Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader (The ORIGINAL launch)
April 24, 2017 4:33 PM   Subscribe

In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war. An interesting look at the early days of Warhammer 40K, before it forgot it was a satirical.
posted by chunking express (27 comments total) 27 users marked this as a favorite
 
If you are a Warhammer nerd, Realms of Chaos 80s is probably the best "old hammer" blog around. (And of course there's already been a metafilter post about Oldhammer.)
posted by chunking express at 4:34 PM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]


this was, of course, many years before reality itself forgot it was satirical.

games workshop has always walked a tightrope between relentlessly mocking the aesthetics of 13 year old boys and shamelessly pandering to the same.
posted by murphy slaw at 5:00 PM on April 24, 2017 [12 favorites]


I'm no expert or superfan, but I liked Warhammer better than WH40K.
posted by GuyZero at 5:00 PM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]


games workshop has always walked a tightrope between relentlessly mocking the aesthetics of 13 year old boys and shamelessly pandering to the same.

14 is the age when you first ask "am I being mocked here?"
posted by GuyZero at 5:00 PM on April 24, 2017 [12 favorites]


Warhammer 40K, before it forgot it was a satirical.


Yeah- I'm pretty sure that's heresy.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 5:07 PM on April 24, 2017 [4 favorites]


games workshop has always walked a tightrope between relentlessly mocking the aesthetics of 13 year old boys and shamelessly pandering to the same.

They've definitely said to Hell with the tightrope by this point and decided (probably correctly) that the shameless pandering is much more profitable.

I just can't quit Ciaphas Cain, though.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:09 PM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]


YESSSSSSS.
posted by Artw at 5:15 PM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]


> I'm no expert or superfan, but I liked Warhammer better than WH40K.

Me, too...that was the best RPG my friends and I ever played, and holy shit we tried a lot of them.
posted by The Card Cheat at 5:15 PM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]


14 is the age when you first ask "am I being mocked here?"

"Hans, are we the baddies?" Only with MOAR SKULLS.
posted by Artw at 5:16 PM on April 24, 2017 [8 favorites]


(God I love the early 40K. I love all 40K really, but these early versions were really something primal and special.)
posted by Artw at 5:28 PM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]


Never played it, but I might, if only to be a Space Marine Librarian in Terminator Armour
posted by zakur at 5:31 PM on April 24, 2017 [8 favorites]


40K was over when they got rid of the squats.
posted by selfnoise at 5:33 PM on April 24, 2017 [5 favorites]


I'm no expert or superfan, but I liked Warhammer better than WH40K.

I've got some bad news for you...

posted by robocop is bleeding at 5:49 PM on April 24, 2017


Never played it, but I might, if only to be a Space Marine Librarian in Terminator Armour

I have no idea if this is still possible, but those guys enabled my favorite gimmick: The Flying Circus.

You get a unit of things that can fire all their weapons while moving. You stick the librarian with them and he takes the void step power (or whatever it was called). You got to redeploy on casting it, using the rules that drop pods used to enter the field wherever you pleased (but there was a random component to it that could put you waaaaay off course). But if you rolled doubles, one of your squad mates took a wrong turn to Albuquerque in the warp and was lost forever. You could take two librarians, and while it wasn't a winning thing by any stretch of the imagination it was hilarious.

I also suspect that someone at GW in the last three years made an actual blood sacrifice to turn that company around. The boxed deals are actually discounted from their individual models. Prices appear to have been adjusted downward (by a hair) since I last looked at them two-ish years ago. The WH40K page that you automatically load to doesn't bombard you with hot-links and sidebars to their store! Their store is seemingly a single link at the end of a chain of lore and art pages!

It's like they're trying to be a real company before Fantasy Flight Games drinks their Minis milkshake.
posted by Slackermagee at 6:25 PM on April 24, 2017 [5 favorites]


Rogue Trader was unconscionably expensive, I think it was like eighty dollars. Eighty eighties dollars, more than I made in a week at my part time job. I bought it anyway of course, the insane price just made it more desirable. I got those plastic marines eventually too, a friend picked up the orks and another got eldar. We played like 2 games, maybe 3. The game wasn't nearly as engaging as painting the miniatures, it turns out.

Although we weren't much interested in playing, we did keep up with the setting, buying the occasional issue of White Dwarf and any particularly cool figs that came out. I eventually got tired of the ever increasing grimdarkness and painted my old marines in bright livery with happy faces on their shoulders as the symbol of their chapter, "The Generally Contented Bunch" then I gave them away or sold them for cigarette money or something and never looked back
posted by rodlymight at 7:09 PM on April 24, 2017 [5 favorites]


"the damp grim darkness of my friend's bungalow attic"
posted by radicalawyer at 8:56 PM on April 24, 2017 [2 favorites]


"The Generally Contented Bunch, with Special Guests Up With People! World Tour 79"

Never played WH40K but I did get sucked into the lore and worldbuilding about a year ago, and this kind of thing is why. I don't what primal thing that kind of artwork touches, insignias and different chapters and heraldry and mystery, but it gets me every time. ASOIAF was the same way before it got bogged down in the muck. That first book, with all the houses and heraldry, was some kind of magic.
posted by Existential Dread at 9:05 PM on April 24, 2017 [3 favorites]


All this stuff would show up in ads in Dragon Magazine and totally baffle young me. "What the heck is this even ABOUT?"
posted by Chrysostom at 9:44 PM on April 24, 2017 [4 favorites]


There is no such thing as innocence, only degrees of guilt!

Yeah it's self-parodying grimdark but Warhammer and WH40k still make some damn fine video games and you don't have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for miniatures. Can't wait for the next Total Warhammer game.
posted by Justinian at 11:28 PM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]


W40K was the beginning of the end of GW. They started casting their figurines in plastic, not lead. Boo!

Still have all my Citadel Minatures acrylic paints around but I guess most have dried out horribly in the intervening 30 years
posted by davemee at 12:13 AM on April 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


I could write screeds on the follies of Games Workshop, but it's like operating on your own wounds – too close to the bone. Teenage me would not comprehend.
posted by mushhushshu at 12:41 AM on April 25, 2017 [2 favorites]


For the record, the "Land Rhino" the article refers to in one of the captions is a "Land Raider". The Rhino was a completely different kit.
posted by radwolf76 at 3:42 AM on April 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


I'm no expert or superfan, but I liked Warhammer better than WH40K.

I haven't paid much attention to Warhammer Fantasy over the years until last year, when Creative Assembly released a Total War game with GW's blessing. Naturally, for a series based almost entirely on historical warfare, a lot of the PC gamer equivalents of grognards had a collective shitfit (something not unusual for Total War players). Of course I had to see what the complaining was about, but after watching a couple Let's Play videos, I actually really wanted to play the game. As it turns out, freeing itself from history and even from much of the tabletop format works pretty well: the over-the-top characterizations of the factions are amusing (and ripe for meme-ification), it looks awesome, and (most important) it's fun.

So anyway, I wanted to see what the fuss was about in the source material, only to find out that WHFB had basically been canceled before TW:W even came out. It still existed in the form of Age of Sigmar, which it seems 99.99% of the WHFB fanbase hates with a burning passion, because it's basically WH40K with the barest sheen of fantasy. They even have repurposed Space Marines! Not my bag of tea, as The Youths might say. I assume this means CA got access to the IP for a relative pittance, and they're milking it for all it's worth, releasing not just one, not two, but an entire trilogy of TW:W games that you will actually be able to connect to each other, which I think is a pretty cool idea. Considering that the game is the most profitable one for CA yet, I wonder if GW is kicking themselves for killing off WHFB right now. And despite GW's stinginess around giving modders free reign, they've been able to do some absolutely amazing work.
posted by zombieflanders at 4:05 AM on April 25, 2017 [3 favorites]


Oh, the game bit of Warhamjer is the least important part - in fact I think the thing that all my kid freinds skirted around was that actually playing the main WH40k game took forever and was a little dull. Some of the spin-off board games were pretty fun though.
posted by Artw at 5:54 AM on April 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


As it turns out, freeing itself from history and even from much of the tabletop format works pretty well

I agree completely, Total War: Warhammer Total is the best Total War game since at least Shogun 2 and possibly ever.
posted by Justinian at 11:49 AM on April 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


I still have my cherished copy of Rogue Trader, having fended off numerous aggressive purchase offers over the years.

I'm in my 10th year of working for a miniatures wargaming company, and every time we do anything the fanbase doesn't approve of, we're accused of becoming more like GW - that should tell you everything you need to know about their business model. They spent the last couple of decades drifting further and further away from what their long-term fans cared about, and compensated for lost sales by constantly cranking up prices, while the rest of the industry went in the opposite direction. The last couple of years have seemingly reversed that trend, and I've even started considering buying some of their stuff again... maybe.
posted by Soulfather at 2:45 PM on April 25, 2017 [2 favorites]


Never had the money to play 40k with proper figures. We played a lot of necromunda with Lego minifigs though. Built a lot of terrain too. Worked so well I'm a little surprised Lego hasn't come out with an official combat game.
posted by the christopher hundreds at 4:47 AM on April 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


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