Traveller Session 4: Verorum (Part 3)

Player Characters:

John A Rico - Former Star Marine

Rocke Ramora - Thief-Turned-Trader

Willy Warder - Noble Administrator

NPC Crew:

Zuleikah - Money-Obsessed Astrogator

A Quick Departure

Rocke gazed on in horror as "his" ship crashed into the bright-red ship one berth over and came to a stop at a 30-degree angle, crammed onto the platform.  He, Rico, and Overseer Paulus Calidius started down the concourse towards the ship, planning to climb up to the airlock intercomm.  A rocket launched from somewhere off to their right, streaking towards the star marine patrol corvette which they just now noticed hovering higher up in the dome, and the sound of gunfire echoed off in the distance.  They jogged towards the ship, Rico carrying their 5kg of immortality drugs.

Meanwhile, Willy and Zuleikah yelled at each other on the bridge ("You should have piloted the ship!" "I told you, I'm not a pilot!" "Well neither am I!").  The ship was obviously way off-kilter, but neither of them were certain if it was stable, or if it was about to fall off the platform.  The crowd that had been around the red ship they'd collided with dispersed, so Willy lowered the entry ramp; as the ship was still at a steep angle, the bottom of the ramp was still 6' in the air.  He then used the intercomm to ask if anyone was injured, but nobody responded other than Zuleikah, who was one chair over.

Wanting to check on their "passenger" Willy brought the camera for the main airlock up and heard a bunch of pathetic moaning from the nobles who had been aboard during the crash ("Are there any other secret cameras I can check?" "Only Rocke knows about those" "Hey, those were supposed to be secret!").  After some fiddling with the computer system he was able to force a connection to the room GX-415 had been locked in, and he claimed to be injured but it didn't sound urgent.

Traveller Session 3: Verorum (Part 2)

Player Characters:

John A Rico - Former Star Marine

Rocke Ramora - Thief-Turned-Trader

Willy Warder - Noble Administrator

NPC Crew:

Zuleikah - Money-Obsessed Astrogator

Clonelord

The crew made contact with the Clone Master Tiberius, who dabbled as a spice merchant on the side, and set up a meeting at the Veroran Super Brothel.  They arrived at the meet to find that the brothel was in full anti-gravity, lending it an appearance similar to an Escher painting full of floating naked people; Rico and Rocke took some sanity damage from the debauchery on display, but Willy, as a noble, was used to it.  Eventually, they found their man entwined with about 20 lovers, but after noticing them the clonelord disentangled himself and got a slave to spray him down with a can of Space-Axe.

Still nude, Tiberius sat down with the crew, and he and Willy got to business working out a deal.  Willy was able to get a phenomenal deal by pointing out that the spice was neither certified cruelty-free nor ethically mined ("It's mined with slaves, sooo").  Willy beckoned for a bottle of space-wine, but upon seeing the exorbitant prices, the crew took their leave.  While they were on the way back to the Suck-It in their rented spacecar, an air-raid siren began to sound.  Pedestrians on the promenade looked around, surprised, but no panic broke out.  Willy asked GX-415 if he knew what was happening, but their slave didn't have any idea.

Lockdown

As Rocke chided GX to properly refer to him as 'master', Rico tried to call Zuleikah on the spacephone, but had no signal.  Several minutes later, they arrived at their ship's berth, and found it on lockdown.  Rocke knocked on the door, and Zuleikah, awkwardly holding a gun she clearly didn't know how to use, opened the door.  She was spooked by the still-sounding siren, and reminded them that Rocke had told her to lock the ship if anything weird happened, so she'd locked the ship.  Willy tried to contact the control tower so they could at least get outside of the dome, but found that something was jamming their comms.

Traveller Session 2: Verorum

Player Characters:

John A Rico - Former Star Marine

Rocke Ramora - Thief-Turned-Trader

Willy Warder - Noble Administrator

NPC Crew:

Zuleikah - Money-Obsessed Astrogator

Gorod

Having sold the haul of Space Tobacco they'd picked up on Lucus III, the crew set about figuring out what to purchase and where to go next.  After some searching, they figured that Gorod's manufacturies produced a variety of finished and raw goods that would fetch a high price on the desert world of Verorum.  Remembering that the S. S. Suck-It's cargo hold still had some xenomorph acid coming from somewhere after a smuggling mission gone wrong, they decided on the raw goods, as if anything melted, at least the loss would be less costly.  They booked as many middle passengers as they could, though none of the crew were willing to double-bunk to squeeze out all the money they could (Rico and Willy heavily considered it, but they couldn't overcome their personality differences).

Willy was confident in his abilities as a medic, so they also filled all the low-berth pods.  The crew decided to leverage half of their assets for the buy (though for Willy this was only 1000 Spacebucks), and both Willy and Rico rolled poorly and dropped a wealth tier.  The crew went to Juan Ghoulio's Industrial Goods Warehouse, and picked up 33 tons of industrial goods, though Willy made a slightly bad deal, costing them another 5%.  With crew, cargo, and passengers aboard, the S. S. Suck-It jumped to Verorum.

Verorum

Verorum, a desert world, had a mildly toxic atmosphere, which would require a breathing apparatus if outside; Rico and Rocke had picked up full breather masks back on Gorod, while Willy could only barely afford a cheap filter mask with straps that chafed and a seal that dug into his face.  Anagathics, aka immortalitiy drugs, were produced here, and could fetch a high price throughout the galaxy.  Fittingly, a patrol corvette of the Star Marines sat in orbit, though it didn't request anything from the Suck-It as they flew towards the main settlement, a great dome which shared the name of the planet.

Traveller Session 1: Lucus III

Player Characters:

John A Rico - Former Star Marine

Rocke Ramora - Thief-Turned-Trader

Willy Warder - Noble Administrator

NPC Crew:

Zuleikah - Money-Obsessed Astrogator

Lucus III

The S.S. Suck-It jumped into the Lucus system and set course for the third planet in the system with a hold full of hard drives carrying mail for the Aurora Corporation, as well as some spare industrial components.  Lucus III had a thin atmosphere, and was operated by Aurora as a garden world.  On the way in, Willy attempted to find a local selling some of the famed Lucus Space Tobacco, and got responses from two; Marcus Primus sent official-looking letters on Aurora letterhead, while Eudoxia Strategos' reply was much more slapdash and casual.

Oddly, Eudoxia claimed to be in the settlement around the only spaceport, in the southern hemisphere, while Marcus' directions stated that he was operating out of a camp in the northern hemisphere.  As they closed with the planet, they received a comms ping, and Rico brought it up on the main screen.  A man in the teal military uniform of the Aurora Corporation confirmed that this was the "SS... Suck-It?", and Rico started to respond in the affirmative only to be interrupted.  Rocke shouted for Rico to "know his place", then confirmed that they were.

The man introduced himself as Proculus Titius, Chief Intelligence Officer in the system, then explained that the main starport on the planet was experiencing "issues", and advised them to land at a set of coordinates in the northern hemisphere which were almost exactly matched those from Marcus Primus.  Willy tried to coax some more information about the starport, but Proculus wasn't talking.  Rico tried to run some scans of the area, but the Suck-It's sensors were a barely functional mess, and the light cloud cover on the planet rendered them utterly useless.