Help Me Design My First Endeavour (Nathaniel's players stay out)...

By luther2, in Rogue Trader

(This got absolutely no play in the GM section so I'm moving it here...)

Ok, I'm not thick or anything, but I'm having a bit of a learning curve with the RT Endeavour system and how to apply it to adventures. I'm running our first RT game in about 3 weeks so I thought I'd ask you lot for a little help in setting up my first one. Here's a rough outline of what I have so far...

MONKEY BUSINESS (Greater Endeavour +3 PF)

Introductory Scene: Every Which Way But Loose

The RT and his crew are on a shopping trip on a planet or starbase (allow each player to make a single acquisition roll). After they have made or attempted to make their purchases they make their way back to their ship. At the loading dock, they are surprised by a group of Jokaero who arrive in a rickety looking spheroid made of random parts. The Jokaero raid the place, grabbing whatever equipment they can get their hands on (possibly something the Players just bought), hop back into their 'ship' and escape into space.

Objective 1: Track the Jokaero (Exploration, Trade 400 points)

An enterprising Rogue Trader Captain will see the profit potential in tracking the extremely rare orange furred hoodlums to their 'home,' capturing them and then selling them to an interested party, like the Adeptus Mechanicus, Arbites lookign to prevent future raids or a criminal organization that might want some of the advanced Jokaero tech. There are many possible activities the players may pursue in their search for the Jokaero...

1. Navigator Tracks In The Stars - The quickest way to find the beggars, but the RT must get the Navigator on their trail immediately. Each successful Tracking Roll nets 50 Achievement Points towards the objective.

2. Triangulation - The Jokaero have been very active over the last year and have raided numerous bases, planets and even ships in a seemingly random pattern. If the PCs visit each site and gather enough information to take a bearing (using any Investigation Skills), they can gradually build up a picture of the raids and roughly triangulate their center with a successful Navigation roll. Each successful Investigation roll is worth 50 Achievment Points. A successful Navigation roll is worth 100 points.

3. Hire Kroot - Around one of the raided planets is a Kroot Warpsphere. If the players don't shoot or run and try to negotiate, they may make a Rare Acquisition Test to acquire the services of one of their number for the hunt.

4. Preparing a holding area - If the players are smart, they'll have a special holding area fixed up to keep the technical savants from escaping and running amuck on the ship. They must decide on just how much their willing to spend on it by determining the level of difficulty for the Acquisition test.

5. Other creative uses of Exploration or Trade skills - worth 25, 50 or 100 points each.

6. Others?

Objective 2: Capture the Jokaero (Exploration, Military, 400 points)

The Jokaero have made a semi-permanent home on a jungle world on which they are worshipped as holy by the primitive lizard people that live there. These aliens will not allow the PCs to just up and take the Jokaero. Shelling the snot out of their cities won't help either, as the Jokaero will simply flee in their 'ship.' Possible activites include...

1. Scouting - By sending a small team out to find the Jokaero (typically just a dozen or so people, including the PCs and a few red shirts to get eaten by jungle beasts) the players can earn 25 points towards the objective. If they hired the Kroot from Objective 1, scouting is worth 50 Achievement.

2. Sabotaging the 'Ship' - Sabotaging the ship just before making a grab for the Jokaero will keep them from escaping and add 50 Achievent Points towards the Objective.

3. Each Jokaero Captured - 100 Achievement Points alive, 25 dead.

4. Capturing a 'Slann' - The leaders of the Lizard Men are even more sacred than the Jokaero and a Xeno-Biologist in the group might see their value as a potential link to the legendary 'Old Ones,' the Slann, and want to take a specimen back to sell as well. This will be very hard to do, as they are powerful psychics with a city of fanatically devoted followers to protect them and will probably require a Mass Combat action to capture. Bring back a live one, however, nets the RT and his crew 300 Achievment Points. Even a dead one would be worth 100 Achievment Points, as even the corpse of one of these 'legends' would be of immense value in a number of scientific circles.

5. Other creative uses of the Exploration or Military skills - worth 25, 50 or 100 points each.

Objective 3: Transport and Sell the Jokaero (Trade, Criminal 400 Points)

The hardest part is keeping the Jokaero from escaping, considering their great strength, agility and prodigious technical skills. And then you have to find the right buyer. Things that can happen...

1. If one of the Jokero can make a Dex roll with a Difficulty modifier equal to the difficulty of of the Acquiisiton test used to build the holdign area, it will have found a way to get loose and run amuck on the ship, stealing equipment, building weapons and other devices and generally causing trouble until it is recaptured or killed. And Emperor forbid it gets to the engines. Lose 75 Achievement for each one killed and lose an additional 50 Achievement points for any serious damage it causes to the ship. Capturing it alive and with minimal damage is worth 100 Achievement Points.

2. Fight Off Claim Jumpers - A rivel RT, Pirates or something else tries to steal your precious cargo. Fight them off and gain 100 Achievement points.

3. Sell to the Adeptus Mechanicus - Worth 100 Points.

4. Other stuff - Here I'm stumped for things to hand out Achievment Points for.

So, there you go. That's the gist of it so far. I'm of the opinion that trying to get more detailed than this hurts the Endeavour system and that providing general goals, creatures stats and basic description and then playing the rest by ear is the way to go. I'd appreciate any pointers on distributing the Objective or Achievement points better, ways to fill in the material with more options and general advice from those who have run an Endeavour already. In other words, how would you set this up and run it?

One thing I'm curious about in Lure of the Expanse is that if you look at the Endeavour Record Sheet they posted up in a DD a while back, there are actually ways to get negative achievement points. A lot of them, apparently. I could see Killing one of the Jokaero or the Slann as a potentital negative, but since the bodies would at least be worth something for dissection purposes, I just reduced the award to 25 AP instead of 100 for the live one. How else do you lot think I can offer up negative points?

You might get a better response in the Gamemasters sub-forum. :-)

Er, never mind. Just saw that you moved the thread here after getting no response.

Yeah, I'm not getting much love here, either.

I'd hate to have to take it to RPG.net, but it looks like I'm going to have to. Thing is, there's a thread there already for Endeavours, but every one of them uses Objectives as a 'you complete the objective you get x points' instead of breaking them down into achievements, which is rather pointless in my view, because what's the point of even giving Objectives a point total if they're binary, i.e. you either do it completely and get the full points or you don't and get no points.

From my understanding of the examples in the book, Objectives should be further broken down so that you can earn more or less points for the objective depending on what you do, allowing you to underperform in one Objective but still complete the Endeavor if you overperform in another or have a Ship Component that can make up for the shortfall.

The point where I get hazy is on how to write and run said objectives. Do I need three or so definate Achievements and then judge any other player driven achievements, which might also complete the Objective, on the fly? How much should I give out for said player driven achievements? How much should I penalize them for doing things that are contrary to the Objective (like pissing off a potential buyer or dumping an illegal cargo to avoid getting nicked by the authourities)?

I think the Endeavour section needed a little more detail. The free adventures and the adventure in the back of the book aren't any better at showing these points either, in fact, as none of the Objectives are broken down into Achievements in there either. I'm thinking that they are the reason the RPGnet thread postings are the way they are, because they are the only examples we have.

I know there has to be more to it, though, having seen the Endeavour checklist from Lure of the Expanse, so that's why I'm trying to see what other folks have done so far and, maybe, get Ross or somebody at FFG to help out with a more detailed example...

I'm not the GM in our campaign, which hasn't even technically started yet, so I don't know how to actually craft endeavors. Our GM is building our endeavors around our characters' back stories, so he's trying to prod the two players who haven't even chosen a class yet. My husband and I already have convincing stories for our characters, and I'm guessing the GM's wife has told him enough about her character that he knows what to do about her.

I wish you luck.

I haven't read the endeavors section closely, as I am not GMing our RT game, but your endeavor looks pretty complete to me.

The one thing that came to mind that might have been missing is something to do with whatever technology the Jericho have constructed. The endeavor seemed to focus on the aliens themselves, but I feel like there's room in that regard to get creative. Can't say anything more due to lack of experience.

The Boy Named Crow said:

I haven't read the endeavors section closely, as I am not GMing our RT game, but your endeavor looks pretty complete to me.

The one thing that came to mind that might have been missing is something to do with whatever technology the Jericho have constructed. The endeavor seemed to focus on the aliens themselves, but I feel like there's room in that regard to get creative. Can't say anything more due to lack of experience.

I'm afraid that I'm going to hear a lot of 'I haven't really figured it out either' comments at this stage of the game, which is more reason for Ross to come in and fill in the gaps. It may well be fairly complete for what the designers intended, but I'm still feeling something missing. serio.gif

As for your other suggestion, it's a good'un. I hadn't thought about the extra money that could be earned by selling off the Jokaero tech that's lying around. Could be worth at least 50 bonus points to Objective 3.

This game looks like a lot of fun. I am the RT Captain in my group, here are some thoughts I had after reading your post -

Agree with you on not getting more detailed than this as otherwise it will be a little too prescriptive for the players. How they achieve the objective is the fun part happy.gif

You ask how would we set this up and run it? My GM would throw us into the scenario, probably give us something really nice and important (like a detailed map to a part of the sector so we can go on a boring courier run for the Harbour master knowing we would do anything for that map) which of course is stolen by the Jokaero (just to make sure that we go after them) and once we worked out what we were going to do (ie. go and get the bastards and sell them) we write out the Endeavour objectives and the GM marks out the achievement points for it, including what we had done so far. He would ask the players to work out the objectives and definitely not hand feed us any objectives such as the holding area, Slann capture etc leaving it to us to work this out in the game as we progress and award points for those at the end of each session as an 'extra bonus'. Negative points would definitely be awarded at the end of the session with no prior knowledge or expectation other than knowing we had stuffed something up and were expecting to be penalised.

So in summary - present the scenario, get the players to work out their plan, then they do the plan which of course evolves and develops as they progress through the game. Points are awarded at the end of each session based on what has been done.

My GM awards a fixed number of Achievement points based on achieving X objective rather than having points awarded based on number of successful rolls (if I have understood you correctly?). If your group rolls really well you could end up giving out a LOT of achievement points. If you look at this link to our Seneshal's over enthusiastic list of other Endeavours you can see how we allocate achievement points by objective. http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=159&efcid=3&efidt=289115

The reason I would be careful about the number of achievement points you hand out is that we are finding that awarding 300-400 achievement points per game session is rapidly increasing our profit factor in a very short period of time. If your players are starting with a smaller ship / higher PF then they could be rolling against a 90+ PF in a few game sessions. I would recommend you look at how Achievement points translate into Profit Factor and do the math on what their current PF is so that you understand how wealthy they may get and how this impacts on the game for you.
(I am certain in our game that our misfortune rolls are going to have more serious implications or our achievement points are going to be a lot harder to come by in the future.)

Lastly, here are some ideas I had for some negative achievement points in your game -
- Selling the xenos to the wrong people (eg. Inquisitor acolyte acting under cover) (negative trade points)
- If any one of the crew get the psychic whammy froma Slann and become a devoted follower and thus work to free the Xenos and take over the ship on behalf of the Slann (negative military points)
- If they shoot up the starbase or port so badly that they are not welcome back there again in the initial attack (negative trade points)
- They let a Jokaero get loose at port and it damages the port badly in recapture. (negative trade points)

Good luck and hope that helps a little.

Luther said:


One thing I'm curious about in Lure of the Expanse is that if you look at the Endeavour Record Sheet they posted up in a DD a while back, there are actually ways to get negative achievement points. A lot of them, apparently. I could see killing one of the Jokaero or the Slann as a potential negative, but since the bodies would at least be worth something for dissection purposes, I just reduced the award to 25 AP instead of 100 for the live one. How else do you lot think I can offer up negative points?


To start with, this Endeavour is really good and you've clearly put a lot of thought into it. I think your approaching the game mechanics in the right way.

With regards to the negative points, unfortunately I think this is just a case of using your imagination as to why the Objective / Endeavour might have gone wrong. I've also found it difficult to find negative reasons for things going wrong, short of obvious failures like getting their ship shot to pieces, or blasting the person they've been sent to capture into tiny pieces (Such as killing your Jokaero).


For my games I approach this problem by awarding my players with a minimum / small amount of Achievements Points if they merely achieved an Objective / Endeavour. So you could think of this as already being in 'the negative' end of a scale to begin with. I then ask myself 'how well did my players approach the Objective / Endeavour I have presented them?' and award them according to the amount of flair, skill, guile, cunning, etc they used to achieve it. It’s obviously easier to award these elite characters for their heroic actions than it is to find fault.

So as an example, using one of your Objectives, Capturing Jokaero. The base level for achieving your objective would be the capture of X number of subjects. I would award them a base amount of 25 AP if they did this. I would then work up from there, awarding them an additional 25AP for how well they achieved the objective. Did they capture the Jokaero by luring them into a cunning trap on a nearby planet where the players are waiting in ambush, and subdue them with Webbers or the minimal use of force, thus keeping the subjects intact for study. If so then I'll give them extra AP for their effort and thought. In my opinion this promotes good role-playing and good interaction between the Players as they come up with their cunning plan.


If they just stormed aboard the Jokaero ship, guns blazing, murder servitors running riot, and merely came away with a few bloody, pulped up corpses with half their limbs missing, then yes they achieved the objective in a manner of speaking, but any pirate with a gun could have done the same and what was heroic about it? So I just award them the base 25AP.


Hope I've explained the way I approach endeavours, clearly it depends on what works for you and your group.

Ravia Khadis Praetor said:


This game looks like a lot of fun. I am the RT Captain in my group, here are some thoughts I had after reading your post -

Agree with you on not getting more detailed than this as otherwise it will be a little too prescriptive for the players. How they achieve the objective is the fun part

You ask how would we set this up and run it? My GM would throw us into the scenario, probably give us something really nice and important (like a detailed map to a part of the sector so we can go on a boring courier run for the Harbour master knowing we would do anything for that map) which of course is stolen by the Jokaero (just to make sure that we go after them) and once we worked out what we were going to do (ie. go and get the bastards and sell them) we write out the Endeavour objectives and the GM marks out the achievement points for it, including what we had done so far. He would ask the players to work out the objectives and definitely not hand feed us any objectives such as the holding area, Slann capture etc leaving it to us to work this out in the game as we progress and award points for those at the end of each session as an 'extra bonus'. Negative points would definitely be awarded at the end of the session with no prior knowledge or expectation other than knowing we had stuffed something up and were expecting to be penalised.

So in summary - present the scenario, get the players to work out their plan, then they do the plan which of course evolves and develops as they progress through the game. Points are awarded at the end of each session based on what has been done.

Aha! That just cleared things up a bit for me!

Basically, if I understand you correctly, the reason that the adventures printed so far only have Objective Points and no individual Achievement Points is because the players are supposed to come up with things and the GM awards them based on the AP chart in RT.

I'm assuming that only those skills that pertain to the Objective Type really qualify for all but exceptional circumstances, i.e. you need to take miitary type actions to score AP in a Militay Objective.

Ravia Khadis Praetor said:

My GM awards a fixed number of Achievement points based on achieving X objective rather than having points awarded based on number of successful rolls (if I have understood you correctly?). If your group rolls really well you could end up giving out a LOT of achievement points. If you look at this link to our Seneshal's over enthusiastic list of other Endeavours you can see how we allocate achievement points by objective. http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=159&efcid=3&efidt=289115

I was thinking along the same lines. You'll notice that all of my 'Achievements' are for things accomplished, so only capturing a Jokaero, for instance, is worth any points. You can make as many rolls to shoot, grapple or talk to them as you like, but you only get AP for finally bringing one back to the ship's hold.

Thanks for the link! I'm really keen to see what others have done.

Ravia Khadis Praetor said:

The reason I would be careful about the number of achievement points you hand out is that we are finding that awarding 300-400 achievement points per game session is rapidly increasing our profit factor in a very short period of time. If your players are starting with a smaller ship / higher PF then they could be rolling against a 90+ PF in a few game sessions. I would recommend you look at how Achievement points translate into Profit Factor and do the math on what their current PF is so that you understand how wealthy they may get and how this impacts on the game for you.
(I am certain in our game that our misfortune rolls are going to have more serious implications or our achievement points are going to be a lot harder to come by in the future.)

No worries there. I'm handing out +3 Profit Factor as the minimum for a Greater Endeavour and then I can't imagine them getting more than a couple of hundred points over the 1200 needed to boost that to +5. And that's for a two or three session adventure which means a large boost in profit only every month or two (we play roughly 4-6 hour games every other Sunday).

And on top of that, at the beginning of every adventure, my co-GM and I have determined that we will roll for a potential Misfortune, which will hamper the PF growth a bit. This adventure we got lucky and rolled under a 50 so nothing happened.

Ravia Khadis Praetor said:

Lastly, here are some ideas I had for some negative achievement points in your game -
- Selling the xenos to the wrong people (eg. Inquisitor acolyte acting under cover) (negative trade points)
- If any one of the crew get the psychic whammy froma Slann and become a devoted follower and thus work to free the Xenos and take over the ship on behalf of the Slann (negative military points)
- If they shoot up the starbase or port so badly that they are not welcome back there again in the initial attack (negative trade points)
- They let a Jokaero get loose at port and it damages the port badly in recapture. (negative trade points)

Good luck and hope that helps a little.

Excellent stuff! I can see a Jokaero getting loose and disabling the void shielding and part of the life support for the port in order to make an escape craft!

Thank you so much, you have been incredibly helpful! aplauso.gif

Mackenzie said:


To start with, this Endeavour is really good and you've clearly put a lot of thought into it. I think your approaching the game mechanics in the right way.

I'm a structure sort of guy, so that's my natural GM brain on duty. That said, Ravia has given some great advice and I'm taking it with one small change. I like having a few 'major' Achievements pre-plotted for each Objective just to force me to have a few pre-planned encounters already written up if the players take the more direct tack.

I don't mind improv, I'm actually very good on the fly, but I'm just too structured (and know the potential for my players to wander around aimlessly) to not have a few set events up my sleeve.

Mackenzie said:

With regards to the negative points, unfortunately I think this is just a case of using your imagination as to why the Objective / Endeavour might have gone wrong. I've also found it difficult to find negative reasons for things going wrong, short of obvious failures like getting their ship shot to pieces, or blasting the person they've been sent to capture into tiny pieces (Such as killing your Jokaero).


For my games I approach this problem by awarding my players with a minimum / small amount of Achievements Points if they merely achieved an Objective / Endeavour. So you could think of this as already being in 'the negative' end of a scale to begin with. I then ask myself 'how well did my players approach the Objective / Endeavour I have presented them?' and award them according to the amount of flair, skill, guile, cunning, etc they used to achieve it. It’s obviously easier to award these elite characters for their heroic actions than it is to find fault.

So as an example, using one of your Objectives, Capturing Jokaero. The base level for achieving your objective would be the capture of X number of subjects. I would award them a base amount of 25 AP if they did this. I would then work up from there, awarding them an additional 25AP for how well they achieved the objective. Did they capture the Jokaero by luring them into a cunning trap on a nearby planet where the players are waiting in ambush, and subdue them with Webbers or the minimal use of force, thus keeping the subjects intact for study. If so then I'll give them extra AP for their effort and thought. In my opinion this promotes good role-playing and good interaction between the Players as they come up with their cunning plan.


If they just stormed aboard the Jokaero ship, guns blazing, murder servitors running riot, and merely came away with a few bloody, pulped up corpses with half their limbs missing, then yes they achieved the objective in a manner of speaking, but any pirate with a gun could have done the same and what was heroic about it? So I just award them the base 25AP.


Hope I've explained the way I approach endeavours, clearly it depends on what works for you and your group.

Another very good point, there. I could set the AP rewards to be slightly less than the Objective Goal, and then only the best would get the full profit factor. In this case, in particular, I think I've subconciously done that by settign the capture AP at 100. The players will need at least 4 Jokaero to gain this objective, no matter how they do it, cause just one is unlikely to warrant a boost in PF. Perhaps I'll lower the AP for capture to 50 a piece so that they'll need at least 8 of them to complete the Objective, lowered to 10 or 25 for damaged Jokaero and 0 for dead ones.

Thanks for the advice!

No worries, really happy to be of help happy.gif

Luther said:

Aha! That just cleared things up a bit for me!

Basically, if I understand you correctly, the reason that the adventures printed so far only have Objective Points and no individual Achievement Points is because the players are supposed to come up with things and the GM awards them based on the AP chart in RT.

I'm assuming that only those skills that pertain to the Objective Type really qualify for all but exceptional circumstances, i.e. you need to take miitary type actions to score AP in a Militay Objective.

Yes you understand me correctly. From other posts I have read not every group runs this way, but for our group, the players work out the Endeavours' objectives and then agree with the GM on Achievement Points. (we suggest and then he agrees or vetoes). Not every objective we have earns AP - it has to have a military/ trade or exploration result in order to be awarded points.

Luther said:

No worries there. I'm handing out +3 Profit Factor as the minimum for a Greater Endeavour and then I can't imagine them getting more than a couple of hundred points over the 1200 needed to boost that to +5. And that's for a two or three session adventure which means a large boost in profit only every month or two (we play roughly 4-6 hour games every other Sunday).

And on top of that, at the beginning of every adventure, my co-GM and I have determined that we will roll for a potential Misfortune, which will hamper the PF growth a bit. This adventure we got lucky and rolled under a 50 so nothing happened.


Our GM rolls on the misfortune table at the end of every game session and then we deal with it during the next game session. Each misfortune impacts on the story some way. We have ships that we are meeting delayed. Supplies stolen... all kinds of things have happened - it certainly keeps us on our toes. happy.gif

Ravia Khadis Praetor said:


Our GM rolls on the misfortune table at the end of every game session and then we deal with it during the next game session. Each misfortune impacts on the story some way. We have ships that we are meeting delayed. Supplies stolen... all kinds of things have happened - it certainly keeps us on our toes. happy.gif

Ah, yes, that is a much better idea. Face-palmingly better, actually. Roll at the end and it gives us two weeks to come up with something related.

Ta, for that! cool.gif