Well, it's not so much a campaign. Some forumites were in on the game at GenCon; I was just going to use the same characters this year and assume that it's the future of the same group.
The story thus far: The characters were the crew of a Far Trader looking to make a few credits beyond the borders of the Imperium, pretty much smack dab in the deadspace region in the Alpha Quadrant of Crucis Margin.
The ship, after some repairs, was having some difficulty making ends meet. Fortunately, they found a potential charter: A group of pilgrims (followers of the Church of Stellar Divinity) from the Imperium were bound for the Free and Holy Federation of Amil. The pilgrims were stranded when their former ride got spooked by a Deadspace-induced misjump and decided to return to imperial space. The charter would pay all the bills and leave enough of the hold open to make some cash on the side, an ideal situation for the troubled ship.
To make a long story short, both the group's wealthy benefactor and a recent convert had an ulterior motive -- they knew that one of the sacred temples in the federation had star charts an coordinates secreted in them of "backways" of carefully charted brown dwarves used by pre-Imperial colonists to navigate the sparse space of the domain with primitive J1 drives.
Not only would this prove potentially valueable for strategic and commerce reasons, but the group's benefactor was in it for the money. The clues that led him here were in pursuit of an ancient treasure ship supposedly lost around one of the brown dwarves.
The other was an assassin, with motives that were never revealed...
Only one of the three groups that played the adventure made it to the federation.
Anyways, I was uncertain what to do: Stay in the Crucis Margin or have the crew go towards the Glimmerdrift or Gateway, or whether it was an immediate follow up to the previous adventure (perhaps exploring the treasure ship and throwing in a twist, like something ancient and evil), or use the post-booty activities as a lead in to get them involved in some other aspects weaved into the book.
I considered exploring some aspects of the setting in the book or the setting at large, such as the efforts of the K'kree in the region, or odd aliens like the Wanderers.
All too often, I run "murder on the orient express" type games at least for one-offs, so I am trying to avoid that this time. I'm thinking something like Ordeal by Eshar or Nomads of the World Ocean, where the players must politic. But I'm not seeing a real good place to do this without making up something spanking new instead of dovetailing with what is already there.
