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........

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