Black Cohort

You see no signs of foul play. It is like boarding an imperial ship before the recent events in Istvaan. "The Istvaan system?" the lead says. After a moment of consulting their dataslate one of the lackeys answers. "A minor system a few jumps away. Raven Guard compliance operations in 994. Imperial Governor Maj (Retired) Vardus Praal."

Ven moves north-west at a run, allowing the trees rather than any stealth to keep the dark kin from getting eyes on him.

Your thunderhawk is directed to the Gamma hanger of the galleon, a vast cargo hanger near the aft of the ship. It is only possible to appreciate the size of the ship as you get close. While star galleons are not front line combat ships, it is certainly in the same weight class as the heavy cruisers and strike cruisers that make up much of legion fleets. You set down next to an enormous Zhag pattern cargo lander, which is at least twice as long as a thunderhawk. Probably capable of holding an entire astartes company in a single load. This hanger could easily hold four. Waiting off to the side is an old man in fancy blue robes. There are several obvious lackeys standing behind him, loaded with scrolls and dataslates. Standing just far enough to the side that it is clear they are not one of the lackeys is a Magos of the Mechanicum.

I have recently started looking into using kin in 40k rpgs and I thought it would be worth asking here what people think would be interesting kin character classes, generic npc types and interesting ideas they could bring to a campaign. If you are interested in the mechanical side of things you can find it in this thread in the RPG (Night) Club.

So here is my initial take of Cloneskeins. I welcome any thoughts you have. Special Ability Cloneskeins At Character Creation a Votann Surveyor choses one of the following cloneskeins. This cannot be changed later. Skein of Mining +5 Strength Bulging Biceps Skein of Augmentation +5 Intelligence Votann with this Cloneskein treat all cybernetics as a step higher in quality than they are. Skein of Hardening +5 Toughness Autosanguine I think one of the big challenges with the Votann is they have very little lore, so we haven't seen a lot about the types of characters that would interact with rogue traders. Also you are assuming a human focused campaign. Why couldn't there be a primarily Votann party using rogue trader or only war? If a Votann "Origin Path" was built, a bunch of Rogue Trader classes would mostly work as is. Same with Only War, A Votann "Regiment" would do a lot of heavy lifting for running Votann in that system.

"Leave the raider to me."

if anyone wants to see the first draft of the starting skills and traits, stat advance table, and rank 1 advances let me know and I can PM the link to the google doc. I should have a couple of Votann weapons done tonight as well. Cloneskeins and more weapons tomorrow.

I will give people a few days before I have you shuttle over to the galleon

The message to the Arbites goes out and there is no immediate response. The Galleon acknowledges your message and transmits details of where to dock your shuttle or thunderhawk on their ship. Their activity seems otherwise unchanged.

OTTOMH?

Would Cloneskein work better as their special ability? Basically a "Chose one of the following options:" which are all +5 to a specific stat and something else.

so I haven't had a ton of time this week between work and trying to make progress on some actual paid rpg work. But I am thinking that the initial Votann Rogue Trader class, which I am tentatively calling "Votann Surveyor" will have Strength, Toughness and Intelligence as their cheap stat upgrades with Fellowship and Agility as two of their bad stat upgrades. I am also thinking they will start with less free XP compared to other RT characters because they will get a choice of what cloneskein they have. each cloneskein (I will probably have 3) will probably be +5 to a stat and a talent/trait.

I rolled a 93 on my Navigation (Surface) check, so Ven is of no use at this moment.

I agree that it would be good to do something like this in stages rather than trying to tackle everything at once. I think the most logical would be to start with a single RT character class + small armoury of appropriate new weapons. But I don't see why a Squat Prospector would be more logical than an actual Votann character. RT already has rules for multiple xenos player characters, an Abhuman would not be a stretch. After that I think the second phase would be figuring out generic NPC profiles for some Votann/Squat stuff, including some ship classes. Third would probably other character classes for RT and OW. Though with only war, I wonder if you could largely get away with basically treating being Votann as the party "regiment" and then only really needing that + weapons. Most OW classes could be somewhat easily reskinned as a Votann equivalent.

Welcome to the nook. I think a Drukhari campaign, while potentially interesting, would also be rather challenging to run. Not in terms of mechanics, but in the story and themes. The Dark eldar are bad people, to the point that even in 40k they rank pretty high on a "Who are the worst people in this setting" scale. I don't see how you could run a Drukhari campaign without a pile of mature themes that many people don't want to deal with in their rpgs or that encourage problematic player actions. It would have to be a campaign where the players and GM talked extensively about how to handle that, and what would be acceptable and not. That level of effort would need a really awesome campaign idea to justify I think. With 40k often being very Imperium of Man centric, from a worldbuilding/lore perspective there are plenty of areas that would also be very interesting to explore that I think would be less challenging.