Warring hams? forty thousand of them? and they're ROGUE TRADING?! AT THIS HOUR?! (Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader)
I’ve decided to take a break from Phantasy Star, but I’m sticking with Sci Fantasy for the game that’s replacing it. When I play another RPG I feel was held back by its platform (or any game, for that matter) I’ll hop back on PSP2I as a comparison point.
Anyway, the next game. It’s...
A relatively recent one based on a retro TTRPG! They are going to murder me with sticks and hammers for calling it science fantasy but it’s true! It’s true and I should say it!
Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader hadn’t gotten a new edition in a long time, before Owlcat’s PC RPG. With a side of “I dunno if there’s a new edition and don’t @ me about it”.
A lot of cishet well meaning white liberals like to say Warhammer 40K is made by and for Nazis because Nazis really like the aesthetic, no matter how much Games Workshop tells them that they aren’t welcome in the fandom and no matter how many people who aren’t nazis really enjoy it. It really does boil down to “Well, the Imerpium has a point about the entire galaxy being hostile to them! And so much of the setting is from their perspective!”
Despite it being a pretty clear satire of that kind of mindset and a really really awful place to live, as well as a power fantasy for not really having to care and going, essentially, buck fucking wild in big battles with stupid and impractical weapons. Because if the object of satire doesn’t understand they’re being made fun of, the failing is on the writer, not the guy who’s dreaming about fellating Cheeto Benito, who’s face he photoshopped over The Emperor’s.
TV Tropes was a net negative on media literacy and Tumblr has been shoveling dirt on the grave for a long time now.
I’m not normally an Imperium player, anyway. Orks. We’z da biggest and da bestest after all.
So... I wouldn’t bother trying to roleplay a “good guy” in this game. There is no good or evil in Warhammer 40K. Just varying degrees of monstrousness. The backgrounds for your character are basically various forms of war crime enthusiast who consider it a religious calling at worst and a business at best if you’re a crime lord.
Though... I find myself questioning one of Owlcat’s... “things”... once we get into the game for real. There’s two... extended introductions, for lack of a better word? First the mutiny on the voidship that leads to you becoming Rogue Trader instead of working for her (To my knowledge, or at least in the campaigns I played way back in the day, you tended to work FOR the Rogue Trader, and none of the players held the title.), and after that you have to rebuild the crew, get a new Magos from the Techpriests, a new Navigator, etc etc. It doesn’t drag and it’s not dull, it introduces you to the setting pretty wonderfully.
But it makes it hard to start a new character, because you won’t really experience combat that’s challenging in said intros if you already know the systems at play.
I’m definitely going to be talking more about the overall themes with a general overview of each segment instead of a blow by blow of the plot because holy hell is there a lot of plot. This is potentially a 100 hour + RPG. A Long haul game even if I cheat like I ended up cheating my levels in Evolution 2.
So my character is Flynn, a former Arbitrator of the Adeptus Artibtes. Weird 40K “cops” who are better cops than real world cops by virtue of usually dealing with hive gangers who will inject you with acid that will melt your entire body into goop if you don’t mass murder for them, or actual cultists trying to open hellmouths (or the equivalent). I am very good with shotguns. I am a terrible person (by real world standards) trying to do what I think is right even if if it means killing a million to save a billion.
That’s the kind of setting it is.
My character had a moment of shining glory where he managed to hold a position all alone until reinforcements arrived despite running out of ammo halfway through the fight, but his darkest day was getting captured by pirates and subjected to tortures so heinous that they even scarred a veteran Arbiter for life. So far, his alignment is leaning “Iconoclast”, with the three alignments being “Dogmatic”, “Iconoclast” , and “Heretic”.
... Iconoclast does not mean “Neutral”, and the others do not mean Good or Evil. Heretic (Chaos Aligned) and Dogmatic (Emperor Loyalist). Iconoclast is focused on saving as much HUMAN life as possible. I emphasized human for a reason.
There is no innocence in this setting. Only varying degrees of guilt.
The first “Intro” begins quickly. You are summoned to the flagship of Theodora von Valencius, Rogue Trader, for reasons unknown to yourself, until her Master of Whispers Kunrad Voigtvir (spymaster) lets you know that you’re one of her rather distant heirs. Shit hits the fan relatively quickly, and said spymaster turns out to have orchestrated a mutiny. She dies in the mutiny (which serves as an extended combat and navigation tutorial) and you are named Rogue Trader because some weird, weird shit happened to the ship that saved everyone’s lives when Kunrad dragged you down to try and corrupt the Warrant of Trade.
The second intro begins when you have tobop around a system you’re stranded in to get a navigator, a new head techpriest, and replace thousands of dead crew.
Things I notice early on include that the game is very explicit about how shitty the setting is. It seems to expect you to disregard the humanity of anyone “Unimportant”. Execute those who raise their voices against you for the disrespect, demand your crew cater to your tiniest whim, and... Iconoclast is the route where you treat people like people. It’s a little harrowing the kind of thing the game makes you reckon with, and I kind of think it does it better than something like Tyranny, where you’re a wishy washy jackass who has to try and reckon with the idea that you can’t overthrow the evil regime and you can only try to mitigate the harm it does as... the right hand man of Darkdoom Evilbad or whatever the glorious leader’s name is.
As a Rogue Trader you are one of the most privileged people in The Imperium of Man and most players are going to want to play that enthusiastically. The intent is to make you feel like shit about being a machine that turns human bodies into corpses in the grinder until it gums up because the alternative is the doom of the entire galaxy.
...Like. The entire galaxy. The remains of the Aeldari (Eldar), the Drukhari (Dark Eldar), the Orks... even if they were supposedly made to fight Chaos? The Tau... Potentially the only thing with a chance to survive a Chaos victory is the Tyrannids. But the ‘nids can’t really eat Chaos, so... who the fuck knows?
So the first chapter’s second introduction chapter ends with a fucking disaster of epic propotions. They stole the sun. They stole the fucking sun I look away for FIVE MINUTES to tell Abelard to stop arguing with Argenta and the DARK ELDAR STEAL THE FUCKING SUN.
It’s okay. I’m fine. I’m normal now, I drank a whole can of bear mace I’m fine.
So the cult of Aurora is a cult of Tsneeze (I AM SPELLING HIS NAME WRONG ON PURPOSE I DO NOT RESPECT HIM!), which anyone with Warhammer 40K experience will know and be able to tell right away, amid the internal screaming because we know our character doesn’t because this knowledge is dangerous. Chaos cultists will scream “I SERVE THE RUINOUS POWERS!” entirely to give you the cognitohazard spinning in your brain because unless you are well guarded against it, such as Inquisitorial training, it can turn your braincase inside out. You probably don’t know the actual chaos gods by name until you’re sent to fight one.
So we know that “Aurora” and the “Weaver of Fate” are linked to Mr. Just As Planned, before we even see his fucking Screamer daemon thing pop into the spaceport to try and be a terrifying boss.
I have the DLC so some Arbites pop in and shotgun it to death before I get in range. Then we fight a fucking Chaos space marine who claims to be The Aurora of the Dusk, and we only stopped half the plan, and did I mention the dark eldar STOLE THE FUCKING SUN while we were busy? Unrelated to Chaos, the Dark Eldar are sick fucks who will torture you to death for funsies and profit but they hate chaos probably the most of anyone.
Which means ol’ Sneeze knew what they were going to do and took advantage of it for his own ends.
Did I mention this is, essentially, the tutorial? In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only getting fucked over constantly because you didn’t have half the information you needed, let alone the whole picture.
And that’s just the tutorial. Congrats, Rogue Trader. You survived. Sleep? No. Get out that pitcher of recaffe and shovel down some salt grox buns while you have five minutes to rest because the Cicatrix Maledictum just happened and it’s your job to keep your protectorate alive, cut off from the rest of the imperium.
Trillions of lives, your responsibility? Trillions? Are you kidding? That’s much too low a number. A single world might have multiple trillion inhabitants in vast hive cities that stretch into the atmosphere. The burden of responsibility on your shoulders is unfathomable. Your predecessor might have even been tainted by chaos, and you have no idea who killed her.
Things are looking grim. Get to work.
(I’m pretty taken by this game, if you can’t tell. Owlcat’s best work, so far.)