I have a friend who is huge into the 40K universe and wants me to start a campaign there. I'm happy to read Ian Watson and Barrington J. Bayley's contributions to the mythos for flavor and detail and otherwise enjoy relying on others to help me with the canon the way I rely on collective rules understanding to run 4E.

However, I've got no good sense either from genre or from gaming experience of what constitutes a workable adventure for a bunch of fantastically wealthy and powerful individuals who control massive resources and have a mandate to do their own thing. In my mostly-trad-gaming experience, science fiction games tend to lack group cohesion - one player goes off and does their specialty, another does theirs, and there's rarely a reason to have all or most PCs active in the same scene as I'd prefer. Having one of the PC classes involve being the commander of a starship under whom the other PCs are assumed to serve has also IME caused authoritarian and anti-authoritatian social dynamics headaches.

What I'm thinking about doing to handle this is to encourage each PC to be a rogue trader, or be the active representative of a different trader, so as to avoid chain of command issues; and run a West Marches style campaign where it's up to the players to decide what their objectives are and hash out their own narrative reasons to come together and pursue a common goal. However, I don't know what kind of adventure hooks I should dangle to encourage exploration of the sandbox, and what kind of complications will make for satisfying group gaming.

It seems to me that one of the issues is of scale. The sample adventures assume that the Rogue Traders will, in the great Kirk tradition, go boldly forth and stick their own necks in danger rather than sending a red shirt. My friend says this kind of lead-from-the-front makes perfect sense in the WH40K ethos, so I figure I can think about some adventures on a personal scale. However, it seems like I'd be missing the point if I didn't also have some adventure structures that'd cope with squad-level events (I've played enough Necromunda to crave mass bolter-and-chainsword action!) and planetary-governor levels of intrigue.

I'm not at all convinced that the Rogue Trader RPG offers particularly good tools for handling this stuff, but I do feel like I have a mandate to mostly use the rules as written and my OD&D play experience makes me appreciate the virtues of systems whose greatest virtue is not getting in the way. I'm open to suggestions for house rules I could bolt on; using Spirit of the Century aspect compels as the basis for the fate point economy seems tempting, for example. Mostly, though, I'm wondering what kind of dramatic structures will provide resistance and challenge for a group of enormously powerful and all-too-easily remote characters to work together against, assuming that the rules structures won't necessarily create their own resistance beyond "roll against a likely-seeming ability or skill and tell me how many degrees of success you get".

If it helps narrow things down a little, I'm thinking about starting out with a convention game at nerdNYC's next Recess. My idea here is that I'll experiment with what kinds of scale and situation people gravitate towards by letting players choose pregen PCs that are either large-scale Rogue Traders or smaller-scale specialists, and giving them a choice to roll on different rumor tables that'll hint at hooks for personal-scale (dungeon-type adventures?), squad-scale (infiltration missions?), or planetary-scale (Imperial corruption and intrigue?) adventures. Here the extra constraints of making the adventures fit in four hours or so may help, esp. since that's about the size of the building blocks I'd want for a continuing West Marches campaign.

Thanks for the comments! Unfortunately I've already painted myself most of the way into this corner before asking for help. Specifically:

1) I imagine each PC having their own ship. Unlike the default Rogue Trader setup where one PC is the ship captain and the others are more or less subordinate, I figure the party is a loose coalition of captains that convoy together when they choose. This helps the West Marches premise - when a player isn't there for a session, they took their ship off in a different direction - and finesses inter-party conflict, which I've previously found game-breaking if one player's PC has authority over the others.

2) One bitchin' premise of the game is getting to command a fleet. Moments where the PCs decide to risk their own skin and enter that derelict hulk/spaceport/foreign ship are awesome, but if that kind of thing is all there is the commander premise is kind of wasted. Another way to look it at is stakes. It's awesome when the stakes drive you to choose to accept the risk and go somewhere in person instead of delegating it to a NPC, but unless there's another viable mode of play that doesn't involve going places in person then it's not really a choice.

* Battlestar Galactica: That's great advice that will be fun to take! Please accept my gratitude here despite my being contrarian about your other suggestions.

* Asking what they're looking for: Since I'm planning for a convention game that'll hopefully continue as a campaign for which recruitment hasn't started, I don't know yet who my players will be! I'm hoping y'all can tell me what you personally want to get out of this kind of 40K action so that I can prepare that goodness for players like you.

Also, knowing what players want is only partially useful because I'm planning a sandbox game in which I eschew the ability to deliver. The best I can do is to make sure the environment contains lots of the things players want, and then signpost "Rumor has it that thing you're looking for can be sought in this direction". I'm interested in this approach because as a player I hate feeling that I'm being catered to, and will gladly trade a high degree of inefficiency in getting what I want for the illusion that, when I do, I have wrested it from an objective and uncaring game-world solely by virtue of my deeds.

This being the case, I prefer that the signposts point to in-game things rather than player desires. Partially this is because I often meet players who are more fluent in the former than the latter, or conflate the two. ("I just want to kick some ass!"). This is also a trade-off. I find "you have an invitation to the private party of the planetary governor's mistress, do you want to attend?" more immersive and evocative than "are you interested in social roleplaying and intrigue?" but this comes at the cost of some inaccuracy. Once the PCs are actually at that party in their own skins, there will be a high likelihood that I or the players will be tempted to start shooting, turning the promised social encounter into a combat.

So my question is thus more usefully posed as: what kinds of things would you want to do as a Rogue Trader player, what kinds of in-game hooks would you understand as pointing the way to a situation where you could do those things, and what kinds of complications could I have up my sleeve to make that situation challenging without ruining the premise for you?

(Also my thread should be more usefully titled "How Should I Get My 40K On, Given Absurdly Restrictive Preconditions That Were Poorly Explained?")

Posted By: David CHow are you going to do anything but combat if the players are divided by their ships?

Yep, that's the question. I'm pretty sure I want to try giving each player the kind of independent agency that comes from being able to set their own course through the warp (although the idea of having the players be sub-officers whose NPC superior is possibly corrupt is an awesome solution to the basic hierarchy problem, and I will definitely keep the xeno infiltration theme in mind).

Some of the answers I've thought about are:

- Resource management gameplay. The Rogue Traders can and may well want to stay onboard their own ships and send out subordinates to deal with things. Keeping track of how much resources they have available to delegate - and making sure that I can raise the stakes and match the scale to put pressure on the players's resource management - may make decisions about where to commit finite resources interesting, the same way that deciding to press on into a dungeon as your torches and HP dwindle makes old-school D&D interesting.

- Multiple moving parts. I think that part of prepping for a situation will be trying to identify at least as many separate "levers" that might influence the outcome as there are players, and making sure there are ways to interact with the levers either in person or at a distance. So if what's at stake is a star-atlas that's being offered at an auction, the moving parts might include the auction house and its security, the former owner of the item who might have kept a copy, and a couple of rival bidders at the auction who might have their own interests and weaknesses. Bidding at the auction, negotiating with the rivals, or trying to steal the atlas could all be done in person or via delegate, and I could provoke a difficult choice around any given lever (e.g. saying that the principal has to bid at the auction in person) while still leaving open choices for a paranoid player. Breaking things down into all these pieces might help engage the entire party (different players can use their own favored approach to push on different levers) and also make the situation challenging and complicated.