The party deliberated for a long time with what to do about the capture pirate raider and its crew and captain. Ultimately the captain decided to put them to work. They got the ship at least mobile again and made the pirate captain swear to a) hate Orks and kill them where he found them and b) pay tribute to Captain Kincaide. 50% of his earnings for the first year and they'd renegotiate after that. So they
kinda added them to the armada but it's not clear he'll honor his terms of the deal. He's a pirate, after all. The Seneschal player planted a couple spies on their ship to keep tabs on things.
So rather than deciding to head back in-sector and deal with refitting the pirate raider (or taking a several month detour to the part of the system inhabited by pirates for shits and giggles) they cut him loose to his own devices, and pushed deeper into Expanse in search of Gromkol using the new warp routes that had been revealed to them by that rescued navigator.
An aside about the map. I spent pains-taking hours editing a digitized copy of the map of the Koronus Expanse from the Rogue Trader book, removing all the planets, all the names and basically anything that wasn't a background image or a major feature of the sector. (Like I left the God Emperor's Scourge and the Cauldron and all that shit there, but no planets, space stations or anything beyond the actual Maw. Footfall is the only planet or location beyond the Maw from the original book.) Everything else I've been inventing out of whole cloth. As they've explored the Expanse and discovered more stuff, I slowly have been revealing those things on the map, including warp routes, anomalies, stuff like that. It's kind of an art project for me but also a visualization aid for them.
This is what my GM map looks like, what I've gotten done so far. All the lines are Warp Routes and their in-warp travel times. All the planets listed with a name I have at least a general idea of what they're about, and full stats rolled up in the
Rogue Trader Generator Tool, a fucking amazing piece of table top aide software if I've ever seen one. In some ways, keeping up the map has kept my energy going for the campaign. As the players work further through the Expanse, I continually spend a couple hours a week creating new planets on the map, thinking about what they could be, rolling up stuff in the Generator Tool until it matches close enough and then figuring out how it fits into the narrative.
The Captain spent a lot of time writing another message to his penpal. He's being totally earnest and forthright with this guy and part of me is on the fence about betraying them now. It's almost legit to conceive of him befriending the guy at this point. They expect him to betray them, and part of me wants to surprise them. I can only play this out as long as they don't find the real 'Undred Teef.
Anyways, they returned the re-captured colonists to their planet of origin because they're such swell guys and all, spent a couple weeks repairing the pirate ship so it could get back to Footfall, and then made the jump to a system newly revealed to them.
They discovered a massive, planet-sized xenos ship floating dead in the middle of the system, that was wrecked and had been floating out there for tens of thousands of years. Without much to see they investigated the second planet of the system and came upon a race of xenos that, much to my chagrin, I basically described as
these things from D&D. They're a simpleton race of creatures that had once descended from the ship in the middle of the system and lost most of their technological skills and basic intelligence. Their history pre and post-settlement had involved a lot of predation from other xenos races, over time their sense of their own racial history and capabilities has been greatly diminished, and so the Kaigo became myopically focused on breeding as the basic survival mechanism. Unfortunately it's driven them to the point of self-destruction. They carpet the planet with their mass of bodies, millions die daily just from being crushed and they're reduced to eating their own for survival. The only standing structures are large hives made from the hardened remains of their own liquid waste, built up over the millennia. In a way they survive predation because they have nothing to offer other races in terms of wealth, technology....they just create problems.
One player described them as a virus which isn't too far from where I was thinking. They're fair-natured but essentially idiot children without the wisdom left to avoid self-destruction, eventually ruining every environment they end up in. They're like Tribles only gross and unlikable. The semi-intelligent Kaigo they spoke with, an ambassador of sorts, begged the PCs to help them colonize other worlds because of the mass, self-inflicted overpopulation of the planet. They'll be disappointed (and the PCs un-surprised) to discover that the Kaigo have already over-colonized the other habital worlds of the system as well. True to their nature as PCs, they saw something to exploit and so tried to reason with the Kaigo and convince them to start mining the semi-precious gems and mineral wealth of the planet in exchange for maybe transporting some of them offworld. The Captain is of the opinion they should just nuke the entire planet from orbit and move on, while his Seneschal is really trying to make something profitable out of this, which wouldn't be too hard honestly. The Kaigo are too stupid or ignorant to sustain a real mining operation but a profit could be had just literally picking up the wealth they can manage to collect. I can see both sides of it. There's money to be made but it'd be a little onerous and not as flashy or punchy as adventuring. I kinda hope they choose to work with the Kaigo though. Then I can have them eventually get off planet on some of the cargo ships if the PCs won't give them a ride. The idea of them as a plague on the Expanse is not one that had occurred to me but now it kind of intrigues me. Maybe that's why they were "preyed upon" by other races and relocated to the system in the Expanse. Maybe they were chased out of other systems by other sentient races who knew the threat they really posed. Hrmmmm......
I thought up this race a while ago and tbh I wasn't sure where I was going with it. But that's ok. Worlds need some pointless stuff that exists for its own sake for the players to interact with and manipulate. I wanted to start digging into some alien races and non-human encounters (since this is the Expanse after all and not the Imperium) and I wanted something non-confrontational. To that end I came up with the Kaigo as a sort of introductory xenos race: quirky, low tech, non-threatening, maybe exploitable. (I'd told them most other captains didn't care to deal with the Kaigo. I didn't specify why though and now they know why.) From the Kaigo I'm going to work my way toward less basic and straightforward races with more to offer in terms of interaction and obvious threat.
It's a little difficult keeping everyone's attention sometimes. Some of my players are clearly on the cerebral side of things, others on the action only, and one who sort of straddles both but wants a level of badassery to it. So there's push pull between the "kill it" group and the "exploit it" group. The kill it group really doesn't have any interests in the logistics of empire building, while the exploit it group totally does. The Captain falls into the kill it group, so that tends to influence the group's actions a lot. I feel a little bad for the guy who signed up to be his first mate, because he's in the exploit it group (as he should be, the dynasty's finances and growth are his big concerns as the Seneschal), and it's gotta suck to have him do all the interaction and roleplaying for the captain to then go "Nah, just kill it."
I expect they'll be moving on from this system very soon one way or another. There's two viable exits right now from that system, both of which should make for good combat-y adventures. One contains no planets and just has a space station fortress hidden within the massive dust cloud that cloaks the system. The fortress/castle is owned by a rebel Imperial noble, who has slowly descended into madness over the centuries while his mostly automated, 18th century-style palace grinds on without him. The other is a system where several different Rogue Traders are slugging it out for control over a series of Eldar ruins that litter the system. That will definitely get the Eldar player's attention, and things will get complicated fast if the crew decides to get involved. Either choice they make should be good for a scuffle or some action-y scenes at the very least.
But first I need to cook up a warp encounter. On their last jump they rolled one of the crazy special events I hadn't yet really written up yet. So I decided to defer it their next warp jump for when I'd planned it out. But the basics are...if you've ever read
Storm of Iron by Graham McNeil, it kind of borrows from that. During the next Warp Jump a warrior will appear on the ship and challenge the strongest fighter to a duel to the death. The entity is the "Eternal Warrior", a soul bound to the armor and weapon of the Eternal Warrior, cursed to travel time and space seeking someone stronger than they are who will defeat them and become the new Eternal Warrior. It's kind a mix of the "Kroeger's Armor" character from
Storm of Iron and
Micheal Moorcock's Eternal Champion.Anyways, this thing will be stupidly strong in a duel setting and I fully expect it to kill any PC that tries to stand up to it. I don't honestly expect them to though. They can refuse and the Eternal Warrior will move on. And if they should fight him and actually beat him.....well.....someone is burning a Fate Point to escape the curse. It's always bad to make too many assumptions about what players will do though, so I need to have some stuff actually figured out if they choose to fight it. The encounter shouldn't take long but, hopefully it will be flavorful and cool.
I'll also be losing one of the newbie players since he's moving. He'll spend the rest of his days as an NPC gunner for the ship, although since he'll have PC stats and skills I expect the rest of the crew will try harder to keep him alive than the average NPC.
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