So, I am very fond of Lure. I have read through it numerous times, and find that I am rather fond of several of the other Rogue Traders, and almost every stopping point one might make along the way to the Dread Pearl. It can feel a little bit on rails, I agree, but I still much like it. I've never played through nor run it, but I really do enjoy it. That said, I do have a quandary: those of you who HAVE run it or played it, how did you make good use of the competitor Rogue Traders? The book doesn't use them because it wants us to decide how best to do that, but I'm not sure what that sometimes might be. The Light of Terra would be very different to me if another RT was running around, trying to do the same things as you, and a number of the stops I can more just see the competition hoping to pulverize your ship, and leave you stranded. So many of them have different ways of finding the endpoint that you might not see them much, and so I don't know good ways to have them interact with the players, whether jockeying, making truces, or just blasting the ever-loving crap out of each other. Of course, some of the write-ups are a joke, so they might need a step up, so that cocky armchair-admiral Bastille doesn't just get blown up.

Anyone want to share some experiences of using these NPC's? Did you maybe squeeze a bigger player, say from Edge, into the shindig, to give some more cool-factor to it? Maybe some stuff where the pimped characters weren't handily winning against their seeming, but maybe not on-paper, equals or betters? Thanks, and I look forward to the stories I might get to read. Have a good one.

We're in the middle of it, so I didn't read your entire post.

No further spoilers for me please!

Alex

Lure of the Expanse is the one book I didn't bring with me, along with most of my notes. Ohh well… From memory (and using search) here are the adversaries and what I did with them.

How odd, it edited everything after I hit spoiler.

Have actually used them more outside the adventure than in it. House M'Kao are a persistant ever-so-polite annoyance to the Inquisitor in our ascension campaign, whilst Jeremiah Blitz guest-starred in Deathwatch, making friends and influencing people by agreeing to sneak the kill-Team across the truce line into Tau space.

Best bits were

• his offering a 'friendly drink' with the space wolf, who nearly ended up falling off his seat in a coughing fit at the contents of the glass that Blitz was able to sip at calmly - the glass subsequently (after he recovered himself) turned out to be empty and bone dry; the ridiculously potent drink being a telepathic hallucination projected by blitz's tame psyker through the goblets (which were a psy-active piece of xenos artwork).
• His announcement that " I've got a plan " when the ship was about to be boarded by Quath'Fannor Commerce Protection Fleet customs parties - which extremely cautious enthusiasm, which turned out to be justified. " It's my understanding ," he tells them, " That the terminator plate you are equipped with was originally designed based on plasma drive maintenance exo-suits ." " You want us...to hide... inside the plasma drive core? Whilst the ship's still under power? " " The key to smuggling, Sir Astartes, is to find somewhere no sane person would think to look ..."

I’ve used them a number of times outside of the adventure, but not quite as much as I could have during the adventure itself. This was more due to time constraints than anything else, I wanted the little mini-mission node explorations to last 1 session.

Part of the explanation I used to for why they didn’t run in to many of the Rival Rogue traders along the way (although they did occasionally see one departing the world when they jumped in to system – indicating they were a week ahead or so.) was that the eldar map had a dozen different node locations on it – but they’d only need to hit four of them. The four they could figure out how to get to (ie – the adventures in the book) weren’t the same as the four the others chose.

For giggles I also tossed in an ork freebooter (acting like a RT) as one of the competitors.

For giggles I also tossed in an ork freebooter (acting like a RT) as one of the competitors.

Actually, he worked one of the best. It's a great instigator character, as orks are quite want to poke things to see what'll happen. I made him one of those blood-ax types that knows what a "taktikol retreat" was, so he'd get mixed in, loose a dozen boyz the have his mek teleporta him outa there. Also served kind of the same use as the guy above (nameless) used Bastelle - they'd find bodies of orks marked as his crew in a couple of places where I wanted to hint something bad was about to happen.

I considered having him appear as an extra enemy for Frozen Reaches, with the idea he could be bought off with a nice shinny ship gun or the like, but the adventure grew to complicated by the time we hit that part, so I decided to drop it.

He's still out there, somewhere, in his red-streaked "Fasta Krooza" (light cruiser), emulating a Rogue Trader, doing his 'ndevers.