Okay, I admit it, I’m a geek. Last night, I received a book from Amazon which I was first promised back in 1983.

Somewhere in my boxes at my parents’ house is a battered old copy of the very first Citadel Compendium. According to this, one of the products which Citadel Miniatures/Games Workshop was planning to produce was a science fiction roleplaying game called Rogue Trader.

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader eventually came out in 1987, but it was a skirmish battle game not a roleplaying game. That quickly mutated into the full on war game that has impoverished spotty oiks ever since. The Rogue Traders (basically space pirates, only of the Francis Drake rather than Long John Silver variety) themselves were relegated to a few paragraphs of exposition.

What came through the post was the core rulebook for Dark Heresy. This is, basically, Paranoia for leather fetishists. The Rogue Traders themselves are mentioned but don’t even have so much of a subheading to call their own. But at least its closer to what I thought was going to be coming out in 1983.

It is slightly ironic that the aforementioned book came out a week after the world’s biggest Rogue Trader sent the stockmarket into a nosedive. Meanwhile, the announcement that the game, and indeed all other roleplaying games published by Games Workshops’ Black Industries imprint is to be immediately scrapped merely ranks as “bloody typical”. It’s deja vu all over again!

Oh, and also vaguely related, the 2000AD section in my local Borders lists Rogue Trooper as “Rouge Trader”, which is wrong on so many thousands of levels I don’t know where to start (”dispensing blusher and filofax, Rogue.” “Thanks, Handbagman.”).

Looking for information regarding the likelihood of United States Cavalry ever being published (or written for that matter), I came across this extensive article written by Stephen Baxter about the history of GW Books/The Black Library via the Official Kim Newman Website. The article in question appears to be slightly out of date, for example it only refers to the republishing of Newman/Yeovil’s Demon Download cycle as a possibility, not a fact, and it doesn’t refer to the Black Library’s expanding out to licensed work such as their 2000AD line at all.

Nonetheless, the article contains lots of little gems. As a spotty youth at the time that many of the events discussed in the article were going on, it is comforting to have confirmed that the transparent and short term greed of Games Workshop at the time was just as disliked by the “talent” as it was by the fans. Bryan Ansell in particular appears to have been a colourful character. A hate figure of my generation, yet it was only when he left the company that GW became the wholly commercialised monster it is now.

It also offers us a tantalising glimpse of GW Books that may have been, with Terry Pratchett ghost writing the finest hackwork money can buy: “I feel a bit like King Herod being invited to write the newsletter for the Bethlehem Playground Association.”

Oh, and it got me peeking at John Blanche’s website. I was obsessed by Blanche when I was doing my Art GCSE and looking back at his work now I can at least still appreciate his mad genius.