Act 1 - The High Era

Captain 2 - A long distance hauler

Captain creation

Describe the Captain and consider how they took command of your ship, and any notable crew or assets.

I turned to a name generator for this one. Most important for me was to keep the game flowing, and the ship is the star of the show anyway.

• Name: Kasey Greene
• Acquired the ship from the university. It was too outdated now for serious scientific work and storing it was a big expense.
• With its storage space and design for long-distance spaceflight and systems redundancy this long distance trader saw a chance to pick up a bargain.
• The exo-suit was a big selling point and made handling cargo easy with a very small crew.
• Kasey also installed a hidden cubby-hole. Not with the intention of using it for smuggling but so her family members would have somewhere to hide if she was ever intercepted by pirates. Long-distance hauling is a lonely job, and she knew she would be passing through some very remote places.

I picked up the cubby hole installation in this section thinking it was a ‘notable asset’, but on reflection I think this should have been added in one of the ship questions - there’s one in there about ship modification that would have been perfect. The RPG police have not yet kicked down my door for this, so I think it’s OK.

Describe their family who live aboard

• Kasey has two teenage kids who travel with her and help with the general running of the ship and management of cargo.
• They have a cat called Snuffles who has the run of the ship and helps catch any pests when the cargo is food.
• They spent years on board the vessel doing long distance cargo deliveries that would have been prohibitively dangerous for traders with more conventional cargo ships.

What was the most valuable cargo that filled your hold?

• The most valuable cargo they carried was medicines to treat a plague that was decimating an orbital outpost on the edge of the sector.
• Few ships were equipped to make the run, and fewer still would willingly go into the compromised outpost to make the delivery.
• The cargo was valuable, but the danger money would have set them up for life.

Memorable events

They can’t all end happily, and this is supposed to be the transition between the High Era and the Time of Strife in the ship’s lifecycle. So we’ll use the Scum & Villainy table for our memorable event. I chose a prompt based on an ambush on board the ship, but partway through writing it my brain joined some dots and took the ‘ambush on board’ prompt in a very different direction.

Your captain and crew, returning from a planetside excursion, found themselves ambushed in the docking bay.

• Returning from the medical delivery the family were surprised to be placed in quarentine. It turned out they were not given all the information about the plague prior to the run.
• It was much more dangerous to children than adults. Sadly one of Kasey’s teenagers fell very ill and died in quarentine.
• Kasey had to live with the guilt of taking her family into that danger for a payday and she lost all appetite for space.
• She found somewhere to settle down with her remaining child and, in her grief, tried to sell off the ship asap.

Ship Question

Your captain oversees a complete systems rebuild - a labour of love taking months to complete.

• Kasey ripped out the aging lab equipment and installed extensive refrigeration and sterilisation equipment to support transport of consumables.
• This allowed her to take contracts for luxuries that couldn’t be freeze-dried or pasturised, and meant she was often the only hauler able to deliver these items to some of the more remote planets and outposts.

How does the captain and ship’s time together end?

• The captain hands disposal of the ship off to a broker, the first she could find.
• Kasey wasn’t interested in getting a good price or her fair share of the profit from the sale, she just couldn’t stand to see the reminder of her hubris and her loss.
• She walked away leaving the Endurance in a shipyard full of old, rusted hulls and coolant leaks and didn’t look back.

Resolve a Rest

I think this ship probably stands out among the piles of near-scrap in this broker’s yard and wouldn’t sit there too long before someone tried to pick it up cheap.

• Wait: 1 week.