The After Party

In our previous session of Traveller Deepnight Revelation, the crew of the Deepnight had been invited to a ball by Earl Egrane. I’d run the ball as a min-game, giving the players a chance to find out information from the main attendees by matching their skills against the skills most likely to win over each attendee.

When we finished, a tug had just been launched towards the Deepnight carrying a gift of food, drink and other luxuries. The captain of the Imperial ship Avenger had also departed the party, heading back to the Avenger for an ‘important meeting’. The crew were suspicious, and were expecting the Earl to be up to something.

We had another round of conversations, which had a mix of successes and failures. Imelda spoke to Jacob Wiseman, finding out the final piece of information from him:

• We’ve lost contact with some worlds nearby. There was just the one, then several others have gone quiet. There were rumours about some big experiment being run on Abyrezuky just before things went quiet.

Zanobia started a conversation with Hanna Delmont, but that didn’t go anywhere. Their Captain spoke to Lady Grey, who was a difficult person to get information out of. She was barely dressed, except for some thin bits of cloth and some fancy jewellery, and was playing the role of vacuous eye candy for Baron Regis. The Captain needed to roll 11 or 12 on the dice, and got 11.

• The Emperor is Henry Jacob Holdenson 3rd, and he’s the Emperor of Envais. A clever man. He’s my uncle. Ish. Outside of marriage at any rate. He tried to get me an education but books are sooo boring. I find out so much more interesting things by sucking cock. It’s getting rather warm in here isn’t it? Seems like a number of extra people have turned up.

Everyone failed Recon checks, but they did notice that some extra people had turned up. Lady Grey identified them as belonging to Earl Egrane’s security team. They were dressed as stewards, but it was noted they had significant bulges where a hand gun might normally be secreted.

Lord Sivas failed to get any information out of Yanas Obley. At this point we switched to the Deepnight, where they were concerned about the tug which seemed to have developed engine trouble. It was carrying a dozen large cargo containers, which were difficult to scan due to the freezer units shielding them. They’d be trying hard to crack the security on the Avenger, and rolling badly. They did discover that the Avenger was communicating with both the tug and also the Tradeport station. It was using direct laser comms to various points on the station, and the Deepnight was picking up some scatter from that. Not enough to be able to tell what was being communicated, but enough to realise that there seemed to be some type of sensor systems at those points on the station. They were all newly installed, and didn’t seem to be connected to the rest of the station.

Concerned that it might be some form of trap, especially since they were on the side of the station facing the Deepnight, the command was given to move the Deepnight slowly out of the way.

Back at the ball, Captain Kishasaa realised that she was wearing a new bracelet. She had no idea where it had come from (since everyone had failed Recon checks). It did look suspiciously similar to one that Lady Grey had been wearing. Also, Lady Grey was now nowhere to be seen.

The bracelet was blinking a light, and despite warnings from the others the Captain didn’t throw it away. It started to display a small hologram of the Avenger, Tradeport, the Tug (including the container pods which were fitted with drives and carrying acceleration couches) and some technical readouts on all of them. It labelled sensor stations on Tradeport as ‘Fake Lock Sensors’.

Then all comms went down as someone started jamming them.

Outside, the Deepnight was moving away. It was still keeping an eye on things, and so noticed the heat bloom as the Avenger’s main reactor went into full power. The Deepnight was hit with sensors locks from the Avenger and also from several points on the station. Then the tug fell apart, and the containers spilled outwards.

It was time for Tactics checks between the Deepnight’s XO and the Avenger’s Captain. The latter rolled really badly, the XO rolled high. Surprised by the Deepnight moving away, things weren’t quite prepared on the Avenger. The tordepo bays prepared to fire a full salvo – when a spinal mount particle beam ripped through the ship.

Shooting a spinal mount at close range, at a small (barely 3,000t) vessel meant a massive penalty. XO Kirk rolled high though, just enough to hit the target. The damage was massive, enough to rip the ship in two.

The containers fired up their drives and started accelerating towards the Deepnight. Filled with marines, they were expecting to board and fight their way to the bridge. However, they were also expecting the Deepnight’s defenses to be kept busy by multiple torpedo salvos, and possibly confused by the lock on’s from Tradeport. There were no torpedoes though, and the crew knew that the Tradeport sensors were decoys. None of the containers made it to their destination.

Back at the ball, things were kicking off. Starship combat rounds were longer than character combat rounds, so all of the above hadn’t quite happened. In terms of theatrics, I thought it would be better to have the starship side of things happen first.

The Earl’s security team drew their guns and ordered everyone to the ground. The Travellers started moving back to cover, with their own security team drawing sidearms and shooting back. There was screaming, running and diving for cover all around.

Zanobia, who had brought some small canisters of sleeping gas in her handbag (and she’d told the team to bring face masks) yelled to Janice Fiesler asking where the air vents were. I knew what she wanted to achieve, but couldn’t see how heading for the air vents would help in that since they only blew cold air in, it wouldn’t disperse it around the room.

And so we had one of our very rare combat scenes in this Traveller game. As it turns out, nobody could hit anyone for toffee. People at small firearms, and the security details on both sides had cloth armour, so when they did hit it wasn’t fatal. It wasn’t entirely clear at first whether this was a coup against the Earl, or whether it had been arranged by the Earl – but they soon figured out that it was the latter.

Zanobia got to the air vents and I realised the player had been looking for the air conditioning intake system that fed all the vents. There wasn’t one of those nearby, and the confusion was put down to, well, the confusion of being in a fire fight.

So, flash back time, what did Zanobia have equipped? We decided it wouldn’t be too much of a stress to assume she had small dispersal discs she could throw in the air. They would hover and spin for a bit, dispersing gas around a small area. She threw one towards the Earl and another towards where some of the goons were shooting from.

It wouldn’t be that strong, definitely not that quickly acting, but the Earl and the Countess rolled really bad END checks, as did a couple of goons. So they went down anyway.

It was then that the room was filled with light, as the Avenger blew up outside. The goons were a bit put out by this, and Lord Sivas stood up and made a rousing demand for their surrender. They either complied or scarpered. Earl Egrane was dragged out by his bodyguards.

The entire event had meant to happen about 90 minutes later, so the goons hadn’t been in position or fully prepared. All the best security people had been on the boarding action, so the operation hadn’t gone as smoothly as the Earl had planned.

His escape was thwarted by the arrival of a heavily armed security team from the Deepnight, including Shinzaro in full pink Vargr battledress. She strode into the ball room carrying a bloody cutlass and the Earl’s head. Things may have turned slightly more bloody than they needed to be there.

So we ended the session with the arrival of the station security and medical teams, with the remaining goons being arrested. The Countess was woken from her sleep, and acted very surprised at the whole series of events. She’d arranged such a good party, and it had been ruined.

Outside, rescue ships were heading towards what was left of the Avenger to see if there were any survivors. It had been a rather spectacular fireworks display to end the evening events.