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I have not read any of the D&D novels and I don't intend to. I'm sorry but I just don't see the attraction in a fantasy universe as generic as the D&D one.



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I suppose the thing that really annoys me about space marines in the fluff is that they are always really hard to kill. In the book Assualt on black reach the marines attack an ork assualt force attempting to take a fortress held by the guard. The main squad in the story loses one member to an entire ork horde in close combat. I'm sorry but that just really irritates me because the space marines are just not that powerful.

English Assassin wrote:Actually Rogue Trader's fluff was primarily devised to fit the models Citadel were already making, thus saving them some money. Space Marines had already been sculpted for Ansell's earlier game, Laserburn, the Jokaero were put in because they had made an orangoutang model to represent mayor Dave from Judge Dredd, etc. Much the same is true of Warhammer; the original high elf miniatures were initially produced and sold as Melniboneans back when Citadel had the license to make miniatures for Chaosium's Stormbringer game, when that license lapsed, they simply rebranded them, likewise the original Imperial and Brettonnian models were reused from a variety of different sources, some fantasy, some historical.

Then again, the games rules came simultaneously with the fluff. There's countless ways to use a Space Marine miniature when you just have the model as a blank slate; the way the Marines evolved from 1E to 2E shows that, too. Technically, the rules are what makes the game, not the minis. See: proxies / "counts-as".

(it is quite funny how cobbled together 40k initially was, tho the franchise has indeed come a long way from back then; fortunately, many of the trademark cliches that have snuck in from elsewhere can still be found)

matsa13 wrote:The main squad in the story loses one member to an entire ork horde in close combat. I'm sorry but that just really irritates me because the space marines are just not that powerful.

Perfect example of what I meant with that earlier post of mine. Thank you.

Lynata wrote:

English Assassin wrote:Actually Rogue Trader's fluff was primarily devised to fit the models Citadel were already making, thus saving them some money. Space Marines had already been sculpted for Ansell's earlier game, Laserburn, the Jokaero were put in because they had made an orangoutang model to represent mayor Dave from Judge Dredd, etc. Much the same is true of Warhammer; the original high elf miniatures were initially produced and sold as Melniboneans back when Citadel had the license to make miniatures for Chaosium's Stormbringer game, when that license lapsed, they simply rebranded them, likewise the original Imperial and Brettonnian models were reused from a variety of different sources, some fantasy, some historical.

Then again, the games rules came simultaneously with the fluff. There's countless ways to use a Space Marine miniature when you just have the model as a blank slate; the way the Marines evolved from 1E to 2E shows that, too. Technically, the rules are what makes the game, not the minis. See: proxies / "counts-as".

(it is quite funny how cobbled together 40k initially was, tho the franchise has indeed come a long way from back then; fortunately, many of the trademark cliches that have snuck in from elsewhere can still be found)

To be pedantically accurate (as you'll have observed by now, my favourite kind of accuracy) the rules pre-date the game by about four years, since they are the rules of Warhammer.

Pedantry aside, Rogue Trader's origins are rather intriguing and appropriately mysterious. It would appear, based on some very old adverts and snippets of interviews, that what Rick Priestley intended originally was to write was a roleplaying game, seemingly a space-operatic antidote to the hard sci-fi of Traveller, and to call it Rogue Trader (no colon or subtitle). Play was to have been based around the eponymous stellar merchantmen, and set on the rough frontiers of the civilised but brutal Imperium, his assumption having been that players might enjoy a 'grimdark' dystopian setting, but that playing inside the Imperium itself wouldn't allow players the freedom of action they were accustomed to enjoying in an RPG.

It was the success of Warhammer's second edition (its first edition was nigh-unplayable) which spurred Bryan Ansell to push Priestley towards reinventing the project as a sci-fi wargame, something Ansell himself had tried, albeit with only moderate success, a few years previously with Laserburn, and from which concepts and miniatures would be reused. That Rogue Trader, for all its charm, is to contemporary eyes, a rather muddled and directionless affair, should thus be unsurprising, though it would be fair to point out that most of game's RPG-legacy traits had been shed by about 1990 (aside from the quirk of individualised profiles, which, despite being - particularly in Warhammer - unnecessary is with us still).

Warhammer 40,000's success led Ansell to paste the same background onto two more generic sci-fi games which had been pitched to the GW studio: a Aliens-esque game of fighting in spaceship corridors written by Rick's schoolchum Richard Halliwell, and a game of giant robots fighting by an unknown young man with a full head of hair named Jervis (respectively Space Hulk and Adeptus Titanicus, which would ultimately give us terminator marines, tyranids and the heresy).

And you're entirely right, it is (for me at least) a significant part of the setting's appeal to know that it was cobbled together out of stolen ideas, old projects reworked to save money, and bits added-on to integrate different games.

English Assassin wrote:To be pedantically accurate (as you'll have observed by now, my favourite kind of accuracy) the rules pre-date the game by about four years, since they are the rules of Warhammer.

That I wasn't aware of - I've played WFRP, but other than that I have not dabbled in the other game too much.
Resorting to the same pedantry, though, I could point out that this doesn't matter since the rules for Warhammer Fantasy are for Warhammer Fantasy and not for 40k. For 40k, the game as well as the fluff have always appeared simultaneously. One might even say that the fluff predates the game, given that Rogue Trader was - as you correctly pointed out - not a wargame, yet its fluff about the Imperium and the galaxy already formed much of what we're still going by today.

English Assassin wrote:It would appear, based on some very old adverts and snippets of interviews, that what Rick Priestley intended originally was to write was a roleplaying game, seemingly a space-operatic antidote to the hard sci-fi of Traveller, and to call it Rogue Trader (no colon or subtitle). Play was to have been based around the eponymous stellar merchantmen, and set on the rough frontiers of the civilised but brutal Imperium, his assumption having been that players might enjoy a 'grimdark' dystopian setting, but that playing inside the Imperium itself wouldn't allow players the freedom of action they were accustomed to enjoying in an RPG.

Oh yeah - I actually hunted down a copy of the book just to check out its contents. Looked somewhat unplayable and like a mess, but at the same time incredibly cool. Those drawings ... and the random mission tables ...!

SM in novers are all HQ in game .
problme solved

btw that sumary in the page before can refect the "SM of books"
but i prefere the SM as is on tabletop.
Other teams are same in book and tabletop.see graunt gost for ex. they lose many "models" as is a table game

English Assassin wrote:

SoloFalcon1138 wrote:And I guess the OP has never read a single D&D novel either? Not too many player characters are really ever like their novel counterparts...

If the OP has never read a D&D novel, then he is indeed fortunate.

Too bad. There are a lot of them that are very well written. Maybe you should try and expand your horizons...

SoloFalcon1138 wrote:Too bad. There are a lot of them that are very well written. Maybe you should try and expand your horizons...

I've read very few D&D novels, but the War of the Spider Queen was fantastic. An entire adventurer's party of evil Drow, and the authors manage to make them likeable villains you just love reading about. Good inspiration for Dark Eldar characters, I reckon.

To me one of the chief issues that BL writters undertaking novels about the Astartes face is an inherient contradiction:

All of the fluff - inlcuding that in the codexes states that the Asrtaes ar few in number but are incredably potent fighters - the actions of a few can and often do decide entire planetary campaigns.

However the tabletop game absolutely requires that they can not be this powerful or indeed rare so that people can field (and more importantly buy) lots of them.

There is not going to be a harmonious blending and I think that the BL writters are usually correct to follwo the fluff path - after all - thats what they are as well

Re: DnD novels;
Never read the Baldurs Gate II: Shadows of Amn 'novel'. It's so bad it hurts to have it on my shelf.

Mr Morden wrote:All of the fluff - inlcuding that in the codexes states that the Asrtaes ar few in number but are incredably potent fighters - the actions of a few can and often do decide entire planetary campaigns.

Can't really agree to this as far as the studio fluff is concerned. Yes, there are a few exceptional instances that are rightly recorded as legendary battles, but it also features numerous instances where Astartes simply get overwhelmed in a way you'd almost never see it in a BL novel.

Or to say it with other words, to me it feels as if BL has a tendency to present these exceptional battles as a standard. Now, this might just be so because the author wanted to deliver a compelling and exciting battle, but if almost every book does that it becoms regarded as a "default" and changes the perception you'd have compared to the more balanced approach from, say, various White Dwarf articles. This is not limited to Astartes (it just has a stronger effect there since 90% of the novels are about them) and also has a negative effect on the value of the various events. "If every battle is epic, none are." And so the next author will try to feature an even more epic battle to make his readers happy. And the next author will try to top that. And so on, until we get to the Movie Marines of a certain RPG.

Balance. It's all about the balance. Epic wins should be softened by grim casualties and pushbacks, else it just stops feeling as if the protagonists are actually having a hard time.
At least that's how I feel. I've always been of the opinion that heroes need to have perks as well as flaws, and should at least feel vulnerable - though there's no true need for them to actually die to achieve this effect (that's what you have the extras for).

SoloFalcon1138 wrote:

English Assassin wrote:

SoloFalcon1138 wrote:And I guess the OP has never read a single D&D novel either? Not too many player characters are really ever like their novel counterparts...

If the OP has never read a D&D novel, then he is indeed fortunate.

Too bad. There are a lot of them that are very well written. Maybe you should try and expand your horizons...

Most of them are awful.

License fiction is one of those pit traps. If you're a discerning reader, it's hard to find the motivation to separate the good ones from the bad ones. Especially if you're not into the D&D license. I mean, D&D makes for a fun game for beginning roleplayers, but that doesn't always translate into good reading. In fact, it usually doesn't, lol.

For game rules, ideally, the main objective should always be game balance, then comes fluff.

However, the game should be set up so that game balance doesn't mean disrespecting the fluff.