Skulls Without Number - Session 4

17 May, 2025

Well, after a little hiatus¹ I finally got back to my Skulls Without Number game (see the report from the first and second sessions.) Session 3, unfortunately, will probably not get a full writeup, but I figured I'd get back into the swing of things with a session report on Session 4!

Dramatis Personae

We had a smaller group this time. A few of the regulars weren't able to make it.

• Alis Zephyr-Emil of House Rey’a’Nor: Needle-toothed Navigator in a spider-chair
• Gallius Vax: Heretek techpriest and enginseer
• Rassolvov van Law: Void-Master gunnery chief, and a decent gambler

Fourth Session

Our party was on Footfall, preparing for their first expedition into the Expanse proper. Having heard tales of a system taken by Rak'gol, discovered by a Naval patrol chasing pirates, they decided to begin an Endeavor to survey the system and cleanse it of Rak'gol, taking any treasures they could find along the way. They met with a Drusian street-preacher named Mordella Al Alaha. She was impressed by the God-Emperor's temple and the warpsbane hull of the Cavalier, and wanted to support them on their anti-xenos mission. She agreed to grant them support and a Torchbearer missionary if they would carry 1,000 lay followers to the planet Loretta, where they could be taught martial prowess by the Red Consecrators of the Blood Tears.

She also agreed to put them into contact with "Eagle", a Drusian-sympathetic naval midshipman who could get the charts from the Navy Patrol that chased the pirates. Alis hoped this would make the travel to this distant system easy. Rassolvov, a former Navy man, tried to help out Eagle's endeavor by trying to lay a few Thrones in the right hands, getting the right people out of the way. It did not work; his bribes had little effect and the next day Eagle was hung in a Footfall dock as a warning to all who might try to steal from the Imperial Navy.

Unsuccessful with the charts, the party decided they were wasting time, and needed to get out to star system.² They departed from Footfall and two days later translated into the Warp, first on a short ten-day jaunt to the feral world of Dolorium, then to the far-off system of Dracost's Stronghold.³ They spent a tense two days in Dolorium, waiting for good omens to reenter the Warp.

Without charts to Dracost's Stronghold, they had to cut a new course. I used my warp route generator to determine the true duration and the stability of the route. The jump from Dolorium to Dracost's Stronghold ended up being a sixty-two-day passage, though they made it in only fifteen days. Nevertheless, they had many close calls with the treacherous passages of the Warp. Alis sees the Warp as a never-ending misty skyless forest, with systems as rare clearings where sunlight bleeds through. Ze had to guide zir "cart" through a narrow path filled with gossamer webs, which would only catch on certain materials (a region of the Warp that could cause ship components to spontaneously combust), and then had to run the edge of an expanding, toroidal hole in the vast space (a temporal wound in the Warp that threatened to yank their ship into realspace in a distant place.) Ze deftly skirted both threats and delivered the ship safely to the Dracost's Stronghold system.

During the long flight, a group of voidsmen deck-serfs arrived with a petition. They claimed the crew's Master-at-Arms, Rodrigo Diaz, was causing great suffering among the crew. He had been hauling able-bodied voidsmen into military drills, making them train for hours at a time, cutting into their sleep and making them sluggish and late for their standard duties. They were reaching a breaking point. Rodrigo Diaz rode in⁴ to defend his ideas and his honor. He knew that, should the Rak'gol board their ship, there would be no non-combatants; he would need to train and arm anyone capable of standing up and holding a weapon in fighting if they were to have a chance to avoid a slaughter.⁵ He brushed off concerns about the crew being exhausted, and stated that it was better to go in exhausted by firm and trained than let a rested crew panic and flail. The crew debated these options, and proposed some alternatives (including a ration incentives for volunteers training under the Master-at-Arms.) They decided to scale back Rodrigo's program to merely training some voidsmen "sergeants", who would form the nucleus of voidsman squads in the case of boarding. Finding this to be acceptable, Rodrigo implemented the changes, and the serfs were sent away satisfied.⁶

After a few hours scanning the system, the crew weighed anchor and hauled for Dracost's Stronghold III, ending the session.

Takeaways

• I had been thinking about this before, but I think I want to change how Warp Encounters work. Currently, I lifted quite a bit of the procedure from the Navis Primer, where I got most of the procedure from Warp travel. Under the approach I adopted from the Navis Primer, every 8⁷ days, a Warp Encounter was rolled on a 1d10. If the encounter was "Physical", the Navigator could avoid it with a Navigate skill roll, and then the helmsman or engineseer could escape it fully with Pilot, Tech-Use, or Know Forbidden. If it was "Psychic", someone aboard the ship would undertake a mental mini-encounter to see if they could avoid it.
  What ends up happening is... rolls rolls rolls, and a whole lot of nothing. There wasn't even necessarily tension in the rolls themselves, just because they so often avoided the events. I could also tell that my players were looking for more interesting decision-making. They wanted to come up with stratagems to avoid the obstacles, with reasonable consequences for failure, rather than just being told of a random event approaching and to make a pre-determined skill check.
  The punchline here is that it is far more interesting to have bad things just happen and let the players deal with that, rather than just saying "Hey, a bad thing might happen", rolling the dice, and nothing happening. In all my RPG activities, I want to cut to the quick, get to the interesting decision points, and have any rests or lulls between those be intentional and thoughtful.
  The goal of Warp Encounters is twofold: 1) to drain the players resources, with longer jumps draining more resources; and 2) to emphasize that the Warp is dangerous and unpredictable. I was not going to get rid of Warp Encounters, because I think the encounters themselves can be fun and challenging. I decided instead to expand the 1d10 list to a 1d20 list. I kept all the old encounters, added a new type of Warp Encounter called "Internal,"⁸ and adding a new Physical Warp Encounter to represent detecting a danger before it actually impacts the ship. Each encounter has an immediate effect, ranging from pretty bad to dire, a default response (usually a difficult skill roll by a specific officer), and a consequence for failure or inaction.
• All the attending players said that the domain event, where they had to navigate between the competing demands of Rodrigo and their serfs, was the highlight of the session. I was particularly proud of this one. I created a 1d50 list of domain events that can happen on the ship. These are events that demand the players, as the authority on the ship, intervene and make a decision, on that will have consequences for their crew and their officers. I sketched out some default options and their consequences, but otherwise left it open-ended for the players to interact with. I have some more thoughts on why I created a table like this in the first place, but I think I may leave that for another post. All I will say now is that it is my firm belief that a game of Rogue Trader should be, to the extent possible, a domain game. The player characters are not Inquisitorial lackeys or cannon fodder or other assorted Imperial schmucks. They are nobility, or privileged servants of nobility, and each player character is responsible for thousands of lives. They live aboard a flying city, with thousands of people milling about. Unlike most sci-fi games, a Rogue Trader's vessel - even a small one - isn't just a ship in space, it's effectively a flying castle town.

#rogue-trader #rpg #session-report #skulls-without-number