Warhammer 40,000 Retrospective - How my Hobby Died, and was Reborn

At some point, I think in my senior year of High School, the one person who I played the most 40K against, lost interest in the game.  He moved onto other stuff, mostly World of Warcraft and other video games.  He was playing a lot more competitive CCG's and having more fun with the big payouts he was getting with those.  I wans't as competitive as he was, but as his interest teetered off, so did mine.

I stopped playing in tournaments because I had to run them every week.  That was right about when I started working for the FLGS as the assistant manager; I got a promotion and that promotion meant having to run weekend tournaments.  Having to run tournaments for the only store that really hosted them in town was pretty much the death sentence for my experience with actually playing the game.  I still bought lots of minis, and painted them at work when the place was slow, or when somebody wanted a painting lesson, etc., but I never really played anymore after that.  In fact, I don't think I played a single game of 40K after they changed the rulebook from 3rd edition to 4th.  It was like the edition war with D&D except with wargaming instead of RPG's.

The last thing I bought though, before quitting my job, and leaving the store, pretty much for the duration of its ownership under its owner at the time, was a small, but potent, force of Space Orks.  I picked up 2 Battle Boxes, several boxes of Storm Boyz, and some bikers.  After I quit, I never even opened up most of the boxes, and one of the Battle Forces went missing.

But, this last summer, before moving here to Japan, I went through some of my old hobby stuff, and tried to find some things I could sell off.  Warmachine was growing in popularity again, so my Old Khador Minis got picked up really fast after a guy found my listing for them on Craigslist, but the Orkz didn't move as quickly and I got to thinking that maybe I didn't want to sell them in the first place.  I held onto them.  They are all still nicely boxed up, some still in their packaging, all locked away at my house. Someday, they will be unboxed and I'll have to time begin my hobby again...

But... that someday might come along a lot sooner than I thought.  When I decided I was going to revitalize my blog this year (and started blogging heavily again in September of 2010) I did some looking around and found the Warhammer 40K universe RPG's.  They looked beautiful, at least from all the preview images over on the Fantasy Flight Website.  I was intrigued.  Over X-mas, this year, I picked up Rogue Trader.  What a massive Space Hulk full of win!

TL,DR for like this entire Retrospective.  I'm going to start covering a lot about the Fantasy Flight RPG's as I try to buy up all of their books.  I loved Rogue Trader and I'm dying to bring some information on those games to my site.  You can bet that when the new game comes out, I'll be playing it, with somebody, even if it has to be somebody I have never met, and can only play with, through an online forum.  PbP, whatever.  Look forward to it.

    

Classic Traveler - Using Subsector Creation rules for...

So… did you think I was done talking about Classic Traveller??? Huh??? Did you? Nope, I’m not. Today I want to start talking about the subsector mapping rules that are used their and one possible application that I see for them in a different sci-fi based game.

Over the last couple weeks, I have been pretty busy, but I have gone back to the Classic Traveller books a bit more as I have been exploring a new game on my horizon – Rogue Trader. I know that game has been out for a while, but hell, like I always say, I’m slow. Sorry. Rogue Trader was another of my purchases back during Christmas and I can say that I love it so far. Everything about the Core book is over-flowing with awesome, except for the fact that they don’t really give a clear and easy way of making a portion of space for you to send your starships hurtling through.

So, for that, I opened up my Classic Traveller PDF and gave things a look see. I really like how easy it is to make a Subsector using Traveller. You use an 8x10 hex grid, some dice, and a couple pages of tables and rules and you have yourself pretty much everything you need. Once again here, I love the fact that so much of the Traveller experience is so easily randomized. Not having so spend hours upon hours pondering over the composition of the universe makes me feel a very, very big sense of relief.

The other really nice thing about this rules system is that so much of the Subsector and World creation rules is not based around any mechanics, but rather around fluff and story mechanics. Apart from the presence of Gas Giants, which provide a benefit for starships in refueling, which might not work so well in Rogue Trader, the majority of these rules are very fluffy and provide an easy way to describe not only planetary and stellar systems, but also a great way of figuring out the composition of the world’s within those systems. Whether you are rolling for planetary population, government, atmosphere, or whatever, you can make your world simply and easily and relatively mechanics free.

Translating all this over to Rogue Trader then simply becomes an application of 40K terms and Rogue Trader Mechanics. Once a world gets generated, all you really need to do is figure out what kind of world that would be – is it a death world? A hive world? Maybe neither. Maybe that world is an imperial world and has military installations of the Imperium of Man. You can do pretty much whatever you want with the Classic Traveller Subsector creation rules, which provide a great baseline for conversion into Rogue Trader. The Universe, after all, isn’t that much different. Though the Rogue Trader version might use distance in a different way, nothing fundamentally has to change there either; honestly, all that you would really need to do is sprinkle some threats around your Subsector which are 40K in theme and you are rolling.

For all those Rogue Trader players out there, you will want to go back and give the Classic Traveller rules a try if you are going to GM. If you are a fan of Classic Traveller and are thinking about playing a new sci-fi game, you might want to pick up Rogue Trader and try it out.