This session was filled with roleplaying of relations with NPCs, planning how to split the characters up to achieve more in parallel, plotting what to focus on next and moving the players’ assets around to achieve their goals.
Pre-Session Update over Discord
The Court of the Iuwoi-ko offers to repair the damage to the So Much For Subtlety and to suitably redesign the interior. This will save you a lot of credits and will certainly be ostentatiously glamorous and high-end, giving you the same shock-and-awe benefits as the original plans, but it will be in an Aslan style. If you do this then the clan starship architects and workers will make it their top priority, meaning that the work will be completed in 9 days.
- Tyokh counts as a Haven for you now, albeit only specifically the Iuwoi clan downport.
- Assuming Jump-3 average message propagation, you can expect that a portion of your forces will assemble at Sink as instructed with engineers and materials to repair and subvert the Lamprey and secure the Seskehalen some time between 224-1106 and 230-1106. It is currently 206-1106. Sink is a single jump from Tyokh (so about 8-9 days or so from undocking to landing.
- Basemath finishes recruiting agents in Blue as per your current instructions on 210-1106. If you have new instructions for her then let her know. Otherwise I have a timeline for what else she will do under her own initiative.
- You sent a message to Dr Leitz-Meyer (who is suing Dr Nazif) on 166-1106. You might expect to receive a message from her around 255-1106, depending on where she is when she gets it and where you are when it arrives.
208 to 218-1106 Tyokh
An older, Aslan female – approached Deanna as she believed a female would be better able to answer questions about certain matters. “Your ship’s Captain swore to aid my nephew in gaining land on Arunisiir. Tell me, what resources do you have available for such an undertaking?” “What ships do you have to establish a cordon to prevent resupply?” “What force of troops do you possess to bolster whatever forces he can assemble?” “What lift capacity do you have to insert these troops into the area of operations?” “Do you have adequate tonnage of logistics ships to supply those troops during any period of combat?” Deanna gave as detailed answers as she could, but the Aslan professional logistician seemed dubious.
“Perhaps,” she said, “it might help if I were to supply you with a member of my team in order to provide you with some guidance for the duration of any operation.” Ahkahista – Sum-of-all-Hopes – was therefore provided, partly as aide-de-camp and partly to try and avoid another embarrassingly half-baked invasion of Arunisiir by Iuwoi-aligned forces.
These rumours were gleaned during a series of feasts and duels in honour of Hteilotorl’s salvation:
- The Tiykhisto (Reaver’s Claw) (company: Glories Under the Claw) clan are enemies of the Ahroay’if (Gilded Diamond clan, currently engaged in war of Assassins) and they are key members of the aggressive, expansionist faction: aggressive proponents of raiding and seizing the Borderland sector; they are traditionalists and opposed to the commercial faction. They have turned their capital Khtiyrlo into a fortress and are attracting Ihatei settlers, with hundreds of millions expected over to settle it over the next few years. They clearly aim to attack Fantasy, Burgess and Gikarlum.
- The Gilded Diamond clan (the Ahroay’if) and their overlords – The Tlaiowaha – seized the world of Eaohfose from the Reaver’s Claw (Tykhisto) clan a couple of years ago and are using it to monitor Reaver’s Claw raiding fleets. They also launched a trade embargo to cut off the Tykhisto-dominated Glories Under the Claw corporation from the Aslan industrial heartlands to spinward.
The party had accepted the Iuwoi-ko’s offer to restore the So Much For Subtlety’s interior to her former splendour, but in an Aslan-inflected style. Patrick was purring with delight at the renovations. “The designs are unfamiliar, and I am no friend to innovation in matters aesthetic, but I am assured that the designs come with a pedigree that extends back as far as fourteen hundred years, and are therefore largely contemporaneous with the Sindalian Empire, albeit from before the Aslan arrived in the Trojan Reach.”
He went on to say “The workmanship is extraordinary and I heartily recommend inspecting the seals on the aft dining area airlock on the molecular level: they are quite exquisitely realised.”
The party also upgraded the beam laser triple turret to possess the Accurate and High Yield upgrades, at a rate heavily subsidised by the Iuwoi shipyards.
227-1106 Sink
Leaving Tyokh on 219-1106, the party next went to Sink. There, they found an Iuwoi Clan Transport at the swampy field that passes for Sink Starport, and the treasonous Koaleia’s estate back under Iuwoi clan ownership. Koaleia himself had fled shortly after the departure of the party for Tyokh.
The party defrosted many of the ship’s crew and marines from the Lamprey, to leave them on Sink to find their own ways home. One – Jon Cardrick, a gunner and marine – approached the party:
“Begging your pardon, sirs, but I was right impressed by the way you took us down a peg after we jumped you, and I reckon you showed you’re proper honest and all, what with the waking us up again after sleeping us, which I didn’t think was your plan if you’ll forgive my honesty and all. And I hear as it’s you lot as took on Ferrik Redthane, and all, which says you ain’t just lucky, important as a lucky ship is at that. So I wondered if you might be in the hiring mood?”
“I ain’t sure as I would heartily recommend many of them, but the Osman brothers – they’re marines, like – are smart and bloodthirsty but they do tend to be on the straight, which is more than I can say for that captain, being as he owes us two months pay and all.”
On 228-1106 the party moved to the location on an in-system planetoid where they had left the Lamprey and the Seskehalen. There, they found most of their fleet assembled, with the salvage capabilities of the Mercifuge already being used to jury-rig repairs to the Lamprey while other engineers and mechanics worked on removing the security devices from throughout the Seskehalen. Only the Phlebotomist and the Lady Luck had been left behind: the Grey Area, Mercifuge and Shinkiro were all present, and the hastily-repaired Ship’s Troops module had been mounted in the Mercifuge to allow around fifty crew members to be squeezed into the various ships.
So it was with a mismatched but impressive fleet of six ships that the party left Sink for Tech-World via Paal on 233-1106.
249-1106 – Tech-World
On Tech-World, the party held a council-of-war to decide how to approach aiding the Revolution on Acrid. They were informed that Vi Lon and Tug Wilson had, in the eight months since the party were left them on Drinax, recruited a platoon of troops and had the skeleton of two more sections: around fifty Vespexers with strong combat skills (but very poor health).
This was felt to be insufficient to the task at hand, and the party decided to purchase three platoons of Chenghiz Robotics’ military droids from a very alien Tech-World droid who sold other droids. The combined forces that resulted amounted to around 160 soldiers, robotic and human: this, they felt, was sufficient for what they so far knew of so far in Acrid, but a number of questions remained: how to deal with the three System Defence Boats posted in Acrid by PRQ? How to transport 160 soldiers and deploy them on Acrid? And how to ensure that they had the supplies to keep fighting?
In the end, the Black Ops crew – Dr Parsifal, Cauldron, Lars Berg and the psionicist Anastasia – were tasked with assembling a force to support and lead the Acrid revolution, and they tasked their spy-mistress Basemath Mondrane (who had arrived on Sink three days after the party left and had been chasing them since then) with infiltrating Acrid and preparing a report for them, and with finding out the maintenance schedules for the system defence boats.
In the meantime, the Black Ops crew would take the Shinkiro to Blue. There, they would procure weaponry from the TL12 mercenary supply company at Bulhai Freeport while also contacting the two agents that Basemath had recruited and investigating why Blue was now so anti-Drinaxian, and where the money to fund their fleet expansion was coming from.
To fund their own activities, the Travellers sold the Seskehalen Far Trader at a 50% discount to a factor who would assume the risk of carrying out the prize court process to claim her since the party had provided footage of her unprovoked attack (alongside the Lamprey) upon the So Much For Subtlety.
This provided an injection of capital to pay the shares of Krrsh and Sharyl and to fund the party’s own increasingly expensive activities (they now pay over a million credits every month for crews, troops, maintenance and other employees). To deal with the remaining gaps in the crews in their fleet crewing, the Travellers also bought several Crewmate droids, and are considering buying a set of ship-board marine droids to supplement their Vespexers in the lethal business of boarding targets.
To begin to solve the health problems of the Vespexers, mainly caused by actinide-laced dust on the ravaged planet, the party begun to price providing a medical centre complete with robot medic and TL-13 Autodoc to each Vespexer tribe.
Patrick also chipped into the planning process:
“One does not wish to be seen to talk out of turn, sir, but if I may offer an observation? I cannot help but cast my mind back to the ship which so happily contributed to your early successes in the privateering line: the Steelgrinder. Whilst we were docked with her I took the unconscionable liberty – forgive me for exceeding my responsibilities here, sir – of noting her itinerary over her recent journeys. No more than a brief skim over the preceding decade or two, sir: it lasted less than a second before I remembered my place.”
“Well, sir, I cannot help but recall that the Steelgrinder was a regular habitué of Acrid, having made numerous deliveries between there and the famously agricultural world of Inurin, sir.”
“I am aware that this is a trifling detail, sir, and I beg your indulgence for mentioning it, but I believe I recall that the Steelgrinder was a Vulture-class ship, sir.”
One rumour emerged in the only sophont-frequented bar on Tech-World: the Deepnight Corporation were performing surveys along the Voidsedge Cluster. Their craft, the Deepnight Amundsen, was reported lost 16 weeks ago while operating in Ergo, and a detailed surface scan by her sister ship, the Deepnight Vespucci, has failed to find where she went down. She’s a 400 ton scout heavy corvette so Deepnight won’t give up easily, even despite the dangers of the Ergo wilds, where pirates, corsairs and reaver-bands operate, often with heavy weapons either smuggled-in or recovered from the ruins.
All in all a very busy, information-dense, four hour session of Traveller…
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