The Diocletian

All of a sudden I feel a pang of loss as I remember The Diocletian in its rapidly decaying orbit around Cobalt004/Tephaine. No matter, the adventure went well and the players have something they will remember for many sessions to come. I think.

There was the zero-gravity exploration, the "waking dream" in which none but the mad could see the acolytes, there was the psychic frost, there was the herding, there was the apparition, there was the psyker child, there were illusions and strange alien creatures that could survive and "swim" in vacuum. There was the survivor that turned out to be quite, quite dead. There was the crewman desperate enough to turn to a damned tome in order to save himself. There was the added intrigue of things found in the ship's Inquisitor's quarters.

By the end of the adventure, the players were almost desperate to get their characters out of The Diocletian. When rescue came, they jumped at the chance to escape.

So now that they have seen The Diocletian, I can post the illustrations that I made of it.

The Diocletian is one of the Black Ships of the Inquisition. Not the nicest place to be when it's fully functional, but when it has been cracked in half (the players haven't discovered what actually broke the ship yet) and it's hanging in space... it becomes something of a nightmare.

Which is exactly what I tried to put the players through. Or at least their characters.

The thing is, I think this adventure went so well that I might have trouble following it with this weekend's game. There were some other (hopefully) memorable events in last weekend's session. We started off with a flashback of one character's traumatising past, we had an "introduction" to the Inquisitor and some of his staff (although the acolytes only learned two new names despite all the new faces they were introduced to), and someone made a deal with an exceptionally creepy astropath and only learned a few minutes later that he had been talking to a psyker (one of his pet hates).

If you can get your players to talk about your campaign outside of game-time, then you're doing a good job as a GM.