I started playing Rogue Trader shortly after it came out, when I was fourteen or fifteen. At the time I had more imagination than money. Honestly, that's probably still true, though the ratio is closer now. The end result was that improvisation was the order of the day. Can't afford to buy a heavy bolter? No problem! Just make one out of sprue and motorcycle kit parts! And that spirit extended all the way to the rules. I have particularly fond memories of a scenario I ran where my brother played against a friend of mine in a classic orks v. marines scenario. The setting was a factory built from model railroad kits on two adjacent tables. Each side started at one end of the first table. The goal was a set of plans to be found somewhere on the second (which was secretly overrun with genestealers.) But here's the catch: The two tables were connected by a narrow wooden bridge across a seemingly bottomless chasm. The marine player had jump packs and the ork player did not, so they quite thoughtfully blew out the bridge. Solid plan, right? Sure, we can allow that. (Okay, wooden bridge toughness should be and hit points should be . . . Oh, you're using your a heavy plasma cannon dialed up to 11? Okay. Roll to hit. You did? Okay. No more bridge.) So now what is an ork to do? Easy! The dreadnought can pick boys up with its claw and hurl them across. You do have to survive two automatic low strength hits: one from the claw and one from the landing. And you have to hope the dreadnought's ballistic skill is up to the task. (Or that the deviation doesn't put you in the chasm.) But no worries. There's always more greenies lined up for the challenge. :) I honestly can't even remember who won. Probably the genstealers. But I surely recall the dreadnought furiously chucking orks through space! Good times!
My favourite thing about RT is that authors knew exactly that readers would have more imagination than money. Rules and hints for using 3rd party and replacement models is something that probably still wakes GW current management screaming.
LOVE IT!!! We once did a wee campaign where both sides were racing to access a crashed spacecraft in the center of the board. Upon entering the spacecraft, unbeknownst to either player, the play switched to a Space Hulk board and the Genestealers entered the game.
Got one better. Can you milk Orks? Orks are meant to be a kind of fungus, or at least reproduce that way, but some models are shown to have nipples. This implies they must lactate. Also, if they are fungus, would that make Ork milk a vegan alternative?
When I was at university the gaming society called 40k "Warty Forty", which is pretty close to Rick Priestley's preferred pronunciation, but with a nice rhyme to it. I am one of the old farts who was present for some of the Rogue Trader era. I didn't actually manage to play many games back then, though, despite painting up enough Space Marines to field a reasonable force. My most distinct memories of playing the game involve an argument with a friend who played Space Orks, who refused to accept the buff GW had just given to the toughness of Space Marines, despite that buff being in response to the massive power creep of the recently released Ork army list he was using. I got him back in the game though, those vehicle rules you mentioned had a quirk where any hit to a transport compartment could be applied to every model in the vehicle. So one lascannon shot took out his warboss and almost the entirety of his retinue. Ha! This episode had lots of moments of joy for me, I love the Logans World stuff, the page shot with a Will Rees picture made me happy, the whole section on robot programming was gold and many more put a smile on my face. Thank you!
Possibly a nod to old school British military in general - there were a bunch of WWI/WWII ship classes that did the same (R-class battleships (also lnown as Revenge-class), J and K-class destroyers, and U and V-class subs come to mind).
@@mindwarp42 I've always enjoyed that. They went through virtually the entire alphabet with destroyers over time. Each "class" was more or less a flotilla, all with names beginning with the same letter. They built the W and V classes at the end of WWI, started over, and just about got there again before the end of WWII. There's a certain whimsy to RN naming that I very much appreciate. The T class submarine HMS Tiptoe is a wonderful example. As are the Flower class corvettes.
The robot names all starting with the letter C might be a reference to the tradition since WW2 of all British tank types being given a name beginning with C. E.g. Churchill, Comet, Centurion, Challenger.
Some memories of Rogue Trader Era 40K Ork Stacking was a thing and the old battle wagon was sort of cheap and very spiky. Plastic Orks with big banners on the corners, lots of orks which were plastic and a bit generic. One wrong move and the things would spill everywhere. Everyone had Harlequins. But they didn't have any vehicles so mowing the down was a thing. It was impossible to turn the vehicles so basically CHARGE. Like everyone else, did a game with each side having a huge defence laser on each side. Dull, but pew pew. Using plastic Woolworths dinosaurs and Zoids because you didn't have enough actual models. I had a derpy looking fisher price thing we used as a space vampire. Oh, and the TARDIS was thing. Finally: Dragon Magazine did an article about using 40K as an actual RPG and we had a stupid amount of fun with that. Using the 40K rules for a pen and paper RPG and the models for a sort of dungeon crawl. It was kind of dumb even back then.
Any ork model that fell out of the wagon counted as being killed in the actual game I think, so that discouraged people from trying to do what was done in this video..
We got the original Space Hulk when it came out and played the hell out of that - but didn't actually play Rogue Trader, mainly because (I quote myself, ca. 1989) "...nobody in their right mind would be daft enough to collect a full *thirty-model* army - have you any idea how much that would cost!?"
In 1989? I recall blister packs being £2.99 at that point, so if you're playing Space Marines you'd be spending about 90 quid - more if you wanted any Terminators! However the August 1989 issue of White Dwarf (the first I ever bought), had an offer for a complete 1,000 point Genestealer Chaos Cult army for £35, including 28 lead miniatures and 24 plastic Imperial Guardsman (who represented Brood Brothers). Not bad!
@@anotherzingbo Yeah, that was my point - in 89 I thought their stuff was painfully expensive, and now 30 years later I do have quite a lot more than 30 models here (I probably painted 30 models alone during each and every month of lockdown this spring) and have spent sums that would probably get me kicked by my younger self...
It's funny how our priorities change, one of my more pressing concerns as a teenager would be whether I'd have enough money from week to week to buy models, with blister packs costing around £4 at the time, and hopping on the bus to get them
Although I didn't play it when it was around, I played Rogue Trader twice in 2017. Orks vs Space Marines and Space Marines vs Eldar. The most notable thing that happened was a space marine with a heavy bolter shot the driver out of a speeding Trukk and sent it flying out of control, running over and instantly killing their warboss and two boyz.
That reminds me of using high lvl magic in warhammer fantasy 3rd edition. I chose necromantic magic for my dark elf sorceress, and cast a spell which caused every living thing on the battlefield to take a toughness test or die. At the end of the first turn I had wiped out 50% of both armies... I can still remember me cackling like a madman when rolling to see if my own soldiers would make it.... good times:)
2nd ed but the orc leader set on top of a bunker. It was late in the game and anyone of us could win. My sergeant failed his grenade throw at the orcs. It came back and blew up the seargent and some marines. My first game, I lost and laughed 🤣
A friend of mine has threatened to run a Rogue Trader campaign at some point. I fully intend to show up with an array of Imperial Robot programs copied onto oversized notecards made to look like 60s punchcards. I will be running them with modern Legio Cybernetica models from HH
I really wish modern GW would experiment more with game mechanics. Having units that have predetermined behavior and can't deviate from that behavior during the game is an interesting idea. Or how Wood Elves can move forest terrain in WHFB. Every faction in 40k is identical in terms of how they move, shoot, and fight in hand-to-hand. The difference between factions is how many models they can field, how far those models can move, and how strong they are. Tyranids are completely alien, for example, but they fight just like Space Marines and Eldar. What if there was a rule that they could behave in-sync due to synapse? Like they can move an extra inch, but the whole army had to move in the same direction that turn. Or you could pick an initiative that would apply to the whole army (for better or worse) to represent synchronized melee attacks. Tomb Kings were a great example in 6th. Edition Fantasy of what I mean. All of their spells were bound spells (meaning they would resolve automatically with no power dice requirement and no chance of miscasting), but their spells had to be cast in a specific order each turn. Makes for an interesting magic phase because they aren't following the norms of how other armies cast spells. Dispel scrolls are much weaker, but your dispel dice are much more efficient.
I started with RT back in 1987, and even got the Citadel Mighty Fortress in 1988 as a birthday gift from my girl friend. My favorite memory is using the siege book to run a 40K siege. A squad of space marines defending a castle from a horde of orks (Space and Fantasy). This was shortly before I entered the Marines in Sep 1988. : ) Yes, I am old. Loved that game though.
You're a brave man; when I tried to enter the Marines I got marched out of Plymouth by the police and received a stern talking to on the topic of consent.
When I was growing up, some of my friends had 40k armies, but I couldn't afford anything like that, but I got the Rogue Trader rulebook from a car boot sale and utterly treasured it (treasured it to pieces!) It made me feel like I could contribute to conversations about 40k, knowing weird and wonderful things about the early days of a game I'd never played. And I fell in love with mutants, and still run a mutant warband (acting as Astra Militarum) as my closest thing to a 'main army.' So while I didn't play during the Rogue Trader era, I grew up with this book as the first version of 40k I knew.
I had a similar story to a point. When I came across Rogue Trader, I had friends who were playing but I couldn't afford an army, so I'd play with borrowed models now and then.
I was very very young myself when I first played 40k, I'm pretty sure it was Rogue Trader but not 100% as it was the 90's so could have been 2nd or another side game altogether. Anyway, the big difference I remembered was that you had to roll each turn to see how many attacks each individual model fighting had for that turn, rather than having a standard number of attacks. It was very chaotic and time-consuming, also in some turns, Gretchin could have more attacks than a Space Marine, which was hilarious.
That sounds like the weird melee rules that were introduced partway through Rogue Trader and persisted for 2nd edition. Each fighter rolled a number of dice equal to their attacks characteristic (adding another dice if they had two one handed close combat weapons). They picked the best roll and added their WS and some modifiers. The fighter with the highest roll subtracted their opponent's roll and the result was the number of hits they caused.
@@anotherzingbo persisted for all of necromunda too until the recent re-release! And they worked pretty great in that, because you got a real sense of blows raining back and forth, being parried, feints, etc. In 40k it was a bit daft though because bloodthirsters had too many attacks and therefore always fumbled a few.
I came in at the end of RT, and for me, it was the combination of Chaos’ baroque and almost organic armour and weapons and trippy landscapes, along with the humor of the Orks, that hooked me. Things like daemon worlds where suns and moons literally hung in the sky from strings, the organic daemon weapons, and the random nature of how characters and armies were generated completely hooked me. My first ever army started as a Chaos warband of cultists and beastmen. The champion was a mutant of Slaanesh whose mutations included having a hairy eyeball for a body. I really loved that randomness, which could be broken if it led to your Ork warboss having a kustom weapon made up of two multimeltas and an Autocannon strapped together, or a chaos champion whose only “gear” was a primitive shield and a funny walk, but despite the balance issues it was a really creative and engrossing way to be exposed to the hobby. Admittedly, my all time favorite aspect of 40k remains my 2nd ed Ork army, which retained some of that randomness while obviously being a much more streamlined and consistent ruleset, but I’ll always have a soft spot for the whole RT era rules and background.
I've got no evidence for this, but it occured to me that the three old school dreadnought names map onto rock musicians, which is pretty on brand for early Games Workshop. So, Chuck Berry, Eddy Van Halen, and Billy Fury.
My dad played Rogue Trader, and often brings up how mad it was when I complain about new rules and what have you, I played it with a friend the other week, and it is every bit as mad and fun as you two and My Dad made me believe!
@@--enyo-- yeah it really is, it's a shame he took a long break from the hobby, so neither of us really know a great deal about 3rd - 5th, but that aside are chats about rogue trader are always fascinating
I learned 1st edition while in a high school summer biology class. We did't have miniatures at the start and couldn't take them to class anyway, so we used the bug collections we were making for a class project. We made up the stats as we wanted, paid the points, set up on Styrofoam boards and attacked with grasshoppers stuck through with pins. White Dwarf used to publish a list of stockist and we found that the only gaming store was over an hour away. Most of the guys there were ok and the shop sponsored a gaming group (Hearts of Lead) by letting us set up tables & play in their back room once a month on Sunday afternoons. The game room at home was an abused pool table, at one of the short ends we stacked milk crates and threw old lounge chair on top for the GM so he could get a god's eye view. We creatively called it the Throne of Judgement. Still friends with all those guys.
I LOVED programming my robots. Cool thing, when they took special damage, you turned over the decision tiles to reveal a random option instead. Instant craziness as your robots shoot at things way out of range, or charge friendly units.
I was in cadets when this came out. We used to have big battles at the base using all the wacky plot lines in the back of the book. I prefer the current 40k but have the fond memories of an Ork used spaceship dealer trying to steal an imperial ship while the crew are having a bar fight in the local pub.
I originally got into 40k because my dad use to tell us grand tales of when he use to play back in the day. He had the original rt 01 box and several robots. I’m glad you mentioned the boys because he use to gush all the time about how cool it was to program and use them. His favorite story was when he played at an older friends house and they used his train set table to play during one turn he pushed the enemy off the objective but while moving the figures several of his marines and some of his opponents marines fell into an actual water filled waterfall and were sent down the river. They decided to continue as if that actually happened and the few marines that had washed down continued the fight in the water. Another story was relating to a whole pack of boys stacked in a truck that spilled over and landed on the table next to it, the ork player flipped his truck over and set up that area on the other table as a new ork camp. The marines then had to invade the new battle area and the game ended up being played across two tables connected by this ork truck bridge.
...once lost as genestealers vs orks... 🥴 ...zurg-rushed across the table...got wiped out... ...later checked my g'stealer stat that i had earlier 'memorised' only to realise that all my stealers had 2 wounds, not 1, and if i had rememberd that then i would have easily made it across the table and wiped the orks out...🤯
The thing about orks and gretchin "interbreeding" I think can be comfortably retconned by suggesting they might hybridize in the same way as plants might hybridize.
I was around during Rogue Trader. Favourite memory: Vortex Grenades. At that time in Australia we had circular chocolates with the same radius as the cardboard tokens used to represent the Vortex Grenade effect, so we had a 'house-rule' that once the effect ended the owner could eat their Golden Rough or Mint Pattie
I remember the rules stated that ork battlewagon could be any size and at that time only models was scratch built. My regular opponent played orks and had an enormous battle tank made just to have 60 orks on it..... without stacking.
I love the idea of a flock of contemptors..... 😂 I started with Rogue Trader in 89, in my first year of High school. My first battle was helping a friend with his Orks against some very Orange blood angels. I had one Gretchen .....the only model I posessed. It was a short battle for me. Another time we had a blue bottle flying over the battle field ( obviously sent by Papa Nurgle to spy on us) when my friend James launched a D6 at it in frustration. He hit it mid flight with said D6, and it promptly spiralled down to the table very dead. Sadly he used all of his dice luck for the day with that heroically good shot and lost the battle rather badly.
I was a player in a 40 K League in the woods in Tennessee when Rogue Trader was new. Our hobby shop was actually a British guy who had a business as a magician and sold British miniatures and Citadel/GW stuff he brought back on trips home. I built my first Orc battle wagon from a converted US School bus toy, chopped the roof, put monster truck tires on it and painted it red to go Fasta!!! It held 30 orcs, had a power field and a macro cannon mounted on it.
I'm 30, was too a baby during this period having been spawned from the gene-pools in the neon colors of 1990. While I don't mind Primaris, and really like the dark medieval fantasy look of contemporary 40k, there's something about the RT days where all buildings looked like they were out of Mos Eisley and the cartoony goofy models etc that just looks really cool to me, and I am glad they've begun bringing it back in some form.
Still love this era. Makes a lot more sense when you remember it was much more skirmish based, like a squad of marines going in to clean up a dirty town, or a gang making a raid on an elder pirate base rather than the all out war of organised armies that the later editions focused on.
My mom took me to a local toy store in Napa. I was an aspiring artist and was really drawn in by the artwork in the rogue trader book so she got it for me and a few minis ! This became a Strong influence for me creatively.
Hi, I was about 15 when 40k first got released. I started playing it a year or so after it was printed. My actual first purchased game was the first edition of Space Hulk, so I soon gravitated to a Stealer Cult. My fondest memory? A Genestealer Magus with the Temporal Distort psychic power... I wonder why they nerfed that? Oh, and GW sales where they would actually sell stuff of at 50% or better discount. I just bought soooo many blisters, boxes and games. Three copies of Gorkamorka (ok, the game was never so hot, but 6 wartraks and 6 wartrucks? Who could resist...
I was literally a human tadpole when Rogue Trader came out, but stuff like Logan's World is why I love reading about it now. It might not be impossible, but it'd be a lot harder to imagine a world with orks and humans cohabiting while dealing with street gangs in the modern 40K world.
Showing my age here, but I was in college when 40K first came out. Was visiting friends at Vandy and a series of demo games was going on. I was an avid model builder and wargamer, and 40K sort of let me bring the two together. Some of my favorite RT era memories was the first tournament the local group at Mississippi State put on around 1990 - homebrew marine chapters (pretty much all beakies) with shuriken catapults facing off against orks with hover boards so fast you were like at -6 to hit... of course, a few handy vortex grenades and assaults managed to put an end to them... Then there was the group taking over the 2nd floor of the student union for an all day battle on a 12 x 12 surface...
The jumping Dreads reminds me of the era where 40k temporarily had Vehicle Design Rules, I had an Ork Dred with giant wings who could Deep Strike, had gatling Big Shootas and a big buzzsaw blade . It was like a Dakkajet with legs! XD
I think that 33 Orkz piled on to a Battle Wagon is exactly what GW intended. I played Rogue Trader back when it was released. It was very involved and super crunchy; though the section on creating your own combatants did allow me and my mate to fight the Dalek-Cyber Wars with our GW plastic Dalek and Cyberman kits.
My very first 40K RT game took place on the tail end of that era (1992). I was at at a gaming convention and lassoed into a game of Space Wolves vs. Eldar. The Marines had captured a collection of Eldar spirit stones, and the Eldar were fighting to get the stones back. The GMs had used the plot generator to add some spice to the battle, and the scenario included a news camera crew wandering the battlefield, distracting the combatants by asking questions and getting in the way. It was hysterical. Among the notable happenings was the marines throwing plasma grenades, and the blast effects kept growing and growing; killing way more enemies than the grenades should have. The game stands out in my memory as one of the most enjoyable in my lifetime. And it set me off on a miniature wargaming journey that continues to this day.
I remember refusing to purchase the Land Raider kit, and the two Land Raider in one box kit because they cost too much for what you got. You could get a really nice Tamiya tank for less than that Land Raider or Rhino. I did scratch build my vehicles, and still do scratch build. My best ever is an Ork biker, before orks on bikes were a thing...the gas tank is an FW190 gun blister, tires from a 35th scale Tamiya wwII Americn Jeep...it fell together. But when my friends and I began to get the hang of the rules, figure out tactics with our tiny squads, ( I was orks, always orks) this became part of my being. It still is.
I didn't play when it came out but my time playing Rogue Trader is one two of the best experiences I've ever had in all the tabletop games I've played My Inquisitor with her entire warband defeated all around her trapped alone in a genestealer nest beat more than 25 purestrain in melee through a mix of desperation, creative interpretation of RAW by both myself and our DM and massively lucky rolls with a Web pistol/Displacer field.
Played since '88. What I miss is head canon. The vagueness of the original setting meant it wasn't just ok but expected to create a unique narrative for the army you created.
I didn't play Rogue Trader, but we owned it. We started playing when the 2nd edition box set came out. The rules...needed help. I was playing a game against my friend (I was marines, he was orks) and because of the control rolls for making tight turns, and the table had a lot of terrain, he managed to crash and kill then entirety of his Ork truks filled with boys in a single turn. It was...something else.
I didn't play a whole lot of RT back in the day, but I had friends who played it a lot. One of the things that would be different to newer editions of 40k would be that when RT was released there were no army lists per se. There was point values though! So one way was simply to say "you have so-and-so many points, make up a force!" A friend of a friend created a force that consisted of... a handful of gretchin on power boards, "armed with" off table plasma bombs, siege weaponry that they could call in. The gretching would arrive on the table zooming on their flying surf boards at max speed (60") which would give any attacker a whopping -6 to hit for firing on a fast moving target. Then the gretching would call in the Plasma Bomb artillery, each causing six 2" templates to scatter from a point of impact with a S10 hit with a -10 Armor save modifier causing D10+10 Wounds... And then the gretching would zoom off the board to come back two turns later to do it again...
In the early 90s, I was in high school and a friend introduced me to rogue trader (a year or so before 2nd edition came out). Did you know that the imperial guard's ratling snipers could pick which poisons to use? Including skaventoxin, for killing skaven, which weren't in 40k at the time? In response I took some of the oldest skaven plastic clanrats (the ones released in '93) and eventually gave them guns from a necromunda weapon pack that came out in '95... so yeah, skaven in space.
My fondest memory was playing with the new Space Wolves rules right at the end of the RT era against a friend who was playing imperial guard. Up to that point I was chuffed I had the better of him over most games. It was that day that I discovered that An Imperial Assassin with Polymorphine wearing Terminator Armour Riding a Bike was Totally legit in the RT rules (sort of) This murder machine stormed through the Grey Hunters, pulped those, killed the Scouts and then zoomed off in the third turn to give my Wolf lord a seeing too. Needless to say such nonsense disappeared in 2nd edition, but...eh fun days. Weird memorable stuff like that is hard to come by.
I played Dark Angels, Ultramarines, Imperial Army, and - when they were released - Tyranids. I had a friend who played Chaos when they were released, but we didn't know each other. Mostly I played solo or against whoever I could get to use my own models against me. The one game that sticks out in my mind is marines boarding a space hulk...before I had Space Hulk, mind you. I had intended it to be a functional spacecraft and they were raiding to stop a rebel faction, but that's when eleven-year-old me discovered spray paint melts styrofoam, so it became a space hulk. The vehicle rules allowed you to use anything you could kitbash, and there was a larger variety of weapons, too. I remember squads with conversion beamers and las-cutters... Somewhere around here I have a Rogue Trader era Land Raider I started restoring, but I haven't been able to find the thing since the move eight years ago. I know it's here somewhere, though...
I used to hang out at my local GW store back in the early through late 90's. While 2nd edition had just come out, the original (hardback too, mind you) Rogue Trader core books were still up in the shelves at GW, so I managed to get a hold of one, even though the employees there told me it wasn't being used anymore. Didn't matter. The art, the crazy lore, the mind-boggingly insane complexity of it all enthralled me as a young teen. Playing a game of 40K wasn't like is today where you can have a pick up game for an hour or two in a store or your friend's home. It required _planning_ and foresight that would put an eldar farseer to shame. Tables and time had to booked, lists of ridiculous detail sorted out, checked, rechecked, final approval, copied in triplicate and disseminated among all involved, a GM present, painted models, terrain (yes, made out common trash and other sundry items), BAGS of various aligned dice, etc. If anyone had to cancel, it was a disaster of criminal proportions. It was simultaneously a scheduled event, epic role playing game and an art house project. Given my young age, I didn't get to play that often and the few times I did, none of it made any sense and the few painted mini's I had were... bad (to quote Monty Python's Holy Grail, over the years I "got better". Of course by then, Rogue Trader was long gone and we were into 3rd edition already). Instead most of us played games that were actually designed for pick up type... 1st edition Space Hulk and later on Blood Bowl and (I forget the name of it now) the Fantasy ship to ship combat game, early editions of Space Fleet, the Armageddon and Horus Heresy board games (which I took a particular liking to) and even 40K Epic, which was actually much easier to play than 40K because most of the models were so small they only required base colors. The 90's and that GW store were some good years that I look back on with very fond memories.
In 1988 I was a teenager hanging out in my local comic/game/nerd-stuff store and I saw a glass case display of Space Marine beakies and a Land Raider, and I thought to myself WHAT ARE THESE DELIGHTFUL LITTLE THINGS, nose pressed against the glass case like a wonder-filled child at Christmas, and i immediately started scraping up the money to purchase the rulebook and some figures - right at the time Harlequins came out and appealed to my little closeted gay self even MORE than the marines did. The next step was to rope in my friends to play as well, which wasn't difficult as we were already playing tabletop RPGs every couple of weeks, so getting them into the figures wasn't overly difficult. Before long each of us had an army - my Eldar, another friend had Blood Angels, another was Guard, the comedian in our group was the Orks, the wanna-be cop had Ultramarines, and the goofball had Squats. We played many, many games of Rogue Trader and the rules would constantly update every month when each issue of White Dwarf altered the game balance, one month jet bikes became unstoppable, another month terminator marines were death-dealing juggernauts. We did not call it 40K. We called Wu-huffukeh. We then branched out into WFB (wuffub), and Space Hulk, and Epic, and then the Games Workshop store opened in our city, and by then we were all in college, and the whole thing splintered apart. But for about three years it was our main weekend activity, until going to clubs and drinking took over.
The Rogue Trader Imperial Guard army list was a work of genius: human bombs, penal troops, beastmen, ratlings, ogryns, commissar training squads, Whiteshields, Rough Riders, Adeptus Mechanicus and servitors, artillery pieces, robots, sentinels, tanks, bikes... And then you could attach allied units of squats, marines or eldar to them. So much fun to play! Also of note were the vehicle combat rules with the targeting matrix. Clunky they may have been, but it was great fun being able to deliberately blast wheels off or blow up fuel tanks :)
I started playing 40K in 1988, after being introduced to Space Hulk. I played Space Wolves and Eldar at the time. I think my favorite memory of playing 1st edition was a multiplayer game. There were 3 of us, 1 Elder player, 1 Ork player, and my space marines. The imperial assassin model had just been released and so we rolled up what his stats and weapons would be for the game. A fourth player controlled the assassin. I remember the assassin had something like 7 different grenade types, including vortex. He was running around the board loping vortex and hallucination grenades and we had to keep rolling to see what happened to our models each turn. I'm pretty sure that I was wiped out and so was the Ork player. It was down to the old school tall/skinny Avatar and the assassin. I think the assassin won by a single wound and the entire table erupted when he took down the Avatar. I think the imperial assassin was the single most OP model in 1st edition. But we always had fun when someone used him. It was like watching Rambo take on the universe and WIN.
Battle Wagon stacking: Yes, that is exactly as intended! and there were rules for minis that fell off during the handling of the battle wagon (auto take 1 wound), meaning it was all good and fun piling your army up on one wagon singing 'Ere we go!' until the table got knocked or you have to move the wagon and half your forces fell to their death like the most tragic game of Buckaroo you ever played :D
I have very fond memories of playing 1st Edition 40k. One memory was a game when a genetstealer successfully managed to successfully achieve an implant attack on an Imperial Assassin. It was all a bit nightmarish after that. Another memory was when I had an ork successfully hit and kill a terminator with a cyclone missile launcher with his plasma cannon set to maximum. The resulting catastrophic explosion ended up killing the entire terminator squad! Oh, and I knew a guy who used to milliput the castrated dongs of his foes to the belts of his orks, and the material you cited was his justification for doing so.
Circa 1988, the back of the RTB01 box of space marines had a short "how to play" that my friends and I used for ages in lieu of buying the rulebook. At the time said marine box was ~$20 USD for -30- marines, whilst the rulebook was a hefty $34.95. Thus we proceeded to play in ignorance of how points actually worked (all of us assuming points were gained for killing the models...) which lead to a huge "arms race." For example i made one of the deodorant canister Grav Attack tanks from the White Dwarf article, and the following week my opponents had made themselves somewhere around 20 of them (the Spanish Armada they called it) Our exclusively marine vs marine (because they were so much cheaper than anything else at that time) battles took place on driveways and garage floors, as we had no access to tables large enough to contain 200ish marines on each side. It was basically the Horus Heresy before there was such a thing. This continued until we had a German exchange student join us for one of these battles. Around 15 minutes into the 1st turn he asked us what in the world we were doing. After explaining to him that my assault unit consisted of only heroes due to my having a points surplus from winning the last battle, he shook his head and with a disgusted look on his face told us: "In Chermany ve play 40 Kah by zee rules" That line lives on in legend to this day. Cheers to you, Mark the German exchange student, where ever you may be
The Ultramarines turning traitor would be an interesting thing to bring back; could be some big dark secret where the original Chapter turned traitor and it got hushed up with one of the successor chapters relain intone their gear and taking their place to prevent word getting out. Also, I think that or stacking was intentional as its just so orky. ;) And technically ‘interbreed’ doesnt have to imply sexual reproduction; it could just mean that they could ‘crosspolinate’ like plants.
The first time I got to play 40K was age 12, during the Rogue Trader era, fielding a borrowed Marine combat squad against Eldar. Dark Reapers happened to be the Insanely Powerful New Thing of the Month, and my troops got pasted by them first turn. Then I got my own army - the RT01 Marine box - and made an embarrassing adolescent hash of painting them. What I really recall from the Rogue Trader era was the much more relaxed pace of the game. RT had no set victory conditions, and few people I knew bothered with GM-led scenarios, so games tended to go on until one side was wiped out or conceded. It was just accepted that a game would take a good three or four hours to play, and you'd relax into it as a gentlemanly exercise in statistical accretion and granular shifts in momentum, rather like text cricket. 2nd ed, with victory points and turn limits, was like one-day cricket, a much more focused competitive effort with a looming finish line. This was generally accepted as a positive change, though diehards occasionally convened for RT games into the 3rd-ed era - the Oldhammer trend, in my experience, going back at least as far as 1996. Though I've sat out the last few editions for want of free time, I've always loved 40K as a fictional universe and recently did an elevator pitch to a publisher for an academic book about it. They actually like the idea. There are other things they want from me first but I'm currently in catch-up mode so I can put together a formal proposal next year.
"We have too many dreadnoughts" Me: nonsense! if the guard have taught me anything it's that you can never have too many of your favourite armoured death machines For example you can't have too many Leman russes because who doesn't like a big box will really big boom stick on the end 11:23 that is bloody hilarious it's literally just small hill of orcs on a pile of tracks imagine you are at the Ottoman defending the line and then just a great big cheerleader moter bike stunt ESK stack just comes barreling towards you at 70 miles per hour
Have you considered making a Codex Compliant vid about armies that you can't use in 40k anymore? I don't mean Squats, but something like Khorne Daemonkin or Eldar Corsairs.
As a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes I feel I have to address the ‘gene-sperm’ comment. Listen, it was a weird time, none of us really knew what to call it at first so when Brother Forkan finished his glue and said “something something gene sperm” as a joke it stuck and we called it that for 2-3 years before an Apothecary from the Dark Angels got really mad about it and made all of us change it. However, I still think a few Soul Drinkers kept using it last I heard.
I modified my battle wagon back in the day because of the infinite capacity of the battle wagon rule. I used a Pringles can bottom and built a crow’s nest on top of the flagpole. If any models fell off they took damage, so you wanted them to be a little secure. Also used up all my extra Space Marine heads from the OG boxes set to make trophies to mount on the spikes on the edge. I miss having stupid amounts of time like that.
Oh my god- I bought a used alternator for my truck at Chuck and Eddie’s! I live about 15 minutes away from it- never in a million years would I imagine that you two would mention it. It really is a small world, after all... Thanks for the video, and for the Connecticut shout out🤣. Edit: I also have some old White Dwarf magazines (including the #100 you showed in this video) and I’ve seen him referred to as “Robert Guilliman”, and the Primarch of the Dark Angels, “Lyyn Elgonsen”. Weird- and awesome.
I played Rogue Trader. I've recently gotten my miniatures from storage and am in the process of rebuilding my 80's Eldar Pirates Army, 80's Adepta Sororitas army with the TWO figures GW produced and some 3rd party offerings, plus a giant G.I Joe Cobra Night Raven as a transport, and of course, several KG of lead Harlequins. Though it's been "awhile" since last I played, I LOVE what GW has done with Corsairs in 7th or 8th edition, and the newer Voidscarred are just magnificent. Oh, also, I'm trying to build a lovely diorama of a small group of Eldar Adventurers, two of whom are in the Rogue Trader "Where's Waldo" style, and their giant pre-fall Eldar Void Yacht.
OK, 40k Memories: ++My Ork Kustom Battlewagon had bonuses to armour in certain places. Everyone got reeeealy frustrated trying to shoot it, as even Krak missiles kept pinging off.l Until someone notices that the wheels have no armour bonus, and they're basically made of paper anyway! ++(fwiw, you had right how to play the capacity of a Battlewagon, but your units where MUCH smaller then, and typically included more metal which stacks up less easily.) ++Terminators having a save of 3+ on 2D6, Wolf Guard having better stats (but the same points), and managing to kill them in close combat with a lone Gretchin thanks to some lucky rolls. ++Team game (two v two) with a GM. The marines hit the Orks with a Missile Launcher having forgotten to declare their ammo type. The GM asks the Marine player what they;'re using. I turn to my team-mate and say "we're fine as long as they don't pick Anti-Plant missiles". Opposing player falls for the ruse, picks Anti-Plant, and all the foliage in the flat field the Orks are standing in dies. ++Ork Kustom Kombi Weapons had a random number of weapons bolted together. The second one has -1 to hit, the third -2, etc. You can fire them all in any order you like.Each weapon is also Kustomised with stat changes. I fondly remember the Bolt Gun with Strength 1, and no Save Modifier, but which had 1D10 damage.
I realise I'm late to the party here. That being said, Rogue Trader was my favorite version of warhammer 40k no question. I played from release and miss the good old days greatly. RT was all narrative play and my friends and I played hundreds of games. I still own and use all my RT models. RT represents for me a time when playing the game was pure fun and the mystery of spotty lore was as grimdark as it gets.
Many fond memories of playing Rogue Trader era Orks as a young teen. Living in the USA, the books Ere We Go and Freebooterz were super expensive for the time even if you could find them to purchase. The lucky thing was that those books had excerpts published in White Dwarf which I was able to use to with my Orks. Everything was so much more cobbled together then. House rules were much more widespread too. I still wonder how anyone allowed me to attach radio controlled explosives to the snotlings launched by my shock attack gun.
It was 1990. Share housing. We got Space Crusade. Loved it. Then three of us got two boxes each. Then the Rogue Trader book arrived. We battled over the salt shaker and the butter. Then the Lost and Damned. Then we joined a club and then we played in a second edition tournament. My first ever tourney opponent cheated and it made me really mad.
I have a copy of the "Warhammer 40k Compendium", which includes several of the articles you showed. It also includes rules for the Imperial Guard, which RAW allow you to field a platoon on rough-riders with jump-packs. (Both "roughriders" and "jump-packs" were upgrades that could be applied to a platoon, and there was no rule saying they couldn't take both).
I played roguetrader in 1990. that marine with the shuriken catapult was my favourite model. We could not afford terrain so spent a lot of time playing in the garden in my friends dads recently turned over dirt, which was actually really fun. The first game i had with actual model scenery felt odd. one of the most fun games i had was a siege game with the official castle, marines and harlequins attacking squats. it was going really well for the harlequins until the squats in exo armour with graviton guns reduced all their movement to 0. also had the imperial player screw up his robots programming and it melted half his army. and another fun game after the updated vehicle manual came out (the one with the perspex targetting grid), if you hit a baneblade in the shells section and got through the armour then on a 2+it exploded 18" radius! at Str 10, -6, D6 wounds or something. i saw it wipe out whole armies when it died. and having to leave the table becuase there were too many vortex missles floating around and duplicating, killing everything. and the list goes on and on and on :)
Back in the day, I had an mercenary army that consisted of guardsmen, two grey knights, two tyrnid warriors, a zoat and a smattering of elder. And it all worked just fine. Lol
This makes me wish there was a regiments of renown sort of thing for 40k like for Fantasy, where I believe there were several armies composed of multiple races because it was fun!
My first introduction to the Warty Thou universe was Space Crusade, which for the yung'uns in the crowd was a board game set on a space hulk made in collaboration with MB games. I was 10. Once Rogue Trader was released my friend and I headed to our local GW in town and bought a rule book. While we didn't play that many games, but the lore, artwork and endless possibility the rule book promised was incredible. I had built and painted some Airfix models in the past, but here was a whole universe, with rules and cool sci fi stuff and models to paint. Needless to say 33 years later, I'm still a fan, although I enjoy the hobby of painting, converting and building scenery more than playing the game nowadays.
Sniffin' Glue was an early punk magazine noted for taking a psa flyer about using glue as an inhalent and reprinting it making it about reading the magazine.
The "beauty" about ork Battle wagon was that it stated you could scratch build one and it could be any size. I did see some very large battle-wagons made for the purpose of having most number of orks on it
My old copy has been my favourite book since I bought it all those years ago... It has traveled across Africa with me on a long journey....the one book I took with me as essential relaxation reading.... I've treasured it... Love the videos you guys.
Not only did I have a buddy who'd pile orks into a battlewagon very similar to the one you used; he also hid a gobber with an orky 'evy weapon under his bedsheet on the bed rail in his deployment zone when we were playing on the floor. Totally okay with me, as I'd equipped a Conversion Beam Projector on one of my Marines and eliminated his ork dread along with his warboss when they were barely out of his deployment zone. Look up the old rules for a Conversion Beamer and you'll enjoy the crazy. RT40K was by far the craziest time for unadulterated nonsense in units, rules and fun!
