Rogue Trader: Welcome to the Acheron sector

Our Rogue Trader campaign, which started back in 2014, is still going on; we've spun it off into Warhammer 40,000 and are looking to recruit some new people, so I thought it would be high time to expand on the fairly meager bit of fluff I gave to our players so long ago. First, I'd like to introduce our setting: the Acheron sector.

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The Acheron sector lies far to the galactic north, in Segmentum Obscurus. In the 37th millenium, what is now the Acheron sector was the northernmost fringe of the Charon sector, one of the most remote reaches of Segmentum Obscurus. During the Age of Apostasy, the Charon fringe was barely under Imperial control. Its rulers were an immensely rich and corrupt noble family, who nominally accepted the authority of Holy Terra. Xenos pirates raided the Charon sector, while the lords of the fringes claimed to be powerless to stop them.

After the death of the tyrant Vandire brought the Age of Apostasy to a close in M37, Saint Isabella the Just turned her attention to the Charon fringe. One of the leaders of the newly founded Adepta Sororitas, Saint Isabella had been a junior leader in some of the first wars of the Age of Redemption, and now set out on a crusade of her own to rid the Charon sector of the alien menace.

When Saint Isabella arrived in the Charon fringe, it quickly became obvious that the local nobility was in league with the xenos and had in fact repudiated the authority of the Emperor. Saint Isabella's crusade exterminated both the xenos and the corrupt nobles utterly. The name of the ruling family of the Charon fringe was expunged from Imperial records, and a new sector was founded: the Acheron sector. Saint Isabella appointed one of her most loyal generals, Lady Devanshi Indriani, the first proconsul of the new sector. House Indriani has ruled the sector ever since.


The Acheron sector is officially defined as extending from the border of the Charon sector all the way into the halo stars and to the northern edge of the galaxy. In the first millenium of its settlement, expansion northward was practically restricted to the area south of the Acheron Typhoon: present-day Prima, Secunda and Tertia Pars of the sector. The Typhoon is a permanent warp storm, and navigating around it is very hazardous. On both its eastern and western sides lie large gulfs of what navigators call null-space: areas of space where warp travel is almost impossible. The phenomenon that causes this is unknown, but in null-space astropathic communication is cripplingly difficult and the Astronomican is imperceptible. These two gulfs, Lacuna Phlegethon to the west and Lacuna Cocytus to the east, cut off the outer parts of the sector almost completely.

This changed in M38, when the revered Saint Anastasia came to the Acheron sector. Driven by a vision from the Emperor, Saint Anastasia and navigator house Radha forged a path around the Acheron Typhoon and mounted a crusade against the xenos empire beyond. Saint Anastasia led her troops through battles so terrible that most chronicles simply refuse to speak of them, merely stating that Saint Anastasia vanquished the xenos. She led the crusade as far as the Anastasian Depths, named in her honor. Her consort, Saint Valeria, crossed the Depths to the west to eliminate a last xenos stronghold on the dead world Silentium. In a horrible battle beneath the planet's surface, the missionary Saint Electra was martyred, and the xenos were eradicated.

Saint Anastasia's conquests were consolidated as Ultra Pars of the Acheron sector. Vestigium Hanini is officially the southernmost system of Ultra Pars, and the start of the twin routes past the Acheron Typhoon known as the Holy Gates. The Holy Gates converge at Babylonia Typhonis, seat of the procurator of Ultra Pars and gateway to the northernmost reaches of the sector.

North of Babylonia Typhonis, a stable warp route leads to the Quattor Proci Benitahi, a group of four solar systems close to each other that includes the hive world Augereau and the forge world Oecus Centrifugo. In M41, Rogue Trader Laurenz Frunze blazed a new route to the east, where the House Frunze colony Sacrificatio Imperatori now stands. North of the Quattor Proci is an area of dense null-space known as the Desolatio Thanos, which is considered completely unnavigable.

From Quattor Proci Benitahi, ships bound west for the Phlegethon sector travel to the garden world of Lilium, famed for its brandy. From Lilium they must attempt the Valerian Gates via Sermones Saryoni, Nekromanteion and dread Silentium. The northern route passes by the mining world of Lapis Nova to Ignis and Fides, where the Weyland Transit leads to Clavis Coronae and beyond. It's possible to take either of these routes and make a circuit around the Anastasian Depths to Sancrist, a colony of Rogue Trader house Karanja and chief Imperial world beyond the Depths. There is also a direct route over the Depths, the Pons Separatoris from the shrine world Termina Anastasiae to Dos Umbrae, but only House Radha hold the secret to navigating it safely. Occasionally, a bold Navigator makes the attempt; it invariably ends badly for them.


Beyond the Anastasian Depths lies the uncharted expanse of Ultra Pars. West of Sancrist are the Acheron Badlands, a seemingly limitless area punctuated by patches of null-space. To the north is a human civilization that calls itself the Confederation; they maintain a lively trade as middle-men between Imperial merchants at Sancrist and unknown operators on the other side of the Cortina Noctis. To the east of the Confederation lie the Morbid Reaches, where few Imperial ships dare pass. Somewhere to the northwest are the homeworlds of the Ishi xenos, a fierce, predatory race whose raids sometimes extend into Tertia Pars.

It's rumored that there are stable routes across the Cortina Noctis in the Morbid Reaches, and somehow the Confederation traffic across it. What lies beyond the Cortina Noctis? Who knows! All the ancient stellar catalogues can reveal is names for regions and occasional individual stars; nothing else. Most star systems in Ultra Pars are known only by their stellar catalogue numbers: for example, O.Ac.U.2887; the O designates Segmentum Obscurus, Ac is short for the Acheron sector and U for Ultra Pars. The brightest stars are generally numbered first; Babylonia Typhonis, a blue giant, is O.Ac.U.1. Beyond that, to the Imperial explorer most systems in Ultra Pars are a meaningless number on a chart. The only way to find out what secrets they hold is to go and look...

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It's out here, in the unexplored depths of Ultra Pars, that Rogue Traders go to seek their fortunes, and it's here that our campaign is set. Later, I'll write a bit about some recent events, and introduce our Rogue Trader house.

Let's Play Star Wars: the Card Game

Back in 2017, we celebrated the fourth of May by getting a copy of Star Wars: the Card Game, but with everything that's been going on, it's taken me this long to get around to blogging about it. The game, of course, has been discontinued since, but I'm not letting that stop me.

Magali Villeneuve: Princess Leia

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A post shared by Michael Halila (@michaelhalila) on May 4, 2017 at 3:01pm PDT

Way back when we first bought the Lord of the Rings LCG, we also immediately bought the Dead Marshes adventure pack, because my partner insisted on Boromir. This time, it was my turn, so we bought Jump to Lightspeed for Arden Lyn, the Sith antagonist of the unforgettable Masters of Teräs Käsi.

I'm not sure I can adequately explain to a native English speaker how surreal and fantastically hilarious Teräs Käsi is. Supposedly a Star Wars martial art, it was apparently named by someone taking an English-Finnish dictionary and looking up the words for steel and hand. Never mind that "steel hand" in Finnish would be a compound word and therefore spelled teräskäsi, and that would still sound kinda lame. More than that, though, the name "Masters of Teräs Käsi" is somehow so amazingly ludicrous that when I first saw it, I flatly refused to believe that such a game could possibly exist. Surely, I reasoned, this must be some bizarre joke. Reading an actual review of the game momentarily convinced me that it was real, but I promptly forgot it, no doubt because my brain dismissed it as completely absurd - meaning that I was stunned when I encountered it again after almost a decade. So once I learned that Arden Lyn was included in the Star Wars card game, how was I supposed to build a Dark Side deck without her?

One of the perennial hot-button issues of Finnish politics is whether and how much compulsory Swedish should be taught in our schools. Whatever the broader picture, for the purposes of this topic I'm delighted that we're a nation of bilingual illiterates, because it means that in addition to enjoying Teräs Käsi, we can also marvel at Hustru fönster, which is as ungrammatical and barely any less hysterical. I hope to one day see the card.

Finally, in the process of looking up those Wookiepedia links, I was reminded - I had mercifully forgotten this - that there is also a Teräs Käsi stance called "Förräderi". At this point, I feel quite comfortable in saying, on behalf of the Nordic countries, can you just fucking stop already.

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Since it was the fourth of May, we had to try a game. I picked the Sith starter deck, and my partner used the Jedi deck.

Since it was our first game ever, we misplayed some things and had barely the slightest idea of what we were doing. We had a lot of fun, though! A particular highlight of our game was C-3PO's rampage through Coruscant. I had initially drawn the Heart of the Empire objective, and it looked like it might be a fun idea to try playing it.

Despite these extra resources, I ended up heavily outnumbered, so I used Varys There Is No Escape to wipe the board. Next turn, my partner played C3PO, and finding no units on my side, attacked Coruscant with him. Now, C3PO has no damage icons, but since there were no defenders, he did one unopposed damage to Coruscant. So imagine, if you like, C3PO wandering around Coruscant, somehow doing 10% of the damage the rebels needed to wrest it from the Empire - because I eventually lost by losing Coruscant.

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While we were getting into the game last summer, Fantasy Flight announced the last adventure chapter Force pack cycle and its first instalment, Allies of Necessity. Since it featured Jyn Erso (a name straight out of the Knights of the Old Republic name generator) and my partner was a big fan of Rogue One, we had to get it. I was intrigued to notice there was also a dark side lady, a Doctor Aphra.

To find out who she was, I read her epynomous comic, and liked it enough to also get the Darth Vader comic it was a spinoff of. I highly recommend both! I find I very much enjoy Kieron Gillen's work: he writes an excellent Vader, and like the Dark Lord of the Sith himself, his stories move at a deliberate and purposeful pace, so far from the breathless rush that I find too many contemporary comics are consumed with.

Anyway, with both Jyn Erso and Doctor Aphra on board, we'll be getting into deckbuilding. That works very differently in Star Wars compared to the other Fantasy Flight LCGs: instead of selecting individual cards for your deck, you pick objectives, each of which comes with five preset player cards. This means there are less choices, but arguably they're far more significant ones: instead of agonizing over whether to have two or three copies of a single card in your deck, you're picking card sets and figuring how they're going to interact with each other. I think this was a good idea, and it wouldn't necessarily go amiss in other LCGs.

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Finally, a verdict: this was a fun enough game and it seems a real shame if Fantasy Flight doesn't follow it up with another Star Wars LCG. A co-operative Star Wars card game made to anything even remotely like the Lord of the Rings LCG standard would frankly be amazing. We can always hope?

Let's Read Tolkien 56: Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit

For the few hours of daylight that were left they rested, shifting into the shade as the sun moved, until at last the shadow of the western rim of their dell grew long, and darkness filled all the hollow.

Gollum leads the hobbits south, parallel to the mountains and the road, into Ithilien, an old part of Gondor that the malice of Sauron has yet to ruin. Tolkien names no less than sixteen kinds of plants that grow there in one paragraph alone. In this relative idyll, the hobbits make camp for the day. Sam asks Gollum if he could find them something to eat, and Gollum catches two rabbits for them.

To Gollum's horror, Sam makes a fire to stew the rabbits. Gollum complains that cooking will ruin the meat, and the fire will draw attention. Sam wants herbs and vegetables for his stew, naming potatoes ("taters") specifically, to Gollum's great confusion. Sam even mentions fish and chips!

Frodo and Sam eat the stew, but as Sam descends to the nearby stream to wash his cooking gear, he realizes to his horror that the fire is putting out a clearly visible pillar of smoke. He goes to douse it, but it's too late: four men have found their camp. Their leader introduces himself as Faramir, Captain of Gondor. Faramir briefly interrogates the hobbits, but as he's in a hurry to ambush a column of southerners heading for the Morannon, he leaves them behind, under guard. The hobbits witness the ambush, and Sam sees an Oliphaunt.

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Food plays a major part in this chapter, so let's talk about it. The Middle-earth potato is another Tolkien anachronism, only imported to Europe in the 16th century; fish and chips even more so! Anachronisms are rarer in the Lord of the Rings than in the Hobbit, but they're still around.

In his comments to Forrest J. Ackerman on a completely ridiculous movie project (loosely!) based on the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has this to say about lembas, the elven way-bread the hobbits have been subsisting on.

In the book lembas has two functions. It is a 'machine' or device for making credible the long marches with little provision, in a world in which as I have said 'miles are miles'. But that is relatively unimportant. It also has a much larger significance, of what one might hesitatingly call a 'religious' kind. This becomes later apparent, especially in the chapter 'Mount Doom'. (Letters, 210)

The script Tolkien is commenting on sounds uniquely terrible. He has a prophetic line: "Practically everything having moral import has vanished from the synopsis."

But lembas, then, is not just a storytelling device, but also, more importantly, a religious device. It sustains the hobbits, especially toward the end of their journey, but is completely unpalatable to Gollum. What lembas is, to cut some corners, is the communion wafer. Again, not by direct analogy, but by anticipation and metaphor. What sustains the hobbits, and remains completely alien to Gollum, is faith.

There's another boundary drawn by eating here, between Gollum and the hobbits. Gollum is horrified by cooking and declares it spoils meat. Gollum's dietary preferences, too, are disgusting to the hobbits, and in the internal dialogue that Sam overhears, the height of luxury Gollum's evil tendencies can imagine is eating fish every day.

Now, it should be remembered that Sméagol was originally a hobbit, and even if they weren't quite as bourgeois as the hobbits of Frodo's Shire, they seem to have lived a fairly civilized life. Gollum must have eaten cooked food. Now, though, after centuries of living under mountains and on whatever he could find, it repels him. Cooking has often been considered one of the defining features of civilization; what I think we're being told here is that the Ring has corrupted and debased Gollum so completely that he's almost become an animal.

Finally, leaving food behind, I think it's worth quoting Sam's experience of the ranger ambush, as one of the Southrons is killed right next to their hiding-place.

It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace

Again, Tolkien's relationship to war is an ambiguous one. Things like the orc-killing contest at Helm's Deep are very true to the bellicose saga traditions that are his main inspiration; passages like the above draw not only from his Christianity but a general humanity and, no doubt, a revulsion for war based on his own experience of the industrialized slaughter of the First World War. He never could reconcile the two, and I think the tension between them adds greatly to the whole work.

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Next time: an interrogation.