If you’ve gotten so lazy that you haven’t updated your blog in almost half a year, you’ve gotten pretty lazy. The last thing I posted was An Early Look at Rogue Trader Characters. Well, since then Rogue Trader has actually been released. Let’s have a look at the process of rolling-up a Rogue Trader character.
Character generation is different here than in Dark Heresy. Ross Watson goes into all the details in A Rogue Trader Is Born. I’m glad I found that article yesterday, because I was going to repeat everything he said. Get all your gory details there.
One thing that Ross doesn’t mention in that article (indeed, they didn’t even include anything about it in the book) is randomized character generation. This is easily achieved by rolling 1d6 to determine your homeworld, and rolling 1d3 (or 1d2 in the extreme cases) to determine the next step along your origin path. This is what I did for my character, and I managed to get “Death World > Scavenger > Tainted > The Hand of War > Endurance > Arch-Militant.”
The power level of Rogue Trader is much, much higher than in Dark Heresy. Theodore Sebastian Grahl, my character, has 37 Weapon Skill, 37 Ballistic Skill, 55 Strength, 44 Toughness, 41 Agility, and remarkably poor fellowship. “Why’s the strength so high,” you ask? The “Tainted” step on his origin path makes him an honest-to-God-Emperor mutant. Being tainted allows you to either select from a limited list of mutations for 200 xp or randomly roll from the full list for free. I went with the free option, and got “Hulking Size.” Wait, it gets worse.
Part of character creation involves making a free acquisition (that is to say, you don’t have to roll for this one). I was able to get Theodore a Good quality Power Fist. He hits guys for 2d10+10 Energy, 7 penetration. At level one. Most player characters still have between 9 and twelve wounds. Yeah, kinda overkill. Speaking of wounds, Theodore has 20 (5 of them are from his mutation).
I’m looking forward to actually playing this game. You can be sure that I’ll relate the more memorable experiences here on cbpye.net. One more thing before I go… Last night, I started work on a Rogue Trader Random Character Quickstarter and a Rogue Trader Character Generator. Both are unfinished and unpolished at the moment, so bookmark them and check back in a few days.
