A deadly Teleporter Chart For Rogue Trader

This is a chart I made for Rogue Trader.  In that game just about every group decides to put a teleportarium (teleporter) in their ship. This isnt really a problem but I find that a lot of situations that could present interesting dilemmas for the crew are solved with the phrase "beam us out!"

for instance:
There is a Giant space cruiser chasing the party down. the party decides to teleport on to the enemy cruiser's bridge and kill the captain and then beam out.

or

The crew are at a fancy dinner at a governor's palace.  mercenaries burst in with guns and masks.  The crew all yell "beam us out". The end.


Both of these situations are really cool and the players feel powerful.  The problem is that every situation becomes solve-able with a teleporter.  When you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.  Besides that in War-hammer 40k a teleportarium works by literally shooting people through the Warp (hell). So the willy nilly use of the teleporter never sat right with me.

the rules are built for the WH40K Rogue Trader System.  Maybe i will tweak it for a generic space setting/system sometime.  Then again why not try that yourself!

** MY Teleportarium House Rules**The rules may seem a little brutal but you would have to roll very badly multiple times to get a total team wipe or any other really bad effects. Besides, you are traveling through the warp (hell) with nothing to protect you but your skin and nothing to guide you but an ancient machine that no-one fully understands.

In normal gameplay- 
1) the PC's get 1 safe use of the teleporter per session. accurate, no test to use, (unless teleporting somewhere insane like into a warp storm, onto the roof of a moving car, into a backpack/chest etc.) and there are no limits on what is transported as long as it fits in the teleporter.
2) every additional use of the teleporter after the first in a session will incur a roll on the following chart after a tech use (-10). 

Roll on a d100 modified by degrees of success (tech use -10)	MISHAP!
1-10	teleport was accurate but took a long time,make a -10 toughness test if u fail lose a fatigue
11-14	accurate. Roll on the Psychic Phenomenon table. For all references to "the psyker", use the teleported group, and any effects originate from that group. The machinery of the teleportarium is considered warded.
15-19	teleport was successful, but you missed the target location by 2d10m. (if beaming back to the ship PC's appear in a small bathroom or cramped space)
20-24	teleport was accurate but one member of the crew was beamed into a different location, possibly under life threatening circumstances. eg. crew appear in the ally way, but the captain appeared in the next ally over surrounded by thugs.
25-30	teleport succeeded but the PC's all appeared at least partially under ground-level, in water, buried in sand, in a cave, in a sewer, under the floorboards.
31-35	teleport was successful, but Pc's all appeared above ground-level, in a tree, in midair, on a ledge, on the roof, over a pit
36-41	scatter 1d10km, the trip was horror itself, what you saw...is beyond words. You were suspended within the screaming vortex of the warp for what felt like hours. Make a fear test (2). on the plus side you arrive 1d10 hours before you actually left.  (if returning to the ship you appear in a random on board location)
42-49	A mechanical failure. some abnormal readings and poor maintenance has caused the teleportarium to refuse to activate. The test can be taken immediately at one degree more difficult, or after 1d10 minutes with no modifier.
50-59	A shower of sparks and a small fire erupt in the machinery of the teleportarium.  it , but angered tech spirits cause serious equipment failure and damage. Requires d10 hours to fix, reduced by 1 hour per successs on a Very Hard Tech Use or Hard Trade (Technomat) roll.
60-69	teleport was accurate, PC's unhurt but re-entry into real-space was violent. all organic material in 2d10 meters of the rentry point is disintegrated, metal walls are warped and twisted. and PC's arrive without their hats/helmets
70-79	accurate Roll on the Perils Of The Warp table. For all references to "the psyker", use the teleported group, and any effects originate from that group. The machinery of the teleportarium is considered warded.
80-89	scatter 2d10km, the teleported party makes a hard (-20) toughness test. failure results in one random mutation and 1d5 insanity points. (if returning to the ship you appear in the vacuum of space no more than 10 meters from an airlock)
90-99	perfect teleport... exept for the huge demon that was pulled into real space with you. roll 1d100 (1-25 nurggle, 26-50 tzeench, 51-75 slanesh, 76-100 khorn)
100	A warp breach, like the beginnings of a warp storm, is opened in the location of the teleporting party. everyone within 50 meters takes 10 energy damage ignoring Armour and toughness and take 1d10 insanity and corruption
130+	A major warp breach resembleing a miniature warp storm, is opened in the location of the teleporting party. The group and everyone within d100 m are destroyed, and the surrounding area instantly becomes hell on earth.

In starship combat- No change from rules in book. any hit and run useage dosn't count as the one use per session. Hovever, PC's who 'lead; the hit and run attack are merely giving orders and organizing the soldiers sent into the teleporter. (most of whom fall victim to the many horrible things on this chart, are teleported into space or otherwise die trying to take the other ship, and few of them return..... it is still really effective though and you have lots of crew to throw at the problem anyway) 
-if the PC's wish to physically bored another ship in combat then the house rules take over.

A Wretched Joanna Pt. 1

This post is the first in a series that will relate to you the tale of my first roll20 campaign and my first attempt to run any RPG whose title didn't begin with the word Dungeon and end with the word Dragons. I have been running this campaign for quite a while and have enjoyed it more than any other campaign i have ever run.  That probably has something to do with the excellent people i have played this campaign with.

This first post is just about the system and an introduction to the premise of the game.  You could consider it my review of this rule system but if that is what your looking for perhaps you should look elsewhere.

SYSTEM:  War-hammer 40k: Rouge Trader

MECHANIC:  1d100 percentile dice rolling
CAMPAIGN STATUS: ongoing
PLAYERS: 4+GM

The players take on the role of a Rogue Trader, a kind of legal space pirate, and his/her command crew.  This may sound simple, and you may be imagining a campaign playing out like a season of firefly or star-trek but if you are then you don't know Warhammer 40k. the lore of the 40k universe is to big to summarize here but in short:

 The smallest space going ships in 40k have crews upwards of 20,000 a cruiser could have 200,000 crew easily, and though they arn't represented in the rules, a battleship's crew could populate a small nation. There is no light speed in 40k either.  In order for ships to travel faster than the speed of light they have to tear open portals to another dimension where non of the laws of physics or time exists and pass through.  It just so happens that this dimension is hell, literally.  Deamons are trying to posess people.  There is a holy inquisition and a psychic emperor and aliens that make the xenomorph from Alien look cuddly. Everything in Rogue trader is massive terrifying and ambitious including the players, characters, goals and rewards.  

Imagine that President Teddy Roosevelt was put in charge of Darth Vader's giant capital ship from The Empire Strikes Back,  Now imagine that all Teddy wants to do in life is get rich, get drunk, get more rich and have some fun.  Then imagine that space-captain-playboy Teddy Roosevelt hires Han-solo, Boba-fett, a 16th century Spanish inquisitor, spike speiegel from cowboy bebop and River Tam from firefly to be his bridge crew.  Now pretend that teddy and his crew are all dressed like pirates from Disney's Treasure Planet.  Finally, in your mind, play the theme-song from your favorite sci-fi series but make it metal.  That is Rogue Trader in a nutshell

For those of you who don't know of, or haven't had the pleasure to experience, this system I will try to describe it to you. Rogue Trader is a gargantuan, twisted, self-contradicting mess of excellent ideas, poor design, simple rules, inconsistent art and a fascinating setting. All of this is wrapped up in a labyrinthine rule book in which you will rarely find the rule you are looking for but, on every page of which you will find a dozen ideas and plot hooks that make up for it.

The basic mechanic is simple, but is often complicated by exceptions and a disorganized rule-book layout.  Every stat that the characters have is a number between 1-100 and represents a percentage chance of success. if you have 35 strength then your character has a 35% chance to succeed a strength challenge.  You roll a hundred sided dice (or two ten sided dice).  If you roll under your stat you succeed and if you roll over it: you fail.

Since I began using this system I have played other games built on the same rules and have learned that all the War-hammer 40k RPG's really shouldn't work .  At first glance you see systems which say "there are rules for everything"; however, as soon as play begins you realize that there definitely aren't. the nature of the game and the universe create situations that cannot be easily represented with the rules provided. Often i am left having to choose between cutting sections out of the rulebook or forcing awkward rules onto awesome situations.  

So in short the system plays like the universe it tries to present, complicated, fun, daunting, grim and clunky. Which is also perfect for me, because i like to make content for my games, and hack them so that they work.  running this campaign has been a lesson all its own on homebrew rules and hacking systems. (but that is a different post entirely)

 My Rogue Trader campaign is the only campaign that i have run using these rules that has survived. I credit this with the players who i have run this campaign with.  We are a group that just gels well.  We all love the system and the setting dispite all it's flaws. We just have a lot of fun.

So i have told you about the game's system.

In Pt. 2 I will begin the tale proper.  The tale of a ship, a crew, a galaxy of opportunity and a string of bad luck that never ends.  The tale of a Wretched Joanna.

The Wretched Joanna
a Turbulent Class Heavy Frigate
(deck plan, drawn in paint)

A Point In Space Plus Time

My name is Zachary Groombridge.  I am a stage actor, a sometimes dishwasher, a decent fry cook, generally a renaissance man and, when i get the opportunity, a Game master. This is my blog.

 (as my old English teacher always said "think tangentaly... in tangents")

This is my first post and so i guess you could call it my mission statement.

"I want to write about games and stuff that interests me."

I write about games and stuff that interests me anyway and my thoughts end up on dozens of websites in dozens of forms and generally my disparate thoughts dissolve into the big messy void of the internet.  Today for no particular reason I decided to blog.  thanks for reading.

Fourteen years ago my mom painted a picture of a red line stretching out into  a cloudy windswept sky. I was Eleven and declared that, of all the paintings she had made and all the paintings I would ever see, this one was the best.  I gave no reason and I doubt that I had one.  Eleven year old me simply liked it and that was enough. A red line stretching forever.  A ray of unidentifiable something, darting across eternity, unbroken and endless.  That painting hangs above my desk now and my appreciation for it hasn't diminished though; I still don't really know why I like it so much.

My young cousin looked at the painting once and said that he knew what the picture was of.  He turned to his mom and said "mom i love you in a straight line, not a circle,  a straight line that never ends..."   I will always remember when he said that because he absolutely meant it.

I don't think that my mom painted love.  She just painted a line.  A Line is a single point travailing through space and time. There is a lack of compromise in a line and in that lack of compromise my cousin saw love.  A person could look at the angry red line and see hate, or furry or youth or honor or virtue.  A literal thinker may see the clouds and the line and see the air-trail left behind a jet in flight.  A line is certainty given form.  A line is precise and definable yet;  infinite.  A line is unnatural and yet Omni-present.  I look at that painting every day and see many things, but I am never looking at anything more then a red line.

I don't know what you will see in this blog of mine or how it will evolve. First and foremost this is a blog about playing, running and hacking table-top-RPG's but in talking about that I will likely get into many other topics.  I am interested in talking about being a GM and about building interesting narratives.  I am interested in random tables and posting my own game hacks for others to use.  I'm interested in songs and books and movies and pictures and art and theater and scifi and politics and design and a thousand other things just like every person in the world.  I will bring whatever i am talking about back to GMing one way or another no matter how wide i cast my net, or how splintered my tangents become.

A line is a point in space plus time.  welcome to the begining. Now go read something more interesting that i have written... unless i haven't written anything else in which case you are too early!.

The painting above my desk