When is this out exactly?

It'll be out when you see it in your friendly local game store.

Seriously though, the estimated arrival was "2012Q1", which obviously isn't happening. The status shows as on the boat, so I'm betting it'll be another 2-4 weeks before I can drop some cash on it.

Cheers,

- V.

I hope it won't be out for some time yet because I've got no money for it.

My guess is it'll be part of the Q2 "batch" (so to speak), which appears to be Koronus Bestiary, Tome of Fate and Tempest Rising.

BYE

Gurkhal said:

Hey, the sooner it comes out, the sooner you can start looking for Used copies Luckily I just paid off some credit cards, so I''ll be snapping it up as soon as I see it…

Adeptus-B said:

That''s true.

I saw May 8th listed on one site for the release date.

That product has been on the boat for a long time! What happened, did they get highjacked by Somali pirates?

I saw April 25th as a release date…so much for that

Guess the pirates took it them then.

**** Chaos Reavers, I hope it would be released and in stock on Book Depository as soon as possible.

Gurkhal said:

Would have been very amusing if that had happened to "Hostile Acquisitions".

Cheers,

- V.

ReaperRob said:

Yeah, after taking a second look. Amazon has May 8th as the publish date

And the date has been changed again. I can except the change from April 25th to May 8th, thats only two weeks. But to change it from May 8th to July 10th??? Heck no

Welcome to FFG. Q2 means as far into Q3 as they can push it.

Mine arrived today, its a top little book with a fair few things I liked seeing expanded on like the Yu'vath and the eldar additions more or less completes the species. Critter creator at the back is pretty good, very happy to see that they've also included a flora creator as well that I think is important when you're detailing worlds.

edit- what the fu… I got a book before anyone else? Weird, mine usually arrive 2 months after everyone else has theirs

MKX said:

So what you basically is saying is that its out in the stores, is that correct?

MKX said:

You'd be a very lucky player if you see a Striking Scorpion coming, combined with already very high Agility, Unnatural x2 and +20 in the skills and Shadowing… Aspect warriors overall are extremely dangerous with the potential to relieve PC's of a fair few extra fate points they might have. Sort of wish I'd had them back when I was running Deathwatch, would have been good for killing off lots of annoying player marines.

Kommando's, not as sneaky but they've got all the skills at about +10, +20 in some with the added bonus its attached to something explosively violent.

MKX said:

Sweet, can you give a summery of whats in the book, table of contents for examble?

Acernis Taine said:

That would be very nice. I agree with this.

Gurkhal said:

Agreed, would be nice. Most looking forward to the creator thing, but it looks like a great book.

Also, did you order your book from Barnes & Noble? According to their site, the release date is still May 8th while Amazon says July 10th so just trying to figure this out

Just a mail order store in Australia I've been using since about 2000 or so, needless to say I was suprised as everything usually takes weeks longer to arrive here.

First section is the Beasts & Monsters , you get 13 assorted critters that come from some of of the Koronus regions, mostly death worlds and other un-fun places to be without a profitable reason to be there. They range from thirsty zombie-psykers all the way up to space Kraken which would give most frieghters and raiders a very bad day. Lot of those I'd put into the Rank 3 to about Rank 6, chewing on players catergory.

Written up as about a pages worth of first person backstory, picture, formal description and then a couple of paragraphs of crunch on how it will wreck players.

Also in there are a couple of besties from the Dark Eldar Codex which I always thought where actually more interesting than the DE themselves- Medusae, Razorwing and Ur-Ghul. On Page 93 later on, there's also the Sslyth, which brings us to…

Second section comprises a large part of the book, Aliens of the Expanse , is more of a formal write-up with quite a lot of information on Eldar, Orks, Rak'Gol, Sslyth, Stryxis and Yu'Vath. Before you groan 'oh no, more elves and orks', this is actually fairly worthy as theres also some adventure ideas involving them after each description.

The expansions on the Eldar as I mentioned earlier are some well detailed examples of your a-typical Eldar codex Aspect Warriors, all their gear and suprisingly- Shadow Spectres from the Forge world stuff with their prism rifles. If PC's are romping through those (unlikely), drag out the Autarch, it should kill most of them… Wraithguard and oh joy, a Wraithlord! I guess the final word on arse-beatings is the Avatar of Khaine, he's about as terrible as you'd expect, but maybe not considering RT characters can probably rustle up some Leman Russ tanks (note- plural: tanks ) or orbital lance strikes.

Orks, fairly meaty write up on what, where and why they do the things they do. Then there's some more of everyone's favourite orky gear, including the "F**K YEAH!" Shokk Attack Gun, which is a personal tabletop favourite of mine for years! As for the Orks themselves, you get a Nob, Kaptain, Kommando, Mad Dok, Mek Boy, Speed Freak, Ork Boy and Runtherder. Plus it was nice to see the Gretchin, 4 varieties of squigs and Snotling rules, because who doesn't love a Snotling infestation.

The Rak'Gol, are still the marauding removers of hit points they always where, individually bad and then they give them a few more guns, sharp objects (Rad-Axe = ow!) and a couple of bigger varieties- Abominations and Renders. PC's should run when they turn up in numbers, if not, remove fate points.

Sslyth get two pages and their stats, I kind of liked them because there a 'real xeno' which isn't just just another human analogue of two legs, two arms with some star-trek bumps on their head and a different colour skin. Nope, he's the big, decadent snake man with four arms and enough capability to whup the crap out of PC's, unless of course you can figure out a way of buying his services

Styrixis, **** I just love the little space rats, I always pictured them as a mix of Jawa's and Skaven, which they essentially are. They've got a fairly decent expansion on the Light-weapons (las-gun sort of things) and Aether weapons which some of you might remember from Dark Heresy, along with some stuff Players will trade their fellow players for, like the Personal Phase Reality Shifter. As far as flavours go, there are Nomads, Masters and Vat slaves- which have a fairly decent description so if you ever did want a whole heap of cheap Ratings in a hurry, Shop Styrixis-Mart.

Well, its been a while but thankyou for finally detailing something on the Yu'Vath. The big bad which was always endemic to the Calixis and Koronus region we basically knew nothing about except they're extinct, PC's will happily know, they're still extinct so you don't get stats. Unhappily, their technology still lives on as descriptions (but not actually stats, lol go the GM's fiat to do what they want…) and some of their creations- Bone Conquerers, Crystal Wisps, Fossil Horrors and Sandslime… all of which are worthy of orbital bombardment levels of engagement.

Third section is the Denizens of the Warp , which considering how long and often Rogue Trader's spend floating around in the warp, isn't much of a write up and quite a small part that I was expecting a bit more on. Beast of Nurgle, Flesh Hound, Fury and a Screamer, not much there thats likely to suprise you if you're a long time 40K player. The only bespoke bit of new writing to the forces of chaos is the 'Veiled Deceit' which is sort of more a 'Geller Field' fluctuation that lets in a warp entity who runs around breaking your ship by using its not inconsiderable psychic strength to really telepathically ruin some players and NPCs.

Overall, I probably would have liked this section maybe as an expansion on the perils of warp travel as our basic MRB rules for encounters are getting kind of tired and I felt that this was shoe-horned in. But I guess for anything else I do own a copies of the DH books like Radicals, Blood of Martyrs etc which have daemonic critters in them to draw on.

Last section, Xenos Generator : which is very much welcome as I've been using the now very dog-eared one that came with the DH GM's screen from many… many years ago. However, this does come with the Flora generator which is one of those things as a GM you like to have simply because you can't have continually have re-runs of Dune deserts and Dr Who scenes in an abandoned slate quarry. Probably best used pre-game to create some random plants and animals for your jungle, ocean, death world and other exotic 'why the f**k are we here and is this making us money yet' locales that players run around in. Now, even the vegetation is trying to kill them and it'll soon show the lack of 'Survival' skill that most characters dont have somewhere in their career, mmm poison berries are the tastiest

The Xenos species generator basically splits it up into what type of critter do you want- Avians, Herd, Predator, Scavenger, Vermin and then you apply the world type of- Death, Desert, Ice, Jungle, Temperate, Volcanic and Ocean to figure out where they are with the option to make them Exotic. Failing that, there's the quick and dirty examples to draw on the fly if you have to while you fumble around in your brain for a name of the beast. Like I mentioned, probably one of those things you want to pre-plan before turning up to the table with.

Moving on is the Primitive Xenos generator which goes on to cover things like, how they communicate, their society structure and physiology etc, so you can flesh out the background of your little species in considerable detail, before your players arbitrarily wipe them out from orbit or make them extinct by selling them las guns and blankets full of influenza.

Overall

Pro- Any book that's got some build your own critters is indispensible to GM's, I might finally be able to ditch my old WEG Star Wars and Traveller creation systems. Its also one of the better written FFG books of late with a lot of new artwork of mid to high quality so you can show players just what is wrecking them.

Con- Would have liked to have seen a 'planet creator' where you can make your newly discovered worlds temperature, rainfall, day length, atmosphere, orbit etc. Because there's a lot out there and PC's shouldnt feel the need to just point at the Koronus map to something pre-known, Rogue Trader should be about exploration after all. The book at 145pp is also a bit slim, could have easily filled another 20 pages on Denizens of the Warp section with some new entities to make it size-up to the rest of the sections.

MKX said:

Oh sweet. From Oz too, can you point me in their direction? Thanks.

MKX said:

Was gonna use Stryrixis alot. This is must have.

Thanks for the write up!

Bewdy.

Shame about the Malleus section, but honestly with honourable exception of Creatures Anathema, DotDG and Martk of Xenos it´s always the least original adversaries section. Rest seems definitely interesting.

May I ask where did you get it so soon?