Thread for funny stories that you beheld in your time playing this wonderful setting.

Important -> use the "You know you are playing Rogue Trader when..." thread for everything that is not just funny, but iconic either.

My 3 tales of wisdom:

1. Once, my players built an "warp aquarium" (by tinkering with the Gellar and Warp drives) and tried to broadcast some executions to the whole crew.

Results: -30 Morale, some insanity points gained, critical damage, bionic replacements and 2 rampaging mutants/warpspawns later they realized this was a TERRIBLE idea (not to say heretical) and jettisoned everything the first chance they got.

2. The admech with str modifier +8 or +9 (I dont recall) crafted an specially crafted "lootbag" reinforced with adamantium lining, boarded an Eldar frigate and started soaking everything he could find in the bag (going all the way into lascutting some stuff that were bolted to the floors/walls), including injured/uncouncious Eldar female warriors . The boarding craft they used couldn't fit everyone in the return trip, so they left a part of the boarding party behind to give space to the lootbag.

3. Ork farm in cargo-hold B, in process of being converted to Emperor-worship.

Some of the stuff we did was a little more low-key, but some was just annoying. My Rogue Trader, Lord-Captain Symon Wylde had to go to this dinner-ball a noble was hosting in a rather wealthy world in the Calixus Sector, and I needed a date. The only chick we had with us was our beautiful Missionary, Canoness Athena Maelstrom, of the Sisters of Battle. I had to buy her expensive gowns and teach her how to dance, and then smile pretty. I tried to tell her that having a 50 Fellowship means she can smile, but her player played it straight. So, I said,

"Just imagine you're setting a heretic on fire." She smiles.

During the ball, she's the surprise hit of the evening, in more ways than one. I had to occasionally jab her in the ribs whenever someone said or did something that seemed ignoble or even downright heretical, to keep her from snapping their neck, a la True Lies (remember when Arnold punches out Bill Paxton in the Corvette for saying something about his wife?). Calligos Winterscale is there, and is quite taken with her. And I let him dance with her. She knees him in the groin. I was somewhat mortified, but the noble host thought it was hilarious and we ended up getting a trade deal with him. Calligos is still taken with her. I asked her why she did that, and she said, "He said I looked radiant."

Another incident was when I had just about enough of a rival Rogue Trader. We had done a hunting expedition on a death world in the Expanse, and she nearly stranded us in the garden spot of the planet. At the end of the adventure, I and my crew ended up saving her ass, but she used my gentlemanly ways to distract us, letting her crew get this strange ape-beasts that the noble wanted. My arch-militant and explorator were able to capture a Genestealer. So, as we began to part ways, I ordered that the Genestealer (and his cage, with a trigger to be opened with a 10 second delay) be put into the Teleportarium, where we then teleported the beast into the good lady's Engine area, where it'd be no tribble at all.

we then teleported the beast into the good lady's Engine area, where it'd be no tribble at all.

I understood that reference!

My favorite funny moment came early in my DH campaign. The Acolytes had captured and interrogated a minor criminal; then they had to decide what to do with him. The consensus was to kill him; one of the players added up his pistol bonuses (Point Blank, Full Aim, Helpless Target) and magnanimously declared "If the Emperor spares you, you are free to go!" and fired, rolling... a 00. It was a few minutes before I could stop laughing.

Needless to say, they went ahead and killed the guy anyway...

That's pure heresy.

My favorite funny moment came early in my DH campaign. The Acolytes had captured and interrogated a minor criminal; then they had to decide what to do with him. The consensus was to kill him; one of the players added up his pistol bonuses (Point Blank, Full Aim, Helpless Target) and magnanimously declared "If the Emperor spares you, you are free to go!" and fired, rolling... a 00. It was a few minutes before I could stop laughing.

Needless to say, they went ahead and killed the guy anyway...

That wasn't the Emperor! That was Tzeentch!

BLAM!

The Emperor himself wants this man to live. Quick attach a bomb collar to him and send him on all the most suicidal missions we have. Clearly he is destined to do the Emperors work.

*grabs popcorn*

Our Engiseer Prime detected the Arch Militant's stress levels were too high and to counter that he uploaded a routine to all the mobile servitors in the ship to randomly offer him hugs. Now, the AM now uses his Power Armor every time he has to leave his room.

*grabs popcorn*

Our Engiseer Prime detected the Arch Militant's stress levels were too high and to counter that he uploaded a routine to all the mobile servitors in the ship to randomly offer him hugs. Now, the AM now uses his Power Armor every time he has to leave his room.

Gotta remember that for next time i play paranoia.

If i was getting hugged by every servitor onboard i'd suspect Slaaneshi daeominc posesion.

HuUuUuGGGzzzsssss!

The Cowardly Arch Militant

My players accepted a minor endeavor to investigate the Witch-Cursed World and rescue an "politically exiled" astropath in order to gain favor from the Port Wander choir.

Once they reached the planet, they tried contact from low orbit and one of the ship's astropaths fried in his cradle. In the whole planet, the only construction was the astropathic signal relay tower.

The RT sent our Arch Militant down to the planet. He insisted to take the best 50 men he could find in the ship and some servo-skull for probes.

The AM refused to enter the building at all and just established a perimeter in front of the tower and asked everyone to remain close to each other.

Eventually they lost contact with the servo-skull (I had put a single Daemonhost in there) and the AM was so freaked out he intimidated the Guncutter pilot into ignoring the RT's orders and going back to the ship. In the rush, they left 2 soldier behind without casters.

Again, they were so freaking terrified that 2 guys were missing that they left the the remaining 49 (AM included) in quarantine until the next star system could be reached.

Finally, they bombed the place for orbit giving up on the endeavor at all.

Have a new incident that had us roaring in laughter last weekend.

We had found an ancient Xenos map detailing the location of a possible Eldar ruin on a planet that I had (ostensible) control over, and we had just colonized it over the past six months of game time. Not wanting to waste any time, I deployed some troops along with our very eager Explorator and a few others down there to secure the area so that we can explore the place in earnest. We found a strange artifact that our Explorator believes isn't of Eldar design, but certainly not of human design either, and for awhile we were worried it might have something to do with Chaos. So, we sent down our potent Astropath Transcendant in order to assess it, and he discovered that it's a psychic device that allows the telepath to survey the entire planet at once. Not only that, but with enough power, this thing might be able to allow the telepath to "see" everything in the star-system at once. But it's quite taxing to the telepath to use, with all that information going into his noggin like that. Well, as soon as he began using it, we fell under attack by a group of Orks. Not a big horde, but enough to pose a serious threat to my people down there, and I was scrambling on my ship to deploy more troops and vehicles down there for support.

It got desperate in there; the initial troops I deployed from my Guard regiment were mostly wiped out, but for the heroism of my Arch-MIlitant, Missionary, and Explorator leading them.

Then a webway gate that we strangely had not found yet (really pissed me off that we somehow missed that thing) opens up and some Eldar show up. Upon seeing the situation, they sort of help us, but then it came down us cornering the small horde in a portion of the ruin complex. That's when our Astropath decides to Compel the remaining leader (I think it was a Nob, not a full-blown warboss), and he succeeds in getting that Ork to start attacking his remaining Orks. The Eldar Seer sees that and then starts to use her abilities on the Ork. The Astropath got angry, and began to Push to keep the Ork under his control, and the poor Ork is just scrambling around, first pointing his Big Shoota at my guys, then at the Eldar, and then at my guys.

"No, you will shoot the Eldar." The Astropath commands.

"Kill the Umies!" The seer says.

"Noo...kill the elves!"

"Dammit! Kill the Umies!"

The Psychic Phenomena are making us all cold and strange things are happening, enough to stop the any fighting between us and the Eldar squad before it even can begin.

They keep tying their Willpower rolls, and apparently, their Willpower scores are identical! I kept waiting for a Perils of the Warp to do nasty things.

Finally, I and the Eldar leader have enough of this. We negotiate a truce, while the two psykers are duking it out with the Ork. Since I'd rather not be on the bad side of the Craftworld Eldar, I let them keep the ruins (for now) and they let us have our colony and let us leave the area.

"What do you want to do with the Ork?" The Eldar leader asks me. "We better do something before our psykers do something we'll all regret."

So I run up to the Ork, draw my power-sword, and cleave it's poor head off. The Seer and my Astropath are pissed. "I nearly had her!" He says. Both sides end up dragging our respective psykers away.

The group was engaging a Kroozer that intercepted them in the Zayth outer rim, and for awhile it was a good fight. At least until the player's Dictator deployed its bomber wings.

On that day we had a voidmaster leading the bombers and the AM was on the batteries (Best quality Sunsear + Lance at prow) and after a couple more rounds, the Kroozer got hulked on the crit table.

Important note: VoidMaster, Explorator and Arch Militant are ex Imperial Navy/Guard. The RT and Navigators are the only ones Noble-born or Child of Dynasty.

GM: the Ork kroozer starts to shut down as inner explosions tear pieces of the hull apart. You still pick faint energy signals from areas of the ship that had their own power source or that are still being able to pull something out of the extensively damaged and unstable plasma drive.

RT: Is the cargo hold intac....

AM: KEEP SHOOTING UNTIL WE BLOW THE ONE OF THE DRIVES. FOOOKEEEENN XENOOOOOSSSSS

RT: Wait, our ally (Charlabelle) also has that freebo....

VM: SUFFER NOT THE XENO TO LIVE, I WILL DO ONE MORE BOMB-RUN.

GM: You realise you will die or worse if any of the drives detonate?

VM: Oh, I am back to the hangar them.

RT: Good, we will take some Sharkb....
AM: I DIDNT SHOOT THIS TURN, I WILL SHOOT NOW.

Navigator: What are you...

RT: STAND DOWN, THERE IS LOOT IN THAT HOLD.

AM: I HAVE HATRED (ORKS) I DONT CARE. *rolls dice immediately after, scores enough, in the crit roll score a plasma drive detonation.

VM: I AM STILL RETREATING GODAMMIT.

GM looks at RT & VM: oh well, ****.

All the while, the Tech Priest was also screaming in the background "KILL THEM, REMEMBER THE LAST TIME! F#### ORKS AGAIN, SUFFER NOT THE XENO TO LIVE".

With loot lost, -1 Fate point for the VM and an interesting addendum to the allied fleet (which had a loyal freebooter operating a Ram Ship) plus 4 Starhawk squadrons obliterated, they left the battlefield for Zayth.

Meanwhile, the Rogue Trader required (ordered) the ship's tech priest to create trigger overrides that she could activate only from her command throne, scolded the AM and threatened leaving here with 0 acquisitions until he could find a new way to increase the dynasty's PF in payment for the loot lost.

Upon reading that Astropaths are all blind, and see things using the psychic residues left on them by souls (and particularly that soulless beings like Pariahs are invisible to them), she believed that she couldn't see things unless they had souls. This meant that she couldn't see things like walls, and requisitioned a squad of "guides" from the ship's armsman complement (also assigned by the ArchMilitant to execute her if it looked like she was going to be possessed/lose control of her powers).

She also decided that since she couldn't see any vox units, the ship evidently didn't have any, and so would write any messages she needed to pass to different members of the dynasty, and send one of her guides to hand-deliver them.

Of course, being blind, said messages were essentially undecipherable, so the runner had to try and remember what she was muttering as she wrote it...

The other Dynasty members didn't like the delay of sending messages back with the runner, so used the ship's PA system to reply. Of course, if they were going to carry on a conversation, she had to scribble the next message and send that off by a runner, and so on. As the campaign progressed, they ended up assigning more and more "guides", as an extended conversation regarding a Warp Encounter she went below to deal with wound up with an entire platoon of her "guides" being run to the point of exhaustion (being made to carry messages from the lower prow decks of a Repulsive-class to the bridge, 5 kilometres aft, up 700m of stairs in under 40 minutes could do that).

Our magos biologis liked to frankenfran herself when she got bored. The only thing that was relatively consistent was that she kept her torso and head relatively the same. One day, she managed to severely botch a medicae roll while altering her own dna. Deciding she had inflicted herself with a genetic condition, I leafed through various potentially embarrassing but non-lethal conditions that could effect someone who was, for all intents and purposes just a torso, but also not be immediately obvious.

Flash forward several sessions and the magos and the wych elf are competing again. The two had been back and forth for a while until the wych made a comment about having 'better guns' than the magos.

At which point the magos removes her robes, revealing what gigantomastia and the finest underwire support the Lathes could build had wrought, declaring 'Guns? Hell, I call them macrocannons!'

I had an adventure planet, a fallen imperial world. one city left alive.

But in the middle of the city was a tall citadel of xeno design.

Humans still lived in the city, but did not have an imperial culture.

The navigator got a weird feeling, asked for the gellar field to be erected.

The voidmaster panicked and lanced the tower from orbit.

And the city burned.

I had an adventure planet, a fallen imperial world. one city left alive.

But in the middle of the city was a tall citadel of xeno design.

Humans still lived in the city, but did not have an imperial culture.

The navigator got a weird feeling, asked for the gellar field to be erected.

The voidmaster panicked and lanced the tower from orbit.

And the city burned.

This needs a bit of explanation. Did they just massacre an entire city from orbit because of a "weird feeling" (if yes, this should bite them back later), or was there actually something fishy happening?

I had an adventure planet, a fallen imperial world. one city left alive.

But in the middle of the city was a tall citadel of xeno design.

Humans still lived in the city, but did not have an imperial culture.

The navigator got a weird feeling, asked for the gellar field to be erected.

The voidmaster panicked and lanced the tower from orbit.

And the city burned.

This needs a bit of explanation. Did they just massacre an entire city from orbit because of a "weird feeling" (if yes, this should bite them back later), or was there actually something fishy happening?

knowing my own players, I guess it was just a "weird feeling" indeed.

the weird feeling was an actual ghostly attack.

but it was on an NPC, no dice rolls had occurred yet.

no imperial citizens died in the ensuing catastrophe

Inaugural RT campaign, my Arch Militant gets into a firefight with some hostiles (I can't remember exactly what, but I think they were either traitors or hive gangers). One plasma pistol to the face later and he's permanently disfigured.

Follow-up DH campaign, my ex-Guardsman Null gets into a fistfight with two vat-muscled bouncers with chainswords. Once crit to the head later and he's permanently disfigured.

Follow-up DW campaign, my Exorcist Assault Marine is part of a running battle against Genestealer Cultists. When going after one of the cult leaders (packing a plasma pistol, of course), one crit to the head later and he's both permanently disfigured and blinded.

Follow-up DH campaign, my Techpriest is shooting it out with the traitor bodyguards of a false living saint when he takes a plasma pistol shot to the head.

You may have noticed a theme developing...

I think I've had maybe two or three characters who haven't gotten their face burned/cut/peeled/ripped/exploded off in the first adventure.

I could post a few of the canned adventure derailments, but the most spectacular of those was over in Only War. The sad part was they demolished most of them using only common sense.

Soulreaver was the worst in RT: "We're working for the Dark Eldar, let's assume we're going to get shafted and possibly enslaved and plan accordingly." Parking the ship out of range of the surface guns and taking small craft to the surface, followed by splitting the party and a concealed teleport homer led to The First Battle of the Sphere in short order, between the RT's private army and the Eldar...

So my Arch-Millitant goes onto an epic quest to find some Demo-Charges to booby-trap a ship in the first chapter of the PbP I'm in. She knew ten arms merchants in Port Wanderer. Two of them were dead, three arrested by the Arbties, one tried to kill her over the death of his nephew, another one had retired to become a toymaker, the eigth set her on fire when he heard her mention the word psyker, the ninth didn't have any, and the tenth proposed to her. In public, loudly, and in full of the ship's Sensechal, a former Arbites who hates my AM. And the would-be groom pursued my AM all the way back to the ship, where she managed to sneak back inside through a side entrance.

-More to follow.

the PCs are looting and exploring an ancient skyscraper on a planet, built during the dark age of tech,

and in it they find a huge library, of all types of info.

Books, cd-roms, micro-fiche, video archives, data-crypts, and even an ancient section of

scrolls, stone tablets, and leather bound volumes.

Some of it is quite valuable, and its all collectable to the right buyer.

However some of it is heretical, some blasphemous, and some may be sorcerous.

Some of the volumes are hand written and chained to the shelves.

Also I described to the players that there had been fights in this room before.

Bullet holes and scorch marks were noticeable, but any bodies and debris had been cleaned.

Upon investigation, I told the players that:

You can see where previous PC parties from other campaigns had made it thus far,

but their GMs had prevented them from burning the books.

the PCs are looting and exploring an ancient skyscraper on a planet, built during the dark age of tech,

and in it they find a huge library, of all types of info.

Books, cd-roms, micro-fiche, video archives, data-crypts, and even an ancient section of

scrolls, stone tablets, and leather bound volumes.

Some of it is quite valuable, and its all collectable to the right buyer.

However some of it is heretical, some blasphemous, and some may be sorcerous.

Some of the volumes are hand written and chained to the shelves.

Also I described to the players that there had been fights in this room before.

Bullet holes and scorch marks were noticeable, but any bodies and debris had been cleaned.

Upon investigation, I told the players that:

You can see where previous PC parties from other campaigns had made it thus far,

but their GMs had prevented them from burning the books.

I'd have had them find an Orangutan with a sign that read 'Please do not feed the Books'.

the PCs are looting and exploring an ancient skyscraper on a planet, built during the dark age of tech,

and in it they find a huge library, of all types of info.

Books, cd-roms, micro-fiche, video archives, data-crypts, and even an ancient section of

scrolls, stone tablets, and leather bound volumes.

Some of it is quite valuable, and its all collectable to the right buyer.

However some of it is heretical, some blasphemous, and some may be sorcerous.

Some of the volumes are hand written and chained to the shelves.

Also I described to the players that there had been fights in this room before.

Bullet holes and scorch marks were noticeable, but any bodies and debris had been cleaned.

Upon investigation, I told the players that:

You can see where previous PC parties from other campaigns had made it thus far,

but their GMs had prevented them from burning the books.

Remind me to pull that 4th wall stuff with a game of end of the world. Now the pc's who are faitfull in game recreations of the players themselves become aware that they are characters in a tabletop rpg. We might all need booze after that...

I'd have had them find an Orangutan with a sign that read 'Please do not feed the Books'.

Sadly this being 40k, they might mistake the Librarian for a Jokaero...