F: Designing Your Own Scenarios
Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader supporting material for budding GMs.
The published scenarios were useful examples of what was possible and how to set victory conditions. As a corpus there were never going to be enough to accommodate all the 40K factions. There were resources for going your own way.
☠ Plot Generator
The Rogue Trader rulebook had pages of charts for generating plot ideas.
The charts below have been designed to help the GM invent plots for games and campaigns. These are only starting points of course - and it is up to the GM to let his imagination take over, filling in the gaps and inventing extra detail to complete the story.
Starting on page 240 plots covered revenge attacks, discovering new worlds, quelling rebellions, and so on. The 100 plots were brief descriptions to provide some inspiration.
Page 247 had a sub-plot generator to further enrich scenarios. The sub-plots included many of Rogue Trader's sillier ideas, like one model being affected by the infectious Mysteriously Acquired Crazy Syndrome.
☠ Battlefields
The battlefield a conflict is set on can help shape scenarios.
☠ Terrain
Games Workshop sells a wide variety of terrain for ruined cities, under-hives, space-ship interiors, et cetera. Each Rogue Trader scenario specified bespoke terrain you or one of your cohorts were expected to make yourself.
To the deranged mind of the modeller the world takes on a strange and different appearance, pieces of polystyrene packaging become buildings and bunkers, dessert and margarine tubs are components for towers, tins and cardboard tubes assume the proportions of mighty buildings.
-Rick Priestly, Rogue Trader
Rogue Trader dedicated five pages to using household, hardware and hobby supplies to create terrain. Three specific projects were a control tower made from dessert pots, a small domed bunker made using plaster and a sand mould, and a residential block made from plastic piping. The tower and bunker looked cool, the residential block was naff.
☠ Citi-Block
The Citi-Block box of cardboard floor plans included rules for use in 40K in addition to the 2000AD Judge Dredd rules.
☠ Warhammer Siege
The Warhammer Siege book coincided with availability of the polystyrene Mighty Fortress, pictured above. The book included rules for 40K in addition to the (3rd edition) Warhammer fantasy game. There was advice on setting up assaults on fortresses and supplemental rules for things like minefields, wall-mounted weapons, Siege Dreadnoughts and alien constructions.
In 745.M41, Hive-fleet Behemoth was finally destroyed in a massed action by Dark Angels, Ultramarines and Whitescars. This victory marked the end of the last Tyrannic War.
-Warhammer Siege
Example 40K fortresses are provided in the form layouts and rules for two locations - Fort Macragge and Burbeck's Asteroid. Siege scenarios are briefly described across two pages.