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Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Fugazi wrote:


Hindsight really helps. The world moved slower back then. For me, if I got one thing at xmas, then if I wanted the second follow-up thing, it would have to wait until next xmas.

Rogue Trader moved so fast. There were so many updates, including stuff we didn't know about until some of those old White Dwarfs appeared on the internet. I could never afford keeping up. I had to rely on friends picking up White Dwarf, and still, they didn't grab them all.

By the time 2nd edition came out, it felt like Rogue Trader had already gone through multiple evolutions, but it was hard to see it at the time. It just felt ...fast and rapidly changing. From the limited perspective of a kid, the changes almost felt arbitrary...like, what are the rules?

The very term "2nd edition" is something of an anachronism. We call it that now, because we lump all of Rogue Trader into a single printing, but if you go back to the contemporary writing, there were two editions of Rogue Trader, and 2nd was actually considered 3rd.

Maybe you & yours called individual printings "editions", but that's not how everyone else (including GW) does it. Not then, not now.

I recall RT being in flux, but no lines being drawn. But then we were not as knit together as a community back then. As we were playing it more as a RPG, we just shrugged and kept on playing with what we had. My group didn’t have anyone collecting WD. We heard second hand about marines getting another point of toughness, and a change to vehicles. But never saw the sources.

ccs wrote:


Maybe you & yours called individual printings "editions", but that's not how everyone else (including GW) does it. Not then, not now.

The Battle Bible (1998) referred to 40k as being on its fourth edition, so obviously someone was using that terminology.

That aligns with the experience at the time. The Compendium was a big revision, which was regarded as a second edition of Rogue Trader, a unified rule book at last (which I didn't buy). When the boxed set came out, the Rogue Trader moniker was dropped and the game played differently, with many of the old factions quietly disappeared.

I still have the box and the rules and there is nothing in it referencing earlier editions or rules. It's just Warhammer 40,000. Players at the time differentiated it from Rogue Trader, and no one said they played "first edition," they instead said "Rogue Trader."

When the 3rd edition came out, there was now a need to differentiate between that 40k and the one immediately before it, because they were both "not Rogue Trader." Rogue Trader retroactively became a unified first edition, the first boxed set second, and the current one was third.

I've been collecting materials from the 2nd era, but it is far from complete. If someone has a WD proclaiming a second edition, I'd love to see it.

Because 3rd ed. was such a radical change, there were people who preferred the older rules, and that's where the "2nd ed." moniker emerged. No one used it while it was current, though. It was just 40k.

By way of contrast WHFB was well into editions, so when I got into it, I knew immediately that I was playing 5th edition, in part because people argued 4th was better (or was it 3rd?). There were no such modifiers yet for 40k because they weren't needed.

The emergence of forums (like Portent) locked in this terminology, and I supposed it's been around for so long, we think it was always that way. I'm not so sure.

That’s my copies of Ravening Hordes (2nd Ed) and Warhammer Armies (3rd Ed) arrived.

Now my historical GW knowledge and reading has been predominantly 40K. So I greatly enjoyed when flicking through Warhammer Armies that at that point? WHFB wasn’t quite its own thing yet.

The roots are of course there, and it’d already shed its Tolkien origins. Instead, it’s more a clear mash up of Fantasy and Historical Tropes.

I am aware that what would become the WHFB 4th Ed Empire book was worked on here, and released in WD as an ongoing project. And of course the Semolina nightmare where an ape tries to eat me seminal Realms of Chaos books would debut in that edition.

Overall, whilst there’s a lot here for me to digest, I’m looking forward to following the same creative curve for WHFB that I have 40K.