What would the most important 'leader' shipboard roles be? I don't need an exhaustive list, just something that will build a fairly large, functional and believable crew with some personality.

So far I figure you NEED to have the following people:

Medicae

Your going to have to have a chief medicae and several juniors.

Communication Officers

Bridge crew, inter and extra ship communications. Basically the dude who goes 'Yes Lord!' when the captain yells: "Open hailing frequencies!" or "Get me a line to the ship's enginseer right now!"

Not sure what you'd call them.

Engineer

You definitely need a chief engineer with several subordinates leading teams.

Master at arms

This guy will handle the security personell and any fighting complement you may have on board the ship. He'd do everything from maintaining discipline to making sure their training and equipment was up to scratch. Possibly even leading them in any large scale engagements.

Gunnery master

One or more, these guys would handle gunnery crews, supervise reloading and firing of weapons during battle and maintenance while not in battle. Likely there will be a master gunner who I assume would be stationed on the bridge and would actually handle aiming and firing of weapons?

Helmsman

Your pilot. The Was to your Malcolm. Except with less 'I am a leaf on the wind...' and more 'Bringing her round 24 degrees to starboard Captain, steady as she goes!'

Warden of Sensors

The guy who will be handling your sensor equipment on board the ship. Kinda like the sonar dude on a submarine. Like that dude with the huge ears in that Kelsey Grammar movie 'Periscope Down'.

Any more? Any corrections to my assumptions?

(Also, is there any way to copy and paste into posts on this board? I typed my post in notepad where I could actually see it properly and found out I had to re-type everything into this window because the silly thing wouldn't let me paste. Really annoying.)

Paste with Ctrl+v

As for Shipboard roles, while they're not glamorous, you'll need:

master of manifests: to not only handle the dock crew, loading and unloading efforts, location and inventorying of any cargo taken aboard, but also keep accurate inventories of the ships food stuffs and necessities, oversee the ship's stores and rationing, and oversee and direct recycling efforts aboard the vessel.

Ship Treasurer: to handle all those massive transactions that the Rogue Trader initiates, make sure docking fees are payed, handle the purchasing of supplies ordered by the Master of Manifests, etc.

Crew Master: Human resources. Handles the recruiting efforts and the assigning of new slaves/ratings/crewmen. Monitors crew population and acts as intermediary between the head officers of the ship and the crew chiefs of the thousands of laborers aboard the ship.

Nice, thanks, that's exactly what I need.

And sorry, CTRL-V doesn't work for me to paste. I guess possibly it's my browser? Using Google Chrome.

It's not a required role, but the crew will quite likely have a union rep. you know, they guy who organises the mutinies when your morale drops too low? Not to mention all the internal-smugglers, gambling-den owners, guns-for-hire and other minor but useful NCs in the crew microculture.

Luxury Passenger Quarters would come with a small handful of servants, butlers and chefs and I imagine the Bridge Crew are important enough to have their own. These guys would have a Master of the Kitchens, Chief Butler and so forth to pass on orders. He very calmly says "Yes mi'lord" to whatever crazy demands are given, walks slowly out of the room and then gives his underlings such a lecture even Gordon Ramsey would be shocked.

If you have a trophy room, a Keeper of the Rag and Polish is vital, as is a tour guide. You don't expect the Lord Captain to show everyone around personally, surely?

The High Priest. Especially in the void, knowing the emperor is with you is a comfort. Besides, if they don't worship him they might start listening to the Whispering Thing in Maintenance Pipe 207-B.

The Bard. His job is to list everything the Rogue Trader and his underlings do, in the way that makes them seem the most heroic.

The Astropath. Even if you don't have a PC playing one, no Rogue Trader should be without faster-than-light communication.

The Man With a Shotgun. His job is to shoot the Astropath if he goes crazy.

Just an odd idea:

Some of your roles might not be filled with "officers" in the common sense of the word. For example, your "chief engineers might be a Temple to the Machinegod onboard your ship. While they will see for the needs of the ship and will in general follow the orders (since they do not want to be removed!) there are some occurences where they will not follow command "No matter what is your will, Lord Captain, we will not desecrate the airducts of Deck3784 with pumping plasma through them. This might clean the investation of Marauderrats, but such a blashemy to the ship itself will not be committed by us!"

Anyway, back to topic!:
If you are a large ship, you might have a " Warden of Blood" or "Warden of Genealogy" who takes care about the family- and bloodlines on board. His sanction is needed for a proper mariage. This way, inbreeding is kept to the tolerable (or unavoidable) minimum.

Talking about "ship birth", there might be something akin to a "Head Scourge" who oversees that mutants are either culled from the crew or charged with the most dangerous jobs. In addition, he and his men might be responsible of keeping the vermin-people (Hullghasts & Ghilliam) of the Blackholds at bay...
Perhaps the same person, I suppose there will be a kind of "Soulwarden" who has an eye upon the corruption of soul and mind...and on emerging psykers. After all, ship crews travell the warp frequently, and the warp is known to taint the soul...

If your ship transports passengers on a regular basis, a "Master of Stewarts" mgiht be responsibel for that matter.

It would be possible that some outside authority have "official agents" onboard. If you have standing contracts with some Guilds, they migh insist on having there own Void Commercialst onboard to see after there goods.

Gregorius21778 said:

That is grim as hell and I love it.

If the Rouge Trader has a harem he probably needs an old lady or a eunuch to manage it. Bonus points for outrageous name: Mistress of the Procreatorium or Chief of the Cut-Men or something.

Ship's Fool : keeping the captain and officers entertained, possibly offering useful advice that no one else is brave enough to give. This could actually be an acceptable place in society to have a mutant.

I plan on asking the PC's for a list of 1 to 10 NPC's on the ship's crew that their character interacts with a lot. I think this will let the players add a lot of character to their ship's crew as well as fill in some of those lower officer or non-com ranks of the ship.

I like the idea of a harem and a unich in charge of it as totally cool. I want my players to feel free to add that sort of flavor to their ship.

Master of the Scutarium clusters- bloke who switches the void shields off and on.

@Plastic Rat: it's a combination of the site software and your browser. When you try to paste you get the usual "pop-up blocked" in the bottom right-hand corner, yes?
You need to allow that pop-up and paste into the window that appears. It's annoying, but as a fellow Chrome user, it's the only work-around that I've been able to find

Don't forget that there will be plenty of specialised roles for those further down the social ladder. Making reference to these will drive home the fact that a starship in 40K is a small city, not something from Star Trek.

Some Examples:-

The Gunnery Crews - each has it's own dedicated team of dozens, perhaps over a hundred, voidsmen to operate it. It also makes sense that the crew and their families will have quarters as close as practical to their place of labour. Take these facts together and you have several small communities performing the same task in close proximity. This is the perfect recipe for rivalries to breed. Perhaps each crew sends a team of men to play against the other crews in some sort of sporting league or bare-knuckles fighting mataches. Perhaps they have long traditions of playing pranks on each other, and initiations for new recruits involving raids on other gun chambers.

The Void Walkers - the void is all around the starship, an ever-present demon kept at bay only by the diligence of the ship's crew and the blessings of the Priesthood of Mars. It is universally feared by all right-thinking voidsmen, with one exception- the hardy breed who are willing to walk out onto the ship's hull and perform those rites of maintenance which must be done outside the ship's hull. Such work demands far more technical knowledge than the average voidsman possesses, coupled with the iron nerves needed to brave the void outside on a regular basis. Such men form an elite aboard the ship, and are both respected for their skills and bravery and feared for their regular contact with the dark void. After all, who knows what might touch their spirits and follow them back inside the sanctuary of the ship's hull?

The Vermin Hunters - rat catching or it's equivalent is a necessary task in any human society, and a starship is no exception. The Vermin Hunters have a far harder job than their planet-bound brethren, though. They must patrol the ship entire, crawling through narrow ducts and wandering isolated corridors and holds that rarely hear a human footstep. And their prey could be literally anything, for who knows what foul breed of Xenos scavenger might find it's way aboard an unwary starship? The whispered tales of horrors breeding in secret in the Black Holds until one day they pour out to overrun the ship are a start warning of the worst case scenario should the Vermin Hutners neglect their job.

You can't forget the Marines or their equivalent, if you have a barracks. Marines are interesting to me because they're a very small percentage of your crew. You might have a gun crew of a couple thousand, yet you'll only have a handfull of marines.

I'm hoping to develop them a bit in our sessions, I.E. for each component granted +10 to commands involving marine-type things, you can take on an additional "company", to a presumably reasonably level for the ship's size. I haven't thought of any really good gameplay effects besides the potential for rivalries between your dynasty's troops and some mercs you've hired, or the Inquisition coming to dig into what sort of soldiers you have camped in the aft barracks.

Priz said:

True, though given the 40K background you'll need a different name for them- "Marine" means something very different in this setting after all. I personally use Assault Troopers, since their primary function is to form the spearhead of any boarding action.

I've ruled that 1% of a ship's crew is Assault Troopers, meaning that my PCs Frigate, with 30,000 crew, carries 300 of them- not an unreasonable number I feel. Since the PC ship has a Munitorium, I've ruled this means they have Carapace Armour and Bolters rather than the Imperial Guard standard equipment I see most such troops wearing.

Naval Security standard on most ships would be Naval Armsmen, who would do the hit and run and boarding duty if you have no other sources.

Come, we forget the two most important men, as usual:

Ship's Quartermaster: Oversees supplies and their distribution. On pirate vessels, also oversees the distribution of shares of the loot. If the captain needs to know how much rum is left on board, this would be the man to see.

Ship's Paymaster: Oversees the distribution of pay to the ship's company and any mercenaries that are hired.

LOL I hate not being able to edit.

Someone, reading through the role descriptions above, tried to rename the jobs something grimdark and flowery. In all honesty, that's one of the few things that makes me wretch reading about things like the Misericord. Grimdark taken to the point of baroque.

BaronIveagh said:

But grimdark to absurd levels with a healthy splashing of baroque is one of the things that makes 40k 40k and not half a zillion other sci-fantasy settings ;-) If it lacks the baroque, it just becomes any other dystopian space opera. The more baroque and ridiculous you can make something sound, the more alien it will feel and the more alien it feels, the easer it is to accept that this is 38 thousand mind boggling years into the future (the equivalent of now vs the year 36,000 bce where humans were first crossing the land bridge into north America, high technology was buts of sharpened rock, and some of the earliest primitive figurative art has been unearthed) rather then a more familiar, easily grasped, and paltry 200 years into the future ;-)

Of course, i dearly love the Misericord... it's strange little things like that which truly make the setting, but that's all just my opinion of course.

Need a bosun. Senior enlisted, probably also the toughest SOB on the ship. Our crew includes the head pilot who decides when to launch what craft.

How about the " The Lord Captains Left Hand "? Every Lord Captain will have a right hand man or a number of right hand men. The Lord Captains Left Hand is his Chief in Command for everything ugly that needs to be done. He is his Senior Interrogator, His Master of Inquiery and his Chief of Secret Police. He has a number of asociates and agents collectivly known as "the fingers" ("Fingermen", anyone?) whom act as his eyes, ears... and of course assasines (if the captain likes to include anything like this).

This figure is similiar to the once noted position of the "Masters of Whispers"