It was a time of rejoicing and coming together under the happy watch of papa Nurgle, the chaos lord of pestilence in this session of Rogue Trader.
The session began with the introduction of 2 new crew:
1. Kasun - Astropath Transcendent, senior officer of the astropathic choir on board the ship, a woman with a blackened gas mask covering up her burnt out eyes.
2. Karlax - A Kroot(dinosaur/birdlike alien with a fondness for eating intelligent beings) Mercenary somehow brought aboard during the November session's massive hiring push. A merc who's previous job was ruined by these HR changes, who became something of a squeaky wheel before getting noticed and elevated to the status of a senior officer.
Then the holiday love really began. Blood came dripping from the walls, and a friendly voice called out from the darkness of the warp before crew began falling under the possession of various malevolent spirits drawn to the ship and the 65,000 souls aboard like moths to a candle. The crew decided not to jump out of the warp unsafely, and instead spent hours in the warp.
Some highlights of this harrowing experience:
1. Szaak, Szaak's troopers, and Karlax pulled off an effective maneuver to defeat the murder-servitors (lobotomized killer cyborgs) guarding the sabotaged gellar field. Karlax defeated one of them in single combat by punching it to death with a power fist (and getting a nasty close call with a buzzsaw as a result of those efforts)
2. Avixis and Aganamor worked to minimize losses to crew morale and population, probably saving thousands of lives and avoiding awful morale failures on board. The ship suffered 37% losses, and a hit of 14% to morale.
3. Kraxius Bent dissapeared into a safe room.
4. Avixis managed to quickly diagnose the gellar field problems and get a crew in position where it could be repaired in a mere 3 hours
5. Felix Fortunato tracked the most powerful warp entity and lured it onto the bridge, where he was able to (with significant help from the party, especially Szaak and Karlax's excellent gunfire), defeat the demon. Essentially Fortunato used a navigator power which increased the damage that the demon suffered from Warp Instability as a result of being in the bridge's realspace bubble.
6. Avixis took a serious bleeding wound from the demon.
Next, the party traveled through the warp into deep space, a short distance from their goal - The Eyes of St. Bartholodexia, an area of space in which two stars light up a small nebula and appear like eyes from a great distance. From there, they scanned nearby systems, having trouble detecting much more than em radiation that could indicate technological civilization.
So, the group made another warp jump into the nearest star, one of the eyes of Bartholodexia, and found a space battle between Alien Pirates and strange well shielded ships that kept transmitting radio pulses of 3, 1, 4 pulses, then 26 pulses. The explorers came into the fight against the pirates (which Kasun recognized as Rak'Gol, a species known for piracy on the edge of Imperial space.), and helped turn the tide.
From there, the group attempted to help one of the damaged vessels, and met with members of a friendly and inclusive governing body that included humans, insectoid aliens, and snakelike aliens. These people had some sort of translator implants, and eventually were speaking low gothic. In return for the explorers help turning away pirates, they agreed to give coordinates to a nearby "forbidden world." which sounded very similar to the Tomb World that the explorers seek. They warned of a possible pirate stronghold somewhere in that system.
