Hey everyone! Adam here to educate you on the bygone eras of 40K.
I’ve played every of edition of this game. Now, I have not played continuously through them all, but I have played each addition at some point. i have been through the highs and lows of both my armies and the ruleset. I am currently enjoying this latest edition of the game. Sure, it’s not perfect, but what game system is? There are always room for improvement and I am glad that games Workshop is taking an active role in the games development. Although I did enjoy each edition of the game, there are things I do not miss.
This article will focus mainly of the Rogue Trader era, as there is plenty to talk about all the other editions. Considering the quality of Games Workshop models today, it is hard to believe there was a time when you had to put metal models together. I do not miss the issue of having to hold metal parts together, for a long time, until the glue had set. This also includes the risk of gluing your fingers together. Although we did end up with Finecast, it is a toss up on which is worse. It just wasn’t the material either, some of the models they produced made you questions their future as a model company. Looking at the models now, some seem very cringe worthy and I have no desire to go back to that design philosophy.
I will briefly* talk about the rules. As we all know, Rogue Trader was originally conceived as “Dungeon & Dragons in Space”, essentially. So it was suggested that you have a Dungeon Master, and you kind of roleplay your tabletop game. They even provided a scenario with the rulebook, “Battle at the Farm”, which gave us the story of the Crimson Fists vs Orks. Being a book from the late 80s/early 90s, this ruleset also gave us charts. Lots and lots of charts. There was even a D1000 chart in the Slaves to Darkness book. There were rules for custom vehicles. Some pretty intense rules for building your robots, and even some rule to literally program how the robots would act. After you were done learning and memorizing that, I even think they gave you a certificate of programming, it was so intense. Ok, I may be remembering that last part wrong. It was what it set out to do. As a result, it was very heavy in the bookkeeping aspect and would sometimes frustrate some players. In the end my playgroup decided just to use bits and pieces of the rules. As someone once told me “You played Rogue Trader, but you really didn’t ‘play’ Rogue Trader”.
Don’t get me wrong. I still loved the edition. It gave us so many characters and ideas that we still see today. From a small call out box in the first Chapter Approved, we got the Horus Heresy. There are stuff that Games Workshop seems to be bringing back from this era also. There are a ton of awesome quotes, that we still see today, that make it probably the most metal edition out of all of them. There are stories in those early days that are a bit of a head scratcher, in so much as to why they did that, but they are still fun to read. So, if you get a chance, have a look at those old books and see some of the stuff the more experienced gamers had to deal with, and be thankful you are playing in the current era.
That’s all for this week, I hope you enjoyed the read. Let me know your thoughts, and anything that you are glad is gone, or wish GW would bring back, in the comments section. Don’t forget to visit our Facebook, Twitch, and Patreon pages to stay up to date on what we’re up to and when episodes drop!
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*I lied