Rogue Trader vs Modern 40k

Quite interesting.

So, if one says that Rogue Trader, was in many ways, wholly different setting from modern 40k, it would be a fair statement?

40k started as loose, early WHFB IN SPACE.

It had it's merits, but they started reshaping it, first to make more ,,mature universe" (they fed Sqats to tyranids because they felt that Dwarfs in Space failed to be really creative faction), and now old concepts are being butchered to feed the narrative of bad BL writing, that is manifest in HH books.

It actually had a sense of humour and was meant to be played with individuality and imagination
so yes

It's kinda reserved statement, so it would be certainly true. Many things were changed completely.

But I also think that 2nd/3rd edition w/Necromunda and current 40k that is shaped by primarch soap opera and has more and more OKAY Imperium of Man will soon be two very diffrent things.

In some ways the lore in the RT era was richer than modern 40k. There wasn't as much of it and it was rather uneven in its coverage (Orks got 3 whole, glorious books, Eldar got scraps here and there) but it had more variety, and wasn't just relentless grimdarkery.

Abdul Goldberg featured a lot

I mostly played 2nd edition but dabbled in RT and have a lot of miniatures from that time. It's where my interest in 40k still is, I'd much rather have old models off eBay than most of the current output.

The 'lore' was pretty thin but was quickly built up. The Realm of Chaos supplements laid the Horus Heresy. It was grimdark in a different way, yes there was overtly pop culture humour everywhere, but also things like the Imperium shipping psychers in their millions to feed the Emperor daily, which GW seem to have dropped mention of, much like the Fimir reproducing by rape in Fantasy. Now we have a much less sinister form of grimdark.

There's loads of stuff that have been dropped. The Eldar-Marine hybrid Illiyan Nastase, for example. The whole recruitment process for Marines was somewhat different as they hadn't worked out the lore of Primarchs.

The game was much smaller scale, more like Inq28 in which every character could be equipped differently, there were some really goofy weapons and creatures in the bestiary. You were even encouraged to have a third player act as a games master.

Get yourself a PDF of it and flick through.

Not gonna lie, I love the RT models a lot more than modern ones.

How did a game master work? Like what did they do?

Also got any links to a place to DL the rules?

The models from back then just had more character to them than so much of the stuff GW makes now. (that goes double for the big CAD monsters that look like rubber toys)

>ex brother marine
>A BLOO BLOO BLOO

what i remember 2nd edition kinda fixed the weapons each race has, so IG has lasguns, space marines bolters etc.
this went on, i.e. in 2nd eldar had lascannons while later they got brightlances instead (was the same model... the model changed earlier from the boxy imperial look to the current sleek one)
rogue trader had space marines with shuriken catapults, eldar could take land raiders etc.
(there simply wasnt much)

There were things like a scenario with had things unknown to players that could happen. Aliens and things that were rogue. But a GM wasn't required for a straight battle.

The Game Master's job was to act as a narrator and an arbiter as well as controlling any neutral creatures or terrain that needed it.

Although they did start laying the groundwork for that in RT - in the ork books the tables for making kustom kombi weapons were heavily weighted towards dakka rather than zappy weapons

That's kinda cool. Kinda wanna make up a skirmish game that has that sorta element to it.

Would be a bit more interesting than 1v1 fighting

I for one, am glad that half eldar were dropped.

No Chaos. The warp had hostile creatures in it, but the Chaos Gods weren't part of 40k until a big expansion later.

That's pretty interesting bit to know.
So if you were to list the founding factions of 40k, it wouldn't actually include chaos?

>is glad that eldar girls getting HUMAN'D is no longer canon
Full pleb.
Eldar pussy was made for Imperial dick

Eldar are ancient aliens whose creation took place before mankind's ancestors even climbed up to the trees from which they later descended again.

Them being compatible with Humans is retarded, and I am glad that it got cut out of the setting over 20 years ago.

I prefer the Eldar as enigmatic, inhuman ancient aliens, not as cheap waifubait-the faction.

>The Realm of Chaos supplements laid the Horus Heresy.
actually it was adeptus titanicus and the various white dwarf expansions for it that started that particular gravy train

realm of chaos came afterwards

Yes. Though it was planned for as was stated in White Dwarf during the build up/release. What existed would become parts of chaos later in the form of warp entities of various kinds. There was some pretty horrific stuff, really illustrating just why psykers were incredibly dangerous to have around. Sure, there was bouncing ball aliens that did fuck all but bounce around like that futurama episode, but there were also Enslavers who were pretty damn horrific, and many thing like them.

But to start out it was the Imperium with its many agents and armies of Inquisitors, Rogue Traders, Marines, Army, Arbites, Custodes were even included and sisters of battle depicted if not given their own fancy shit, Eldar (corsairs, craftworld came later and dark not until 3rd edition), Orks, Squats. Then a mess of warp entities, alien life forms and renegades made from any of the above.

I still love that the Horus Heresy came about as a way to cover only having to make a single type of titan in plastic for the game.

completely different game, it was basically an rpg system to play skirmish battles, it even hat a game master

You want it really

Now those are some eyebrows.

That sounds great. Make being the greyknight guy even more fun.

>fat on your leg scroll
techmarines need to stop tactical dreadnought shaming

>Penitent Engines are still not MCs

They are clearly the superior person strapped to lots of metal.

it always bugged me.
Can anybody explain why the fuck first edition of warhammer 40k is called Rogue Trader?
Like rogue trader is just a bunch of people with ships in space. What this has to do with 40k? You don't even play as them in 1st ed of wh. Why is it called rogue trader?

Not much. It was pretty much Age of Sigmar with bolters.

They are rogues who land on planets to trade.
95% of these trades go sour and the parties end up shooting and chopping each other to bits.

Because Rogue Traders were the core of the game during development, giving players a nice player-character in charge of their force of whatever with maximum freedom of action and opposition in an un-established setting. It allows GMs to have a wide array of scenarios in which players might find themselves in conflict, even if they're nominally on the same side, it lets players choose from practically anything available to add to their forces, and in opposition.

In short: the game was about A character and their force, not a specific faction as an army.

And it sounds cool.

WFB IN SPAAAAACEE

Rogue Trader is by far the superior fluff.

(I'm actively retrofitting it to be an RP setting)

Space Marines
S4
T3

That actually sounds a lot better.

Damn it, why'd it have to grow into such a huge clusterfuck?

I want my retro 80's Gothic metal Star Wars 40k

Mostly because armies sold better. And then it went a bit crazy. And then a lot crazy once things like superheavy tanks became the thing to push.

There's definitely something to the small characterful skirmish game given there's a shitload of them around right now, though most seem to rely on pre-made hero characters in the manner of a MOBA game.

This is off topic, but what was old school Warhammer Fantasy like?

Depended a lot on the edition, how old do you mean?

Like 1 or 2e. I hear a lot about Rogue Trader but nothing on old WFB

I had 3rd edition, the bestiary had all the familiar races and more. They were classified as being good, evil, neutral, etc, and allies were anything with similar alignment. So frog men and dwarves and stuff could ally into one army. You had a huge variety of creatures, it was possible to use giant snails or leeches for cavalry instead of horses.

Realm of Chaos allowed you to give chaos rewards of boltguns and other 40k weapons to your fantasy champions, because with the warp any shit goes.

Was WFB still more like a wargame or more RPG like rogue trader?

It was a lot more like a wargame as it descended from historical gaming. You had lots of rules for moving models in formation and changing unit formation. I Don't know if that was still the case with the last edition of fantasy before Age of Sigmar, last I played was 5th.

Ah, that's because hardly anyone actually played them. Ok they actually popularised the concept of fantasy wargames, but in comparison to RT, they didn't really do anything impressive, where as RT kickstarted GW's rise to being more than a tiny chain of game stores selling other people's stuff.

1st edition warhammer is incredibly basic. Warhammer as a setting really isn't there and hte combat engine is very simple stuff. It was a thing to do with all those D&D miniatures had piling up, including fighting in dungeons. Characters, experience points, injuries; it's all very much just an RPG large battle system, far closer to warhammer quest but with the possibility of formations. GMs were basically a given.

2nd edition came out quickly after and started ramping up the complexity of the battle system so it could account for more varied things, as the GW guys realised they were on to a good idea going that way. Still pretty basic, and keeping a lot of the character focus and GM'd scenarios, there was a lot more attempting to represent formation combat in a realistic manner. Warhammer as a setting coalesced into a recognisable form though still very basic. There's still character levels but they're to cover how good the character is, less of an RPG progression. Scenario packs including the classic McDeth were the big thing of this edition and White Dwarf contained a lot of characters, scenarios and special regiments to add in for flavour.

Yeah, I get the MOBA feel with Warmahordes a lot. I don't like it really lol

Cont.

3rd edition is when shit got real. Grabbing all the extra complexity of 2nd edition, it's white dwarf additions and then a bunch more stuff on top, plus overlap with Rogue Trader, this is where most of the really oldfags started out. Whilst still focusing on GM'd scenarios, the game had a lot going on with its combat engine and world building. Character levels were cut down to multiples of 5, each being how many extra points they had added over the basic race stats, a unit champion for instance could be a level 5 character, with 5 stats raised by 1 over the baseline. Magic was expanded upon even more but the more impressive spells were really there to be scenario tools; Summon Army is not exactly a spell designed for competitive play.

However army lists did become a thing. Technically 2nd edition did it first but it was over so quickly (same year that 3rd edition came out) that 3rd is the one remembered for The Ravening Hordes book, which contained a shedload of army lists, both for specific factions as well as mercenaries and allied lists so that there was at last a baseline structure for how armies could be constructed without scenarios in mind. Or just keeping them more themed. Contrary to later editions, outside of Realms of Chaos insanity, there wasn't really all that much to tool characters up with in terms of items. The strongest stuff was usually unit banners.
40k was clearly the focus though at the time, as that got a ton of expansion material where as Warhammer kinda coasted along, already reasonably well established.

But when people go for oldskool warhammer these days, 3rd is usually the one people are drawn to, either because they started there or because it's got that old style that went missing with 4th edition, but is way fuller (yet condensed in amount of publications needed) in content than the earlier editions. The earlier ones had the rules split into multiple books, akin to original D&D.

Sorry that should be 2nd edition's one was Ravening Hordes, 3rd was Warhammer Armies. Both of these books contained extra rules for the game as well as army lists. Though most of it was probably in White Dwarf, since that was the main tool GW used for publishing extra content for the games, though 3rd incorporated the extra stuff grown for 2nd and built off it.

As a game, well, the old warhammers are distinct from the latter ones by way of the focus. 1st was pretty much just there to be a game. 2nd and 3rd had a lot of tie-in stuff with the roleplaying game, sharing a lot of content. And a distinct focus on games that were not just equal points pitched battles, but also allowing for interesting on-table tactics as formation changes were possible and manoeuvring units tended to require leadership tests, so more disciplined armies would play differently in terms of what you could expect a unit to be able to do, rather than everyone being able to wheel and reform at will of the later games. Fights tended to be more drawn out, not nearly so much possibility for the one-turn break and over-run as in later editions.

Anyway, gonna post a battle report since that'll work better than my incoherent rambling.

...

...

...

...

...

Mr. Spock?

I played Rogue Trader, 2nd, 3rd and a bit of 5th. I have the latest but haven't played 40K for a couple years.

The rules changed quite a bit from RT to 2nd, then again from 2nd to 3rd. After that, it seems to me anyway, each edition is more of a tweak so the changes aren't as abrupt.

The best thing about the old days was that there wasn't a huge meta element. People tended to play with what they thought was cool. I don't recall any 'mathhammer' talk. I remember watching a massive dreadnaught only battle at a convention, about 20 Imperial vs. 20 Eldar dreads. That was mindblowing at the time.

RT was pretty wacky and clunky, but fun.

There's a new game just now coming out called 'Rogue Stars' which is small groups of figures, a skirmish game, and it is said to have the 'RT feel'. My copy is on the way!