Thursday 9 July 2009

Rogue Trader and Forsaken Bounty

So I’ve downloaded the ‘Forsaken Bounty’ adventure that showcases the new Warhammer 40,000 RPG ‘Rogue Trader’, which seems to be a combination of 40K and classic role-playing profiteering. The idea is that Rogue Traders travel on the fringes of Imperial Space with a license to plunder anything they find. The objective of Rogue Trader as opposed to Dark Heresy, from which it takes its (compatible) system, is to accrue profit and prestige.

One of the big differences seems to be the idea that the party are the head staff of an Imperial vessel and as anyone who knows the 40K background can tell you this means being in command of a vessel that is at the very least colossal and will have a crew of thousands. This means, in theory at least, that players can always call upon teams from their crew and fire support from their vessel and this has provoked fears that parties will pursue a ‘strike-from-orbit’ strategy to cleanse all resistance before they even set foot on world, indeed the designer’s even mention this is an entirely acceptable option.

The trick here seems to be to appeal to the player’s greed. Greed is a natural by-product of RPGs; we all want bigger and better stuff. The reason the Imperium still performs assaults on worlds instead of simply nuking them from orbit is because of the valuable infrastructure and resources on a planet that might be lost if it is reduced to glass by an orbital bombardment and there’s no reason that this can’t be true of Rogue Traders too, compelling them to raid planets rather than simply destroy them.

I’m also intrigued by the ship-to-ship combat that has been touted in the book. If it is a simple and manageable system that allows all players to participate then I think it will be a mainstay of any campaign I’m likely to run; however if it’s clunky I may just be tempted to abstract battles or use the wonderful Battlefleet Gothic rules instead.

All in all the idea of Rogue Trader has piqued my interest and I have the hankering to run the adventure, perhaps as a one-shot for my group before or after our Dark Heresy campaign. There’s an eerie feel to it that appeals to me and the ‘ship-in-the-void’ setting is quite different to the planetary based adventures we’ve enjoyed so far.

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