Rogue Trader

I am beginning a new campaign for the Rogue Trader RPG and am thinking of blogging it. Perhaps I will start a separate blog or just kick the dust off this one… Here is the background I sent my players:

The Flight of The Magnificence

The Magnificence is a titan of a foregone age; a relic of the power and drive of Holy Terra.  A super cruiser that rivals any Battleship of the Line the Imperial Navy can offer up. One hundred and twenty thousand bodies (at least) call her hull home. Some of these denizens are the product of so many ship born generations that terrestrial life is a fairytale to them.

The history of the vessel is shrouded in the obscurity of time, lost like so many of the wonders of The Dark Age of Technology. Rumors abound, the most prevalent spread by the upper echelons of The Magnificence is thus: During the crusades, even before many of the Primarchs had been found, the Emperor was beckoned to a lost human system with open arms. Those arms quickly turned on the Emperor’s fleet with the full force of the system’s forge-world space dock. The trap cost The Emperor his flagship and escorts and he barely made planetfall himself. Cornered on a hostile planet he  sent out an open call for aid. That request reached a young, independent, Lord Captain named Strai Davion, at the helm of The Magnificence. Punching through the recidivist fleet, Lord Captain Davion rescued the Emperor and regrouped with his Armada. So impressed was the Emperor with the vessel that he named it his de facto Flagship for the conquest of the traitorous system. During the course of the engagement Davion and the Emperor became fast comrades, so the rumor goes. Though offered a position as admiral, Davion refused, citing that his adventurous spirit, and that of his vessel, would not do well in uniform and formation. To this, the Emperor could not argue, so instead he drafted a Rogue Trader warrant for Davion, and signed it himself. Other versions of the rumor say the Emperor just met the Lord Captain once, or that his vessel had once accompanied the Emperor’s own flotilla. Whatever the truth, none can argue that The Magnificence’s charter is as old and vaunted as the ship itself.

The Magnificence has been at the edge of the Imperium ever since, pushing the boundaries of man to the furthest depths of the void. Currently, she is rumored to be exploring the cryptic frontier know as the Koronus Expanse. And though she may vanish for decades at a time she always comes home with holds full of wonders and mouths full of tales. That is, until now…

The Magnificence silently and unobtrusively floated into the Greymere system of the Segmentum Pacificus, a full segmentum away from her last known location. Her bridge is silent and cold as a tomb; her hull still shows the telltale signs of battle, hastily repaired; and within, dark rumors circulate amongst the crew. Halting in orbit around the hive world Asher a single message was delivered to the planet’s surface… and thus begins the mystery of The Magnificence.

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