Black Crusade Ideas.

[SlightlyEstranged]

Hello everyone! I'm a first time gm running a black crusade group at my fraternity and I've got a good group of guys hooked on the 40k universe. The problem is I'm starting to run out of ideas for where to go next with my campaign. The group is 3 humans and two space marines (2 psykers, apostate, chosen, and forsaken). It's fairly early in the campaign, and I had them on an imperial world trying to escape, and destroy a rival group that culminated in discovering a violent gang was being backed by a Word Bearer who summoned, via sacrifice, several bloodletters to destroy the PC's. The PC's one with a couple casualtys and are now heading to a deep space space station on the edge of the screaming vortex. They eventually want to organize a Black Crusade so the Vortex is where I want them to go. I guess what I'm asking after a little bit of rambling is what would be some good little adventures in the Vortex that would eventually lead them to power.

Ideas that I have so far.

Fall under the patronage of someone in the vortex.

Do missions such as removing rivals/secretly gathering power/discovering arcane lore.

Come upon a ritual/tech that could turn a young adolescent into a marine (physically at least) and wrest it from those that control it.

Recurring villains from each character's origin story.

I'd like some extra ideas as I'm not the most creative individual.

Many thanks for those that respond!

[Grimmeth]

I'm just starting up a game myself, however the compacts system could definitely be your friend here:

If we break down the idea of starting a Black Crusade - effectively the PC's want to build an army and start a war.
To do that they're going to need soldiers, weapons, transport, general logistics (food, supply chains etc) and intelligence on where/when to attack.
We could just pick one of those - say Soldiers.
With that aim in mind they then just need to decide where to get these soldiers from (Penal Colony? Corrupt an existing Military? Cult Uprising?)
From there story ideas should be starting to form, if we went for corrupting an existing military - how would they do that? Shatter their morale by assassinating their key Priests/Commissars and then implant someone themselves to take over (The Apostate could work there)? Corrupt their senior command members (insert whichever Chaos God's methods they choose to follow)? Destroy their loved ones while the army is out on manouvers and frame The Imperium for doing so?

That's just ideas off the top of my head, but hopefully you should be able to drill some ideas down from those for some games.

[Steam_Giant]

I think Grimmeth has made some great points.

I suggest that, similar to the Rogue Trader system of Endeavours, it might be worth letting the Players drive the story forward, with whatever they want to do.

[Grimmeth]

I might be able to help a little more by detailing my current plans (but not in too much detail - you never know when those sneaky players are reading...)
I've just ran through the starter adventure online (which was so-so, had to alter things a little to tidy it up and make it a little more interesting) and am planning on running through the adventure in the main rule book next, followed by the one that comes with the GM guide - by this point I should
I've had the players already start to think about where they want to go and what they want to do, and one of the main points that has come up is that they want to repair the ship that they were originally captured on and crew that as their own vessel - there's potentially a multitude of games in here (Repairing the ship, finding a crew, sourcing upgrades, currying favours with others to do all of this etc - thankfully I've got the Rogue Trader book which will likely help here - as most of the ship rules are in that.)

The main thing I've noticed is that the Heretics are all very powerful (especialy when compared to Dark Heresy starting characters) - the Psyker can quite happily nuke a large chunk of any attackers that come along (but then invariably hits Perils of the Warp and something nasty happens), the Heretek is awesome at anything Intelligence based and is turning into quite a nice sniper - although his Servo Arm does unbelievable damage up close and the Forsaken Chaos Space Marine is turning into a bit of a duelist and has his own weird twisted sort of morale code developing - can't hit the broad side of a barn with a ranged weapon though!
They all enjoyed hacking through Murder Servitors and Inquisitorial Alpha Acolytes but that's going to get real old real fast - I'm going to need to find something a bit more challenging without being too OTT soon (so Grey Knights are likely out of the equation just yet.)