The Forgotten Setting of Rogue Trader

As someone with an interest in worldbuilding, there's one interesting thought experiment I've seen going around. I don't know if it's ever been given a name - or, indeed, if anyone else has ever really noticed it being a thing - but for lack of a better term, I'm going to call it selective canon. Essentially, taking an existing series but treating only some installments or iterations of that series as canon, and then exploring how such an approach would impact the setting.

More often than you'd think, this results in a setting quite distinct from canon, due to something TV Tropes calls Early Installment Weirdness. It's rare that fictional universes, especially long-running ones, emerge fully-formed - often, they need to go through a growing phase where authors are still working out the details, which may lead to ideas or plot points coming up that don't fit neatly into the vision that would congeal later. Selective canon, then, asks us to consider how things would be different if these outliers were never brushed aside or retconned to bring them in line with what came later.

One popular example I've seen asks "what if A New Hope was the only Star Wars movie?" This actually changes quite a bit. Most prominently, Darth Vader is a distinct character from Luke's father (not yet named Anakin). We know that Obi-Wan served under Bail Organa in the Clone Wars, but we don't know what or when this is. The Jedi are a religion that few people in the galaxy have ever heard of, and even fewer believe in; there's no indication that they were once a unified order, let alone one that held prominent political power. There's no Padme, no Qui-Gon, and no Yoda. If we bring the official novelization into this, there's also the fact that the Emperor is a powerless figurehead and the real power in the Empire is with his council of scheming advisors. If we ignore the prequels, the Expanded Universe, and even the other two-thirds of the Original Trilogy, what we get is something very different.

Another proposal I've seen is running a campaign set in Tolkien's Middle-Earth that assumes The Hobbit is canon, but The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion are not. We know Gandalf is a wizard, and we know that he left the party to fight an evil necromancer at some point, but as far as we know, both are simply human magicians; we have no reason to believe that they are immortal angelic beings. Elves are just as antagonistic as goblins are. Gollum, as far as we can tell, is simply a strange creature who lives in a cave and has always lived there, and he owns a magic ring that can turn people invisible. There is no indication that he is a hobbit driven mad by a cursed artifact of immense power.

On my own end, there's The Saga of the Ortegids, which was inspired by these exercises - it asks to take the first three Dragon Quest games, and their Western marketing materials, and ignore everything else relevant about the franchise, reverse-engineering a setting that has more in common with 80s pulp fantasy novels than the pages of Shonen Jump. But another setting I think is just begging for the selective canon treatment is Warhammer 40,000.

I haven't talked much about 40k on this blog, but I'm a long-time fan, first getting into it with its third edition in the early 2000s. However, I'm endlessly fascinated by what came before my time. While I do enjoy the modern 40k universe, I'm equally interested in the setting of the game's first edition all the way back in 1987 - which I would argue should be considered a separate setting, because it's evolved so much over the years as to be nigh-unrecognizable today. And I think that the setting revealed in the first edition rulebook, Rogue Trader: Warhammer 40,000 (yes, that was a subtitle at first), as well as the articles in White Dwarf released around that time, deserves to be examined more closely. It's a compelling and unique setting in its own right, and one arguably more conducive to roleplaying than the modern one (fitting, since Rogue Trader started life as an RPG, and even in its final release is only mostly not one). So, let's take a look at the far future of 1987, when it wasn't quite so grimdark and there were still things that were not war.

• While this article will discuss what the setting of Rogue Trader does have, I think it's just as interesting to pay a close eye to what it doesn't. Many factions that modern 40k players will be familiar with had not yet been established. There are no Tau, no Necrons, no Dark Eldar, no Skitarii, no Grey Knights, no Sisters of Battle (there's a single illustration of a gun-toting woman in power armor and a nun's wimple, but there's nothing to indicate who or what she is), and perhaps most consequentially, no Chaos. There's no daemons, no Chaos Space Marines, no Chaos Cultists, and no Horus Heresy. All that stuff, at this point in time, is strictly exclusive to Warhammer Fantasy. It would very quickly be added with the Realm of Chaos sourcebooks, but when we look at the core rulebook in a vacuum, the second most popular faction of modern 40k is completely absent.
• The aesthetics of the setting resemble a combination of Star Wars, Alien, and 80s glam rock. Bright colors and big hair (especially mohawks) are the order of the day. There is not nearly as much gothic imagery or as many skulls as modern 40k, and things generally look like they came off the pages of Heavy Metal or 2000 AD more than they do from a medieval manuscript.

It took me far too long to realize the graffiti was supposed to say
"MARINES OUT," not "MARINES LOL"

• The main power of the setting is the Imperium of Man, a dystopian aristocracy encompassing somewhere in the vicinity of a million planets. The capital of the Imperium is Earth (not "Holy Terra"). It is governed by the Emperor (not "God-Emperor"). He is extremely old, but mortal, and dependent on a life support device called the Golden Throne to sustain his aging body, which requires the daily sacrifice of a thousand psykers to operate. Although immobile, he is conscious and can talk, and has agents that he directly orders to do his bidding. Overall, he comes across as more of a Baron Harkonnen than a Leto Atreides.
• 
  The other planets of the Imperium are feudal dependencies of Earth, and largely autonomous. The Imperium of Rogue Trader appears to be a much more diverse place than that of modern 40k canon, even if we take Games Workshop at face value when they emphasize that the Imperium is much more culturally heterogenous than what we see in published fiction. There are multiple religions practiced and tolerated in the Imperium, including the Adeptus Mechanicus (who are explicitly based on Earth, not Mars, and do not have their own exclusive units) and the Cult of the Space Pudding. There is no indication that the Emperor is universally worshiped as a god.
• Mutants are a persecuted minority in the Imperium. They are stated to arise from the effects of long histories of pollution and nuclear war on the human genome - remember, no Chaos. There are extensive mutation tables included in Rogue Trader, allowing for the creation of anything ranging from X-Men style humans with superpowers to something more visibly grotesque. Certain strains of mutants, like Astropaths (psychics used to maintain interstellar communications), Navigators (mutants used to guide ships through the Warp), Beastmen, and Squats are defined.
• Although the Imperium is a human polity, there are at least some planets where aliens coexist openly with humans, and trade is maintained with both the Eldar and the Slann.
• Robots are explicitly noted to be a common sight in the Imperium, and are used for both labor and warfare. The Imperium also makes use of artificial intelligence in its vehicles and weapons, allowing them to operate autonomously.
• The main military arm of the Imperium is the Imperial Army (not "Imperial Guard" or "Astra Militarum"). They are supported by genetically-altered special ops commandos called Space Marines. Space Marines are often recruited from criminals and convicts and are given combat stimulants. They are easily identified by their trademark power armor and bascinet-shaped helmets; however, power armor is not exclusive to Space Marines. Both the Imperial Army and Space Marines use the same vehicles, including the Leman Russ tank, Rhino APC, and Dreadnought walker (the latter of which is piloted conventionally and is not exclusively used as a life support system for crippled Space Marines). Traitor Space Marines do exist, but they are portrayed as criminals and mercenaries who mostly serve their own agenda.
• Space Marines operate as autonomous organizations, called Chapters or Legions. Each Chapter has its own colors that it uses to decorate the power armor of its Marines for ceremonial purposes, but Marines are expected to use camoflauge while on field duty. Chapters include the Dark Angels, the Blood Drinkers, the Silver Skulls, the Ultra-Marines, and the Spacewolves (note the formatting on the latter two). In addition, there are specialized positions within a Space Marine Chapter, including Chaplains, Librarians, Medics (not "Apothecaries"), and Field Police, which all have their own designated heraldry.
  

• The founder of a Space Marine Chapter is called a Primarch. Primarchs are normal, mortal Space Marines, if esteemed and decorated ones. The named Primarchs are Rogal Dorn of the Imperial Fists, Roboute Guilliman of the Ultra-Marines, and Leman Russ of the Spacewolves. The former two are long dead, and their bones are on public display.
• The Imperium also uses Inquisitors and Rogue Traders as agents of their agenda, who have free reign to do what they want with whatever resources they wish, and map quite clearly to traditional RPG adventuring parties. One Inquistior is named Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau.
• The single named character most often referenced in Rogue Trader is a smuggler named Abdul Goldberg, who makes several appearances in the random scenario generator, apparently intended as a recurring rival to the PCs.
• The Squats are a race of offshoot humans with shorter, stockier builds adapted to planets with heavy gravity. They are found throughout the Imperium, but have their own autonomous holdings concentrated in the galactic core.
• The Imperium's most prominent enemies are the Orks. Orks are explicitly noted to be the most populous race in the galaxy. They have changed the least out of any major faction since Rogue Trader, but it is noted that they have planets that they govern permanently, sometimes using human slaves as an underclass.

• The Eldar mostly live in their own post-scarcity societies, but are usually encountered by outsiders as pirates, most commonly because they turned to piracy out of boredom due to their long lifespans. They can interbreed with humans.
• The Slann are a race of humanoid amphibians found on many planets. They were once a highly advanced spacefaring empire, and may have seeded life across multiple worlds, but have degenerated from their prime.
• The Tyranids are a race of hexapodal reptilians who travel in nomadic "Hive Fleets." They utilize organic technology, which is manufactured from biomass obtained from slaves. Tyranids are fully sapient and do not have a hive mind. They primarily rely on slave races to do their bidding, most notably the centauroid Zoats.
• Interstellar travel is accomplished through an alternate dimension known as the Warp. Navigating the Warp is very dangerous and often requires Navigators. There are several entities native to the Warp, including Enslavers, tentacled creatures capable of mind-controlling other organisms, and Vampires, bat-like humanoids that feed on the life force of others. The latter are capable of adopting illusory human forms, and contact between humans and vampires in the past gave rise to traditional vampire folklore.
• One hazard of the Warp is Warp Storms, which can block off routes of travel. One major Warp Storm is the Eye of Terror, which encloses multiple planets, including Logan's World, the capital of which is Helsreach. Because the Imperium cannot easily get there, the planets in the Eye of Terror are wretched hives of scum and villainy, but abide by the traditional laws of physics. The Eye of Terror can only be accessed from the outside galaxy when it "blinks" once every four to ten years, which marks both boom periods of trade and attempts by Imperial authorities to crack down on crime.

• 

  He also has a throne
  shaped like a Velociraptor.

  The Ultra-Marines are a relatively recent Chapter, and their arch-enemies are the Tyranids. The leader of the Ultra-Marines is Commander Marneus Calgar. He was originally a soldier in the Imperial Army, but was inspired to join the Ultra-Marines when they liberated a Tyranid POW camp he was being held in. Another important figure in the Ultra-Marines is the Chief Librarian Illiyan Nastase, a half-Eldar Astropath who was born on the planet Badab after the Imperium ousted its Tyrant and reclaimed control. He originally served as a member of the Dark Angels before joining the Ultra-Marines. I saved this one for last because it's such a perfect encapsulation of how much the setting has changed - literally every fact I just listed makes no sense in the current canon.
• Also, there is something called the Stegatank. Need I say more?

The Sci-Fi Kitchen Sink Setting

Don't ask why. Ask why not.

There has never been a successful RPG that has done for science fiction what Dungeons & Dragons has done for fantasy.

Already, I'm sure there are hundreds of hands running to keyboards to tell me I'm wrong. Surely I can't believe that - there are all kinds of successful sci-fi RPGs out there. What about Traveler, which has a history almost as long as D&D's own? What about games like Spelljammer and Starfinder, which build off D&D's rules to facilitate space adventures? Star Frontiers was being published by TSR at the same time they were publishing D&D; surely that counts. There's all manner of RPGs based on existing sci-fi properties, like Star Wars or Warhammer 40,000. And if we step outside the space opera subgenre that's dominated this conversation so far, we'd be remiss to forget Cyberpunk and Shadowrun. Science fiction surely has as much support as fantasy does in the TRPG landscape!

And that statement is absolutely correct! However, that isn't the point I'm making. I don't mean to say that there has never been a successful sci-fi RPG. I'm saying there has never been a successful sci-fi D&D.

All the games I just listed, to some degree or another, have their own defined tone, look, and feel. They all have a setting they're either built around or heavily associated with. They're geared toward playing a specific kind of sci-fi. Most RPGs are like that - D&D, despite being the oldest and most popular of them all, is somewhat of an outlier in that it doesn't try to emulate a specific subgenre of fantasy.

Much has been made about the "kitchen sink" nature of a typical D&D campaign. If you asked what kind of fantasy D&D is, the answer would be "yes." It combines Tolkienian elves, dwarves, halflings, and orcs with the barbarians of the Hyborian Age, monsters from myth and legend, Hammer Horror vampires and werewolves, Lovecraftian elder gods, and even some original creations. That's been tempered somewhat in recent years, as Wizards of the Coast has tried to lock down a canon for the game, and while I understand why that is - they're part of Hasbro now, and a game about an entire multifaceted genre doesn't do well to attract investors or establish a brand identity - I can't help but feel it's lost something. To me, D&D is at its best when it's a game that can cater to and accomodate pretty much everything under the fantasy umbrella, allowing DMs to create their own fantasy worlds with whatever colors of the genre's broad spectrum they choose.

Science fiction has long been viewed as fantasy's sister genre, but it doesn't have anything like that. And I've always found that curious. Really, there's not much of a difference between expecting every high fantasy setting to include elves and expecting every space opera setting to include Wookiees. Both races were created as something specific and idiosyncratic to a seminal work in their respective genre, but one expectation is normalized, and the other sounds completely insane.

Part of it might be because of copyright laws. Tolkien, after all, was building off of a long tradition of mythology and folklore. He might have codified the ways we view elves and dwarves, but no one owns elves and dwarves, as a concept. Meanwhile, most of the classic sci-fi races were created out of whole cloth in living memory, and are protected by large and litigious corporations. Gygax faced legal trouble with hobbits and balrogs, after all. But, on the flip side, he was able to get away with basically using them as-is once he changed their names, and no one stopped him. No one in sci-fi has even tried that.

It could also simply be the fact that D&D was the first of its kind. When it came out there was no real precedent for what a roleplaying game was supposed to be, and TSR was allowed to make their genre as broad and as open-ended as "fantasy," with no further qualifiers, without anyone telling them not to. So too, it was a game made by and for fans of the fantasy genre, not by any large-scale corporation, so it's understandable that the people behind the game would want to make something to capture the magic of their favorite stories instead of trying to stand on its own within its genre as a product that could itself be marketed for its background lore, as later games would do.

I can't help but wonder, if D&D was made today, assuming the TRPG landscape was otherwise identical, would there still be elves, dwarves, and halflings, or would it just be dragonborn, tieflings, and kenku? Many have noted a greater trend toward players wanting to use D&D original races instead of those grounded in Tolkien, but I have to ask if that's truly just a player thing, or if it's what Wizards wants - after all, they can establish dragonborn as their thing. They can't do that for dwarves. And we were getting setting-specific RPGs as early on as Empire of the Petal Throne. Sci-fi RPGs, then, had to enter a world where merely being a sci-fi RPG wouldn't set them apart. They needed to create their universe from the ground up, and be RPGs about playing in that setting, not just in a sci-fi setting.

Now, you'll notice the qualifiers I used. I said that no successful RPG has pulled off a sci-fi kitchen sink setting like this. That was on purpose, because there have been attempts. Grognardia, which has a very good article on this very subject, reviewed 1980's Space Opera, an RPG by Fantasy Games Unlimited that probably came closest out of any published RPG to what I'm positing here. To pull a direct quote, "this is a game where Flash Gordon, Chewbacca, Ming the Merciless, Barbarella, and assorted aliens can meet in a cantina and go adventuring among the stars without the petty concerns of rhyme or reason." Alas, Space Opera was burdened with an incoherent ruleset and the shadow of Traveler, and never caught on.

But I also want to talk about something outside the scope of TRPGs. I want to talk about Star Schlock.

Star Schlock is a skirmish wargame by Wunkay Games that's seen steady releases for the last few years, with both rules and an official miniatures range. It's themed around science fiction cinema and TV from the late 60s to the early 80s. I don't have much interest in the game itself, but as someone who's been steadily getting back into miniatures, and as someone who's always been interested in retrofuturism - and in particular, the cassette futurism movement of that era - it scratches an itch for me, and I've picked up several of the minis for my collection.

But even if I might not ever play the game, I'm fascinated by Star Schlock's setting. The developers have made no attempt to hide its origins. Their ranges all draw heavy inspiration from assorted source material. The two armies included in the starter set are the Explorer Corps, an agency of scientists and explorers charting the final frontier led by "Captain Timothy J. Curt," and the Simian Star Kingdom, a brutal regime of ape despots and their oppressed human slaves led by "Dr. Zayce." Other factions include the Eternal Empire and its faceless, white-armored "Dronetroopers," the zombie plague of the Necronauts, and the Viper Legion, a ruthless terrorist organization led by a megalomaniacal masked commander. There are stat profiles for lawyer-friendly versions of Boba Fett, Buck Rogers, Robbie the Robot, and even Ro-Man from Robot Monster. To my delight, the cuts run so deep that there's an entire faction that seems to be based on the concept art from Alejandro Jodorowsky's aborted Dune adaptation, complete with a miniature of Salvador Dali as the Emperor of the Known Universe.

It's a game that unabashedly started as an exercise to mash up forces from different sci-fi universes and find out who would win. But in order to justify that, the game has spun a setting with surprisingly deep and extensive lore that places these different factions in the same universe - and it works. The starter set includes a "Galaxy Guide" devoted entirely to background information, and the official Schlocklog magazine publishes enough articles on the setting that I've found them an engaging read even when I have no plans to play the actual game.

This, to me, is what a setting that does for science fiction what D&D has done for fantasy would really look like. And I'd argue that it's a setting that would work very well for roleplaying. There's enough background material out there for a prospective DM to get started on a campaign, with a number of distinct factions and power players; there's even been multiple planets that have gotten their own dedicated writeups in the pages of Schlocklog. So too, the mix-and-match nature of the setting makes it easy for newcomers to get in - chances are they'll be familiar with the series these factions were drawn from, and can come to the table with their understanding of what they can expect from them, no expodumps needed. It might have been written for a wargame, but the information would be just as applicable, and just as useful, for a TRPG.

Am I asking for an official Star Schlock RPG some day? Not necessarily - though it would be cool. But I do think what's there could prove just as useful to DMs as it could to wargamers. It would be a good fit for Retrostar, an RPG designed to emulate science fiction film and television of the same era, if one wanted to lean into the genre conventions (the system even puts a limit on how many actions can be made per session to ensure "episodes" fit into a 30-to-60-minute timeslot). But if one didn't want to go such a meta route, I'd argue that you could grab a sci-fi ruleset of your choice, use the Galaxy Guide and Schlocklog as your campaign setting, and be good to go.

Random Encounters From Your Miniature Drawer

I've always had somewhat of an off-and-on passion when it comes to miniatures. I've never really used them for my games - collecting and painting miniatures is an awful lot of setup, especially when you factor terrain and scenery into the equation, and (to riff on my last post) I fear that visual representations on the gaming table can influence the imaginations of my players more than I would like. Couple that with the fact that my regular gaming group is spread over multiple states and I handle everything over Skype chats anyway, I find it easier and more streamlined to just go with the theater of the mind.

At the same time, I've always liked the little bastards. Just to have them, and paint them, and to look at them for their own sake. Maybe even play a skirmish wargame once in a while. They aren't (or at least shouldn't be) necessary, but minis are fun.

Since moving into my new house, I've been getting everything unpacked and reassessing what I have. That includes going through my old, mostly unpainted collection of minis I've had for years, always hoping to do something with but never really getting there. I've been looking more into games like Planet 28 lately, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to sort through my collection and see what I could make of them.

What immediately struck me was that, when I was at my peak of miniature collecting, I was very much the kind of person who collected things I thought were cool, rather than trying to build a certain army.

There's a lot of Reaper fantasy monsters, mixed in with some Warhammer Fantasy monstrous types, and even a few packs of the old Chainmail range from when Wizards of the Coast briefly wanted to get into the metal miniature business. An ogre, a dire boar, plenty of lizardmen (of various sizes), a bunch of orcs, quite a few skeletons and ghosts, a handful of Skaven, some barbarians...

Wait a minute. I'm sensing a pattern here. Maybe I can't make a cohesive army, but I do have a pretty decent random encounter table. Let's throw some of those things together, and see if I can write a dungeon around it.

1d20:

1. Dire boar

2. 1d8 orcs 

3. 1d8 kobolds

4. Ogre

5. 1d2 myconids

6. 1d2 Rat Men 

7. 1d8 goblins

8. 1d6 mummies

9. 2d8 spiders

10. 1d4-1 (minimum 1) lizardmen

11. 1d8 skeletons

12. 1d4 specters

13. Vampire

14. 1d4 wolves

15. Werewolf

16. 1d4 berserkers

17. Dragon (I haven't painted it yet. Let's say a red one)

18. 1d2 trolls

19. Death knight

20. Earth elemental 

I also think the reason I like the myconids in Dark Souls so much
is because they remind me of these old Reaper ones.

Yeah, it probably looks pretty funhouse-ish right now, doesn't it? And quite unbalanced, but remember: not all random encounters need to lead to immediate combat. But that's where we start thinking about how we could make everything fit. And as we do, the seed of an entire dungeon starts to emerge.

Right now, there's two big themes I'm starting to realize with the monsters we're using. There's a lot of undead, and a lot of reptilian creatures (with the dragon, lizardmen, and kobolds). These could easily be grouped into their own factions. The vampire and the dragon sound like natural leaders for the two groups (the death knight could be a second in command to the vampire, or vice versa), and that raises the question of what they're doing in the same dungeon.

Maybe the vampire has set up a lair for his necromantic experiments, and it just so happened to be in a cavern already inhabited by the dragon. Perhaps he's trying to manipulate the dragon and his lizardman servants to his own ends, and to serve as extra muscle to keep out those pesky intruders who are getting suspicious as to who's taking all the dead bodies. Maybe he has some magic artifact or other precious treasure that he's bribing the dragon with, knowing the creature's greed. This way, smart players could exploit the factions by pitting them against each other - maybe they'll need to steal the treasure from the vampire to sway the dragon to their side! After all, those lizardmen could be useful allies, to say nothing of the dragon himself!

There's some other entries we could group into smaller factions too. The orcs, goblins, and maybe the ogre all seem like they could be allies. Maybe it's an independent tribe of Trollkin, or maybe it's more hired muscle being used by the vampire (which could make them jealous of the lizardmen if they feel they're being replaced - something that the players could win their allegiance over if they don't side with the dragon, since they probably will have a harder time doing that with skeletons). The dire boar could be a pet of the orcs, or just an independent monster. The myconids, spiders, Rat Men, trolls, and earth elemental would all most likely be random denizens of the dungeon. As for the berserkers, wolves, and werewolf, they could be independent too - but what sounds more fun to me is the thought that maybe this is a clan of wolf-worshiping barbarians, led by a werewolf! Maybe they're visiting a shrine somewhere in the dungeon, or raiding it for its riches or as a sort of initation ritual!

As you can see, there's a ton of ways that this seemingly random collection of creatures and characters can be made into something more cohesive. And like many instances of working within constraints, it can get the creative juices flowing to be given a set of incoherent, mismatched elements and to be forced to make them work. Already, I have the start of a dungeon that could last me plenty of sessions to come. And if I was the kind of person to use minis, I wouldn't even need to buy anything new for it!

I'd love to see other people try this exercise out. It's a great way to come up with dungeons and other scenarios that you might never have considered otherwise. Do you have a bunch of random miniatures laying around? Try making a random encounter table out of them, and let me know what you come up with!