Greetings and salutations.

I'm planning to try out GMing and got a scenario idea I'm working on to introduce our group to BC with. I've a fairly good idea of how I want to pull it off, but being in this role for the first time I figured it wouldn't hurt to hear some ideas and insight from outside.

Starting situation is roughly the following: As a result of an incident between two rival groups of Chaos folllowers, the PCs find themselves drifting somewhere between the Warp and real space/in the warp, having lost the fight and instead of being executed ending up to be creatively sacrificed. The ship is largely running on emergency power and there's no telling when key systems like shielding and life support will fail completely. The crew has already splintered into smaller groups and factions, some in their desperation calling out for salvation from the powers of the warp, others hoping to appease those powers by sacrificing other crew members. Some ambitious individuals harbour ideas of taking advantage of the situation to rise to power. Daemons present an ever increasing threat, slowly forcing their way through the crippled defenses, drawn to the despairing souls and slaughter.

And that's where our group has to macgyver themselves out of one way or another. A number of obvious and less obvious options are in place to make a difference in the outcome, and the order in which things are sorted out/time spent on each will affect everything else. The description I provided will largely be what the PCs will be aware of at the start and it's up to them to figure out how to go about it. Details I'll for now leave out because a) I'm still working on them and b) I don't want to risk revealing too much if some of the group decide to snoop around here.

The scenario has, as I see it, at least two major pros: it allows any and all kinds of characters and has a number of ways for them to operate, and it leaves me plenty of freedom as the GM since the situation is rather, wait for it, chaotic and pretty much anything can happen.

Anyway. Feedback/ideas I might or might not want to use?

In general it looks pretty good to me and you could have all kinds of interesting characters running around and causing hell. In general I don't see any big problems with the situation except that you should probably have some ideas about how the characters can solve the problems they face. For example they could perhaps summoned a daemonhost which could guide the ship to a planet where they could get the ship repaired, or land/crash it to escape the cage which it is.

Anyway, two ideas for NPCs could be

- A cannibal lord leading a band of Slaaneshi cannibal-cultists who dines on human flesh as a sacred rite

- A heretical Navigator with a court of mutants and ghouls under his rule

I'm sure others could come up with a great deal better stuff but its getting late for me.

Heya, thanks for the response!

I do have quite a few ideas for how the players might go about getting out of the situation. I first tried to make a list of objectives, but when I ended up having three primary objectives, some seven to ten secondary ones and a bunch of tertiary listed I stopped. Instead I decided to just go more with what's suggested in the rulebook and give the players the info they need to get started and more along the way as they progress, letting them set their own objectives. I'll still have a list of things they could do and sort out with set EXP/infamy rewards and possible appropriate items to hand out depending on the difficulty and impact of the task. They could take the "easy" way out and try to appeal to the powers the warp, getting them to help in exchange for favours and worship etc. This'd of course be riskier in the long run and would grant a bunch of corruption depending on the degree of involvement with the daemons, but perhaps a daemon-bound ship would be worth it (in an extreme case)? Or, they could try to sort out the ship one thing at a time, which'd be more time consuming complicated, but the rewards from having to deal with multiple smaller issues should stack up nicely, not to mention a relatively man-operated vessel being a tad more reliable in the long run than one relying on the whims of a daemon or a few.

I've a few NPCs I'm working with, namely a master engineer-type heretek who'll be important in restoring power to the ship, captain of the boat along with a sidekick or two and few leaders of the splinter-factions of the crew. In general, I'm hoping to keep it as a "relatively fresh" band of chaos followers*, renegades falling deeper under the influence of Chaos, so I'll probably try to be avoiding any well established cults. That said, the ship and its crew are most likely attracting a variety of things their way and those things in turn no doubt will be affecting the minds of the crew, so it'll be far from impossible to bump into groups leaning towards one power more than the others.

*This partly because it'll make the choices the players make have more impact on things. If they choose to resort to the help of the powers of the Warp, they'll be taking a big leap down to the depths of hell, so to speak, bringing any possible remaining crew with them. A rapid rise to power perhaps, but definitely with costs. Avoiding dealing with such powers and still managing to pull out of the situation alive however, would no doubt impress the crew and the leadership (if still around, not replaced…) while minimising the more unnatural risks involved.