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Rogue Trader: Session 1

Last weekend I was fortunate to be a player in an excellent Rogue Trader game. I played the Seneschal on a ship owned by a crazy, spoiled Rogue Trader with a Napolean Complex. It was my job to translate his vague instructions into commands that could actually be used to run the ship. We also had a dead world warrior and a navigator along.

Our first mission was to recover a city building artifact to pay off the Rogue Trader's charter. We set off to meet our contact to get the co-ordinates. We met him deep in the bowels of the space stations machinery. As he was passing off the data some kind of mechanical bird swooped down to steal the crystal. We made quick work of the bird and its psycher owner. While our fearless leader was standing on the cooling body of our foe making odd proclomations we tracked the psycher back to another Rogue Trader named Garren Fel, who was trying to jump our claim on the city building McGuffin.

As we prepped the ship for the journey the navigator approached me with some interesting news, our ship had been part of a space hulk at one point. She also felt that there was something "wrong" with the ship. I decided that this was not information that the captain needed to perform his duty and went to tell him that we were ready to go.

When I arrived on the bridge I was shocked to find the barely clothed captain glistening in the middle of the room. He had ordered "the men" to cover him with butter. He had also ordered "the men" to cover the floor with butter, or at least that is what they told me when I woke up in sick bay after my fall.

At this point I instituted a policy change on the ship. I created a group of fairly useless men and labeled them "the men". This way when the captain asked me to give "the men" a stupid order I could literally follow his instructions without causing too much harm.

Soon after we started our journey the navigator informed me that another ship was following us. The captain gave the order that we were to find a space monster and trick them into following us into danger. The navigator was able to find an Orc warship that we bribed into attacking the following ship. The captain proved surprisingly good at talking to orcs.

Once in system we decide to investigate a planet that has an area our sensors cannot scan. Jace, the dead worlder, and I landed outside the dead zone and hoofed it in with 150 of the ship's troops. We soon found ourselves in a maze. I took a small force to scout ahead and promptly got totally lost. Jace managed to find me just in time for our unit to run into a force of 600 orcs.

A short while later we stood on the smoking bodies of the orcs with only 7 or our force still alive. We proceeded to the middle of the dead zone where I communed with a force called the Star Mirror. The Star Mirror downloaded every event of the last 400 years into my brain in a matter of seconds. This had two results, I learned when the city builder entered the system and where it went when it left, and I went a little crazy.

I could now commune with the solar system whenever I wanted, but doing so warped me a little more each time. I used my new found abilities to determine exactly when and where the ship following us (Gerran Fel) would enter the system. As they jumped in I communed with the Star Mirror to guide a shot right to their bridge. I also started spouting nonsense about being a god. The captain knocked me out with a blow to the head.

Needless to say, we brutalized them and took their stuff.

We then jumped to the co-ordinates that the Star Mirror gave me for the McGuffin-bearing ship. As soon as we jumped in system we were faced with a bunch of planets carved to look like giant elder god heads. We set course for the one planet not carved up.

We hit the ground in three groups to retrieve the city building device. Two of the groups went after proof that we had found a long lost fleet. The main group went after the McGuffin. We fought off the deranged mechanical guardians and made off with "acceptable losses". In other words only about 30 of the several hundred men sent to the surface returned.

I really enjoyed this Rogue Trader adventure, and I am looking forward to more.

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