Rogue Trader is the perfect vehicle for Warhammer 40K’s satire

The Games Workshop store staff have a tough job, from low wages to consistently unreasonable targets from upper management, so it is with all the love and respect that I tell you about the animated boy who used to prank my 14-year-old friends and I or for liberal use of the phrase “If a Space Marine walked in here right now…” It was always accompanied by wildly enthusiastic gestures intended to convey the absolute unity of the said Space Marines (8 feet tall in the lore from Warhammer 40,000). I bring this up because it perfectly sums up the thorny issue behind the marketing of these yoked stormtroopers: Space Marines are very expensive for something so small, forcing Games Workshop to let the legend of these little plastic soldiers take precedence over reality tower.

And what a legend it is. The Horus Heresy book series currently consists of more than 60 thick paperbacks of lore. There's way too much nuance to explain here, but it's fair to say that when writers spend so long researching something, they have to take it pretty seriously, especially if they want to keep their readers hooked. To be clear, 40K is a fascinating, fun, creative, expansive, and often extremely clever setting. But it is also – according to the parent company, at least as recently as 2021 – explicitly and deliberately satirizing the very faction that the vast majority of lore seems so fascinated with. “Satire is people as they are; romance, people as they would like to be,” wrote novelist Dawn Powell. As 40K grows and grows, it becomes harder to deny that its depiction of the Empire is at least somewhat ambitious.

Image: Owlcat Games via Polygon

A quick primer: Humanity's overwhelming presence in the 40K setting takes the form of the Imperium of Man, where staunch xenophobia, mindless fanaticism, and outright hostility to social or technological progress are among the highest virtues – a literal “cult of tradition”. Ordinary people live in cramped 'Hives', toiling until death, after which they are repurposed as tasty, nutritious 'corpse starch'. The Imperial Guard, humanity's most numerous fighting force, is best known for deploying the Zapp Brannigan maneuver, i.e. throwing endless bodies at a problem until it solves itself. As such, individual human life is not exactly worthless. Terra's more elite army are the Space Marines. If 2000 AD' Judge Dredd is for law enforcement, as the Space Marines are for the concept of the Ubermensch – a grimly satirical warning about the pursuit of perceived physical perfection and ultimate power.

Of the 36 playable factions in 40K, about half (17) are in some capacity with the Imperium, while another nine are their direct counterparts in Chaos, leaving only 10 to be divided among the multiple non-human species that make up this mind-bogglingly enormous universe populate. Sci-fi can vary wildly in taste, but a common thread is that great science fiction is almost insatiably curious. 40K absolutely shines when it mocks the stubborn anti-curiosity of its human protagonists. But as the company has slowly come to value sales over artistic intent, that lack of curiosity too often seems to be carried over to Games Workshop itself.

Image: Owlcat Games via Polygon

This fantastic look on 40K's timeline, and how it evolved from satire to something almost like a celebration, it says this: “As the setting became more mainstream, the role of Space Marines (portrayal) as noble warrior monks became more and more prominent, which resulted in a world where these abused, intolerant, mass-murdering child soldiers are depicted only from the point of view of the Empire,” and, in the vast majority of official artwork, “as true heroes.” Even the official website categorizes non-human armies as 'the Xenos threat'. If you look a little closer, you can easily see the inherent satire in images of Primarch Roboute Guilliman with a Christ-like halo of light shining from the background. But unless you know what you're looking for, this stuff looks suspiciously like the propaganda it's mocking.

Of course, this isn't to say that modern Games Workshop has lost its sense of satire, and certainly not its sense of humor. As we've seen time and time again in the games industry, shareholder misunderstanding or simply not valuing the creative process is a depressing overriding theme. It's easy to crush nuances in the pursuit of easy profitability. The rule of cool sells plastic, not difficult themes. Moreover, 40K is a war game. In an environment that requires constant conflict, factions that think in absolutes become necessary. But that's where video games like the recent, excellent CRPG Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader come on in. It would be a huge anticlimax to end a 40K game with a conversation before it's even begun, but now that the setting is allowed to spread its wings into a new genre, some of that classic satire is starting to flourish again.

Image: Owlcat Games via Polygon

Above all, 40K is ridiculous, and A rogue trader has having fun with it without losing any of the campy grindhouse stuff that grimdark excels at. Characters speak in rich, baroque prose, at once excellently written and almost indecipherable to anyone not yet indoctrinated into their bizarre religious neo-feudalism. You don't even have to leave your own ship to encounter an inhuman class structure, and each of your former associates is comically nefarious enough to be the main villain in any other setting. In Baldur's Gate 3For example, the evil path requires a deliberate, long effort to stray into monstrous territory. Here you can have several crew members executed in the first few hours without breaking character.

A rogue trader isn't even the first game to achieve this recently. Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, despite a rocky launch, is emerging as an excellent follow-up to the Vermintide series, masterfully portraying the gruesome satire of existence in the gruesome hive cities of 40K. Loading Screen Quotes is such a sharp satire that you'd have to accidentally glue your eyes shut while building models to miss them, with lines like “A small mind is a tidy mind,” “Blessed are the intolerant” and “Duty is essential, understanding is not.” It seemed like just a few years ago that the glut of Warhammer games felt like a punchline. Now the scope and breadth these games offer are starting to feel like a better medium to represent the most complete version of 40K than the tabletop game itself.