LogYuriRT1-2011/03/03-Jason-1

Game log for the 2011/03/03 session of Rogue Trader: After the Gold Rush, as taken by Jason

Marneus, Victrus, and their combined fireteam of very frightened guards continue to battle Plaguebearers. The armsmen can't hit squat, but Victrus' bolt pistol gives the Plaguebearer a little anguish. Marneus also misses. Victrus hits it again, but his little pistol just doesn't make a big impression on something with a Plaguebearer's general high level of heinousness. Marneus, too, cannot seem to make an impression. However, after a quick reload, Victrus manages to catch it good, knocking the Plaguebearer flat on its ass with an exploded leg. The armsmen just keep missing their mark - perhaps they need to find their faith anew and start shooting with their eyes open. Sure enough, Marneus' men, perhaps cheered by the sight of the daemon with a blasted leg, manage to put a good volley into it. The daemon tries to strike an armsman, but then suddenly gasps as though it had taken damage. When it next tries to vomit, it begins to scream and shake. Then it grabs its head, makes a very odd noise, and collapses into nothingness. Silly daemon, reality is for humans. The Lord Commander announces his preference for waiting for backup, which happens along shortly.

As the searchers try to track down the remaining daemons, we stumble upon more bodies. Jotham cleanses them with fire while reciting the rites of lamentation. We stumble on to a horrific smell, which may be something we can use to track it. Actually the smell has Marneus' eyes watering. Opiter Castus asks his servo skull to begin tracing the smell, which at last gives us a way to track it without running into obvious ambushes. As we close in, the smell gets so bad we can actually taste it. Yuck. We find a machinery space full of people bits, and the thing left bloody footprints there. Quadrapedal footprints. Shortly thereafter, the servoskull finds the bad thing. It's 4-5 meters long, 4-5 meters high, and busily eating a work crew. Opiter freaks out a bit and starts making Stig noises. Bors slaps Opiter, which snaps him out of it, and then Opiter delivers the bad news to the group. Opiter recommends moving up a level and shooting at it from the catwalk. Bors would prefer to get to longer ranges. Marneus overrules him and orders the attack.

Bors gets off the first shot, or rather hail of heavy bolter shots, and inflicts seven hits. The hail of exploding bolts sends it back to the Warp in a long, reality-distorting, purple blast that knocks many of the party flat. We then deploy drive plasma to clean out the Nurglings and call it good. A few hours later, the crew who were feeling unwell begin to feel better.

Inquisitor Bask, on the bridge, tells Livienne that Marneus has shown great courage and fortitude. He then tells her to have the Lord Captain join him on the quarterdeck. Bask turns over the bridge to his second and goes to talk to the Lord Captain in the Lord Captain's quarters. Livienne goes along with them but the rest of us get to wait. The Inquisitor condemns our warp breaches, which Marneus points out were entirely incidental. The crew will need to be liquidated, and the senior officers will be debriefed and (implicitly) judged. The ship itself will need to be of service to the Inquisition, which would like to have more resources in the Expanse. Bask's adjunct will be staying on ship as an observer.

The Adjunct, one Drax, receives orders to observe and use his judgement.

Marneus calls for Bors and Jotham to join him, Livienne, and Drax. He explains that we need to pick the key competent and reliable crew members and feed the rest to the Inquisition. Opiter runs neural checksums against standard litanies to make sure his senior men have no parity errors of doctrine or faith. The Inquisition has some concerns about Opiter, though, and there's a mark against him in the file. Drax assures Marneus that he has no desire to interfere, which of course means he's going to be in an interfering bastard all the time. You just have to translate from Inquisitor-speak.

We repeat our usual recruiting method, involving preaching and sandwiches. Marneus' father also agrees to send us a few crew to help us get started. Between that and recruiting, we manage to scrape up a crew. Lots of people acquire things, but I choose to ignore most of that and comment only on Marneus' desire to award medals to the survivors of our adventures.

At the end of the session, we sail back to the station, and find out that the Orks have been back. Vagabond has been totally wrecked, and everyone is very happy to see us.