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Rogue Trader (wh40k) RP-- Get your ass to the in-character wave! Seriously!
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Makes sense. I don't think I'd entrust the safety and navigation of a ship with 10,000+ souls on board to a person who runs the risk of being possessed by a Daemon/swallowed by the Warp on one of their bad days.
It's workable, not anything to boycott over, but it's bad enough to make some legitimate snarky comments. Sure the book is huge, but the percentage of typos has meant we've run into them really fast compared to every other game system I've played. I'm more annoyed by some of their descriptions, which often can be interpreted multiple ways.
That said, the game is too fun to really get worked up over the minor issues it has. If you have a good GM who can make calls on the fly the players will hardly notice.
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That's what I got the impression of. I'm going back and forth as to whether I should purchase this yet. I was going to wait until Ascension came out for DH, but that may take a while.
There is still a lot of crazy shit that can happen, from the looks of it. You can arrive really, really late at your destination, for example, you can encounter all sorts of crazy stuff with alarming regularity, depending on rolls and GM discretion.
I think the typos things is being overstated. I think some of the typos ae actually British English, such as "traveller" and "savour."
Which is a little odd considering a bunch of guys in Minnesota made the game.
It's a Warhammer 40k game, and Warhammer 40k is a Games Workshop property. Games Workshop is based in the UK, and as such all of their literature is written in the Queen's English. It's not odd at all.
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In the grim dark future of the 41st millennium, there is only the Oxford English Dictionary.
But that's all right because it is now the size of a planet and includes every word, ever.
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They had a index page once, but it was run by an AI so it had to be purged.
Now the largest moon in the system is full of clergymen shuffling punchcards around in filing-cathedrals.
They have a choir of Astropath's monitoring all communication in the Imperium and legions of field agents, if they catch you using a word that isn't in the Dictorium they'll hunt you down and purge you. Emperor help you if you were playing scrabble at the time.
I wonder how grave an offense would have to be for the Ordo Lexicanicus to order an Exterminatus on a planet.
Like adding IM phrases into the local dictionary.
-Last known transmission from Forbidden World Teratax VI
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I had a brief session after our character building was complete last week. We didn't do much, though, just a bit of setting exposition and a brief fight with some murder servitors. The Rogue Trader's ability to give anyone he can see who can hear him a +10 to any test once per round is especially tasty. I also like that if you're trained in a weapon class, you can use all of the types of that weapon; for example, my Explorator has Basic weapon training (universal), which allows me to fire bolt, las, sp, melta, plasma and launcher guns.
Aside from that, so far it's basically Dark Heresy with the awesome dial turned up, which suits me fine. I'm really looking forward to taking control of the ship
This makes me look forward to Ascension. Which is actually supposed to be Dark Heresy with the awesome dial turned up.
What is Ascension?
It's to be a rule book for Dark Heresy that allows you to continue your characters beyond the highest class rank attainable in the original DH core book. From what I've heard, it places you in the role of Interrogator, and is supposed to put the players on an equal footing with the power level of the classes found in Rogue Trader. Naturally it hasn't come out yet, but I assume it'll come out some time after The Radical's Handbook.
Amazon has some info on it, and I think the Fantasy Flight DH website has some too, since I recall digging up some info on it there.
Really? If your DH characters were that powerful then he should have been throwing serious challenges at you, Aliens etc. I hate to say it but my one flaw with DH is that it's almost three times as much work for the DM to prepare for games since you have to custom-make nearly every enemy if you want the game to be a credible challenge.
Hahaha, I'm sorry man, pathfinder is so crappy
And then it buffed everything else as well, so it didn't really change anything.
We were getting a fair amount of xenos, but the campaign was based around a rogue trader vessel which was slightly more rogue than it should have been, so there were a couple of human fights as well. Looting was handled quite well by using the ganger scum weapons, as they provide a credible threat without being that enticing for a player, so we weren't hauling around uber-guns by the end of the campaign - the only real additions to our arsenal were a heavy stubber, a shiruken pistol and plasma gun with very limited ammunition, and a few best-quality melee weapons.
Here are just a few thoughts I had on your outline; they're not especially original or anything, and I'm sure you're thinking about these points already, but if I help even a little then I'm happy.
Second, I think the escape sequence can become an Endeavour in itself. I only see one problem with the plot as it stands right now, and that's what's happening to your ship as you're isolated from it - if this Chaos fleet is powerful enough to smash the planet's defences so quickly, how does your ship manage to survive?
The cool thing about Endeavours is that they're the perfect way to reduce railroadiness - the players have to hit a number, and there are more than enough objectives to hit that number, so they can pick and choose which goals they want to go for, and exactly how they want to go about those goals. They're really a great tool, both for planning the overall campaign and for laying clearly out to the players what their current goals are.
So to kill two birds with one stone, one cool way to explain the survival of the party's ship, and to keep them involved with their ship's survival, while also giving them a few different options, might be to have them moving through the city recapturing defences and comms with which to direct and defend their ship, or something similar. They can choose which objectives they want to go for and each one can have a different knock-on effect. It's like a mini-Endeavour, except rather than granting Profit Factor, defending the ship and successfully escaping the planet fulfills one objective of the greater Endeavour, if you see what I mean.
If the opening gave the players a way to ease into social interaction in this world, this will give them a nice easy taste of goal-oriented battle, possibly even commanding some tattered guardsmen survivors or something. They don't have to complete all the objectives, but perhaps each one completed much reduces damage done to their ship?
Third, I think the Chaos picket ship would make an awesome antagonist for the campaign. You get the chance to show off how ancient, sinister and powerful it is to begin with, and it can hound them throughout the campaign until the party figures out a way to destroy it, whether through direct confrontation or some trick maneuver involving the terrain of space. What would be cool is that you can alternate the fairly small-scale and investigative Cultist plot with large-scale attacks from the Chaos picket ship. Destroying the picket might even contribute achievement points toward the larger Endeavour.
The Cultist plot, by the way, is great. Maybe if you really want to motivate your party at the beginning of that plot, subtract a point of Profit Factor for every rich, paying noble refugee who gets horribly eviscerated...
Finally, I spy potential there for a sequel - I suspect your players will want to get involved in the eventual confrontation between the Imperial Navy and the Chaos Fleet, and they still have to collect their bounty from the Governor. It's possible you've outlined the first half of a very cool campaign with a gigantic finale.
One thing that could come up is that once the picket is knocked out, there's no reason not to broadcast a message anymore, but broadcasting a message isn't quite the same heroic image as arriving in Imperial space with a dire warning.
You can play that one by ear I guess, either saying that you're so close it'd actually be quicker and wiser to arrive in the system personally than risk your message getting lost in the warp or being heard by other ears. Or more dramatically, knocking the Astropath out when the choir dies in a numbing wave of psychic energy.
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Who's most interested in GMing?