Has anyone run this adventure with their group yet.

I'm planning to run this as an introductory session for my group, just wondering if people out there have played it yet and could let me know if there were any points in it where it fell apart or where their group went right off the rails.

In my experience there are always a fair few holes in these pre written adventures and often pre-knowledge of where other groups had problems can help to smooth over them if they occur.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

Did not played it, but I assumed I spotted two "holes" already

1) "Swift Justice"
The Arbites show up after 8 round of combat. If this isn´t a high security area, I do not know why they should show up that quick. It would change the Arbitrators to Enforcers... and further ensure that they have been bribed by the thugs ambushing the pc to break things up rather quickly. The pc might notice this by there quick reaction and some other "oddities" (like the thugs giving up rather quickly, the everyone to relaxed for a break up of a shoot out etc).
All in all, an ordinary test for Scrutiny could reveal the fact these Enforcers are "bought and paid for". The pc´s in turn could try to bribe them as well, which could give some hints to actually who is behind all this etc.

2) Battle at the bridge
The adventure assumes that if the pc arrive first, Lady Ash and two servitors are following them up cloth. In that case, the "battle at the bridge" would turn in to an "battle at the airlocks to the bridge". Only a group very fresh to roleplaying would not secure the two (?) airlocks. So, as soon as the locks are used they will note. The door goes up on there side, they upon up fire. I would say "target destroyed", if one keeps in my mind what kind of firepower an RT has available to him and his men.

A solution to this would be teleport decive on bord of the enemy ship, allowing to teleport Lady Ash and the Gun Servitors directly to the bridge. INI! COMBAT!!!

I've ran one session so far and everyone is having a blast. The only side rail thing I've ran into is that the PC's choose not to touch the gene encoded stone until they got on the ship so really changed the flow of the game and caused me to do some thinking on my feet. I applied them for doing unscripted things for after all, players can always wreck the best laid plans. THe end result as actually been a little more fun I think then the original outcome. The PC's captured lady ash, not knowing she's a psyker, and brought her aboard, Then then invited Fel on board to talk about why he attacked them, and lady ash silently read their mind and got the information from the stone while Fel talked to them and kept their minds off her. He also parked his large cruiser next to their small raider, gun ports open, more for show than anything. After fel left, he went to one of his other fleet ships on the otherside of the station, leaving the cruiser parked next to the Explorers ship, and quitly left for the morgoros system. Meanwhile they though he went to the cruiser and waited for him to leave. The cruiser set there for 24 hours before leaving, giving Fel a head start without the Exlporeres even knowing it.

@Dragon

Great! A very very good idea!

One thing that my players pulled off was that they used thier tricked out Dauntless-class, the Beyonder , to turn the tables on the Raiders in the Battleground encounter. Both ships were detected, the players 'played possum', using the mine to fake having taken more damage then they really did to lure them within range of the teleportarium and used Murder-servitors to disable both ship's engines. One was totally knocked out and the other had it's speed reduced by half.

They then moved aft of the mobile ship, and demanded they surrender. I gave them a moderate circumstantial bonus as it was obvious that there was neither escape nor a hope in hell of repairing the engine before they blew the ship to hell, so one prize captured. The ship was boarded via teleportarium by the prize crew. They then engaged in a successful boarding action of the immobilized Raider, capturing both.

They then supplimented the crews of both ships with the understandably more loyal pilgrims, until they got to Footfall, making it hard for me to logically set up a reasonable rebellion against them on the Raiders. Obviously once they reached Footfall, they herded the pirates and pilgrims off the ships and took on new crew.

Which brings me to me pondering: though they havn't done it yet, liking that they have two escorts for the cruiser, would each SP of a ship they might capture and sell be worth 1/2 a point of profit factor?

BaronIveagh said:

Talking about seeling the ships :
I would not try to exchange the SP into Profit 1-to-1 ratio. This will unbalance thinks and will turn your pc to ship hunting. Instead, make it a greater endavour to sell each ship (+5 Profit per ship).

• Travell from System to system to find a buyer (very rare) who is cabable of buying a ship ( What do mean with "cash & know?!?" )
• Haggle with the Administratum to ensure that all legal requierements are met and you are not acused for "selling armed ships to enemies of the Sector/Government
• Have meeting and haggle for the prize... unless you want to sell this as junk to a salvager!
• Find a way to get rid of the pirates that are still on board ("the prize is fine, but I expect you clean the ship of the scum first?"), either with cruel and short military actionon board or with organizing a gulag to stoe them away ...and sell them later!

Your Murder Servitors would need replenishing (by your Explorator) after such an encounter. Oh look, all these handy meat puppets, er pirates...

Gregorius21778 said:

On your first point, it was a choice of dying right now or maybe dying later, most people, pirates included will opt for the second. Oh, and remember, this is space. They don't bother with silly things like trials or penal legions for pirates here. The airlock is right this way...
As far as the Mutiny goes, you're making two assumptions. One that the players were dumb and didn't offer bribes and pardons for co-operation, (*being, technically, outside the Imperium, the Rogue Trader was within his rights) then toss the people who didn't go along out the Airlock. The second is that pirates are absolutely committed to piracy. In the real world, pirates were very rarely in it for the love of mayhem, they were in it to make money.

The requirement of finding a buyer is a good idea. The players already spun the good will they got from the Ecclesiarchy for rescuing the pilgrims into a clear claim on the prizes by getting them to support their claim, so as far as the Administratum goes, they're the legitimate owners. Their agreement to sell might be more difficult, but they haven’t tried that yet, though they have been making a lot of contacts within the Adeptus to shore up their salvage claim on the Righteous Path. I decided that it was full of archeotech, and rather than give them a flat profit boost, I'm letting them haggle for favors with the AdMech. Their goal is to repair the Path, and refit it as their new flagship.

I'm preparing to run "Into the Maw" for my group of five next week, and I would appreciate further reports on how the game went for others. Since it's been a month, more people surely have tried this out by now. Like the original poster, I'm particularly interested in how to cover up or overcome "holes", such as the case Dragon mentioned in which the Explorers moved to the safety of their ship before opening the casket.

Thanks for any more stories.

Zamzoph said:

I haven't run it and don't intend to, but the "took two raiders as prizes" story raises one obvious point. Published adventure or not, you should adjust your encounters to provide a challenge. Two raiders might provide a decent fight for a PC frigate or raider, but they're likely to murder a transport-hull RT unless they're very sneaky or lucky. A party in a light (or heavy!) cruiser really ought to face three pirates, or two with a better ship. Why two of them would even think about jumping a capital ship by themselves is baffling. Their chances of a win are poor even with a successful ambush, as the fight proved.

Argoden said:

Actually 2 raiders stand a very good chance against a light cruiser, this is not BFG. The raiders could mass 4 weapons mounts against the light cruiser and the cruiser could only reply with one (assuming the raiders were smart and stayed close together so they were in the same weapons arc). The tactic of having them beat up on the light cruiser a little and then boarding is a good one and would probably work. The problem they ran into was the light cruiser had a teleportium and murder servitors. The murder servitors are rare and the teleportium is archeotech, you just don't run into that kinda stuff very often, if ever. If the light cruiser had not had them it would have been in a bad way.

I'm not all to concerned about how the raider space combat will work out, honestly. Although my group's Dauntless lacks the teleportium half of the OP combo, it does have hidden weapon components. In this case, I'll have it so that the raiders believe the ship is entirely unarmed, reveal themselves by closing in from two different directions with the intent of surrounding, and actually make the surrender demand without actually attacking, aside from using the leech mine. The Explorers may even actually get the surprise on the raiders when they finally reveal their weapons and open fire.

My bigger concern for that part would actually be what immediately follows. The previous story would definitely be the worst case scenario, as I would hate to see my players capturing every intact ship they fight and assembling a fleet out of them. If possible, I'd much rather have them stick to having one ship at a time. This would actually be a concern about the aftermath of ship combat, in general, rather than specific to this scenario.

llsoth said:

Not hardly. I'm going to hazard a guess that you've missed the bit that states quite clearly that prow weapons on light cruisers and larger ships fire in three arcs. Unless it's having maneuver issues from damage, a CL should usually be firing one broadside and the prow guns at a single target each round. That's enough to easily the shield of a raider, and with even moderate luck (and the usual prow lance or lance battery) doing serious hull damage is a breeze. The raiders' counterfire has to chew through two shields each time (no quadron fire, since as you said this isn't BFG) which means even with an optimal "cruiser hunter" mix of macrobattery and lance you need considerably more luck to score hull damage than the cruiser does, and it has a lot more hull than you do. If the raiders are running twin macrobatteries it's even worse, since you're looking at needing a total of 5+ successes to claw through shields and armor.

Two raiders with optimal weapons and above-average crew/officer skills can give a CL a hard time, but unless they're manned by supermen I still wouldn't bet on them.

Argoden said:

Well, they could be crewed by hideous mutants. Might be manned by spidermen...

Gregorius21778 said:

Well, they're pirates and they value their stinking hides for some reason.

We played through Into the Maw today, and we managed to assimilate the two pirate raiders into our fleet as well. (let's just say that having a Light Cruiser equipped with a teleportarium and a bunch of murder servitors can really decimate a couple of unsuspecting raiders)

What we did was gunning our engines towards the first pirate raider ship and then launched a bunch of hit and run attacks, taking out the engines, the thrusters and the sensors first, effectively making it impossible for it to escape, while using our broadsides to keep the other raider at bay. Then when the other raider closed in to fire, we launched hit and run attacks against that one as well doing the same routine.

In the end, one of the raiders was crippled and the other had suffered so severe critical hits so it couldn't possibly escape. After that we simply hailed the enemy and our capable Rogue Trader managed to Charm the pirate crew of both enemy vessels into a mutiny against their own captains with the promise of letting them live and serve under our dynasty instead.

Let's just say that when fires are raging all across one's puny little ship and more than 30 % of the crew have died due to devastating hit and run attacks, and your vessel is dead in the void with no way of escape and also having your enemy aiming it's mighty broadsides at you, the situation tend to be pretty persuasive.

After that we spent a week with the broken pilgrim ship and the two damaged raiders, making ad hoc repairs and rooting out potential mutineers and cracking some skulls, while mixing up the crew of the different vessels. After that, order had been more or less restored, and suddenly we weren't just a single light cruiser, we were a fleet!

Argoden said:

You are correct I had forgotten about the prow weapons for the cap ships, thank you for correcting me.

All agog that cap ships might have regained some of their power me and some friends ran the battle a few times against the Light Cruiser and then against a cruiser. We pretty much but them to BFG specs (no special components and a crack crew (40)). The Light Cruiser still ends up loosing (4 out of 5 times) usually due to the raiders having 2 hit and runs to their 1, and eventually falling to boarding operations. The Cruiser is a different story, it won in the exact opposite proportions (4 of 5 times). Its fire vs the light raider armor and hull points was the difference.

As a side note, better boarding rules would probably tip the balance more in the cap ships favor. As it is I think there is supposed to be a part in there about hull points but looks like a typo was made so it is hard to tell.

To make it more like BFG our group house ruled that hull points, crew pop, and moral, and all related tables was doubled for light cruisers and tripled for cruisers. IE a light cruiser would have 120 hull points, 200 base moral and crew. The numbers on tables 8-13 and 8-14 were also doubled to maintain the ratios. IE at a moral of 120 the light cruiser would suffer a -5 to BS tests.

llsoth said:

Huh?

The way we did it was sending two H&R attacks each turn against one or the other of the raiders. One where the Rogue Trader led the boarding party and one where my character (the Seneschal) led it. According to the rules, doing this was considered kosher since it stated that any PC can attempt to do one extended action each stratetigc turn, and it didn't say anything about any limitations to which extended actions that could be done, nor how often or that each PC has to do a different extended action rather than being able to do the same.

Now you might think that a Seneschal wouldn't be the best guy to send on a H&R attack, but the thing is he's got a Fellowship of 50, and since Command is a basic skill, and oth the Murder Servitors and the Teleportarium confer a +20 bonus to the opposed Command test each, and you don't need to roll for the pilot skill since you're teleporting aboard the enemy vessel rather than trying to manoeuvre a boarding craft through the fire of enemy turrets either, making H&R attacks with someone that doesn't even have Command as a trained skill had pretty good odds of succeeding.

Then again, in your scenario the ship might not have had a teleportarium or a bunch of murder servitors, and the PC's might not have had a few with both Pilot (Spacecraft) and Command?

Our group went round and round on the topic of allowing multiple hit and runs each turn per ship but in the end decided against it as it made certain elements (namely the barracks,murder servitors, and telportium) way over powered. Plus only allowing 1 per turn made it closer to BFG (which my group loves). In a strict raw sense though you are correct there is nothing preventing it. However if you can do 2x hit and runs then so can they

As to the ship loadouts you are correct we included no special components, and had no special crew on either ship, both had crack crews (40 skill level). I can easily believe that the addition of special ship components and talented command staff would make a huge difference.

llsoth said:

Of of course they can do multiple hit and run attacks. The thing was that even though the raiders came out of nowhere, we rolled higher on our initiative and got go go first. And our strategy bottled down to gunning our engines towards an outside arch of one raider so the other one would have to spend some time to be able to close in on us, and during that time we attacked the first raider with multiple hit and run attacks, which struck home and made life very difficult for the first raider.

That being said, I'd never had launched an H&R with my Seneschal if it weren't for the Teleportarium and the Murder Servitors. Mainly because he doesn't have Pilot (Spacecraft) and so would have been completely unable to reach the enemy vessel in the first place, and second he only had Command as a basic skill so without the boosts in bonus, the experienced pirate captain would have likely averted the attack even if he was avble to pilot the needed spacecraft across.

Still, normally, multiple H&R attacks per strategic turn aren't really very overpowered. They only tend to get really nasty when you have the appropriate components (like a teleportarium and murder servitors), but the way I see it, that's no different than buying really large and powerful macrobatteries or lance weapons. It's just a case of specialization.

So im quite sure your group could do the rules as written and not have to worry. After all, the ships in Rogue Trader aren't purely military vessels like the ones of the Imperial Navy, and most of the time the guns will just harmlessly be neutralized by the void shields than actually inflicting heavy damage, meaning that successful hit and run attacks should quite justifiably inflict more damage to a vessel than the ships weaponry.

I know it might sound strange, but it bottles down to what the ships are intended for. Considering that in the fluff, a large scale fleet battle between military vessels can take days if not weeks of constant bombardment, where both sides try desperately to neutralize all the protective forcefields and thick armour with their MILITARY CLASS weapons, then the armaments used by void pirates and Rogue Traders would be quite puny by comparison, and only the most focused firepower would be able to inflict really horrifying hits (because regardless of what ship you got, void shields work on the same principles for military and civilian alike).

So fluffwise, it would be correct to assume that if ill equipped rogue traders and pirates want to do some serious damage to an enemy vessel, then Hit and Run attacks would be the best course of action. Using the guns would just be a war of attrition.

Oh also, if you feel that your players might abuse the Murder Servitors and Teleportarium combo, remember that there is nothing saying that the enemy vessel doesn't have the same set-up in components.

llsoth said:

So you're playing with house rules and ignoring the fact that a ship manned by PCs is going to have much, much better skills than the generic Skill 40 Vets on the raiders. Hardly surprising that you're getting results that others aren't. In a "real" fight between a CL owned by PCs and two generic light raiders with competent or even crack crews, the PCs should have a walkover on their hands. The GM can and should make that a more challenging fight by either adding another ship, increasing the size of one or both raiders, or even building some more-talented NPC officers for them. Or you could be sneaky and have the pilgrim ship be functional and crewed by pirates as well, holding off on the raider attack until after the RT ship is in range of the pilgrims it thinks it's rescuing (or looting, for the heartless).

But two "by the book" raiders versus a RT light cruiser? Too easy by far.

Personally I'd only give a given componet's bonus to one boarding attempt a round.

Argoden said:

Unfortunetly you seem to have missed the point of the exercise. The reason for using base/equally equipped ships was to see how the ships fair against each other. The original point I responded to was, is it stupid for a pair of raiders to attack a light cruiser. Given a parity of command staff/crew/and components it is not stupid they have a decent chance of winning. Also those house rules you talk about would not change anything since if the light cruiser could launch more hit and runs then so could the raiders if played by RAW.

You point of a PC owned LC verses 2 generic raiders is so obvious that I did not think it bore mentioning, of course it is going to make a huge difference. However since this is not MMORPG and there is no distinctive glowing tag above the ship proclaiming it to be a PC ship no doubt filled with munchkin crew and gear, the raider captains might not know it and actually act like they had a chance.

As to your point about GMs and challange.... I don not know why you are telling this to me but I will simply respond that, yes the GM is responsible for creating challenging encounters for the players and should do what is needed to accomplish that goal.

Varnias Tybalt said:

Pst, that's what you have crewmen for, to do all the things your PC's can't... unless you skimped out on your crew and got a Poor Quality one. ;-)

Though, all in all, i'd be with Dalnor on the component issue. While I can see the validity of multiple hit and run's in one turn (you're just sending over more teams to destroy more stuff, reasonable) the components such as Murder Servitors, IMHO, could only be used once per turn unless purchased more then once. After all, you only have so many of the little buggers. If one PC is leading them, the other PC or NPC would ave to settle for leading regular crewmen as the servitors would be tied up doing what the other it and run is attempting.

Honestly, I was hoping for more discussion besides the raider battle... I'm more inclined to make that fight on the easier side since it is my players' first try at space combat. In fact, for those who are complaining that the setup by default is made too easy for the players, you should keep in mind that this would be the very first space combat for a lot of people.

Zamzoph said:

Well right off the bat there are a few huge ones where the PCs can muck up what they have written. I had to cheat horrendously (actually had to just decide the other RT had the information he needed that lady ash is supposed to get from the tomb. When I described the scene to my players the RT looked aghast at me and demanded that all the gawkers and such clear out of his family tomb. Lady ash never had any opportunity to even get a glimpse at it.

Next up was delivering the heretical texts... my group kept trying to go off on a tangent with that one.

Also be prepared to fudge travel times for your opposing RT, in this case the speed of space travel really did need to happen at the speed of the plot, which I hate. I actually rolled up travel times and the pc's (with the skittish ship) would have gotten there looted the ship and left before Hadarak even got to the system.

Next up be prepared for the PCs to come upon lady Ash in trouble with the Oks (who they knew from an attempt to get the info from the players after they kaboshed the one written out), and simply gun her down.

As to the final fight.. well be prepared for questions like, "wait where did these people come from? we left our ship in orbit running sensor sweeps and they did not pick up the enemy shuttles?"

Next up is the last space battle... The adventure says if the enemy takes to much damage he runs off to plague the PCs another day. Unless you are willing to fudge rolls and/or lay down some GM fiat don't expect that. Expect hit and run raids to disable engines and boarding operations etc. PCs are vindictive and Rogue Trader is not an episode of Superfriends where the bad guy shouts "Curses" and runs away with all the good guys just standing there letting them run off.

For all of that the adventure was good for helping to how to GM a game of RT, and what to avoid. The whole "yah he showed up before you.. hee hee you know those wacky warp currents, got me a bunch of cold stares and pointed questions".