Greetings all,

I am currently thinking about giving my players a ship at some point, and letting them have a level of autonomy as Inquisitorial Agents. Not in the same style as Rogue Traders however, but just Dark Heresy characters with a ship etc.

My problem with this is, most of the crew sizes of Rogue Trader scale ships are ridiculous, and it makes me wonder why the characters would bother doing anything themselves and why they wouldn't send hundreds of troops in instead.

So my question is one of two:

a) Is it possible to give my players a Warp capable smaller ship that only needs to be crewed by maybe 20 people at maximum (less if preferable (think the Serenity from Firefly))?

b) If the above isn't possible, how many of the thousands of crew are actually vital? Is it possible to give my players a large ship with many of the systems unfunctioning so they can have a small crew (and maybe upgrade and restore the ship as they go for added fun?)

Thank you.

1) It is always possible, but it doesn't really feel right in the setting. The Imperium just doesn't use small ships. Come to think of it... pretty much no-one uses small warp-capable ships. It might be that the engines and Geller-shields just takes up to much space. But it's an easy tweak to make.

2). Most of them are needed. Yes there is some redundance, but space is very costly on a ship so no ship is going to carry around lots of people it doesn't need unless they are paying customers. What to remember however is that most of the people on the ship aren't soldiers, they are workers. You would solve nothing by sending them down on some mission considering that they are all incompetent oafs.

And to add an additional point. Larger ships are in a way more story friendly. Perhaps something horrible is festering in the dark holds, perhaps there is rebellion on the ship or perhaps the machine spirit has gone mad and is starting to kill off the crew one by one? On a small ship with just the characters the options are more limited.

Honn is correct. Remember: everything in 40K is larger than life ... including warp-capable ships.

There may be another way around your situation, though. You could reasonably, based on fluff in the novels, make the vast majority of the crew servitors. Only those with the most complex tasks would probably be best-left as normal humans.

The secondary benefit of this arrangement is that it cuts down on morale issues.

I think you want to give your players more independence in their travels. Fine. I don't believe small ships are capabable of Warp travel, but there are Firefly-sized spaceships - they just cannot leave a system. For missions in a system with several inhabitable planets, that's fine. So you can travel from Sepheris Primus to Sepheris Secundus, or from Terra to Mars without difficulty.

The Imperium is loath to give the independence of Warp-capabable ships to just anyone, which means only Rogue Traders, Inquisitors, Sector Lords, Space Marine Chapters, and of course the Imperial Navy has access to such ships on a routinely basis. Even Inquisitors are unlikely to have more than one such ship, thus the need for Rogue Traders and Passenger ships or cooperation from Departamento Munitorium.

Right, thanks for the information everyone.

I didn't really think of it along the lines of 'useless oafs' until now (and the prospect of having ship borne adventures, such as a Genestealer idea I had seems far to attractive). So I shall give the players a regular big ship... But perhaps the smallest possible big ship, like a converted cargo ship or something similar.

Our GM handle it this way:

We do have a ship, but we dont own it. It's a rogue trader who owns it, and he just fly to where we want. The Inquisition pays for it (You have to remember someone has to pay for this all also, if your player OWN this ship, how are they going to pay the crew ?).

I gave mine a small ship after a difficult part of the campaign was over and put its running in the hands of 'trusted' NPC with most of the skill set to run it. By small it makes a Destroyer or Raider look positively tough, its crewed by about 1000 living people, 5000 or so 'bitey' servitors that see organic things as mostly rubbish to be removed. The alternative is when the campaign is at a high enough level (8000xp) or so, you could get a PC re-roll a rogue trader who's somehow found themselves by the nuts in the service of the Inquisition.

Into the Storm, the new Rogue Trader player handbook, gives one option to address the "vast crew" point: an all-servitor crew. This is an option for all Imperial vessels. In fact this was actually used (and is clearly based upon) a Rogue Trader from the Eisenhorn novels, who did the same thing.

So a ship with this option would be closer to the "classic" sci-fi image of a large, echoing, largely empty ship, with a tiny crew...and thousands of lobotomised semi-corpses wandering the halls with arms replaced by auto-mops, of course!

This means you can combine the 40k trope of the 5 kilometer long starship with the classic sci-fi RPG trope of a small group of adventurers having their own ship and the freedom to go where they want.

I actually really like that idea Lightbringer, and it also make up for the 'paying the crew' problem. However, the party will still need to pay for maintainence, but that might come from Inquisitorial funds, as I wont be giving them this ship until around 5th rank... So they are definitely trusted agents by this point.

But I think I will have SOME Humans on board... Maybe about 100-500 or so souls, all of which are indentured labour. The rest will be servitors, and the ship will have large parts of it 'Offline' and thus allowing for scary things to exist in the dark places of the ship. It also means I can have some cool 0-gravity fight scenes!

So if I say the ship pattern is a about half smaller than a Vagabond, I can say that the suggested crew is 8,000 or so. The most vital parts are crewed by Humans, which makes up say 100 seats, and then a further 25% of the ship (the auxillery systems) are manned by Servitors (2,000) and then have the rest of the ship offline and acting as dead weight until the Acolytes see fit to clear it of its darkness with purifying fire and to bring in their own labour to man it...

That could work.

Lightbringer said:

Which is exactly what I was alluding to above. It's also what I did with my players ... gave them a Havoc-Class Merchant Raider with a mostly servitor crew. It's small, but fast. It limits the amount of tinkering they can do with it, but still allows them to go wherever they want (mostly) and defend themselves somewhat.

There are a few (very rare) references of very small vessels in the service of the Imperium that have small crew populations and are still Warp capable.

Aside from the Servitor-crewed ships as mention there are one of two references to some very specialized pre-imperial tech or Heresy era tech ships with a small specific crew. The ships are usually controlled by in-built servitors linked to someone in a dreadnaught-sarcofagus like device with the only living crew being some Enginseers and a Astropath and Navigator. These types of ship probably skirt on the edge of tech-heresy and would be in no use as a fighting vehicle due to thier tiny size.

Other mentions are usually clanky falling apart transport ships used for running bulk non-perishable cargo but not enough to warrant one of the massive transport. These are the ships that do without a Navigator only making very carefully plotted Micro-warp jumps. Crew size in these vessels is about a hundred or so who work to keep an ancient vessel running with little true knowledge.

The references are there, just difficult to find and usually contain no information as they are a plot mcguffin for a writer to set a scene or reason for an event to occur.

Despite all I have said and what others point out, its your game, if you have a plan for you players that needs a ship do as you will. Give them a rare small vessel say 500m long with only a dozen living techs and the rest hardwired servitors. Make it capable of small warps andthen make it clear that the Mechanicus or Inquisition have maybe a dozen such vessels, each unique and irreplacable, with no way of making new versions, perhaps the ship might even have a piece of archeotech at its heart or be originally a xenos design. The choice is yours.

- Raith

in the R.T adventure "lure of the expanse" the pc's have an encounter with an ancient unmanned mechanicus probe capable of warp travel,, it is roughly 75 meters in diameter and has some minor weaponry,, you could take this as an example of there being smaller warp capable crafts,, you just need to add a Gellar field and some sort of life sustaining facility (stasis field/cryoboxes) and you could be on your merry little way.. that being said, the construct was made by a heretech mechanicus fraction but,,,,, anywho,, the inquisition has endless resources at their disposal so just do what you wanna!

hey

! : ?

Smallest Warp capable ship is the Cobra Destroyer

Raith said:

One of those references is in the Eisenhorn trilogy- one of the recurring characters is a Rogue Trader who specializes in small but highly valuable cargoes. Thus his Warp-capable ship is smaller that a standard vessel (but still pretty big- I picture it alittle bigger than the Enterprise ) crewed entirely by servitors.

If you didn't want to go that route, you could use a standard vessel with a huge crew, but impress upon the players that the crew have no legal authority to act on behalf of the Inquisition- any unauthorized personnel made privvy to the activities of the Holy Ordos would likely be subject to immediate execution, and good luck running that giant ship with most of the crew dead...

I gave my players a very small Warp-capable ship and fluffed it as a highly advanced Adeptus Mechanicus raider. It was given to a bunch of Mercs hired to track down and board the ship the players were already on, and they counter-boarded it and took it for themselves. Had about 50-60 people on it in total, and now they own it themselves, but are running it with a skeleton crew (and by skeleton I mean the 4 of them plus one Tech-Priest and one Navigator).

Seems to work.

BYE

Well, this is kinda where the setting shows its age.

And also where the DH and RT setting info clashes slightly with novels.

If you refer to the Ravenor trilogy in particular, there's quite a lot of star hopping going on and very active (albeit supporting characters mostly) rogue traders.

There's a fair amount of ship-to-ship and boarding actions, during which the size of these rogue traders and their crews very definitely clashes with the published material in RT. In those books, most "small" RT ships range from 70+ crewmen on up, if I recall correctly. Even the Essene (the aforementioned 1 man + full servitor crew) was described as quite large physically but it really didn't make it seem as though there were literally thousands of servitors on board. Of course many of these ships didn't feature Navigators much either...if they were there they were **** near invisible.

So yeah, this is one place where the DH/RT lore differs from published storybooks. And I guess the bottom line is that as a GM you should go with what fits into your campaign the best. If you're running a campaign that focuses heavily around a few planets, limiting travel is obviously not a problem. If you're wanting a more Star Warsy game where the players do a fair amount of system hopping, stealing the 70+ crew in their much smaller (but apparently still warp capable) ships described by Dan Abnett seems appropriate.

The Gun Cutter is also a possibility. Heck, you perhaps just elaborate on Abnett's source material in the following ways:

Gun Cutters: Non-warp capable, still primarily a system's craft. Could be used by acolytes as a homebase but necessitating that they piggy back warp capable ships for warp travel.

Abnett's Rogue Traders: Larger ships, but still not of the level published in the RT sourcebooks. Still warp capable, but limited. Think shallow water craft of the age of sail. Useful in short jumps along well travelled and relatively safe warp lanes, their jumps might be accompanied by very long periods spent computing travelling vectors or what not and forcing frequent drops into real space to recalibrate and take measurements. Similar to the way Abnett's RT's worked various routes and lanes, you could just formalize those limiters by stating that the ships can't risk travelling freely warpspace, having to skip in and out for short intervals. Perhaps the smaller drive cores can only maintain Gellar fields for a limited time? Whatever works.

RT's as published: The true deep water ships. Able to slip in and out of the warp with relative ease and (with some risk) able to dramatically shorten travel times due to the presence of the Navigator...but also necessitating the larger size etc. The preferred method of transport in time sensitive situations (almost always right?) meaning even characters with a smaller RT and fair independence will want to piggyback when possible or if its necessary.

That way you can get a level of detail versus freedom of movement that you prefer, without getting too caught up in the nitty gritty of managing a true Rogue Trader. Heck, you could even explain it away by giving them a small RT and then stating that the ship comes with a Navis Prima of some sort gifted by their Inquisitor. That way you can revise and update what warp routes the group has available at any given time while still giving the players a great deal of freedom (or the illusion of it...which is just as important).

For what it is worth, I like to give players something small and capable of only very short jumps. Something a little larger then a standard guncutter but not by much. The players can either choose to recruit a Navigator (which will be a drain on influence) or have to rely on larger transports to stow in for longer-range ships.

This cuts out most of the transport problems during missions and leaves things a little more open in between. Also they get exposed to more ships and crews and can do more networking or have a bigger chance of running into something interesting then if their own ship ALWAYS went A to B...

Questionable Methods said:

The sheer size of a warp drive makes a ship the size of a guncutter that's capable of warp travel pretty much impossible. However, you could go the Eisenhorn route of your players having a guncutter for themselves, and relying on using Inquisitorial funds to pay for docking space on a larger warp-capable ship which they would dock with and that ship would take them where they needed to go. You wouldn't even have to leave (or might not be allowed to) leave your shuttle for the duration of the trip, which would rule out actually running into the thousands of crew on even the smallest ship.

I've found that, for when it comes to transport in the Imperium, Dan Abnett isn't very good, as his crew sizes (around 70 or so) clash with every other piece of fluff out there for 40k. He underballs the figures by a very large margin. He is pretty good for plots though, especially with Ravenor and Eisenhorn, so I can forgive him somewhat for screwing up space travel.

There are sources in the canon for much smaller vessels - for example in the recent Heresy-era novel, Nemesis,

SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!!

...the Officio Assasinorum characters have the use of a warp-capable vessel with a crew of three: a servitor-pilot, a navigator and an astropath.

END SPOILERS

And there are rumours of even smaller 2-man espionage vessels that are fired into the Eye of Terror to spy on what the Chaos forces are up to. I would say though that such vessels are incredibly rare, and only appropriate for Ascension level campaigns, as they'd be precious Inquisitorial resources. It's actually hard to see why a Sector as remote and relatively unimportant as Calixis would have any reason to have access to such a type of ship.

I think the whole "tall ship" 40k approach is something players struggle getting their heads around: they're used to the standard sci fi model of a group of adventurers having their own ship which can go anywhere in the galaxy virtually instantly. And we're all from a society where everyone has easy access to international travel, motor vehicles etc etc. We take personal freedom of movement for granted.

There are plenty of historical models one could use to replicate the 40k travel feel, though.

A sort of late 19th century vibe is the way I often think of DH travel arrangements. Think of the sort of travel arrangements the British Empire might have had for sending a group of low-level spies/colonial agents to (picking a country at random) Burma in 1885. That's the sort of analogy we're talking about here. There's no way at all these guys would make it there in a rowing boat that would only be crewed by themselves!

The journey would last months, and may involve stopping at numerous ports and changing ships many times. They might travel part of the way in a Royal Navy ship, then change to a Tea Clipper, then to a steamer, and so on. While their official business might be very important, they are unlikely to ever have the resources or authority to have a whole ship to themselves. (Though they might have the power to delay one or even make it leave port early.)

Lightbringer said:

There were plenty of Yaughts and similar vessels capabable of ocean travel back then though, but such might rouse suspicion.

Which makes me think: What kind of travel security exists in 40k? Note I'm not talking about safety here...

For example, when one travel the Golgonna Reach, is there anything like current airport security, or is it just walk into the spaceport, ask after what ships go where, pay the required fees, and board? Is luggage checked? Are obvious weaponry allowed?

Lightbringer said:

Doesn't mean that it's small (relatively speaking), just that it's only got an extremely small crew.

Personally, I take the view that while ships with more automation and smaller crew requirements did exist during previous ages of man, the technology to reproduce them is virtually lost, and as these archaeotech devices have become harder and harder to keep functioning, they've been replaced by manually-operated equivalents, with the last legacies of these ancient automaton-ships in the service of the Adeptus Astartes and Adeptus Mechanicus, a pale shadow of the technology they emulate.

I can think of two references to small warp capable ships.

Jaq Draco in the first inquisition trilogy (Inquisitor, Chaos Child etc.) travels in a small warp capabel ship. The crew size is around 10 I believe.

In the first of the three Grey Knight books an Inqusitorial agent at one point travels in a very fast messenger ship with a crew of three. Himself as pilot a navigator and an engineseer.

So it's certainly not impossible to find small warp capable ships. They might for all practical purposes be restricted to high ranking inquisitors or large conclaves.

Inquisitor Thaddeus in the Souldrinker books also has a fairly small but warp capable ship. It never outright mentions the size...but it definitely did not seem like a ship with thousands of crew.

But this is a natural consequence of having so many collaborators working on a setting. All-in-all, I remember finding it odd when I read the novels but as someone else mentioned the rest of the plots were generally good.

For Dark Heresy though, I think the Gun Cutter method works for most campaigns. I only mentioned smaller, more limited warpships as a possible option for giving players warp travel without piling the resource management and costs (in time and the like) of a true Rogue Trader into a DH campaign.

By setting the limitations on them, you also keep some kind of logical consistency within the game world. The massive starships are still kings of the void, their benefits equal to the costs and expense of keeping a small city floating in space. And you still get to keep that epic imperial feel with most space travel.

Mundane traders working between 1-3 systems would account for a great deal of regular commerce, leaving the high profile (and high profit) stuff to the RTs.

I think in my campaign that when the players start messing with starships that I'll explain it something like this:

The Immaterium doesn't really follow the laws of the natural universe. That's one of the reasons ships using warp travel are able to do what they do. But, just as Chaos seeps into our world, the laws of our universe do filter over into the Warp. The closer to that indefinable border between the Materium and Immaterium you are...the more of our rules still apply and the saner and "safer" the Warp is. So, what Rogue Traders do is plunge deep into the warp, under the guidance of a navigator, and emerge at their destinations. Lesser ships use a method similar to the Tau. They dip into the warp but stay close to the "surface" of the Immaterium and skip along for a few light years, emerging frequently to take new bearings. Without a navigator, going deeper in the warp would quickly get them lost and essentially be a death sentence. For that reason, these ships only travel along routes they have travelled before or to which they have careful and exacting co-ordinates. They also are much slower then Rogue Traders since they have to re-calculater their locations constantly and if the warp is fickle, they could be "blown" off course.

If this clashes with any published material, I'd be happy to hear it but this seems like a decent enough base line explanation. Obviously, the warp is the warp, and nothing is ever completely safe...but so long as the GM has a pretty decent idea on what the Warp is and how it functions in his world, it should be possible to find the level of ship travel that suits you best and is still consistent with your world.

Friend of the Dork said:

As always, I guess the answer is "It depends."

Given that the Imperium is one big state (theoretically) with millions of lesser states within it, there are likely to be many different standards of customs/border controls.

I think the simplest way to approach them is to ask who is running those border controls. Let's say you want to travel from world A, a feudal world, to world B, a hive world.

World A, as a feudal world, is unlikely to have complex security arrangements, so you probably won't be checked over when leaving the world. Depending on how primitive they are, they may not even recognise that the weapons your players are carrying are potentially dangerous.

However, the Captain of the ship they are travelling on, when he touches down, will probably want to ensure at the very least that what you have on board won't damage him, his interests, or his ship. He might do a thorough search of the players, and strip them of everything they have. Or if he's a "no questions asked" type, he might just take the larger and more dangerous weapons off them for the duration of the journey, and give them back when they arrive at their destination, provided it won't get him into trouble with rulers of Planet B.

Planet B, as a Hive world, MAY have very complex security arrangements, depending upon how well organised the Governor is. One would imagine that hive worlds are quite strict on things like drugs, anti-governor propaganda, and infectious diseases, as hive worlds are particularly vulnerable to these. Or, if world B is in disarray due to a recent war, it might be like arriving in a banana republic, and the players may walk straight off the shuttle bearing heavy weapons and no one blinks an eye...

I think the best way to deal with it is to take a view about the planet they're leaving, the ship they're travelling on and the destination world. The players, at the very least, should be checking this stuff too, and making arrangements accordingly (investing in concealable weapons etc). If they don't take those basic steps, then hit them with somethng surprising during the journey!