Benny and Sophia

This post pretty much contains spoilers for both Deepnight Endeavour and Deepnight Revelation, so if you’re planning on playing on either of those, you probably don’t want to read this. In fact, the rest of this series of posts is probably going to be spoilers for those adventures.

When I ran the Deepnight Endeavour adventure last year, the expectation was that it would just be one adventure as part of the campaign. Since we’d started with the Islands in the Rift adventure, and the PCs were set in Reft sector, when I fleshed out Deepnight Endeavour I had it picking up the infection from a comet in the Anundarluu nebula.

When the Deepnight Revelation campaign was announced, my players were interested in moving on to that, so I needed to move the start of that campaign from the top of the Rift in Corridor, down to Reft sector where the players were. I could have kept it the same – but having them go all the way up, then all the way back again seemed a bit pointless.

The campaign also added a new introductory adventure, Deepnight Legacy, which introduces the PCs to the concept of the alien Entity that had first been encountered in the Deepnight Endeavour adventure, as well as some things unique to the campaign itself. I didn’t need to introduce the Entity, since the PCs have already met that, but it was going to be useful to bring in some of the new concepts, so I wanted to translate these plot points into somewhere else. Since the PCs had already expressed an interest in exploring the comet where the infection had come from, it seemed a natural fit to join the two together.

One other thing I didn’t want to do was make the PCs the only people doing anything. So the introductory adventure for Deepnight Revelation has still happened – it just happened to some other ‘Travellers’ a few years ago, and this is what has kicked off the Deepnight Revelation mission.

So the plan is close off some of the plot lines that the players have already shown interest in, introduce them to some of the crew of the upcoming mission, and give them an opportunity to demonstrate their capability to both Deepnight and Imperium leadership before they are invited to take part in the main mission. They’ve already demonstrated that they can be effective when they helped rescue the Endeavour, but it’s really how well they work with other crew members. Since they’re outsiders, they’re also partially expendable.

So most of this session was planned to be a briefing for the mission into the nebula, as well as a bit of an info dump on what else has been going on.

Having finished events at Eskandor, the crew of It’s A Sex Thing take on some passengers and freight, and make the two-jump trip to Egurgadi, a TL 15 law level 0 world with a class A starport. The main world itself is a water world, mostly left alone by the Imperium but populated with alien aquatic sophonts. Most of the activity is on the two moons of Benny and Sophia, the first being heavy engineering and ship yards, the second being a university world where some research companies are based, including Deepnight Exploration.

Since the PC’s had mailed their requests for starship upgrades ahead, there were three quotes waiting for them. Rather than just have they take the prices from the books, I decided to flesh things out a bit and give them different quotes with different prices and different ‘specials’. Since they wanted a new turret fitted, cutting holes in the hull and routing through new sets of power cables and control mechanisms I figured might have a chance of weakening the hull, so each contractor had a chance of doing (1 point) of permanent hull damage. Not enough to be really damaging to the ship, but a bit of flavour.

They had quotes from General Products, Civilian Defence Engineering and Egugardi Power Systems. The former gave a relatively standard quote. CDE was more expensive but had a better reputation, and also offered a fire control system for the anti-personnel weapons. They also were offerering a deal on an upgraded jump drive (-15% fuel usage). EPS was the cheapest, but didn’t have a great reputation.

In the end they went for CDE, but without the jump drive upgrade (it wouldn’t save enough fuel to allow an extra jump, it would only save them a bit of cargo space).

There was then a lot of time spent buying equipment – battle dress, laser rifles, flame throwers and other such things. For a group not that interested in combat, they want to be very certain that if there is ever combat, then they are going to win.

Eventually we got to what I was expecting the session to mostly concentrate on, which was the briefing for the next stage of the adventure.

They met up with Deepnight representatives, and were given some of the background on what had happened at Point XF-1402. They saw the video that Able Spacehand Kinya Vaalence Micaalu had left behind at Candling Station, and debriefed on what had happened there (the Deepnight Legacy adventure). They were also provided with more details on what had been discovered at the comet DSB-7483 – the wreckage of an alien craft, as well as infected crew from the scout ship Widdershins Explorer from the Endeavour.

The plan was to head to the Anundarluu along with the scout I Mean It This Time, and the Endurance class tanker Clean Up Your Own Mess, which would provide enough fuel for all three ships to get there and back. They would also be given charge of the mission – mostly because I wanted the players to be dictating what to do, rather than relying on NPCs to make all the decisions.

There was discussion about pay (which really doesn’t matter, since money isn’t really going to mean much once they go on the mission), as well as the interesting timeline. The evidence seemed to suggest that things had happened 300,000 years ago, around the time of the Final War of the Ancients.

There was also a side discussion with Alfred about Psionics, and that the Deepnight organisation had invited him along specifically because of his talents. They were careful not to mention this in front of the other crew members though, since they didn’t know how much they all knew.

So hopefully we should be ready for an exploration of the comet next session. It’ll be a few weeks game time for their ship to have its refit, but currently I don’t see too much happening between now and then.