Iphigenaia

In our previous session, the Travellers met up with the Deepnight Revelation at Goal Terminus, and we ended things with them leaving and heading for Homeward. Homeward was another independent world, a corporate government, Homeward Trade Warehousing, which ran a small starport around one of the moons of a gas giant. The starport was little more than a string of fuel depots, warehouses, cheap hotels and burger joints in orbit.

The most notable thing here was the Cult of the Opening, a small group of people who believed that about 50 years ago a wormhole opened in the core of the gas giant, and the clouds opened up to reveal it. It was witnessed by 3 people, only one of whom is still alive, and there is no recorded evidence of the event ever having happened. The cult believes it will happen again ‘soon’ though, and spend their time just watching.

From here, they headed to Deata Chi, refuelling at the Oort Cloud for simplicity, though it took a bit longer to find a suitable body to refuel from. After that they left the sector of The Beyond behind them, and headed to Kereq, a world in the Jarnac Pahalic in the Vanguard Reaches.

For now, I’ve decided to move things on reasonably quickly. Since the Captain and Mission Commander of the Deepnight are NPCs, I’m doing most of the route planning and only involving the PCs for the important decisions. I’m abstracting all the deep space surveying in order to streamline things.

So from Kereq they went to Saishigei, and from there to Bursk and Charsala. At Charsala they stopped off in the kuiper belt, and found a suitable small world to retrieve ice, and therefore water, from. It was another chance to make use of my Wonders of a Solar System collection.

This is a large, reddish, snow covered world. It has towering mountains of pure water ice as transparent as glass and as hard as rock. The edges of the mountains are sharp, almost unnaturally so. The world’s core is rocky, but geologically dead, and there is little residue heat in the world. There is a trace atmosphere of Nitrogen and Methane, which sublimes from the snowy surface during the day, and freezes back at night. There is little sign of impact craters on the surface.

— A small world in the kuiper belt of Charsala Belt A.

Finally they made the jump to Zastravaz in Iphigenaia sector.

Zastravaz is an X class starport – i.e., it doesn’t have one, and is their first system out of civilised space. From this point on, they will mostly be visiting star systems which are uninhabited.

The Zastravaz system was also a chance for me to introduce one of the ‘random’ encounters from the first part of the Deepnight campaign. On approach to Zastravaz IV, they detected some disturbances in the innermost rings. There were biological compounds there, as well as a faint x-ray source.

They sent one of the scouts ahead to take a look, and discovered the remains of some space dwelling creature. It was dead and decaying, but had radioactive material in its body which was giving off the x-rays. It also seemed to contain some form of parasite, which tried to eat the probe they sent in to take a closer look.

After much careful examination, they got some samples and took them back to the Deepnight for later study.

This session was also a chance for me to introduce the players to my WorldGen software a bit more, and provide access so that they could browse the generated star systems. They’re not going to need it too much, since I’ve decided to abstract that side of things, but it allows them to see what systems look like, especially as things head out of Charted Space where the Traveller Map will stop becoming useful.

It also means I need to start generating more sectors, since I’ve only so far generated out to the Near Side of Yonder. It takes an hour or so to generate all the systems in a sector (mostly the effort is generating the planetary maps).

The players are interested in stopping off in the Regency of Muirimi on the way, which is only a small detour, so I need to flesh out that polity a bit. After that, it’s the long treck to Point Demnan in Incognita Citerior.

To round off the session, we had a brief discussion of switching to Foundry, though I’d like to complete (or at least get it to a usable state) my system implementation for Mongoose Traveller. Skill checks and attack rolls are all working, but there’s other things still yet to complete before I think it’s ready.