History VideoGame / Warhammer40000RogueTrader

* AmbiguousSituation: In Abelard's first character quest, a lower deck is on lock down due to the finding of a chaos artifact. His harsh response ended up causing a strike, as various clans try to make their voices heard, stating they have no idea where the person who had the artifact got it from. While many of the clans are fine with Abelard's actions being reversed and the enforcers lightening up, an old woman clan leader also wants the enforcers gone and their deck armed so they can police themselves and weed out heretics. Abelard is also attacked and named upon visiting the deck for negotiations. If you ask about this to the strikers, they claim they know nothing. [[spoiler:A hidden awareness check reveals that they do indeed know nothing, but there's also a box of grenades hidden in a pipe you can only access after meeting with the strikers. This suggests that there is a heretical presence somewhere on the deck, but the strikers were genuinely unaware of it, and that presence did that attack and name Abelard in particular to try and make the situation go violent]]. The ambiguous part is that [[spoiler:the awareness check makes note of strikers in the background, not the negotiators talking with you. The old woman being the only one calling for the removal of the enforcers and arming the deck could be a legitimate want, or she could be apart of the heretical activity here. It's never made clear. She's also the only one not excited by you choosing the coercion option to negotiation terms without removing the enforcers or supplying guns.]]

** The end of Act 1 involves the [[spoiler:Drukhari somehow removing a planets star as the planet falls to Chaos]]. Heinrix, the token Inquisitor, immediately urges the Rogue Trader to [[spoiler:[[EarthShatteringKaboom use Exterminatus]] on it to stop it from becoming a Daemon World and condemning an untold amount of lives to a FateWorseThanDeath]]. An iconoclast Rogue Trader can try to save as many people as possible, but this leaves [[spoiler:the planet to potentially suffer horribly compared to Heinrix's more MercyKill suggestion]], which he will [[OnceDoneNeverForgotten never pass a chance to point out]].
** In the ''Underworld'' quest, one of the big questions is "Who is Fidelio?", the person set to inherit Denz' fortune. You can only figure it out if you don't pretend to be Fidelio. [[spoiler:She's the wife of the captain of a ship called "Repentance" whom Denz brutally murdered in his pirate days. She tried to assassinate him in revenger and almost succeeded, but he sent mercenaries to capture her and had her turned into a Servitor, destroying the parts of her mind that gave her free will and self-awareness, but keeping intact the parts that stored memories, so she'd be aware of what happened to her and her husband even as she was forced to serve the man who murdered her husband and did this to her. Occasionally her memory would return and she'd write "REPENTANCE" around the house. As he grew older Denz got remorseful about his past deeds and facing the Emperor's judgement in his final days (Not helped by Fidelio writing on the walls to remind him), so left his inheritance to her. The player can give Fidelio a MercyKill or ask Denz's chaplain to take care of her for the rest of her life.]]

* FailedASpotCheck: Make sure you have a party member with good awareness to get all the goodies in a level, you you may just not notice them.

* BadPowersBadPeople: The bread and butter of Chaos. The power of Chaos from the warp outright corrupts people into being bad.

* BeingEvilSucks: While there's plenty of pain on the way of a good path (see below), there's also some moments that show evil isn't all it's cracked up to be. The Imperials often subject themselves to horrible treatment due to their self-destructive dogma, or just general ineptitude caused by bureaucracy and backwards thinking. The guy piloting your ship hasn't slept *in thirty years* due to someone messing up some implants. As for the forces of Chaos, a lot of cultists usually end up being human sacrifices, or cannon fodder for imperial agents to shoot through.

* {{Cult}}: The Final Dawn is a Chaos cult established by a local [[SinisterMinister World Bearers]] warband who are trying to take control of the expanse by subverting the Von Valancius dynasty. They serve as the main overarching antagonists of the game and the source of most of the Chaos threats you face.

* FantasticRacism: Standard Imperial policy towards alien races and non-sanctioned mutants is normally [[AbsoluteXenophobe "shoot or burn them on sight for the glory of mankind"]], but as a Rogue Trader bearing a Warrant of Trade, your duties include contacting alien species for trade opportunities. You may even recruit an Asuryani Ranger and even a Drukhari teammate into your retinue. That's not to say that the racism only comes from the human side though - Yrliet [[AbhorrentAdmirer sees a female human crewmate hitting on her as deeply offensive and repulsive]], like a human being lusted after by an animal. [[spoiler:So for those who want to romance Yrliet, it ''is'' possible, but this is your clue that you have to be more subtle going about it than expressing open attraction.]]
* FateWorseThanDeath: In the ''Underworld'' quest, one of the big questions is "Who is Fidelio?", the person set to inherit Denz' fortune. You can only figure it out if you don't pretend to be Fidelio. [[spoiler:She's the wife of the captain of a ship called "Repentance" whom Denz brutally murdered in his pirate days. She tried to assassinate him in revenger and almost succeeded, but he sent mercenaries to capture her and had her turned into a Servitor, destroying the parts of her mind that gave her free will and self-awareness, but keeping intact the parts that stored memories, so she'd be aware of what happened to her and her husband even as she was forced to serve the man who murdered her husband and did this to her. Occasionally her memory would return and she'd write "REPENTANCE" around the house. As he grew older Denz got remorseful about his past deeds and facing the Emperor's judgement in his final days (Not helped by Fidelio writing on the walls to remind him), so left his inheritance to her. The player can give Fidelio a MercyKill or ask Denz's chaplain to take care of her for the rest of her life.]]

* EarthShatteringKaboom: The ''Dogmatic'' choice at the end of Chapter 1 [[spoiler:features you doing this, better known to 40k fans as ''Exterminatus''. A planet has had its star removed, and is falling to the forces of a Chaos cult. Your resident member of the Inquisition insists you fire upon the ancient archaeotech fusion reactor on the planet's surface; destroying it will cause an explosion that wipes out the planet's life, killing everyone on it but preventing it from falling to Chaos and turning into a Daemon World.]]

* GuideDangIt: The game has "Rumors", which are basically small quests to encourage the player to explore but who don't have full quest logs. A lot of the rumors fall into this, as their aforementioned rumors often have precious little detail to tell the player what they are expected to do. To make it worse, several of them are bugged, or just do not update or remove the rumor from your log when completed, creating further confusion about if they were done or not if there's still steps or developments pending.