I had a thought for a grand adventure hunting down one of the lost Gloriana-Class Battleships, and I'm curious on the take of other GMs. This is an adventure chain that would take players well outside the Screaming Vortex, but has sufficient pieces to make for a long campaign, and rewards enough to make them prominent in a Black Crusade of their own.

In particular, my thought was to find the Macragge's Honour, the Ultramarines Gloriana that was lost in the warp after ship to ship action with the Word Bearer's and Kor Phaeron which disabled it's Geller field and left it stranded. Since Kor Phaeron is still apparently floating around in the 42nd millennium, it seems likely that there would be some sort of record of the encounter. I see a campaign playing out something like this:

1. Find a sect of Word Bearers with the account of Kor Phaeron's 'scuttling' of the Macragges Honour (even though Kor Phaeron was actually defeated, perhaps some intrigue to be had from that). This would provide PCs the last known location and heading of the missing Gloriana, and is itself a series of compacts as the PCs either earn the trust of the Word Bearers or sufficient wealth to trade for the information.

2. Acquire a contingent of Navigators, preferably of a well known and established house. My thought here is to create a grand ritual using the Navigators as sacrifice. Use the Navigators, channeled through a particularly powerful psyker to create a map of the warp in the vein of a holographic image above the ritual. Then use them to turn back the clock on the map to when the Gloriana was lost, chart the position and heading of the lost ship, then turn the clock forward again charting the ships course through the intervening warp tides. This bit assumes some level of logic to warp tides, which is a bit absurd, but its a first shot at locating the vessel.

3. Once the region of the warp has been narrowed, the PCs will need a potent relic of the Ultramarines to be used as a psyfocus, capturing and tracing the aura of the Ultramarines in attempt to scry for the Gloriana in the narrowed space. I feel like this could be done by a coven of psykers, or better yet a group of Dark Eldar Medusae inducing a trip to Commorragh.

4. The PCs, once they have the location and the ability to narrow in on the vessel will need a small fleet of recovery vessels to make the trip into, most likely, Imperial space.

Then the fun begins, because the Gloriana's were home to the Primarchs. No telling what riches they left behind, let alone the fact that it would have been home to at least a couple of chapters of Space Marines and all of their support equipment. Better in the case of the Macragge's Honour because it was the largest Gloriana, and because it spent the last 10,000 years in the warp. Maybe dangerous warp entities have roosted there waiting for the ship to be rediscovered. Maybe the Word Bearers boarding parties and the Ultramarines are still alive and locked in an epic struggle for the ship. Maybe some contingent of the Ultramarines survived and went into stasis, only to reawaken to greet intruders. Maybe all of the above. I feel like boarding the Macragge's Honour is just the halfway point in the campaign as the PCs struggle to salvage her. Lets not forget, her Geller fields were disabled, so the PCs have to struggle with either getting them running again while still in the warp, or find some way to shunt her into real space so they can start clearing her out. All the while, vulnerable to predators of all kinds.

And, again, think of the loot. All the support vehicles for a Primarch and a good chunk of his legion, all the geneseed stored for replenishing troops, all that power armour, and the Gloriana itself, one of 20 such vessels that could destroy traditional battlecruisers with one broadside. Then what do you do with it all? Turn it over to Abaddon to add another to his fleet? Go back to the Screaming Vortex and dominate the war moons of Talax so you can recruit the entire body into your budding army? Start whole new chapters of Chaos Space Marines?

I'm curious on what others think of this idea. Its a huge undertaking, probably too big for all but the most dedicated of groups. But oh the possibilities. There's so much for the PCs to do, so much they could dictate themselves. And it would culminate in an epic reward.

I'm also curious on what others think the stats for a Gloriana should be. The whole idea of them has been altered over the years. Ships that started out as battlebarges became Gloriana's, so existing stats from BFG are somewhat poor for their latest description. Not to mention you need some way to put pen to paper on what is actually IN the Gloriana that can be salvaged/rebuilt. Tallies of support vehicles and types, weapons lockers, munitions, etc.

Any ideas for embellishing/fleshing out the story are welcome too. Really just looking for brainstorming.

I don't have too much to add since this seems like a great basically ready to go idea that I'd love to either play through or run, it has a ton of legs and angles. I wasn't too familiar with the ships before this topic so when I thought about it for a minute and looked it up I was surprised by just how big and tough they are. First of all these are Heresy era boats, so presumably they would be equipped to launch not hundreds but thousands of space marines, especially because it's a Smurf boat. Since it's Heresy era it'd be able to land presumably millions and millions of normal soldiers. You can get a universe class conveyor from RT to house 2 millionish troops with the right mods. That ship is both less than half the size, and is not superpowered movie marine heresy tech.

You could conceivably have thousands of marines and many thousands of soldiers sitting in suspended animation. Ready for a fight, but also just sitting there begging to be corrupted in their sleep. Once you finally get the thing operational, you might be able to skip the recruiting steps and head straight for the Black Crusading part. Not that it'd be wise (in or out of story), but it would be conceivable.

It'd have all the sorts of crazy strong weapons that seem crazy overpowered from some splatbooks as a baseline if not on the weaker side.

As far as how I'd stat stuff. I'd take the strongest gear you can find in the splatbooks and use that as either your baseline, or maybe add a few points to them, or maybe just slightly spiffier versions of DW gear. Make up new special super thrice blessed runic forceswords that add 2 damage and pen per PR. All sorts of silliness. As far as you think you can go without snapping the balance of the game. That'd be my advice with the ship itself.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxYPI8sS1DsYT1Ytci1vaG5iQTA/edit?pli=1

This is some free homebrew with statted out battleships that one of the local posters made(his name eludes me). Add whatever you need to dwarf those by a bit. Again I don't know how far you really can continue stretching the stats and have it still work mechanically. But at the least giving it a bit more punch. 4 macros per side, does another 1 or 2 points of damage.

Again this is all in how you choose to interpret what might have survived, and what the relevant ship might had when it was lost. Also in terms of what you're willing to do with the balance. I'd honestly likely err on the side of caution and only make stuff like besterest quality. A few points her and there, a few new qualities perhaps. And leave most of the reward be the non strictly mechanical. The ship and it's ability to easily be the focal point of any crusade.