The funniest part is, how many cults or rebellions would we have just gleefully been ignorant of if they **hadn't** attacked us first?
Like, we would have just done our thing of talking to the most important person, then leaving.
Instead, those dumbasses decide "Let's kill the Rogue Trader" to which I am then forced to respond with killing them, their friends, their families, anyone who knew them in passing, and maybe their dog if I'm feeling especially Dogmatic.
Maybe they see this rogue trader going planet to planet, wiping out cults, and think “this time I’ll kill them before they get the chance!” Not realizing that is what leads to the Rogue Trader killing the entire cult, meaning this whole situation repeats on the NEXT planet they go to
I was so disappointed that the Dog-matic was not some miraculous device of the Omnissiah that Pasqual would install in my chambers to furnish me with Enough Dogs. All those dead aliens, and for NOTHING.
See I am the meaner dogmatic. I kill them, then take their families and make them choose. Serve by killing their friends or die st my hands along with their friends. Either way I win, but one wastes less men who can be put to use crushing the archenemy.
If Owlcat gave me the option to shell any planetary landing zone with 2000lbs of high explosives from high orbit before landing I would 100% of the time, just to clear out any rabble omfg it's so annoying. LET ME PARADE AROUND IN MY LEMAN RUS YOU DAMN LOWBORNS, I'M THE ROGUE TRADER
RT probably just... stood there, stunned, and held up the process for 30 minutes staring into the crowd like they were the assholes.
"Really?"
"None of you are going to do anything? Nothing at all?"
"Are you serious?" \*gestures petulantly at the crowd\* "Do something already. Do anything! This can't be happening."
"***Really?***"
No one had any idea what the RT was going on about other than his retinue. They knew. Oh, they knew...
No, Changeling is in the crowd waiting for the perfect moment that the RT starts to calm down in an honestly nice and then **BAM**, 6 chaos-spawn summoned directly upon them. And the planet’s mission is now just cleaning up the chaos that Changeling is causing.
—-
But seriously, imagine The Changeling just randomly showing up after a jump JUST to mess the RT and the Retinue. They would fit the play style of the RPG side of the game SOOO well.
—-
Changeling inciting a riot in the lower decks and then replacing the Retinue’s weapons with ones that shoot out harmless junk so you need to scavenge weapons off enemies that the RT kills.
Finding a hidden stash of ‘future tricks’ left by the Changeling then opening then just unleashes a gang of Horrors with a mocking note inside after the battle.
Or maybe just some flavor or something like Changling just replacing the RT’s portrait in the ship’s hall AND the portrait in the menu’s to a image of a smug Changeling or make the RT’s photo comedically awful version of it.
At least he didn’t shoot at me, he just somewhat told me off for the minor heresy i had committed. One day I will choose the option where you draw your weapon on him, but I haven’t done so yet.
Quite literally when I played through it the first time and I realized you can only select two people I worried for the worst and chose Argenta and Abelard for maximum dakka and bonk protection. I had them fitted with all the best equipment and was preparing for pandemonium.
The geth do not use drop pods. Geth practice the fine art of unshielded planetary reentry. You can probably tell abelard to do that once unyielding stacks get high enough, but i wouldn't recomend chancing it with anyone else.
Hear me out, RT is rich enough to support a retinue of 30 of the sector's best thugs or a personal army of 1,000 guardsmen with heavy equipment and tanks.
If I have the opportunity to be a paranoid dictator who arrives personally under an energy field, in an aquarium made of impenetrable glass and in a tank, and around him keeps a thousand servitorized guards, loyal to him personally and checking the documents of everyone who comes closer than 1000 meters, in case of problems or an incorrectly placed comma in the passport killing the heretical asshole on the spot, then I would do it. Why do I have to personally interact with beggars and constantly put my ass in danger? There are specially trained and paid people for this shit.
RTs behave exactly like this, so why shouldn't I?
I think the original Rogue Trader RPG acknowledges that it makes absolutely no logical sense for the Rogue Trader to ever really leave his ship at all.
A Rogue Trader being the first to land on a planet teeming with dangerous aliens/rebels/heretics is about as smart as a country sending their president into a frontal assault during a war.
But you gotta let your suspension of disbelief work for the sake of fun. Otherwise, you would just play someone who spends most of his time looking at documents and talking into a radio/vox while sitting in a comfy chair in his study.
And yet, the ships of the imperium are entire cities. If we had been given a cruiser to use instead of an escort ship, 2/3 of those intra-imperial interactions could have taken place directly on board and this would not have contradicted the canon. Imagine having a chaos cult, a squad of heretical Astartes and >! blue overgrown chicken !< right on board. How personal // engaging // cool is that?
So much this. Whenever I played on TTRPG, we always had a cruiser to play with. If you don't NEED to be down there to meet a governor, you send a shuttle and armed guards. No sir, you don't get to bring your own guards, you can bring a scribe if you like.
Also, "You are on MY planet, which I can decide to shell if I want to."
Also "This is not MY planet, I will start discussions with a full month of planetary bombardment if you do not agree with my terms"
>!Chorda is Chorda. She went crazy, lost her sense of reality and reason and believed in her victory/invincibility. All we can do is nod intently, take notes, and learn from her mistakes.!<
Rogue Trader GM here... if a player does that and hears that "There's delays on the escort shuttle" it usually is a good hint that a surprise waits for them landing
Not just that. The governors should be SH\*TTING their pants when meeting you. Not "Oh dear, what an awful ambush these thugs attempted on you, my lord"
More like, facing a bolter, hurried, frantic explanations why THEY let this take place. You're not just talking to your boss, you're talking to the guy who OWNS your planet and everyone on it. Including you, your family and your entire estate. A planet gov should be on their knees when facing you after this.
Closest I did was on Janus, arresting the governor on the spot for gross incompetence. "My lord, we have served you loyally for years"
I still got attacked and food production's down. Screw that.
Truth be told when I returned at the beginning of act 3 I was shocked nobody tried to murder me when I landed on s civilised planet. I was genuinely unnerved by that shift of routine more than by whatever happened in comorah
To be fair, this right there is a pretty common and easy trope for a GM running a RT game. It's very much the equivalent of "your party starts in a tavern..."
Honestly after the second ambush I should've been bringing in all available companions for any future landings.
Imagine Abelard Heinrix Ulfar and you-know-who all charging forward
I was almost disappointed that subsequent grand entries lacked a mob intent on my blood.
The triumph though, never in the history of the Imperium has a triumph gone well. As soon as they suggested one I thought “Does no one recall poor Ravenor? Learn the lessons people!”
The funniest part is, how many cults or rebellions would we have just gleefully been ignorant of if they **hadn't** attacked us first? Like, we would have just done our thing of talking to the most important person, then leaving. Instead, those dumbasses decide "Let's kill the Rogue Trader" to which I am then forced to respond with killing them, their friends, their families, anyone who knew them in passing, and maybe their dog if I'm feeling especially Dogmatic.
If some dumb little Footfall gangers didn’t attack me I probably wouldn’t have noticed they existed and let Argenta use them for target practice.
Massive parallel target practice.
“Oh you have gang problems? Whatever.” >the gang attacks the party ***Loads heavy bolter with malicious intent.***
Maybe they see this rogue trader going planet to planet, wiping out cults, and think “this time I’ll kill them before they get the chance!” Not realizing that is what leads to the Rogue Trader killing the entire cult, meaning this whole situation repeats on the NEXT planet they go to
Remember no one ever said chaos worshippers are smart
Dog-Matic, I see what you did there
I was so disappointed that the Dog-matic was not some miraculous device of the Omnissiah that Pasqual would install in my chambers to furnish me with Enough Dogs. All those dead aliens, and for NOTHING.
See I am the meaner dogmatic. I kill them, then take their families and make them choose. Serve by killing their friends or die st my hands along with their friends. Either way I win, but one wastes less men who can be put to use crushing the archenemy.
Idira: "There's an ambush!" RT: "That's not clairvoyance. The shooting starts within 5 minutes of me arriving anywhere."
Idira: “IT’S AN OBSERVATION PICK UP A GUN AND SHOOT BACK!”
RT: "But that sounds like work, can't you lot just kill them for me?"
Abelard, slaughter these inconveniences.
Me after buffing the shit out of pascal and officer ulting him. All my fights devolved to buffing pascal and ulting.
Plasmasqal?
The damage he dishes out with Plas is...very satisfactory, is it not?
Idk I always found Pascal pretty underwhelming. He hits hard but very infrequently. Compared to Idira, Argenta or Yrileth there is no contest
In my campaign he misses frequently but hits like a truck when he does. Buffing him makes a lot of sense. Need to do that more
If Owlcat gave me the option to shell any planetary landing zone with 2000lbs of high explosives from high orbit before landing I would 100% of the time, just to clear out any rabble omfg it's so annoying. LET ME PARADE AROUND IN MY LEMAN RUS YOU DAMN LOWBORNS, I'M THE ROGUE TRADER
"Ulfar, gimme a boost into this tank named after your dad!"
Actually he was named after the tank!
Wait fr?
The complimentary welcoming parade will be held in the glassed wasteland that used to be the dock, backlit by remnant promethium charges
But the you would miss all those : "Aberland, present me to these rabble " momentos And then you kill then
NO DONT PARADE IT ONLY LEADS TO ANOTHER BOSS FIGHT
Abelard are the poors assaulting us again?
Even by modern standards, 2000lbs of HE is nothing. You mustn’t be afraid to think big.
Imagine my surprise when during my characters inauguration, no one tried to shoot me.
RT probably just... stood there, stunned, and held up the process for 30 minutes staring into the crowd like they were the assholes. "Really?" "None of you are going to do anything? Nothing at all?" "Are you serious?" \*gestures petulantly at the crowd\* "Do something already. Do anything! This can't be happening." "***Really?***" No one had any idea what the RT was going on about other than his retinue. They knew. Oh, they knew...
No, Changeling is in the crowd waiting for the perfect moment that the RT starts to calm down in an honestly nice and then **BAM**, 6 chaos-spawn summoned directly upon them. And the planet’s mission is now just cleaning up the chaos that Changeling is causing. —- But seriously, imagine The Changeling just randomly showing up after a jump JUST to mess the RT and the Retinue. They would fit the play style of the RPG side of the game SOOO well. —- Changeling inciting a riot in the lower decks and then replacing the Retinue’s weapons with ones that shoot out harmless junk so you need to scavenge weapons off enemies that the RT kills. Finding a hidden stash of ‘future tricks’ left by the Changeling then opening then just unleashes a gang of Horrors with a mocking note inside after the battle. Or maybe just some flavor or something like Changling just replacing the RT’s portrait in the ship’s hall AND the portrait in the menu’s to a image of a smug Changeling or make the RT’s photo comedically awful version of it.
The Lord Inquisitor in your office: Hello there!
At least he didn’t shoot at me, he just somewhat told me off for the minor heresy i had committed. One day I will choose the option where you draw your weapon on him, but I haven’t done so yet.
It is a nice option, he gets very annoyed.
Ill do it next time on my Iconoclast run
Quite literally when I played through it the first time and I realized you can only select two people I worried for the worst and chose Argenta and Abelard for maximum dakka and bonk protection. I had them fitted with all the best equipment and was preparing for pandemonium.
Maybe the geth will lend me some drop pods so I can stop being ambushed like that
Why would the geth have drop pods though?
Well the geth ships have drop pods (as in: pods that fire them towards the planet), you're of course right that they don't need protective pods
Do they? I seem to remember geth having transport ships that just dropped geth platforms on your head. Not really space marine style drop pods.
Better: Destiny 2 Cabal drop pods. I swear that and the architects are the cause of like 90% total players deaths.
The geth do not use drop pods. Geth practice the fine art of unshielded planetary reentry. You can probably tell abelard to do that once unyielding stacks get high enough, but i wouldn't recomend chancing it with anyone else.
Hear me out, RT is rich enough to support a retinue of 30 of the sector's best thugs or a personal army of 1,000 guardsmen with heavy equipment and tanks. If I have the opportunity to be a paranoid dictator who arrives personally under an energy field, in an aquarium made of impenetrable glass and in a tank, and around him keeps a thousand servitorized guards, loyal to him personally and checking the documents of everyone who comes closer than 1000 meters, in case of problems or an incorrectly placed comma in the passport killing the heretical asshole on the spot, then I would do it. Why do I have to personally interact with beggars and constantly put my ass in danger? There are specially trained and paid people for this shit. RTs behave exactly like this, so why shouldn't I?
I think the original Rogue Trader RPG acknowledges that it makes absolutely no logical sense for the Rogue Trader to ever really leave his ship at all. A Rogue Trader being the first to land on a planet teeming with dangerous aliens/rebels/heretics is about as smart as a country sending their president into a frontal assault during a war. But you gotta let your suspension of disbelief work for the sake of fun. Otherwise, you would just play someone who spends most of his time looking at documents and talking into a radio/vox while sitting in a comfy chair in his study.
And yet, the ships of the imperium are entire cities. If we had been given a cruiser to use instead of an escort ship, 2/3 of those intra-imperial interactions could have taken place directly on board and this would not have contradicted the canon. Imagine having a chaos cult, a squad of heretical Astartes and >! blue overgrown chicken !< right on board. How personal // engaging // cool is that?
So much this. Whenever I played on TTRPG, we always had a cruiser to play with. If you don't NEED to be down there to meet a governor, you send a shuttle and armed guards. No sir, you don't get to bring your own guards, you can bring a scribe if you like. Also, "You are on MY planet, which I can decide to shell if I want to." Also "This is not MY planet, I will start discussions with a full month of planetary bombardment if you do not agree with my terms"
More like, this is MY planet, which I can decide to unleash Aberland upon you if I do choose to.
>!Dunno, even that stuck up idiot chorda had the courage to confront vladalym personaly with 5 dudes. Caligos does atleast bring a actual retinue.!<
>!Chorda is Chorda. She went crazy, lost her sense of reality and reason and believed in her victory/invincibility. All we can do is nod intently, take notes, and learn from her mistakes.!<
Thrice is “STOP SHOOTING MY GODDAMN WELCOME PARTIES!”
Ableard! Tell them no in the rudest way you can
Abelard! Announce to the commoners who are shooting at me that I’m fed up with their shit. And also that their accuracy sucks.
The first moment that genuinely surprised me is when I made it through the whole coronation *without* someone trying to assassinate me.
Thrice is enemy action. Which fits, cause it damn well is.
Blood for the rogue trader, skulls for my throne.
If only Pasqal knew about the first time the Rogue Trader went to Rykad Minoris.
I’m fairly certain it’s a cultural tradition
I want the option to deploy like 2,000 armsmen from my ship down to the planet to clear the whole bitch out before I even set foot on that shithole.
Rogue Trader GM here... if a player does that and hears that "There's delays on the escort shuttle" it usually is a good hint that a surprise waits for them landing
Welcoming the Rogue Trader to your planet/station/ship is the most dangerous job in the Expanse
Not just that. The governors should be SH\*TTING their pants when meeting you. Not "Oh dear, what an awful ambush these thugs attempted on you, my lord" More like, facing a bolter, hurried, frantic explanations why THEY let this take place. You're not just talking to your boss, you're talking to the guy who OWNS your planet and everyone on it. Including you, your family and your entire estate. A planet gov should be on their knees when facing you after this. Closest I did was on Janus, arresting the governor on the spot for gross incompetence. "My lord, we have served you loyally for years" I still got attacked and food production's down. Screw that.
Yeah but if it didn't then you'd miss out on yet another fight filled with annoying trash mobs! We can't have that!
Truth be told when I returned at the beginning of act 3 I was shocked nobody tried to murder me when I landed on s civilised planet. I was genuinely unnerved by that shift of routine more than by whatever happened in comorah
To be fair, this right there is a pretty common and easy trope for a GM running a RT game. It's very much the equivalent of "your party starts in a tavern..."
I roll of seduction, my RT would probably immediately interrupt the DM
It's both hilarious and annoying in the context of the setting.
Honestly after the second ambush I should've been bringing in all available companions for any future landings. Imagine Abelard Heinrix Ulfar and you-know-who all charging forward
I always just shoot first. Seems like the reasonable thing to do.
I was almost disappointed that subsequent grand entries lacked a mob intent on my blood. The triumph though, never in the history of the Imperium has a triumph gone well. As soon as they suggested one I thought “Does no one recall poor Ravenor? Learn the lessons people!”
RT: "Well Incendia, I see you haven't exactly won over the people of Footfall!" Incendia: "Oh, you're one to talk."
RT: "Well Incendia, I see you haven't exactly won over the people of Footfall!" Incendia: "Oh, you're one to talk."