HappyDaze said:

In my opinion it isn't a deliberate policy of preventing the formation of an united entity that could scare others faction into stoping it out - it's more a case of various internal factions and interests pulling the organisation left and right - basically caring more about the size of their own slice than the whole cake.

They'll still stick together if someone looks like he will seriouslly shrink the cake, endangering everyone's slice, but I'd think many would have no qualms about shrinking it a bit it it's at teh expense of the other and their own slices gets bigger in absoluteterms (and even more in relative)

LETE said:

I do play a Navigator and I do whatever I want. Of course my PC comes from a huge and influential Magistrate House too. In one of the tomes of the contract between our respective Houses, it has been clarified that I do not fall under the normal chain of command of the Rogue Trader but am only bound by the terms of the contract.

In a recent scenario my captain expressed that he thought it'd be too dangerous for me to go, I thought about it briefly and informed the captain of my decision to go down there. Not much to be done about it by him. Gotta send his best bodyguards and hope nothing of ill happens to me. I do have 5 Fate Points and 12 Wounds or so though.

Alex

HappyDaze said:

LOL, my Magistrate House has the clout to never accept those terms. Exclusiveness or bust. Of course certain houses (which are in fact secretly minor allies who'd think thrice to double-cross House Caligula) would be acceptable as secondaries.

Alex

HappyDaze said:

Sorry about the triple posting but I have to comment on this.

I see where you're coming from and overall I would agree but on one vital point our views diverge: there are core interests that cannot be touched. As mentioned, my Navigator comes from one of the biggest and most influential houses in the segmentum. And there is lots of infighting, more than we let the outside world know. But when it comes to business, there is no nonsense. Any Navigator who is being seen as harming the business of House Caligula will get the upper ranks going after them. That's why the room for the individual is limited. Also there is standard contracts with Rogue Trader dynasties which fill tomes about what the rights and privileges (much) and what the duties (little) of a Navigator are. There is wiggling room in there but not all that much. In fact the negotiations have been left to some skilled personnel and my Navigator wasn't even involved in such a lowly, mundane (and boring) task.

The same goes in my experience for the Navis Nobilite as a whole. Nobody messes with them. If the Inquisition would get funny ideas with one or two of the Great Houses, it would prompt a fairly united response from all the others because they would fear for them all losing influence as a whole. That is the basis of their power. And that justifies page 175: "Few organizations within the Imperium hold as much power as the Great Navigator Houses of the Navis Nobilite. Their position of control over nearly all Imperial shipping places them in a rare place of power, one that sits almost beyond the reach of both the Administratum and even the Inquisition itself."

As a consequence, my Navi does whatever he wants. He doesn't act like a jerk or anything but he doesn't let anyone or anything stop him except the above mentioned contract to which he is bound (by his navigator elders).

Alex

It's an interesting problem. The campaign that I'm running has so far managed to avoid that by having the RT be the Navigator. He's a navigator class who inherited the warrant. Bit of a bastardization of the setting. The dynasty comes from a system that has been locked into place for centuries by a warp storm and there has been some severe inbreeding among the population of the crashed ship.

The closest lines of heredity put the navigator as the sole remaining member of the family. It's going to be fun introducing them to the rest of the imperium.

The Navis, Mechanicus and others are going to want to have a nice chat with them all.

I'm down two players at the moment and hope for a rogue trader(class), arch-militant or void master to join up. Seneschal would be fine too.

Hehe... At the moment, I think they'd love a missionary. They just went up against some of the plague swarms from Creatures Anathema and only had lasguns, hellpistols or stubbers.

ak-73 said:

I still doubt that a House is united enough for all members to decide in unison what is 'best' for the house. Any given House of the Navis Nobilite is bigger than the US Congress - and likely more fractious.

HappyDaze said:

It's totally fractious when it comes to the Great Houses. House Caligula (my house) is composed of several major bloodlines around which lesser bloodlines of absorbed shrouded and renegade houses are composes. There is a fierce inner warfare going on, one of the rules though is that to the outside world the house must always look united; it's an issue to go to war over.

*But* you can also think of the House as a Mafia family. The Matriarch of the house cannot control all aspects of it. But rules are in place and most navigators are shy to break the basic rules for fear of another navigator of the house finding out and reporting him in in order to climb the ranks.

But this is of course only my intepretation of this one house only. Other interpretations are possible, I was only saying to show how this can be made to work even in unison - fear of eventual repercussions. It won't be an easy or quick death. Quick as in: the dying lasting shorter than a year.

Alex

I'm more in-line with HappyDaze. Navigator Houses are much like RT Houses on a galactic scale - they collectively wield impressive levels of power, but they are very pleased to undermine one another for greater control; some factions actively encourage cut-throat attitudes from its membership, some are great, mighty and they dictate terms for massive contracts for hundreds of ships. The Navigator Houses go to war, secretly, with one another on occasion.

A RT House is a very specific breed of customer for the Navis Nobilitae: a small, and highly dangerous contract - that could be very profitable. Getting in on the ground floor with an RT dynasty can lead to great things. These kinds of customers are going to attract all the Houses, and as the rules show, Navigators that end up an RT come from all the various Navigator Houses, including the renegades (showing that the RT market for Navigators is open).

And the baseline is: they are mutants; Useful, like Ogryn, but mutants all the same. They are useful because they serve a purpose and have proven to be loyal to the Imperium. If an STC pattern device could replace the need for a Navigator - Navigators would be purged within a generation; they are no longer useful.

The text is pretty clear that Navigators are encouraged to get-out when they are young; horrible mutation in their future is a certainty. It's better to go out and see things before the general human population would like to see you burn for you obvious and hideous mutant nature.

Hi LETE,

OK, you ask;

'Excuse my density & unimaginative nature but I cannot fathom any time or place when/where a Rogue Trader would endanger his/her invaluable Navigator in any way... So what's stopping the RT from banning the Navigator to ever set foot outside the ship? It's too GE-**** risky!'

and you also go on to say that you want to stick to canon as closely as possible.

The problem of course is that, as with all 40k canon, its inconsistent and often contradictory, so you'll have to take a judgement on how this will work for you.

I think the first thing to point out is that the most 'senior' person (in terms of the wider Imperium) aboard any ship is the Navigator. In noble status terms he 'outranks' even the most powerful Rogue Trader by several degrees and, within the terms of whatever agreements of service he has signed can do as he wishes..

As you say, the Rogue Trader will be loathe to endanger the live of the precious Navigator (few ships actually have a Navigator, and are forced to travel by short Warp-hops, a much slower method than the deep travel made possible by a Navigator. However, aside from negotiation and social persuasion, technically there will be very little a Rogue Trader can actually do to control the movements of a Navigator.

As a model it might be worth looking to the original source material of the Navigators (the Spacing Guild seen in Frank Herbert's Dune series)...i think the following scene is a very good illustration of the relative status of for example a very powerful Rogue Trader and an average status Navigator.

The second thing to address i suppose is political pragmatism. The Navigator is not essential to Warp travel, especially if operating beyond the Astronomican (roughly the eastern half of the Imperium, and presumably in the deeper recesses beyond the Imperium's borders) but for a Rogue Trader its a highly useful part of his operational capacity, making fast Warp travel possible. So the RT is in a position of having to maintain good relations with his Navigator to make his activity and travel easier. Negotiating the services of a Navigator can take many years and once he's got one on board, a Rogue Trader will do everything possible to keep this vital contact. Barring the Navigator's free passage, isn't politically a good move.

Moving away from in-game justifications, you get into the 'Captain Kirk' issue. Why, in Star Trek, are the highly dangerous away missions always stuffed to the gunwhales with vital command crew? Because the story requires it. A Navigator is presumably a PC and therefore should be given the same gaming free will as any other PC.

But, overall, its a decision you'll have to make for yourself.

In several of the novels it is the reverse, you cant get the navigator to even come out of his quarters let alone leave the ship if you want them to.

Here is a question, what did they use before the Emperor made the the Astronomicon, Navigators existed since the age of strife so somthing was needed?

dhs1745 said:

Very short, calculated warp jumps.

It might take 10 or more calculated jumps to equal one short Navigator jump. I'm not sure if they really extrapolated these, this is where I place them.

ItsUncertainWho said:

Indeed, this is how the Tau get around now, as they lack Navigators.

That said, there's no real indication that the Emperor made the Astronomican at all... it just sort of always existed, but there's no real talk of him building it. It existed throughout the Great Crusade, and if Navigators date back to the Age of Strife, and need the beacon to navigate... wouldn't it be of a similar age?

As for letting the Navigators off the ship, I agree that it's very much, as said earlier, the "Captain Kirk" scenario. Sometimes you just have to let the PCs do their thing.

The Emperor 'is' the Astronomicon. He always has been. It was only after the Crusade that he had to sit down and it was transformed into an actual Imperial institution rather than just something the Emperor did. And the Navigators are still much better at navigating without the Astronomicon than any cogitator bank would be.