Weaver95

yep, ’tis true!  the long awaited Rogue Trader RPG is now onstore shelves everywhere!

I have to admit, i’ve got a special place in my heart for sci-fi RPG games.  Star Frontiers, Gamma World, the old Alternity Star*Drive setting, Traveller in all it’s incarnations…I love sci-fi RPG games.  But they never seem to do very well in the general gamer market.  well, not in the RPG market anyways.  Minature games and computer games certainly do well enough but the RPG aspect has always seemed to be dominated by fantasy games.

That said, I hope that Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader will reverse this trend.  See, they both incorporate elements of fantasy in their game setting.  I guess the best way to explain the game background is that it’s ‘gothic horror/sci-fantasy’.  Technology advanced to a very high point, but was lost during various/sundry upheavals and for the most part regressed.  There’s even a cult dedicated to worshipping advanced technology.  And then there’s the whole ‘daemons from warp space’ thing, but we won’t cover that right now.

Basically, Rogue Trader is a game about commerce.  But given that this IS the warhammer 40k universe, it’s commerce with very large guns and daemonic sorcery.  I’ve skimmed the rules, and picked up a basic understanding of the  commerce rules and they seem a bit….basic.  i’ve played Traveller quite a bit and they had some very advanced economic theory underpinning the game, so perhaps i’m allowing my experiences with that game to color my impression of Rogue Trader.  That said, the game uses a mechanic called ‘Profit Margin’ to handle the economic impact of the actions of the intrepid crew.  There are various/sundry economic activities for you to try, and the rules cover most everything any trading organization could do.  But for a game that is allegedly based on interstellar trading, I found the rules actually governing interstellar trade to be overly simplistic.  There are more pages dedicated to weapons and ship design than economics, so take that for what you will.

Other than that minor qibble, I’d have to say Rogue Trader hits all the high marks.  The book packs in a lot of detail, offering several new character classes and ship design/travel rules that are fully compatable with Dark Heresy (and vice/versa).  So if you’ve already invested in Dark Heresy, picking up Rogue Trader can only add MORE levels of detail and options for your game of Inquisitorial purging by faith and fire.  Additionally, Rogue Trader books and game suppliments will be fully compatable across the board so you can take things from both systems and combine them in new and interesting ways.  Full marks for economy of effort on the part of the game designers!

On a somewhat related note, I will NOT be jumping into a Rogue Trader campaign at any time in the near future.  I’ve got a rockin’ idea for a 4th ed Shadowrun game that will kick into gear on or about the 22nd of this month.  so until I finish my SR4 campaign I won’t be running a Rogue Trader game.  sorry guys, but  I won’t have anything to report on that front for quite a few months!

Seriously. Microsoft has always been extremely leery of people who pop the hood on their Xbox console to see what’s in there.  And modifying the hardware is technically a crime.  As fucked up as that law is, I don’t think i’ve ever seen it enforced.

I suppose I could rant about just how incredibly asinine it is to arrest someone for modifying a game console.  Ok, modding TWO game consoles, since this guy is charged with 2 counts….but if I did rant about how draconian this is, or how obviously law enforcement have better things to do than checking to see if game consoles have been modified, I don’t think anyone would listen.  Or even care.

So i’m going to just add this to the ever growing list of just how authoritarian our society has become.  We have so many laws that now we could go to jail for damn near anything.  Even modifying a game console.  Makes you wonder how far down the rabbit hole we’re going to go.

I stumbled upon this the other day.

Now, I’ve played World of Warcraft since Day One.  Done the whole ‘raid leader’ thing, the PvP stuff, the guild officer bit…and I really do like the game.  But what really keeps me logging into the game these days is my fellow officers and players.  The game itself has become somewhat stale to me.  The math behind the various class mechanics is a known quantity, the fights themselves are largely a matter of making sure everyone on the raid team knows which waltz we’re dancing too that night.  There isn’t much of a ‘zip’ to the game anymore, at least not to me.

But my semi-secret guilty pleasure has always been the post apocalypse genre.  Books like ‘Alas Babylon’, tabletop role playing games like Morrow Project and computer games like the entire Fallout series have always held my interest.  And I could list book after book and game after game of all the things in my guilty pleasure collection (like Twilight 2000, which deserves honorable mention).  I guess it’s because I grew up largely during the 80’s.  To my mind, that time produced some of the best cold war/end of the world science fiction ever seen.  There was a weird vibe in the air, we all thought that President Ronnie was gonna push the button…or the Ruskies would invade and we’d all shout ‘WOLVERINES” at ‘em during the occupation.  At any rate, that was probably the last decade in which good post apocalyptic sci-fi got written.  From that point forward, authors stopped writing about the end of the world and started preaching about how global warming was going to kill us all by 2004.

However, back to the subject at hand.  An MMO dedicated to an ‘after the bomb’ setting?  Oh hells yes!  And I could probably get a few of my current Warcraft guild interested in it as well.  But I don’t know if this game will get off the ground.  I really hope it does, because i’m going to watch for it.  with luck, it’ll go somewhere!

Oh my God. No, really - OH MY GOD! that video clip from the link is a fight between an Atlas and a WARHAMMER IIc!  The warhammer is my all time favorite mech design from the entire product line.  And now….it’s coming BACK!

total. Bad. ASS!

Looks like i’ll be flipping between making WoW raids, shooting zombies in L4D 2.0 and blowing up people in my pimped out Warhammer IIc.  ’cause that’s what it’s all about!

This is either the lamest thing imaginable OR it’s the greatest thing I have ever seen….judge for yourself but beware -the site itself is written in Russian.  There’s a handy translation link from goole that renders the site mostly legible.  Oh, by the way: LARP is shorthand for Live Action Role Playing.  Basically it’s moving your D&D game to live action/out in the woods.  Not a bad way to spend the weekend, if you’re into chicks who like to dress up in skimpy clothing and wack people with foam swords.  Or in this case, nerf guns.

Of course, what I want is the hats!

Occasionally, I get hit with insomnia.  Which I suppose isn’t exactly a good thing to have happen…but it does give me time to create and edit a couple fraps files that i’ve got sitting on my desktop.  so here’s my latest effort - enjoy!

I have to admit - I like Dark Heresy.  I really do.  It’s like Lovecraft in space, only with plasma weapons.  Granted, the lastest book they put out (first in the Haarlock series of mega-adventures) didn’t overly impress me…but it’s the first book in a trilogy, so I really can’t comment until I see the third and final book.  I suspect that the authors have secrets aplenty for their dear readers to absorb, but they didn’t want to blow their wad on the first book.  So I can afford to be patient and wait for them to complete the trilogy.

That said - this is a link to the most recent blog update on the next game supplement that is due to hit the shelves soon-ish.  See, the basis of the game is that you’re working for one of the Holy Orders of the Inquisition.  The Ordo Xenos - which hunts aliens, the Ordo Hereticus - which hunts witches and the Ordo Malleus - which hunts daemons.  You work for an Inquisitor who belongs to one of those three orders.  But there are many ways to serve the God Emperor of Mankind, and some Inquisitors walk the path of the Radical.  They choose to use the power of Chaos against itself…kind of like using fire to fight fire.  The tricky/evil part to all this is that you could be working for a radical Inquisitor and never know it until its far too late.

Fantasy Flight Games hasn’t released much in the way of details for the Radical’s Handbook, but I have yet to see them release a ‘bad’ book.  So I have to admit that i’m very interested in how they plan on treating the subject.  I could easily see myself planning a campaign that has the players being all puritan and purging the heretics by faith and fire…then slowly starting to realize that their boss isn’t burning the books they’ve been finding but reading them and having them do questionable things in pursuit of saving mankind.  Or what’s worse - having the players realize that maybe their boss is right - that the Radicals ARE the only hope of mankind.  But I like setting my stories in morally grey areas like that.  It makes the game more about character development than a game about who’s got the best toys.

So suffice it to say that I have high hopes for this book.  the artwork looks good, which is always good sign.  And FFG tends to have high production values for all their books in this line.  Which again, bodes well for the release of Rogue Trader later this summer (set for GenCon release, I do believe).  So if you’re interested in gothic horror/sci-fi role playing games you might want to check these guys out.  I like them, and I try to recommend their stuff to gamers everywhere.

I’ve been hitting the politics and tech heavy news pretty hard lately, so I think it’s time for a bit of a break.  So I got up, looked around the room and decided to do a review of something else.  Pulling a book off the nearest shelf at random we find….

Star*Drive (the asterisk is important) was the space adventure setting for the short lived Alternity rules from Wizards of the Coast.  As I understand it, WoTC was experimenting with a ‘universal’ rules set, with the intention of making characters ‘plug and play’.  This was PRIOR to the release of 3.0 and 3.5 rules of course.  I never really liked the Alternity rules - I thought they were needlessly encumbering.  And they insisted on using a 12 sided dice for everything, which make the math underlying the system rather interesting.

Rules aside, the game suppliments themselves were phenominal!  The Star*Drive setting had it all - huge galaxy spanning empires, a sinister conspiracy of mind reading aliens, bioengineered parasitic infiltrators, and plenty of weird locations to explore for fun and profit.  The main book was efficent - you got a good solid overview of each faction and game benefits for being from that faction, a short history of the universe and a star map for the local region where the basic campaign was to take place.  you also got a description of the main star systems, local factions on the ground, short history of each…all in all this book packed an amazing level of detail into it’s short 256 page format.

The downsides of course, were that some sacrifices were made.  While the descriptions of stellar nations and local star systems are efficent, they lack local color and depth.  A lot of the history of the stellar nations and the recent Glactic war(s) was sadly lacking.  Understandable, since those conflicts weren’t really the main focus of the campaign but i’m a big fan of fictional/alternate history - especially military fiction, so the lack of detail in that respect was something of a disappointment for me.  Also, the book suffered from the usual WoTC indifference to artwork.  It’s minimal at best and while I certainly understand the need to pack as much information into the book as possible, I feel the authors could have spent at least a bit more time on the artwork layout.  All in all, it was a minor quibble at best and what art they have in the book gets the job done.

Another thing that made this setting stand out was that somehow the authors managed to avoid making their space opera setting feel like yet another Traveller clone.  While interstellar trade was certainly an option to the game, it was not assumed that any campaign would automatically be a bunch of traders tromping from world to world as space truckers and fast talking snake oil salesmen trying to eek out a living while avoiding the authorities.  In fact, it was entirely possible to play the entire setting as a military campaign, working for any number of factions (both sinister and honorable alike).   My personal impression was that the intended campaign style was to be an interesting (if odd) fusion of the X-files, Star Trek and Firefly.  But that’s just how I’d have run the game so take it for what you will.

Of course, the game is now sadly out of print.  It still shows up on eBay from time to time and I think there are still some copies floating around on Amazon.com.  Not to mention that various/sundry dealers at gamer conventions worldwide seem to always have a Star*Drive book or three sitting around for those interested in semi-obscure sci-fi role playing games.  You might end up paying a bit more than face value for a decently preseved copy but if you should stumble upon one, you might want to pick it up.  I think it’s worth the read.