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Because I believe Bias is important to note, a little about me: I started gaming in the late 80s with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, mostly because my mom would not buy me D&D, at age 15. I have run just about every game that has rolled out. I enjoy more narrative games, I spend enough of my money on books and character sheets and I just don’t want to buy more stuff to play a game. So I need a balance in my rules, a strong setting with appropriate rules that don't bog down my vision.
But enough about me, lets talk Rogue Trader!
First of all this game is the sequel to Dark Heresy. Dark Heresy has you play some inexperienced acolytes to an inquisitor, some random cat’s-paws for the inquisitor’s grand games. As you grow in experience you gain more notoriety until you become a powerful force to be reckoned with in your own right, but (so far) you will end up less than an inquisitor but more than the rank and file of Mankind. The Experience charts cap you out for Experience at around 15,000. Its also heavily pointed to inquisitorial intrigue and investigation, your primary task is to hunt the Xeno (alien influence or life form), the Mutant (those twisted by dark energies), and the Heratic (those who worship dark forces or support ideas that are an anathema to the Imperium of Man). As they hunt these forces in the default setting they get to see the Warhammer 40K world as the inquisition does, seeing how these insidious forces undermine humanity for control of space. You can do other things but the game is focused on giving the players a feel for the dystopian society of the Imperium of Man and showing why they militantly oppose certain things out of hand.
Rogue Trader immediately takes you to a completely different place. A Rogue Trader is given a mandate, the Warrant of Trade, to seek out new worlds and technology. They are allowed to talk to Xenos and decide if they should be further pursued as allies. They are allowed to openly consort with some of enemies of the Imperium, such as the mysterious race knows as the Eldar. In addition the primary focus is to improve your profits, not to investigate and destroy evil. It’s a game that explores some of the freest characters in the Imperium.
So, on to the book!
Clocking in around 400 pages, it’s a monster. And the price tag is no joke, 60.00 here in the states! But it is gorgeous, lots of artwork and full color on every page. Some of this art may be recycled, but its new to me and I like what I am seeing here.
There are 15 chapters and a forward. Let’s take a little time and look into each chapter.
The first chapter is all about character creation. The designers really want to support this game with Dark Heresy, so if you have made a Dark Heresy character up to 5000 xp you are about equal with the starting characters in this game. The character creation system is very different, however, from what came before. Dark Heresy has a lot of charts and you can completely create a character, right down to their eye color, with random rolls. No such system here. Now we have a Character Path system which is a series of choices that add new abilities and advantages until you pick your career and put the finishing touches on your new crewman.
Personally I was very fond of the random rolling for home world and such, I know a lot of rules lawyers, min-maxers and generally indecisive people and part of the fun I had with Dark Heresy was telling the roll and suck it up. Very rarely did folks get something they hated to play and even then it was just a quick re-roll on having them make a pick instead on one table. This career path system brings back the min-maxing and power playing and that is not something I am too fond of, but I can whip up some charts if I have to.
The upside of this system is when people pick a common element, such as two players who have a criminal background; you can cross pollinate their backgrounds into one shared event. Maybe they were both gangers on a hive world who stepped wrong and signed on to a trade vessel to escape with their lives. The upside is this gives a GM plenty of opportunity to create a more compelling character history uniting the crew than “so, there you were with your new Warrant of Trade when….”
At least they still have banging random name generators. I love that about this setting, there is a wealth of good setting names available!
Chapter 2 is all about the careers and their advancements. They went away from separate xp charts for each career (Upgrade!) and they did away with branching paths (Downgrade.) The branching paths was one of the more interesting things about the Dark Heresy line, the fact that two Guardsmen specialize in different ways helped to give two players who rolled some guardsmen different options to make each stand out more. Now a Navigator ends up with the same options as any other Navigator. I would have really preferred some branching paths for each career.
The basic Careers are:
Rogue Trader: The big man (or woman) themselves. A diplomat and trade master, the ship captain, and the built in team leader.
Arch-Militant: A combat specialist. The man with a gun and the will to use it.
Astropath Transcendent: A super telepath. Astropaths are bonded to the Emperor of Man; this makes them capable of telepathically transmitting messages across the galaxy. The Transcendent is capable of manifesting new powers beyond the telepathy that defines an Astropath.
Explorator: A tech priest who is authorized to review and examine new and alien technology to see if its of use to the Imperium or if its tainted beyond usefulness.
Missionary: A person who is bringing the word of the Emperor to the masses in space. They evaluate whether new worlds worship dark forces or if they are just misguided and then direct them to the true path of the God-Emperor.
Navigator: Someone who has the precious Navigator mutation, sanctioned by the Imperium due to their incredible ability to see the warp through their third eye and make travel in the Warp safer.
Seneschal: Accountant and master spy. Here is the guy who needs to know everything and knows how to get it; he is also an expert assassin.
Void-Master: A trained ship systems operator. He knows how to run the ship systems for one of the main stations and knows more about ship operations than any other career (including the Trader).
Each career gets a special ability to make each career stand out even more from the rest.
I was a little disappointed in the options, Dark Heresy has so many iconic types (Psyker, Guardsman, Assassin, Arbiter, Tech Priest) that many of these careers titles don’t inspire the way the previous games did. Don’t get me wrong, some do deliver excitement but for fans of the setting this feels like a B team to the Dark Heresy A team line up. Also, there is still no Space Marines. Sorry fan boys, but rumor has it they will get their very own game line next year (Deathwatch).
Chapter 3 goes over skills. There are several new skills, and several repeats from Dark Heresy. This is a pretty clear cut section; each skill is reviewed and explained. While it does not make a big difference for this review it is something you are going to want to review. There are a few skills with odd names (for me) so a review here is a good idea so you don’t mistake one skill for another.
Chapter 4 goes over Talents. Of particular note are the Universal talents that grant complete training in a particular class or type of weapon. They are quite costly and some (like Basic) are great deals and others (for example, Flame) seem to be bad bargains. This is meant to ensure that your Trader characters are as capable as their Dark Heresy compatriots but while Dark Heresy characters chose type and class for weapon training they are much cheaper and makes for, in my opinion, a more interesting character than one with Universal Pistols and Universal Basic who can use just about everything. This is more of a personal opinion than a real criticism.
Aside from that talent its like Dark Heresy (and 3rd edition d&d before it) where they add capabilities to your character. Often times, especially in this game, it’s your talents and not your weapons that make a difference. Anyone can dual wield with significant penalties, the guy with Two-Weapon Ballistic is the one who is the most effective, especially if they are also Ambidextrous.
Next up in the Armory, chapter 5. Guns, guns, stuff, swords and then Guns. They have made things a little more interesting by introducing different patterns for guns. These tweak a weapon to be a little more in one way or another, like make a sword more balanced for parry or do a little more damage.
The chapter is an in depth explorations of Astropaths (Chapter 6). The Astropath part shows off a new way to do Psykers, focusing more on power manifestation and less on perils of the Warp.
It makes manifesting powers a little less dangerous, since you need to roll doubles to invoke the warp now unless you make a fettered check for a routine and simple manifestation. It also makes Psyker power checks more like a skill check, instead of adding dice and having a target number you now need to roll under the associated stat with a 5% bonus for each point you have in Psy Rating. For example, if you want to Inspire someone you would check against Willpower with a 10% bonus (psy rating 2 gives you a 10% bonus to the stat). So if your rolling to manifest the power and have a willpower of 45 you need to roll less than 55 on percentile dice. The old way had you roll your Psy Rating with an overall bonus of your Willpower modifier. Same power with a threshold of 15 to activate the power had you roll 2d10 (not percentile but your psy rating) with a +4 to the roll. But if you ever rolled a 9 on any of your test dice and you went screaming to the Perils of the Warp table. At first that does not seem so bad but as you increase your psy rating you get increased likelihood of perils. There have been tales of folks testing for basic powers and becoming unbound Demon hosts at rank one, that is a total party kill folks. The new system keeps the risk even the whole time so instead of getting more chance to invoke the Warp you just get better at making it happen.
Telepathy also gets something of an overhaul with the new Astropath making them more dangerous. There are also rules for Divination, which seem to be an overhaul of Clairvoyance from Dark Heresy, and Telekinesis. The Astropath stuff also includes a conversion discussion for folks who want to bring a Dark Heresy Psyker along for the ride with the new rules.
Chapter 7 reviews the Navigator, a mutant capable of seeing the Warp through their third eye and allowing long distance travel when they are guiding the ship in the Warp. This ability to see in the Warp is done via their mind, they see it when they sensory deprive themselves but without this mutation space travel would be all but impossible. Their powers are treated like Psyker abilities, so when something interferes with Psyker powers it interferes with a Navigators abilities, but they are not Psyker powers. The system is different, using opposed checks instead of standard stat checks for effect. They can also be very powerful in combat with area effect powers (they all get the Lidless Stare that affects all targets in a certain space who take damage that they can not soak!) but are very valuable to mission so taking them with you on every planet can be something of a risk. They can take any of their powers three times: The first time gives them the power, the second improves its effect, the third expands it abilities in some way. For example, the Lidless stare does straight damage with the first selection, doubles the damage and adds insanity and stun with the second selection, and the third time anyone damaged by it must make an immediate test or be slain. Other powers are less combat focused, for example Tracks in Space allow the navigator to track other vessels in the Warp and Void Watcher allows the Navigator to sense disturbances in local space to detect things the ships Augers may have missed (Augers are sensors in Warhammer 40K).
Navigators are very intriguing to me. Their powers are very different in scope and effect from a psykers, they are an iconic part of the 40K universe, and they present a very different power system from the psyker system. Bravo, they have made what could have been a very boring addition to the crew (mutant pathfinder) far more interesting.
The next chapter, Chapter 8, reviews the most important thing in the game aside from the players: Starships. The systems for getting a ship up and running are very simple and straightforward. Every vessel has some quirks and the Machine Spirit has some kinks, nicely this is reflected with a chart for random generation reflecting the unpredictable nature of the technologies they use and don’t understand. Building the vessel is quick and interesting; each vessel is selected by buying the shell and then adding essential components. This tells you how much space and power you have left after the necessary parts are added in. After that the players can select additional components until they run out of points to buy stuff, space on their vessel, or power availability. Its also nicely open ended, new components are easy to add as the game line expands. This section wraps up with ship to ship combat rules which do a good job of allowing the players to contribute to starship fights without giving one player all the responsibilities.
Chapter 9 is the meat and potatos of every game, the rules. They do a good job of reviewing the various actions capable at each phase of the combat and effects of your various maneuvers. As an old hat at Dark Heresy I have been running with these rules for while now and after skimming the chapter I moved on, there is not a lot of change her that I noticed on the basic rules and combat rules. Basically you have three phases to each combat: A Full action, a reaction action, and a free action. You can also break your full action into half actions, but in the end you can only take the equivenlent of a full action per round, react to one action a round and take a free action as often as you like (there really is no limit here but I wont let my players make speeches with their free actions and if it gets ridiculous in my opinion they are done. I had a player once try to give 6 three sentence warnings about stuff happening around him and vetoed the whole thing). A new player or GM really needs to look over this chapter, when I was starting out with Dark Heresy we had a really hard time hitting things and it seemed like everyone was neigh untouchable until we realized things like point blank shooting gives +30 to your Balistics skill. When you have a 35 and try to roll under that you are going to miss 2 out of 3 shots, when you realize that point blank is +30 your hitting 2 out of 3 shots. That’s massive. When you add in automatic fire (+20, each degree of success (multiple of 10 you score under the target number) an additional bullet/shot hits with each shot rolled for damage separately) there was a sudden run on auto guns. For the record, same character as above with a 35 (which is dead average for a starting Trader level character) at point blank range that’s +50%, so they need to roll under 75% to hit. If you roll a 23 you have hit the target with 5 degrees of success. Each shot is 1d10+3, so that’s a total damage of 5d10+15 where most characters have a total soak value of 5 (Toughness bonus of 2 with around 3 points of armor) and wounds of around 9-10. Now each bullet is rolled and soaked separately but that still rips most foes in half within a round.
As I previously stated the combat rules are nothing new for me, but following this part came the Exploration rules heading that has, of all things, Skill Challenges! You set a target number of degrees of success and then the party applies their abilities to this task until the target degrees are achieved! All kidding aside, this is a good system allowing players to leverage their abilities in unison to achieve targets that otherwise would have been a pass/fail affair. They also discuss how to apply this to Investigation tests and the dangers of trying to rush these types of tests. Good stuff.
The next part that caught my eyes are the rules for Profit Factor. The days of tracking thrones (money) are long gone, now your Trader has a whole bunch of scribes and accountants tracking cash flow and you have a freaking STARSHIP! Money counting is peasant work. When you want something you make a profit factor check, like it’s a stat. At first its going to be either less than you would like or its going to be high enough to get whatever you want and then your going focus on other things. As mentioned previously this is a game where the gear is less a measure of your abilities than your actual abilities. Power Armor is all well and good, but if no one can talk their way past an imperial blockade and call the commander names your dead from the void just as quick as the un-armored crew men. Even when you get it you will peridodically need to make test to ensure that maintance and repairs are being kept up on it, stuff falls apart and repairs for these fabulous toys can only be done by very specialized folks. On the other hand your profit factor is rarely impacted by these purchases. The tests are more about how you throw your weight around to get what you need (and how likely what you want/need is available) than actually spending money for it.
There are also rules for how to create Endeavors, which is a framework on how to increase Profit Factor. Basically it’s a three step objective, each step requires an amount of achievement points related to completing that steps goal, and when all three steps are complete the profit factor improves by the predetermined amount. For example, the crew wants to establish a colony (+3 profit). The first task might be to find a sutable world or it might be to find financial backers for the operation. After several skill tests, maybe a short adventure or scene, they get the needed successes and achieve enough points to move on to the next objective. They find the world in the Kronos Expanse (the sector that is base setting for game) and start setting up the colony. More adventures and skill checks later they have the needed points to move on to the last phase. Here they discover some pirates or raiders plan to prey on the new colony, so they set out to deal with them. Once they mop up these foes the Endeavor is complete and profit goes up by +3. The achievement points are almost like group experience and are by and large just a tracking system for the GM to determine when they have put in enough effort to justify moving on to the next objective. After the description several samples are presented, both themes (like exploration or setting up smuggling rings for Xeno artifacts) and specific examples for each theme to show you how to flesh it out.
Chapter 10 is the Game Master section. It covers general advice on how to run the game, when to reward the players and how, and the different setting styles. It also discuses Insanity and Corruption, which are largely the same as Dark Heresy with only a few refinements to the charts as far as I can see. Now I have not compared Dark Heresy to Rogue Trader side by side but they seem pretty similar.
Chapter 11, 12 and 13 cover the Imperium of Man, Rogue Traders culture, and the Kronos Expanse. The reason I am discussing them all at once is because they are all setting chapters giving a deeper understanding to their topic in the setting. Everyone should be reading the Rogue Trader and Kronos Expanse chapters, the Imperium chapter is an overview of the Imperium as a whole and discusses things that folks familiar with the setting will probably skip over. All three chapters are rich with information and plot ideas, especially the chapter on the areas of the Kronos Expanse. Of particular note are the discussions of the Kroot, the Eldar, and Ork interests in the sector.
Chapter 14 stats out some foes for you, you get a nice cross section of various imperial characters and roles as well as some common Xeno races and such. This secton was very much lacking in needed types, there were not enough alien races for a game about exploration and first contact. There should have been at least a race generator, and I am sure a future supplement (like the GMs Screen) will include it but its absence is a serious stain on the books completeness. I know that there are other resources, I own them from Dark Heresy, but this is meant to be a stand alone book and I don’t think anyone out there will disagree that not including something like that in a space exploration book should be required.
While we are on the subject, some rules for building planetary systems would have been nice too. The Alien/monster generator is far more useful to me but some solid rules on create ancient systems to visit with some charts would have been helpful.
The last chapter, chapter 15, is an adventure called Into the Maw. I have not run it, I don’t usually run the premade adventures in favor of my own stuff, but it looks well constructed and fun focusing on a search for an ancient and lost starship.
The final bits of the book are the index, which seems passable and everything I needed to find was there, and some nice character sheets.
Overall this book is a beast, but it’s a beast that I will be running and playing for some time to come. It manages to expand on the setting and take the game in interesting new directions without invalidating the stuff from Dark Heresy. There are a few things that should have been included in my opinion but overall this is full of Win.
Is it worth 60.00? In this economy that is a big question, and is not a simple question to answer.
Take me for example. I own every Dark Heresy book, my players love the setting and the rules. We will be moving our acolytes up to Trader status, the Inquisition will be giving them a ship with a secret mandate to hunt the Expanse looking for a Heritic from thier home sector. For me this is a no brainer.
For an new player looking to get into the Warhammer 40K roleplay world? Well, thats going to depend on your players. If they are familiar with Warhammer 40K then go for it. If they have no idea what a Space Marine is then start with Dark Heresy as it is a better primer to the universe.
The game presents good rules for 40K space ships and space combat, presents a new mechanic for Psykers, and explores a higher strata of the economy. On the downside many of the classes feel uninspiring and some of the no-brainer parts of a space exploration game are missing.
In the end the book is beautiful, the setting is invocative of horror and darkness, and it presents a very exciting part of the Warhammer 40K universe. Aside from the price point I can not find a reason to not suggest it and I am hard pressed to deny that its worth 60.00. Everyone is differant, but if the price that is all thats keeping you away the I would suggest finding a way. There is very little that will disappoint and a lot to excite in this tome.
