What would happen to a ship caught in a warp storm? More to the point, what would happen to a small (less then 1 km in length) ship caught in a moderate warp storm?

Currently, my group is stuck on a small tramp freighter in the frontal wake of a warp storm caused by the Tyrant Star making a small appearance but I'm not too sure what should happen to the ship. I don't want it destroyed, tossed into another sector, or stage a demonic incursion aboard the ship because of the storm. However, I'm drawing a bit of a blank as to what the warp storm would do aside from those three options. I'm wanting the storm to be the backdrop over which a murder mystery / survival story is told aboard this ship caught in it, but not the end all be all event as there's nothing the PC's can do about it. Any ideas on what could happen or be happening? What hardships it would inflict upon those aboard the ship, etc?

You could make it the the storm effect the reality within the ship. Ok that doesn't say what I mean.

Imagine that the warp is as usual having an advers effect on reality causeing it to desabilise in such a way that you could walk through tiny rifts in space that send you to another part of the ship. You open the cafeteria door and suddenly your in a holding cell. This could completely mees with your gamers heads and be a pretty funny way to trap the bad guy in the end.

This is the only way I can see at the moment that you could have the stom effect the game on a small basis. But if you want my opinion. Warp storms are powerful things you would have to be pretty far away for something this minor to happen. Good luck with the idea and tell me what you do in the end I might use it myself.

I for one totally agree with the above and maybe for som real random happenings u could use the Psychic Phenomena Table for some funny and dark effects when the ship is assoulted by the storm.

Instead of deamons invading, have hallucinacions invade instead!

As well as the above idea (which is awesome), the players could be walking along corridors and the like when a player hears his/her parents calling to them. They'd turn around and see a mother/father standing there, all torn up and bleeding. They'd see flickers of people from their past or future walking around the ship. Or they'd see existing crew members walking say ahead of them, then when they go to their quaters, they find a glimmer of someone browsing through their stuff. Likewise, this'd be effective for screwing with the murder mystery in general, say they'd see a porter ahead of them with a knife, when really he's in the cafeteria having recylced soup and the like.

Combine Hoodedcrow's suggestions with Cyclocius hallucinations and you can really mess with you players heads. In fact, I think I'm going to put my group through something like that just to see how many insanity points they can rack up. The poor bastards...

Demo said:

Lol that's a great idea. You could also throw in a few corruption points as well considering they are technically travelling through the warp. But would that be too mean..... NAH

Another thought (for a bit of action) - the Warp storm has roused up some beast from the depths of the Warp (going with the whole ancient mariner theme here). The PC's are in the corridor or chapel or what not when they hear the ships hull start to pop and groan. Alarms start ringing about Gellar Field compression. The Servitors start bleeping that the gargoyles on decks 3 to 13 are being removed. Then there is a shattering sound, outrush of air and then a great squamous tentacle thrusts itself into the ships corridor- plucking up and crushing crew and servitors as it blindly - the ship is in the arms of the Kraken and the PC's will have to cut or seal off the tentacles long enough for the Tech Priest to electrify the hull or reinforce the Gellar Field to drive it off!

SJE

I just had a Dead Space flashback, **** that was scary!

Anyways, you could just Shamelessly rip off the ebst bits of dead space (that bit between the beginning and the end) ^^

A ship trapped in a Warp storm is basically a haunted house in space. You could have any and all of the strange parapsychological phenomena reported in "real" hauntings (i.e., ones actually reported in the Really, Real World, the gullibility of the witnesses notwithstanding) and those in movies (when I read your post, I heard the quote from "Ghostbusters": "The walls of the Ninth Precinct were bleeding...."). I would include the following, at least at the beginning:

Cold Spots

Bleeding Walls (see above)

Phantom Noises/Voices

Poltergeist Activity (Objects moving or disappearing)

Odd shadows

Electrical malfunctions (lights going on and off, etc.)

Spontaneous vermin (flies, bees, etc.)

As the strength of the storm increases, these events increase. Maybe the cold spots become cold rooms, where an entire section of the ship freezes and ice prevents the doors from opening. Or the environmental controls just go haywire, blasting a room with cold or heat while characters are in the room, but when they come back, there's no evidence of it, and the climate controls show steady temperatures. Phantom crew members could also be good; ghosts of people who used to serve on the ship, or who were on other ships lost in the Warp. ("Where did you find that?" "Second Navigator Hughes showed me." "Second Navigator Hughes has been dead for 12 years." *cue spooky music*) Spontaneous vermin could become spontaneous higher animals (Hounds of Tindalos, anyone?), and be a whole lot more threatening.

The above post has the right idea, but you don't want to make them so regular that they're commonplace. Walking along a normal corridor and having

Cold Air, Electrical Malfunctions, Life Support issues, Ghosts, floating objects and Gravity problems all in the space of 5 minutes quickly gets repetetive. Especially since it's another 500m to their destination

And, as if raised by the warp, I give life this thread for a brief bit of life to say:

Thanks all who contributed! I had one hell of a month and wasn't able to get back to running the game again until this past weekend (damned cost of living!) but it was a rousing success! We usually play from 6pm 'till about 12am as that's when one of my players begins fading out and falling down. This time however, she insisted we continue hour after hour until I was about falling over. We went until 3am like we were collage students all over again :-D

I took the simple advice of using the phenomena tables deciding that I would roll one phenomena for the first scene, two for the second, and so forth showing the storm getting worse and reality breaking down. Every living thing present in the scene was treated as "the psyker" for the purposes of determining phenomena effects that references the psyker as well as for corruption if perils were rolled. If warp Feast ever came up, the ship would start completely breaking down resulting in mad dashes to the life boats and what-not (but that never happened). Once the phenomena total reached 6 in one scene, the ship would be spat from the warp into a section of dead space somewhere in the middle of the Golganna Triangle.

I took a lot of other advice for reality breakdown and approached the entire warp storm and everything that happened like a David Lynch film. Dream Logic ruled all actions and all scenes, hallucinations, time travel, missing chunks of time, spacial breakdown, men in bunny suits, it was all there. And just to make things extra special fun, I had one of the NPC's slowly turning into a Dispayre as well and a mutiny brewing amongst the crew (which came to head once the ship was spat).

Like I said, it went exceptionally well. I just wanted to thank you guys for helping kick my gray matter into gear and allowing it to happen :-D

Have you ever read House of Leaves? I always found the idea of this vast unexplained extradimensional space a little creepy. What if the players soon discover, thoughout the course of the game, that the ship has become larger than in really is ... a lot larger. Soon they find themselves wandering into the halls of a ship they've never seen before, with strange, archaic designs and endless empty depth. Are they walking through hallways of vile chaos itself? Has the ship somehow been superimposed upon some ancient hulk? And how far do they dare pursue suspects when they escape down those strange depths? Maybe add some ctulhu esque imagery in the shadows (and only the shadows) to really get them worried.

The endless corridor is good, maybee it loops, maybee it just goes on and on and on and on... and on. Dfferent PCs can experience diferent realities, when one's cold another's ho whilst a third looks on. People phasing (passing through things) or being real to some characters, not others. The Black Decks could get... weirder. Random gravity (all surfaces are floors, or the wall is, or the middle of the room). All the NPCs in a room suddenly doing a musical number, singing and dancing. Things running backwards...

Will you be dealing with the consequences?

Memories. A nasty turn would be to have all the other crew remember nothing strange about the voyage, with (consistent) explanations fr any deaths/ material changes. Of course, this is backed up by the ships log and cogitator systems.