The story of a less-than-humble Rogue Trader in the London-based Voidbound 2025 crusade

• Prologue: Rogue Trader Emberlyn Driftwood
• Chapter one: It’s not heresy
• Chapter two: The Inquisitor
• Chapter three: Authority
• Chapter four: Performance issues
• Chapter five: Abominable Intelligence
• Chapter six: Stolen goods
• Chapter seven: Exotic asset
• Chapter eight: The ballad of Greg
• Chapter nine: The Greater Good?
• Chapter ten: Emberlyn versus Gold
• Chapter eleven – Officio Assassinorum Officially Assassinating Officials
• Chapter twelve: Stella and the Grey Knights
• Chapter thirteen: Superior lifeforms
• Chapter fourteen: Sting like a Rogue Trader
• Chapter fifteen: Voidbound vacation
• Chapter sixteen: Diagnosed with Deathwatch
• Chapter seventeen: Three assassins walk into a bar
• Chapter eighteen: Battle on Treasure Planet
• Chapter nineteen: Checkmate, Greg
• Chapter twenty: I kissed a demon and I liked it
• Chapter twenty one: Pillars of Creation
• Chapter twenty two: Atlantis
• Chapter twenty three: Secret Dinner Party
• Chapter twenty four: Paragons of the Inquisition
• Chapter twenty five: The Disappearance of Emberlyn Driftwood
• Epilogue: Inquisitor Stella

Commentary

I knew what I was getting into when I chose Imperial Agents (IA). It’s not a secret that they are not a good army. They don’t even have an army rule. The one way to actually win with IA is spamming horde six identical Subjector Squads and weathering the storm. Absolutely not, this is Crusade.

Lore

Since I absolutely adore Rogue Traders (I’ve played as a Rogue Trader in the old tabletop RPG, a Rogue Trader in Wrath and Glory tabletop and of course, a Rogue Trader in the titular video game), I selected a suitable model (Lady Credo from Necromunda) to represent my Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader and the stories came flowing. The dynamic between the Rogue Trader and Inquisitor (Jean of Arc mobility from Infinity) was especially fun to write about.

During the Crusade, I lost battle after battle, which is always difficult to write for, so I mostly wrote lore for the Rogue Trader’s adventures inbetween games, rather than doing battle report narrative. 

Regardless, I had a wonderful time crafting some fun stories with other players. 

Crusade rules

The Crusade rules for IA looked really fun at first, but after completing my fourth Shadow Operation, they got very stale. Ultimately, the soup army I ended up with struggled a lot in games due to the way IA units and detachments were written – I feel they didn’t playtest anything as 80% of the battle traits were straight up rubbish. 

However, there’s a lot for characters in IA (a relic that reduces all incoming damage to one? A 4+ FNP battle trait?! – the Rogue Trader became especially difficult to remove from the board and the Inquisitor became extremely lethal), so it became very top-heavy and character reliant. Just the Rogue Trader and Inquisitor alone were worth 23 Crusade points. If I were to gamify it, I would have just spammed more Inquisitors, but being true to the narrative, I diversified to the detriment of army battle effectiveness. If not in crusade, when? Crusade is perfect for this. At the end of the day, Rogue Traders are just normal humans – I can’t really expect them and their crew to survive against an army of Space Marines on any day of the week.

I also really enjoyed playing with the assassins. Although they are completely ignored in the crusade rules of the IA book, they’re very fun to play with. As soon as they appear, they can take an enemy character off the board, but then tend to die immediately. This is completely fair, but for 565 points of my army (over ¼ of a 2k army for 4 models), it meant I lost a lot of firepower very quickly. In most games, I was pretty much tabled by turn 3 – IA tend to run out of steam mid-game, when you’re trying to compete with any other armies. In the majority of games, I was usually left with the nigh-unkillable Rogue Trader and the Inquisitor.

Overall

Imperial agents weren’t an army I ever intended to build. I was given the 1st Edition Kill Team Rogue Trader expansion a few years back, which is another reason I decided to have a Rogue Trader unit as my Void Captain. Even after the new IA rules came out and the universal consensus was to steer clear of it, I’m a narrative player at heart: I had to do it. I also had to play the Veiled Blade assassin detachment once the crusade master let me bring assassins in Phase 2.

Most of my gripes about the Crusade format is that it’s simply too lethal to make good stories out of – how do you write an interesting story about a group of voidsmen who die on turn 2 of every game? That and the Agendas, which are rarely ever interesting –  and those that are, such as the ‘sneak here and survive until the end of the game’ agendas always lose out to simple ones like ‘kill a unit.’ At times, it became a bit too competitive 40k, and not enough ‘truce to let our characters meet in the middle for mortal combat and the narrative.’

All in all, I had fun with this crusade, but that was entirely down to the other players. I had an overall win-rate of 26% (4W-15L). 

TL;DR

• Do I have many suggestions to make IA crusade rules more fun? Yes.
• Would I recommend playing IA in a crusade? Depends on why you play crusade.
• Did I come away with some great stories? Yeah.
• Would I play IA in a crusade again? You betcha.