Velozity said:

Well we are talking about Noble Born Hoity Poity Navigator Houses here who happen to be so nice to help you out in your travels, they are not common laborers. It depends on how convincing they can make it that a Navigator needs proper rest and meditation to keep him from plunging the vessel into the nearest warp drift. I personally rather have happy well rested Navigators on duty when I am passing the Maw. Would you trust your soul to a single overstressed Navigator on the brink of fatigue collapse at such times?

Minimum would be 2 Navigators, unless the captain prefers lying still in mid transit halve the time wasting valuable time while he could make profit.

Sister Callidia said:

I agree, but the whole concept of 8 hour shifts is very 9 to 5 and 21st century ideals. Just challenging some assumptions, s'all.

Im putting together my first campaign as a GM & my first try at RT/DH (some players want to buff up and use DH characters).

My understanding is that there is scope enough in the 40kverse to justify however many or few Navigators / Astropaths you'd like withour being silly. so long as they make up only a very very small number of the 'space cities' population. You could have six Navigators and a big choir of fifty Astropaths. Or only one Navigator perhaps with an apprentice and an Astropath Ascendant with a Choir of only a couple of Astropaths or perhaps no Choir at all. As long as you justify it by deciding that there are X number of Individuals and this is why, then the game (which I have yet to play I hasten to add) should run ok.

I'm personally going for an ancient dynasty that has fallen from glory; the fleet is now just four ships. Im thinking of having several family groups for the fleets navigators most of which come from ancient agreements with what is now a more minor house whose fate is tied with the dynasties but being unable to provide enough navigators one or two new players are on the scene trying to make a name for themselves.

As for the specifics im leaning towards, Mother and Father with teenage sprog on the Cruiser, an older sprog and Uncle on the Mining barge. A trio of cousins from a different family but same House on the Ore refiner/transport and identical creepy quadruplets from a new and unknown house on the Stasis trawler. PCs can be any of them, from the same group etc as them or a new and fresh threat to some or all of them.

As for Astropaths I was thinking of one Ascendant on the cruiser with his apprentice and a choir of twelve (thinking of a Master and apprentice Rule of two theme as the dynasties guiding principle in all things lol). On the Mining barge a Choir of nine, on the Ore refiner/transport and the Stasis trawler choirs of seven. PCs could be master or apprentice or as with the Navigators a new face.

When it comes to how aware the PCs will be of the numbers of Navigators or details of the most recent treaty etc im putting together for each of the PCs a short summary of things they would know about the ship dynasty and so on, given their histories and position indicating what they should know to be a Secret or just inside knowledge.

Velozity said:

The eight hour work day is a 20th century thing, but actually eight hours still fits for 40K as well. In the Age of Sail, the ship's crew was divided into three watches, dividing the day up into six shifts, so that each watch would work two four-hour shifts separated by eight hours for sleep or time off.

Individual captains could easily change these numbers around though, maybe two watches, working four shifts of six hours each. Depends on the Rogue Trader and how he wants to organize it. But it's not like the Age of Sail navies were particularly gentle to their sailors, it's just that tired men make mistakes that get people killed, especially on a warship.

AkumaKorgar said:

Given that the calendar system used by the Administratum separates a Terran Standard year into 1000 segments, you end up with each segment being approximately eight hours and 46 minutes. Given that a normal day-night cycle would be an artificial consideration aboard a starship, it seems appropriate to fit ship-board timekeeping to a standardised Imperial system and fit the shifts around that.

AkumaKorgar said:

Not quite. In Age of Sail navies, in a three watch system (very generous), it was 8 hour's (off/on), 8 hour's, (on/off), 4 hour's (off/on), 4 hour's (on/off), with the short watches known as the Dog Watches (ie the middle of the night).

In a two watch system it was 12 hour's (on/off), 6 hour's (off/on), 4 hour's (on/off). The advantage was you had more peaople available for each watch at the cost of (occassionally) less sleep. You could also fit more men on board as they could sleep in bigger shifts (per hammock), though it required more stores to provide for them. If you were short on men you might move to three watches to reduce fatigue, or improve morale (at the cost of efficiency) or run an easy ship.

I think it makes a lot of sense to have a small crew of Navigators. RT suggests there are actually a decent amount of Navigators. You do need one to travel effectively through the warp. Having a couple of senior Navs and several apprentices makes a lot of sense. And the apprentice thing goes with Late Middle Ages/Rennaisance/Age of Sail influences on the setting.

In the Rogue Trader novels Lucian (the main character, a "veteran" RT) only has 1 Navigator and 1 Astropath. He wanted to change the Astropath (because the Astropath was quite mad) but the Guild didn't let him. Reading the novel it seems that the Navigator is in trance 24h/7 while in the warp.

When the Navigator is navigating the warp his attention is understandably occupied by the warp.

I would suggest that there be groups of both classes on any one ship EX:

Astropath Transcendents = 2-3 Per ship; One never leaving, the second specializing in Interrogation and domination, the third specializing in psychic combat and healing, All on rotating shifts. An astropathic Choir of 10 to 20 on rotating shifts to assist the astropath on duty they never hit planet.

Navigators again about 3 possibly 4 depending on the way you want it per ship.

The way I think I would handle this many Members of my crew is to have one PC be in charge of the members of that class IE your PC astropath is commanding the other astropaths and therefore he is the combat or interrogation guy.

In our case, we had both an Astropath Transcendant and a Navigator as PC's.

We agreed that we had a small choir of half a dozen astropaths, maybe a dozen, which always operated as the ships point of contact. The astropath transcendant would often defer his work to them unless it was important.

However in the case of our navigator, we only ever had the one NPC navigator, and then we wrote in an additional Navigator PC role, so the NPC took a back seat. We went with the "navigators are rare, highly revered individuals. Navigators dont like being benched." Eventually our PC navigator left the party, and we defaulted back to our NPC navigator. But for the most part we have only had one. Its quite interesting, you really wanna make sure he is happy

E.X.A.-Puggy said:

If you did not have a player character Astropath Transcendant, I dont think you can expect to have one on board at all (unless your DM has something in mind), let alone 2-3. They are too rare, and even if they were secured and employed, they would require a solid first-hand role (the role which a PC can provide, not a benched NPC position).

Same applies for the Navigator.

@vip

The problem I see with having only one Navigator around is that the only logical course of action for a Rogue Trader would be to weld shut the doors of his Sanctum. If the Navigator dies, you might as well say "Ok, group, everyone either roll up new characters or play out the hundred year journey home." Navigators that go out and adventure only make sense when they're at least partially replaceable, even if that means relying on your crew rating and praying not to pop up in the next Waaagh! every time you make a jump.

In my campaign there was a sole PC Astropath Transcendant and a PC Navigator with two apprentices from his house. The Astropath got friendly with the head of the Sibellus astropaths and picked up a small choir of six Astropath ordinary. The Navigator was assigned another two apprentices after some "disputes" with his previous pair.

Ships are rare, with mant being 100's to 1,000's of years old. It makes no sense to anyone to send a ship of this value into the brink undercrewed, or with a risky crew.

However these are Rogue Traders, and risk is in their blood, and profit rules over sensibilities. Traveling into the kronus expanse through the maw is a dangerous start, and there is every chance the ship can be lost before it even gets a chance for profit.

Add these factors together and the liklihood becomes that the number of Navigators and Astropaths would be as low as 1 per ship.

Navigators: For these to be on board there must be some kind of agreement between the RT house and the Navigators house. The Navigators house would probably only consider supplying more then 1 navigator if the profit was high.

I would suggest 1 per ship unless circumstances are explained (loss of profit per endeavour for having more)

Astropaths: These are the Emperor's servants first and foremost. The RTs are important to the empire as they go beyond imperial space, which means they can highlight new worlds that would expand the empire, identify threats on the borders that may not otherwise be known about, and as such information they provide is invaluable. I would imagine that on a profitable and succesful the empire would sanction more Astropaths.

I would suggest more Astropaths avvailable based on the RT's profit factor.

Gaming it

As far as the navigator goes though, having 1 per ship (as a PC) can almost give the PC navigator a feeling of immortality. After all if he ides, the players have to risk the Warp to get anywhere, and in many cases this can derail the game. As such I would have an apprentice on board - whether it's the PC who is apprentice or the NPC would be the players choice, but either way it removes the "you can't kill me without killing the game" mentalitiy that could surface.

As to Astropaths, communication is important, but loss of an astropath is not game breaking.

There is also a distinct difference between an Astropath and an Astropath Trancendint, with the latter far more rare then the former. Astropaths themselves are actualy fairly common (compared to other things in these topics) There will be many on every station, world, etc. And likely a handful on any given ship, except the most poor or safe transports. Astropaths are the only means of FTL communication avaliable to the Imperium, and that level off communication is critical to a functioning socity.

That being said, most Astropaths aren't good for much other then human radios. Game wise, this translates to Psy-rating 1 & only the Astrotelepathy power. More or less only useful as a choir. Astropath Transendents are the one in 1 thousand among Astropaths that can grow their abilities after the soul binding. They can transmit intersteller by themselves, not to mention untold other psychic powers. This you don't find at every port of call, nor on every ship. Most of them are likely with Rogue Traders, Navy Scout Ships and Inquisitors.

In my game, the Astropath Transendent has 2 Choir members who hang out on the ship to boost his power, or relay messages when they're planet side. The Rogue Trader has made great use of this instead of a bulky, potentialy traceable Ship-to-Shore Radio.

vip_chicken said:

Except that if you don't have an Astropath, you can't communicate with home base, and without a navigator, you can't traverse space at all. IMHO, I would think it harsh for the GM not to provide NPCs for certain key roles, such as those, if the PCs could not fill them.

Additionally, my understanding is that the Astropath Transcendent needs a choir of astropaths / psykers to effectively do their job.

I might consider your interpretation a little too harsh for my fun pallet. That's just me though.

@FatPob

The exact situation of multiple Navigators on board was mentioned in a Designer Diary. It was noted that many Rogue Traders had an arrangement with the Navis Nobilite house of their choice - the house supplies one senior and a couple of apprentice navigators for reduced cost and the juniors get to practice their craft in situations they'd rarely experience in some dinky navy or merchant vessel.

vip_chicken said:

I bet they don't like the idea of working 24 hours a day either.

Rareness in the 40k universe is a relative thing. If only one in every ten million humans is an astropath, then it is rare occurance that one is born, yet when you consider that single worlds have populations in the billions you realise that their are a lot of Astropaths. The same is true of navigators.

It makes sense to allow a rogue trader crew to have back ups so that a PC navigator or astropath can die, if you do not allow this, then either the player never does anything other than send and receive messages or navigate the warp, or an unexpected character death effectively ends the campaign.

Loosing a PC navigator or astropath should however negatively impact the crew, have the NPCs be relatively less talented, unskilled in combat, and with deep character flaws, perhapes they could even be villains within the campaign.

This kinda links in with the previous thread on what to do with errant navigators who go dirtside with their master. If he gets killed who pilots the ship through the warp? Theres only so many 'calculated' small warp jumps you can do with cogitator banks( 3-4 light years if I can remember the fluff correctly) before something goes horribly wrong. The rogue trader could be effectively stranded for decades hopping between 1 system and another on a torturous long step by step route back to any centre of civilisation.

The Fluff Is divided on the issue of ethe amount of crew.

In Rogue Star and Farseer, both rogue traders have as far as we know one navigator to their ship, but neither of these do any of the down and dirty fighting. In Farseer Simon Belisarius takes control of the ship while Janus Daarke is down on the eldar maiden world, but thats about it.

Other books involving the Navy like Relentless implies that the navigator (s) shut themselves away into their own quarters and run their own affirs until the order to jump by the captain comes in, however in the fluff the navigator is there with an entire enourage of hangers on, and you would think that apprentice navigators would rake take some of the smaller/ safer translations while the PC character rides the 'warp storms' as it were.

With our group we have pumped for two apprentice navigators (barely described) whose sole purpose in game terms is to translate the ship out safely if the navigator cant discharge his duties.

The astropath Transscendant is a bit different though. Its entirely feasable that there is just one of his 'type' on board. He is different from the other astropaths in that the transcendants love to be on the fringe of the astronomicon. In much of the fiction material its implied that astropaths are feel lost/sad/withdrawral symptons when they can no longer hear the astropathic choir of their fellows (rogue star/blind). So out on the fringes of the galaxy they would slowly go mad or crack from the lonliness and emptyness they feel.

It's implied the the Transcendants are the few ones of their kind that can stand the empty vastness of the voids between the galaxys and the "alien thoughts" which drift between them.

Also if the astropath gets killed then its not THAT big a deal...the rogue trader just can't send messages. Kinda like losing your mobile phone in the middle of a jungle or a desert.Its pretty bad, You're on your own but you can still get around.

On the other hand not having a navigator is like being in a ocean FULL of trecherous rocks and reefs. You can only get about by tiny amounts and you will probably crash your ship and get eaten by sharks if you dont have someone who knows his way round that ocean.

Well, look at it this way: if you lose a Navigator, and you still have an Astropath Transcendent - you can get in touch with home and get a new one. If you lose a Astropath Transcendent you can return to the Imperium for a new one since you still have your Navigator.

That's the 40k equivalent of a safe bet - this isn't really a setting where things are carefully calculated so no ship is ever lost. At the end of the day, they're doing the equivalent of strapping middle ages peasants to a large rocket and firing them through hell while wearing a blindfold. Occasionally some ships never come back. That's life. Plenty more where those came from.

The real problem is that kind of 'whoops, no navigator. Roll up new characters' setup isn't fun for PCs. On the other hand, it doesn't need to be handled like that - as gm you can give them the same degree of plot protection as the average 40k novel. If they lose their Navigator and lose their Astropath, you can have them make a deal with the 'conveniently located' devil - be it warp witch, xenotech or just a plain xenos psyker. They may not like it, but when needs must... In other words, there are always options for those characters because that's part of what makes it fun.

As for rarity, Astropaths/sanctioned psykers are supposed to be extraordinarily rare. You're talking maybe 60 detectable psykers in the entire population of Earth. Of those, maybe a 10th would be accepted to be sanctioned or soulbound. Of those, only maybe half will survive their training. Then maybe one will rise to be something more. To put it in perspective, there are about as many spacemarines as psykers (of any kind) in the Imperium. There are probably worlds without Astropathic choirs on them as a result let alone ships having replacements for the most powerful Astropaths of their kind.

It's kind of unfortunate that 40k fiction tends to have so many psykers in it - they're there because they're cool to read about, but they give a really warped perception of exactly how common they are when every town seems to have a 'Psykers'r'us' store to play with and an Astropath on every desk.

As for Navigators, there's never many of them and the Navigator families have no incentive to put more than one on a ship unless one is an apprentice.

In other words: losing the Navigator or the Astropath should necessitate an adventure not plugging in the backup and continuing on.

Criv said:

Except there is absolutely no guarantee of that. Your message might not get through, or it might take a lot longer to arrive than you thought, or hell, it might just take them months, years, to get to you depending on where you are and what the warp conditions are. Given that you only have 6 months worth of supplies on the ship, I know I wouldn't make a risk like that, which is why the rulebook itself suggests that there are several navigators (as well as an astropathic choir) on board the ship.

MILLANDSON said:

As I said, 40k is not a safe 'too risky' kind of setting. Entire fleets have been lost for millennia, space hulks are commonplace, technology is poorly understood at best, geller fields fail often enough that senior crew worry about it, and if a Rogue Trader goes missing - *shrug* these things do happen.

Modern sentiments don't really belong - during the age of sail, worse risks than a single navigator were routinely taken without the safety net of possible communications. For example, only having supplies for the first leg of your journey under fair wind, having a single set of navigation charts, setting sail without an accurate clock, tapping the admiral or even just plain old scurvy. We wouldn't take those risks - but people did and sometimes for little enough reason.

Astropathic choirs are mentioned as something that RT often go out of their way to obtain rather than something that every ship has. Astropaths Transcendent are explicitly mentioned as rare prizes and not part of a standard RT crew.

As for suggesting multiple Navigators, throw me a page reference there, I can't recall (or find) that at all. In fact, every reference I've found is to ship's Navigator singular (look at the bottom of page 60 for example).

At the end of the day, it's your game but both Navigators and Astropaths are supposed to be rare. More so those who are at PC levels of power.

Criv said:

In terms of number of Astropaths, you're way off. Astropaths are a common sight across the Imperium, and they're mass-produced in order for the Imperium to function - interstellar civilisation would collapse without them, as they're the only means of sufficiently-swift interstellar communication (carrying messages by ship being the next best method, and that's a long way behind).

Astropaths make up the overwhelming majority of usable psykers - powerful enough to be useful, but not safe enough to use without soul binding. The need for them across the Imperium is vast, and they can be found supporting military and civilian ventures in every corner of the galaxy.

There's variation amongst Astropaths, of course - few are powerful enough to lead the choirs that exist near many of the most important worlds (the Bastion Psykana that serves the Segmentum Pacificus capital of Hydraphur is home to several choirs and hundreds or perhaps thousands of individual Astropaths), or to venture safely beyond the reach of the Astronomicon (Astropaths Transcendent - the player character option isn't an ordinary Astropath) - but there are a great many remaining to lend the power of their minds to maintaining the Imperium.

It's not something that the novels have misconstrued - the Codex Imperialis from 2nd edition 40k explains just how common they are, and the original Rogue Trader rulebook states that 90% of all psykers in service to the Imperium are Astropaths. Yeah, they'd be rare if only one person in every hundred million was a psyker... but simply put, that can't be the case (that, or the number of acceptable ones is higher - the Codex Imperialis describes the psyker tithe as only comprising young and promising psykers - the rest presumably being executed instead), given how common Astropaths (in general; not just the specific player character kind) are supposed to be.