Sunday, February 27, 2011

Seventeenth Session Part Two - Interactive Cutscene

Now, if you remember, when last we left, the Rogue Trader was trapped aboard the Nihontu as 50 percent of its crew went insane. Luckily, the Explorers were able to find the allied vessel and rescue their leader.

Thereafter, the Astropath was able to share with the rest of his mates what he had seen in the psychic storm that hit the entire fleet.

It was a vision - a psychic broadcast from the Undred-Undred Teef.

Since the Astropath elected to share what he saw, I proceeded with my cutscene. The vision panned down to just one planet orbiting just one star in the Undred-Undred Teef. And there, they saw a vision of war. Total war. Orks fighting orks. Orks in stompas. Tanks. Fightas. All killing each other until a transmission is received by one gretchin who rips off a piece of paper from a read out in a teetering iron base, and thrusts it into the face of his kommanda.

On that paper was one orkish symbol, but the kommanda knew it well. "Tau", he breathed.

Then, the ork kommanda contacted the three other opposing bosses, informing them of the news. "I call a krusade!" he barked, but as one of the other bosses said, "For a krusade...there can only be one warboss!"

Then, all four of the bosses activated in their respective bases an ancient teleportarium which transported the bosses to a hollowed out moon which orbited the battleworld.

I explained in the cutscene the great irony of the whole affair - the ork kommandas could have stopped the fighting and the slaughter at any time. At. Any. Time. They could have called a duel to determine a warboss eons ago, but now only did so because there was a "reason" to.

I then described each of the potential warbosses as they made their way across the hollowed out moon toward each other - and here's where the interactive part came in - the players got to vote on which boss won! So, they got to pick which ork was going to become the final warboss. What I did was to provide a picture and a short, two-sentence description of each.


Da Monsta: a hulking, 40 foot tall super-ork


See-Not: A stealthy, cyber-ork. I told them to basically think, "The Predator".


Jawless: A horribly mangled and mutilated ork with no jaw, and limited capacity to speak.

Auld One: Very much the "standard" ork warboss, who happens to be quite old and somewhat cunning.

I had the players vote for two orks a piece. I figured if they just voted for one, it would just be one ork who won overwhelmingly. In the end, Da Monsta and Auld One got the highest votes, with the Auld One winning. See-Not got no votes at all, because he scared everyone too much. Apparently, stealthy 40k orks are scary. Note to anyone who wants to steal this idea from me, the scarier you make something, it may be that the players are less likely to vote for it.

With that, I then finished the cutscene, describing the ork battle with the Auld One winning in the end. In this manner, the players themselves got to pick the villain of the last quarter of the campaign. Kind of neat, I thought.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Cutscenes in Roleplaying Games



Way back in my college years, there were many video games that dominated our time - Warcraft, Warcraft II, Doom - the list goes on. But one game in particular sticks out in my mind - Star Wars: TIE Fighter for DOS.

Not only was it a really cool game - but it had a profound effect on how we roleplayed. One of the more rewarding experiences in TIE Fighter were its cutscenes. Every once in a while, you were rewarded with a cinematic, Star Wars-esque scene of how your character had influenced the larger Star Wars universe. In the example above, you are shown how you, a lone TIE Fighter pilot had a hand in bringing an Imperial traitor to "justice". (See above)

Now, remember that back then, very few games had cutscenes. Particularly flight simulators. In any case, the cutscenes in TIE Fighter worked very well for a few reasons.
  • For the most part, each cutscene didn't reveal too much. In the game, "you" took on the role of a TIE Fighter pilot, so most scenes never gave you information you were not supposed to have.
  • The cutscenes were short, sweet, and to the point.
  • The cutscenes also were a form of reward. You got to watch a (what at the time was) a cool motion graphic.
  • The scenes gave the game an epic feel, because it showed how your actions in each individual mission ultimately affected the fate of the Empire and the rest of the galaxy.
  • The scenes allowed you to get to know the villains and antagonists in the story, because you certainly weren't going to meet them in space while flying a starship.
We enjoyed these cutscenes so much that we immediately started incorporating them into our own games, unconsciously following the rules above. Now, with time and distance, I can see why they worked.

What a Cutscene Is
In a table-top RPG, a cutscene is a moment in the campaign where the player characters are not present. The GM describes the scene, the characters, and what happens. For example, you might feature a scene where a king talks about the problems within the kingdom, or a council of Imperial Inquistors discussing the latest heresy. It might feature either allies, neutrals, or antagonists. For example, it might show a the campaign's main villain committing an atrocity or plotting his next move.

Incorporating Cutscenes into a Game
I've found over the years that when I talk about cutscenes in text or on the net, there will always be a number of people who balk at the idea. Critics of this idea state that it creates too much of a strain on the players. It's too much to ask of them to make a disconnect from the information in the cutscene and the information that their character know. Others say it jerks players out of the moment and puts them into someone else's shoes, straining the sense of disbelief.

These criticisms can be very true if cutscenes are done incorrectly. However, the way we used them really addressed those problems. For one, any cutscene we used never gave away information the players didn't already know. For example, a cutscene in Rogue Trader might have the Explorers landing on a planet that was ravaged by orks. As the Explorers comb the planet, they piece together what happened. Then, the GM describes the events in a cutscene, rather than just telling them the cold, hard facts. The point here is that the PCs would have discovered all of the information you had in your cutscene anyway. But the scene you craft helps put the events into perspective and makes your campaign setting seem larger. Hey look, stuff happens when the PCs aren't there...

A cutscene also might be form of reward for players. For example, when the villain of the campaign finds out that the player characters have interfered with his long-range plans again, he might lose his temper or have to go before his superiors and explain himself. Again, it's not a hard stretch that the player characters know the villain has been frustrated. These sorts of cutscenes will often get players high-fiving each other.

To avoid breaking the players out of the game, a cutscene is best used right before a break. The PCs finish what they are doing, and right before people go pour themselves a pint, you give them a little teaser or reward scene to think about.

When it's all said and done, however, cutscenes are simply not for everyone. It may simply not be something that you would want to do in your game because it doesn't fit your style. That's totally fine. This is just my take on them.

My Interactive Cutscene in Rogue Trader
For our big pre-holiday session, I wanted to make it grand, big, and epic. For that reason, I crafted a cutscene for that game. However, when scripting it, I noted that it was fairly long. The thing is, no one wants to see you soliloquy for ten minutes. Even five minutes is pretty long.

So, what I did to break it up a little was to make the cutscene interactive. Huh. As I write this, I see that I've gone on long enough. I'll talk about my interactive cutscene in the next post. Instead, here's a little reward: all of the cutscenes from the old Star Wars: TIE Fighter game.


Thursday, February 17, 2011

Prepping for a Big Set Piece

So, for one of the set pieces I had set up for the big battle in the Undred-Undred Teef, I had pictured a huge battle across the hull of a space cruiser, using all of the cool minis that my friend Nick from E-Bay. What is interesting is that I didn't just come up with this idea from the blue, but rather from the fact that he was loaning me all of these neat sci-fi minis.

So, I set out to produce a table surface worthy of a climactic vehicle battle. To that end, I printed out a giant picture of a 40k space cruiser. And the idea for the big print out didn't come from me either, really. It came from my time with the Minions, and their copious use of Kinko's finesse. It just goes to show you the old teacher mantra that is said over and over in the smoke-filled corners of teacher's lounges: "Don't re-invent the wheel. Rob ideas and techniques from other people."

It was relatively simple to do. I took a simple 40k cruiser picture like the one below, printed it out, and then took it to Kinko's and had it blown up to poster size. Using their poster maker cost me about $20 and some change, so it was cheap and expensive. Is $20 a ton of money? Not really, but it might be pretty steep considering that you are doing this for a one-shot affair.

The original pic...
Now, the blow-up model - 8 and a half feet long. Not a bad battle-mat.

Now, the giant picture could simply serve as the battlemap for the game! Simple, easy, and very impressive on the table. The funniest thing was, when we started playing, I had to explain that the picture was still not to scale. An actual cruiser to scale with the minis would have actually been larger than even the printout.

Here's a shot to show the perspective of the minis on the hull of the cruiser.



Now, these pictures of the actual game (forgot my camera), but some staging to give you an idea of what it would have looked like. There are no squares on the improvised battlemat, so old-fashioned measuring tape worked just fine. Yes, you'll see some chaos raiders there. Those were stand-ins for ork fighta-bommas. Didn't have the money to spring for a squadron of real ones.

Monday, February 14, 2011

Seventeenth Session - Part 1: Journey to the Undred-Undred Teef



What I Had Planned
So this was going to be the last session that we had before the holidays. I was really trying to make it a big one. As it turned out the group was about to embark on a tremendous endevour - a journey to the Undred-Undred Teef to rescue what they believed to be 10 missing vessels from their Dynasty's fleet. A successful rescue would mean that the Explorers would now actually have a fleet of ships, not just a single frigate.

The set pieces I had planned out were:

1) A fateful meeting with a lost vessel - one of the Holocene Dynasty's lost ships. And a chance to spotlight the Seneschal and Rogue Trader.

2) An interactive cutscene.

3) Big space battle where the PCs had to get their ship into position against a large number of ork vessels. It would feature ork ram ships which would be raiders who attempted to just ram the PCs ship over and over.

4) A vehicle battle where the PCs would deploy vehicles onto the hull of a giant space cruiser and fight across the hull to get to a particular point.

5) A boarding mission to get to a critical part of the ship.

As I type this up, I can see now that this was entirely too much to try to cram into one session. Well, live and learn.

The Tau and a Warning
As the Explorers set out for the Undred-Undred Teef, the passed by the Lucin's Breath system and there learned that the Tau were performing massive excavations of the planet that they had raided, evidently looking for something big and buried in the ground. It wasn't hard to make a connection to the hidden alien vault on Vedic.

The Rogue Trader himself spent his time while traveling to the Undred-Undred Teef aboard the allied vessels of the rag-tag fleet they had assembled. Basically consorting with the other captains, making preparations for the raid, coordinating plans, etc.

Then, deep into their journey, they suddenly ran into a strange vergence in the Warp. A massive, rapidly expanding bubble of psychic energy. Large as a supernova, and rolling across parsecs of space.

The crew's Astropath was skilled enough to basically function like a lightning rod and ground the psychic phenomenon - preventing the entire crew of the Ferral Wolf from going mad. However, as I told the players, the other vessels following them into the Undred-Undred Teef might not be so lucky. After a few rolls, I determined that they had lost some of their allied ships had been lost.

That's when the Seneschal's player said, "Wait. Which vessels were lost? Remember, the Rogue Trader was on one of them."

I let the players make a luck roll...and they blew it. Which meant that the Rogue Trader himself was on one of the vessels that had been lost. Not only that, he was on the Nihontu, a statted-out NPC vessel. Captained by Lady Kitsune. (Both the Nihontu and Lady Kitsune [appearing as Lady Sun Lee] appear in Lure of the Expanse.)

I inwardly winced. I liked that NPC and that ship. I had had plans for it. But, for me, part of the fun of roleplaying is dealing with the unexpected. Dealing with loss. Wrestling with stuff that throws your plans to hell.

Madness Aboard the Nihontu
What happened next was a desperate, off- the-cuff adventure. The Rogue Trader himself was aboard the bridge of the Nihontu when 50% of its crew suddenly went mad with the power of the psychic disturbance. The ship's Astropath was able to prevent the other 50% of the crew from succumbing to insanity, but that was sadly not enough.


As comrades and even family members turned on each other, Lady Kitsune made for way to the Navigator's chambers. I had the Rogue Trader basically make a Skill Challenge roll to see if they could fight their way there. (Basically, I had him make a series of tests, needing X number of degrees of success total.)

He failed, so I ruled that in the ensuing battles to get to their goal, he took some wounds. 3d10 worth. I rolled the dice and the wounds were enough to actually put him in critical wounds. He went unconscious. When he woke up, their was Lady Kitsune, barely alive but disemboweled. There was nothing to be done for her. For me, this stung again because she was a named NPC who I had some plans for. But, I thought to myself, if you're going to have a player roll and that player fails, there needs to be some tangible consequences.

To honor her, the Rogue Trader made his way to the room where the Nihontu's Warrant of Trade was kept, intending to give it back to her Dynasty. There, he meant the Nihontu's own Arch-Militant, deep in the throes of madness and singing to his own power sword.

Now, the Rogue Trader found himself with Critical Wounds facing down an unscratched arch-militant in power armor and wielding a power sword. Fortunately for him, the arch-militant was quite mad and not fighting his best (he neglected to parry or dodge), but all the same, a single hit from the power sword would easily have cleaved the Rogue Trader in two. The Rogue Trader did have an edge, however. The Luminous Reproach - an artifact weapon the crew had gained in a previous session.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Explorers made a mad dash to attempt a rescue of their captain. I had them make a Skill Challenge test and they passed it to find the Nihontu, and then I had the Arch-Militant of the Ferral Wolf make another one to see if he could get there in time. Patrick (the AM's player) blew his test out of the water, so I let him describe how the rescue attempt went.

He proceeded to describe his great, hulking character plowing through the walls of the Nihontu itself, shearing away bulkheads, and power-fisting through beams to save his lord and master. Upon their arrival, they came upon the Rogue Trader who had just put down the rival Arch-Militant with two solid strikes of the Luminous Approach. They took the Warrant of Trade from the Nihontu and left to return to the Ferral Wolf.

Thoughts on Using Skill Challenges
While Skill Challenges are not in the Rogue Trader rules specifically, they are hinted at in the form of Exploration Challenges in the game. They also appear somewhat in the form of Social Challenges from Into the Storm.

The whole Skill Challenge thing came about with 4th Edition D&D and has been quite controversial every since. There are some who praise it for allowing more free-form, free-flowing storytelling; but others decry it for being used to throw dice instead of roleplay. (Some cool comparison of 4e vs. Rogue Trader skill challenges here.)

Unfortunately, I have seen it used far more for the latter rather than the former. Stuck in a swap with your buddies? Skill challenge! Okay, you're out. Need to sneak out of a city? Skill challenge! You're out!

In my case, what I've tried to do is to use Skill Challenges to fulfill some of the core themes of Rogue Trader. This is one of the harder aspects of running a Rogue Trader game - capturing the spirit of the game itself. The game that is implied in-between the lines of text in the core rulebook. One of the ideas that I gleaned from the Rogue Trader Core Rulebook was the idea of "fast-fowarding to the good stuff".

The whole idea of an Endeavour (collapsing large, board actions into a simple card or list), really points to the idea of campaigns in which you can participate in world-shaking events such as conquering a planet, but each of these Herculean tasks is only supposed to take a portion of your campaign.

To that end, I've often used Skill Challenges - not to bypass the cool roleplaying in the game - but to essentially fast-forwards to the most exciting and climactic parts. For example, I could have rolled out the battlemaps and allowed the Rogue Trader to move his mini up the hallway, fighting as he went, and then the rest of the players could have watched him for over an hour. And then he could have sat idly by while the rest of the party marched down the miniatures map in an attempt to rescue him, all the while fighting crazed crew members. Such an encounter might actually have been very cool with the proper maps and figures. However, it would have also taken the entire session and most likely the next one as well.

Instead, I used the Skill Challenges to get to the good parts of the story so that all of the players could move on to get to what they were aiming for in the first place...the Undred-Undred Teef. In the end, it seemed to work out well for us. Everyone had a good time.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Glorious Failure


Now, for most of this blog I've been crowing about my own successes here. And overall, the campaign has been a tremendous success. My players have said as much.

But it hasn't been all Hollywood Blockbusters and Oscar Awards all around. There have been a great deal of problems in the game. It's easy to celebrate your own successes on a public forum. It's sometimes a bit more difficult to talk about what you did wrong. Especially out in public.

But let's talk about that. My failures in this campaign. I was going to write a single post about the subject, but then I found myself writing pages of text. Clearly, this isn't going to be something I tackle with a single post. So, we'll probably see a series of these throughout the blog.

A Tough Game
The Rogue Trader campaign has easily been the hardest campaign I've run in recent memory. The only other game that gave me this much trouble dates back to '03-'04. Yeah. Seven to eight years ago. I still remember it vividly. And no, that was not any game that I played with the Minions of the Monster Master. With the Minions, we were fortunate enough to knock it out of the park almost every time. (Much love to the Minions, BTW, for mentioning one of our old, great campaigns. They even put up pics!)

But even though I remember the '03-'04 campaign being fraught with mistakes, misfires, and downright failures - I also remember having a really good time, and learning a lot from what went wrong. More than I learned from my more successful campaigns.

Outside Problems
One problem our campaign has faced (and we've been extremely lucky to weather this) is a changing player roster. We lost players. Gained players. Had players come and go. Thought we were going to lose players, but then didn't.

The game started out with the loss of Casey, one of our most energetic and enthusiastic players. Losing a good player is very difficult, especially if that player brings a lot of energy to the table. A player who is like a cheerleader for your campaign is, in my opinion, invaluable. Players like that get everyone excited about the game, and maintain its momentum.

Then, we had another player Nick, who had to leave the game for months at a time due to work. We had another player, Doug, who thought was going to have to leave. To fill his spot, we invited another player, Rob, into the game. And then, it turned out that Doug didn't have to leave.

All of this resulted in a game that eventually got too big. At the top, it had a total of seven players. In my opinion, that's too many for a game like Rogue Trader. Because of the way I'm running it (sort of like Birthright), each character has to command either a sizable group of people, or make key decisions about important parts of the ship. This means that often, the game will focus solely on one character. In a big group, it's very difficult to get that spotlight onto every single person. Also, a game of this kind is going to feature a lot of long periods of political discussion and interplay. In a big group, quieter players can lose out.

I don't know if I would call this a mistake per se, because it was no one's fault, but it was probably one of the biggest problems in our game.

Now, luckily, this continually changing roster of players did not kill our campaign, as it might have with many groups I've been in. I think we can credit that to the fact that our group as a standing, set-in-stone, gaming night. But making game night a regular thing, our campaigns don't tend to die off before the end. As a result, so far, we've completed three different campaigns in about six years. That means that we seen the beginning, middle, and end to three different campaigns.

How the Game is Supposed to be Run?
In my opinion, if you read the adventure in the back of the Rogue Trader core book, or read through Lure of the Expanse, the designers seem to want you to run the game like Star Trek. Even though you command 30,000 or even 100,000 people, you and the command crew are the only ones that really count. So, of course you deploy to the unexplored planet with your Navigator. Of course you enter the ruins with your lead Astropath. Can you run a Rogue Trader game like that successfully? Of course you can. And I think you can do it very well, because the game is designed to support that sort of play.

However, we had already run a game very much like this in our previous campaign in the Iron Kingdoms. I wanted something different. I wanted a game that felt like you were in charge of a dynasty, not just a ship. A game that would be like Battlestar Galactica, but where you don't play Starbuck or Apollo...you play Admiral friggin' Adama.

Now, a game like that can have it's problems. Like T-Bone of the Minions stated, you can end up with a game where all you do is manage people. As T-Bone manages people in his day job, he surely didn't want to do that on game night! So you have to be careful. Another problem that I ran into was that I've never run a game like that. Nor are games of that nature ubiquitous.

At that point, what I wished I had understood was that I was now taking the game in a direction far outside the confines of the rules and how the rules were even organized. Sure, there are things like the Endeavour System or Profit Factor which help create a sense of epic-ness, but there simply aren't (currently) solid rules on mass combat or mass ship combat. There is a small write-up on squad-based combat, but it's very short and unfortunately shallow.

What I wished I had done was....


What I Should Have Done
I should have done was understand the game a bit more before running it. And then implemented some solid, defined house rules. Things like house rules for mass combat. Mass ship combat. Things like that.

The reason I say that is that often I've had to do these things sort of on the fly. And while it has worked, the small sub-systems I've come up with have not been consistent. It sort of cheats the players, because they have a hard time knowing what to expect. We'll see how I do implementing these things from here on out.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

The Orks is Comin'!


Well, for the big battle, I made up a bunch of stats for ork vehicles as well. I didn't use most of them, because...well, you'll see later...but I made them up anyway.

Not using stats that I make up is not bad by any means. There are always opportunities down the road for these things to show up.

One thing that I tried to do was to keep it close to the 40k stats as I possibly could. Simply because it was a design challenge and because the Warhammer 40,000 rules have fantastic flavor. And if I could capture some of that flavor in my own stats, it would have been a victory for me.

Ork Blasta Tank

Type: Ground Vehicle Tactical Speed: 10m
Cruising Speed: 50 kph Manuoeverability: -5
Structural Integrity: 25 Size: Enormous (+20 to hit -20 to conceal)
Armour: Front 40, Side 30, Rear 20 Special: Unreliable – 20 to repair
Crew: Driver, Gunner, Crew Chief

Weapons:
Position: Gunner
Great Big Shoota (Front); Range: 300 to 700 m (1d5+2 AUs), Heavy, RoF: S/-/-; Damage: see special; Clip: ?, Reload Full; Special: Random Fire – Roll 1d5 to determine what kind of shell is fired.
1) Boom Shell 3d10+20, Pen 20
2) Tank Hamma Shell 8d10, Pen 0
3) Burna Shell - vehicle catches fire, 1d10 to structural integrity until put out
4) Scrap Shell – 3d10, Pen 0, Vehicle takes a 1d5 crit hit
5) Dud

Ork Fighta Bomma

Type: Craft Tactical Speed: 20m / 22 AUs
Cruising Speed: 1,600 kph / 5 VU Manuoeverability: -5
Structural Integrity: 25 Size: Massive (+30 to hit -30 to conceal)
Armour: Front 25, Side 25, Rear 20
Crew: Pilot, Crew Chief/Bomma, Forward Gunner, Rear Gunner

Weapons:
Position: Forward Gunner
Twin-Linked Big Shoota x1 (Front); Range: 600m (6 AUs), Heavy; RoF: S/-/-, Damage: 5d10+10 I, Pen 10; Clip: -; Reload -; Special: Twin-linked (+20 to hit, 2 shots fired)

Position: Rear Gunner
Auto Cannons x2 (Sides); Range: 300m (3 AUs), Heavy; RoF: S/2/5, Damage: 4d10+5 I, Pen 4; Clip: 60, Reload 2 Full; Special: None

Position: Bomma
Big Boms: Range: 0; RoF: -; Damage: 3d10+20 X, Pen 20; Clip: -; Reload 2 Full; Special: Blast (10)

Ork Stompa


Type: Walker Tactical Speed: 5 m
Cruising Speed: 30 kph / 1 AU Manuoeverability: -20
Structural Integrity: 65 Size: Massive (+30 to hit -30 to conceal)
Armour: Front 35, Side 35, Rear 30
Crew: 2 Drivers

Weapons:
Position: ?
Twin-Linked Big Shoota x1 (Front); Range: 600m (6 AUs), Heavy; RoF: S/-/-, Damage: 5d10+10 I, Pen 10; Clip: -; Reload -; Special: Twin-linked (+20 to hit, 2 shots fired)

Position: ?
Deth Kannon x1 (Front, Sides); Range: 600 m (6 AUs), Heavy, RoF: S/-/-; Damage: 4d10+20 E, Pen 15; Clip: 250, Reload -; Special: Inaccurate (No bonus for aiming)

Supa Skorcha x1 (Front, Sides); Range: 30 m (0 AUs), Heavy, RoF: S/-/-; Damage: Special; Clip: -, Reload 2 Full; Special: catches enemy on fire, 1d10 to structural integrity until put out
>

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Making Up Stats for the Big Fight


So I knew that I wanted to stage a really epic and momentous battle in the Undred-Undred Teef. I So, as I did with the Battle at Footfall, I started sketching out set-pieces. One of the set-pieces I started arranging was a big vehicle battle.

Some time ago, towards the beginning of the campaign, even, the Explorers had discovered a Reaver Titan and believe me, they never let me forget it. And on top of that, one of my players went out and bought a large quantity of epic scale miniatures. Including a titan mini! No, not that Titan mini. No one in my group has that kind of money lying around. In any case, such an opportunity cannot be missed.


Look at the cornucopia of minis Nick bought for the campaign! There are troops on bases, here, mostly. As well as some tanks (grey-colored on the right). The Reaver Titan is prominent, of course.

Here is a close-up of the Titan and some tanks. I painted the Titan.

I went about making up a large scale vehicle battle using the Into the Storm rules. The only problem was that there were only a few stats for vehicles in Into the Storm. I had to make a lot of them up. Luckily, there was still the Dark Heresy apocrypha, which contains stats for vehicles. But those stats were incomplete compared to the Into the Storm write ups.

So, I had to make a number of the vehicles up. Particularly the Reaver Titan, of course.

I thought I would share them here, and perhaps save some fellow GM the trouble of having to do it. No doubt people will see something wrong in these. No problem at all. It may at least give others a starting point.

As I were, I only needed to make up three stats for the good-guy team. The Leman Russ, the Reaver Titan, and some rules for their mysterious Scylla flyer. The team bought Calixis-pattern Fury Interceptors and the Into the Storm book already had rules for those.

Rogue Trader Vehicles

Leman Russ Tank



Type: Ground Vehicle Tactical Speed: 10m

Cruising Speed: 50 kph Manuoeverability: -5

Structural Integrity: 35 Size: Enormous (+20 to hit -20 to conceal)

Armour: Front 40, Side 30, Rear 20 Special:

Crew: Driver, Gunner, Crew Chief

Weapons:

Position: Gunner

Twin-Linked Autocannon x1 (Front); Range: 300 m, Heavy, RoF: S/4/10; Damage: 4d10+5, Pen 4; Clip: 40, Reload: 2 Full; Special: Twin-Linked (+20 to hit)

Turrent-Mounted Lascannon x1 (Front, Sides, Back); Range: 300 m, Heavy; RoF: S/-/-; Damage: 5d10+10, Pen 10; Clip: 10; Reload: 2 Full; Special: Twin-Linked (+20 to hit, Fires 2 shots)

Reaver Titan


Type: Walker Tactical Speed: 5 m

Cruising Speed: 45 kph / 1 AU Manuoeverability: -20

Structural Integrity: 65 Size: Massive (+30 to hit -30 to conceal)

Armour: Front 40, Side 45, Rear 40 Void Shields: 40%

Crew: 1 Drivers, 1 Tech Priest, 2 Servitors

Weapons:

Position: Tech-Priest

Carapace Mounted Rocket Launcher (Front/Left/Right); Range: 75km (750 AUs), Heavy; RoF: S/4/8, Damage: 3d10+20 X, Pen 15; Clip: 24; Reload -; Special: Burst and Auto Fire

Position: Pilot

Arm Mounted Turbo Laser Battery x2 (Front); Range: 700 m (7 AUs), Heavy, RoF: S/-/-; Damage: 8d10 E, Pen 10; Clip: 1, Reload 2 Full; Special: Blast (10)

I'll put the ork vehicles I made up in the next post.