Warhammer Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader Pre-Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[frajaq]

Portrait for Commissar RT

looks fucking tight by Owlcat so far

 

[Vermillion]

Owlcat Website filename: Wow Such Waifu

Well they knew what they were doing there, and given the design follows my aesthetic taste it's working. Can't wait for her ending where you marry and an Agri world farmer impregnates her. Lmao.
Seriously though, I hope to have lots of fun with the "safe" mind bullet spamming mutant. Where's my Ork Freeboota already?

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Meh, the thing is that quite a few combat will probably take place indoor and in cramped space, and I'm not sure the combat system would be robust enough to support both possibility, so you just pretend that all outdoor skirmish take place in close range

For combat inside spaceships, there's an excuse at least. Outdoors though? That's another story.

Outdoors combat needs an excuse for why you don't just use your orbiting space city that fires bullets the size of houses and lasers that melt metres of steel per second to annihilate the enemy 10s after it got spotted.

The TT has some really outrageous rules for how hard it is to accurately target something (iirc you need to make like, navigation at -40, followed by ballistics skill -30, and even then you still scatter 1d4 kilometeres or something). But this is just a different from of excuse for why you can't annihilate stuff from orbit.

TBH fam the best excuse for outdoors combat and not annihilating stuff from orbit is already build into the setting. As a Rogue Trader you generally want to plunder and/or colonise the planets that you discover and planets that dont have anything worth taking are generally not of interest to you. Kinda like why people IRL dont just drop nukes all over the place even though they could win wars easily with them - territory that gets completely destroyed is not really worth fighting for.

I agree that the rules for orbital bombardment in TT RT were needlesly restrictive, but the thing is that its most likely meant to be used against cities or Epic-level battlefields rather than to snipe individual targets (which I suspect is what most people would like to do). If you fire at a city, then scattering for 1d10 km would not matter much, let alone 1d4.

 

[Peachcurl]

Meh, the thing is that quite a few combat will probably take place indoor and in cramped space, and I'm not sure the combat system would be robust enough to support both possibility, so you just pretend that all outdoor skirmish take place in close range

For combat inside spaceships, there's an excuse at least. Outdoors though? That's another story.

Outdoors combat needs an excuse for why you don't just use your orbiting space city that fires bullets the size of houses and lasers that melt metres of steel per second to annihilate the enemy 10s after it got spotted.

The TT has some really outrageous rules for how hard it is to accurately target something (iirc you need to make like, navigation at -40, followed by ballistics skill -30, and even then you still scatter 1d4 kilometeres or something). But this is just a different from of excuse for why you can't annihilate stuff from orbit.

TBH fam the best excuse for outdoors combat and not annihilating stuff from orbit is already build into the setting. As a Rogue Trader you generally want to plunder and/or colonise the planets that you discover and planets that dont have anything worth taking are generally not of interest to you. Kinda like why people IRL dont just drop nukes all over the place even though they could win wars easily with them - territory that gets completely destroyed is not really worth fighting for.

I agree that the rules for orbital bombardment in TT RT were needlesly restrictive, but the thing is that its most likely meant to be used against cities or Epic-level battlefields rather than to snipe individual targets (which I suspect is what most people would like to do). If you fire at a city, then scattering for 1d10 km would not matter much, let alone 1d4.

btw., the most typical reasons for lack of orbital bombardment given in the fluff / novels:
- Protection of ground targets by powerful void shields (in case of cities / fortifications / etc, but not mobile targets)
- Ships can't move into 'range' because of ground-based anti-ship guns, orbital anti ship guns, or defensive action by other ships.

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[Jorus]

Naval Officer RT portrait

Image

 

[Thonius]

 

[Thonius]

Portrait for Commissar RT

Doing a good job with concept art for the Navigator, and the Commie RT.
The commissar looks better than, e.g., this earlier one:

So, any Tom Selleck fans around here?

It's because of moustaches, you just cannot not trust people with moustaches.

 

[Thonius]

Meh, the thing is that quite a few combat will probably take place indoor and in cramped space, and I'm not sure the combat system would be robust enough to support both possibility, so you just pretend that all outdoor skirmish take place in close range

For combat inside spaceships, there's an excuse at least. Outdoors though? That's another story.

Outdoors combat needs an excuse for why you don't just use your orbiting space city that fires bullets the size of houses and lasers that melt metres of steel per second to annihilate the enemy 10s after it got spotted.

The TT has some really outrageous rules for how hard it is to accurately target something (iirc you need to make like, navigation at -40, followed by ballistics skill -30, and even then you still scatter 1d4 kilometeres or something). But this is just a different from of excuse for why you can't annihilate stuff from orbit.

TBH fam the best excuse for outdoors combat and not annihilating stuff from orbit is already build into the setting. As a Rogue Trader you generally want to plunder and/or colonise the planets that you discover and planets that dont have anything worth taking are generally not of interest to you. Kinda like why people IRL dont just drop nukes all over the place even though they could win wars easily with them - territory that gets completely destroyed is not really worth fighting for.

I agree that the rules for orbital bombardment in TT RT were needlesly restrictive, but the thing is that its most likely meant to be used against cities or Epic-level battlefields rather than to snipe individual targets (which I suspect is what most people would like to do). If you fire at a city, then scattering for 1d10 km would not matter much, let alone 1d4.

btw., the most typical reasons for lack of orbital bombardment given in the fluff / novels:
- Protection of ground targets by powerful void shields (in case of cities / fortifications / etc, but not mobile targets)
- Ships can't move into 'range' because of ground-based anti-ship guns, orbital anti ship guns, or defensive action by other ships.

More like planets are expensive yo!

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Additional concept art for Footfall - the Mos Eisley-like space station that is kind of a gateway into Koronus Expanse:

Seeing this makes me really wonder how much attention will go to the insides of your own ship actually. Even smaller escort ships are fairly vast, the lower level crew members often form various “ship tribes” that hold certain “territories” and develop their own cultures (with the voidborn crewmembers sometimes being only peripherally aware that they are on a space ship as they spend their whole lives there). Then you have so called darkholds, the unused parts of the ship taken over by various mutants and other vermin that the crew usually prefers to ignore.

I can imagine whole quest lines that would have you exploring darkholds or other parts of the ship, dealing with the conflicts among the various crew factions/tribes and fighting monsters that dwell in the shadows. Lots of potential there, we will see if the devs try to tap into it.

Footfall itself is bound to serve as some sort of the hub with traders, quest givers and such. Definitely a very important location.

 

[Thonius]

Not sure if I like what I see, I mean when I read books about spaceship in WH I did not envision something like THAT, is there any official arts of inside of the ships other than bridges and hangars/troops hold?

 

[Peachcurl]

Not sure if I like what I see, I mean when I read books about spaceship in WH I did not envision something like THAT, is there any official arts of inside of the ships other than bridges and hangars/troops hold?

I don't think it quite fits. The church-like look mixed with a bit of steam punk is okay for larger / important rooms. But why does it look like an impromptu shanty town as well?

 

[Thonius]

I mean exactly! Sure there are usual elements of WH design. I think DarkTide nailed it better, something like this would be a common on ship (with less disarray)

Owlcats art looks like some ceremonial chamber that got overgrown with shanty town... maybe that's exactly what it is?
Darker parts of the ship would be something like this IMO:

 

[Parsimonious cook]

The shanty town thing might be specific to Footfall as it is not a "normal" space station, but rather a huge collection of various communities that exist side to side, some of them pro-Imperial, some openly heretical/criminal and mostly in the grey zone between the two. All kinds of people come there as it is outside of Imperial borders, but close enough to allow travel back and forth. Also there is no "government" or anything like that there, so you dont get a room assigned when you show up - people just take over some space and make what they can of it, building a shanty town inside larger rooms seems like fairly logical thing to do.

Other than that, crews of the void ships can sometimes be outright weird. People start families on board (hence we get voidborn) and low level people sometimes have to live at their stations, so building some improvised structures in the "low level" parts of the ship might also make a lot of sense, especially when there are also mutants and various monsters on board as well. I can imagine people even building walls and such to protect themselves from such things. Darkholds would be even weirder than that since you will have communities of mutants living there among much worse monsters.

As for ship interior pictures, here are a few:

This is from one of the PnP Rogue Trader books:

These are from the Battlefleet Gothic (table top) rulebook:

 

[lightbane]

Depends on the writer on how weird ships are. Sometimes you do have the abandoned holds full of mutants and degenerated crewmembers, other times you have a regular sci-fi ship with excessive gothic imagery, sometimes you have "normal" ships where passengers are allowed to walk around the bridge to see how the Captain works, others you have something in-between.

Some also mention ammunitions of the ship being loaded by windmills and hordes of slaves for extra grimderp factor.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Talos Pain Engine of the Dark Eldar.

 

[Reinhardt]

Not sure if I like what I see, I mean when I read books about spaceship in WH I did not envision something like THAT, is there any official arts of inside of the ships other than bridges and hangars/troops hold?

in Gaunt's Ghosts mentioned that imperial guard regiments are followed by huge retinue between worlds and that's pretty much what end results looks like. whores, traders, various performers, gambling halls.

 

[Humbaba]

Depends on the writer on how weird ships are. Sometimes you do have the abandoned holds full of mutants and degenerated crewmembers, other times you have a regular sci-fi ship with excessive gothic imagery, sometimes you have "normal" ships where passengers are allowed to walk around the bridge to see how the Captain works, others you have something in-between.

Some also mention ammunitions of the ship being loaded by windmills and hordes of slaves for extra grimderp factor.

One of the default rules of 40k is that everything is so unimaginably vast, decentralised and diverse that it is basically impossible for there to be a "normal" or standard look or structure of anything, which is why authors and artists are very free in their depictions or descriptions of ships for example. That's also why anybody can make up their custom space marine chapter without being lore-unfriendly.

 

[Peachcurl]

Not sure if I like what I see, I mean when I read books about spaceship in WH I did not envision something like THAT, is there any official arts of inside of the ships other than bridges and hangars/troops hold?

in Gaunt's Ghosts mentioned that imperial guard regiments are followed by huge retinue between worlds and that's pretty much what end results looks like. whores, traders, various performers, gambling halls.

wellll... I think Gaunt's Ghosts is entertaining to read, but I also think it's fairly liberal with some stuff, starting with the whole officer+commissar idea . No other novel I remember mentioned any sort of "retinue" for a regiment, that is not associated to transport, medical, tech or similarly necessary services.

(come to think of it I'm actually not sure that Gaunt's Ghost have a "huge" retinue, rather than some few people they picked up, have to look that up I think)

 

[Reinhardt]

Not sure if I like what I see, I mean when I read books about spaceship in WH I did not envision something like THAT, is there any official arts of inside of the ships other than bridges and hangars/troops hold?

in Gaunt's Ghosts mentioned that imperial guard regiments are followed by huge retinue between worlds and that's pretty much what end results looks like. whores, traders, various performers, gambling halls.

wellll... I think Gaunt's Ghosts is entertaining to read, but I also think it's fairly liberal with some stuff, starting with the whole officer+commissar idea . No other novel I remember mentioned any sort of "retinue" for a regiment, that is not associated to transport, medical, tech or similarly necessary services.

(come to think of it I'm actually not sure that Gaunt's Ghost have a "huge" retinue, rather than some few people they picked up, have to look that up I think)

well, to be honest most of the things we know about guards we know from Abnett, so pretty much he IS lore.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

It's because of moustaches, you just cannot not trust people with moustaches.

Spoiler

 

[Peachcurl]

Owlcat just released concept art for Naval Commander RT

 

[Vermillion]

Not sure if I like what I see, I mean when I read books about spaceship in WH I did not envision something like THAT, is there any official arts of inside of the ships other than bridges and hangars/troops hold?

Not sure if I like what I see, I mean when I read books about spaceship in WH I did not envision something like THAT, is there any official arts of inside of the ships other than bridges and hangars/troops hold?

I don't think it quite fits. The church-like look mixed with a bit of steam punk is okay for larger / important rooms. But why does it look like an impromptu shanty town as well?

Everyone else has already covered this but the reason is because it's a shithole.

 

[FreeKaner]

Portrait for Commissar RT

This is really good. Really striking that Victorian era mishmash aesthetic, looking more like early 20th century. I was worried they'd slip too much to WW2 because rest of Warhammer 40k can be like that at first glance.

It really feels a lot more like that Owlcat artists are a lot more comfortable with Warhammer aesthetics rather than Pathfinder, might because Warhammer is just a much better setting too. Hopefully they will also be with the systems and make it more lean too instead of bloatware that is Pathfinder.

 

[santino27]

Another pic from their twitter account: