I picked up mine in the UK yesterday from my FLGS (Patriot comics in Sheffield) if you are having trouble getting it in the UK they had a few copies…

Oh and its awesome

Striking Scorpions…… Mmmmmm

crisaron said:

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I do have to admit I know completely nothing about the publishing industry, but this is one small observation I have gained from buying newly released RPG material. During a period of time both before and after I moved to the city where I currently reside (around mid-2003), I was faithfully following another RPG that was published by a different company. Company X posted its shipping updates on its website in two-month intervals - i.e. January/February, March/April, etc. I soon came to learn that when product #23-A was announced to be available for shipping in the March/April interval I should be expecting to get it after the May/June interval ended. There always seems to be delays between the announced release date of a new RPG supplement and when it actually gets into your hand, but this could be true of any industry.

My RT core RPG book is quite lacking in resilience. It is not holding up to the small amount of use I have put it through. The pages are ready to fall out of the binding.

I got an e-mail this week from Amazon.com that said the new release for the Koronus Bestiary is now in mid-January 2013.

Kasatka said:

Hmm… not true. At least for 40k rpg books. It seems to alternate between them being release in Europe first (like Koronus Bestiary, which as people have been saying is now available in the UK… I have my copy) and US first (Honour the Chapter, which is announced as released, but is yet to appear in the uk).

The Living Card Games on the other hand, often seem to take about 3 months to get to the UK.

Just got an email from Amazon UK saying it's in the post and on its way to me.

Ausposters, where did you get your copies from?

Also, why are book depository only showing what I presume is Koronus Bestiary as "Xenos Compendium"? www.bookdepository.co.uk/Rogue-Trader-Xenos-Compendium-Fantasy-Flight-Games/9781589948013

My copy arrived yesterday evening. Haven't had a chance to do anything with it yet, but have briefly skimmed through. Lovely book. Stunning art.

My copy was despatched today, ordered it 2 days ago. And glad I did, as the price has gone up £10 since I placed the order…

The Xenos Compendium was the name around the point that the upcoming releases PDF was released, I'm assuming that it's an early development name that the store hasn't bothered/wanted to change (possibly to avoid messing up pre-orders).

How disappointing that IGUK lets me down for the first time ever with an order. Normally they despatch same day if you order before 1pm and I've done this everytime i've used them before. Unfortunately Koronus Bestiary didn't get a same day despatch. I've been after this for ages. What a shame.

Mine has been sent too! Hopefully coming tomorrow….

I too was a lucky person to get it off Amazon.co.uk before the price went up £10. Oh joy and happiness.

Is there a contents page for this anywhere? I'd like to know the full listing of stuff within.

Annoyingly it's not letting my edit my earlier posts.

I've just received my copy through the post from IGUK, whom I can wholly recommend (if you live in the UK, of course, don't know about itnernational shipping). I thought they hadn't dispatched it because their site hadn't updated. So that's another excellent service from them (always next day delivery and always packaged well). Credit where credit is due, i believe.

Postie brought mine today. Funny that it still says "Available Soon" here on the FFG site and yet I have it here in my hands. Annoying for our American cousins no doubt, but rather nice for us that we're the ones to get something first for a change.

It's about what id expect from FFG. Like all their stuff I have no burning issue with what they've included (i don't know of any errors though i'm sure knowing FFG they will soon come to light), but it's more a question of what they didn't include. The first chapter is a fair selection of critters and monsters. The next chapter is races which is what people really want.

You do wonder why they didn't include this stuff in something like Edge of the Abyss. It's a bit haphazard again: that book has a bunch of NPC's wheras this gives more info on, say, the Eldar as a whole. In fact they could easily have fleshed it out some more and given us rules for creating our own Eldar (they are doing something similar with Soul Reaver). Hopefully this Eldar stuff is cross compatible because it would be very useful for everygame; Deathwatch marines can now fight an avatar of Khaine, for instance. I'm guessing the Dark Eldar content was excised for Soul Reaver, which again is a bonkers idea. It could have been included here surely; a write up for he Dark Eldar just the same as the regular Eldar. Again FFG resort to this scattershot approach: there's some DE in the BC rlebook and in OW, and in Soul Reaver (whenever that's released). I wish to god they'd think this all through a bit more.

No HArlequins though, they are in Black Crusade. So it's not a thorough treatment of the Eldar (there's probably a ton more that's missing, even without the Harlequins - I don't recall seeing any Farseer rules).

FFG are a strange company. I really would love for them to explain themselves, but it's not for want ot asking.

signoftheserpent said:

You make it sound like all this material is already written and just sits on a hard drive waiting to be put into books, which, to quote you, is a bonkers idea.

In all cases, content takes space, time and approval - space within the book to accomodate the material, time to produce it, and approval to include it. On countless occasions, I've seen material pulled from a book because there wasn't enough space to include it (the Rogue Trader rulebook had a lot of this, though all the material cut from it has, I believe, been published elsewhere in the product line in some form - the vehicle rules and ship roles are the two main examples of this), and similarly I've had material that I've wanted to include in a book but couldn't because I didn't have the time (or available word-count) to do it, or because it wouldn't go through approvals for whatever reason.

A variety of factors can influence what appears in one book instead of another, not just the whims and fancies of the developers. At times, GW may restrict or demand that something not be discussed, or only be discussed in a particular way, based on whatever the design studio may be working on at the time, or what the IP gods have deemed is appropriate or inappropriate at any given moment.

Edge of the Abyss was deliberately meant to be a setting book, rather than a bestiary. There are actually a lot more NPCs in Edge of the Abyss than I was initially expecting when I started work on that book, given its purpose as a book of ideas, plotlines and adventure hooks. With Soul Reaver, it was going to include Dark Eldar NPCs anyway - afterall, you'd need them in order to actually run the adventure - so their inclusion there shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, and the decision to include a Kabalite Warrior career path (one made very early during development - that sort of thing is the kind of inclusion that needs approval from the start) made it easy to turn a chunk of the book into a sort of Dark Eldar sourcebook (as player characters and NPCs both will use the same sorts of skills, talents, traits and equipment).

My point is, the way FFG do things is not determined purely by the capricious decisions of the faceless overlords within FFG. An assortment of factors, including another set of faceless overlords in Nottingham, influence these things. There is method to the madness, but 99.9% of it goes on behind the curtain, so to speak.

I'm not saying that stuff was already written for the DE to be used in KB. I'm saying the decision not to include them and to use them instead for Soul Reaver is what happened. Now, to my mind that's not smart. That's content that could have been included in this book. If you thenw ant to write an adventure then by all means write and publish one, but SR comes across as trying to be more than an adventure as it's bound to have a lot of Dark Eldar stuff. Again it's this scattershot approach; it means that if i want that DE stuff as well as the stuff already in KB i've got to buy another book.

Now we can speculate that GW has a hand in this, but I've got to say that makes no sense. The only exception is perhaps it's related to them updating their info, new codices and such, but even that's not really the case here. I could accept that it's really GW's 'fault', if there were, for example, no DE stuff at all. Or if the reason we have no playable Eldar rules (yet) is because they won't let us - but then this book has a ton of Eldar content (still not complete, no farseers or vehicles iirc - vehicles, the bane of FFG) so how does that make sense.

Maybe it's a plabn to get us to actually buy the codices and convert it all ourselves!

To be honest I could have happily done with less space 'wasted' on Orks and Space Elves in this book (which for me is just going over old ground that I personally have no interest in), and more of either the "Beasts and Monsters" section, or the sentient species unique to the Expanse: both of which are the parts of the book I like the most.

But I'm not really complaining, I guess many more people would be up in arms if I had got my wish. This book looks like a corker, and I reckon I will be getting quite a bit of use out of it.

Plynkes said:

signoftheserpent said:

Sure, there's that argument. But there's also the converse.

Soul Reaver would have had a whole pile of NPC profiles for Dark Eldar adversaries in it, regardless of any other factors… because it's an adventure featuring them, and you can't just publish an adventure and then tell people to go and buy another book to get the NPC rules they need to run it. So, if there were Dark Eldar included in Koronus Bestiary, then they would either be duplicate material (encouraging many to complain about paying twice for the same material), or they'd be a set of different stats for the same thing (which would cause many to complain about inconsistency). In essence, there is actually no way to go about this that does not cause people to whinge about the way it was done.

signoftheserpent said:

You'd be surprised at some of the stuff GW requires, and how quickly it can change depending on a variety of circumstances. Remember, while I'm speculating about the specifics behind Koronus Bestiary, I do have actual experience with the GW approvals process, given that I've worked on 40kRP books on and off for the last two and a half years. My speculation is informed by experience, so I'd like to think that I've got a better idea (though one that is still incomplete) about what goes on behind the scenes than you do.

I understand the counter arguments. But for me it comes down to this:

1. It's just more books to buy. If I want the DE stuff (and of course I do, which is how it should be - if we all resorted to DIY, there'd be no game at all).

2. Those books come out oh so slowly because, IMO, FFG cannot cope with their workload (and I don't just mean the 40k workload). So who knows when Soul Reaver will release. On top of that I'm waiting on the Lathe Worlds and Tome of Fate (and then the three other Tomes that will surely follow), and I'm keen to see what's in the Navis Primer…nevermind Only War!

3. The book, as they all do, looks fantastic. Again the production values are superb, it's full colour too. But that doesn't preclude the possibility that, again, the rules might be wrong. There might be errors with stats and with balance. It took them 6 months to errata Black Crusade - and there are still issues that i've (and others) have spotted. What are teh chances these will be fixed given that they are pushing OW?

In an ideal world it would all come together brilliantly: i could reference KB for Eldar to use in DW, for instance, and use Battlefleet Koronus stuff for Heretics buidling their own Black Crusade fleet. But at best this requiers a ton of cross referencing and a lot of books to bring to the table (maybe it's easier if you own an ipad, I don't, even if i did i'd be extremely reticient to buy all the stuff I already own on pdf!)

As I've said before I buy these books in spite of FFG, a company a few years ago because of their boardgames I would have rated as my favourite company. But I just don't think they are experienced or skilled enough in rpg mechanics, and I simply do not believe they can cope with what will soon be 5 game lines (nevermind everything else thy put out!). I don't think they are maliciuos or evil or even greedy. I have no problem with the prices, I just think that they need to evaluate what they are doing more. Even with OW and it's sort-of-open playtest, they are still behaving inexplicably. Charging people to buy a beta test is…unheard of! It's not like they'd want for people to playtest, I imagine everyone on this forum would jump at the chance even though it has to be done properly. Overall I'm glad there is a 40k rpg in existence, but I'm sad, given that I love the setting dearly, that what we have has so many mistakes - time and again. Hopefully KB will not be full of mistakes.

You may well have more knowledge of the GW approvals process. I have nevber claimed to be an expert in it anymore than the average customer or player. It's not a process to which we are a party. I can only base my opinion on what makes sense to me, and it just doesn't make sense that a lot of what I see as problems are because of GW. For instance why include skills, in BC (or DH for that matter) for piloting and driving (and why change the name to Operate, seems pointless on reflection, especially when you copy and paste text from other games and import it without changing it) but absolutely NO rules for vehciles. This means I need RT and the supplements (and possibly Rites of BAttle) to use them. Again we have the issue of compatibility and having to carry a ton weight of books in order for all this to be available at the gaming table. I'ma fraid you aren't going to convince me that's down to GW, I'm sorry.

any idea on the pdf release date?

N0-1_H3r3 said:

This is true for all of us, that we really are in the dark about why things are the way they are. So, I would like to ask you to explain to us, to the extent you are allowed what the decision making process is for what gets included in a book and what doesn't. I'm new to Rogue Trader, but have been into Deathwatch for awhile. but for example: why do we have two books that have much overlap and refrence each other frequently like Achillus Assault and Jericho Reach, when we could have three books that each cover a particular salient in as much or more depth, with less cross refrencing and trying to remember which book had which rule or bit of information. Why do some books just kinda feel unfinished when we read them? They can take all the time they need to work on them, as much as people complain about release dates and whatnot, they are pretty vague, and what is it if a book comes out a week or two later? Are we gona burn all the ones we already have and become a hermit? I certainly wouldn't, and I expect i'm not a minority on that. I understand what signoftheserpent means when he says scattershot, sometimes the books seem really unfocused and from what i'm reading from you, they run out of space so save stuff to put in other books? So in a sense, there is info sitting on hard disk drives somewhere waiting for a spot to be dropped into? I'm not trying to be mean or sarcastic, I'm genuinely trying to understand, because this has bothered me for awhile. I still have my Black Industries copy of Dark Heresy, and even later books in the DH line seem more focused and tight to the topic while still being comprehensive, but with Deathwatch and it sounds like Rogue Trader too, is there such a drive to get so much material written and available that they just cram in what they can, then find a hole for the rest to plug into? And how does the GW approvals fit into all of this? Do they often just nix whole ideas? Can you give us an idea of what you mean that we would "be surprised at some of the stuff GW requires"? Also, if you could discuss time and word counts a little, When you're given an assignment, do you have a choice of what you want to do? Then, do they tell you "have 1000 words to us by Wednesday."

That was alot more than I thought it would be. Thanks for whatever you can do to explain why things end up in ways that seem illogical or sometimes counterintuitive.

Trader Austin said:

As the old saying goes: "what he said."

Darth Fanboy said:

I'm guessing it'll come when it comes.

Which is to say '2013' most likely *shoots self*