Raiders

Our Deepnight Revelation campaign continues, with the Travellers heading Rimward across Atlantis sector. They are giving the ship Clayton’s Chariot a lift, and using Clayton and her crew as a guide for the journey. During the jump time, there is a lot of conversation between the two crews, as both parties try to find out what they can about each other.

According to her crew Clayton herself might be a bit biased in her views. Apparently she was kicked out of the Commonwealth Navy for some reason, and still harbours a grudge against them.

The ship arrives at Aloste, a system with a TL 7 civilisation, a C class starport and half a billion people. The Deepnight is given a friendly welcome, with the crew invited down to the planet for a party. The locals are humans – a mix of Solomani and also another human branch called Firbolgs. There are also Droyne here, though they are castless, and don’t have much knowledge of advanced technology. There are some basic defences here – apparently raiders are common hereabouts.

Talking to the Firbolg, they seem to be barely intelligent. They lack reading skills, and have no knowledge of science. They seem to be used as simple labour, though nobody digs too much into exactly what the relationship is. Zanobia manages to get some DNA samples, and they do appear to be humans from Earth, though possibly from a period prior to the Vilani. Are they evidence of a previous wave of human settlement?

The Deepnight shares some cultural information (stories, science data, pornography), resupplies and heads on. At the next system, activity is detected in the system’s kuiper belt. It is guessed that it may be raider bases, and there is discussion about the economics of raiding and piracy.

At Epsilon Ety, there is an old wreck of a ship in orbit around the gas giant. It has been attacked, with large laser blast holes in the hull. The crew are still onboard, though long since dead. The ship has obviously been boarded and everything of value taken.

The following system is empty of anything interesting, and then they arrive at the system of River. The gas giant is normal, but there is an icy terrestrial world with a small colony on it. The colony is in the process of being attacked by raiders. The raiders are taking their time, moving from settlement to settlement and not expecting a need to rush. It takes almost 3 days for the Deepnight to reach the main world under full thrust, but the raiders don’t spot them until they’re less than a day out and rapidly decelerating.

A couple of the raider ships make it away, but the others are caught on the surface still refuelling. Not wanting to risk their smaller ships, the Captain takes the Deepnight down into the atmosphere so it’s only a kilometre or so above where the main raider vessel is holding some locals hostage. Realising they have no escape, the raiders surrender without a fight.

The Deepnight provides the locals some help, and hands the raiders over to them. The raiders are then let go – out into the cold wasteland with no supplies.

A couple of worlds further on, and the Deepnight Revelation reaches the system of Giselle, home of the Tradeport Consortium.

For this session, I had wanted to get the party across the sector and to the Tradeport Consortium, so that next session we can deal with that location. I do need to do some more reading of both this adventure and the next one, since they aren’t completely independent of each other. It’s been a long while since I’ve read them in detail, and my memory has become hazy on the subject.

I also need to re-read the campaign ending, and starting thinking how I’ll handle that. The players have already been asking about what the polities here know about the region ahead, which means I need a good idea myself to be able to give sensible (and consistent) answers to those questions.