The Inside Scoop on Gaming

I used to be a huge fan of Warhammer 40,000.

Bought the minatures and everything. One box of Space Marines, one box of Orks - nobody else played, so I had to buy both sides - and constant poring over compilations of old White Dwarf articles.

I even bought the Battle Manual. Right before they brought out the boxed version, which contained everything that I'd been buying over the last little while - including two armies, clearer rules, and blast templates. About that time, my ardor for WH40K cooled rapidly.

But I kept the original rules - I can't even remember why, now. And now that Warhammer 40,000 has gone to the third edition, I thought that I'd go back to look at the first edition, to see what had caught my eye in the original version.

And it's still pretty cool, despite the different directions that the game goes in. Rather than being the ultra-gothic,sooper-dark universe of the current edition, Rogue Trader portrays a universe that's slowly pulling itself out of anarchy, fighting against mysterious alien races and the forces of the Warp. Astral spectres instead of demons. Tyranids that look like early versions of Termagants and who control Zoats, and Genestealers who look like big leeches with legs. Space Marines that are weak as kittens compared to their current status. And the Emporer is still dead.

I won't say that this game is one of the best that I've played - it certainly isn't. It can't seem to decide whether it wants to be a wargame or a role-playing game - it has rules for minature combat, but there's quite a bit of material on characters in the game, and the various adventures that they can go into. There's extended riffs on the various factions of the Imperium, but very, very little information on anything else - the Eldar barely get three pages, and the Orks only have slightly more.

But there's plenty of meat. The 4 star rating that I gave this product comes from purely archival material - not only can you see what the original design plans for the Warhammer 40K world were like, you can see the germs of ideas that later matured into entire armies later in the game's development. A single picture on page 269 likely inspired the entire Sisters of Battle line. The Genestealers and Tyranids are given some description, but so are the Slaan and Jokaero, two races that didn't make the cut into the game later. The Genestealers themselves are sandwiched in with Cthellen Cudbears, Ferro-beasts and the like. There's also complete listings of weapons, vehicles, and a whole boatload of alien creatures and plant life. And rules to play characters. And a gigantic list of story ideas for games. And tons of art. And little short fiction blurbs. It's unbelievable that the book has as much information as it does.

The rules? The thing about them is that they're fairly old - my book was printed in 1990, but the rules go back to 1987. I've tried them once - they're the early progenitors of later GW systems. You roll to hit on six-sided dice, then cross-reference on a chart to measure Strength vs. Toughness, then roll to see if your armor saves you. For close combat, it's the same thing, which is guaranteed to cause wrist-slitting when close combats get big. But for a game this old, there's a lot of stuff that survives - follow-up moves, area weapons, save modifiers.

There's also, as mentioned before, a listing of every piece of equipment that you could possibly want to equip your characters with. There's even a sling, for God's sake - take that up against a Hive Tyrant sometime. There's also psychic powers, mutations, bionics, power fields, and vehicle rules - everything is paid for with points, which means that there's some level of game balance included. Army lists are included. In spirit, at least. Instead of picking out what you want, there's a bunch of random charts included. Normal troop types don't get a lot of variety, but special characters have the potential to be lugging around multi-meltas on a good dice roll. The point system lets you balance out battles, but it'll require tons of flipping back and forth between the army list and the point values.

Is it playable? Yes and no. If you keep the game small, and makes characters interesting, then yes, you can play it. A fight between two 2000-point armies is guaranteed to be a lot of time and a headache, too, since there's kinks in the game that need to be ironed out. Then again, I doubt that you're going to buy this for its play value.

The tone of Rogue Trader is what makes it such a fascinating read. It draws a lot of inspiration from the British comic 2000 AD, and the comics that ran within it - Strontium Dog, Rogue Trooper and Judge Dredd are obvious influences. I imagine that most games were meant to be played with Rogue Traders - independent agents commissioned by the Imperium to explore outer worlds, complete with a retinue of PCs. Rather than playing an entire race, you're one guy and his friends in a universe that hasn't even begun to be mapped out. And there's no shortages of places to go and things to do, either. The Imperium exists as a menacing force in the background, tyrannical and irrational - there's no Emperor worship, no Horus Heresy, no Chaos, and so the Imperium's measures even darker. The Space Marines are bald, scarred, grim-faced ogres in power armor, carrying outre weapons in some of the most barren cityscapes I've seen; the Adeptus Mechanicus look even worse, wearing robes and armor that make them look worse than any conventional GW demon. You can play armies off against each other, but the book doesn't seem to have been designed with that in mind.

The organization is what kills this book. There's no real excuse for it - pictures, flavor text, and rules are splattered in equal measures across the book, as if the authors are eager to show you everything at once. The rules are fine, but clotted thick with clip art and flavor quotes that make it difficult to read. The equipment section is the worst, where the designers throw in as much art as they can. Admittedly, not all of it is bad, but there's enough poor choices to leave you with an impression that the layout wasn't planned beforehand.

What seems especially baffling is the way that the art is used. The equipment section starts and stops - midway through, there's a full-page picture of a Rogue Trader, breaking up the flow of the text. The section about grenades has a gigantic two-page spread of Eldar pirates flying in on what look like insect wings - the rules themselves have a small paragraph in the lower-right hand corner and continue onto the next page. Later, in the world book, the art gets easier to look at, since it doesn't interrupt rules, but there are some baffling choices - a two-page, poor illustration of what looks like a spaceship taking off prefaces a chapter, for no good reason. A humorous, painted picture of a Marine shooting a sniper-Ork is crunched into a thumbnail portrait, making you squint to see the story it tells. The rules for the Jokaero are split by a haunting picture of Space Marines raising their flag into the sky, Iwo Jima style, but that art splits an important piece of information in two. You could probably chop the page count - and price - of this book by half just by removing and reformatting ninety percent of the art.

But the art. Like I said above, there's a lot of very worthwhile art in this book, although the design choices utterly ruin certian pieces. But the stuff that does make it through is fantastic, including the delicate, cross-hatched work of an artist whose vision of the WH40K universe is guaranteed to get your attention - it _could_ be Ian Miller, but I'm not sure. His version of the Adeptus Mechanicus has buzzsaws, bone and tubing sticking out from the masks in equal measure, including one who has two faces set into the same mask. (What's underneath? Do we really want to know?) The other art ranges substantially. The book's art does range widely, but shares enough similarities to make it clear that they're in the same universe. The sheer variety alone is worth looking at, just to see what WH40K looked like before they standardized things.

Is it worth buying? If you're a fan of Warhammer 40,000, as a collector's item, the answer is yes - it gives a wonderful view of the roots of WH40K, and there's a lot of possibility here - something that I felt was missing from the 2nd and 3rd edition of WH40K. There's also potential for developing WH40K from the standard model, if you're so inclined. I've seen homebrew rules for adapting WH40K to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay somewhere out there...

If you're not a fan, though, flip through Rogue Trader, and then see how much it's been simplified and cut back for the 3rd edition - a single note played at top volume, just in case there's some bacteria on Mars that aren't aware that the WH40K world is Sooper Dark. The game evolved away from its origins, and rightly so, but it's worth flipping through just to see how it evolved.

-Darren MacLennan

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
Author: Rick Priestly Category: miniature Company/Publisher: Games Workshop / Citadel Minatures Cost: $20.00 (?) Page count: 292 Capsule Review by Darren MacLennan on 01/12/99. Genre tags: Fantasy Science_fiction Horror Far_Future Space Gothic	I used to be a huge fan of Warhammer 40,000. Bought the minatures and everything. One box of Space Marines, one box of Orks - nobody else played, so I had to buy both sides - and constant poring over compilations of old White Dwarf articles. I even bought the Battle Manual. Right before they brought out the boxed version, which contained everything that I'd been buying over the last little while - including two armies, clearer rules, and blast templates. About that time, my ardor for WH40K cooled rapidly. But I kept the original rules - I can't even remember why, now. And now that Warhammer 40,000 has gone to the third edition, I thought that I'd go back to look at the first edition, to see what had caught my eye in the original version. And it's still pretty cool, despite the different directions that the game goes in. Rather than being the ultra-gothic,sooper-dark universe of the current edition, Rogue Trader portrays a universe that's slowly pulling itself out of anarchy, fighting against mysterious alien races and the forces of the Warp. Astral spectres instead of demons. Tyranids that look like early versions of Termagants and who control Zoats, and Genestealers who look like big leeches with legs. Space Marines that are weak as kittens compared to their current status. And the Emporer is still dead. I won't say that this game is one of the best that I've played - it certainly isn't. It can't seem to decide whether it wants to be a wargame or a role-playing game - it has rules for minature combat, but there's quite a bit of material on characters in the game, and the various adventures that they can go into. There's extended riffs on the various factions of the Imperium, but very, very little information on anything else - the Eldar barely get three pages, and the Orks only have slightly more. But there's plenty of meat. The 4 star rating that I gave this product comes from purely archival material - not only can you see what the original design plans for the Warhammer 40K world were like, you can see the germs of ideas that later matured into entire armies later in the game's development. A single picture on page 269 likely inspired the entire Sisters of Battle line. The Genestealers and Tyranids are given some description, but so are the Slaan and Jokaero, two races that didn't make the cut into the game later. The Genestealers themselves are sandwiched in with Cthellen Cudbears, Ferro-beasts and the like. There's also complete listings of weapons, vehicles, and a whole boatload of alien creatures and plant life. And rules to play characters. And a gigantic list of story ideas for games. And tons of art. And little short fiction blurbs. It's unbelievable that the book has as much information as it does. The rules? The thing about them is that they're fairly old - my book was printed in 1990, but the rules go back to 1987. I've tried them once - they're the early progenitors of later GW systems. You roll to hit on six-sided dice, then cross-reference on a chart to measure Strength vs. Toughness, then roll to see if your armor saves you. For close combat, it's the same thing, which is guaranteed to cause wrist-slitting when close combats get big. But for a game this old, there's a lot of stuff that survives - follow-up moves, area weapons, save modifiers. There's also, as mentioned before, a listing of every piece of equipment that you could possibly want to equip your characters with. There's even a sling, for God's sake - take that up against a Hive Tyrant sometime. There's also psychic powers, mutations, bionics, power fields, and vehicle rules - everything is paid for with points, which means that there's some level of game balance included. Army lists are included. In spirit, at least. Instead of picking out what you want, there's a bunch of random charts included. Normal troop types don't get a lot of variety, but special characters have the potential to be lugging around multi-meltas on a good dice roll. The point system lets you balance out battles, but it'll require tons of flipping back and forth between the army list and the point values. Is it playable? Yes and no. If you keep the game small, and makes characters interesting, then yes, you can play it. A fight between two 2000-point armies is guaranteed to be a lot of time and a headache, too, since there's kinks in the game that need to be ironed out. Then again, I doubt that you're going to buy this for its play value. The tone of Rogue Trader is what makes it such a fascinating read. It draws a lot of inspiration from the British comic 2000 AD, and the comics that ran within it - Strontium Dog, Rogue Trooper and Judge Dredd are obvious influences. I imagine that most games were meant to be played with Rogue Traders - independent agents commissioned by the Imperium to explore outer worlds, complete with a retinue of PCs. Rather than playing an entire race, you're one guy and his friends in a universe that hasn't even begun to be mapped out. And there's no shortages of places to go and things to do, either. The Imperium exists as a menacing force in the background, tyrannical and irrational - there's no Emperor worship, no Horus Heresy, no Chaos, and so the Imperium's measures even darker. The Space Marines are bald, scarred, grim-faced ogres in power armor, carrying outre weapons in some of the most barren cityscapes I've seen; the Adeptus Mechanicus look even worse, wearing robes and armor that make them look worse than any conventional GW demon. You can play armies off against each other, but the book doesn't seem to have been designed with that in mind. The organization is what kills this book. There's no real excuse for it - pictures, flavor text, and rules are splattered in equal measures across the book, as if the authors are eager to show you everything at once. The rules are fine, but clotted thick with clip art and flavor quotes that make it difficult to read. The equipment section is the worst, where the designers throw in as much art as they can. Admittedly, not all of it is bad, but there's enough poor choices to leave you with an impression that the layout wasn't planned beforehand. What seems especially baffling is the way that the art is used. The equipment section starts and stops - midway through, there's a full-page picture of a Rogue Trader, breaking up the flow of the text. The section about grenades has a gigantic two-page spread of Eldar pirates flying in on what look like insect wings - the rules themselves have a small paragraph in the lower-right hand corner and continue onto the next page. Later, in the world book, the art gets easier to look at, since it doesn't interrupt rules, but there are some baffling choices - a two-page, poor illustration of what looks like a spaceship taking off prefaces a chapter, for no good reason. A humorous, painted picture of a Marine shooting a sniper-Ork is crunched into a thumbnail portrait, making you squint to see the story it tells. The rules for the Jokaero are split by a haunting picture of Space Marines raising their flag into the sky, Iwo Jima style, but that art splits an important piece of information in two. You could probably chop the page count - and price - of this book by half just by removing and reformatting ninety percent of the art. But the art. Like I said above, there's a lot of very worthwhile art in this book, although the design choices utterly ruin certian pieces. But the stuff that does make it through is fantastic, including the delicate, cross-hatched work of an artist whose vision of the WH40K universe is guaranteed to get your attention - it _could_ be Ian Miller, but I'm not sure. His version of the Adeptus Mechanicus has buzzsaws, bone and tubing sticking out from the masks in equal measure, including one who has two faces set into the same mask. (What's underneath? Do we really want to know?) The other art ranges substantially. The book's art does range widely, but shares enough similarities to make it clear that they're in the same universe. The sheer variety alone is worth looking at, just to see what WH40K looked like before they standardized things. Is it worth buying? If you're a fan of Warhammer 40,000, as a collector's item, the answer is yes - it gives a wonderful view of the roots of WH40K, and there's a lot of possibility here - something that I felt was missing from the 2nd and 3rd edition of WH40K. There's also potential for developing WH40K from the standard model, if you're so inclined. I've seen homebrew rules for adapting WH40K to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay somewhere out there... If you're not a fan, though, flip through Rogue Trader, and then see how much it's been simplified and cut back for the 3rd edition - a single note played at top volume, just in case there's some bacteria on Mars that aren't aware that the WH40K world is Sooper Dark. The game evolved away from its origins, and rightly so, but it's worth flipping through just to see how it evolved. -Darren MacLennan Style: 4 (Classy and well done) Substance: 4 (Meaty)

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader