Have any of your players expressed interest ( or threatened to) bail out on their =I= obligations to go " Star Trekking" in RT as soon as it comes out? I believe I.m going to have to go with the flow as soon as they pick up their books. My players are around their 3rd rank so maybe they wont file them away but I guess I'll have to see how "cool" the new characters are.

Anyone else see this on the horizon? At least for us running two separate games isn't an option.

If you wanna keep the same characters but transfer them to RT you could easily just have them leave the Inquisition. Since they're low ranks you might have their Inquisitor offed by a group of other inquisitors for some unknown but serious heresy. The players, neigh the entire organization of the former Inquisitor, are then investigated. Inevitably the guilty, mostly high ranking interrogators, receive execution. Lowly acolytes, uninvolved the whole mater ,are given the choice to either join with another Inquisitor or leave the Inquisition all together. Obviously you players are going to want to leave inorder to play RT so they accept the former. Next they are given some cash and the one with most leadership/responsibility in the group is given a limited Letter of Marque. Seems pretty straight foward from then, meaning all they have to due is purchase some old Navy ship and boom they're sailing amongst the stars. At least this is how my group tells me they want to handle it.

That's a good idea. I'll just have to wait and see how the wind blows with my group on this one. Hopefully I'll have made their characters exploits interesting enough that they'll want to continue with them and not just want to roll up new "improved" versions.

Adepts in space would be fun- but it might be overshadowed by Rogue Traders in space. Only time will tell.

I'm fully intending to put my Dark Heresy campaign on hold for a while to start a new Rogue Trader game. It's quite full of new ideas and themes that I think is natural many 40k roleplay fans will want to explore.

It doesn't mean we've lost interest in Dark Heresy, but we have been playing it for a year straight. I'm sure we'll play some RT and then come back to it.

Maybe the Radicals Handbook will garner some more interest for the players.

Yep, "Radicals" should come out FIRST, after all


Anyway, I do not see the "Danger" in my two groups that they are going to want to change system

In Group 1 two of the three players are to happy to play "special ops" and would shun away from being high ranking members who will deal with "strategic thinking".

Group 2 are all made up of WH40K "newbies" who are not familiar with the background. They still have a hard time to puzzle out the workings of society in rather medivial and isolated Dusk. Making decission for or against long term buisness will not make them happy till "alot later"!

Anyway, I will be so happy to be offered rules and mechanics for space travelling... especially to gain a feeling for "time and distance". In every group there is one player with the VOID BORN orgin. To these, I might now be able to give material for further background developing.

my group has only done one adventure and im pretty sure that they will enjoy continuing as they are running of to join a rouge trader wouldnt suit them, though games involving rouge traders could be fun!!

Or they are sent into deep undercover (devised by the GM)

Honestly, I'm looking at RT as a supplement for DH right now. I want to see what the next few books for RT are going to be and the overall power level of the game before I consider running a RT game. But the rules and background for interstellar travel and exploration should definitely be of use for a more powerful DH party. Of course I have no aversions to playing in a RT game -- I just feel that I haven't really done enough with DH yet.

My GM for Dark Heresy has weaved it together in such a way that our cell of acolytes has developed an ongoing association with a Rogue Trader that will be our basis for adventuring once RT comes out. When the game ships we'll do a rotating deal where we have some adventures with our acolytes and then bounce back to see what's going on in space. When the dark heresy group catches up power-wise we'll have more oportunity to decide who we are playing session to session and co-mingle the games together. I've got high hopes.

My PCs wanted to play RT the day DH came out.

Dalnor Surloc said:

Holy infinite mirrors, Batman, it's a game within a game, excellent! I can just see your group of acolytes huddled around a flickering glow-globe while you narrate what the acolytes GM narrates, or is one of the acolytes the GM? And would the acolytes being distracted from their sacred duties by playing pretend Rogue Traders be considered heresy?

As for jumping ship, my group will be doing such for a bit. After retooling the two free preview adventures into ship logs their DH PC's were reading to get to the heart of the mystery they're exploring, and thus they played the info the adept read as opposed to me info-dumping them, they were rather psyched up about rogue trader and want to give it a spin when it hits the shelves. I'm rather excited about it my self as, after running DH for over a year, I need a break from it. Rogue Trader really dose have a very different atmosphere and feel which i think is just the thing we need. We'll be returning to DH after a time when we need a break from the Glory and Freedom of RT for the Draconian Claustrophobia of DH.

Any chance of you sharing those Ship's Logs, Graver? That sounds like an excellent and slick way to set up the lead in to using those adventures.

Callidon said:

Now why didn't I think of that? That'd certainly spice things up a bit.

Well, my players are already past those 5000 experience points Rogue Trader PCs are supposed to be at, and they have their own ship. At least for the foreseeable future, Rogue Trader is going to work as a supplement for our DH game, adding further character options and proper rules for ships (and any other awesome stuff found there, and I hope it is plenty!).

DocIII said:

My previous post to this thread might have been a touch misleading and for that I apologize. I didn't actually write up any ship logs or anything like that -though i wish i had the time to make such props, that would have been awesome! What i meant when i said I made the adventures into ships logs was that my PC's reading some ships logs were the excuse I used to run those adventures like a story within a story... well a heavily modified FB and a story roughly based on an interpretation of an idea of Dark Frontiers (when i got done with it it only resembled the original in the fact that there was two factions, a Yvath (sp?) Star Fortress, and it was in space).

After the House of Dust and Ash, my group had both the Unbound Book and the Grayskin Psalter which, for some time now, they have been decoding and piecing bits and pieces of the Haarlock mystery together. While on a voyage to Sinophia on the trail of another lead in the mystery, the Adept curled up again with the Unbound Book determined to make sense of all the random ship logs, letters, notes to self, and everything else that makes the "book" up. In doing so, he finally scored enough successes to get The Information.

Originally, i was just going to info-drop the needed info on the adept but it seemed flat as this was one step from The Big Reveal. They are almost to the end of things, they have almost all the pieces, and piecing the info in that book together was supposed to give them about 90% of the puzzle pieces as well as instructions on how to assemble the damned thing. A simple info-dump just didn't seem dramatic or important enough for such an occasion and, beyond that, the players would have a hard time remembering all the bits and pieces if i just did that. So i decided that this might be the perfect excuse to run the intro adventures for RT.

So, when the session rolled around that would have the adept getting the info, I set it up as usual, narrated their time so far in the voyage, then let the adept know he found something truly ground breaking. At that he rounded up the cell and began to tell them what he found, paused, and his player looked at me questioningly waiting for the info dump. Instead, I handed each of them a character sheet from Forsaken Bounty altered to match my needs (changed all instances of Kronus (sp?) Expanse to Calyx Expanse, changed Sarvus Trask to Sarvus Haarlock, Port Wander to Sinophia, the Golden Maggot to the Black Sphere, dates to an equivalent in M36, etc) and informed them that they will be taking on the roles of characters in the story Cedric the adept was about to tell them. Anything they do, say, or uncover in the story would be what was recorded for Cedric to eventually put together.

In the end, while something that could have taken me less then 10 minuets to get to the players took two sessions totaling nearly 12 hours of game time, it also seemed to engage the players a LOT more then an info dump would have, made at least one of them excited to the point of annoyance at the prospect of Rogue Trader, gave them a much larger hand in shapping the events and outcome of the story (after all, they got to play through and decide how one of the most pivital events in the current campaign's history actualy went down and influence what's going on now), and helped give them an better look at the Imperium as a whole (none are really 40k nuts and know little to nothing outside of dark heresy about the 40k universe) though experiencing bits and pieces of one of it's earlier times (the end of the Age of Apostasy and beginning of the Reformation).

In summery, while I don't have any props or handouts for you, including the intro adventures in RT (or anything for that matter) as ships logs, old stories, or anything else you might info-dump on your players but having them play through it instead seems to have a good result... though it's probably something that shouldn't be over done or else the novelty would wear off and it could just become tedious for the players who came to play their favorite character, not some guy you just handed them ;-)

@Graver

Hey, from your other post I thought you just had taken the mission briefings and made them ship's logs instead of just reading/telling them to the players. (Which would have been kind of cool)

But what you actually did, having them play an adventure with pre-gens and making those events known to their primary characters as something they read in a ships log, waaaaaaay cooler. I can see some issues cropping up with needing to control outcomes in such an adventure, but nothing insurmountable.

All in all a very slick idea. <yoink!>

Well our group is running pretty hot and is in the final stages of Tattered Fates I.

The manner in which our most awesome and impressive GM (Zextelmon here on the boards) has laid things out could make for some very cool cross-over. While our group is interested in RT, I think DH has captured myself moreso. Part of that is attachment to my Ashen Confessor, and an equal part is the notion of battling evil in the most incarnate sense. Also in there is the inevitable slide toward corruption and madness.

RT's impression is much more akin to Cecil Rhodes in space. While there is the Imperium's hand on the helm in one manner of speaking, there is much more of the classic "mad phat lewtz" motivator here that speaks to me less.

I am much more interested in Ascension, and how I can place my character in a position to advance in terms of narrative.

Since I have a high level DH character I'm also more interested in Ascension.

The only thing Ive started looking at in RT is the updated weapons stats and gear; like, great weapons being "unbalanced" instead of "unwieldy", new/fixed plasma gun rules and stuff like that. So, for me as a player, the RT book is mostly a DH errata at the moment.

The Tattered Fates campaign (and the House of Dust and Ash adventure in Disciples of the Dard Gods) can be a good segue into RT. Have the players inherit a Rogue Trader warrant via the Inquisition - that is, it is a fake identity. They are using the PCs as bait to flush out the heretical Haarlocks by having the Administratrum Chancery court proclaim them the rightful heirs of the Haarlock warrant.

Even better, for more roleplaying opportunities, have a previous Inquisition agent have been the ringer, but was/is assassinated. Plastic surgery and gene modification later (to pass gene-locked stuff), one of the PCs is ready to step into the shoes.....but of course doesn't know exactly what the last guy was up to, and has to keep up the ruse.

If one of the PCs actually has a mind-wiped background he could be a purpose-made clone for this. Many decades of planning. Of course, there might be 6 more clone agents just in case....

Another possibility the canny Inquisition could do is say the PC is the father of the heir (via marriage to another now deceased Haarlock blooded parent) and have the Administratum name them Regent of the Warrant. Less likely to get assassinated, as the child (that may or may not exist) would be the primary target.

It could be amusing to force the PCs into a sham marriage too, for the above, if the surviving parent is not of Haarlock blood (just the child/children) to give them standing to claim Regent status.