The Rogue Traders

The Rogue Traders are the privateer explorers of the Imperium, individuals granted an ancient and priceless document known as the Warrant of Trade that permits them to operate beyond the borders of settled human space. Where the ordinary subject may not so much as leave their birth-world without sanction, the Rogue Trader is licensed to sail into the unknown, to treat with aliens, to claim new worlds, and to make war or peace in the Emperor's name, answerable to almost no one so long as the terms of their warrant are honoured.

Such freedom is unheard of elsewhere in the Imperium, and it makes the Rogue Traders figures of immense wealth and stranger loyalties. Each commands a private fleet, a household army, and a court of retainers, ranging the fringes of the galaxy in search of lost colonies, forgotten technologies, and profit beyond imagining. Some are little more than sanctioned pirates; others are explorers and empire-builders whose discoveries add whole systems to the domain of Mankind.

The Warrant of Trade itself is the true source of their power, a charter often granted in the earliest millennia of the Imperium and handed down through a dynasty across ten thousand years. These documents bear the authority of the High Lords of Terra or offices of comparable majesty, and the privileges they confer are frequently so old and so sweeping that no living authority can revoke them.

Operating in the lawless dark, Rogue Traders inevitably brush against the Imperium's other far-flung servants, and more than one has drawn the suspicious eye of the Imperial Agents of the Inquisition. Half-merchant and half-conquistador, their nature and their charter are explored further in the glossary account of the Rogue Trader, Mankind's boldest and most avaricious hands upon the frontier.