by Greyfeathers
I greatly enjoy Rogue Trader. To be specific, as there’s a couple of them, I mean Fantasy Flight Games’ tabletop roleplaying game set in Warhammer 40,000’s grim darkness of the far future. It was actually my introduction to 40K as a whole, and as such holds a place near and dear to my heart, even though I should probably hate it for that. But anyway… Rogue Trader is unique, in that it looks at the oppressive totalitarian and theocratic nightmare of the Imperium of Man, and says “Yeah, well you’re exempt from all that. Emperor said so.” Rather than being one among untold trillions, Rogue Trader puts you in the Imperium’s top 0.001%, points you at the great and terrible unknown and tells you to go plant the flag, find the shiny, and make more fat stacks to go do it all over again. Right out of character creation, it puts you in charge of so much wealth and power as to be the endgame boss for the protagonists of just about every other of Fantasy Flight’s 40K RPGs, if not 40K RPGs entirely. Yet despite this, and despite all the excellent lore in Fantasy Flight’s notoriously badly edited and formatted books, you see comically little support for that lore, and arguably the premise of the game entirely. It feels like the writing staff and the game design staff were in separate parts of the office and never met outside of bloody skirmishes in the break room. What I mean by this is that there are very few rules that actually reflect the scale that it’s player characters are ostensibly operating on, and even those seem like a poorly designed afterthought relegated to the back end of supplements, rather than a core consideration to be put in the main book.
I refer to this as Sarvus Trask Syndrome. For context, Sarvus Trask is the first Rogue Trader character created, in class and quite possibly in general. He’s the guy the lead designer, Ross Watson, created for the internal playtest. He’s bombastic, arrogant, extremely crazy, and insists on doing just about everything himself. And unfortunately, because he does so, everyone else must also do so. So very much of Rogue Trader’s adventure design is predicated on the assumption that no matter how small the issue is, the player characters must be involved. Which is all well and good, it’s an RPG after all, the players kinda have to do things. But in this case, it misses the forest for the trees. I can recall several instances in one singular adventure module where the overriding thought I had when reading them was “Why are the characters being bothered with this?” In case you’re curious, the module was Lure of the Expanse. It’s a pretty great adventure, despite it’s flaws and inundation with Sarvus Trask Syndrome. For example, in one of the very first scenes of the module, the player characters, some of the richest, most powerful people in the Imperium, while walking unescorted to a super secret shady auction on a lawless space station…are expected to fight off a few dock thugs in order to save an old guy pretending to be an informant. Said old guy’s plan was…to lure them to his apartment by teasing them with useful information about that auction, and rob them with a couple brutes he hired.
I need you to understand just how ridiculous this is. This is the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, on their way to an exclusive auction held for the sake of other such CEOs, deciding that the best way to get to this auction house isn’t to fly, or take one of the fleet of luxury vehicles they possess, with a route meticulously planned out, scouted and screened by some of the best private security money can buy to arrive safely and on time, and to not have to talk to anyone of us lesser members of the public. No, the best way to get there is to gather the board of directors, leave the army of very scary hired goons at the mansion, drive the luxury limousine down to the harbor of a run-down port city, get out in full view of the starving dockworkers, then hoof it over the wrong side of the tracks, flaunt their expensive jewelry in the bad part of town, and then get into a fistfight with crackheads in a dark alley, for the sake of the tinfoil hat-wearing homeless guy claiming to have dirt on how the auction is actually for the lizard people running the world to divvy up the global supply of camembert cheese. Also, he’s actually lying and is going to sic some of his trained raccoons on them. This is, of course, absurd. At least, to me. Maybe I’m alone in this, but I enjoy verisimilitude in my games, and when I’m playing as one of The Elite that Rogue Trader inherently positions it’s players as, things should have to go categorically wrong in uncountable ways before my character’s immediate concern is being held at knife-point by a street thug. Where are my courtly and political intrigues? The high-tower dinner balls in which money, power and influence are exchanged as freely as empty compliments and platitudes? My grand campaigns of conquest across the stars?
Sadly, such high stakes situations in any official material are rare due to an almost terminal case of Sarvus Trask Syndrome in just about every adventure, module and supplement. And when they do appear, they only have half-baked mechanical representations. The closest is within my beloved Warp Storm Trilogy, which right out the gate puts you in the hotseat of juggling the conflicting interests and beliefs of a number of power-players on an Imperial colony world that’s about to have Orks rain down upon it. The module presents you with a complex web of relationships, motivations and ambitions to build off of, and I love it for it, even though it too suffers from the characteristic FFG Jank when you get into the weeds of it. As you might be able to tell by now, I take issue with this jarring lack of crunch to back up some inspired fluff. And I haven’t even gotten into how most of the talents in the system are combat-oriented! If you’re playing a non-combatant or someone who just doesn’t get their hands dirty, well, you’re just out of luck, buddy. But I’m in serious danger of going off on another rant, and the mechanical flaws of the system are actually not why I’m writing all this. Okay, technically they are, but only a specific one and y’know what, you can go-
My apologies. So anyway, instead of continuing to gripe about it indefinitely, I came up with a fairly basic yet adaptable system for Rogue Trader GMs and parties to quantify, handle, and manage all of the cool stuff they supposedly have. I should be clear, I have nothing against people who run Rogue Trader as just your typical adventuring party in space, but I consider it to be a terrible waste of a very interesting premise. I won’t say you’re playing it wrong, but. The system is very much a work in progress, and I have to thank some of my fellow Legionnaires for their patience with my GMing, and for using them as guinea pigs for my half-baked ideas. If nothing else though I think my Seneschal’s player appreciates having things to do, assets to manage and pieces to move on his chessboard. I’ll write about their adventures at another time, as they’ve been pretty memorable and easily the highlight of my tenure as a GM. I am in no way shape or form a game designer. Please feel free to pick it apart, criticize and point out it’s undoubtedly many flaws, and if you can, make it better, and make it your own. And if you do, please let me know what you did and how it worked for you! From the start, I intended this to be an adaptable baseline for you to make as abstract or granular as your party’s tastes desire. I hope, in some small way, it can be a treatment for Sarvus Trask Syndrome, and encourage you and your Rogue Trader players to think bigger, and think better. While I have your attention regarding cool homebrew, do go check out any of Motormouth Jamie’s excellent works. Dancing in the Ashes in particular is excellent for those looking to give the knife-eared bastards some love.
Rogue Trader, Assets and Holdings 0.4
An unholy amalgamation born of the union of Florida Man and Cretan Woman, little is known of the entity called Greyfeathers. Some legionnaires believe he is a ballistic wedding planner, others that he wrestles alligators to entertain the children, and others still that he makes ends meet by reciting philosophy to people caught in the rain. Most of the time though, he’s just involved in some form of nerdery. Sometimes it’s even productive nerdery!
