Rogue Trader: Review (Part 2 of 2)

Imperial Navy vessels engage an enemy. Artist: Zach Graves

Picking up where I left off in my previous post, I recently bought the Rogue Trader core rulebook on DriveThruRPG. I have spent the past several days reading through it and absorbing the rules, and while I have not yet had a chance to play the game, I can conclude that the book looks great and the game looks fun.

My previous post dealt mostly with how cool it is to be a Rogue Trader and his/her crew. This post will provide more of a review of Rogue Trader, both as a rulebook and as a system.

Rogue Trader: Gothic Baroque Space Piracy for Fun and Profit (Part 1 of 2)

Rogue Trader cover, from the Fantasy Flight Games site. Artist: Andrea Uderzo

I love the Warhammer 40,000 universe. I really dig the epic scale of it, the grim feel of constant danger, the unabashedly gothic design of everything. But I always thought that, given a chance to play a Warhammer 40,000 pen-and-paper RPG, I would jump at the chance to be an Inquisitor. Playing as a badass religious fanatic who hunts down the demonic enemies of mankind sounds right up my alley. But when I decided to buy one of Fantasy Flight's Warhammer 40,000 RPGs, I ended up choosing Rogue Trader over the Inquisitor game, Dark Heresy.

The reason for that has a lot to do with the image above. Before I saw that image, I had always thought of Rogue Traders as reckless fortune seekers who explore beyond the borders of the Imperium, only to inevitably uncover something that should have been left buried, get wiped out, and need the Inquisition and/or the Space Marines to come clean up the mess.

But then I saw the image above and something clicked.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine

Imagine that each step Titus takes sounds badass

What does badassery sound like? Is it the kdang kdang kdang of the footsteps of a man in sacred two-ton battle armor? Is it the brom brom of a stalker-pattern bolter popping the heads of Orks? Or is it the rarrrrzzzzzz of a chainsword powering through the throat of a warp-spawned demon?

If you want to know true badassery, play Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. You will know.