Rogue Trader: To pillage where no man has pillaged before.

I'm sure we've all watched Star Trek and thought to ourselves: "Golly, I wish the enterprise was stocked with plasma guns and power weapons and was attacked by demons every once in a while".

Here's your bizarre crossover fantasy.

I don't know how to really explain this so I'll leave the first post of the Something Awful Rogue Trader thread to explain:

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"In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
Armies rage across the galaxy, fighting for power, ideology, or genocide.
Countless trillions of human beings slave in the depths of hive cities, eking out a meager existence.
Billions more are employed keeping a tenuous control over the bloated infrastructure of the Imperium of Man.

Out in the Koronus Expanse, where men once were and now are again, colonists uncover strange monstrosities in the ruins of once-great cities, and raiders strike with impunity.
Beyond the borders of known space, terrifying alien races wait to strike at this new tendril of humanity.
And as ever, where mankind goes, it finds it has brought daemons with it.
The Koronus Expanse is a dangerous place, where wars of all forms rage, where alien terror waits without and eldritch terror waits within, where the only laws are the laws of the gun, and the only certainty is chaos.

But all that aside, it's a great place to make some money.

Okay, so the good people at Fantasy Flight Games have come out with the second of the three planned tiers of the Warhammer 40K roleplaying experience, and I'm giddy as a schoolgirl about it.

There are many, many complaints that can be levered at their previous game, Dark Heresy. Among which:
"A stray shot can and quite possibly will kill me!"
"Having a failure rate lower than 50% is only achieved by extreme specialization!"
"I'm basically playing the scrubbiest scrubs in a universe with so many badasses that my existence is pointless!"
"A plasma gun will very literally cost me ten times my net worth AND when I get it odds are still good the thing's going to explode on me!"
"Within the framework of the game, you are stuck on some level supporting the generally evil-as-fuck Imperial hierarchy!"
"This book was laid out by someone who actively hates their readers!"
"The psyker was trying to heal me, but instead he exploded in a shower of gore and a demon jumped out of his torso who proceeded to dismember us all!"

All these problems except for the last two have been addressed, because that last one is awesome!

The best way to describe what you play in Rogue Trader is the following. Have you ever seen this episode of Star Trek? And thought that being a captain in the evil alternate universe would basically rock?

In Rogue Trader, you play the bridge crew of a Rogue Trading vessel, an ancient, enormous ship armed to the teeth, crewed by several thousand loyal_ish crewmembers, with a stated mission of "fuck bitches, make money, smoke obscura." And when they say bridge crew, they mean like the Star Trek bridge crew. There are rules for letting the redshirts handle just about everything, but let's face it, you're going to want to beam down with the away team every once in a while and kick some rear end.

The two biggest mechanical additions to the game are ship combat rules (in a combat round, which is half an hour, the ship moves and fires, and every player gets to make an extended action. extended actions include 'active scan,' 'Emergency Repairs,' 'Hold Fast!' and 'Work Harder, You Scum*') and the Acquisition rules. As a Rogue Trader, even one on the scrub end of the scale, you've got more wealth on hand than some planetary governors. It takes a -lot- of effort for you to lose an appreciable amount of that money. It follows a similar pattern to standard Dark Heresy rolling; roll d100, get below your Resources number, you win.

The interesting part is there are two sets of modifiers; scale, and rarity. Sure, a Crusade-era power sword is a definite rarity, but if you're only looking for one, well, you know, some people are so -lax- about their private storehouse security. Conversely, if you're looking for a lasgun, suppliers will be asking you how many hundred you need.

Character creation has been improved; it's a bit less random, and characters are given several more freebies. On top of these freebies, a starting Rogue Trader character is the equivalent of a 5000-XP Dark Heresy character. To take this back to Star Trek, Dark Heresy characters are the redshirts. You are the bridge crew. "
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At the beginning of the game, the players have a set amount of profit to spend. They could get a small dingy ship and spend the rest on Power Weapons and Space Blow, or purchase a giant cruiser with a crew of 1000's. Hell, Space Marine squads can probably be bought as personal guards.

Adventures come in the form of Endevours, odd jobs or expeditions into the dark frontier, ranging from looting space hulks to trading with alien species (by that we mean kill them and take their stuff). The players don't have to take orders from the Imperium if they don't want to or play intern for an inquisitor. They are their own bosses. Hell, the game advises players to make up their own endevours to play through. It's a sandbox game in every sense. And with big jobs comes big money, like purchasing a giant moonbase and an army of mercenaries capable of holding a coup on an Imperial world. The scale of the player's decisions are massive. I think this type of gameplay would meld better with the group than having the inquisitor demand his acolytes to file those TPS reports and solve mysteries then get their soul sucked out by a daemon. I know the good Commisar is marshalling Deadlands, Kit is goofing off with D20. But this, this demands I game master it, if only to see what the hell happens with this many options. Come on, the Dark Fronteir is waiting...

Also, anybody want to buy my Dark Heresy Stuff?

The first half of this video is Rogue Trader in a nutshell