Guildfleet Yeemo is another location for Psi-wars. It is a mobile city of Traders built into former warships. I love the Traders, and I built this fleet to explore what such a city would be like. If you don't know what psi-wars is, the best place to start is probably The Psi Wars Primer. The project is great, and if you haven't read enough of it to get its basics, you should, because it's really cool!
Guildfleet Yeemo is a collection of enormous ships transformed into the permanent home of the Yeemo Clan. They eke out a living traveling from planet to planet, peddling their wares and services as they go.
Yeemo travels back and forth between the trader belt in the core and the nearer portions of the Umbral rim. It tends not to vary from this route too much, and can occasionally feel a little paternalistic about the worlds it visits routinely.
This article mostly focuses on the locations to visit in Guildfleet Yeemo. This includes small shops, great industries, and places of interest a party might be led to or seek out.
Fixtures
A visitor to Guildfleet Yeemo is very likely to interact with one of these major facilities. Indeed, most members of the Guildfleet know someone who works at one of them. They form the economic and cultural core of Clan Yeemo
Yeemo Powerforge: The signature industry of the Guildfleet, Yeemo Powerforge sells and more importantly maintains advanced reactors all along the Guildfleet's route. While its reactors are efficient and powerful, they also can be difficult to replace parts... which means the Powerforge has a steady supply of customers. A sizeable portion of the Guildfleet's total income derives from Powerforge, and it employs a similarly significant portion of the populace.
The Geospace: Traders, appropriately, rely on trade to earn their livelihoods, but they also prefer to keep aliens at a sanitary distance, and are reluctant to let outsiders wander about their ships. The solution is The Geospace, a massive collection of meeting rooms equipped with barriers that allow Traders to conduct business in person with aliens without risking their health. The Geospace is located nearby the Ark's main hangers, and is kept pristine and impressive. The Geospace is also renowned for its privacy, and clandestine meetings between two sets of traders or even two sets of aliens are fairly common in its labyrinthine rooms.
The Great Hospital: A large state-of the-art facility serving both its local population and visitors, The Great Hospital of Yeemo aims to be the best hospital around for at least half of the planets it visits. In addition to simple preventative medicine, the great hospital excels at cybernetics, cloning, and the treatment of rare maladies. It's especially renowned for its work with cybernetics replicating trader speed of thought in aliens.
The Bridge: The leadership and governance of the Guildfleet is known as "The Bridge". While they do physically steer the ark from place to place, and have set up their offices in the old bridge of the main Ark, the officers of the bridge fill as much, if not more, of a social role than a navigational one. The Aunts and Uncles there have extensive connections and both soft and hard power. Of course, getting an audience at the bridge requires connections in the first place.
Food and Lodging
Access to a Trader Guildfleet isn't simply a matter of money, the Ark is reserved for Traders, and to stay a Trader must vouch for you, so you generally need to find someone willing to share their cramped space with you, or return to your ship to sleep when your business is done.
Restaurants, on the other hand, abound.
Elegant Eels: Serving the iconic leather eels of the traders, Elegant Eels specializes in this most Trader of delicacies. It has three ways to cook up the eels for aliens or the young, but patrons mostly come to consume the large eels whole. The place is full of bubbling aquariums filled with the eels, doubling as partitions and providing a low level of noise. While very expensive, Elegant Eels isn't exactly refined: there is something primal and rough about the place, as one might expect from a place where Traders take off their masks and gulp down live creatures whole.
Elegant Eels is the favorite haunt of Saporee Remix, a wealthy trader with extensive connections to Yeemo's criminal world. It's also a favorite haunt of senior security officers: perhaps because it's an ideal place to flaunt wealth and masculinity, or perhaps because the two may have business together
The Observation Deck: The Observation Deck specializes not in Trader food, but in importing and imitating the local traditions of whatever planet the Ark is currently orbiting around. The place gets redecorated each time the Guildfleet takes up orbit around a new planet, cheap printable posters swapped out to match the newest location. The Observation Deck has an almost human feel to it, intentionally mimicking offworld motifs. It does a steady business, and is always full of customers.
Ideal Eats: A small busy shop selling bites of food rendered into simple colorful geometric shapes. This is a neorational culinary tradition celebrating mathematics and transforming the dull paste produced the ship's vats into something bright, delightful, and delicious.
Changing Hours: A fine restaurant specializing in showcasing the full breadth of the galaxy's cuisine. Its decor is mixed, an ever-changing collection. Many will observe a superstitious edge to the restaurant, and they're not wrong, but spectacle, display, and conspicuous consumption come first.
The Four-Sided Coin: A casino catering to visitors as much as to Yeemo Traders, the four-sided coin is a place to indulge in vices from around the galaxy and to try your hand at Rikarik, the infamous Trader game where not being able to see the rapidly flashed cards is a major disadvantage. The Four-Sided Coin is very Touristy, presenting a very carefully cultivated impression of trader culture to entice those seeking the exotic without offending anyone with anything truly alien.
Problems and Solutions
Everywhere has trouble, even a Guildfleet ship, and there are places that specialize in taking care of such things. One may accuse them of even causing such trouble, but most of the time these places would prefer the negative effects to end up outside of the Guildfleet.
Imperial Defense: A law firm specializing in imperial law. Some of their clients are accused offenders, some need help with the arcane import laws for different planets, and some are trying to win lawsuits on Imperial worlds.
Yitkan's Placement Agency: One of the small places that make Trader society function, Yitkan's focuses on finding work for the least fortunate members of the ark. They do a steady business: living on an ark isn't cheap, and Traders can be very rigid about their contracts.
Tesseract Security: A security company in name, Tesseract Security is essentially a mercenary outfit for hire, complete with their own transportation. Tesseract Security likes to stay somewhat above the board, but that's mostly a matter of not wanting the law on their backs.
Next Level Negotiation: If you want on board an Ark past a small designated area, you need a host. This is a fairly intense duty for a Trader to agree to, with substantial social and legal penalties for vouching for the wrong guest. Next Level Negotiation helps outsiders find business partners, and it helps business partners check out just how trustworthy their proposed associates are.
Yeemo Sporting Wholesale: Outwardly, Sporting Wholesale is a place to buy gear for the outdoors in bulk. In reality, it's an arms dealer hawking "consumer" grade firearms that can be rapidly upgraded into military level hardware. Sporting Wholesale will tune its business model to match local conditions, but often the shipments go straight from orbit through smugglers to worlds other than the one the Guildfleet is at. Over the last generation or so, they've done fantastic business.
Yeemo Exotics: Specializing in the transportation of exotic beasts from around the Galaxy, Yeemo Exotics has a wide variety of beasts from all over the Galaxy: or at least from all over Guildfleet Yeemo's long route. Yeemo Exotic's space is excessive for an exotic pet dealer... but that's because the company is a rebranding of a slaver facility that goes in and out of business depending on the local legality of such practices. Traders don't like using slaves on their arks: the precious space is meant for Traders, not aliens. But if moving slaves around can turn a profit, they'll tolerate it, as long as the "cargo" is kept isolated and off-loaded fairly quickly.
Shops:
Traders love to trade, and Clan Yeemo is no exception.
Heirlooms and Dials: A pawn shop willing to accept old trader tech. Finding actual heirloom tech here is possible, but the shop is going to get a good price for it, and you've got to spot it before someone else snaps up the millennia old irreplaceable tech. The owner, Yeemo Ituna, is notoriously shrewd, has a sharp eye, and drives a hard bargain. She has a weakness for making bets to resolve hard haggling, but only based on trader specific games, and only against "easy marks".
Fashions and Facades: A trader rebreather store, selling the latest trends, allowing the trader to customize their appearance for the outside world. Remember, your mask is your face. They do a large amount of custom work, from designing a look to complement a face to executing the most intricate designs brought to them.
Custom Arms: A gun shop, specializing in trader arms and smart gun maintenance. The proprietor, Yeemo Semarix (and indeed much of the staff) has a full set of cybernetic spider limbs. Those who know Semarix especially well know he also dabbles in espionage, buying and selling information, and is expert at installing bugs.
Digital Assistance: A robot shop, willing to sell, service, and buy trader robots. The shop and the store are the same location, with the shop hanging vertically over the registers along an old vertical shaft. The place relies heavily on robotic labor, and it can be difficult to distinguish between stock, labor, and repair jobs.
The Bargain Bin: Supposedly a wholesaler recycling rejected product from other sources, The Bargain Bin has specialized in pharmaceuticals. Other places would call them "unlicensed", but here on the Guildfleet, they are merely "unprescribed". Some are useful, some recreational, some dangerous. The proprietor is quick to warn customers about taking the goods off of the Ark, but often follows up the warning with a wink.
Quick Fire Tech: Catering mostly to Aliens, Quick Fire Tech promises to teach them the intricacies of how trader tech works, allowing them to get the trader tech perk. This actual training is poor, but the exposure to many different types of trader tech allows a diligent student to effectively teach themselves. The training is heavily neo-rational, full of quotes and 'proven methods'.
Using Guildfleet Yeemo:
I wrote Guildfleet Yeemo as a sample Trader Ark, and many of the places don't need to be on Guildfleet Yeemo specifically. These places have two purposes. The first is color: what exactly do you find on a Trader Guildfleet? what do they eat? how do they make money? What can you buy? The second purpose is to give players a way to interact with the city. These are places and people that can be walked up to and talked with. There is a big difference between asking the GM for a streetwise roll to find a smuggler, and talking to the proprietor of the Bargain Bin to see if he is willing to point you at one.
I hope this helps give the Traders more color, and I hope you are both entertained and inspired by these parts of a Trader City. Happy Gaming!
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