This morning I thought I might blog a tribute to the late, lamented Gary Gygax. Then when I heard Nick Clegg on the Today Programme, I thought I should write about that.

Now, thanks to the magic of Comment is Free, I have combined the two for your perusal.

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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.”).

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Roleplayer blurs fantasy with reality? Clearly Rona Jaffe was right.

Ban this filth now, or face losing your knickers.

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