HomeFeaturesWarhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader’s most intriguing aspect is the most boring part of other RPGs - the middle groundEverybody disliked that, yes, but they’re all hideous zealots
Everybody disliked that, yes, but they’re all hideous zealots
Image credit:Owlcat
Image credit:Owlcat
In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only… compromise, calculation and license to misbehave. In Owlcat’s forthcomingRPGWarhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, you play the free-wheeling head of an interstellar merchant’s dynasty. Operating on the fringes of uncharted space, you’re the owner of a Warrant of Trade that essentially lets you run your own miniature empire within the Imperium, deciding the fates of planets, amassing vast wealth and recruiting a motley crew of xenos, heretics and assorted weirdos. It’s the kind of behaviour that’d get you vaporised if you were some run-of-the-mill Space Marine Chaplain, but out here on the frontier, you’re allowed to act with impunity, providing you fulfil your overall mandate of adding to the God Emperor’s glory and kicking the odd Eldar’s head in.
Rogue Traders are arguably the only characters in Games Workshop’s brutal and decrepit table-top setting that lend themselves to the role of CRPG protagonist, because they are the only characters in Warhammer 40K’s Imperium who enjoyanything like the plot agency of a Commander Shepard. And with that, I think, comes an interesting transformation of the character alignment systems the game shares with other CRPGs such asBaldur’s Gate 3.
Consequences Showcase | Warhammer 40,000: Rogue TraderWatch on YouTube
Consequences Showcase | Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
So far, these alignments split the game’s dialogue choices between them in familiar ways. You can assert your zealous loyalty to the Imperium, indulge in openly Heretical banter, or Benevolently hedge your bets with that special variety of toneless and functional, “strictly business” RPG wording that always makes me think the character has cracked a fart and is hoping nobody will notice.
But Rogue Trader is different, because in Warhammer 40,000, the extremes areextreme. Everybody who holds any kind of factional standing is some kind of arsehole. The Imperium and Chaos are two revolting institutions pointed in different directions, each the shadow of the other. The other factions are either fading, ancient empires or newer, wannabe empires or some mixture of the two. The Orcs are probably the friendliest faces at this point in Warhammer canon, and that’s because, for all their tendency to hack entire solar systems to giblets, they sort of just want to party.
