Hey everybody!

First post here (that I remember). Got the core book for a steal ($10!) on amazon for myself for christmas and am looking to get a solid library of material together, exclusively RT unless heavily suggested otherwise despite knowing all 40k RPG's are compatible. Miniature Market is also having a massive clearance sale if you guys weren't aware on most of this product line (as in all 40k RPG's), though the every day amazon prices compete with most of MM's. With that announcement you're probably already aware of aside, I now ask:

What are your favorite adventures and expansion books? I have a budget of roughly $50 so am aiming to order....5 books or so. I currently have the Koronus Bestiary, as its reviews seem to indicate it's among the best in terms of content volume, and the lure of the expanse trinity, because I want to stack up on pregen adventures, which is easy enough with FFG RPG's haha. So figure 3-4 others beyond those.

If anyone wants to ask, there is no play group yet assembled, so I can't really ask them how they want to play, which might tell me whether to buy, say, faith and coin or hostile acquisitions. Anyway, looking forward to getting into this game full bore as Rogue Traders have always fascinated me and I'm confident at least someone who reads this can help. Thanks in advance!!

My old 40k RT GM recently posted this in another forum:
it summarises everythign nicely

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Lure of the Expanse is a great adventure that you can run as a single long campaign or break up in to a series of shorter mission-based scenarios. Several of the locations you will only visit quickly because the adventure has you on a timeframe, but there's plenty of scope to go back and revisit those worlds later.

Twilight Crusade isn't worth piss for anything. It's a poorly-written adventure and shoehorns the Tau into a location that the're not canonically supposed to be in, by the dodgiest fanfiction-style handwaving ever. There are some small snippets of the adventure and location that are redeemable, but it's otherwise a waste.

The Soul Reaver: Used to be my pick for shittiest RT adventure book. Then Twilight Crusade came along. There is no reason why any sane (or indeed insane) person would have a Dark Eldar on their ship, not even the most depraved pirate captain. So I don't know why they were chosen as PC options before, say, a Corsair Eldar or something similar. The best thing to come out of it is the lovely, nasty Dark Eldar weapons and a few more NPC Dark Eldar to use as foes.

Warpstorm Trilogy: I never got a chance to run this, but everything I've heard paints it as a very good adventure, up there with Lure. It's three campaigns that settle into an arc, but they can be run as isolated parts.

Into the Storm: This is invaluable. The expanded origin paths alone are brilliant, and it's all around just a good, solid splatbook that adds a lot of content.

Battlefleet Koronus: Also good, not quite as versatile as ITS. But it's got a lot of fluff about the Navy fleet that operates in the Koronus Expanse, adds ship options and enemy vessels and is a book I'm happy to have had on hand.

Koronus Bestiary: Always good to have more enemies available. It's a fluffy splatbook with a lot of flavour text in it, and a xenos generator that's quite fun to play with. It's got a number of plot hooks for the various xenos that are in there.

Navis Primer: Invaluable for beefing up your warp journeys. In the Core, the warp voyage portion of things was really sold short. Warp travel is horrifying, dangerous and frequently deadly. This helps make it so. You don't have to use the full PC Navigator rules for warp transit, because they're ridiculously complex, but it gives more options to make warp travel feel like an event, not just a quicktravel option.

Hostile Acquisitions: RT Core and several of the splats tend to assume your players are going to be erring on the Noblebright side of things, and they don't really get into the smuggling, nasty bastard business. This book tries its hardest to make that a Thing. A bit too little, too late, it's still a useful splat for having on hand for if your players want to do something that's technically outside the law. Not necessary to run the game well, but useful.

Stars of Inequity: Another good one to have if your players have decided that they want to play the Exploring-Conquering-Colony-Building game. It's got some pretty deep mechanics for setting up and maintaining colonies, and a neat world generator. Like HA, not necessary to run the game well but if it's the sort of game your players want to play then it's the book you'll want.

Faith and Coin: A book for pilgrims, those who seek to bring the Emperor's Holy Light to the lawless reaches of the Koronus Expanse. Some interesting and very useful gear and alternate careers in this book. And a small adventure that I have no experience with, so I can't say if it's good or not.

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Thanks for the post InquisitorVawn.
But seriously Vawn and I see eye to eye on the whole 40k setting and how it should feel.

IMO if you can only get 4,then i would get these 4 in order; Battlefleet Koronus, Into the Storm, Hostile Acquisitions, and then either Stars of Inequity or Navis Primer depending on if you feel like dealing with colonies or beefing up psykers.

Part of this is I am more interested in ship building/playing than anything else and these books give the most options for that. This also covers most of the important character options you can choose from. Other than the the dark Eldar Armoury/ vehicle entries the only other thing worth mentioning about Soul Reaver is that it does technically include the rules for an Eldar Battleship.

@melas

EXACTLY what I was after, thank you. I was surprised to find no such thing here or on the 40k RPG reddit, perhaps it'd benefit yet more of the community to circulate that a little more!

@htsmithium thank you as well. BFK and ITS are both a LOT of money elsewhere (70+) and both out of stock on mini market, so I think I'll consider those when BFK gets reprinted and when we decide we like the game and will actually play it now and again, at which point I see no reason not to snag ITS. Great points about the others, I hadn't originally thought about Hostile Acquisitions but now will.

Thanks again guys!

Happy to steal my GM's information to help you haha.

Happy to steal my GM's information to help you haha.

Doesn't look like Edge of the Abyss was out at the time he wrote that up. Any particular thoughts on it? It's in my tentative list but Im considering navis primer and even faith and coin more now...

As a Gm, I find Into the storm and Battlefleet Koronus to be what I use most in developing games. Since you obviously have a computer may I suggest Drive-thru RPG? They still had both last time I checked and lot's cheaper than Amazon!

Edge of the Abyss is useful, but certainly not necessary. It has several planets and systems detailed if you need help with that aspect of the game. It has details of xenos, how to run them, their technology, etc. In short, it has campaign background information. It also has a decent mini-adventure.

The three books I think are essential to running Rogue Trader (thematically appropriately of course, you can just homerule a bunch of stuff) are:

Core Rulebook - Obviously

Battlefleet Koronus - Fleshes out Space Combat, and if you don't want to do Space Combat, or think about these sorts of things it's not different from Dark Heresy

Koronus Bestiary - This is a great resource for fighting all different types of enemies or rolling up your own, and there's honestly a ton of interesting plot hooks in here.

There are some other good ones like Into The Storm, which fleshes out character concepts. Navis Primer has the Weirdboy which is a surprisingly good base class and a bunch of interesting hooks. Stars of Inequity has the fun treasure generator, plus some mid-level enemies. Lure of the Expanse is a very good resource compendium, and you can adapt the adventures in there into all sorts of standalone things. Faith and Coin has a weak adventure, but a ton of interesting backstory.

The only one I would give a miss is Edge of the Abyss, as people have indicated. It does a little bit of everything, so if you only could get ONE other book after the three I mentioned I would consider it as my fourth, but only if you never plan to get anything else. Otherwise everything it does, other books do better.