In my experience the players only want it for the ability to choose the critical hits their ship suffers.

I think if your players went around, put in effort acquiring weird traps, installing them into their ship you could certainly make that argument. However there's a few flaws with it I can see

1) A tenebro-maze refers to the ship layout, so if you've booby-trapped your ENTIRE ship, people will have trouble getting to work every morning.

2) Boarders go for shield generators 90% of the time so that they can blow up your ship and not face the super powerful PCs that exist on the bridge who seem better than anyone else in the Galaxy.

3) The preferred way to deal with this problem in 40K is to send wave after wave of your own men into these death traps until their blood and guts clog the machines until they stop working.

How is the PCs ship being boarded? Teleportation? Only if the shields are down, and they will bypass a lot of the Tenebro Maze.. Boarding torpedoes? Those are limited strike forces that are only meant for rather specific missions. The Tenebro Maze would work against them, but boarding torpedoes are pretty rare. Assault craft? That seems to be the most likely victim of the Tenebro Maze and those are likely only to be launched once the ship is nearly wrecked, so activating all these traps from the bridge might be a moot point. It seems an awful lot of effort for something that's only going to get used in the most unlikely of situations. Then again, you might make a case for a prime tactic while using a Q-ship. Is this something your players are really pressing for? I know mine won't be thinking on that micro of a scale. They're always trying to figure out where and how to get another ship.

Errant raises a good point which is that hit and runs tend to be extremely quick. You target known components, board very close to them, plant some melta charges and get out. If people have boarded your ship then you're already in trouble.

If your ship is loaded with archeotech gear then people are going to want to take it - and they're going to want to take it intact which doesn't mean boarding (people will run out of bullets/bolter rounds/promethium/power packs long before you run out of crew). It means plague or melta torpedoes, or possibly just stealing it when you dock.

My overarching principle is that if you're having fun, and you're creating a scenario where the other people at your table have fun, then there's nothing wrong with it. Keep in mind your GM is sitting at the table too.

My second, very strong principle is that if you come up with a common-sense solution and think it should override something in the book, there has to be a very strong reason why it won't work because otherwise EVERYONE would be doing it.

I think the main problem right now is you might be thinking Imperial sensors are, even remotely, good. A handheld augur can detect movement, and maybe some sources of heat that are probably lives, but it can't pick up "life signs". Neither can ship sensors. If you're rolling on the bridge with a wall-mounted control panel that triggers death traps throughout the ship - which is awesome - then you have to accept that you're probably going to kill large quantities of your own crew doing this. Void ships are enormous, so a small control panel is going to have to activate multiple traps at once to be reasonably effective.

I'm not trying to throw a monkey wrench in this parade, but let me be frank. I've never attempted to do deck layouts and the ones I've seen are, IMO, deficient. A capital ship 3 miles long x 1 mile tall x 1 mile wide is going to have over a thousand miles of corridors if the corridors are all spaced 100 yards apart and the decks are all 300' tall. I find it likely that a capital ship has more like 10,000 miles of main corridors, 30,000 miles of secondary corridors, and untold mileage of access passages and crawlspaces. The sheer immensity of these ships' interiors is almost inconceivable. Ever seen a real aircraft carrier? You could fit about 400 of those in a main cargo hold of one of these capital ships. Those antennae that stick out of the artwork you see aren't antennae at all. Those are towers that are larger than our own world's largest skyscrapers by degrees. That is, to me, why boarding actions are even possible in the first place. It's just not that hard to find a remote place along the hull that isn't covered by the small gun turrets, burn a hole through the hull, set some explosive charges, and whisk away. The actual damage done is probably minimal, but the immediate damage probably intereferes with the ship's combat abilities.

These ships are difficult to navigate on a good day with a perfect map, which probably doesn't exist. A tenebro maze is an improved version, which is a real nightmare to an invader.

I would think that it would work using pressure plates and laser sensors, the crew wouldn't die because the need to avoid the deck plate twelve to the left of the statue in corridor 44G is as ingrained in them as the fact that it is corridor 44G. Anyone who sets off a trap is a "Nuwmin", anyone who survives setting off a trap is a "bastard Nuwmin sir" and immediately promoted.

I would think that it would work using pressure plates and laser sensors, the crew wouldn't die because the need to avoid the deck plate twelve to the left of the statue in corridor 44G is as ingrained in them as the fact that it is corridor 44G. Anyone who sets off a trap is a "Nuwmin", anyone who survives setting off a trap is a "bastard Nuwmin sir" and immediately promoted.

This is exactly what I mean by invoking ship size. Maybe they have all been trained about that deck plate on 44G, or was the plate on 44E, or was it 444G, or was it 54G, or BOOM! These ships are simply so large that it would be impossible to remember where everything is. You can make the argument that each crew section only traverses limited deck space, but keep that in mind next time you throw in a hullghast hunt scenario. "Make sure to hire a Deck 44G guide to help the investigator through the traps sections."

And mind you, I think all of these suggestions are workable, it's just that I don't think it's mappable in the lifetime of the average GM.

You all think that a trapped Tenebro Maze ship is complicated for people to move through?

Just think for a moment how complicated the situation gets after a few generations of Rogue Traders. Every time the ship passes hands to a new Trader, new traps are added and old ones are forgotten about. It is completely possible that due to a unfortunate strike everyone who knows how to actually turn off some of the traps that were activated during a battle died and the crew just merely avoided that part of the ship for so long that no one remembers exactly -why- that section of the ship is avoided anymore. No accurate map of the ship would ever exist on the off chance that a rival would get a hold of it and at any rate the ship's layout is likely to change along with its new owner anyway.

So for the Gm that wants to have a lot of fun with a Rogue Trader crew that just inherited a Tenebro Maze ship... Consider it having booby traps that only the eldest members of the crew have a vague awareness of the existence of, let alone where they are and under what circumstances they can be operated/turned off. Hell, for all the Emperor knows they **** things could have broken down after all this time without repairs and restocking.

I'd say that's certainly one way to give your ship some character, if you will, and make parts of their frequent environment more "alive", and even hostile; the ship isn't always on your side. Figure, these are the same humans who, even with mighty cogitators, and mostly working examples to study, they frequently "have lost the ability to still manufacture ______________." It could make perfect sense to have "ghost town" parts of the ship, or even, maybe, the one or two elders who DO know some, and they get captured by the mutineers in your crew, who hole up in that one part of your ship you can't get into, giving them at least a short opportunity to actually threaten you.

On an off note, I think it could be hilarious for a specific dynasty to be looking for some specific relics over a handful of generations, due to their importance to the family's history, or some such, but not knowing that they've been aboard the very ship, all along, hidden in some shadow hold, which is on the wrong end of a fragment of your out-of-date tenebro maze, so no one can ever find it. I'd laugh, at least, so long as it isn't my ship, and my loot.

You all think that a trapped Tenebro Maze ship is complicated for people to move through?

Just think for a moment how complicated the situation gets after a few generations of Rogue Traders. Every time the ship passes hands to a new Trader, new traps are added and old ones are forgotten about. It is completely possible that due to a unfortunate strike everyone who knows how to actually turn off some of the traps that were activated during a battle died and the crew just merely avoided that part of the ship for so long that no one remembers exactly -why- that section of the ship is avoided anymore. No accurate map of the ship would ever exist on the off chance that a rival would get a hold of it and at any rate the ship's layout is likely to change along with its new owner anyway.

So for the Gm that wants to have a lot of fun with a Rogue Trader crew that just inherited a Tenebro Maze ship... Consider it having booby traps that only the eldest members of the crew have a vague awareness of the existence of, let alone where they are and under what circumstances they can be operated/turned off. Hell, for all the Emperor knows they **** things could have broken down after all this time without repairs and restocking.

Well, I think that I am going to have some Rogue Traders come across a ship that was abandoned like that, but is better than their current ship and holds a large cache of relics that would help them out. This really does sound like it would make things more interesting, at the very least.

I'd say that's certainly one way to give your ship some character, if you will, and make parts of their frequent environment more "alive", and even hostile; the ship isn't always on your side. Figure, these are the same humans who, even with mighty cogitators, and mostly working examples to study, they frequently "have lost the ability to still manufacture ______________." It could make perfect sense to have "ghost town" parts of the ship, or even, maybe, the one or two elders who DO know some, and they get captured by the mutineers in your crew, who hole up in that one part of your ship you can't get into, giving them at least a short opportunity to actually threaten you.

On an off note, I think it could be hilarious for a specific dynasty to be looking for some specific relics over a handful of generations, due to their importance to the family's history, or some such, but not knowing that they've been aboard the very ship, all along, hidden in some shadow hold, which is on the wrong end of a fragment of your out-of-date tenebro maze, so no one can ever find it. I'd laugh, at least, so long as it isn't my ship, and my loot.

Totally plausible. For that matter, whatever hidden Mcguffin gets found by accident, it's entirely possible that it predates the Dynasty's taking possession of the ship, depending on ownership history.

It is for this reason that whenever you take possession of a ship, you need to thoroughly survey it. Especially if a prior owner was an enemy and/or heretic/pirate. If there's some evidence or remnant of their activities on your ship, you need to know about it before anybody else does, so you can either take advantage of the information or destroy evidence of things that could get you labeled a heretic and executed if the wrong people found out about its existence on your ship. However ... no GM should be expected to detail map an entire ship, unless it's ridiculously tiny for the universe (which is usually quite big enough for any other universe). And even then, the GM is probably still only going to detail map it if it is (a) important and/or (b) can find a suitable map to steal elsewhere and tweak to fit.

The most a GM should reasonably be expected to do is a rough block layout of where things are in relation to other things, and perhaps travel times between the various important locations and/or sections onboard.

A scenario like this could even form the basis of an entire mini story arc, with the ship itself being the locale for a number of exploration style missions into its depths. This could work very well with some of the larger ship classes, Cruisers, Grand Cruisers or something like a Star Galleon. A savvy GM could have the ship respond in mysterious ways to entering orbit around specific planets, thus guiding the party along a breadcrumb trail to unlock its hidden secrets.