Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader Background Information

Following Owlcat Games’ announcement of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, we can now check out a couple of quick articles that bring us up to speed with the Warhammer 40,000 universe and the tabletop Rogue Trader game this CRPG is going to be based on. Let’s start with an excerpt from PC Gamer’s article:

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader will cast you as one of the voidship captains who explores the fringes of the Imperium. Somewhere between Star Trek captains and 18th century privateers, Rogue Traders have Warrants of Trade that let them bend the otherwise strict rules of the Imperium to trade with aliens, travel freely, and reclaim lost technology. They can act as sanctioned pirates, conquistadors, or colonists, and their ships are baroque monstrosities with thousands of crew.

And here’s a couple of sample paragraphs from TechRadar:

It’s a strange omission. The dense lore and ready-made world-building of the Warhammer 40K mythos provide fertile ground for digital roleplaying. Its history stretches across millennia, spanning interstellar conflicts, personal betrayals, and political intrigues that have been well-documented in a litany of novels, comics, and expanded source material. The universe has its famed champions and beloved characters, alongside heaps of unknown grunts and unsung heroes that offer a malleable base for narrative expansion.

The world itself is a network of varied hyper-industrial planets and decaying star systems. Hives – dense, caste-based cities that house millions of people in rusting megastructures – sit next to manufacturing Forge Worlds. Debaucherous Pleasure Worlds, enjoyed by the Imperium’s nobility, lie across from huge Agri-worlds dedicated to producing enough food for the thousands of soldiers and slaves put to work under the Emperor’s ever-advancing war machine.