With a fairly complete existing line of 40K rpg's, and a cream of the crop License property in Star Wars, it really doesn't seem likely that there will be a new 40K RPG line any time soon. But I enjoy speculating on what such a new game would be about, if it were ever to materialize. So, this is more "Wishing Well" than "Crystal Ball" territory, but--what the heck!--its for the Fun of it after all.

I like trying to pick a candidate for a new line out of existing Games Workshop games that don't already have rpg incarnations. A couple of candidates come readily to mind:

NECROMUNDA: Maybe not those exact gangs, but I like the idea of an rpg centered in the grungy, violent underbelly of the Underhives. Seems like it would be easy to do, basically being a low power equivalent to Dark Heresy, with a lot of similar types--(break out that Book of Judgment!) only with a very different theme. Gang building for a Player Character group would be similar to the undertakings and ventures of Rogue Trader, just grungier, and grimmer. In the dark, sort of. I think this would appeal to gamers who like the 40K universe, but squirm under the oppressive Authority present in most of the other game lines. But, without the soul-sucking eldritchy horror thingies of Chaos hanging around waiting to eat you, as in Black Crusade.

I know this would be an easy sell to any of my gaming groups.

TITAN LEGION: Mechs! How can you go wrong with Mechs? I mean, I think the fever-craze fascination with big walking roboty tanks has slackened off, but I'm sure there's still plenty of interest still active in the gamer community. Playing the crew of a Titan seems like a natural fit for most gaming circles, and you would have a variety of sizes and scales to work with. While there's plenty of canonical antagonists to fight: everything from Chaos Titans to Tyrannid Bio-Titans to Ork "Junkhemoths" to Eldar to...you get the picture, I prefer a slightly different idea. There are lots of "Cyclopean" and "Monolithic" Xenos ruins scattered around the existing game line settings. That's part of the juicy Lovecraftian atmosphere that FFG has injected into the games (and one of the things I love about them!). These are usually presented to evoke the flavor of Great Old Ones and unfathomably powerful but extinct (we hope) Xenos. But, what if some of those gargantuan thingies were still around ? You would need Titans to keep them at bay and preserve the Imperial Worlds from unimaginable Horror-ror! Yeah. Imperial Titans vs. Xenospawned Gargantuas! Mecha vs Kaiju, in the Grim Dark! That would be an easy sell to my gamers, too! In fact, it's such a juicy notion that I may just cobble together a campaign along those lines someday, with or without a dedicated game line to run it with.

...Then there are those non-human, non-Imperium options.

THE TAU: are too easy. Screw 'em. That'd be too close to playing "the Good Guys.". I've never liked the flavor of Tau, anyway. They just don't feel..."40Kish" enough to me.

ORKS: Now we'z talkin'! There's enough Ork material in Rogue Trader to design Ork PC's with, and you can glean enough out of the other lines' books to put together an all-Ork campaign easily enough. Heck, the forums are full of clever Mad Boyz GM's wot has done that very thing! Still, it would be a hoot to have an official Ork-centric RPG to play around with! First, I see it as some welcome relief from the unremittingly Darkish Grimlyness of the Grim Dark 40K setting. Come on! Orkz would be a delightful Beer & Pretzels game with outrageously bad accents, pizza and likely too much beer at the table. Oh, sure. It might get old as a steady diet, but it sure would be fun for one-off game nights, every once in awhile. Maybe not a game line, per se, but I'm sure more than enough gamers would get behind a single core book, or something.

And, falling back on the Games Workshop games justification, there's GORKAMORKA to invoke! Angelis would make a splendid RPG setting!

ELDAR: Lordy. My gamer friends, they just LOOOVE the Eldar! If I brought up the idea of a new 40K rpg at most of my gaming groups' sessions, the first thing anyone would blurt out would be "ELDAR!" I know that there have been grumbles from GW pros in the past about "not playing xenos characters because they are too alien" yadda yadda. Silly that. And I've heard choruses of "The Eldar are NOT 'Space Elves!' They're NOT!" *foot stamp* Which is just plain silly because they clearly ARE "Space Elves" and everybody darn well knows it! I think it'd be more fair to say that the Eldar are not JUST "Space Elves," which would be true since they've developed a lot of distinctive flavor over the years. At least the folks I hear about from GW these days sound a lot less cranky about such things, so it might not be a problem anymore. 'Sides, again, there's plenty of material for playing Eldar characters in Rogue Trader and enough material scattered about the lines to make an Eldar campaign doable. It's just that, again, it would be nice to have dedicated sourcebook type stuff instead of piecing things together. I know an Eldar game line would be greeted with fists full of dollars! Admittedly, my grubby currency-clutching paws would be right in there with the rest.

Xenos role-playing gets a little thin, and very, very weird after that, though.

I think it wouldn't be too hard to put together a Genestealer game, centered around infected/infested/whatever humans turning into 'Niddy xenomorph wannabes. All you have to do is look at the rpg empire White Wolf made out of "playing the monster" with characters who have cool powers but must forever struggle to cling to their Humanity amid the darkness of their unholy lusts/appetites and... ah. You get it, right?

On the far fringe of Weirdness, I'm putting together some ideas for playing Tyrannid Lictors (in an all-Lictor group, of course), or maybe even some other 'Nid types, with the intention of running some Convention games one of these days.( PM me if you want to hear of my Madness, or share your OWN! mwah-ha-hah! etc.)

Had a notion for an all Mechanicus game too, but that winds up just being a variant of already existing materials. The Mechanicus is thoroughly represented in every 40K game line already on the shelves, so it doesn't seem like there would be much point in rehashing so much of it.

I did play with an idea for a setting for an all Mechanicus game, though. Trying to think out just what sort of setting you would find nothing BUT Mechanicus adepts and minions, and what kind of Antagonists would do them justice, without dragging the Chaos-tainted back again, I came up with the notion of an Archaeotech menace. Back in the Dark Age of Technology, certainly there were fleets of proud vessels that journeyed out in glorious fleets to do inscrutable Tech Age "stuff." And theoretically it's pretty certain that they ran into opposition and hazards "Unguessed At!" So, the setting would be a drift of ancient, shattered, wrecks of such ships, in drifts between the stars and scattered across a cluster of worlds like broken toys. There's undreamt of wonders in there, to be sure, but also terrible Heretical dangers. Hostile Machine Spirits and techno-abominations of all kinds lurk within the wreckage, along with scavengers from every race and Empire. Only the Mechanicus themselves could be trusted to explore such a realm of Wonder and Horror!

Unfortunately, you can't base a campaign on Archaeotech without letting the PC's get their hands on Archaeotech, from time to time. And you certainly can't trust Player Characters with Archaeotech! In no time Game Balance and the Imperium's status quo become things of the lost past. So. yah. Maybe not. Still...it feels like there's a game in there...somewhere.

So, those are my Speculations. So far. Just for the fun of it!

Engine War would be an awesome 40k RPG, and the one that I'd very much vote for.

The mechanics would need a bit of careful thought to 'work' right, but could be very satisfying.

Essentially, you've got something somewhere between an Only War tank crew game, upped to the max, but as Titan crew you are a critical enough asset that you would be involved in the strategic-level planning for a war; a titan princeps and his bridge crew are at least the equivalent of senior colonels in terms of the firepower at their disposal.

Not to mention, you have canonical background 'room' for non-battlefield (sort of) missions. Titans are attached to titan legions, but these legions fall under one of three different branches:

the Divisio Militaris does what titans generally do; stomp the ever-loving **** out of the Omnissiah's enemies on the battlefield.

The Divisio Investigatus are the 'research orders'. These have three functions:

• Designing new hardware for titans - for the modern adeptus mechanicus this will mean recovering lost STC data. A titan could feasibly be attached to a high-end explorator force, and a titan princeps will almost by default be the expedition's military commander. (As an addendum to the above, retrieving actual examples of items. Leftover titan and ordinatus archaeotech is buried on battlefields all over the galaxy)
• Field-testing newly installed weapons and systems. The Imperium being the Imperium, I don't imagine this will be on papier-mache cut-outs.
• 'Investigating' new threats to catalogue their combat capabilities.

The Divisio Mandati are the 'executive orders'. In the original fluff they only use Imperators, but it's not too drastic a change to see them deploying other lighter units (they may be famous for imperators, but it's not like they could field enough units to make a difference to the Imperium if they only use them)

• The Mandati are essentially a 'travelling assizes' - a small fleet of Administratum, Arbites, Astropathica, etc, travelling under Mechanicus authority and on Mechanicus ships to frontier worlds with no permanent Imperial Presence
• They essentially turn up every few centuries, check tithes, mutants, psykers, etc, hand over a copy of the latest addendums to Lex Imperialis , and leave saying "see you next millennium. We'll call you if we want anything."
• These expeditions include a single titan, which is essentially parked outside the capital city of a world whilst the expedition is in residence to make it really clear that this should be taken seriously.
• Again, the Titan's princeps would by default be the military commander of the expedition, and this time would almost be in a rogue trader-esque role; responsible for diplomacy and soothing ruffled feathers to make sure that a) the world stays loyal and productive, ideally without him having to go Gypsy Danger on the capital city, b) the brief visit doesn't miss any hidden heresies bubbling away that will surface after he leaves, and c) that some over-eager arbites nutjob doesn't burn 65% of the world's population because they've painted the cathedral walls in mechanicus standard grey rather than administratum grey.

Theoretically, a titan, or titan maniple, could find itself transferred between these orders.

There is a fourth order - the Diviso Telepathica. You don't talk about them or the Inquisition and the Mechanicus both want you killed.

Oh, very cool!

I think I'll mix a couple of ideas for a future campaign and have the players be members of a Divisio Investigatus/Divisio Mandati effort to reconnect with a far flung edge of the Imperium, where the local worlds have had barely any contact with the rest of the Imperium for centuries. The region was the site of a collision between advancing Age of Technology fleets and a primordial, degenerate empire of gargantuan Xenos. The Ancient Ones (or whatever) were driven deep underground, into the "Darkness Between the Stars", into the Warp, or other appropriate refuges. The region is thick with remnants of shattered AoT fleets, Titan wreckage on the ground, and various hidden defensive installations--with attendant AI overseers. As the Imperium begins to open the Warp routes back up and exert tighter control over the colony worlds, the Ancient Ones begin to stir out of their long slumber. As they wake up, so too do the AI's and Machine Spirits tasked with controlling them. Into the middle of this brewing Apocalyptic struggle comes the Mechanicus expeditions--the thin metallic line that is all that stands between the Imperium and a variety of gigantic threats.

Sort of August Derleth's take on The Mythos (Great Old Ones vs Elder Gods--with the Archaeotech AI's being the latter), with Mechs!

The ancient legends record events too fantastical, too horrific to have been true!

"Thing on the Planet stood on two legs, like a man, only tall as a Hive. It had a many-petaled fleshy flower for a head, with thousands of teeth and a single, great eye. It screamed Madness at the fleet, causing crews to tear themselves apart, some exploding into clouds of blood and bone fragments, until massed orbital bombardment by the fleet drove it into the side of a mountain. There was no sign of an opening on that mountain cliff, only a life-sized carving of the horrible Thing etched into the rock long ages ago."

"What we thought was a 'lake' sloughed up out of the dry lake bed in which it had made its home, and undulated across the ground for a hundred kilometers before slithering into a seemingly bottomless ravine."

"It looked like a skinned rat, the size of a Titan, with a face that was nothing but a mass of writhing tentacles. It screamed when the particle beams hit it, then gibbered with a thousand voices from the mouths that opened all across its flesh. The sonic pick-ups were able to focus in on the sounds and shortly we realized that the voices were those of the Hive citizens it had already devoured, all begging for mercy or rescue. After that, we shut down the audible sensors and concentrated on blasting it into smoking carbonized lumps."

"We found survivors, huddled on the edge of the dead forest. As we began the evacuation, they looked at us--with pity--and warned, 'The Jungle is hungry. It used us for bait. We are so, so sorry...' That's when the bare branches of what we thought were leafless trees began to squirm and pulsate..."

That's what I'm thinking of trying to do, but truthfully, I'd gobble up any Engine War style game with great relish!

Ah. For that sort of stuff, you may well end up with Divisio Telepathica stuff getting deployed after all. Psy-Titans are...scary ju-ju, but nearly impossible to field; because you need an individual with the correct qualities to become a titan princeps and be a beta-plus level psyker.

But yeah, that idea sounds very cool. As noted, it would be primarily a Mandati mission, with an Investigatus contingent sent at the same time.

Rules-wise...... I guess you've got pretty much complete statlines for a Warhound Titan in Deathwatch, and I believe Bio-Titans have stats in the same game. Black Crusade has the Subjugator Titan and a few other greater daemon engines. Only war has guard super-heavies, but also has the stats for the Volcano Cannon; which means you can start trying to build a Reaver if you were so inclined.

The actual mechanics for using the titan could do with working through.

40k Crusade?

I think a great Idea would be to have a new 40k game but to incorporate all of the previous ones into a new campaign. Lets say a new sector of the galaxy has appeared that was previously non existent.

This would lead the Imperium to send a massive contingent of the Imperial Guard to conquer it (only war). The Inquisition would take notice as there are worlds in this sector that are still loyal to the imperium but they would need to be checked for corruption and what use they could be to the Imperium, not to mention what artifacts or chaos being lurk in this sector (Dark Heresy). The new appearance of watch stations in this sector leads to the death watch's involvement. also there could be a xenos threat weather new or old in this sector lets say hive fleet that was previously unknown also appeared in this sector more than enough reasons for the deathwatch to be involved (Deathwatch).last but not least the rogue traders, a new sector means new worlds to explore, tech to steal and sell, and any number of ways to make an insane amount of money would be here as well. Granted I have never played rogue trader my self but I assume that is the basis of the RPG. For the other side of the coin you have the black crusade lets say a handful of planets in this sector all in the same area are all aligned with chaos or maybe just not loyal. this would create a great base of operations for the black crusade and another reason for the all the previously mentioned good guys to be here.

I think this would be a great way give all the 40k RP something they want, plus updating some of the older rules and interacting with other players making the cross playability easier. If you wanted to include the mechanicum in this that could be done by having a exploratory fleet being the one who discovered it.