Tradeport

The Travellers have reached the Tradeport Consortium, coming out of Jump around Giselle IV. It is a large gas giant with green tinged bands of clouds and a wide ring system and four large icy moons. There are several small ships in orbit around the gas giant, but the first communication comes from the outer moon where there is a small D class starport.

They are contacted by Lt Janice Melcom, head of operations at the starport. She greets them and asks for their identification and purpose, then stalls as the rest of the sensor details come across her screen. A 75,000t heavily armed cruiser was not something that she or anyone else was expecting.

There is a friendly exchange of information, and Lt Melcom states that the Deepnight Revelation will need to have a, um, medical check since it’s come such a large distance. In case of any alien diseases. Actually, she just wants an excuse to go on board and take a look around, but the Vilani on the Deepnight think a medical check is a really good idea.

A team from the port turns up and gets to have a look around the Deepnight, impressed by its size and technology. They explain that the main port is around the third planet, and though it is large, it isn’t fully completed. They don’t have people with the right skills to finish construction and make it fully operational.

After refuelling, the Deepnight offloads its visitors and heads to the main world. The starport here is B class, and at 85,000t is slightly larger than the Deepnight. There are two other ‘large’ ships here – a 3,000t destroyer that belongs to the Empire of Envais, and a converted 5,000t Commonwealth light cruiser that is being used by the Tradeport Consortium for defence.

At this point we start to get distracted away from the main plot, into a discussion about various ship classes and sizes, as well as a history of the Imperium and Solomani Confederation. They’ve managed to pick up more information about the humans here – that they arrived around about the year -300, and started as an expedition from the Old Earth Union during the Long Night.

Giselle has a large population of about 60 million, mostly located in cities around the “Sea”. The world doesn’t have much life, but the cities grow food in large greenhouses, and are beginning to terraform the world. It has aerobic bacteria, and an atmosphere with low oxygen content.

On approach to the star port, they receive invitation from both the port’s Chief Administrator Marcus Fiesler, and also someone called Earl Egrane, a noble of the Empire. Both offer their services.

The Deepnight crew take up the offer of the Chief Administrator, and meet up on the high port for a meet and greet. It’s explained that Fiesler is more than happy to help them, and will initially extend them some credit so they can purchase supplies and take part in some R&R. He’s sure that the Travellers will have something that they can trade in return. It seems that the thing the world is most lacking is high tech knowledge. They are investing in an education system to try and get people with the skills, but have few people with experience in high tech engineering.

This session was a bit rambling, partly because I didn’t have any really strong hooks for the players, and partly because a lot of the things they were interested in was background details I didn’t have to hand. I think what I need to do for next session is write up some details of the history and politics, and also include some hooks. I do have hooks, but I failed to articulate them well, so getting them in writing may help direct things and provide the players with some solid choices about what to do next.

This is also a good opportunity for a number of the NPCs to get involved. A lot of the discussions should have been between skilled NPCs, but it fell to the players because of the difficulties of me as GM effectively just talking to myself if I play out conversations between NPCs.