The Ghost Ship - a scenario for The Expanse RPG

What is this project about

The Ghost Ship was developed as a holidays special session with haloween + christmas theme mix when a player of our Expanse RPG group told us in advance he wouldn't be able to attend to one session.

I wrote the short premise of a ship docking with the crew's, saying it was a merchant place (much like a market) but being actually quite empty. Upon arrival on the ship, one of the player characters would be kidnapped (the PC of the player that wouldn't be present) and the other PCs would need to find him.

The Ghost Ship works like a maze accompained of a deck of random encounters to make the work easier on the GM (and heavier on the guy who developed that). That way, the GM doesn't need to think of specific encounters for each room. Rather, just draw a card and let that encounter happen.

Due to it's characteristics, this scenario can be run in a single session of 2-3h. You can also speed it up by keeping the clue and rest cards apart from the main deck and by choosing to activate them whenever you want. The missing crewmember can be found in a specific compartment or you can change his placement on the fly to make the crew find him faster - or not.

Ideally, someone kidnapped him (or her), but that NPC won't be found on the ship. On the other hand, you can set an encounter with that supposed villain. If it's some hollidays special adventure, you might want to give them a reward for rescuing the crewmember. The guys at the Expanse RPG Fan Community Discord server suggested a goose to be found at the same room as the kidnapped crewmember and I adopted the idea.

Content

This project contains the following files:

Deck of random encounter cards in A4 and Letter form. It's printer friendly. Print it in real size (or resizing 100% for some printers) and cut when indicated.

Maps for each compartment of the ship. They're all 10x10 squares and if you're indeed playing The Expanse RPG, cosider each square as 2x2 m.

Map files that you can edit on Dungeon Map Doodler. They're just not correctly cropped as 10x10 there, so you'll need to crop them manually using a image editing software.

Compartments of the ship

The map files contain eight rooms/compartments for the ship. They are numbered according to the room in which it's accessed. 0 is the entrance, -N refer to levels below the entrance and +N refer to levels above it. All maps are 10x10 squares. The list of compartments is:

+2 Bridge
+1 Passengers (rooms)
0 Entrance
-1 Crew Quarters
-2 Cargo
-3 Cargo
-4 Engineering
-5 Reactor

Running The Ghost Ship

The ship works like a maze. I was inspired by this reply on Reddit about running a maze. Have the PCs choose a room and, upon entering it, draw a card to reveal the encounter they'll need to face.

If you're using a virtual tabletop service that allows you to hide and reveal areas, I suggest you hide all areas except the rooms the PCs are in. Let the rooms they accessed remain revealed.

There are two options for drawing the cards: (1) simply draw one card from the deck and apply its effect (better suited for online play) or (2) draw some cards (equal to the number of players), show the back of them to the players and let them choose which one they want to see/activate - you might reveal or suggest the content of one of them if they pass a Perception (intuition) test (set a high TN for that, like 17).

Future projects

Currently I'm [slowly] working on a better designed and rather generic set of cards for random encounters. There's no ETA for the moment but I'll release it in 2023. If you want to follow this account, you'll be notified by Itch.io when it is released - and when other projects go live as well.

If you have any comments and feedback, feel free to post it! I'd love to hear what you found about the project.

This is a nonprofit, independent, fan-made, unofficial adventure for The Expanse RPG. The Expanse Roleplaying Game is © Green Ronin Publishing. The Expanse is © Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.