Rogue Trader: Thinking about the Imperial economy

To lend some kind of coherence to our Rogue Trader tabletop campaign, I've tried to think semi-seriously about how the Imperial economy works. Rogue Trader abstracts money and business with the profit factor mechanic, which I think is excellent, but in the interests of verisimilitude, I also wanted to form some notion of what actually goes on. So here I'm going to talk about what I think are the two principal drivers of the Imperial economy.

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The Imperial economy is overseen by the Adeptus Administratum: the administrative arm of the Priesthood of Earth. The Administratum assigns each world in the Imperium a tithe grade and collects the tithe.

If you want a historical analogy, think about the annona system in the Roman Empire, where vast fleets of ships delivered grain to Rome from all around the Empire. Because of the unimaginably vast size of the Imperium of Man, obviously the tithes can't be gathered on Terra, or even in the segmentum capitals. Because the planets the tithes are collected from can be completely different and have very different tithe grades, the actual tithe can be anything from a fully equipped regiment of mechanized infantry to bulk freighters full of grain or ore, or in less typical cases, probably almost anything you can think of. The only constant is that the tithe is that planet's contribution to the business of the Imperium: war.

Because the Imperium is constantly engaged in a multitude of wars all over the galaxy, I would imagine there has to be some kind of sector- and/or subsector-level system for directing the tithes where they are needed. We can think of this as a series of supply chains that culminates in the production of Imperial Guard regiments. The focus of this production is the hive worlds. Vast urban centers housing billions of people, the hive worlds supply the soldiers and manufacture their equipment. To do this, they need gigantic quantites of ore from mining worlds and constant imports of food from agri-worlds; the recruits can be supplemented by tithes of people from feudal or feral worlds. The regiments then need to be shipped out to whatever warzone they are needed in, and provided with supplies and reinforcements.

This massive process, where the tithes from each planet are turned into fighting forces and delivered to the Imperium's field commanders and garrisons, is what I refer to as the Imperial war economy. It's a massive, galaxy-spanning planned economy run by the bureaucrats of the Administratum, so we can only imagine the gigantic inefficiencies this entails. Many of the supply chains would probably not be in any way economically feasible, but like in the Soviet Union, if no-one is counting, who cares? In addition to the regiments, the war economy also has to support the Imperial fleet, and some tithes no doubt go to the Ministorum, the Adeptus Astartes, and other Imperial agencies - not to mention the Administratum itself! But the majority of the traffic will be from planets engaged in primary production to manufacturing and recruiting centers, and from there to war zones.

I assume that the volume of the war economy is so large that it dwarfs all other shipping, and effectively defines trade routes in the Imperium. Since the tithes have to be delivered, there's an opportunity to use any excess cargo space for other exports. As tithes will usually be one-way, they provide huge opportunities for trade in the other direction: transport costs will be almost zero since the ships have to go back anyway! So the tithes are absolutely crucial in shaping the whole Imperial economy.

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Tithes are only a part of any Imperial planet's economy, of course. It's long been established that as long as a planetary governor delivers their assigned tithes and suppresses witchcraft and heresy, they can pretty much do what they like. So governors and everyone else high enough in the planetary administration are left to enjoy the spoils, and can become very wealthy indeed. On smaller or poorer worlds, this can just mean the governor and his family; a teeming hive world will support entire noble houses.

So all these people have plenty of disposable income. What are they going to spend it on? The luxury economy. Luxury products marketed to a super-rich clientele can easily be valuable enough to ship over interstellar distances, especially if they're in fashion. You could probably do some interesting stuff with how waves of trends propagate across a gigantic interstellar empire, but it probably suffices to imagine that if some obscure luxury product becomes popular in the right circles, they'll have orders pouring in from across the segmentum, if not further.

This is also where mercantile-minded rogue traders operate, in my opinion. Recall that rogue traders are so named because they have an extraordinary license to trade beyond the Imperium, even with the xenos. For what, though? What can a rogue trader trade for that wilĺ be worth the considerable trouble of warp travel outside the Imperium? Possibly some strategic resources, but in most cases, if they're trying to make a profit out of it, surely it must be luxury goods for the Imperial elite. With their warrant, rogue traders can effectively launder xenos luxuries into the Imperial economy. Given how unequal the distribution of wealth in the Imperium is, that's going to be worth quite some money and influence.

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There will also be other shipping routes, especially ones connected to rogue trader operations. We also know from the tabletop books that there are entire dedicated pilgrim vessels: it'll also be worthwhile to map any pilgrimage routes! In addition, there may be some substances valuable enough to transport over interstellar distances that aren't strictly part of either the war or luxury economy: building or industrial materials of exceptional quality, maybe, or some kind of consumer products that aren't exclusive enough to be restricted to the nobility, but still very valuable; I don't know! It's a big galaxy.

Anyway these were some thoughts I had bouncing around in my head on how the Imperial economy works, and how rogue traders fit into that, which I wanted to set down on virtual paper.