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So, it's 2009. GW's greatly changed from the small thing we knew it as to the giant titan it is now.

However, as with all great beasts, its legend must be remembered and recorded somehow.

So I ask those Dakka members old enough to have been around during this mythical age, what was Rogue Trader like?

Curious bump. I've only been around for 5th, so I don't have anything to add save that I'm interested in the subject.

Well rouge trader days were "glory" day of the 40k.I wasn't born then so I don't know much about it.

The rules were terrible and thre were crazy uber builds nearly every month. Psychics were scary, Harlequins were sick, not to mention a time when Marines were T3. Vortex missiles existed with the Mentor Legion and somewhere there were these cool Marines called the Ravenwing. Dark Angels had black armor. Boxes of 30 Marines, 3 Rhinos and then metal Terminators.

Then, the Eldar changed from Eldar Pirates to Craftworlds filled with Warlocks, Farseers (who had randomly rolled stats) and Aspect Warriors. We all hailed Jes Goodwin for designing these models and when we could buy 5 Swooping Hawks in a blister pack for $7.50.

All in all, despite all the wackiness that came from it: we all had a blast b/c there was nothing out on the market that came close to it.

Sounds insane

It was envisage a time where most of your units were bought in bulk be it blister packs and boxes of 30-40 Orks and 30 marines 30 imperial guard and squats were all the rage.

Two Land Raiders a piece in a box also two Rhinos

Ooooh.

So The Ravenwing were separate from the Dark Angels?

So Aspect Warriors, Farseers, and Warlocks were not part of the original Eldar, who seemed to be a mesh of Dark Eldar and Eldar concepts.

I've seen many of GW's older boxes had a LOT more models in them.

Sometimes overly complicated, but brilliant fun (especially in their day, as nothing else was really like them). Needed more work and effort to make games (easily) playable; but was often worth it. Large battles could be slow (due to players and loads of options) but the sheer range and options were key. You could customise and tweak your force making a truly personalised force. Amusing battles between a small force of well armed futuristic warriors and large primitive sword and shield forces were possible. Often worked at its best with a GM or two players trying to generate a fun game rather than play competitively. Also you could generate your own stat lines and point cost them up easily for other miniatures.

The current and infrequent 40k editions of "Old wargamers articles" (jeremy vettock and co. - something like that) in White Dwarf seem to re-capture the spirit well. Effectively it became to big, clunky and spread out to be popular to the mass of gamers who wanted to turn up and play in a couple of hours. Still a good game and worth checking out if you like tweaking and narrative style of play. Oh and the fluff was excellent. Birmingham, Cardiff and Kipling all getting mentions.

I still play, and its a love/hate thing for me. Love the fact my force still exists (no comment) but some larger games we've played in the last year have taken 1-2 days to play through due to sheer scale (note - these were BIG battles, in RT terms, with a couple of hundred troops, tanks, fliers, robots (oh my love of pre-programmed robots) and lots of cool stuff - hoverboarding squats). Not a bad thing but not to everyone's taste. That said quick skirmishes are a blast and become very tactical and exciting.

Its part of what has made me play games for 20-odd years and for that reason alone its worth checking out just to read through.

Would it be possible to still purchase this rulebook on Ebay.

I'm quite interested now. It sounds quite entertaining.

Cryonicleech wrote:Would it be possible to still purchase this rulebook on Ebay.

I'm quite interested now. It sounds quite entertaining.

Here's one I think.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Rouge-Trader-Warhammer-40k-Rulebook-1987_W0QQitemZ110469617941QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUK_Toys_Wargames_RL?hash=item19b8809915

Marines were T3 with a 4+ save. Aspect Warriors (when introduced) had majority 3+ saves at this time.

Before, we had Eldar Pirates. Generally, all of them only wore Mesh Armour, but had a forcefield invulnerable save (IIRC, worked more like Fantasy Ward Saves).

Loads of character (not characters!) in the models and art, you could really see the love put into it.

Lastly, Space Marines looked more awesome, with all of them having Beakie helmets.

I would recommend any players of 40k to have at least one game using the original Rogue Trader rules They were a fun sci-fi rules set that let you have the type of game you wanted, not what the rules or army book dictated.
Mick

The other marks of amrour werent brought in until 2nd edition me thinks slightly off topic does anyone remember the old Warhammer regiments boxset??

I want the Skaven from that for Skaven Slaves also some of the old lead mini's were brilliant.!

I still own The Warhammer Regiments box set, though the models are all partially asembled. I am planning to use the elf heads to convert some Eldar.

Rogue Trader was great, especially the articles in WD at the time, circa WD100ish.

Much like GW's first editions of ANYTHING, it was very deep and complicated, with tons of options and special rules for everything. Every model in a squad could have different wargear (and usually did) and, as a result, the game took forever. It seems like each evolution of the game has sought to: a) streamline the game; and b) make sexy what sucked before to make people buy new models. So, now, you have lots of generic troops, etc., that make for a streamlined game, but as a result, you have lost some of the "soul" of the game in the process. Don't get me wrong; from a GAME standpoint, 5th Ed. is more fun and generally "better" than Rogue Trader, but RT will have a piece of my heart for what it was and what it started.

Back in Rogue Trader, all the codexes seamlessly merged with the rulebook and there were no grey areas or rule discrepencies. Every codex had equal potential of every other codex, and were very well balanced. All was harmonious under the emperor's everlasting gaze.

Its been downhill since then.

BOSS_PIMPALOTZ wrote:

Two Land Raiders a piece in a box also two Rhinos

Three Rhinos, actually, if memory serves...

Vale,

JohnS

And Rhinos were, what, something like 250 points each to field? Good times!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Dashofpepper wrote:Back in Rogue Trader, all the codexes seamlessly merged with the rulebook and there were no grey areas or rule discrepencies. Every codex had equal potential of every other codex, and were very well balanced. All was harmonious under the emperor's everlasting gaze.

Its been downhill since then.

LOL. This part of RT they can bring back. God forbid we have well-written and cross-checked rules sets.

250 points per model???

Must have been damn fine back then...

I remember the 3rd edition rules had army lists for everyone in the back. They weren't very complete (wargear and weapons were generally "counts as [Imperial equivalent]) but they let you try out an army before you bought their codex. I liked that a lot. They're doing something similar for the new rulebook but it's not nearly as comprehensive. 3rd edition had points values and everything.

The rules were crazy insane. But the fluff and other ideas were rich. All the tertiary options for hostile plant-life (brain-leaf) and stuff was just beyond compare.

I remember the 30 man marines! It was that nice cream color with all 'beakie' helmets.

I have a White Dwarf from around 1987, and in it there is the army list for Space Marines in Rogue Trader. Land Raiders cost something like 562 1/2 points. Yes, half points. Armor values go well into the 20s and above. For independent characters there are around 4 levels of power, so your commander can be a sergeant, champion, captain, or master. With his stature he can get more rerolls on the equipment chart for his randomly generated equipment, which has stuff from power swords to conversion beamers. By the time your hero is a master, he'll have something like WS 10 BS 9 A7 T8 and so on.

I never had the opportunity to play, since it was before my time. However, I've gleaned a lot from that old WD and old war stories from other gamers. It was best run with a game master, like in a pen and paper role playing game. More narrative, less structure. It could take forever to play a small game though.

So you ask about Rogue Trader my young apprentice. It was a thing of many wonders, a true skirmish game that encouraged the imagination. You wanted a unit of Space Marines armed with autoguns and needle pistols and a civilian car to drive around in? It was yours. You wanted genestealers and zoats to fight together against a rabble of imperial citizens in a jungle full of man eating plants including the dreaded brain-leaf and the occasional wandering Ambull? It was possible. Initially vehicle damage tables were crude, but later on you had a cut away diagram of each vehicle and a sheet of transparency film marked with a grid to lay over the top to which you would roll dice to work out if you had hit it and which damage table to roll on. And you had a damage table for everything, the engine, each crew member, guns, turret, wheels, etc.

And that was just the Rogue Trader rule book, later on you got the Ork books, with pages and pages of randomly generated bionik bits and ten different tables to roll on depending on the type of madness you Madboyz were suffering from at the time. The possibilities were virtually endless, or at least numbering in the hundreds quite literally, a big RT game could last ages. Then came the Realm of Chaos books, the dreaded D1000, yes D1000, mutations table (available in WD #99 I think) and an almost equally large table for chaos gifts and weapons. And if you thought that was bonkers, wait until Traitor Marines armed with boltguns could warp their way into the middle of a Warhammer Fantasy Battle game!

Sarigar wrote:The rules were terrible and thre were crazy uber builds nearly every month. Psychics were scary, Harlequins were sick, not to mention a time when Marines were T3. Vortex missiles existed with the Mentor Legion and somewhere there were these cool Marines called the Ravenwing. Dark Angels had black armor. Boxes of 30 Marines, 3 Rhinos and then metal Terminators.

Then, the Eldar changed from Eldar Pirates to Craftworlds filled with Warlocks, Farseers (who had randomly rolled stats) and Aspect Warriors. We all hailed Jes Goodwin for designing these models and when we could buy 5 Swooping Hawks in a blister pack for $7.50.

All in all, despite all the wackiness that came from it: we all had a blast b/c there was nothing out on the market that came close to it.

Yup that 110%
i remember fondly of having a SW captain displacing (displacement feild) around from so many shots from an orc hoard (they were unlimited unit size at 7 pts per.....) that he ended up in the same place 3 times....... Wacky and fun, to bad that same company that really wanted to put out a great game back then turned into the turd we see today.

Oooohhh.

D1000 mutation table??? Sheesh. With NO repetitions either?

10 Different Madboy Tables?

How would Traitor Marines warp into WFB turn out? Sounds interesting.

Makes me sad that we have all this standardization now...

The rules in the actual Rogue Trader were fairly ridiculous by todays terms, especially when you saw models on hover (power) boards surfing around throwing vortex grenades. But one thing that is also vastly different is that you could buy 1 box of metal miniatures and have an entire army with just that.
I still have the original Harlequin box all painted and stoved away, and that one box was pretty much my entire army, but then the individual point cost could sky-rocket with all the wargear you could buy for individual models. I later upgraded with some Harlequin jetbikes, but that was not need to get right into the fray.

Oh and the Dark Angels issue is strange, but I guess somewhere along the lines, they adopted the mistaken labeling of a green (salamander) marine into the actual fluff, and thus they changed from black to green.

Cryonicleech wrote:Oooohhh.

D1000 mutation table??? Sheesh. With NO repetitions either?

There weren't 1000 options, some things were more likely to come up than others so "Blood Replacement" would cover results 230-245, say, I don't recall the actual set up of the table. There's still a LOT of variety especially when things like skin change and limb replacement or blood replacement would require a further roll and you'd end up with Chaos characters bleeding acid or electricity, their various limbs atrophying or growing, skin changing to a variety of colours, going scaly or growing spikes, characters heads expanding a certain percentage, over 50% gives a toughness penalty because you stand a significantly increased possibility of being whacked in the head, characters could sprout tails of various types...it was truely truely mad but if you had too many mutations, you were "gifted" spawndom.

10 Different Madboy Tables?

Yes, you'd roll (every turn) for the type of madness, say paranoid, schizophrenic, manic, etc, and then roll on that to see what they did, typically they were D6 or D10 tables. The Madboys would then do things like huddle in a group discussing what to do next, or they'd copy the exact actions of the nearest Ork unit, or they'd fire their guns in the air... it was similar with the binoks.

How would Traitor Marines warp into WFB turn out? Sounds interesting.

I don't recall as such, only that the Chaos player could warp in random characters that could include Marines if I recall correctly. Other randomly generated chaos gifts included 40K weapons even in the Fantasy setting.

The Ork book that I remember was 'Freebooterz'. The Ork kaptainz of spess.

The Realm of Chaos books 1 and 2 are nuts. The picture of the fat Great Unclean One smiling is from one of the the Realm of Chaos books.

I remember when Tyranids weren't actually "named" and they looked like a cross between lizards and bunny rabbits with bucktooth smiles.

Yes, I remember a time when the Tyranid threat wasn't there. And when it finally hit the 40k universe, it hit it with the force of a sledgehammer. An Eldar Craftworld almost dead? Ultramarines almost getting exterminated? Yeah, I remember all that.

Tyranid Attack I think was the first one...or was it the original Space Hulk? I just remember at the time that everyone didn't know that Genestealers were part of the Tyranid race.

Ultramarines, not winning?

My God, this has elevated Rogue Trader to AWESOME in my book.

So which races were the originals. I know Orks were the first Xenos, and Space Marines were obviously there.

Doombot001 wrote:The Ork book that I remember was 'Freebooterz'. The Ork kaptainz of spess.

I had "Ere We Go", but there was another called "Waaargh the Orks" or something.

Cryonicleech wrote:So which races were the originals. I know Orks were the first Xenos, and Space Marines were obviously there.

Most are there in one form or another. The RT book has lists of various races in the back, many are given a single entry like the brain leaf plant, or the Grynix. This was the early Genestealer, the drawing resembles that of a Genestealer, but it was simply described an an enignmatic creature from the moons of Ymgarl and there was no connection to the Tyranids. There were Tyranids, but only one variety that looked like the Tyranid Warrior and was running on all fours and they were supported by the Space Zoats. There were the Orks and the Gretchin (Grots) to go with them. There were also the now dead Squats, Beastmen that fought in the Imperial army, Space Slann and wierd forgotten races like the Jokaero, an intelligent orange orangutan thing. At the end was a selection of the wierd and wonderful, the Ambull, which was featured in a drawing in 3rd edition 40K listed under "Other Dangerous Aliens", there was the Catachan Face Eater Plant and even the Enslaver, the creature that, according to the fluff today, caused the downfall of the Old Ones and the C'tan to go into hibernation.