The practical upshot of this is that a book like Rogue Trader becomes a paradoxical minefield. You're playing space fascists, but you're encouraged to be awesome instead of ridiculous, and when you catch that happening, it's always a little. The text forgets that the Imperium is supposed to be a joke and revels in its aesthetics and its military might.
When it's most like this, Warhammer 40k is actually pretty good, but sometimes it seems to get a little.
A lot of the time, it is self-aware and satirical and you get a proper sense that the Imperium is transcendentally awful - it is as corrupt, as unjust, as inefficient, as ignorant, and as self-defeating as a society is possible to be, its power and its grandeur existing only to expand the scope of its failings into the ludicrous. It's like the Golden Age of White People, filtered through the most fevered imaginings of the "European Identity" assholes. The Imperium of Man takes a base of Rome and Byzantium, adds a whole lot of Imperial Brittan, and just a little bit of Nazi Germany and the worst parts of America, and then seasons with a very superficial parody of Catholicism that is so extreme even Bill Donohue couldn't object. Armor is positively medieval, as interpreted by careless Victorian scholars and with a needlessly inflated scale that reeks of machismo. Architecture is over-the-top Gothic, even on things that have no business having buttresses and gargoyles (like spaceships). Space travel evokes the age of sail, not just in the thoughtlessly mechanical way that most space sci-fi seems to do, but also in its fashions and its military organization and its mercantile politics. Basically, it's a mish-mash of influences. Where it gets a little uncomfortable for me is that WH40K's style of presentation is terribly inconsistent. I like it because it's a grandiose sort of villainy where you're a larger-than-life figure, thoroughly enshrined in the trappings of obscene wealth and aristocratic privilege, and your goal is to keep getting away with it.Īnd all of that is possible because of the Warhammer 40k background. The Imperium of Man is a bureaucratic nightmare and a feudalistic nightmare and a capitalist nightmare, and at the intersection of those three tendencies lie the Rogue Traders, a group of peripatetic merchant/soldiers (ie "pirates") who troll the fringes of the empire in search of uncontacted worlds they can ruthlessly exploit for profit. This isn't a criticism so much as it is me being weird and impossible to please, because I love Rogue Trader and it's undeniable that a significant part of that is due to setting elements it inherited from the 40k universe.
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