The Rogue Trader dynasty at the heart of this adventure have a treasure map and they plan to use it. Coming to the world of Solace, they find an industrious hiveworld busy supporting the new campaign in the Spinward Front. However, the cargo in the hold is little more than a distraction, as the map points to a cache of xenotech certain to raise reputation and profits alike.

The Shedding Light adventure is one of four based around Solace, written for convention play, interlinked and showcasing one of four different variants of Warhammer 40K from Fantasy Flight Games.

As a con game, it's solid. You have a basic background on the situation, a gazetteer for Solace, and the adventure proper, which breaks down to arrival, planet fall, finding the destination, and investigating. The investigation has a variable length, so if you have a con slot, you can pull one or more encounters to fit the session. At the end, you have all the stats you need for the adversary, plus SIX pre-generated characters - something I found to be a great addition, especially as they're designed at 3,000XP. You have six ready to use characters with some oomph behind them to showcase the game/system - which can sometimes be hard with characters created as if direct from basic creation.

If you want to use the mission as part of a personal campaign, I think you will want to do some serious work to it. None of the NPCs in the hive/docking control have any more detail than a couple of skills for opposed checks. Only the end game adversaries have detailed stats. You get a broad brush overview of the planet, and no maps. As a setting, it's a blank slate with just enough to get through the session and nothing more. However, like the convention scenario, Shedding Light could easily serve as a nice introductory mission if you wanted to sell your gaming group on playing games in the Warhammer 40K universe.

On a final note, I really like the linked mission angle. If you have four slots available at a con, you can run these and get a buzz going. In your home group, running the four could get a totally different vibe, as the players cotton on to the extent of the doom that has come to Solace. Really, there's a lot of cleaning up to do here...