We finally started our BC campaign and we're having trouble with compacts. We're all a bit green at 40k RPG, in general.

Background:

We are playing in the Korrounus expanse. We started on a Chaos ship, mostly devoted to Slaanesh. We were gathered by the captain to find out who murdered the Astropath and the Navigator. Since most of us didn't really care who did it, we made a compact to try to profit from the murder. Since murder-mysteries tend to end as a bust, we decided not to dedicate this to any god. In the end, the Captain found out we were thinking of plotting a mutiny to take over the ship. We did find out, however, that the captain had taken the ship into an Imperium controlled sector of space. Figuring the Captain was going to serve the ship to the Imperium, we decided our best bet for survival was to get off the ship….this is where we left off.

We basically had 3 options to land our Landing ship: Sparsely populated low tech agri-planet that has 3 continents, 1 of which is almost entirely unpopulated, a Jungle Death-World and a Forge World. We're deciding on the agri-world.

What should the scope of the next compact be?

We have a Renegade face/sniper, CSM Chosen, Human Psycher Archeologist guy and a Heretek. We chose the agri-world because the psycher knew of a dig-site on the unpopulated continent. There are roughly 1000workers and the dig has been sanctionned by the governor of the planet.

This is the renegades home-system. It was taken over by a Rogue Trader(which is when/why the Renegade fled the imperium). He hates the rogue trader, who is currently the gov. of the characters Home planet somewhere else in the system, and wants to see him dead.

The psycher wants to check out the dig site. The heretek can check out some cool archeo tech which is native to the system.

We have almost no gear. Just what we could carry (3 clips of ammo minus what we used to fight our way off the ship), no ship with warp capabilities, no extra fuel and no base of operations. There is one space-port on this planet.

Obviously we have a list of objective: check out dig sight, gear up(which will be tricky considering the tech level on this planet), insight rebellion, start some cults, steal a void ship, get off the planet, find a base of operations (on or off the planet), mess with the RT, kill RT, take over all the planets etc…

Do we make the compact, "take over the system" Then everything else is secondary objectives? Or do we say "check out dig sight" and secondary objectives deal with gearing up, infiltrating the camp etc.

My worry is that we're thinking too small, but at the same time we don't want to take on more than we can chew.

I really thought we could take over the void ship, but the rest of the party was convinced we were out-gunned. Since we'd never played before, it was hard for us to judge.

A Compact is used to provide scope for a goal. Your Primary Objective is that goal, and all Secondary Objectives should help to achieve that goal in some way. "Check out the dig site" isn't a good Primary Objective, but it could make for a Secondary Objective such as "gather information about the planet", where the Primary Objective is "take over the planet" or "get off the planet". Your Primary Objective, unless the GM describes it for you, is whatever you want it to be, but it should realistically be some goal that requires considerable effort to achieve.

Hope that helps!

One of the players suggested getting off the planet, but since we haven't even set foot on the planet yet, it seems a weird goal to already be planning to get off.

The problem is how do you set a goal of "take over the planet" when you have no gear and know almost nothing of the planet you're on. So yes, potentially, we could take over the planet, so we make that a primary objective, but in gathering info(a secondary objective), we find that we're completely ill-equipped to do so. Suddenly all your objectives have to change so you can leave the planet, go somewhere else, gather the resources you need and come back to finish the compact. Is it reasonable to play without a compact and gather info of the surroundings before committing to something? It just seems hard to make a huge compact like that whenwe're going in blind.