Ok so I might not have been the GM of this session, but I thought some might find this quite... interesting to say the least.

I was the groups Rogue trader, I created our ship and everything. When I rolled for past history I got "Temperamental Warp Engine"

Temperamental Warp Engine: The ship suffers a flutter in its Warp Engines, an inconsistency that no amount
of maintenance or supplication can eliminate. Whenever the ship travels through the immaterium, the GM should
roll 1d10. On a 6 or lower, the journey takes an additional 1d5 weeks, on a 7 or higher, the travel time is reduced
1d5 weeks instead (potentially causing the ship to arrive before it left!). However, once in a great while, the ship
will leave the warp to unexpectedly find itself someplace other than its intended destination. (This is at the GM’s
discretion, but should not happen on a regular basis.)

Most of my group brought our profit factor down, and we didn't have much of a profit factor to begin with, so we were taking any job we could to try to get some cash. We ended up doing a supply run for some lowly noble. Now before I go any farther, our GM was making the Warp Engine rolls in secret for a few sessions and I had forgotten we had the possibility to go back in time. Basically we rolled really well for the time it took to get to the next star system and back. To our characters the time elasped from travel to the planet, and a little combat, back to the nobels place was 3 weeks. Apparently one of the warp travels took us back in time and we ended up seeing ourselfs leaving the nobles house... The group, having forgotten we could travel back in time, decided to approach these strange look alikes. In the end we ended up creating a paradox and had to fight our way back to the ship. Avoiding many a warp hassards, due to our "meddleing with the fabric of the universe, with our careless time travel". The past us kinda just dissapeared, and three of our group died to warp predators. We created a chaos world and drew the attention of a Imperial cruiser carring Astarties. I couldn't believe our GM would do that to us. In the end we convinced the Space Marines we were free of taint and they should be occuping their time on purging the warp entites running free on the planet.

Over view of what happened,
1. We killed ourselfs, but still lived???
2. We created a warp portal, because of the instability of the situtation
3. Our Ork, Arch-millitant, and Tech-Priest died
4. We created a chaos world
5. We had the Space Marines ignore us and purge the taint of chaos
6. We still got paid, so I think it was worth it.
Oh yeah, one more thing. I was given 2d10 corruption and insanity becuase I was responisble for an entire planets descruction...

LOLOLOLOL!

Fantastic! I'm not sure about that chaos world spawning, but I find the rest quite funny. Every GM should get schooled by your GM in nastiness I guess he has read much Knights of the Dinnertable?

Well the Chaos world spawning was more of me exaggeration the horrible events of warp entes being released. Also, I'm not sure where this was inspired from. I do know he is very adept at being original, and it is always challenging, sometimes i disagree with what is in our character's level. For instance, three of us died in that campaign, I think it was just too advanced for us. My GM's response to that was simply put "Your ork tried to charge 5 warp predators, and the tech-priest's leg was broken. How was I supposed to know the ork would be stupid... ok you have a point there, but the tech-preist's leg was beyond my controll."

Shadowspaz said:

My group's first trip in the Warp managed to get them from Port Wander to the Temple. I rolled it in secret, and rolled that they arrived five weeks early for a really short trip.

So, they've kind of got a pretty big advantage over Hadarak Fel right now in our starting adventure, but they'll likely end up losing that advantage. Thanks to a combination of rolls, the trip from there to the Battleground managed to make it exactly on time, but they've still got at least two more jumps.

Shadowspaz said:

LOL.

Time travel can be a sticky wicket for a GM to run. TV shows and movies rarely get away with it without at least a few glaring inconsistencies and they have the luxury of being able to precisely script what the heroes do. That said, I think your GM handled this situation perfectly. Time travel should be messy business and I imagine this experience will make your party think twice in the future (past?)

The lesson to be learned here is to make a point of verifying the current date and time with independent sources that have not been traveling through the warp whenever you arrive at your desitination, especially when doing short back-and-forth runs, and if you find yourself arriving back somewhere before you left, just keep a low profile until you're clear of yourselves. =P

I would imagine this is a lesson most seasoned Rogue Traders will have learned sooner or later. =)

Meet the Emperor cruise lines: Opens Tomorrow! One way travel ticket only! Who wants to return anyway?

Way too easy with Rogue Trader as per rules.

(But gratz on the fun adventure )

One point of note... I've assumed the minimum travel time is one day, and going back in time is at GM's discretion only. Since my players have an overcharged warp drive (-1d5 weeks), a hot Navigator, and take a lot of short hops, this has been a great sanity saver for me.

Cheers,

- V.

We deliberately designed our ship to be utterly silly. We took a warp drive which halved our warp travel time, a runecaster (which halved our travel time) and a full set of maps which cuts our travel time by a week or so. Our GM frequently lets us time travel due to the utter sillyness of our ship in the warp but warned us well in advance that there would be very grave consiquences if we actually messed with the timeline too much. So the first thing we did was establish a ship's callender of realative time and interate a time signal into our Identification broadcasts. Second thing we did was set up a light semafor on the navigation towers which also showed the current ship's relative time. This way if we encountered a "Very familiar looking ship" we just looked for those signs to tell us whether it was from our future or our past, then stayed well clear of it and never speak to it or look at it too closely. Other than that he also tended to up the anti on warp hazards during travel so our Navigator has become a boss at mitigating the rolls for that, he focuses more on that than the actual navigation roll due to all the ship's stuff we have to help with that anyway.

He did throw an interesting spanner at us last session though when we arrived a Port Wonder a day after we left laden with a years trip worth of loot only to be met by a member of the Inquisition's Ordo Chrono. He wants to make use of our ship's 'Unique properties'. We are frankly bricking it, like any healthy rogue trader would against any Ordo.

That does sound fairly awesome.

Order Chrono? Dear God, the Imperium thinks of everything, and always with appropriately horrible consequences, I'm sure.

What are the odds of a visit from the local Inquisitor after this incident. I'm pretty sure if that does happen, I'm screwed...

Shadowspaz said:

An Inquisitor has better things to do than harass a Rogue Trader with a very fast ship. Unless he wants the RT to help him deal with these more important things. Hopefully all the Inquisitor wants is you to take him somewhere in a hurry, maybe provide orbital support and return trip.

Remember, the Inquisition has no authority over a Rogue Trader while you are outside the Imperium. But you would have holdings within it.

A few months past the Explorers in a campaign I'm running dealt with some time travel. As in the above example, their ship had a temperamental warp engine. It also had a shard cannon.

While surveying a settled planet they had recently claimed, the Explorers found what appeared to be the wreckage of their own ship half-buried in a crater. Assuming it to be from the future, half the Explorers went about salvaging components (namely the shard cannon, so they could have two), while the other half attempted to figure out just what happened to cause their ship to travel back in time and crash. The Explorator went as far as to salvage the ship's cogitation core and find out specifically what happened/happens to all the Explorers in the future.

Knowing this was a possibility, I made a deck of 8 index cards each describing a possible future fate. If an Explorer attempted to learn their own future, it would be determined by a draw. The possible fates were as follows:

• Mind Wiped
• Executed!
• Fled in a Stolen Gun Cutter
• Insufficient Data
• Killed in a Warp Breach
• Hired by the Lord-Captain
• Converted into a Servitor
• Died of Old Age

The Explorator looked up his own future first, discovering he would be mind wiped. The shock earned him 1d10 insanity points. Not taking the hint, he uncovered everyone's fate. The Lord-Captain would be executed, the Arch-Militant would be mind wiped, and the Astropath would escape on a stolen gun cutter. The Explorator decided to keep this to himself, but the Arch-Militant broke into his study and read his notes. The Arch-Militant learned her own fate and gained 1d10 insanity points.

After the Explorers finished salvaging the extra shard cannon, they departed on another adventure. However, the two shard cannons reacted strangely with each other when in the warp, and the energy wave created by the two xenos machines hurled the Explorers back in time, to an age 200 years previous when their ship was the property of another Dynasty.

Without going into too much detail, everyone's fate came to pass due to their own actions and inactions. Out of all the Explorers, the Arch-Militant had the best handle on the situation. Knowing she would be mind wiped, she had the Astropath use the Reprogram power to create a backup of her mind deep within her subconscious. Later, at the helm of the Astropath's stolen gun cutter, the Arch-Militant destroyed the shard canon on the past version of their ship, thus preventing it from being salvaged and preventing it from being on their ship in the first place. A lot of wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey stuff happened, and the Explorers were hurled back to their present only to find both shard canons missing and a localized warp distortion left in their place. As a result, their past history complication went from Temperamental Warp Engine to Haunted.

There is more to it, but this campaign is still ongoing, and there are past and future repercussions that the Explorers have yet to encounter. The Explorer's ship traveled through time on several occasions before it came under their command, and it did so for a specific purpose. It all makes perfect sense in my notes.

I'm assuming that the Ordo Chrono thing was made up (which is perfectly fine. Minor Ordos *do* exist), but if an incident of unfortunate retrograde temporal displacement did occur and was of sufficient import, which of the three major Ordos would it likely fall into?

If the time travel occurred because of the Warp, I think the Ordo Malleus would be the ordo involved. If the time travel was made possible by xenotechnology, then the Ordo Xenos. However, this is the kind of thing there could be jurisdictional battles over.

Nerdynick said:

Depends on what type of bad stuff was pulled into the world.

Hmmmmm, as the op discovered, meeting yourself would be bad. But what would you guys, as GMs, do to the party if they met themselves?

When time travel causes PCs to meet themselves, I handle the situation by making it unclear exactly which version of the characters are being played. This creates an adequate amount of confusion and keeps the character's reactions more honest.

The Ordo Chronos: "We deal with wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff."

A motto to strike fear into the heart of any cultist

Nerdynick said:

I'd have a hilariously fun game of 'do them before they do unto you.' My players are rather predictable in how they'd respond, so they can hardly feel bad if I make the same decisions that they would, vis a vis going to silent running, sneaking up and unloading all their boarding torpedoes at point-blank to take the ship.

Would you rule them killing themselves in the past would kill them in the present?

Nerdynick said:

Maybe, maybe not. After all, the Ork codex has one Ork who killed his younger self. All that happened was he got a second of his favourite gun and the rest of the Orks were so confused they called off the waagh.

Nerdynick said:

Nah. Several-worlds theory taken to its extremes, maybe. Possibly have the doppelganger crew - defined as whoever was beaten by the other the first time around and thereafter considered to not be the players - die in a messy, paradox-resolving manner a short while later, but based on past experience killing people off just because they had the audacity to murder themselves in the past isn't a fun thing to have happen in a game.