowels of the ship without a good reason. Since Ingeneri had an interest in heretek, the reason could be a nice, exotic artifact. Off the top of my head, that could include a Necron or Dark Eldar artifact, or something dangerous and tempting from the Dark Age of Technology (perhaps an STC for something involving AI, which would make the cogboys blow a whole fusebox), or a nifty piece of maletek. If your players don't have enough problems as it is, a thoroughly nasty individual might like to get the artifact back, particularly if Ingeneri stole it from him in the first place (examples include: Lord Vect, a Dark Mechanicus Magos, or those Logicians the players ran into).

In any case, I hope these insomnia-fuelled ideas help.

Vibius said:

As it happens, they already know that there's at least one Crusade Era A.I. where ever Ingeneri was poking around - that was the macguffin that got them hareing off after him in the first place

Of course, the complicated story of how it got to Zayth, and why Iron Hands Space Marines are involved, is another question entirely

If you have access to Creatures Anathema (the Dark Heresy 'monster manual'), check out the entry for the Eye of the Warp. The derelect could be full of its Daemonic Ammunition...

Adeptus-B said:

ta