A Comedy of Errors

Welp, they made it. Our first night of Rogue Trader was a pretty rousing success. Here's last night's game log. Enjoy!




For ease of reference, here are the players:

Marneus Machariel - Rogue Trader
Bors Tovon - Arch-militant
Victrus Karellius - Void-Master
Anastasia Xanatov - Void-Master
Jotham Lentillus - Missionary
Opiter Castus - Explorator

Now, I'll let Zorak, the writer of the log and our young Missionary, tell you how it all went down.

Marneus returns home after a disastrous voyage through the warp and some wicked time dilation to find that his father is retiring, and the family wants him to have Solo Drakban so he can show them what he's made of. He's done a few basic courier-type runs to shake the ship down, and now he's been sent to Footfall. The mission: meet with a guy, who has some stuff for the ship.

Marneus has Drakban parked in the mooring area while the bridge crew fly to the rock where the meet is to take place. Anastasia and Victrus remain on the shuttle, while Marneus, Bors, Opiter, Jotham, and Seneschal Cornelius, an old family functionary, cheerfully blunder into a trap. With the trap sprung and Cornelius dead, A mob of eight thugs give chase seeking to do bad things to us. Running through a crowded street, Bors deploys his heavy bolter and puts on an exhibition of firepower, generating substantial panic among the bystanders. Opiter sets up overwatch with his bolter. Marneus asks Anastasia to prepare for hasty takeoff, and Jotham runs ahead to try to set an ambush with his flamer. The enemy boss facepalms the nearest civilian, exposing him to Opiter's fire, and ends up getting pasted badly - the third bolter shot effectively amputates his leg. Opiter claims first kill by a PC. The fire toward us actually intensifies as the bad guys' rage increases. Their return fire hits Bors and Opiter, bloodying both, but not causing any critical damage.

Meanwhile, back at the ship, Anastasia and Victrus fail perception rolls. It surprises them a lot when someone shoots the viewport, which starts to show a spiderweb of cracks. Victrus investigates and sees a guy in a dockworker's coverall spraying the shuttle's hatch with a bolter. Victrus' return fire suppresses him. Anastasia struggles to expedite the startup sequence. The situation deteriorates as another bad guy comes around the shuttle, firing yet another automatic weapon, forcing Victrus to duck back into the hatch. Even so, Victrus gets nicked.

Bors, seeing the crowd thinning out, decides to engage properly. He finds a decorative buttress and uses it to brace his heavy bolter, taking aim to set up some extreme hate-death next round. Opiter ducks behind a delivery truck and puts two rounds each into two guys. The first guy loses his arm at the shoulder, spraying blood and shoulder bones everywhere. The second guy also loses an arm, and in this case, his severed arm begins twitching and freaking out any perceptive bystanders. Good call on the running away, innocent civilians! Marneus joins the fight with his laspistol but fails to impress. Jotham's attempt to set up an ambush is failing dismally, but fortunately the bad guys decide that it's better to run before the properly braced heavy bolter comes into play.

At the shuttle, Victrus' return fire forces the nearer bad guy to duck again. Sadly for the foe, he ducks behind the engines. Victrus tells Anastasia over the vox to spool up the engines, which deliver unto the bad guy such a vast cleansing flame that Jotham, had he seen it, would have died of envy. Of course there were two bad guys, but bad guy number one is still un-jamming his weapon. When he finally pops back up, Victrus has him dead to rights, and blows a big ol' hole in his stomach.

Back in the street fight, Opiter tries to hotwire the delivery truck, but gets a nasty shock for his pains, and gets blown out of the cab, smoking and unconscious. The local law draws closer. Marneus tries to hotwire the same truck, and can't. Bors wakes Opiter up. Marneus moves to plan B: step out into traffic with a power sword and a pistol, and demand that the oncoming car stop. Fear: delivered. We make the youthful driver of the delivery truck sufficiently terrified that he drives us to the docks.

At the shuttle, port control demands that we shut down, but Anastasia patches the Lord Captain through and he successfully commands them to free his shuttle. Sadly they don't speak for port security, who surround the shuttle and insist that the crew vacate the craft. The shuttle crew refuse to comply. When the landing party arrive, the standoff continues, with port security growing increasingly upset. Marneus gives him some attitude, and they stand down. Victrus opens the hatch and we board the ship. Yay, we got away with it! Except that the Lord Captain seems upset about his shuttle window.

As we travel through the outer system, Jotham conducts funeral services for Seneschal Cornelius, and then the ship enters warp for the week-long trip back to Machariel Base. Victrus keeps an aggressive drill schedule going, beating to quarters twice a day, running out the guns, training them on arbitrary coordinates, and generally keeping the gun crews busy. About two and a half days into the warp, the navigator warns the Lord Captain of an oncoming warp storm. We try to detour around it, but by the fourth day, the whole ship feels the immanence of chaos. On the fifth day, the storm's strength has the whole ship rocking. Marneus gets a video call from a former shipmate who's been dead for a score of years. The line of voidmen looking for religious counseling has Jotham busy as a one-handed Eversor assassin. On the bridge, the ship is handling badly, the navigator is freaking out, and the astropath's third eye is glowing a bit. The captain summons extra security to the bridge. Just as Victrus arrives, a massive warp current strikes the ship firmly abeam, causing klaxons to blare, the navigator to have a fatal aneurism, and bridge deck morale to plummet. Oh yeah, and the comms officer tells us that there's something wrong with the Choir. In fact, there's a containment alarm for the Choir room. They've gone mad and are ripping each other apart with their bare hands. The Lord Captain summons Chaplain Lentillus to the bridge just before the Gellar Field alarm sounds. Bad, meet worse. We're down to 60% capacity on the starboard Gellar field, where 50% means breaking. Captain Machariel goes on the 1MC to calm the crew down. Drakban takes another hit from a warp tide, and this time Anastasia can't hold it; the ship is thrown violently on to another tack. The Gellar field actually flickers, but Opiter manages to correct it almost instantly. Bors decides to annhilate the shrieking Astropaths, but can't get in to the choir chambers due to the containment door. When Jotham arrives on the bridge, he tries to calm everyone down, but his lack of a human touch prevents him from delivering that reassuring touch. He and Bors go to roam the ship and dispatch any difficulties. Meanwhile, Opiter estimates he will require seven hours to fully repair navigational control.

A bridge conference results in a disturbing realization: we have no control, we don't know where we are, and the senior remaining navigator can't see the Astronomcon. If we drop warp, we probably won't land in a star. Probably. We do have void navigation and propulsion intact, so as long as we don't land inside something inimitable, we ought to be OK. Jotham finally gets to burn something. A mysterious hand the size of a grown man appeared on the gun deck during the Field failure, and while the lay preachers had done some basic praying over it, a little holy cleansing fire does it good.

We transit out of warp. We immediately get void shield warnings, but it's just a little debris. We pick up a beacon! We also discover, by comparing star positions, that during our five days in warp, only two days passed in real space. The storm dumped us in Cinefus Maleficum, near The Cauldron. We got flung almost exactly the wrong direction. Opiter takes the warp drive down for maintenance, marooning us in real space for several hours.