Hey all, just a question about the Rogue Trader adventures; which ones are actually any good? The reason I ask is because, having played some of the FF 40k premade adventures in the past and been pretty dissapointed with them (namely the Chaos Commandment series), I'd like to know if people have had good experiences with any of them, or at least can point out which ones they would recommend avoiding?

More specifically, when we played the Chaos Commandment, we found the story pretty hard for the players to follow, and pretty nonsensical really. We always ended up having to try and understand why something was happening by sitting back and trying to link together pretty unrelated stuff. It just never seemed clear what was going on.

I personally enjoy Lure of the Expanse and the Warpstorm Trilogy. I haven't had a chance to run Soul Reaver, but it looks very good.

Naturally, you need to tailor every prefab to your party to get the most out of it, and usually you should extrapolate on what it gives you.

My main gripe with some of them is the horrible characters (Book 2 of the Warpstorm trilogy) and how much they hold your hand at points, but these are both easily overcome.

I use the prewritten stuff as a good jumping off point.

The ideas are usually sound and the background and baddies are good but the plots as written are usually railroady and assume too much of the players. Whispers on the Storm for example assumes your players will clear the Svarrd system planet by planet. My lot found the source of the disturbance, bypassed the 3 other planets and went right for the finale. I did't stop them, if one game is not to be railroaded, its Rogue Trader, I keep things as sandbox as possible.

Fallen Suns is another good example, the storyline is dire, but the evil craftworld is fantastic and is the setting for the finale of my campaign where the players are desperatly racing against time, the Rak'Gol and the craftworld itself to deploy a secret weapon created by the Egarians before they were wiped out, to stop the Yu'Vath being reborn into the material universe. The Rak'Gol are planning to use the massive warp gate at the heart of the craftworld to do it. Much better than some "Chaos and Eldar" plot.

Even Lure of the Expanse is pretty boring if run as written. Instead, use it as a base (Eldar nexus replaced with Egarian nexus in my game) and go from there. Lots of additional ideas in the "Creating an endeavor" chapters of the corebook/IttS/HA etc to help you get going.

Remember no matter how well any adventure is written, it will only surivive about 30 seconds before a player does something totally unexpected.

UberMutant said:

tell me about it… I think the most flabbergasting moment I've ever had was during a WFRP session: Something Rotten in Kislev where a necromancer had settled himself inside a undead infested town and the players needed to get through to to him… I had several idead of how to establish that, when one player said: o we'll just wrap 50 stones inside a piece of parchment on which we write: "we would like to parlay" (the text was a bit more tangible then that and certainly enough to arouse the interest of the necromancer but you get the drift).