Tell me about 1st Edition!

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**Cheese Elemental**

What was 40K like back in the days of Rogue Trader? I hear that it was more like an RPG than strategy. I must know more, but wikipedia and /tg/ has failed me.

**Oldgrue**

Best description of 1st edition was Warhammer Fantasy in Space. It had a reasonably strong narrative, but it was generally unbalanced regarding points values.

**Hellfury**

http://www.angelfire.com/id/roguetrader/rt.html

I have no idea if it is accurate, but typing what rogue trader is will take far longer than I am willing to commit.

Hope that helps.

**chromedog**

Whilst RT DID have about 10x the 'flavour' of current 40k, it had about 20x the paperwork and numbercrunching to go with it.

That article is a good start, though.

**Daggermaw**

Wow that article was great, but even better it was an angelfire site!

I haven't been to an angelfire site since.... i don't know when.

**Hellfury**

Daggermaw wrote:Wow that article was great, but even better it was an angelfire site!

I haven't been to an angelfire site since.... i don't know when.

I know right? I thought those sites went under in 1999...
Who the hell besides grandmas posting pics of their 12 grandchildren and their 46 cats uses that site anyways?

**Le Grognard**

RT? I just remember seeing the adverts in WD and thinking it looked cool. Then saw some guys playing it at a con that was held at West Point when I was in the military. I was enlisted, they were cadets and officers, but we all were enthralled with the game and spent many hours huddled over tables and just having fun with some toy (space) soldiers.

**Grot 6**

It was more reading and making up alot of your own stuff.

The Minis look like gak now, but at the time they were 100% better and more interesting then some of what was on the market.

There was a seriously fat market for gaming, and there was lots of stuff to get into along with the GW games. The Guys were what made the game and turned the heads.
Building your own army up out of whatever you came up with on the D100 chart was part of the fun.

Then along came the Confrontation stuff, then that was about that. there were 30 something guys in the box for 15 bucks. If you got plastics, then you got a ton of extras, of you got the metals, you got something along the lines of christmas.

The Chaos books were the best.

**olympia**

I have the original rulebook. It's great stuff. Unfortunately the binding is terrible on it.

**Howard A Treesong**

It has the infamous 'hover car made from a deodorant bottle' article in it.

But it is good, and very varied. Much of it survives today and can be seen throughout the fluff across the editions, jokaero digital weapons, catachan death plants etc. The armies were much less defined and you could make an army picked freely from the bestiary list and field a mixed bag of inquisitors, space marines, a jokaero and some space slann.

**Slipstream**

It was good but it was clunky.
It was bursting with ideas.The mission generator was great!
Some of the weapons were unbelievable.They were huge!
It also had humor.If you ever get the chance to either
look at or buy a copy,do it!

**perplexiti**

I never played Rouge Trader but a friends brother did so I saw it when I was younger.

I picked up a hard back copy in an auction recently and had a good read, looks complicated but I agree with Slipstream if you get a chance to read a copy do, it's got some great stuff in it.

**Howard A Treesong**

Slipstream wrote:Some of the weapons were unbelievable.They were huge!

Including the building mounted defence laser, and the vehicles!! Everything from civilian cars and walkers to titans, not called titans then, which were so big they could have whole games played within them.

**Kallbrand**

Imo it was the best edition ever, with craploads of options and insanely fun (or just insane) alternatives. It pretty much had to be played with a game master and took quite some time tho, if you consider that negative. Guess the only drawback was that it was pretty hard to play it competativly but wait.. its the same today so I guess that doesnt really count.

**pox**

it was pure controlled chaos. especially right before second edition came out, you carried around a TON of books, especially if you played chaos or orks.

you had to carry around the rouge trader book, the compilation, the compendium, and whatever WD had an article for your newest purchase. (like an ork bike or a dreadnought.) at this time the rules for anything new would just be covered in WD, for a lot of units it was the first time they were seen. no foresight at all to have rules for units that didn't have models yet.

for chaos you had "lost and the damned" and "slaves to darkness", good luck hiding the book covers from mom. even early roleplaying games didn't make stuff that looked so extreme.(also good luck trying to find the rule you need in game.) for orks you needed "'ere we go, 'ere we go, 'ere we go," "freebooters," and "Waaaagh! da orks." once again, the ability to manipulate time/space was needed to find the proper rule at the proper time.

the actual game itself was more like playing D&D with miniatures. you never really fielded large armies, as the rules were just too cumbersome to support a ton of troops on the table. the benefit to that of course is that every model on the board could and did do lots of stuff. now that I'm thinking about it, it was very similar to how necromunda is now. you kept track of each models equipment, though most models only had one wound. the idea of sitting down and playing x-point games with terrain and deployment zones was pretty rare. the usual way our group played was you brought what you had, they brought what they had, and then you figured out how to make a story or game based off of what was on the table. (along with bowls and cups for terrain.)

the older guys in the group usually taught the younger guys how to play, then went off to play each other, leaving the kids milling around trying to figure out how to shoot a conversion beamer.

much like the rich kid with the most starwars toys, the kid with the most miniatures usually set the tone. not because he had more stuff, but because he had a lot of passion for the game. this didn't always translate to a good gaming experience, but you learned you needed a hook to get your turn in the sun. making good terrain was one way to do it, if you actually had a gaming table in your house with hills you were never at want for players.

psykers were the bees knees, they would kick the crap out of pretty much anything. a level four psyker had 80 "points" he spent over the course of the game. (20 per level.) you bought the abilities available to him, and then he spent the points every time he used the power. when the points were gone, no more powers. usually the game was over at that point, you opponent left in ruins.
the power that got used all the time was TK, he could lift you tank up into the air and then smash it into other tanks, buildings, troops, or the body of a varsity cheerleader. (yeah that's right, a meatloaf joke.)
or as it was done to me, run on top of the tank, TK it, and then surf over my whole army, ramming as it went.

it was a lot of fun, and I liked it enough to still be playing from then till now. I don't have rose-colored glasses, however. if you thought power gamers are bad now, you should have faced them when they had five books and twenty white dwarfs worth of rules to exploit. I only heard of one tournament done in first edition, and it did not go well. the idea was like doing a D&D tournament, its just not what the rules were made for. The game simply required a level head and respect for the older gamers, they were usually the arbiters of disputes. if you couldn't come to a decision on a rule, you looked to your peers, and your group as a whole made a decision. this became cannon for your local area. when you moved or visited somewhere else, the first thing you did was to find out if any local rules covered what you played. I moved around a lot back then, there were some interesting regional rules that I encountered. as long as it effected everyone, and I knew it going into the game, local rules were no problem. (think house rules but for a community of gamers, not just joe's garage.) The game evolves and changes. you have to evolve and change with it, or go play something else. I've enjoyed most incarnations of warhammer, I expect I'll enjoy most future ones too.

for what its worth, I still prefer a good narrative game to a tournament. its how the game started, and its how I'm gonna finish. (I'm also working on new terrain to lure in gamers, muwahaha.)

I've rambled on enough. hopefully my tales were of some use. If not, you kids get off my damn lawn. was there anything specific you were wondering about? I'm sure I'm not the only longbeard on the board.

**Phoenix**

olympia wrote:I have the original rulebook. It's great stuff. Unfortunately the binding is terrible on it.

I'm with you on that one.

In general, the original game was set up to be more of a Game Master vs Players style game rather than a Player vs Player game like it is now. The focus was on much smaller forces that were highly detailed (think something more like necromunda). As it expanded, all the paperwork needed to keep track of things got to be a bit much. They also paired down on stats a bit (they used to have tech, cool, and leadership and have since ditched tech and cool). They also use to have a lot more randomness in the game. I can remember rolling stats for some of my models (the strength of the eldar avatar used to be 6+1d3) and things like that.

Shooting at vehicles also used to be rather odd. You used to take a picture of the vehicle that was printed out in the book and then place this plastic grid over the picture (in any orientation you wanted) you then rolled dice for both the X and Y coordinates on the grid. Then you look at where that coordinate was on the picture of the vehicle. Where ever that lined up, that's the portion of the vehicle you hit (or if it wasn't on the picture, then you missed). Then you would roll armor penetration (which usually involved 2 or 3 different dice...las cannons were something like 9+1d10+1d6) against that location. If you got though then you rolled on the damage chart for that location (there were usually 4 or 5 locations per vehicle). All in all, I got a lot of laughs out of that system since it was really hard to hit the spindly eldar war walkers and dreadnaughts.

As for scaring memories, character defences took the cake. Back then, you could layer invulnarable saves (called unmodified saves back then). So you shoot my farseer...ok he'll take his 6+ refractor field save...and fail. No worries, now he'll take his 5+ conversion field save...and fail. No problem, now for his 4+ rune armor...failed that too. All right, now for the 3+ displacement field...wow failed that one as well. Last shot, the 2+ power field...ahhh finaly made it. Any more shooting?

**Steelmage99**

The original Rogue Trader book has this awesome picture of a Eavy Metal painter wearing purple tinted sunglasses while painted. Cracks me up every time I look at it.

**Bahkara**

When I was playing RT, marines were only toughness 3!

**captain.gordino**

I always like threads that drag out the guys who have been registered since 05 but haven't posted themselves into a position of fame like Gonads and H.B.M.C. and so forth.

Anyway, I'd never realized how different Rogue Trader was. Reading people's comments and the Angelfire article have given me a lot to think about. I've been working on a game of my own, (which I'll eventually post the rules for on here) and I hadn't really thought about the difference between gamey and simulationy before.

**Trench-Raider**

The Minis look like gak now

That's a matter of opinion...one I strongly disagree with. I know I'm not going to be able to convince kiddies who are drooling over GW's current crop of over-done figures or buy into the "old am the suxX0r" mindset, but I like to point out Jes Goodwin's Eldar, Kev Adams's Space Orks, and the Perry boys's Chaos Marines to those who make such statements.

Like second edition RT worked just fine if you did not over-scale it (that is to say play game that were too large for the system to handle with ease) and played with reasonable opponents who had a sense of sportsmanship as there were some very broken combos out there.

(actually "over-scaling" is a common problem with many wargames. If you try to put a full division of tanks on the table using Challenger or so other one to one scale micro-armour set or try to refight Waterloo using a Napoleonic ruleset like Empire that has Battalions as the base manuver element you are going to have a slow moving bogged down game that does really not work)

The comments that others have made in regards to needing to lug around many books by the time of the last few months of RT are correct. The clean up that 2nd ed. brought in was sorely needed. It's too bad that in the change over from RT to 2nd and especially from 2nd to 3rd they threw so much of the good stuff (and the flavor) out.

TR

**Grot 6**

As for Variety. yes, they had thier share. As for gak, compared to some of the minis from the time, from Grenader, Ral Partha, etc. who were supposed to be the cats meow, GW was Brahms or Wagner.
Here are a few of the Images of the day from the Rogue Trader days. Compair them to what you have now and make up your own mind.

http://www.solegends.com/citrt/

**Grot 6**

Here are a few more.

http://www.solegends.com/citrt/

**captain.gordino**

Whoa. Cool. That's pretty neat.

**Grot 6**

Trench-Raider wrote:
The Minis look like gak now

That's a matter of opinion...one I strongly disagree with. I know I'm not going to be able to convince kiddies who are drooling over GW's current crop of over-done figures or buy into the "old am the suxX0r" mindset, but I like to point out Jes Goodwin's Eldar, Kev Adams's Space Orks, and the Perry boys's Chaos Marines to those who make such statements.

Like second edition RT worked just fine if you did not over-scale it (that is to say play game that were too large for the system to handle with ease) and played with reasonable opponents who had a sense of sportsmanship as there were some very broken combos out there.

(actually "over-scaling" is a common problem with many wargames. If you try to put a full division of tanks on the table using Challenger or so other one to one scale micro-armour set or try to refight Waterloo using a Napoleonic ruleset like Empire that has Battalions as the base manuver element you are going to have a slow moving bogged down game that does really not work)

The comments that others have made in regards to needing to lug around many books by the time of the last few months of RT are correct. The clean up that 2nd ed. brought in was sorely needed. It's too bad that in the change over from RT to 2nd and especially from 2nd to 3rd they threw so much of the good stuff (and the flavor) out.

TR

I can actually change my stance and agree on that. They did, if anything have character, even if they arn't Michalangelo.

It is a matter of opinion, i guess.

**pox**

one last nice front shot, just a little too big for the board.
http://i110.photobucket.com/albums/n109/conversionman/donebattlewagon_004-1.jpg

so yeah, I do still love old orks. the older models might not be posed as well, and they might be a bit small, but they had way more character than the new stuff. my favorite models are actually the early to mid-nighties orks, around when they cot their first codex in second edition. the next part of my army will be from that time period, I can wait to get them painted up. (damn school, ruining my free time.)

**Red_Zeke**

Oh 1st ed, Orks you crazy cats. There were so many rules that involved randomness, including while making your army list. So 25 points could randomly generate you a lasgun bolted to an autopistol, or a 5 barreled, rapid firing, blast radius laying lascannon.

Madboyz had about 20 pages devoted to all the behaviors that they could manifest, and Ghazghul, Kaptin Badrukk, and others were just getting their start in example lists.

For all the hours and hours we poured in to the game, I think we probably only played a couple times. It was tough to get excited about a game when someone was going to launch a cluster missile of vortex grenade land mines into your deployment zone. Not much you can really do about that. But a good game for imagination...

**talthar**

Whew...this takes me back. I never had the chance to play RT (I hopped on the bandwagon with 2nd edition), I do remember the ads for it. White Wolf magazine (anybody remember that?) had a huge color ad for it, like 10 pages of models and background. It was very much sold as "Marines vs Orks", and had a great bit of fluff that said when man and ork first met they immediately shot each other. Set the tone for the whole game...

**palaeomerus**

Rogue Trader borrowed several ideas from Laserburn too. (Probably because Brian Ansell worked on both)

(Like a rutheless Galactic Empire, a fanatic inquisitorial space church called the Red Redemtpion which fought the Emprie, conversion beamers, heavy power armor called Dreadnoughts, combat robots...)