New Rogue Trader Designer Diary: The Emperor's Ferrymen

By FFG Ross Watson, in Rogue Trader

Hi Rogue Trader fans!

This week I have a guest designer diary from Owen Barnes that gets into the details of the Navigator Career for Rogue Trader. Enjoy!

Nice, i'm glad to see that the navigators abilities are being treated specially and kept seperate from the psykers powers. I was quite worried they might just be tacked onto the end as a special discipline.

I agree, Darkstar. I think this Navigator diary is the most exciting so far. Navigators are the one area of the 40k universe that hasn't really seen the limelight much. The diary shows that they're being treated EXACTLY how I pictured them: noble families of varying degrees of respectability with unique powers and family traits/mutations/reputations/powers.

Very intriguing stuff indeed, can't wait to see the final product...

Interesting, sounds like plenty of intrigue exists in the character generation alone. I look forward to gettting this game.

The past few diaries have been a vast improvement over teh whole "oh they have endeavors and resources and stuff" ones from earlier. Now if we can only get some hard examples and previews. Id like to hear more about how character generation may be different and such overall for the entire game in general as well.

So some game mechanic stuff would be nice.

I would have thought that by the time these previews become available the game itself will probably be released! Not long to go now in any case - and those rules for Navigators do look to have hit the right note, indeed.

I wonder how overt these mutations will generally be - after all, the average DH character will end when he acquires one. Navigators on their ships are generally cut some slack, but navigator characters aren't supposed to stay on their Trader's ship after all.

I'd imagine that the Navigator's mutations would be fairly cosmetic, more along the lines of the sort of things you'd see in upper class aristocratic families. (no chin, withered arms etc). I have a friend from an old upper class family who was born without knuckles, that's the sort of thing I always saw as a Navigator type of mutation. More caused by inbreeding than warp taint.

"Classic" Navigators were supposed to be spindly and frail, and many had webbed fingers, that's something I recall from the original Rogue Trader book. .