So, I've been looking over the Ship & Warrant Origin Path details in Into the Storm , and have become confused about something.

Its pretty clear (to me, at least) that when a gaming group gets together to create new characters for a Rogue Trader game, find their starting Profit Factor and construct their ship, spend their first 500 experience points, that this group of characters is (relatively speaking) recently assembled and has only just begun its' journey of exploration and adventure, profit and plunder. Yet it seems clear from the Ship & Warrant Origin Path (SWOP?) that the majority of Warrants were issued centuries if not millennia previous. It also seems clear that most Rogue Trader Dynasties are gargantuan corporations stretching across many systems and ships under some nebulous central authority (the Warrant holders or Dynasty heads), which clearly is not a group of new characters who are only just now embarking on their adventures.

Whereas before I had commonly seen the Warrants and Dynasties of a player-character group newly issued and thusfar consisting only of a single voidship and its crew, SWOP seems to indicate that such situations are a rarity even among Rogue Traders. Furthermore, creating a new Warrant/Dynasty using SWOP paints one into a corner, blocking off several branches of the SWOP tree.

What does this mean for a player group and their starting-level characters (the Rogue Trader in particular)? Are they generally assumed to be the scions of a larger and older Dynasty, commanding but one ship of their family's fleets? And if so, how do Rogue Traders from background other than Child of Dynasty (such as Frontier World or Battlefleet) become Rogue Traders empowered by the Warrant when they are effectively excluded from the line of succession?

As a general rule the older warrants wil be owned by large families who may own large fleets of ships and territories, and the more currently created warrents are generaly owned by individuals or very small familes. But these are only general rules and do not need to apply to every Rogue Trader, for example an new created Rogue Trader could have a Warrents created durring the age of strife and the previous owner was a family member that just died and had no other children to pass it along to. So the Rogue Trader being the nearest person connected to the pervious Rogue Trader could have be awarded it that way, or due to his impressive action he could have been addoped by the Rogue Trader to act as his heir. The point is there could be may ways that you could set up your idea of what the Rogue Trader is with his Warrent, your are only limited by the story you can come up with.

Same goes for how a newly created Rogue Trader from a Battlefleet comes into ownership of a very old warrent, maybe the older family member thought it would be good for him to grow up in the navy to get a understanding of life in the void or maybe he was the fifth in line to get the warrent and so was suffled off to live a life in the church only to find that all the other hiers had been killed off. Again as long as you can make the story work out and make sense and your GM approves of it you shouldn't have too much limit in where your Rogue Trader was born.

Perhaps an ancient line fell on hard times, through years of neglect by previous heads, or even just blind chance, and the newly inhereting scion is the one who's going to turn things around, or die trying.

Perhaps the mother or father of your Rogue Trader told your character that they were taking the fleet and going off to join the Margin Crusade (*sniker*), leaving behind a ship for you to bring when you finally come of age.

Some ideas:

1. The Warrant was somehow lost and only recently found, as such, their ship is the first in a re-birth of the Dynasty. The group I play in used this option; the Warrant and Flagship was lost and recently found within the Expanse hundreds of years later.

2. The Dynasty has had a series of poor/weak Rogue Traders, who have squandered the wealth and glory it once had. The player RT hopes to turn that around (this also ties in nicely with some of the Lineage options for the RT).

3. The player RT doesn't hold the physical Warrant, and is instead a newly appointed captain in a larger RT fleet. He has free reign, and speaks with the power of the Dynasties Warrant, but he himself does not hold it.

4. Simply ignore the Warrant Age line of the Origin Path. Let the players start at Fortune & Fate and pick from there. When done, tally up the SP/PF and then add points to each to bring them up to 88 or 90 points total. You'll find the SP/PF from the Origin Path is slightly lower than the options in the core rulebook. The core end with 90 split between them, while the origin path option is somewhere in the 80's.

5. Make them select The Waning and then pick from there. Simply and effective.

Perhaps a Rogue Trader could not father a child, so decided to adopt?