Long story short, I'm thinking (still ath the phase of gathering ideas and fleshing them out) of running a Chaos in space campaign, by combining the Black Crusade character rules with the Rogue Trader ship rules.

Plot

I'm going for a somewhat free-form campaign (the way most prospective players play, any polt would anyway be derailed by personal quests for fame, glory or riches, random exploration and so on).

All the PCs would be condemned for some crime or the other, somewhere in the Imperium, and placed in cryogenic stasis at some point and place. Next thing they know they are thawed by Huron's Blackheart men somewhere within the Malestrom. They find out their caskets got found in a general freight container in a random freighter Huron's plrates attacked. Everyone aboard that might have known something is dead, and all they can find out at this point is that somebody (who was on the ship and is missing, presumed dead in the boarding action) paid a huge amount of money to the captain, to carry that container without any further questions.

At this point, not sure exactly how important the PCs are, and for whom, Huron will try to keep them close: offer them a (crappy) ship (where most senior officers will be instructed to keep an eye on them for him) and a chance to get back at the Imperium by pirating for him (for a while at least).

Where the PC's go from there (pirates, mercenaries, sneak back into the Imperium to find out who was so interested in them etc.) and how they get the crew on their side is up to them.

Rules

Everything character related will be using Black Crusade rules.

Aquiring equipment and ship components will be using BC Infamy rules.

Everything ship related will be using Rogue Trader rules with MathHammer.

I'm interested what you guys think about this idea.

Any suggestions and comments welcome.

PS: This has been posted in both RT and BC forums, as I'm interested in feedback from ppl who enjoy both systems.

We're pretty much already playing that. Former penal legion on a captured mutineers' frigate. It's a sound idea, in principle, though we ditched the acquisitions system in favour of throne gelt/souls, and are now mass producing frenzon in our cargo hold for extra money, and auctioning off slaves as we capture them.

Played that, works just fine.

Might want to housrule stats for some chaos vessels which are listed as NPC ships without space value.

Honestly, the rules being easily convertible (for the most part) across the 40K RPGs was a massive draw for me in terms of how a given campaign could be enhanced by multiple rule sets, opening up detailed involvement in a storyline by numerous factions and allowing incredibly varied character creation as long it fit the nature of the campaign in question, so with that in mind anything like what you described tends to get a massive thumbs up from me. I believe the Tome of Excess for Black Crusade has a class specifically designed around this theme, the Pirate Prince of Ragged Helix, but I currently don't have direct access to the tomes themselves to expand on that beyond knowing it at least provides a ship and character class incredibly well suited for a Chaos-themed RT campaign.

If anyone's using that class, the Rogue Trader rules for vessels would be a fantastic way to provide detail for their ship and I'm quite envious of your players for being able to enjoy such a fitting combination of game systems.

The biggest problem is probably that FFG decided to start leaving off a lot of the important details when they statted NPC ships for RT after the first couple books. And I mean some of the big ones, like how space the non-Imperial hulls have, how much space and power a lot of the non-Imperial components require. Even some of the Imperial ships got left light on some of those details

That being said, BC and RT are quite well suited to combining in a game. Thematically at least, if not always rules-wise.