The Size of Money

 

 

In one of our ancient D&D sessions, it actually became relevant exactly what size were the coins the characters were carrying. Thanks to the internet, and especially to the miraculous Wolfram Alpha, I can now give a categorical answer to that age-old question.

The assumed weight of coin in AD&D2e is 50 to the pound, which means that any coin, regardless of its metal, weighs 9.07 grams. With that information, and knowing the density of the three primary metals for coinage (gold, silver, and copper), Wolfram Alpha gives us the respective diameters for cylinders 2mm high (or thick, if you prefer) of 17.3279mm, 23.421mm, and 25.419mm respectively.

So, there you are. That's how big your coins are.

The Archipelago: Episode the First

The party are passengers/supercargo on a small trading vessel, working their passage towards Comana City, land of opportunity. The ship's cargo at present consists mostly of bolts of silk and other textiles, and ingots of copper and bronze currently being used as ballast.

A black squall and storm lasting several days has blown out all the sails, broken away the mainmast and foremast, and eventually driven the ship before it before driving it across a reef to beach in a sheltered cove on a small uncharted island.

The island, once the storm passes and the sun reappears, proves to be volcanic. The volcano is active: there is smoke issuing from its caldera, and tremors of varying intensity occur several times a day.

The cove in which the ship is beached is fairly sheltered, with a coral sand beach and bushy trees coming down almost to the water's edge. Further inland is taller standing forest and bamboo, and vegetation extends right up almost to the mouth of the volcano.

The island is inhabited: drums are heard from time to time, though how far away is impossible to say with any certainty. The natives have not allowed themselves to be seen.

The ship is too damaged to be safely seaworthy, needing masts and yards, a new rudder, and a great gash in the timbers below from scraping across the reef will need to be mended before they can get under way again.

Sea water gushing in through the rent in the ship's bottom has spoiled much of the silk. How much of the cargo can be saved is a question for later.

The captain and mate disappeared during the squall, overboard presumably. The most senior crew member remaining is the carpenter, IOANNES.

One of the crew, CABASILAS, says that she saw a great black tentacle reach out of the sea and pluck them off the deck, but she is a notorious drunkard and her stories are generally taken with a grain of salt.

Since the landing, four members of the crew have died or disappeared. One was so badly injured during the storm that he died shortly after landing. Two went into the jungle, hunting for fresh meat, and were never seen again. Their trail disappears a little inside the tree-line. And one, spear-fishing in the cove, stumbled into a nest of falorials and died before she could be rescued.

The island is clearly not without its perils.

Apart from the carpenter and the party, there are only eight other crewmen remaining:

♂ ALKRITAS
STR 13, DEX 14, CON 16, INT 12, WIS 11, CHA 10;
Male ; Sailor, 5 HP; 6′2″, 181#, 25 years old
Ultra-civilized, Friendly

♀ BALSAMON
STR 13, DEX 11, CON 14, INT 9, WIS 8, CHA 14;
Female ; Sailor, 5 HP; 5′2″, 106#, 32 years old
Pessimistic, Grudge-holding

♀ CABASILAS
STR 16, DEX 13, CON 12, INT 16, WIS 10, CHA 11;
Female ; Sailor, 5 HP; 5′7″, 107#, 37 years old
Drunkard, Fabulist

♂ DIOGENES
STR 14, DEX 13, CON 12, INT 15, WIS 16, CHA 17;
Male ; Sailor, 5 HP; 5′9″, 180#, 20 years old
Capricious, Careless

♂ EROTICUS
STR 11, DEX 12, CON 14, INT 7, WIS 8, CHA 15;
Male ; Sailor, 5 HP; 6′3″, 168#, 23 years old
Pessimistic, Naive

♂ FERRO
STR 15, DEX 11, CON 13, INT 8, WIS 17, CHA 11;
Male ; Sailor, 5 HP; 6′1″, 172#, 16 years old
Suspicious, Sober

♀ GORGO
STR 12, DEX 12, CON 11, INT 15, WIS 15, CHA 9;
Female ; Sailor, 5 HP; 5′11″, 138#, 30 years old
Friendly, Sober

♀ HEGEL
STR 15, DEX 14, CON 13, INT 12, WIS 14, CHA 12;
Female ; Sailor, 5 HP; 6′4″, 125#, 19 years old
Curious, Sober

They are all reasonably skilled seafarers, but none of them have more than rudimentary navigational abilities. They do not know where they are. IOANNES has a little more navigation skill than they do, and he can probably make something of the captain's charts, given time and good guesswork.

Being basically useless for any of the skilled tasks of ship repair, the party are given the task of fetching timber.

The reef has been explored in the ship's jolly-boat, and a gap wide enough for the ship to pass through has been found and buoyed with old barrels. Once the ship is seaworthy again, they can get out to sea.

Kidnapped!

The crew have been stranded for a full week, with repairs having proceeded reasonably smoothly and now are almost complete, when the carpenter IOANNES disappears in the night. He suffers from night terrors, so when he called out in fright nobody much took any notice.

There is little sign of any struggle, but a GOOD perception roll reveals a small tufted blowgun dart lodged in the carpenter's sea-chest, and another ground into the sand near his bedding.

A successful tracking attempt reveals small humanoid footprints, only five or six inches long, like those of children. There would appear to have been perhaps six or eight individuals, and the trail leading off into the bush indicates that several of them were carrying a reasonably heavy load.

The trail leads through the jungle and up into the foothills of the volcano, to an ancient overgrown structure built into the hillside. There is a small clearing in front. Many of the surrounding trees are swathed in cobwebs, some of which are as thick and strong as fishing line.

The kidnappers are there, crouched in a semicircle in front of the entrance. They are tiny naked dark-skinned humanoids, only about 3' tall, but squat. They are swaying and chanting. When the party arrived, they scattered into the forest and disappeared.

IOANNES has been taken inside by the creature that lairs there. He has been bound in a silk cocoon, but has not yet been hoisted up into the web larder that comprises all of the first chamber. It is thoroughly choked with webs, in which are hanging the remains of many corpses of animals and humans. Almost all of the humans or of the same race as the kidnappers, but not all. They have all been drained of their innards.

The creature is a huge maggot-like centipede thing, 25' long, which can rear up to about 15' high and still move on its last few sets of legs. It can shoot webs from spinnerets along its belly, and it has a paralytic bite. An ovipositor at its rear can inject eggs into a victim; they will take about a week to hatch, whereupon the babies will suck all the remaining juices from their host. The babies partake of the nature of both the maggotipede and their host, and none are exactly identical.

If the party enter in force, the creature will retreat initially, in order to assess the situation. It can move through the webs unimpeded, but they will create a significant impediment to movement for anything else.

If set alight, the webs will burn sluggishly, and give off a choking, foul-smelling smoke. They are not particularly flammable.

Resolution:

The team, with the aid of the remaining crew, managed to kill the maggotipede and rescue Ioannes.

Three more of the crew died: one (Diogenes) was bitten and poisoned by a spider-like web dweller, one of the offspring of the maggotipede. There are hundreds of these little bastards scurrying about in the webs that choke the dungeon's rooms and passages.

Two more were eaten whole by the maggotipede in the final battle. 

Ioannes, when examined out in the daylight, proved to have a suspicious abdominal wound, which was assumed to have been created by the creature's ovipositor. Which it was. A frankly stupendous piece of surgery by [Qarl's character], assisted by [Andrew's character] rid him of the egg-sac and saved his life.

Note: I will, hopefully, eventually learn the actual names of the PCs. 

---

Potential Interesting Things

The whole complex was not examined, but the party did note a couple of things on their way in and out:

 1) A crystal ball on a sculpted pearlescent metal stand, the whole standing on a low (8") dais in the middle of a moderate-sized chamber. One of the sailors, Alkritas, was entranced by it, but they snapped him out of it.

 2) A group of three obviously magical pictures or portals or something, in the room in which they fought the Boss Monster. 

Standing next to them, it was noted that the air was perceptibly colder. 

 

 

The team have decided, at this time, not to mess about with any of the potential loot, owing to the presence of the viciously poisonous little web-critters, of which there are hundreds, and also the natives of the island, whose god they had just killed.

The current plan is to get the ship seaworthy just as soon as possible,  and to get afloat.

Dragonslayers Not Aloft For The Moment

 

Made it back to Fnordonia with our Sack Of Itchiness.

Certain members of the party, who shall remain nameless, fastened on to Orson and Fnord like ravenous bloodsucking stirges, sucking out of them as much as they possibly could in the way of resources, justifying themselves by saying "they should be pleased we're undertaking this task, so it's the very least they could do".

Jaipoor, the flying carpet, has definitively transferred her loyalties to Remy. Sir Douglas gave them a nice set of silver-backed carpet brushing and grooming tools as an engagement present.

They have, with the aid of Orson and Trûk (Fnord's adoptive copper dragon baby, now thoroughly grown up), located the site of the dastardly red dragon's lair. Now all that remains is to scout out its layout, get in there with the magical Sneezing and Choking powder, and chop it to bits. Easy-peasy.

Postscript:

The plan worked. The dragon was ensneezled and slain. Hoorah for the good guys! 

Dragonslayers Aloft

 

After a relaxing and quiet night at a respectable boarding establishment in Westport (except for Remy, who naturally sought out the lowest of low dives to befoul himself) our heroes began the trek up the road to Fnordonia. A full day's hard walking, uphill all the way and in the company of a variety of merchants and tinkers, took them to the gates.

Sir Douglas' sturdily upright demeanour and obvious honesty and sincerity saw them into an audience with the man himself, Sir Fnord the Pretty Neat. 

They put forward their quest, and asked for advice on how one goes about assassinating a very large, very old, very bad tempered, very dangerous dragon. Fnord's memory being not of the best, he called on his friend Orson, a wizard of great power (and paranoia), to use his magic for a Sending to Fnord's old friend Anya, who actually commanded the quest to kill their own dragon some hundreds of years ago. 

She passed on the recipe and method for creating a Super-Duper Dust of Sneezing and Choking, which is what she had used back in the day. 

Orson had, or could easily source, all the ingredients but one: a type of fungus or lichen that grows only on the rocks of the Swefelmunt, down in the Curséd Land.  So, it's a simple matter of getting down there and collecting some.

Fortunately, Daffyd's Boy's Big Book of Magical Plants and Stuff has useful illustrations and descriptions, so hoorah! 

Since it's quite a long way, and time is a factor in this quest, Sir Fnord the Ridiculously Generous went into his lumber room and presented the team with the loan of a talking flying carpet, by the name of Jaipoor. She was not in the best of tempers, having been rolled up under the bed for some considerable time, but the smooth-talking Remy soon chatted her up, and the very next dawn, off they all flew, considerably faster than they'd managed to travel either on horseback or by boat.

Jaipoor seems to have developed an unnaturally, one might almost say inappropriately close relationship with Remy. Poor thing. 

Five hours saw them all the way from Fnordonia to the trade town of Rowan, where they overnighted. The next day, another five hours (about Jaipoor's limit before needing to rest), with a brief interruption by a roc who was convinced to seek elsewhere for a meal, took them to the banks of a river, just 40 or 50 miles from their destination.  

The next day should see them there.

Oh, did I mention that the Swefelmunt hosts one of the openings on this plane to the Pits of Hell?  Or that large swathes of the Curséd Land glows with poisonous radiation?

I'm sure it will be fine. 

Next session:

 The team flew south to the Swefelmunt — easily distinguished by virtue of being much taller than any of the other mountains in the range. There they made use of Roisin's Arrow of Location (that she'd previously thought was a lame and useless item) to determine a course to the nearest patch of the lichen they wanted.

They followed the course, flying low, until they spied the luminescence of the lichen in a jumble of rocks at the end of a small, vaguely rectangular pool of water. Considering the rarity of standing water in the Curséd Land, Sir Douglas thought it highly likely that it would be a preferred ambush spot for the local predators. So rather than landing nearby and walking around the pool, they hovered the carpet over the rocks and just stepped off on to them.

Which turned out to be a good choice, since it meant the numerous attacking reptilioids had to travel further to get at them, and the burrowing ones were hampered somewhat by the rocks. 

Added to the perils of hungry monsters, it turned out that handling the lichen, even with thick gloves on, led to terrific itching all over, swollen, watery eyes, and massive drooling of the sinuses. Great misery ensued.

They flew the carpet back north to the riverbank they'd camped on before, and attempted (with only limited success) to wash away the irritating spores. Daffyd, by virtue of his Boy's Big Book of Magical Plants and Stuff, discovered that aloe would be a partial antidote, and made himself agreeable to the rest of the party by finding some to relieve their sufferings.

The lichen was wrapped up as hermetically as possible and stored away in Daffyd's Bag of Holding,  and the team flew off, backtracking along their old route back north towards Fnordonia and Orson.

They've made it as far as Rowan so far. 

Religion in the City and Empire of Comana (and thereabouts)

 Religion in Comana is both monotheistic and exclusive, worshipping a publicly nameless god, referred to by a variety of nomme de culte, such as the One God, the Many in One, the Supreme, the Divine Greatest, the Greatest and Best, and many more.

Though perceived as a singular being, the god is worshipped in many aspects, depending on the needs of its many worshippers. Prayers may be addressed to the god's universal being, or to one of its aspect — as a god of storms for example, or a god of the sea, or the god of the harvest. Also, a hierarchy of celestial creatures are deemed to be deputized by The One to attend to minor matters on its behalf. Small local shrines to, say, a river or pond, will be dedicated to the Great God, but it is fully understood by the local congregation that there is some divine intermediary handling the small stuff, and passing on any major issues to the All-in-One upstairs.

The Emperor is supreme in both the secular and religious realms, and the Cult of the One is the only official religion of the Empire.

Orthodoxy is strictly maintained, and the official church maintains an inquisitorial arm responsible for making sure that the populace toe the official line. Punishments for persistent heterodoxy can be both severe and gruesome, though initial infractions will normally be dealt with with an escalating scale of fines, through a range of corporal punishments, ultimately resulting in death by a variety of inventive and nasty methods.

Other gods are not actually denied, nor is their worship within the empire actually forbidden, but there are substantial and onerous legal burdens placed on those who wish to worship their foreign gods openly. Most immigrant or indigenous people will eventually convert their religion simply because of the heavy legal and financial obligations placed on them by remaining with their own gods.

The church is rigidly hierarchical, and even the lowest ordained priest has absolute authority over the laity in spiritual matters, and great authority even in secular affairs. Technically, even the greatest secular lords cannot punish even the most minor priest for any infraction. However, the intermiscibility of the secular and religious aristocracy means that if a priest offends a lord, that lord almost certainly has family in the church that can make that priest's life an absolute misery. And even if family connections aren't brought into play, a complaint to the church authorities against a priest by a secular lord will, if nothing else, spark a tedious and inconvenient, and potentially dangerous, church investigation. And of course it can work the other way too: a priest who makes an unfavourable report to the inquisition can cause real trouble for a lord. There is, therefore, an uneasy detente.

The Comanate Empire - Political Geography

 

Here we have the political situation as regards the Comanate Empire and its immediate vicinity.

The bright pink is the area that is directly controlled by Comana, the light pink areas are tributary to it.

Comana's greatest rival is the kingdom of Attarisyas, shown in green. The light green areas are tributary to Attarisyas.

To the north, the blue islands of Shutarna, Shinukhtu, and Shaushka pose no particular threat to either of their larger neighbours, though they are each powerful enough to maintain their independence.

To the east, the mottled island chain of Urukhtu is an unstable mish-mash of tribes, both human and not, in a more or less constant state of conflict and constantly shifting alliances. It has, in the past, been the object of military expeditions from both Attarisyas and Comana, but with little to show for them. 

The dark brown areas are politically unimportant, being for the most part tiny tribal territories and petty kingdoms. 

To north and south of the map above are

    ....the lands of the ice and snow
    From the midnight sun where the hot springs flow
    The hammer of the gods
    Will drive our ships to new lands
    To fight the horde, sing and cry
    Valhalla, I am coming 

Ahem. Quick Led Zeppelin discursion there.

Anyway, both north and south (off the map as shown) are the homes of fierce, warlike barbarians, sea-raiders who fight among themselves and prey on the sea-lanes and coastlines of the civilised lands. They also frequently appear as mercenaries in the armies of all the major powers in the area. They are more of a nuisance than a threat to the empire and its neighbours, mainly because of their disunity.... however, if they could ever combine under a suitably charismatic leader, they could become a real problem. 

The Archipelago — First Glimmerings

 

The Great Archipelago, dominated by the Comanate Empire, lies pretty much directly opposite our customary stomping grounds.

Each of those hexes is about 1,000 miles wide.

This is a very old map I drew of the Archipelago many, many years ago. It is sadly faded and foxed, but it still serves to show the main islands of the various island chains.  There are also thousands of tiny uncharted islands, not shown at this scale.

 

 

 

 

The city of Comana lies directly in the tropical zone; the climate is similar to that of the Greek islands in the Aegean. Here are a few "flavour" images — the cultural vibe is basically pre-Ottoman Byzantine. 

 

Dragon Slayers: Sailing South

 

Sailing south to Fnordonia for some dragon-slaying advice. Dinosaurs spotted in the air and on the shore. Slight trouble with pirates on the way: they came off much, much the worst and we marooned the survivors on the Elvish Shore. I'm sure they'll be fine.

Dragon Slayers: The Road to Fnordonia

 

Dragon Slayers

The Progress of the Dragon Slayers of Thursday Night

 

One hex = 25 miles side to side

(About a day's travel on foot in easy terrain)

Updated 2025-05-29 

21: Is It Getting Hot In Here?

 Lee decided to set up some surveillance cameras to keep an eye on the exterior of the ship while they were in dock, which paid off quite quickly. That very night, while he was on duty, he noticed something on one of the monitors, though he couldn't be sure what it was.

He failed his Security Systems roll, but not by much. So he had a functional video feed, it's just that the cameras weren't really pointed anywhere very useful.

He hit the silent alarm to wake everybody, and dashed out the side airlock opposite to where he thought he'd seen the bogey. He moved stealthily down the ladders, so stealthily that the intruder, fossicking about around one of the ship's landing struts didn't even know he was there until Lee challenged it.

It immediately spun round and started shooting blindly in Lee's general direction (it still hadn't seen him), and Lee tossed a flash-bang over in its general direction (can't throw for toffee).

Regrettably, Enkain'os, who had slipped sneakily down the ladder on the opposite side, wasn't expecting the flash-bang at all and was momentarily dazzled when it went off. The intruder took to its heels, sprinting across the tarmac. Enkain'os rapidly recovered and went after it, and Lee attempted to slow it down by winging it with his plasma rifle.

He certainly did wing it. In fact, he blew one of its arms right off, and it went down like a sack of spuds.

Enkain'os dragged the corpse (and its arm) back to the ship for examination. It was a Perseid in some sort of chameleon suit. They found a small holster (empty), a hip pouch (empty), a belt pouch containing a set of micro-tools, and — uh-oh — a police ID blazer.

Janey examined the landing strut where the cop had been working and found a cunningly disguised module of some sort, but could not determine what it was. Lee and she between them managed to detach it without blowing anything up, but they couldn't get it open to see what it did.

Enkain'os set about dismembering the corpse and shoved it into a plastic bag in the refuse disposal system, to be automatically dumped next time they were in space.

Lee went out on to the tarmac to find the gun that must surely be out there. On the way over to where the cop had dropped he noticed a pair of spaceport cops loitering about in a doorway, so he went into "fly casual" mode and attempted to pick up the little pistol without looking like he was picking up a little pistol. He failed utterly. Twice. So it was probably a good thing that the mall cops were just wasting time  on their shift and taking not a blind bit of notice of him.

Enkain'os took the gun, badge and Mysterious Module off to find Dagog (the mobster) to see if he could take care of them. Dagog was clearly not pleased to be given a bloody police ID and gun, but kindly told Enkain'os not to worry, he'd make sure that none of them went to prison.

This, Enkain'os naturally assumed, meant that he'd be killed on his way back to the ship and that there would shortly be a kill team on its way to take care of everybody else back there. He made a not-very-cryptic call to Lee to alert him to the situation, and began to make his way back to the ship, with every nerve a-tingle for the assassins he just knew would be there any minute.

Sure enough, as he passed through a section of the promenade strangely bereft of any traffic, he became aware of a pair of shadows closing in on him. He decided to try to take them one at a time by virtue of his superior stealthiness....

Superior to one of them, at any rate. One of the hit-men was depressingly amateurish, and Enkain'os encouraged him to stab himself in the throat with his own vibro-knife. regrettably, the other was considerably more efficient, and managed to creep up behind him while he was dealing with the dummy. A brief struggle ensued, in which the Good Guy triumphed; he left the Bad Guy unconscious and hot-footed it back to the ship, which was just warming up for take-off.

As he crossed the tarmac, he saw a suspiciously L'regh-heavy "maintenance" crew emerge from one of the administration buildings and head right towards our ship — he leaped on board, got everything buttoned down, and they took off, leaving the kill team impotently on the ground, since they hadn't brought anything heavy enough to take down a ship in flight.

As they were achieving orbital altitudes, Our Heroes received a message from the departure tower saying that there was a problem with their flight plan, and they were required to return to their docking bay... Lee exerted his Fast Talk skills.... "Sorry you're breaking up, message not understood, we're going through a tunnel..."

And they took off for one of the asteroid belts, where Janey had pinpointed a Super-Secret Dark Web Refuelling Depot...

No she hadn't. She fumbled her roll completely. She'd actually pinpointed a Super-Secret Dark Web Military Research Station. Oops.

They had about a week in transit to consider that maybe they wouldn't want to be going back to Talat Prime any time soon. They also had time for Janey to discover the Talat Customs techs' little sleight-of-hand with their navigation and jump control modules, but there wasn't anything much she could do about that now.

Fortunately, Patience's sensors skills were substantially better than Janey's dark-web research skills, and she figured out that the featureless asteroid they were heading for was, whatever it was, not a covert refuelling depot. She exerted her magnificent piloting skills to make it look like they were just casually flying past and had no interest at all in that completely featureless asteroid... and success! They were not blown out of the sky.

They decided to give up the idea of trying to refuel on the down-low, and just to find a regular old Esso station or something. Which they did, and spent all their local cash on enough fuel to make one jump.

Lee got out his Planetary Sciences For Dummies and tried to figure out which of the systems within range might be most likely to have one or more nice fat juicy gas giants to feed from, and narrowed it down to three out of the dozen or so systems in their extremely basic Perseid navigation database that were on their heading. They decided that they might as well squeeze every last light year out of this, possibly their last jump, and set a course for the last of the three likely potentials.

Thankfully, the system they chose bore fruit, and they settled down to skimming gas into the ship's refineries.

Not dead yet.

Their next jump should take them into the Spinward Territories, and from there it's not too far back to Terran space.

20: Minimalist Precis

I have not been keeping up this journal, entirely due to laziness. Therefore this entry is just a very basic precis outlining the barest bones of events.

• The crew decided to try to jump their way back to Terran space, preferably avoiding any Perseid Imperial entanglements. They can carry enough fuel for four (?) jumps, and plan to refuel at handy gas giants. The navigation database they've been gifted shows the coordinates of star systems along their route, but not the composition of those systems, so each jump is a bit of a gamble when it comes to refueling. If they don't find a refueling stop after two jumps, they're going to use their third jump to hop to a known inhabited system for refueling, leaving them with fuel for just one more jump.
• Things went okay briefly, but then a series of effectively useless systems meant that they had to take the emergency Perseid-engagement option.
• They jumped successfully to TALAT, a Perseid manufacturing colony fairly near to the imperial border.
• Unlicensed aliens are not very welcome, and allowances are not made for them. There is no legal free refueling available in this system, so they're going to have to find a way to come up with some local money.

Talat

There is one human(oid) habitable planet in the Talat system, very heavily industrialized. There are a multitude of sealed environments on other planets, moons, and asteroids, as well as a fair number of orbital installations, all servicing the central industrial core at Talat Prime.

There is an alert and active Imperial Customs and Police presence in the system. There is also a thriving criminal underworld and black market.

The predominant species are Perseids, but there are also a lot of non-Perseid species present as well, mainly from the CCR, with whom the Perseid Empire maintains fairly friendly relations. 

• Our ship was pinged almost immediately on arrival, and on claiming the status of Distressed Mariners, a long, tedious, and intrusive immigration procedure ensued. Both the ship and crew were subject to intensive and detailed scans and tests. The Perseid techs were very very interested in the shiny and seamless navigation and jump controllers gifted the ship by the Dreary Remorse, but were unable to find any way to look inside. So they just took them out (without even asking) and replaced them with standard Perseid modules, jury-rigged to interface with the Terran systems of the ship.
• Once they were allowed to land on the surface, and were given temporary licences as Alien Visitors (spaceport only), Esekain'os made contact with a fairly low-level L'regh criminal family, in the person of a supposed street-food vendor named DAGOG.
• Esekain'os organised doing a job for the Family: delivery of a discreet cargo to one of the asteroid belt factories, accompanied by Dagog's two "sons" (?), MAGOG and AGOG. A successful conclusion will earn the team 10,000 credits (they need 40,000 to refuel fully, plus docking fees).

The L'REGH (of which Eskain'os is one) are humanoid-insectoids, with chitinous skin, compound eyes, and creepy mouth-parts.

• The cargo arrived at the ship, in the form of a number of nondescript crates, along with Agog and Magog.
• The outgoing Customs inspection went suspiciously smoothly. Also, a potential boarding by a patrol ship on the outbound journey was unexpectedly aborted after Agog (or Magog) spoke with them. It appears that Dagog and his family might have more clout than first appeared.
• The ship arrived at its destination and landed without problems, but the unloading party (naturally) turned out to be hijackers. They were fought off with heavy losses, but the cargo bay systems, and all the un-hardened spacesuits therein (Our Heroes) were briefly knocked out by an EMP grenade. Also, Eskain'os had an arm blown off.
• New unloading arrangements were made, and carried out, by Agog and Magog.
• The "discreet cargo" turned out to be small stasis pods, child-sized. Hmmmm.
• Turns out that the ship's AutoDoc isn't programmed for L'regh physiology.
• They made it back to Talat Prime, and got their 10,000 cr. bounty. Also, the Family arranged to have a new arm put on Eskain'os as a courtesy.
• The ship has been moved to a bay in a part of the spaceport controlled by the Family, which makes life a lot cheaper for our gallant Crew.

19: The Dreary Burden

 Apologies for my great Slackness at keeping this journal up to date — I am but a worm.

Out of nowhere, all the ship's instruments showed massive interference, and all the speakers made an ear-splitting Dolby-THX VROOOOOOOAAAAAAAAOWWWWWWW noise as a huge thing like an elongated blob of mercury suddenly appeared floating beside them.

Almost at the same time, a floating vaguely humanoid mercury figure like a silver Oscar appeared on the bridge in a flash of ultra-violet light that left Our Heroes blinking with arc-flash and instantly sun-burned on all their exposed skin.

"Greetings!" it said. "You are in possession of artefacts from this embargoed cemetary planet. They may not be removed without authorization. I will now return them."

Down in the cargo bay, unaware of all this, Janey was quite startled to see a series of mirror-globes appear around all of the bits and pieces from the planet that she'd used to bodge together her jump-controller, and then disappear, leaving perfectly spherical holes in her benches and things. Various of the fittings, having been cut into pieces, fell to the decking and scattered bits and pieces all over the show.

On the bridge, the entity said "I see from your records that you were unaware of the status of this planet, and that your theft was from no malicious intent, so I will therefore not obliterate you at this time. I will update my warning beacons to accommodate your primitive sensors in future. Have a nice day."

There was a brief period of chaotic babbling as multiple people tried to get information out of this entity before it disappeared. They did get some, and some more tangible benefits as well:

• It calls itself The Dreary Voluntary Burden of Remorse
• It was, indirectly, responsible for the destruction of the planetary society below by prematurely accelerating their technological development before they had outgrown their tribal competitiveness and aggression, and had thus arranged and kept the remains as a sort of museum, reminder, and cautionary memorial.
• It agreed, having investigated the condition of the ship's navigation and jump systems, to fix their damage. It replaced the ruined modules with a pair of amazingly compact sealed units that Janey is panting to get a look at the guts of. Alas, there is no way in that she can find.

The Dreary Burden disappeared in a similar actinic flash as it arrived in, and almost immediately the ship's sensors started picking up signals indicating that they were in orbit of a guarded memorial planet and that access was restricted.

On investigation, they've found that the ship's jump and navigation systems are as good as new. No better than they originally were, but certainly no worse, and their navigation database has been updated with basic, fairly low-resolution maps of their current whereabouts. They are in the spinward reaches of the Perseid Empire.

18: Delusion, Illusion

 As dusk drew in, the away team made their way back to the ship and battened down the hatches for the night. They decided that since they'd got their intrusion sensor packs blown up, they'd rely on old-fashioned sentries for their security. Lee took the first watch, keeping guard from the bridge.

When he turned off the bridge lights so as to be able to see out the windows into the dark, and once his eyes had adjusted somewhat, he began to make out what looked like faintly luminescent vaporous sprites moving around outside, hundreds of them.

Ah, fumbles. I just love 'em.

He immediately leaped to the conclusion that they were some kind of alien surveillance devices, and that an attack was imminent. He hit the alarm and got everyone back... fortunately no one had had time to actually get to sleep.

Since Lee was the only one on the team with military experience (Enkai'nos doesn't count, for he is but a simple supercargo, and not any kind of secret ultra-ninja assassin-spy or anything) the team took him at his word, and they decided to vacate the locality and find some high ground from which they'd have a decent view of the surrounding countryside. This was done without any problems.

Patience settled the ship down on top of a flat-topped hill, and Lee (now hopped up on a stimulant to keep him awake) and Enkai'nos went out to do a sweep of the immediate area.

Lee continued his run of luck with the dice by utterly failing to spot one of the centipede-creatures they'd seen earlier in town, this one roughly the mass of a centipede-shaped cow, barreling at him from the shelter of a tumbled pile of rocks and thorn bushes. Fortunately, Enkai'nos was a bit more alert, and shot at it with his looted alien ray-gun....

....which fizzled out after about ten or twelve metres. Clearly a very short-range weapon design.

Lee finally woke up to the danger, and shot at the creature with his trusty plasma rifle when it was almost upon them. The shot blew the thing's head apart in a shower of boiling goo, but a goodly portion of the beam was also reflected almost straight back at him, whizzing past his left shoulder.

Fortunately, Enkai'nos was standing to his right, or else there may well have been tears before bedtime.

Fascinated, Enkai'nos took a sample of the creature's iridescent carapace for later analysis. As he was working with the corpse, he observed a faintly luminescent vaporous sprite-like phenomenon gathering above it. Hmmm.

Back on the ship, they too had failed to spot the thing on sensors until it was opened up, whereupon it showed up on infrared like a flare.

The idea of having large, effectively invisible predators roaming about the place filled nobody with joy. They buttoned up the ship to make sure nothing could get on board, and settled down for some rest. Even Lee eventually collapsed into sleep once his stim had worn off.

Next morning arrived uneventfully, and they decided they needed a larger city. Referring to the cursory survey they'd done of the planet from orbit, they noted an unobliterated urban conglomerate of reasonable size within easy reach, no more than a couple of hundred kilometres away, so they hopped over there.

As they approached at low altitude, they noted a collection of several hundred areas on the outskirts of the city, each perfectly square, each with a slightly different texture and albedo. Intrigued, they descended to within visual range and found something startling.

One area consisted of perfectly regular piles of bones, each pile constructed of a single bone type. A pile of skulls, a pile of pelvises, a pile of femurs, and so on. A quick volumetric calculation of the skull pile indicated that there must have been several million of them in there.

Other areas were each composed of a single class of object. One that attracted their attention was an array of several hundred thousand vehicles, personal transportation modules probably, roughly analogous to an air-raft, though much more primitive. They were briefly attracted to what appeared to be a flying saucer, in the hope that it might yield components they could use to jury-rig a working jump controller, but on examination it quickly proved to be nothing more than a primitive internal combustion powered hovercraft, or at best a highly inefficient helicopter.

There were collections of various sorts of household appliances, children's toys, furniture, sculpture, and badly decayed piles of perishable substances — cloth and paper and the like.

Though a bit creeped out by the idea of an OCD obliterator taking the effort of arranging all their victims' stuff, they put the piles behind them and went in over the city proper. It was completely empty of anything but buildings, dust, and the occasional hardy thorn.

The buildings got generally taller towards the centre of the urbanization, and in several areas they detected signatures above the ambient radioactivity that indicated some sort of low-level nuclear activity. They landed the ship on a large open paved area beside one of the indicated buildings, suited up, and made their way inside. The doors were unlocked.

They used their suits' built-in rad counters to trace the signal, and made their way down underground. Though a bit of a labyrinth down there, it didn't take them too long to find the reactor and control room, and found that the reactor had been put into a more or less safe standby mode, just barely ticking over. Of who had done it there was no evidence at all.

Further investigation revealed a maintenance workshop, which still held some potentially useful stuff: circuit board blanks, boxes of incredibly basic switch chips, primitive photolithography and etching equipment, and a bunch of other bits and pieces that Janey thought could be used to build some sort of JayCars "My First Jump Controller" kludge. So they nicked the lot.

They spent the rest of the day humping the loot back to the ship's cargo bay, with occasional breaks to douse themselves with Radz-B-Gon.

Janey got on to designing something that might work well enough to get them somewhere civilised, and while she was doing that, the others decided to take a jaunt to the planet's moons to see if the inhabitants had progressed far enough to make that hop. They did find evidence of landers and what-not, and briefly thought of finding the Cape Canaveral equivalent in search of more computer stuff, but then decided that any such facility would almost certainly have been bombed to smithereens.

It took Janey just over a week to construct a jump controller that she's absolutely sure — well pretty sure — well fairly sure will work. The whole device takes up about ten cubic metres of the cargo bay to replicate a much more complex device that could be held in one hand. But at least they've got a thing (maybe) as long as nobody trips over the cables and unplugs something.

17: Frying Pan, Fire

 While the others were investigating the abandoned survival shelter, and finding a lot of nothing very much worth nicking, Patience on board ship noticed an energy blip appearing out near the hulk, followed shortly afterwards by another, then several others. She alerted the rest of the team, and this time, rather than offering their heads for a whacking, they decided to choose the path of caution and hide until they knew who and what they were up against.

Patience powered down her active sensors immediately so as not to be broadcasting the fact of their existence far and wide. By the time everyone was back on board the newcomers' numbers had swelled to a couple of dozen.

Hugging the ground, Patience relocated the ship into the shadow of a crater wall between them and the shelter site, just in case. Regrettably, this left the ship effectively blind to what was going on, so Lee and Enkai'nos humped a pair of sentry sensor packs up on to the crater rim — short range devices, and pretty much useless for seeing what was going on a quarter of a million kilometres away, but hopefully they'd give some warning if anyone approached too close. Enkai'nos got his up and running in no time at all by just following the instructions from the manual step by step, but somehow Lee managed to get his unit stuck in a feedback loop, and it was about an hour before the combined efforts of Enkai'nos and Janey managed to get it properly up and running.

Meanwhile, Lee went back to the ship for a nice, simple telescope that he could look through without having to worry about any sort of networking nonsense. At that range he couldn't see in great detail, but he could see enough to show that the newcomers, whoever they were, appeared to be scavenging and dismantling the hulk and neighbouring wrecks, and tumbling the remains down into the atmosphere of the gas giant. And they seemed to be working remarkably quickly and efficiently.

Once again the same old "we should talk to them" "we should hide" discussions ensued. They decided to split the difference by keeping the ship hidden, but sending a standard Terran communications blurp via an off-site aerial, so that the beam wouldn't lead directly back to the ship....

Which turned out to be a good thing, as it happened, because about ten minutes after the transmission was sent, all the ship's sensors whited out, and when they reset themselves, they saw that the site of the aerial and the shelter site and the two expensive sentry sensor packs were a boiling, fuming, molten crater. Clearly whoever these newcomers were, they were not interested in having any survivors around.

Someone noted that the strangers not only had jump technology, but obviously better jump technology than the Terrans, since they're able to jump right into a planetary gravity well. Which lead inexorably to the idea that they should hijack one of these alien vessels and steal, if not the whole thing, then at least their jump tech. The immediate problem was that the aliens vastly outnumbered and outgunned Our Heroes. What to do?

We've got to sort out a name for the team's ship.

Lee, keeping an eye on proceedings via his telescope, noted that their efficiency did not seem to be abating, and already the leviathan was well on the way to being completely skeletonized. Within a few hours, there were indications that the swarm was diminishing, and fairly soon it was down to the last couple who were engaged in dumping the remaining debris down into the gas giant.

The team came up with a Cunning Plan: they would take off, keeping the moonlet between them and the mysterious Dismantlers, detach the other alien escape pod, and send it on its way to attract (hopefully) a single dismantler ship to gobble it up while Our Guys stayed dark and invisible until the moment to pounce. A cunning plan indeed.

It went well initially and all according to plan except for the bit when it all fell apart.

As soon as the escape pod hove into view, both dismantlers immediately perked up and thrust out towards it... or at least, one of them did; the other one thrust directly towards the Good Guys... who had not seemed to take into account that the aliens were not restricted to passive sensors and could see them perfectly well sitting there with their engines ticking over and their life-support running and everything.

It did not take long before they were close enough to make out their configuration fairly clearly: definitely not like any Terran vessel anyone was familiar with, they looked roughly crab-like with a more or less spherical central mass surrounded by a fringe of articulated limbs, and with a pair of large pincer-like booms extending to the front. Almost as soon as they could see this, they could also see the tips of the limb-fringe light up, and a beam weapon of some kind just missed the ship, briefly knocking its sensors off-line — an EMP weapon of some sort, they theorized. And now they could see arcs of some kind of energy between the pincer-booms....

They quickly decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and took off for the cover of the planetary ring, attempting to lose the alien in hot pursuit. A chase ensued amongst the tumbling rocks, and a game of hide and seek for about six hours before they were confident that the disassembler craft had given up the pursuit.

Since they were basically fully fueled, and were only lacking jump control and navigation systems (pfft, who needs that stuff?) they elected to head back into the system to check out the potentially life-supporting planet they'd briefly seen when they first arrived. It took a little over six weeks to get back in under thrusters, and they settled down to do a more thorough survey.

Though there was some vegetation to be seen in the sub-polar regions, most of the planet was arid and barren. Although no signs of current habitation could be found, it was clear that it had been inhabited in the past. The ambient radiation was pretty high, though in environment suits they'd be safe enough for six or eight hours at a time. Built-up areas could be observed from orbit, as well as many, many devastated and highly radioactive areas at places like the confluence of rivers and the like — prime sites for major urban areas.

They decided to set down near a small, undamaged town, and everyone except Patience went off in the ship's air-raft to explore. Lee noted some odd tracks in the dust that looked like they'd been made by some small tracked vehicle. It was just a few minutes into town, and though everything seemed largely intact, there was no sign of life... except for a brief glimpse of something like a huge millipede, about four metres long and maybe half a metre in diameter, which scurried in under the foundations of one of the buildings.

Lee noted that it left tracks in the dust that looked like they'd been made by some small tracked vehicle.

It's purely coincidental that I just finished watching Fallout. Honest.

Further into town they flew, to the largest building they could see, which bore a strong resemblance to a Greek temple of ancient Earth. They made their way inside, and found.... a bank. It was a bank.

The whole settlement looked like, and displayed the technology of, a small European or American town of the 1950s or 60s, when the Wild West was engaged in its genocides, and people used exploding hydrocarbons to power their velocipedes. On the walls of the bank were a group of portraits, showing a species clearly humanoid, but clearly non-human — strange fan-like ears, and no visible eyelids over large, bulging eyes.

Janey judged, by the general level of decay, that the place had been abandoned for perhaps fifty to seventy years. Certainly no longer than a hundred or so. Maybe a hundred and fifty. Two hundred perhaps. There was no sign of any inhabitants, but curiously, also no sign of any corpses.

16: Deus Ex Machina

Events in this episode are a little hazy, as I very slackly didn't get around to writing it up while they were still clear in mind. The reason for that is that I am a lazy prick.

---

Time passed in Our Heroes' air-lock prison. Their captors appeared to be completely ignoring them.

Janey spent her time thinking about how they could get out without immediately being killed, and looked around for something to help with that... and, by an amazing stroke of luck, in the Survival Ball cupboard she found a toolbox she'd mislaid some days earlier and completely forgotten where she'd left it!

She quickly had the cover off an access panel into the ceiling maintenance ducting, and Lee wriggled his way out and over towards the  crew lounge.

Peering furtively through a convenient ventilation grill, he could see a couple of their alien captors lying sprawled on the floor... very, very still. He watched them for some time and saw no sign of movement.

As stealthily as he could manage, made his way back to an access panel outside the cargo bay airlock and eased his way down to open the air lock door, freeing his compatriots.

There was something around about here where the crew got themselves some spare environment suit helmets from the suit store; I forget exactly why, but it seemed like the thing to do at the time.

They made their way into the crew lounge and found the two aliens lying there, very clearly dead. Their faces were swollen, blackened, and oozing with suppurating lesions, which (it turned out when Ekain'os shucked it out of its suit) extended throughout its body. It had clearly succumbed to some horrible and fast-acting plague, which did not make Our Heroes feel any more comfortable than they had been.

Further investigations eventually accounted for all of the known intruders, on the bridge and in the engineering bays, all showing signs of the same disease. Someone took a sample of the oozy slime and fed it into the ship's autodoc for analysis, and while waiting for the results, everyone else cleaned up the revolting corpses.

I don't recall what they did with them. Probably just dumped them outside I suppose.

Patience got the ship's internal sensors up and running again, and found that they had a parasite — the alien escape pod was clamped to the upper hull of the ship. They soon found that an umbilical had been run from the pod to the engine bay roof hatch.

Lee, Enkain'os and Janey crept up it and found their way blocked by a locked iris hatch. Finding no way to open it gracefully, Lee burned his way through it with his plasma rifle, and just missed having his head shot off by the terrified, wildly shooting pilot still inside. A second shot also missed, and then Lee returned his fire and cut his leg off at the thigh. The unfortunate pilot died on the spot from trauma and shock, but on the other hand he was spared a revolting death by plague, so there was that.

Back at the autodoc, it transpired that the cause of death was a massive allergic reaction to a fungal spore, completely harmless to humans but clearly deadly to whoever these people were.

On the bridge, Patience had back-tracked the course of the escape pod, and found that it appeared to have come from a small shepherd moonlet, part of the planetary ring of rubble (and also now spaceship debris). The team decided to take a look.

There was some refuelling at some point, courtesy of the gas giant — I don't recall exactly at what point in the proceedings that took place.

The ship made the crossing without incident, and in short order they found what was clearly a temporary survival shelter. Nobody shot at them, so they decided to investigate more closely.

There was nobody home.

15: That Went... Well?

 The away team, having landed themselves inside the Brobdingnagian alien spacecraft via one of the spherical disintegrated sections, peered down the corridor into darkness. By the illumination of their suit lights they could see that the passage was about four metres high by six wide, and every surface was covered in ornate organic decorative enameling and embossing.

I completely forgot to take into account the fact that they had no gravity to work with, which made things much simpler for everyone than it had any right to be. Ah well, there's always next time.

Lee noted that their tether, where it crossed the edge of the disintegration area, was being alarming cut and frayed by the more-than-razor-sharp edge, and promptly took steps to reattach it at a point where it wouldn't make contact with anything sharp.

Searching down the corridor, they found an oval panel that seemed door-like — probably not a pressure door, as there were no seals in evidence — but no sign of any way to open it, until eventually Janey found a group of what might be... buttons? If so, they did nothing. Then she realised that there was probably no power, so of course they'd do nothing. She searched further, looking for the emergency override controls, and after a while of trying to figure out what was just decoration and what was an actual component, she found a small panel and managed to get it open.

Inside was a handwheel and locking bar, and also an array of pipes. Even here the mania for decoration held sway, with the handwheel cast in a mandala of animal (?) forms. She quickly figured out the mechanism, and the door rolled away into its wall socket.

Behind the door they found a small room, missing a perfectly circular chunk of its far wall, and thus open to space. Three corpses floated in chairs facing a wall of dials, gauges, and small glassy screens. Hopeful of being able to jury-rig some repairs to their own ruined navigation and jump-control systems with the alien tech, Janey and Esakai'nos attempted to detach one of the screens... and completely buggered it. Then they ruined another one, but on the third try they managed to get one more-or-less intact.

Esakai'nos noticed that the corpses (all very tall, cone-headed humanoids) had what appeared to be sidearms in holsters at their sides, so he nicked all three. Alas, Janey and Lee noticed, and decided that they should have one each.

And right about then...

Back on the ship, Patience had been alerted by the ship's computer of an anomaly out in the debris ring around the planet. A piece of... something... was moving contrary to the drift of all the rest of the debris, and it soon became apparent that it was on a course that would intercept (roughly) with their position.

She alerted the away team, who made haste to get back to the ship, and they decided to go silent and turn off their active sensors and try to hide. Using only vectoring thrusters, Patience drifted the ship over to a cluttered part of the hull that she hoped would give them visual cover, and they grappled the ship to the hulk.

Unfortunately, with active sensors inactive they were effectively blind, and had to rely on optical means alone of keeping track of their bogey. They knew the part of the sky they should be looking at, but even so the chances of actually seeing anything before it was very close indeed were minimal. Nevertheless, against all odds, Lee did manage to pick it up with his binoculars when it was perhaps half an hour out.

In the meantime, Janey, in the lower-deck engineering section, got their looted screen open, and found the innards almost incomprehensibly complex. It was full of mechanical componentry, like a huge and complicated steam-powered watch, with only minimal electronics. Huh. That does not bode well for any kind of compatibility with their own systems.

There was some discussion about who or what the bogey might be, and eventually the generally accepted most likely scenario they came up with was that it was maybe an escape pod from the mega-ship, coming back to see what the activity was about.

Lee decided to camp outside in a good fire position, just in case. Patience (with an optimism bordering on naivete) thought that perhaps the two groups might be able to help each other — maybe the aliens might be able to fix Our Heros' systems, and they could all go home. Maybe.

They switched their active sensors back on and activated a distress beacon, and Patience opened up the forward cargo ramp to indicate their lack of hostile intent.

And then...

From outside, Lee was following the process of the pod, and as it approached closely he saw it disgorge a line of smaller dots, which rapidly formed into four groups of three. It didn't take long before they got close enough to distinguish them as suited humanoids.

Three of the groups landed out of his line of sight, but one group of three landed around his position... he elected not to attempt to fight it out at this time, and they disarmed him and walked him back down to the ship, he clumping along on his magnetic boots while they floated gracefully around him on three sides.

Meanwhile, another group had burned their way up through the engineering floor hatch, forcing Janey to scramble for her suit helmet. Another group entered through the cargo ramp. The fourth combat team are nowhere to be seen.

The Good Guys were herded together, disarmed and stripped of their space suits, and locked into the starboard cargo lock. Esakai'nos noted that (a) the aliens appeared to have only their side-arms, no long guns or heavy weapons, and (b) they did not remove their own suits at all and in fact seemed very reluctant to make any physical contact with Our Heros.

And there we are.

No doubt it will all end up just fine.

Terran Empire 14: The New Era

Note: After a hiatus of more than two decades, I restarted this campaign using the Basic Roleplaying system from Chaosium.

---

In the (new) beginning...

We have a whole new team, and a new ship. Probably the same old chaotic fiascos though.

They are:

• Annette — Patience Strôenn, pilot. On a trail of vengeance for the deaths of her parents.
• Clare — Janey Terranova, engineer.
• Andrew — Lee Thomas, bounty hunter.
• Carl — Esakai'nos, Lregh union worker who is definitely not any kind of secret spy-assassin or anything like that.
• Keld — itinerant magician. Pick a card, any card.

The deck plans in PDF format, scaled for use with 15mm miniatures.

The ship is an Empress Marava class Far Trader (as yet unnamed). It is an elderly and somewhat battered vessel, third- or fourth- or even sixth-hand, but it is kept running by the tender attentions of Patience and Janey.

(Note: don't be misled by how nice and clean the ship in the illustration looks.
Appearances can be misleading.)

---

First Steps

Our story opens with the team departing, with relief, from the bleak and tedious New Canaan for Vaxandros Prime, ostensibly in search of cargo and/or passengers to help keep the ship flying, but actually because Patience, via Lee Thomas, had heard murmurings that members of the Malorean Syndicate (the gang responsible for the murders of her parents) might be found there.

VAXANDROS PRIME: Located in the spinward regions of the Outer Core, Vaxandros Prime is the first of five planets orbiting the yellow dwarf star Vaxandros. Dis covered in the late 2400s, it's a pleasant, Earthlike world that's attracted over 200 million settlers in about a century and a half. Most live in one of the planet's five major cities, but a few have struck out into the wilds to establish homesteads.

Unfortunately, the planet's relative proximity to Drago's Reach makes it a convenient stop for smugglers and other neer-do-wells traveling to or from that lawless region of space. The Intelligence Bureau, a combination law enforcement and espionage agency under the control of the planet's ruling oligarchy, often has difficulty keeping track of all the criminals in or passing through the Vaxandros system. The enormous Vaxandros High Port in particular has a reputation as a haven for criminal activity.

NEW CANAAN: A barely-habitable world, New Canaan was deliberately selected for its harsh conditions by its original settlers. Motivated by religious faith, they sought to create a society that met the most exacting requirements of all religions. The original settlers were Christian, Jewish, and Muslim, but since then settlers from dozens of other religious groups have immigrated to New Canaan. Under New Canaan's constitution, all citizens must obey the tenets of all religions represented on the planet. In cases where practices directly conflict, a citizen can choose, but otherwise he has to follow all the rules. New Canaanites eat no meat, drink no alcohol or caffeine, may not divorce or use contraception, and wear robes and veils. They use only the minimum technology necessary to support life. Needless to say, the planet's not exactly a tourist destination.

They broke orbit and made their way out to Minimum Safe Distance for jump, and hit the go button.

Immediately there was a loud bang, a stench of burning hair and flesh, and a brief squealing from inside one of the bridge consoles. The jump-drives started to spin down, then they spun back up again, out of control, and the ship went into an uncontrolled stutter-jump which went through six or eight cycles before they could cut the power and turn them off.

They found themselves floating inside a system of six planets, which sensors revealed to consist of two gas giants and four rocky worlds, orbiting an old orange star. The second planet from the sun could conceivably support — just — human life, but there were no signs of any kind of industrial settlement that could be detected from this far out.

Janey opened up the console and found, hanging from an energy bus, the barbequed corpse of a New Canaan creature, a bristly cross between a pangolin and a rat. She saw more signs that the creature(s) had been chewing on other pieces of equipment, most importantly the navigation control systems, and there was poop a-plenty as well. Listening carefully she detected the sounds of skittering feet, so it looked like the ship had become infested on New Canaan.

She removed the corpse of the vermin and made a quick survey of the damage. The jump-drive controller would need to be replaced, and there was no spare on board. That's a big problem. But fortunately the navigation array controller looked simple enough to fix.... and lo! It blew up in her hands (rolled a 00 for the repair) and is now completely irreparable, and will also have to be replaced. If only they hadn't put off paying for all those spare components...

The mis-jump had virtually drained the fuel reserves, so getting more fuel became of pressing importance. The gas giants were the obvious place to look, and Patience set a course for the nearest — about a week by thrusters. Looking ahead with the sensors, she discovered not only that the gas giant's atmosphere contained useful quantities of fuel-gases, but she also detected an intermittent radio signal from its orbit — incomprehensible, but clearly artificial.

Lee, Eskai'nos and Keld filled their time during the passage attempting to hunt down the infestation of galacto-rats, with limited success. Someone suggested just opening the ship to vacuum, but janey was resolutely opposed to the idea of venting all their atmosphere without the certainty of being able to replace it.

When they got close enough for more detailed scans, and eventually even visual inspection, they discovered that their signal was coming from something big. Very, very big.

Floating within an extensive debris field that created a complete ring around the planet was an unreasonably massive hulk, in space. A Space Hulk, if you will. It was not of any recognisable configuration: certainly not Terran, nor Perseid, nor any other tech known to any of the crew. It reached over three kilometres in length, the remains looking like a weird Gothic space-cathedral dreadnought.

It appeared completely dead, except for the mysterious radio bursts which seemed to be emanating from somewhere towards what they assumed was the stern due to the presence of gigantic thrust cones there. Large parts of the structure were completely missing, apparently disintegrated by some unknown weapon that left perfectly spherical voids, leaving the vessel like a Brobdingnagian Swiss cheese.

Patience maneuvered the ship, with great care, right into the bowels of the giant via one of the disintegrated holes. Lee managed, though without really knowing what he was doing, do send a magnetic grapple from one of the cargo locks directly exactly where he meant it to go. He, Janey and Eskai'nos suited up and wheeled themselves across the line into a corridor in the behemoth.Nobody died during this exercise.

The corridor extended off into darkness. Mysterious structures jutted out into the passageway, function unknown. All of the surfaces are etched and embossed, decorated in a gothic baroque style.

What lies ahead? We don't yet know. It'll probably be fine.

13: Uninvited Guests

 Note: In the interests of keeping track of what's happened when and to whom, while maintaining my habitual sloth and indolence, I've written this highly abbreviated summary of recent events:

K'pok limps slowly back towards the Hzeel freighter, failing to observe the tiny life-pod zooming past her.

Jek, Measure Twice and Weptish, by means of a bit of random fumbling, manage more or less accidentally to restore artificial gravity. On the bridge they feel a sudden jolt through the floor-plates. Jek, looking out a window, observes something tumbling rapidly away from the ship, but cannot identify it.

After a while, Jek decides to investigate and floats off back down towards the airlocks. Down a stairwell and through a pressure door, he surprises — and is himself surprised to run into — a large humanoid wearing a Nasty Scary Ruthless Warrior brand environment suit and hefting a HUGE plasma rifle. All hell breaks loose and Jek ends up floating unconscious in a thoroughly melted stairwell, saved from being brutally killed to death by his trusty armoured EVA suit.

Measure Twice is alerted by Jek's girlish shrieks over the radio and makes his way cautiously down the stairwell, narrowly missing being blown up by one of the warrior's plasma grenades.

Jek recovers consciousness moments before the Ackalian and zaps the bejeezus out of it, fortunately failing to ignite the bandolier of plasma grenades across its chest.

K'pok attempts to rendezvous and dock with the freighter, but is startled when it disappears from hyperspace. Fortunately, she isn't travelling at too fast a clip, but nevertheless by the time she is able to initiate her own exit from hyperspace the separation between the two craft is several million kilometres.

Jek and Measure engage in a fire-fight with an indeterminate number of foes in the main cargo deck. Jek, as usual, spends considerable time unconscious. By the time Weptish makes it down there to join in, Measure is also feeling poorly.

K'pok eventually catches up and attempts to dock at the ventral docking port. With a masterful display of piloting she actually collides with the ship, sending it tumbling sedately through space and upsetting the combatants who are getting it on in the cargo bay.

K'pok manages to dock successfully on her second attempt, and responding to the wails coming over the suit radios makes her way down to the cargo deck to join in the fun. More biffo ensues. At some point, I don't recall exactly when, the artificial gravity stutters and goes off again; Weptish is immediately blamed.

One of the bad guys ignites a couple of smoke grenades and makes his escape up the freight elevator; Our Heroes, hearing the elevator (by some mystic means through vacuum — once again the GM's poor memory comes into play) assumed it meant the arrival of more foes, rather than the exit of the ones they already had. They hunkered down for another attack, until after some time they realised that they were the only ones left fighting. K'pok gets an emergency distress call from her ship AI alerting her to the fact that someone was attempting to force access, and then that intruders had entered the vessel.

K'pok dashed back up the stairwell with Measure to try to find the escapees, leaving Jek and Weptish to investigate the battleground. Jek attempts to salvage a fallen Ackalian's plasma rifle which had unfortunately been rigged; once again he enjoys the thrill of flying through the air (OK, the vacuum) on a wave of white-hot plasma. Once again he is saved from annihilation by his extremely expensive and increasingly battered EVA suit.

K'pok and Measure get up to Deck 4 in time to the elevator to the ventral lock; pounding down the corridor they stabbed frantically at the call button. The elevator arrived and the door opened; Measure leaned forward alertly to check whether or not the Bad Guys had left any unpleasant surprises, and was therefore in the ideal position to see the plasma grenade drop right at his feet. Bravely he shielded K'pok from the blast by not being able to get out of the way in time, and he too experienced the Jek Effect, ending up sprawled down the other end of the corridor.

About then, the ship shuddered and its tumbling worsened as the Ackalian pilot tore loose from the docking clamps. K'pok is understandably upset at having her ship, and also her mother's body, stolen. Unfortunately there's not a hell of a lot she can do about it.

An extended period of tinkering with the ship's systems is undertaken, guided inexpertly by Measure's extremely basic grasp of the Hzeel language and script. Not much is achieved initially except to lock themselves out of the systems until Jek manages to trace a hardware bypass. Eventually, by trial and error, enough systems are deciphered to restore the life support systems, and more importantly, to determine that they don't work and are busily pouring nasty poisonous gases through all the corridors and staterooms. Weptish goes off to check the plant and finds the tell-tale holes left by duct-creepers. Measure, checking the manifests, finds a lot more weaponry installed than one would expect of an innocent freighter.

Jek checks out the gravity generators, squeezing his majestic bulk through the very tight confines of the Underdecks, but having not the first clue what he should be looking for can't find out why they aren't working properly. He does find out what caused the hyperdrive to malfunction however — it had melted down to worthless slag, though he doesn't know why.

Once he got back up on the bridge, it suddenly occurred to Jek that since the ship was a Terran design, the Hzeel systems were probably just a translation overlay over the Terran originals — and so it proved to be. The previous week turned out to be largely fruitless effort, not to mention the discomfort of being confined to EVA suits for such a length of time — d'oh! Once he made the appropriate adjustments, almost all of the systems became freely available. Only the security protocols remain undeciphered, and they soon submitted to Jek's ministrations. And not too soon, as it soon became clear.

The Ackalians had managed to get the Vulcan ship more or less under control, and with their characteristic stubbornness were having another go at the Hzeel vessel. Though inexpert at manipulating the ship's tactical systems, the defences were more than adequate to fend off the attacks of the Ackalians as long as Measure could angle the shields, which he did almost half the time.

K'pok attempted to disable her ship with a shot to the reactionless drives, but miscalculated the power of her lasers slightly, missed her target and accidentally blasted a gaping hole right through the bridge. Her ship immediately lost all power and control, and drifted off into the void.

ur Heroes caught up with it easily, harpooned it with magnetic grapples and boarded to find nothing where the bridge used to be, and a badly wounded Ackalian in one of the med bay hibernation chambers. Jek quietly spaced him and regretfully told K'pok that there was nothing he could do for the injured warrior. K'pok found her mother's corpse still safely frozen, Weptish managed to retrieve his collection of Weird Stuff, and together everyone began to salvage as much usable stuff as possible.

Weptish has a plan to build the Hyperdrive Of Doom with salvaged bits and pieces and whatever components can be saved from the freighter's drive, but that's still very much a work in progress and the ship is currently far, far away from civilization. A sensor scan managed to detect some faint signals that indicate sentient technological life, but they emanate from a direction in which the nearest star is over a light-year away, and even at best speed using the ship's reaction drives it will take several years to get there — and there's no guarantee that the nearest star system is the source of the signals. Our Heroes settle in for a long, boring trip and hope that Weptish manages to come up with a miracle before the food and life support supplies run out.

Measure Twice, with the aid of his trusty Hzeel phrase book, ploughed his way through the ship's logs and cargo manifests. Much he found incomprehensible, but he did find a reference to his two comrades, who had been travelling on board in stasis as cargo — it appears that they had been sold off to some tin-pot warlord outside the fringes of Terran space; a notation accompanying the entry contains a recommendation that they be pithed before revivification to ensure that they are controllable. This information has caused Measure some upset; there's no possible way he can reach the planet in time for a rescue mission, but honour demands revenge.....

Jek is relieved to be in a relatively roomy spacecraft after the extremely cramped quarters on board K'pok's ship, but all of the sleeping quarters — and more importantly, all of the ablutions — have been rebuilt to suit the Hzeel stature. A Jek-sized bed he can build, but he's forced to shower one limb at a time, and going to the toilet is an exercise in claustrophobia.

K'pok is as stoic as ever in the face of the prospect of years drifting through space. She has her meditation equipment, and she keeps herself occupied familiarising herself with the ship's