Who You Calling Old(hammer)?

Or... Rogue Trader strikes again.

So glad I kept this stuff

I'm still alive out here, still chipping away at little gaming/art projects. I mentioned in a previous post that 2020 has seen a vast decrease in my blog posting but a monumental increase in actual gaming. 

About this time last year I found a really great local group to end a two-decade hiatus in roleplaying. Due to the global pandemic we quickly transitioned to Discord and didn't slow down. Nearly a year later and we're over 20 sessions into an AD&D 1st Edition campaign.

Even better, I finally got back into the GM chair after nearly 25 years, running a variant of FATE. It's supremely satisfying to create a world and have players tell me they are totally immersed. That immersion comes at a huge time cost however; the long interruption in my GM career made me forget just how much work goes into being a good GM. Therefore, even as I'm just getting back into GMing RPGs, I find my attention drifting to other, arguably less time-consuming interests. Funnily, this follows the pattern set 30 years ago in my gaming heyday.

It was 1989 and I was heavily into RPGs, running or playing campaigns every day at lunch and making monthly pilgrimages to the local small-town hobby store to spend my meager preadolescent funds on ever more gaming stuff. On one of these trips I picked up a copy of Challenge magazine, issue 37 specifically.

Flipping through the GDW magazine, I was enthralled by all this reference material for games I'd only heard of in TSR's "Mail Order Hobby Shop" catalog. When I reached the article titled "The Undead of Space" my RPG train derailed.

"The Undead of Space" featured a new faction and associated scenarios for Warhammer 40000, a game I'd never heard of. I still remember to this day reading the random equipment tables in that article and marveling over esoteric words like "chainsword", "lasgun", and "bolt thrower". I didn't know what to make of all this but even without knowing any of the actual game mechanics I was already hooked by the tone.

My friends and I dabbled in tabletop wargaming via Battletech but the look of this strange British game fascinated us more. Soon one of the group showed up, fresh from the hobby store, with the actual rulebook: Warhammer 40000 Rogue Trader.

Roleplaying games quickly took a back seat as we collected miniatures and built terrain in earnest. We were never ones to paint our figures but we packed the games in; so many battles, so much fun.

Leaving for college broke up our game group and post-college time demands convinced me to give up gaming in the early 00s. Yet, even as I purged near complete collections of such classics as TSR's Marvel Super Heroes, Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu, and a respectable Ral Partha miniature collection, for some reason I couldn't part with my Rogue Trader stuff.

And now, the pattern repeats. I've returned to the gaming hobby and after years of searching I've finally found a stable RPG group. Instead of prepping my next GM session however, I find myself inexplicably drawn to the closet where my old miniatures lay waiting. Some, including two boxes of 60 or so beakie space marines, have lain dormant since I bought them off eBay nearly 20 years ago.

So, while I should be fleshing out NPCs, closing plot holes in my stories, making diagrams, and establishing plausible reasons for PC motivation, instead I'm stripping paint off 33-year old miniatures and planning new color schemes.

And I'm loving it.

Two weeks off for the holidays gives me time to work, motivation, and a definitive goal: field two small painted forces on a table with some decent looking terrain.

I doubt I'll get the forces done before the new year but I'll give it a go, likely pitting a squad from my own homebrew chapter of Space Marines versus a handful of Space Slann.

So awesome... so tedious to put together

Even in 1997 I paid an absurd amount for these guys (11 of my 14)

Despite my love for the old Rogue Trader book, I'll instead use homebrew rules for the actual battles, combining original ideas with great nuggets borrowed from various systems like Stargrunt, Song of Blades and Heroes, and others.

I guess I could try the newest edition of Warhammer 40000 but... why?  Did you know GW is on the 9th edition? 9th?! They can't get it right after 8 attempts??

All joking and faux GW-bashing aside, I'm not using any contemporary rulesets because my fights will be solo and my homebrew is built from the ground up to be a solo skirmish game. And besides, for me there is no other WH40K than Rogue Trader.

My friends and I eagerly jumped on the Warhammer 40000 2nd Edition bandwagon when that boxed set came out in the early 90s. It only took one play for me to decide it wasn't for me. Too slick, too homogenized, too dumbed-down. The rest of my group embraced 2nd, and even 3rd edition, but whenever it was my turn to pick the game I insisted on using the Rogue Trader rules.

I guess even back in the early 90s I was doing "Oldhammer". In my mind though, it's just Warhammer 40000. The only 40K that matters. Stripped of mystery-killing "lore" and standing proudly at only 28mm.