--- title: "Rogue Trader 4" subtitle: "First edition of Warhammer 40,000" author: Seth publish_date: 2025-07-24 08:00 date: 2025-07-24 08:00 hero_classes: text-light title-h1h2 overlay-dark-gradient hero-large parallax hero_image: rogue-trader-book.webp show_sidebar: true show_breadcrumbs: true show_pagination: true taxonomy: category: blog tag: [ gaming, settings, rpg, scifi, wargame ] --- In 2023, Games Workshop re-released the first edition (titled **Rogue Trader**) of **Warhammer 40,000** to celebrate the game's 30-ish year anniversary. I'm a sucker for nostalgia for things I missed out on, so I bought a copy and now I'm reviewing it as I read. This post covers **Chapter 4: The Advanced Gamer**. The start of Chapter 4 explains that it contains extra rules and ideas for readers who have played a few games of **Warhammer 40,000** using the rules provided up to this point. Then it goes on to describe, in clearer language than anything found earlier in the book, how those games would have been structured. I find it odd to describe back to the reader how their games probably happened. I admire the author's intention, but admittedly I find it amusing that he accidentally made simplicity the enemy of clarity. To me, it seems like it would have been more useful to tell readers how a game is played _before_ they've tried to play. Explaining how a game has gone in retrospect means that probably several players would have made several attempts to play the game, and possibly failed or failed to play it correctly. Anyway, the author apparently expected there to be multiple players to a single Games Master. It seems that early 40k wasn't intended as a 2 player game, which I think is the widely accepted default today. ## Additional rules My complaints about delayed revelations aside, this is an excellent chapter. It discusses the practical side of gaming that are likely to arise only once you've got the basics down. With mixed results, it's got ideas and rules for: * Establishing random directions for ricochet bullets or grenades. This is good, and I've used the same system in other games, and it's a good alternative to a scatter die if you don't have one. * Methods for fast rolling, using different colours of dice, or rolling in batches. This one is good, and for all I know they've copied and pasted it into modern 40k rulebooks. * Random targetting. I like this one a lot, and I'm definitely going to use it in my games. * Bodyguard effects to protect an important character or personality. This acknowledges that when you have a big fancy miniature on the table, your opponent is likely to try to kill it first. This provides a very reasonable solution, and it's essentially still in use today. * Hidden movement, involving a series of secret tokens revealed only to the Games Master. It's over-complex and of no interest to me, but maybe for somebody it would be a fun experiment. Personally, I'd rather just roll dice against a Stealth stat. * Duckback and shock: A way for a target to lose its next action after it narrowly escapes death. A bothersome way to make a game slow and long and boring. * Indirect fire: A way to waste minutes of your life calculating the trajectory of a projectile that missed its target. * Corrective aiming: An inelegant solution to modern 40k's **[Heavy]** keyword. * Multi-sided games suggests to me that people were expected to play with multiple players (because the plural form has been used in previous sections, in contrast to the singular form of a Games Master), but that all players were allies. This rule variant is for a game in which multiple players are playing opposed armies. ## Subsystems There are [more] rules for dangerous environments. This was already covered, in a way, back in Chapter 3 with the killer plants and beasts. However, this one provides terrain types with special qualities, such as a mud pit or a spaceship crash site or a honey lake (that's a lake of honey, and no I'm not making that up). It's really just a bunch of random ideas for a Games Master to throw into a game when things need to suddenly get more exciting, and I think they're all great. Planetary landing rules provide a minigame in which one player attempts to deploy drop pods full of troops down to a planet, and another player attempts to shoot the pods before they land. This is a fun game-before-the-game idea, and I may try it out some time. I like the idea that an army's deployable units could be limited by a pre-game scenario. I wouldn't want that to happen in every game I played, but it's a fun idea for a special scenario. The language of the planetary landing rules, I couldn't help but notice, does assume that the game is player against player. This is interesting because I'd thought I understood that multiple players were playing against the Games Master. Look, the truth is, I have no idea what the author of original 40k imagined a game would be like, but maybe that's intentional. It could be that the author wanted to keep it flexible (but I do wish he had just said so). * If you have 2 people available for a game, then it's player against player, possibly with one of them also serving as Games Master. * If you have 3 or more people available with allied armies, then it's players (plural) against Games Master. * If you have 3 or more people available with some mix of allied and opposed armies, then it's players (plural) against players (possibly also plural), and possibly against the Games Master. Or the Games Master generally just ran the world. * If you have 1 player, then it's a solo game. That's pretty much it works for me, and I don't even know how or why. I don't recall ever reading it in a book. I think it's just the obvious way to handle the game, so maybe that's the conclusion that the author, probably correctly, assumed the reader would reach. ## Campaign mode There's a page describing how to run a campaign, too. It's mostly intuitive stuff that probably any gamer would have invented anyway, but I think it's nice for the idea to be presented in this book. It explains what a campaign is, how to keep the narrative going between battles, and so on. Modern 40k's campaign mode is called [Crusade](01.blog/blog_warhammer40k-crusade), and it provides rules for earning points to "buy" new troops and new gear, and to upgrade your army as the campaign progresses. Units and characters removed from the board during play might acquire penalties, while those that perform well gain new abilities. The **Rogue Trader** campaign system has fewer features. There's no concept of gaining upgrades over the course of the campaign, and I think it has a soft attrition-based lose condition. For each miniature that got removed from the battlefield during the game, you roll a d100 against a 25% chance that the miniature is dead. I see no allowance for reinforcements, and no system for "buying" more soldiers or hiring mercenaries. As far as I can tell, the campaign is over when you run out of miniatures to deploy. Maybe that's how campaigns were run back then, but I don't see the appeal. It's a downward spiral toward defeat. I can imagine choosing to abandon the campaign after the loss of an entire unit. Surely the campaign storyline doesn't get easier the farther along you go? Unless it did, because your opponent was also losing miniatures. Either way, it doesn't sound engaging to me, and I much prefer the modern **Crusade** implementation of a wargame campaign. ## Random tables There are 7 pages of random tables, including a plot generator, a sub-plot generator, and tables to expand the plot and sub-plot results. It's brilliant, and makes the book worth every bit of its price (I know I already recovered the book's cost thanks to the weapon descriptions in Chapter 2, so this is actually bonus). ## Painting and crafting The final several pages of the chapter give you instructions on how to paint miniatures and craft terrain. The instructions are verbose, but clear. I honestly think that if I'd read this before starting to paint miniatures, I'd be none the worse for it. All the important stuff is explained, and as a bonus there are some great ideas on what materials to repurpose as terrain. There are even a few examples of the terrain you can make with junk, and tips on how to paint terrain. ## A useful chapter In my opinion, Chapter 4 was misnamed. Its extra rules make sense for an experience gamer, but much of the content is just plain useful for any gamer. Presumably, anyone who had purchased the game would have been compelled to read the chapter no matter what, so maybe the title didn't matter. Either way, this was a good chapter that largely feels, in a strange way, ahead of its time. Maybe I feel that way because so much of it could be copied and pasted into a modern rulebook and no one would realise that it was text that was 30 years old. There's really good content in Chapter 4. The next and final chapter is the book **Summary**. There's enough miscellany in there to make it worth a dedicated review and, much like Chapter 4, it's all _good_ miscellany.

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