I'm about to run the Forsaken Bounty adventure as the starter point for our group and I am querying the amount of Profit that can be gained from the adventure (ie 19). In the RT book this would mean earning as much as a Hab Collective in one go which would put the endeavor at the very high end of the grand scale (months of in-game planning, scouting, looting, hiring, contracting etc), yet the adventure itself seems more to fit a lesser endeavor, maybe a greater.

I simply feel that this amount of profit seems huge to hand out after a single session of play and I realize that this was before the actual rule book came out but I am proposing the following PF to the different sections to try and balance it for more long term campaign play.

Salvaging the Bounty: +2

If their own vessel enters the debris cloud: -2

If the crew sucessfully scans the cloud: +1

Thoughts and tweaks on this would be great.

I've just run this myself with my group and we pretty much halfed the rewards so that they came awa with a total of +5 PF. They managed an extra +1 after making a truly epic commerce check when settling terms with the slavagers.

5 profit factor is far less than an actual endeavor with proper side quests will give. While it's a lot of PF in a single session, as it says at the intro, it's only the final part of a larger endeavor that would include getting the salvage rights, getting the location of the ship, etc.

Example of WHY +5 is not as much as it should be just using the game's abstract numbers.

Endeavor, total points 1500 achievement, +3 profit factor

Session 1 - Obtaining Info 500 achievement

Side Quest 1 - Help someone you bribed to get the information 200 achievement

Session 2 - Chasing off Pirates 500 achievement

Side Quest 2 - Con the Pirate's disaffected crew to working for you 100 achievement

Session 3 - Finish the Objective, 500 achievement

Let's say it's a military endeavor and all the objectives are military (not necessarily realistic but it's just an example) and the ship has a barracks. That's +100 achievement for each military objective (a total of 6) so, +600 achievement

So, for this endeavor, the Trader has exceeded the 1500 necessary achievement by 900, giving them + NINE profit factor AFTER the +3 for completing the endeavor. So, assuming they only had 1 appropriate ship component that gives them bonus achievement, and assuming they only do 1 side component to each step, they'd walk away with +12 profit factor from this endeavor before upkeep tests and other things that chance to bring the factor back down (it's fair to say that they'd take damage fighting pirates, so their ship will require an upkeep test and the results of that could end up being -5 profit factor, etc).

Point taken. I guess the biggy for me is that for simply salvaging the ship the PF is +10. Then all the other aspects are added/subtracted to it. I completely understand your breakdown of the endeavor and that is a lot more reasonable to me, especially once you take upkeep tests into account. Maybe I need to break it all down into the endeavor components and rebuild it. I think as the adventure stands now, it is broken from a PF perspective. Again understandable as it was released before the rules were fully released.

I just ran the NOTE "pre-game launch" adventure. Its obvious that the adventure is more than a little broken when it comes to PF. As a GM I looked at if from realism stand point. First of without adding any other acts into the game I thought. How is the Explorers salvaging the ship. Did they just drive up fly in with their "guncutter" and salvage the ship? Well unless they have some high power tools on that "guncutter" they arent going to get much profit out of the ship. The plasma reactor, gellar field, core cog are all too big to be placed on a small ship and flown to their main vessel. Thats plain and simple. Also most RT arent scavengers and don't have the tools and ability to drag a space hulk back to Port Wander to get the full price of a damaged vessel.

Anyways what I did is assumed that the +10 was if by random chance the Explorers got the ship back to port perfectly. Not damage... Opps its already damaged. Do to the ship being having a damaged reactor, possibly a ruptured gellar field, a damaged haul from months in a debris field, and several bulkheads open to the void so I gave it the -3 for having "suffered serious damage". PF +7

It has a rule if the Explorer's ship tries to go in the cloud of debris they get a -8 to their PF. Well I said the same if they tried to rig the Emperors Bounty up and drive it out. That's a quick way to the PF to a -1. However having the ship out gives the Explorers a +5 to salvaging the ship. PF +4

So scanning the debris field gives you a +2. I said the Explorers found a interesting cargo haul full of pre-fabricated domes. This was just something random salvage that I knew the Explorers would think second before selling. However other GMs might make it something more worth selling on a possible plot hook to a later adventure. PF +6

Unlucky for my Explorers on the few flights between the ship they damaged the guncutter and took the -1. PF +5

Lastly, the part about the survivors giving the Explorers a +2 PF for helping salvage the ship. That one was lost on me. Im not sure what those starved people could do to help but it wasnt worth a +2. Instead I left what they did with the survivors purely roleplay.

My Personal Final PF +5. Equal to a in the book as a Hive Gang or Outcast Sect. That didn't sound to bad for RT on a two week or more job.

NOTE: The Explorers still had to ether limp the Emperor's Bounty back home or try to warp travel her home. Don't forget the RT might not have enough crew to crew both ships. The RT might leave the prize at the Battlefield and go hire a transport of crew or hauler to bring the Emperors Bounty to a shipyard. If the RT doesn't have more than one ship this might get tricky with leaving the prize behind. I guess it goes down to how realistic or anal you are as a GM.

Good Luck To Everyone! Sorry for being so long winded!

DM Variyn said:

It's not as simple as it seems.

Remember that the wreckage in question is just floating in space. The only form of gravity in such a location would be the artificial gravity generated by the respective ships grav plates (which aren't that hard to disassemble). Once that is done, not even a big plasma reactor is going to weigh much and a guncutter would without a doubt be able to "tow" such a machine, or vital parts of it back to the holds of the PC's vessel. The size of the plasma reactor might provide some inertia (which would barey be felt unless the component in question is REALLY big), but that would just slow down the towing process, not stop it dead in it's tracks (unless the reactor is big as a small world that is). Apart from that, the PC' could simply use their own ship to tear out a large reactor by burning a large enough hole through the hull of the derelict vessel, attaching a bunch of chains to the reactor (yes, chains! Imperial space technology don't use much in the way of sci-fi tractor beams and such, they even use gigantic chains to tie large asteroids together ) and simply gun their own engines backwards and pull the reactor out.

That's how I imagine a salvage operation anyway, and most of the fluff seem to support it.

Granted, it would take a long time to hack up an entire vessel and transport all the components somewhere else and sell them off, but due to the absurd profit factor this scenario hands out, I don't think anyone would complain if it takes the better part of a year or even an entire decade of in-game time to complete.

Anyhow, always keep in mind that the lack of gravity of a planetary magnitude does allow people to pull off pretty impressive feats when you think about it. Heck just look at the tugboats of today that are quite pathetic in size when you compare them to the gigantic super freighters that ply the seas, yet these small tugboats are able to pull and guide vessels close to ten or even twenty times their size safely to port, mainly because of the bouyancy that the water provides (bodies floating in water don't provide much resistance, even large bodies. Just imagine bodies floating in zero gravity )

TOUCHE!

Yet if you remember you must make a flight test just to get to the Emporers Bounty. Could you drag essiental compents through that space without damaging them?

DM Variyn said:

Now that's an entirely different problem, but I like that you bring it up.

If you want to, you could decide that the salvaging of certain components is going to require very difficult pilot tests to be able to tow these components through the debris field without damaging the component in question. After all, these components weren't designed to have to cope with being dragged through space and being bombarded by debris and asteroids during the trip, they were designed to stay safely inside the vessel, protected by armour, hull and voidshields. Which of course means that the PC's are going to have to be crafty if they want to salvage "the good stuff" and not just having to settle for cogitator banks, equipment and grav plates bolted to the decking.

Another way to solve the issue might be to spend some time bombarding the debris field and hopefully clear away enough scrap and rock (i.e spending a week playing "asteroids" over a gun platform console). That's what we did in my group when we played Forsaken Bounty, and our GM decided that because of our extreme amount of degrees of success we got, the pilot test to navigate to the derelict vessel wasn't as hard as it usually was.

In any case, make sure to let the players come up with ideas of how to salvage the vessel, and review their attempts before they get to do them. Certain attempts that seem crafty and smart should be rewarded, sometimes regardless if they are successful or not (even if they f*ck something up, they are likely to keep such mistakes in mind in the future and thus it could warrant a few extra XP than usual). Other attempts might be less thought through by the players and the GM might even feel that it i necessary to subject them to an entire misfortune, or other forms of penalties like reduced PF, Acquisition tests or having components damaged due to accidents etc. etc.

The point with Rogue Trader seems to make the scenarios and campaign as player driven as possible, so as a GM I think one should focus on letting the players try out ay attempt they can come up with, rather than saying: "No you can't do that" from the very beginning. After all, if you are doing the effort of giving the players as much choice in the matter as possible, it should be within your right to spring a little more nasty surprises on them (than usual) when you feel that the players haven't thought things through enough.

In my opinion, the skill Evaluate could be very useful when trying to determine how much value you could get out of a salvage operation. Depending on how many degrees of success the one doing the evauating gets, the GM could reveal details of an estimate of how much profit factor they could recieve through a cursory salvage (basically looting everything from the derelict that isn't bolted down), they might also have the opportunity to acquire more PF than that if they decide to strip the vessel of all working machines and mechanisms, but the time and effort required might result in misfortunes and penalties to PF due to the amount of trips and extended stay in the void that would be necessary.

It's gonna require more work and thinking on the GM's part, but it sure seems a heck of a lot more fun than the standard: "congratulations, you beat the boss on the wreckage, here's how much profit factor you get", wouldn't you agree?

Actually other than shooting the debris thats exactly what my players did last night. The ideas you just said si what I came up with and it seemed to go really well. The Explorers got the ship in good enough order to fly it out of the debris field. After a few tests from the navigator setting a path through the lighter of the debris the Explorator fired up the engine.

To my amusement the Helmsman failed his pilot test by a handfull of degress even after using a fate and rerolling. To the Explorators distaste the vessels hull was skinned, redamaging many of their repairs and opening new ones.

Even with the bad outcome the Explorers loved the mostly RP driven adventure of thinking how to get their vessel out. I had them lose communications with their main vessel as it glided around the halo of debris. (A ork freebooter were spotted and the Explorer's main vessel, causing it to try to run silent and stay out of sight.) This lose in communications really put the players on edge and forced them to think. Before they lost communications they got sent two transport ships full of armsmen, enginseers, and servitors. I recommend this lost island idea to all RT GMs.

I'm actually making a post on ideas for my next game if anyone wants to look. It will probably be named something of the sort "Escape From Ork Infested Space Hulk"