TiLT: I read what you wrote in the other thread, what I has I wish to know more aobut is what those endevours are, could you give examples of lesser, greater, and so on so we can get a feel for the kinds of things we can do. I am waiting on the PDF version so it will be a bit till I can a chance to look at the book myself. One additional question is are there any ship based components themed for colonization and what kind of items are provided with the theme of colonization in mind.

Asajev said:

There is some new equipment in the book, but I don't think any of it is in the form of ship components. I don't have the book in front of me, so I can't check. Regardless, anything that already helps with objectives (such as a cargo bay) will help with colonization endeavours that have the right themes. 

There are no examples of endeavours in the book, as that's not what it wants to do. It gives the GM a few ideas about the purpose of an endeavour, then expects him to work out the details in cooperation with the players. Let's say you want to upgrade your colony so that it has Adeptus Arbites patroling your streets. The book lets you know that this is most likely a lesser endeavour, and that it should involve going to one of two specific (it names them) planets in the Calixis Sector to talk to the Arbites there and arrange a deal with them. It's the same with the colonizatoin endeavour itself, which is typically a greater endeavour. It gives you three basic things that the players need to do (create a charter, prepare the expedition, and colonize the planet), and the rest is up to you. It talks about the entire process at length, but not as an endeavour. It expects you to be able to figure out these things for yourself, which is for the best. It's not a numbers game. It's about the narrative, and too strict rules would get in the way. 

Once you do build the colony you've got numbers you can track and rules for how they change, but even there it's expected to be handled narratively. You have two tables with unexpected events, one good and one bad. There are no rules about when to roll on these tables. The text says that you should roll when the GM feels that it's appropriate. That's the attitude of the book in general.

You can do pretty much anything you want with this system, from setting up a research station which studies Xenos ruins, to building a gigantic hive city stripping its planet of industrial metals. That it's somewhat vague with the rules means you've got more flexibility to come up with interesting ideas on your own. 

The only downside is that there's the typical FFG lack of proofreading. A couple of tables in the middle of the generator chapter have are numbered wrong (as in: Roll on Table 2-12, but then it turns out that there's no such table and that you're really supposed to roll on 2-13. That's not a real example by the way) and some rules appear slightly contradictory or incomplete. The majority is good however, and I'm sure we'll get some clarification as more people start reading the book and asking questions. 

Is there a "Shake'n'Bake" Colony? 

TiLT said:

Movement should be N/A

That's all I got. 

BYE

H.B.M.C. said:

Out of those, only the Bullwark seems to be actually wrong. I'll update the PDF with the modified values.

The Fuzzball I'm a little unclear on. I get the impression that multiple doubled values shouldn't double the double, so to say. In other words, x2 + x2 is x3, not x4. I'm not sure if this is really correct, but it's the way these values are treated when a single modification-source increases in strength. Since both Quadruped and Size give x2, it becomes a little harder to figure out. I took a judgment call and made the total x3. 

The Void-Diver is as intended. It prefers to fly (at very, very high altitudes), but it can land, and once it does is actually extremely fast due to its Quadruped trait. Most flyers aren't quadrupeds in real life, which makes this a pretty unique little beast for us humans. 

The Windwyrm is very, very sluggish on the ground because of its Earth-Scorn trait, which I believe is from Stars of Inequity (book is at home, I'm at work). It's a creature that always flies, so it doesn't have any natural way of moving across the ground, hence the slow speeds. If you check the core rulebook page 265, you'll also see that creatures can actually have a base speed of 0.5 if their effective agility bonus is 0, so it's exactly as it should be. 

I just dropped a cool two hours on system generation, and that was because I knew what I was doing and had a computerized die roller. I think I got slowed down a lot by the Titanic Gas Giant, but that's still a lot of prep work. Admittedly, one good star system like this could last many, many sessions. Heck, I could see a system with 9 worlds and multiple civilizations being the focus of an entire campaign really easily.

This should become less of an issue once I finish my generator application. Actually, it has evolved a bit since my early specs. It's now more of a general GM tool for Rogue Trader, allowing you to build and name star systems and planets, with every bit of detail from Stars of Inequity (and more!). I've come a long way with it already, and I'm currently working on the most complex part: Xenos generation. You know that ship generator from the GM Kit? It's here too, and I'm probably going to expand it to allow ships from Into the Storm and Battlefleet Koronus (at the very least) along with torpedoes and support ships. The generator will even have a chance of creating Dark Eldar presence in star systems if you've got The Soul Reaver. 

Star system generation is more or less complete. The stuff I still need to work on is, including my estimate of how much work the features are going to be to include: 

- Terrain, landmarks and resources for planets (minor)

- Xenos generator (major. This is going to support both the Stars of Ineqity model and the Koronus Bestiary model)

- Starfarers system feature (moderate)

- Expanded ship generation (minor)

- Plot hooks (minor)

- General UI work (moderate)

I can't wait to finish this thing. :)

Would it be possible to create planets that are allready under imperial control? For instance could i make planets for Only War or Dark Heresy with this book?

Bassemandrh said:

You could make the basic planets, but this system is designed for Rogue Trader. You'd get only very limited use out of it for other systems. The idea is that systems generated through Stars of Inequity haven't been explored/colonized in modern times. You could stumble upon an advanced human society, but it wouldn't be under Imperial control, instead representing remnants from humanity's earlier colonization efforts, millennia ago. These generators won't create the types of details you'd need for the other systems, focusing on macroinformation instead of microinformation. 

Bassemandrh said:

Not really. This generator is designed to give outputs like "There's a planet with four continents- One that's mostly forest, one that's mostly wasteland, one that's mountains, and one that's split between plains and wasteland. The forest continent has three mountains and a canyon, and is inhabited by snakes."

Now, if you wanted, you could use that as a starting ground, and then write up cities and stuff on top of that, but the huge majority of the things that matter in Dark Heresy (politics, mysteries, demons) won't be generated by Stars of Inequity.

susanbrindle said:

which isn't to say that a book that helps you generate evil chaos/heretical cults for Dark Heresy wouldn't be a totally awesome thing to have in and of itself…just that you aren't going to find a 'politics generator' in SOI.

The Treasure melee weapons have a pretty decent spread, but the ranged list [rolling-wise; the bonuses are fine for the most part] are a bit odd.

"Who ever uses non-blast thrown weapons" aside, there's no bolter-style or plasma-style options in the list to work from. Weights are also all over the place: The [melta] thermal cutter is a 40kg beast, despite being a basic, not heavy, weapon, and having the stats to match that. Given overheat is never covered or mentioned, the wording difference there would make it odd as well, but at least none of the treasure options can be ones that overheat in the first place.

Bit odd that everything starts 'Impact' as well, including both the melta and the flamer.

'Heavy Rifle' is a half-range heavy stubber, but, again, its 'basic' instead of heavy. You'd expect it to be basic after, say, the Compact archeotech upgrade [not that said upgrade currently grants such an effect]. Steady granting 'reliable' is kind of odd, given its difficult to not at least have Good Quality on the weapons given the Archeotech rolls; plus there's a chance the weapon might also have gained 'never jams'

I've had the book downloaded for a couple of weeks now - I'm glad I downloaded it, because I would have felt a bit cheated if I had paid full price for it.

There's some useful stuff in here for pencilling in details to otherwise one-dimensional systems, but there's no way I'd use it to run whole Endeavours from. I tried to go through the process of system generation from start to finish, but I just found it desperately boring. After generating three planets in the Inner Cauldron - with moons - and ending up with generic hot rocks rich in minerals but not a lot else of interest, I just gave up. For all the generation and tables I'd rather just pick the more interesting bits from the Encounter Sites to give my players something to do if they end up off-course or attacked by pirates or something.

Having said all that, I rather like the Treasures tables. Trying to justify the odd results that it throws up is rather fun (A Relic Shield with the Vanishing and Resplendant quirks … a collapsible archaeotech shield maybe :D ), though I admit some of the end results can be a little strange. Still, that's what GMs are for, so you can always iron out the kinks

Oh yeah … and this book does remind me of what I liked about Edge of the Abyss, so that's a good thing …

Phew, I just finished making the xenos generators for both the Stars of Inequity and Koronus Bestiary models. That was a lot of work, but it was also the biggest hurdle remaining for my generation application. With this out of the way, the rest should be smooth sailing. :)

And that's terrain, landmarks and resources for planets complete! Turned out to be a bit more complex than expected. I'm not doing a straightforward conversion of the tables, but extrapolating and expanding where the book suggests a GM should do so. For example, when rolling for landmasses, the book casually mentions "and any number of small islands at the GM's discretion". I'm trying to save people work and be thorough, so my generator actually creates these islands (in the form of "hey, there's an island here". It doesn't create any further details about them). Then there's stuff like exotic landmarks. These are supposed to be carefully considered by the GM before being placed, so randomly rolling for them doesn't work out so well. Instead I had to create an algorithm that considers the planet and the terrain where the landmark is to be placed, to see if it's appropriate. For example, on a temperate planet you're most likely to find glaciers in the mountain ranges and only rarely elsewhere, while on a cold planet all bets are off. Whirlpools are affected by the presence of water and the amount of orbital features. A dry moon without orbital features is unlikely to ever see a whirlpool in its landmarks, and a desert wasteland is unlikely to ever contain an inland sea.

I also created an algorithm to make xenos presence in the system more uniform. If the system contains derelict stations, starship graveyards, or xenos ruins, you're more likely to see the remains of the same xenos species in many of those places rather than a random assortment that barely makes sense. You may come across a system with plenty of Eldar ruins, for example. At this point the generator is less likely to make Ork ruins on new planets than it is to make Eldar ruins, simply because it may have decided that the Eldar, for one reason or another, is a dominant species in this system. If that same system contains a starship graveyard, you're likely to find further traces of the Eldar there. If you come across a foiled invasion attempt, for example, you may find the occasional Eldar ship among the larger assortment of different ships that once invaded the system, the remains of whatever defenses the Eldar were able to muster at the time.

This kind of stuff is among the many reasons why this generator is taking a lot of time to code. I'm a perfectionist, and that means more work for me. Hopefully everyone will be happy when they get their hands on the results. :)