Campaign Prep - Rogue Trader

And the blog is back! I took an unannounced hiatus from the blog for a couple weeks, mostly because there was nothing really going on. I've been reading novels rather than game books, and my PbP games have slowed down a bit with the holidays, so I didn't have a whole lot to say on gaming.

But now, I'm back to gaming, and first up for this year is Rogue Trader. I love this game. It's complex, super detailed, steeped in Warhammer 40k lore, and fairly difficult to pick up for a newbie to the setting, but despite all its flaws, there's something about it that really sings for me. It's like a cross between Star Trek, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Event Horizon. You don't just have a starship, you have a multi-mile long gothic cathedral capable of flying through hell itself and blasting all life from the surface of a planet. You don't just have a chief engineer, you have an Explorator Tech Priest of the Adeptus Mechanicus who may literally be more machine than man. You don't just carry around a pistol, you carry a miniature plasma reactor that happens to be shaped like a pistol and which fires blasts of pure plasma capable of immolating or melting whatever they hit.

It's over the top, gloriously violent, and is explicitly about flying around the galaxy and looting whatever the hell you find, all in the name of the God-Emperor and the Imperium of Mankind. And I love it.

How badass is this? Seriously, these are the kind of characters I want to play.
Picture from FFG.

So why did I title this post Campaign Prep? Because I'm leaning toward trying to run it via PbP this year. Maybe not this week or even this month, but I haven't been able to play very much of this game and one of my New Year's resolutions is to fix that. Hopefully I'll get in some Dark Heresy or Deathwatch too, but Rogue Trader is the main 40k game I'm looking to run.

But, in spite of my love of Rogue Trader, I've never GMed it, and I'm honestly not all that experienced with the system, since every group I've been in fell apart for one reason or another. I've played both a Rogue Trader and an Explorator, but both were fairly brief stints, so I'm asking you guys for your Rogue Trader GM tips. Which published adventures are good? Which are bad? Am I better off trying to write something of my own, or even just throwing together a quick sandbox and winging it?

Above all, what are your thoughts on Rogue Trader? Better/worse than the other 40k RPGs?