Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Urist McScoopbeard]

I have yet to play Dark Heresy or Rogue Trader, but I did get the chance to play an immensely wonderful Only War campaign. Personally, I think the best course of action is to plan on EXPANDING the scope of the game continually. In my experience, beginning the play through as a raw recruit scouting some asshole, and ending it as a highly professional tanker who is also a master of disguise and cartwheeling is way through the burning of thousands of sleeping heretics (true story fan) is very rewarding.

[nenjin]

Well, a few points from my perspective.

-Rogue Trader starts after you've left the middling peasantry of lower level play behind. You're big important guis with a lot of money and a license to go big and go bold. There's a lot of room of growth from that point (from a house with one ship to a house that commands an entire fleet) but the scale can become....unwieldy as a GM.

-My group in particular has a faction that really dislikes low level gameplay. Or at least, their appreciation of the progression curve in many games is pretty worn out. We're a group of 30 year olds, so, we've been around the block in gaming for a long time and some pretty strongly held opinions about what is fun are had.

-I'm sort of the only person at table who was, initially, genuinely enthusiastic about "scope." Most of my other players primed themselves for a sort of pulpy, swashbuckling adventure that requires, to be honest, almost none of the scope Rogue Trader offers. So they basically interpreted all the wealth and potential at their finger tips as "buy best craftmenship everything in the first couple sessions." That said, I think they're starting to understand how to make the scope work for them in ways that aren't boring. Understanding how to narratively describe how they use all their resources to get stuff done. There's a fuckload of things to consider in RT, dozens of ways to do things from personally to impersonally. And it all takes a while to absorb.

-So the more the scope increases, the harder my job gets. Not like, sitting down and drafting documents and ideas and stuff. That comes naturally. It's at table where it starts to become an issue. Both in remembering all the shit you've written up and remembering to use it at table, and giving the PCs an enjoyable challenge given they can approach any situation from boots on the ground to commanding thousand of soldiers and nuking things from orbit and anything in-between. I start needing to deliver satisfying narratives that account for way more than your traditional dungeon crawl/audience with the king/etc... I've done pretty good so far playing a lot off the cuff but it's the kind of thing that can quickly get out of hand and get away from you. In this situation for example, if I really rewarded the PCs for this adventure.....I could easily be looking at something like "We buy 1000 Leman Russ tanks and bring them with us." Or an entire second ship and crew to factor into things. Shit I can barely remember to roll attacks in combat for the 13 bodyguards in power armor that follow them around wherever they go, mostly because there's not a great way to both have a personally satisfying combat for the party that still actually utilizes stuff like hordes of NPCs with great gear.

[Andres]

Perhaps do something like Xanthalos' morality thing, but with a twist.

The AI is in a bad situation where it can't do anything but die. However, it has the option to transfer into a human mind and live alongside the old one in its own "room", even if it's forced to forget a bunch of the technical stuff due to tech-limitations or something. The problem is that for the main mind is that with the decreased "room", it becomes dumber or insane or any number of other things.

Now, in the AI's mind, a morally good person would allow themselves to take on the AI even at the cost of their own brain-wholesomeness. If none of the PCs choose to take this responsibility, then that means 100% of humans are evil and it blows up the place. If one of the PCs takes up the AI's request, the place blows up anyway because there's no AI to make sure everything's running smoothly.

This way, you have a way to blow up the facility, no change in the grander scheme of things, and your players (potentially) take home something that - while it has no actual value - is still interesting on its own. Moreover, since it still knows about its culture - including its legends - it can be used as a plot hook to get players to explore for one of the mythical locations the AI's heard about.

[nenjin]

That'd be some straight tech-heresy to download your consciousness into someone else's body. But I kinda like it. The party so far has been collecting a quirky assortment of NPCs so far. (A blind Oracle Psyker on loan from the Imperial Navy that seriously is just waiting to die, she's so old and cranky. A saboteur from a house that is the enemy of the dynasty. They caught him sabotaging warheads in the ship's Munitorium. So they had him lobotomized and turned into a servitor. His main duty is to pick up all the dog shit the Captain's dogs leave on the bridge. His name is Doodle.) I guess we could add "100,000 year old AI downloaded into a human body" to the list.

The nice thing about this being is I wrote several viewpoints or priorities that can speak autonomously for themselves (even if they aren't the ones that actually make the decisions.) Sort of like if you could listen to the internal arguments people have. That could certainly be a viewpoint of at least two of the personalities of the being, and I may hold on to that as a quirky option to throw out there, or just to put the party off balance.

[Andres]

Just one question: how was it alive 100k years ago? Humans were still cavemen back in those days.

[Boltgun]

About Rogue Trader, I suggest to search for the horde rules that are included to the next games. I made a lot of things simpler once the PC start bringing troops with them.

My group tend to treat it more as a Star Trek game, with them going on expeditions with a few red shirts, but we are doing the Lure of the Expanse campaign and their resources are limited on purpose to prevent them from blasting all the 9 rivals in one sweep.

Oh and I got an Ork in the group, and the player is quite in character, he even cut a destiny point out of another PC by mistake.

[sprinkled chariot]

Does imperium use bioweapons?
In great crusade and horus heresy they are as common as bolter, and in 40k I did never see them mentioned.

[Tack]

Technically yes.
There's a hellhound variant with a toxin-spewer and Marbo had a poisoned knife.
Other than that it's mostly radiation, which is used in abundance by the Mechanicus and loaded into anti-personell Leman Russes.

[Kot]

Does imperium use bioweapons?
In great crusade and horus heresy they are as common as bolter, and in 40k I did never see them mentioned.

Viral torpedoes. The problem is that most bioweapon experts turned chaos with their weapons.

[GiglameshDespair]

And if you're giving everyone diseases, well... Papa Nurgle is happy with your actions.

[LordBaal]

On the AI, I know you already discussed and it was mentioned, but I would see if I can use any intruders as a way out, and seek revenge. That's what 40K needs to be completely fucked up, a race of non biological(nids), non chaos corrupted (because reasons, plot armour), highly aggressive Von Neumann replicators. I wonder what the Imperium would think about it, hell the Mechanicum would have an collective orgasm/aneurysm for sure.

[Kot]

On the AI, I know you already discussed and it was mentioned, but I would see if I can use any intruders as a way out, and seek revenge. That's what 40K needs to be completely fucked up, a race of non biological(nids), non chaos corrupted (because reasons, plot armour), highly aggressive Von Neumann replicators. I wonder what the Imperium would think about it, hell the Mechanicum would have an collective orgasm/aneurysm for sure.

Gee, it would be truly awesome if some kind of highly agressive non-chaotic self-replicating machines existed in Wh40k... wait...




SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI SOI

[LordBaal]

Necrons do not self replicate, they phase out and reassemble/repair themselves. Also with their new fluff they have been demoted from unstoppable force of universe end doom that even tyranids avoided to yet another powerful threat riffled with internal political struggles.

[Kot]

Scarabs self-replicate (and possibly other stuff also, I'm not really good when it comes to Necron lore), and honestly, to an outsider they still totally seem like an unstoppable force of doom. I mean like, Necron Tomb Awakening is one of few events than can make Imperium go "OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT" and instantly Exterminatus planets, the other being Tyranids and maybe planetwide deamonic incursions.

[LordBaal]

A yet is not quite the same, at least not in the scale. If all necrons warriors where like that they might fit. Although is stated they can build even space fleets, they are nothing more than workers for the necrons. Also the necrons aren't that quite expansionist either, at least not yet.

What I'm talking about is essentially a mechanical counterpart for the tyranids, no political bullshit, no territories held or anything else. Simply a scorching plague that roams the galaxy turning every suitable materials into more ships, more warriors and keep moving on. In this case their goal would be revenge and then... well I don't know. Making a single huge machine from all the matter in the galaxy?