Trying to figure out if it takes me too long to get through a single endeavor/adventure over several sessions. What I'd like to know is:

How many sessions (assuming they're 4 hours) does it take for you to get through:

A Lesser Endeavor?

A Greater Endeavor?

A Grand Endeavor?

Or alternately:

How long did it take you to get through

The intro adventure in the Rogue Trader corebook?

The Egarian Dominion adventure at the end of Edge of the Abyss?

Forsaken Bounty?

Dark Frontier?

Traitor's Nexus?

Forsaken Bounty took us three sessions (the first was just one hour of play that followed character generation, while the other two were each about 3-3.5 hours of play).

The adventure from the main book went horribly off track. The players diverted from it before making it to Magnagorsk and I ended up pulling them into the sequel to Forsaken Bounty (the psycharus worm actually got the game back on track), which took two sessions to complete. Now they plan to head back out to finish the main book adventure.

Interesting. That sounds about roughly what it takes me to get through an adventure divided into three parts like that. Did you add anything to Forsaken Bounty or did you go strictly by the adventure as written?

I added some stuff into Forsaken bounty. The PCs have Finances in Arrears on their ship, so I reworked the beginning and had the Bounty be a vessel belonging to their patron. This worked out well and gave them a bit of motivation beyond just greed (although that's powerful enough with some of them). I also expanded out some social scenes in which various factions among the survivors of the Bounty's crew took steps to ensure that they would be the few rescued by the Explorers (the craft they came over on could only hold a score or so beyond the Explorers). In the end, some of them resorted to violence and extortion and the PCs decided they were all corrupt and unworthy to live, but that didn't stop them from exploiting them to aid in their own escape.

It took 3-4 sessions to finish Forsaken Bounty. We play on sundays, so many players are hung over. I make sure that they are well supplied with coffee to try to compensate. They actually followed the script the whole way, without much prodding... miraculous.

Which led straight into the sequel, which took about 5 sessions. Again, slow due to being hung over etc... and YET another time they followed the script!

We're now doing a lesser endeavour on Lucins Breath, which they will finish in 2 sessions by the look of it... (Switched to a friday. No hung over people, but they brought beer )

Throughout the whole process some new people joined, and creating a new character eats up a huge amount of time (since I'm the only one who bothered to buy the rulebooks).

The Egarian Dominion adventure at the end of Edge of the Abyss: one session.

we play on saturdays and fridays, and the friday session is short (3-4 hours) saturdays can be all day but usually go from 5-11. The egarian domain was all rapped up by the end of saturday, which surprised me, but the Rak Gol and the eldar kept everyone motivated and focussed which was good. next up is a confrontation with an old rival who is attacking one of their mining operations (and now has a halo device), which will probably take longer as they debate more when given more freedom to roam.

trentmorten said:

Did you use any of the optionals? I just ran this and it took three sessions of roughly 4 hours or so.

I decided to run the intro in the core book and the Forsaken Bounty simultaneously since they both link nicely to the Battlegrounds and are introductory games for new players (and GMs). We play 6 hour sessions on Saturday nights, and we started early at our first session to allow a new player time for character gen and for the other players to flush things out a bit. I started the session with their ships arrival at Port Wander and we played from the main book until they translated back in space near the battlegrounds, at which point I switched to Forsaken Bounty. We finished the night completing Forsaken Bounty. I inserted Nathin Tsantos into their crew, with him dropping the lead about the Writ of Claim when they were at Port Wander. Next session I will pick back up with the main book at the Battlegrounds & then when they try to Translate to the Warp, I'll trigger the follow up adventure to Forsaken Bounty. Part of the reason my session might have gone faster than yours was because I used narrative combat for the fight on the Bridge, before the final showdown.