The Original Idea

At the start of 2012 I decided, after having taken a break from running any RPG games following a two year stint as the Head ST of a live-action Hunter: the Reckoning game that the time was right to get back to running a tabletop game, probably something on a monthly basis since finding time to prepare and run a session isn't quite as easy as it used to be; so I rang up a few of my friends who I hadn't role-played with for some time and asked them whether or not they'd be interested.

The original idea, oddly enough, was to run a World of Darkness Vampire: the Requiem game set in New Orleans and we started off running that, however, after a couple of months I started to struggle to come up with ideas for the game; whether it was writers block or just a slight burnout on the World of Darkness left over from running my Minds Eye Theatre game I don't know, but rather than attempt to struggle on month after month I sat down with the players, laid out my problem and suggested that we switch to a different genre of game in order to give us a bit of a break from the modern day horror style games that we'd all played so much of in the past. Looking through my collection of RPGs I decided that it might be nice to attempt some kind of dark futuristic setting, and having always been a fan of the background of Warhammer 40,000 (if not the current ludicrously priced iteration of the actual wargame) I decided to go for once of the 40K RPG lines from Fantasy Flight games.

After speaking to the players we decided on the Rogue Trader game, the piratical game of spaceship trade and noble houses amongst the Imperium of the 41st millenia appealed to the player and myself. Characters were reasonably quick to generate although a goodly amount of book flipping was involved, the delay lengthened slightly by the fact that the rulebooks were so expensive and so we didn't have one copy per person.

Eventually we had our party though:

• Lord Captain Fortunus Black: Young member of an ill-omened Rogue Trade dynasty called the House of Black, despite several run-ins with the Inquistion the family (ruled from the shadows by the aged and secretive Macharius Black) had managed to avoid the revoking of it's Trade Warrant.
• Navigator York Benetec: The twisted, hulking form of the jaded navigator guided Lord Captain Black's ship the Lunatic Pandora through the shifting tides of the Immaterium.
• Chief Confessor Cornelius: Zealous member of the Ecclesiarchy ministering to the bodies and souls of the Lunatic Pandora's crew and bringing the zealous fires of purification to the alien and the heretic.
• Enginseer Prime Pak: Once a lowly hive ganger on a polluted industrial world, through his technical ability and the patronage of the Adeptus Mechanicus, Pak had raised his lot in life and become a devoted follower of the Omnissiah.

If the character generation had been fairly quick, the ship generation to create the Lunatic Pandora took far longer and bogged down a good part of the generation session, this was partly because my players couldn't decide what sort of stuff they wanted on their ship and partly because the rules weren't very clear regarding the effects of certain shipboard components. Eventually however we got everything sorted and we ready to start gaming.