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StoryKeeper
2012-02-26, 03:03 AM
Hello, ladies and gents. A friend of mine recently suggested that, to compensate for the lack of planning time my busy schedule gives me, I prepare a bunch of plothooks for my Rogue Trader game. That said, I'm having a little trouble getting my creative juices started. So, do you folks suppose you could give me a list of Rogue Trader plot hooks? Thanks in advance!

Some setting info to help get you started:

* Tau are in the general area.
* Warp storms have left the sector disconnected from the Imperium for two decades and slowed travel within the system to a crawl thus making trade difficult. The IG have also failed to receive their tithe of soldiers for the last two decades.
* Piracy has picked up a lot in recent years due to the chaos and economic troubles the storms have caused.
* Chaos pirates have recently returned to torment the sector after being absent for almost two decades.
* The Rogue Trader has a rival active in the sector.
Have at it!

DeltaEmil
2012-02-26, 03:32 AM
A space hulk has been detected in vicinity. It might contain valuable archao-tech or xenotech (one ship being apparently of eldar origin). However, there are either tyranid gribblies inside (genstealers), chaos gribblies (daemons, chaos space marines, insane cultists and so on), ork gribblies (orks, just orks), or an insane warp-fused A.I. that believes itself a god and keeps the descendants of the poor souls that were trapped into the space hulk under its mechanical leash. The A.I. believes itself a god is most interesting if the rogue traders have a mechanicus priest traveling with them, who belongs to those strange factions that do not consider A.I.s to be abominations, but truly divine parts of the machine god.

Else, have the tau try their classic trick of conquering worlds with almost no pulse gun shots. They hire the rogue traders to look for information about the local governor of their target planet. If the rogue traders are staunchly anti-xeno, then have the tau use human intermediaries (who of course will not mention that they work for xeno scum). Once they find out what the governor likes (useless trinkets that make flashy lights, exotic alien fruits, eating baby livers or whatever), they'll bribe him to join their empire. Transporting the bribes is a job for the rogue traders.

Let the rogue traders pick up an astropathic S.O.S. signal. Have them be surprised, if the one they rescue is an astartes with a very secret mission. The astartes can be of any order. While he waits for his order to send a ship to get him back, he'll stay and try to repay the rescue by either improving the rating's defense procedure, or come up as a one-time game master-player character to save the players, but that's it, before it retreats to a sanctum and does nothing anymore.

Have the rogue traders find an ancient satelite that has managed to cartography warp routes. One of these warp routes is totally unknown to virtually anybody in the whole segmentum, perhaps even the galaxy. The route is totally supersafe, and it seems that you can even travel through time with it. It can massively shorten the travel distance between any place and all that stuff. After they enter it, they find out that it the legendary webway of the eldar. Now they must hope to leave the insane psychic maze, before angry craftworlders, bloodthirsty commorites or mysterious harlequins get them into their psychic claws. And they'll of course try to destroy that satellite.

A nearby star system is soon going nova, a few thousand years sooner than expected. Most of the planets have been abandoned in a haste. There might still be valuable stuff lying down there, and it would be quite a shame for the nova to obliterate it. Unfortunately, so do the local pirates think, who claim to all rights to this system.

The rogue traders find some kind of strange pyramidal structure on a desert world. The architecture is xeno, but cannot be identified. Then, suddenly, Necrons. They shoot.

The rogue traders are gifted some kind of silvery metal thingy as a reward. It's fluid like mercury, but not deadly. It can take any form, and is totally resilient to everything. It even improves machinery, and greatly increases the intelligence of everybody on board. Little does anybody know that this is a C'tan-shard, which seeks other shards of a C'tan to be reunited. Soon, the star vampyres will again rule the galaxy.

The Glyphstone
2012-02-26, 11:00 AM
suddenly, Necrons.


Works with any plot, really.:smallsmile:

EccentricOwl
2012-02-27, 01:32 AM
Ever try looking at some of the Eclipse Phase or Traveller plots? Traveller is so Rogue Trader-y in design it's not funny. All you need is some gothification.