I've decided to create a fish bowl to swim around in and get their feet wet. The fish bowl concludes with the player group escaping, and in the process the player Rogue Trader will inherit his or her charter.

The players are marooned in a system, that has been influenced by a warp flux for 500 years. Their ship has been orbiting the main hive world the entire time, the original captain has long since died and the player is the second son of the current captain. The vital elements of the crew (navigators and astropaths) have been kept in cryo. The crew has dwindled and occasionally restocked from the planet below and some of the outlying colonies or orbital platforms when needed. Indeed, by some peculairities of the flux, a few ships have arrived in-system and couldn't reenter the warp (a-lead-in for other player characters that don't want to be tied to the system).

The system itself is composed of the main hive world (which suffered greatly when the flux occured), a bombed out feral world (a previous rival of the hive world) and a scattering of mining or orbital platforms on the other celestial bodies. There is a small navy detachment, which has degraded over the centuries and mostly crewed by locals, rather than pure navy; the same can be said for most Imperium institutions within the system.

The flux has shuddered recently, which could mean the end of being trapped. The astropaths and navigators are roused from their slumber to get a feel for the situation (imperial tarot?). Ominous portents are revealed with the news the flux will indeed end soon. The players are tasked with visiting their planet-side operations and revealing the details to their planetary envoys.

The players start the game, going to a eco/political ministry meeting with their envoy, which entertainingly will end in a gun fight, which breaks out, naturally when the players envoy is speaking. The players get arrested by local authorities who blame them (innocent or otherwise), but it's quickly overturned by the Adeptus Arbites and the players get a navy escort back to their cutter - and get to meet the navy commander who brings bad news: their was an incident on their vessel of critical importance and they must return immediately.

Upon their arrival they find that danger is afoot: someone or something sabotaged all the cryo pods, the astropaths/navigators are dead.

Any psker born in the last 500 years has been executed by Witchhunters (Inquisitor?), because they could not be returned to Terra to be tested. The only way to leave the system is to track down any 500 year old astropaths in the system and get them to the vessel. The senior crew is dispersed to track down any leads; the players included.

And that's how is starts. I might include 'pseudo endevours', namely they get a 'chapter house review' about their performance, which would work similar to a normal endevour, but on a smaller scale (scaled to the finite resources of their vessel and the system).

A series of small adventures to collect information and find replacement navigators, and deal with both the local and naval groups.

The end results of the prelude are: The older sibling and father are killed, the player inherits the charter. They find the crew they need: they are frozen in deep storage in the naval base, which also happens to be the source of a chaos cult.

The hive word slowly becomes more riotous, until a full scale rebellion occurs - and only revealed to be a chaos cult near the end of the prelude.

The players flee the system with their replacement crew: they have to repel in-bound orbital shuttles filled with chaos cultists and those trying to flee the planet. The scene is punctuated when the now chaos-crewed frigate turns on the players and starts attacking (it gets attacked by two escorts still loyal, allowing the players to flee).

And the players escape to rejoin the rest of the Imperium. The planet will be deemed infected and suffer an exterminatus.

Is there any additional insight, or is this solid?

The only comment I would make is that you probably wouldn't get 500 year old astropaths as they tend to burn out from continual use and unless they have access to juvenat treatments will die of old age anyway.

It all seems quite good to me. Very creative. Well done.

Hellebore

Hellebore said:

I really want to include the 500 year span, especially because none of the players really know much about 40k. That alone, 500 years a ship has been floating in orbit, fully crewed and waiting (on a vessel that might be 5-7000 years old) should help jolt them into the setting.

I figure the planetary governor and navy detachment would freeze their astro/navigators too, knowing the system was cut off. Or if there is some canon material, a combination of cryo and rejuvenate treatments to keep them going as long as possible. Or perhaps some huge vat-like structure, something sufficently creepy.

It's entirely possible that one of the players will chose to be a navigator or an astropath; at which point I'll substitute the problem: it will be some highly specialized piece of technology that they need and not psychics.

Citizen Philip said:

I have a suggestion. Have a piece of the navigation equipment of the ship be locked requiring the genetic code of living member of the orginal ship navigator family to power up. This would normally be no problem, since the genetic code is required only for powering up the system and the lock can be premanently removed from system files once you've powered it up... However, during the 500 years wait time at some point, someone decided to power down the system. Now that they once again power up the system they have a problem... cryo pods were sabotages and all navigators with right genetic code are dead (no, you can't use dead persons blood to power it up). So, even if you had someone else to navigate (after all, you might have PC navigator and the planet has several psykers in cryo) you can't get the ship to actually jump.

Now, according to ancient logs one of the navigators fell ill 472 years ago, was transported to the hive world for specialized treatment and was never returned. So s/he should be in cryo somewhere on the planet... maybe.

Also, according to ancient engineering manuals the power-up lock of the ship console packed up a redundancy system with no lock in it. However, it seems that the console that had the redundancy system backup files was scrapped and sold 362 years ago during the Great Shipboard Famine. So that might also be found on the planet... perhaps.

Nice idea but why ditch the system? Wouldnt it be much more interesting when a RT came along, claiming the planet in the name of the Emperor and the pc's are tied into a conflict to save their planet from the evil outsiders invading it? If they co-operate then the ball starts really rolling. The Missionair claims that their Emperor ult has degraded so much the past 500 years that he wants to overthrow the whole Church there. The RT claims that the ship of the PC's rightfully belongs to him as well since it is system bound (Hence their need to find those Navigators before the ship is taken from them.)

Then after a hopefully big revolt and overthrow of the greedy Rogue Trader they are faced with the prospect that there IS an Empirte of Men outside and soon others will come to claim the system unless someone beets them to it. Those beings could be the PC's in hteir now fully functional Voidship.

Polaria said:

I haven't read much into the specific navigator families, but that might be a good point to bring up durning the course of the game (I really want to avoid descriptive oratory about the Imperium, but rather give them relevent reasons to bring it up in regards to their well-being/success). a piece of navigational gear that is gene locked to the navigator family that was part of the navigator deal with the original captain. Or that a potenial workaround was accidentally scrapped over the 500 year period. Might be interesting for the players to wander the depths of their own ship, finding adventure looking for the details.

At the same time, I don't mind empowerng any potential Navigator characters with the knowledge that they alone can get the ship to warp (at least not 5 ly jumps). of course, that means the player navigator is 500+ years old, which is kind of funky too.

Sister Callidia said:

I'll encourage the players to interact with the starting system and its people, heck, if they make the effort to evacuate people, and during the climax - help fleeing hivers get on board and repel the chaos shuttles I'll reward them for it ..and then burn it in the name of the Emperor. And then have the surviors and the PCs picked up by the Inquisition for a proper and thorough interrogation (after they've warped away and made it back to civilization). To be sure they are clean and not tainted themselves.

A fiery naval bombardment of the entire planet because it is deemed too infected with the taint of Chaos. Because, well, that's what the Imperium does. The fish-bowl is suppose to help the players get a feeling for the Imperium by object lessons.

i was thinking of making the RT specifically loyal on-board their ship (ie. i repeatedly bring up the emperor and so forth during conversation with the crew and ship-born people) and the natives of the hive extremely skepetical (to the point of heresey and ridiculing the players faith) and instead of a chaos taint - it's more of a rebellion against the Imperial administratum and its related agencies. Which would avoid Exterminatus (and likely avoiding an interrogation, but not a meeting with the Inquistion, since they were trying to escape), but most certainly result in an Imperial Guard invasion - which of course the players participate in.

In fact, that sounds more fun.

About the 500year old astropath, he could have took in an "apprentice", hiding it from the witch hunter and teaching him the trade, and died later, so only the "younger" (maybe 200-300y old) astropath would remain, but since he didnt learn from the Adeptus Psykana (thinks thats right, not sure), and didn't "saw" the Emperor, his power would be either really weak (but strong enough do get what he has to do in your adventure done) or unreliable (better option in my opinion, can bring up nasty surprise with either Inquisition, or other source if he stays with the group), possibly being tied to the cult, without him knowing (he could have been possessed at some point or a deamon could have used him to communicate to lesser being to form the cult).

That could be a good way to show the good and bad side of being a psyker to your players, and have them feel the threat of the Warp a little bit more closer if you choose to have some nasty stuff happen when the Astropath use his power too much.