The Deepnight TV Series
Returning to our weekly Traveller game after the break, the player characters are ready to leave the Deepnight Endeavour and go and find some professional help from Neubayern. Some spoilers for that adventure will follow.
The travellers get together with the company representative Dr Laura Matthews to decide what they want to do. Dr Matthews is keen at this point to hand things over to a government to sort out. There is still cleaning up to be done, but they now have a lot of information about what has happened, and a bigger team with more resources will probably have a much greater chance of success.
From my perspective, things had probably reached as far as I wanted to go in this adventure. Any more would be either the PCs just telling the NPCs what to go and do, or more of a dungeon crawl to clean things out, and I wasn’t keen on running more of either at this stage.
At the end of last session they had come to the conclusion that Dr Jara Kleine was infected, and possibly not acting in the best interests of humanity. The decision was to leave her here and promise to come back.
The whole ‘abandon’ the Deepnight but we promise to come back later had a risk of being taken badly by the survivors, so I had Zanobia make a Diplomacy check to persuade them that this was both a good idea, and that the crew of the Sex Thing would keep its word. She got a 14, which is a pretty good success. In addition, the donation of more food supplies (the Sex Thing had brought along several tonnes of supplies, just in case) and entertainment videos definitely helped their case.
They agreed to take Trennance Zedehlale and Vania (the woman Khadashi had shot in the back) back with them, albeit in cold sleep. They also took some samples of the entity from Dr Kleine, though but the box in a box and strapped it to the outside of the hull.
So the Sex Thing moved away from the Deepnight, ever fearful of the latter’s laser turrets. Once they were a safe distance away, they spent a couple of days going over the outside of the hull to make sure there wasn’t anything unexpected attached, then made a jump to the middle of nowhere.
It was 1106-122 when they reached the empty hex Reft/1820, and they were able to move fuel from the cargo hold into the fuel tanks and then make their final jump to Neubayern, coming out in the asteroid belt.
Zanobia managed to get in touch with the Imperium Ambassador to inform him of the situation and see if he could arrange a rescue mission to rescue the Deepnight crew.
Whilst they waited for the replies, they caught up on the latest news and discovered that tensions between Neubayern and Serendip Belt were still high, but hadn’t escalated since the incident of a couple of months ago.
Eventually they get word to head to Blauer Seezentrum (Blue Lake Centre), a medical and research facility in the belt, where they would be met by Dr Jacob Weber for de-briefing and medical evaluation. Looking him up, he was quite a big media personality on Neubayern (think Professor Brian Cox, but for biology rather than physics), and for him it was an opportunity to make another vid-series.
In the process there was also an opportunity for the crew of the Sex Thing to do media interviews, but only Zanobia took advantage of the situation, becoming a bit of a media celebrity herself (a decent SOC + Art check), at least for a short time.
As expected, the government was willing to at least give the illusion of wanting to help, in order to curry favour with the Imperium. So they were putting together a rescue mission with the medical ship the Ludwig Büchner, together with a fuel tanker.
It’s a 4 parsec journey to the Deepnight, and then another 4 parsecs back, with no prospect of re-fuelling. According to my maths, the combination of the two can just about make it. The plan is for the tanker to hold back and let the Ludwig approach and do all the work. If anything goes wrong, the tanker can come back and report. The Ludwig is a converted lab ship, fitted out with medical bays rather than laboratories.
Having had their medical checkups, and with Dr Weber heading off on the rescue mission along with his vid crew to document the rescue, the crew of the Sex Thing were left to do their own thing. They handed over the ‘pirates’ they’d rescued from the rogue gas giant who had been in cold sleep all that time, and got a bit of a bounty, then headed down to Neubayern.
Zanobia was able to do the vid-show interview circuit, and was invited to several private night clubs along with the rest of the crew. Though Neubayern society is quite uptight in public, they really know how to relax and de-stress in private.
They offer Trennance Zedehlale a place on the crew, which he accepts, at least in the sort term. Which means another NPC aboard the ship – I should really do more with them than I have been. The plan seems to be to head back to Zuflucht, and do some trading on the way. So there should be time for plenty of rumours and minor missions along the way.
This does pretty much bring the Deepnight Endeavour adventure to a close. I’ll probably say more on this adventure in a different post (since I’ve now run all three of the Great Rift Adventures from Mongoose), but the players are interested in doing more deep space research like this, especially trying to find out where the infection came from. Given that the Deepnight Revelation campaign is coming out of Mongoose later this month, I’ve suggested to the players that we hold off on doing anything more on this front until I have that campaign, since it’ll probably be useful for anything I plan.
However, given that I’ve nailed down a lot of chamber pots as to where the infection came from and what the Deepnight had been doing, then I might need to do some reworking of the Revelations campaign to make it fit with what has happened so far in my campaign. We’ll have to wait and see.
Until then, it’ll probably be some smaller adventures, trading and rumour following for the travellers.
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