Ran another Rogue Trader session tonight after a long break.
So first off I presented the Captain with a written message from the Rogue Trader they've been going back and forth with, then read it to them. The Rogue Trader has been "enamored" with the Captain's tales of adventure, vengeance, blah blah blah. He looked up his service record and now he's all about helping the Captain locate this system where the Ork Freebooters live. This has been the crew's #1 goal since starting the game. Find the system, find out how to get there. There's a couple ways I could play this. I could make it totally legitimate, he really does want to help and all debts are forgotten. Secondly, he could be playing it legit because he wants to see the Captain get himself killed by Orks. Or he could do my personal choice, and what I'm already angling toward, which is directing the party to a system full of Rak'Gol instead of Orks. The party vocally already said they knew it was a possibility. So it won't be a surprise but it could be fun. I want to let loose some Rak'Gol. Either way, if I'm going to betray them (not much of a betrayal really...), the plan is that when they're stuck in the deep end of something, this Rogue Trader will start pillaging their assets covertly back in the Imperium. If they manage to get cut off from communication somehow for several months.....those assets will be gone before they have a chance to react and Rogue Trader Balthus will have well and truly stuck it to them.
If you're wondering why I went this route, it's because one of my players kept saying how he'd enjoy it if this NPC they totally dicked over and essentially blew off would become a penpal or friend to the Captain. So I took that and married it to my idea of revenge. I think I overplayed it though. They know there's an 80% chance they'll get betrayed and that's ok, I don't see much of a future in a friendship with a Rogue Trader in Imperial Space. I doubt they'll head back to Imperial Space before they kill Gromkol or I quit running the campaign.
After that I let them know they'd identified a bunch of potential saboteurs after the intelligence network the 1st mate runs on the ship had enough time to look through 26k crew members. Gonna need to do something here, I've got them set up like sleeper cells and the players keep assuming they're going to band together at some point. There's been two foiled sabotage attempts and an assassination attempt on the Captain. I could and should go for other targets other than the obvious ones but I sorta need to think of an encounter that isn't "your guys caught someone doing something suspicious" or "something bad happened that you are probably going to be angry wasn't prevented what with all the security you're saying you're doing." I'm sorely tempted to have them attack the Astropaths (wouldn't help to attack the Navigators, there's three of them on the damn ship now.)
Meanwhile, the Magos aboard the ship basically admitted to the Captain he wanted to commit tech-heresy and start really digging into how the Archeotech robot they discovered on that Archeotech world. The Captain was like "So you admit you want to commit heresy?!" and the Eldar player effectively went "Uhm, hello?" And that was that. The captain ordered the magos to....reprogram the machine warrior to hate Orks. Yyyeeeeepppp. I gave myself a few months time on that because reprogramming an archeotech sentient AI is pretty goddamn unlikely period. Failing that, there was a lot of discussion of removing its weapon arm and/or possibly grafting it to the 1st Mate's arm instead of his bionic. There's all sorts of fun shit I could with that robot if I let them activate it.
The Soothsayer/Astropath finally met her end. I did another poorly RP'd "seeing through the eyes of the enemy" bit and kinda made it like she went overboard and fell too deeply into the Ork Freebooter's reality. She'd been on the edge of death for about 2 months while the players only got the barest hints of where to go out of her and I really wanted to be rid of her (God Emperor I hate prophecy, foreknowledge, future reading and all that shit as a GM. It's really hard to think of stuff on the spot that both sounds good and doesn't just railroad your plot and invalidate players having to learn or discover anything.) So I really played up the masochistic levels of abuse astropaths and psykers in general have to put up with. She was all emaciated and thin and almost completely delirious while seeing through Gromkol's eyes. Gromkol has gotten a nice shiny power hook to replace the hand the Captain took from him, and big metal bits to replace the rest. So while Gromkol was testing his new power hook by smashing the tip arm rest of his command throne, the soothsayer was mashing her 90-year-old arm into a steel table, and swinging at what she thought was grot underlings while the PCs are trying to whisper stuff in her ear. They started trying to fuck with Gromkol and talk directly to him at which point I had her go into a seizure and the Eldar player mercifully put an amputator round from his hand cannon into her chest. Thank the Emperor I'm rid of that NPC, I could never figure out how to do fortune-telling and future reading in a way that didn't feel like me cockblocking them or myself.
Her mid 20s totally feckless aide totally lost his mind after watching all that, all tears and shock, so the Captain put him in the charge of the Sanctioned Pskyer player as his assistant. (The player playing the Captain has a soft spot for hopeless cases and likes to nurture them. So that he can then be bereaved when they're horribly killed in combat.) So they gave him a chain cutlass or whatever and started putting him through combat drills. Now the question I'm wondering is, do I make him a "rise to the occasion" kind of guy, or possession bait. Choices, choices.
After all that they dined with the ship's Twistcatcher for reasons I don't remember why and got to know him a little bit. It's kind of nice to have written up all these NPCs and finally gotten to show them off without stuffing them down the player's throat. It also gave me the chance to plant the specter of mutants living on their ship in their heads. Tee hee.
So that was all the first half of the session.
The second half was me stalling, essentially. I'd yet to really decide where to go. I laid a lot of bricks this session with all the plot threads I threw out there, but I knew all that alone wasn't going to carry the whole session. And so I figured it was finally time to try out ship combat!
It went...ok from my perspective. From the player's perspective it went GREAT. I was doing it without a board or map to track the ships in combat so it was all narrative. Two raider class vessels, one standard wolfpack raider and the other a modified raider designed for speed and boarding actions, ambushed the Deadly Dame just after they translated out of warp.
I decided to borrow one of the ideas from this thread and made their enemies pirate scum who had invaded the system that also happened to be the same system where the players had just raided themselves. So, of course, the pirates who attacked the players had holds full of.....you guessed it.....the refugees of the colony trying to return home.
The players tried to get their systems online after warp translation. They got sensors up and then I think in their hurry to shoot their guns we all forgot about trying to wake up the other systems. I let the pirates just have one free attack on the ship as a warning shot and it harmlessly bounced off the Sword-class Frigates armor, and then the real combat began.
The lead pirate captain hailed the Deadly Dame and tried to play it gentlemen rogue but of course the players wouldn't stand down to that, they weren't meant to. In the combat that followed the "Boarding" Raider ship with the armored prow got close and launched hit and run attacks which were easily rebuffed. The player's gunner fired a pretty craptacular pair of shots from the Macrobatteries and did some piddly damage to the ship launching the boarders. The rest of the party launched counter-boarding attacks themselves and did a little more damage, disabling the weapons on the ship. There was some confusion was to which ship was getting attacked (they thought they were boarding the main captain's ship) so essentially the other pirate ship did nothing that round.
The next round the Gunner rolled ace on two Macrobatteries fired as one barrage and obliterated the Boarder pirate ship. That one massive shot caused every system on the ship to either pretty much explode or be damaged. Engines, the Bridge, Warp Engine, several other components completely destroyed. The other ship decided to turn and try to run after seeing that.
And the players gave chase. They rolled really, really well on their piloting and "engine manipulation" rolls to more than double the speed of the ship and close the distance to the raider, who utterly failed their rolls to overdrive their engines, which caused them to just stop working. The players rolled up on their aft side and the Gunner, once again, laid out a punishing combined barrage of two Macrobattries and stripped pretty much all the ship's hull off it in one go, void shields be damned. Their single crit went toward the last active weapon on the ship and damaged it. (Not that the fleeing ship could have fired due to the players being behind them and out of their weapon arc.) The players launched boarding parties again and stripped away the last bit of hull left on the pirate ship but didn't harm almost any of the components. With the ship totally crippled most of the party boarded it and they prepared for a big fight at the bridge of the ship, the approaches still guarded by hundreds of pirates. At that moment though the player Captain decided to hail the ship from the Deadly Dame and offer the pirate captain one more chance for honorable surrender. (That player actually chose Peer: Pirate because he can't quite make up his mind what kind of Captain he is.) The Pirate Captain, understandably, facing down a couple hundred guys in power armor with melta guns, accepted. (Gonna have to start reminding those guys that Melta guns aboard a ship are NOT a good idea. Also that their range is shit.)
In what was a pretty amusing moment, the 1st Mate (who accepted the other captain's surrender) took him aside and was like "If you know what's good for you, the first words out of your mouth when you meet Captain Kincaide will be "I hate Orks." It's the surest way to get on his good side."
So now they have a crippled but otherwise intact pirate ship and a couple MORE prisoners to deal with. (And me a couple more NPCs.) It had sort of been implied that their ultimate target, Gromkol, was not just going to be floating around in space by his lonesome and would probably be surrounded by a small fleet at least of Ork ships. So the players knew they'd need help along the way and this captured ship is the first part of that. A lot of them seemed to hate on that idea when it was first brought up but now that they've claimed their first ship I think they're starting to come around to the idea of building a fleet, though it clearly will have humble beginnings.
Meanwhile, for me, combat kinda sucked. I was more focused on making sure the players were doing all their shit right and not paying attention to my own, as usual. So the fight was easy mainly because I didn't run my side of the combat very well. They walked out of it without a scratch on the ship and probably only a couple dozen incidental dead from the boarding parties. And a ship that, after a few months and maybe a little profit factor, will be serviceable. In my defense though, there was pretty much nothing that was going to survive those macrobatteries, not when they rolled that well.
Ah well. At least ship combat doesn't seem so horrendously complicated, you just gotta remember NPCs can take several actions on their turn to even the odds. Forget that and the PCs can rack up overwhelming advantages. Meanwhile I've looked at Rak'Gol ship weapons, and holy fuck. The resources may say they're technologically inferior to most other races but their guns do shitloads of damage.
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