Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader lets you make truly terrible RPG choices

polygon.com:

Rogue Trader puts the player in a position of elevated power in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, somewhere in between a governor, a ship captain, and a noble. The game continually asks you to make choices about what kind of Rogue Trader you want to be, and some of the options on display are utterly reprehensible. This is actually fantastic, because I’m a huge fan of RPGs that let you be a bad guy. Rogue Trader even goes one step further than most other games in the genre; you can be not just a bog standard bad guy, but an unspeakably petty tyrant that makes scenery-chewing villains like Cruella DeVille look downright reasonable and level-headed.

The 40K setting is defined by a certain baseline cruelty that isn’t there in other sci-fi galaxies; this is a place where instead of computers, people delegate work to lobotomized criminals called servitors. The state executes citizens for crimes like “enjoying history books” and “having weird mouths.” But a Rogue Trader has the ability to set the rules for everyone around them; their sacred Writ is signed by the God-Emperor himself. If you choose, your Rogue Trader can be a benevolent and kind person who shelters those under their command.

Or, if you prefer, you can go hard on being the absolute worst boss in the Koronus Expanse. At one point, my trusty right hand steward, the Seneschal Abelard approached me and told me that there were a bunch of orphans onboard thanks to the events of the tutorial. The Seneschal said that a word from the prestigious Rogue Trader would mean the world to those orphans.

To my shock, one of the options I could choose was to decline, and explain that I didn’t see the purpose in speaking to those orphans; it would teach them that they deserved attenti