You know it’s going to be one of those nights when the session starts not with a war cry, but with Dave typing mournfully into Discord at 7:35pm:
“My mic is playing up.”
It echoed like a premonition of doom.
Dave, ever the techno-optimist, had updated to the latest Windows 11 patch (KB5060842) because the release notes promised to fix the very memory leak issue that had plagued him before. Trusting Windows to fix itself is like trusting a grox not to gore you if you look at it funny.
Within 20 minutes, his machine was hemorrhaging RAM like a busted Promethium tank. Thirty-two glorious gigabytes, all devoured by the great void. We told him to reboot. He rebooted. The leak returned faster than Craig at the sound of a loot chest unlocking.
Dave then tried to roll back. But alas, the rollback only removed security patches, not the blight itself. He toggled services, killed startup tasks, sacrificed a small Java daemon—no dice. The leak endured.
Eventually, Dave entered “Pascal Spectator Mode.” He watched via Discord stream and issued guidance like a Tech Priest operating a remote forklift:
“Use the meltagun.”
“No, not that button.”
“Why is Craig charging the refrigerator?”
He became a digital Obi-Wan, whispering from the cloud, occasionally glitching into a Force Ghost every time Discord buffered.
🦾 Meanwhile, In the Actual Game (Sort Of)
To say we were also fighting the game would be an understatement. Rogue Trader had clearly ingested some of Dave’s memory leak and decided to offer up a constant stream of “loss of synchronization” errors. Every 15 minutes, someone—usually Safe or Craig—was ejected from the Warp like a bolus of corrupted data.
Step 1: Reboot Rogue Trader.
Step 2: Load save.
Step 3: Wait for sync.
Step 4: Someone drops.
Step 5: Repeat until morale breaks.
It was the digital version of Sisyphus, except instead of rolling a boulder, we were launching a CRPG with all the stability of a servitor with its RAM on fire.
By the time we actually resumed combat, it was already creeping toward midnight. Of course, that’s when the game decided to unleash something big. And not “Craig’s ego” big—we’re talking 800 hit point “hope you packed snacks and painkillers” big.
It lumbered onto the battlefield with the ominous weight of an unpaid Adobe subscription. We had barely started swinging when Zaph looked at the clock, narrowed his eyes, and said:
“This is going to be at least another hour. Maybe two.”We all silently agreed. We were too tired, too broken, too RAM-deprived to face a boss fight that would likely involve multiple phases, a monologue, and Craig yelling, “I jump on it!”
So we paused. Mid-battle. Mid-chaos. Dave still exiled from gameplay, Craig mid-swing, and a monster mid-lurch.
🎮 Final Thoughts: The Emperor Protects (But Not from Windows Updates)
This wasn’t a Rogue Trader session. It was an elaborate tech support LARP with occasional combat elements. Dave, our noble Pascal, spent the night scrying the battlefield through Discord like a divining priest watching over the feeble.
We fought no demons, defeated no masterminds. Our true enemies were:
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Patch KB5060842 (may its memory leak forever),
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Rogue Trader’s netcode, and
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Whatever eldritch algorithm decides when a save syncs correctly.
And yet—somehow—we remain undaunted. We’ll return next week. With patched clients. With cleared caches. And with Dave, gods willing, back in the pilot’s seat of Pascal, ready to ignite something other than his RAM.
In the grim darkness of the future, there is only war. But in the present, there is only Task Manager.
