Like in almost any CRPG, Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader has a social-based Fellowship stat that increases your dialogue interaction skills like Persuasion, Commerce, and Coercion. That said, it can also increase your combat effectiveness for certain Archetypes. But there’s more to it than that. Let’s dive in.
What Does the Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader Fellowship Stat Do?
Essentially, the Fellowship stat in Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader has two uses. One’s during dialogue scenes with NPCs and the other is in combat for specific Archetypes and Talents. For a more detailed explanation, you can use Fellowship for:
- Social Interaction: Increasing Fellowship boosts Persuasion, Commerce, and Coercion. These social skills can convince an NPC you’re friendly, make them act in a certain way, or score you better deals. As an example, an early errand called Dark Echelons presents a worker’s strike and you can use Coercion to negotiate a deal with them and avoid a combat situation.
- Combat Abilities: Base Archetypes like the Officer and Advanced ones like the Grand Strategist use Fellowship for their abilities. For example, the Officer’s core ability Voice of Command increases all ally characteristics equal to five plus double the Officer’s Fellowship bonus.
- Talents: Even certain talents scale with Fellowship like the Hive World Homeworld’s talent Comradery which allows you to use Fellowship instead of Willpower for resistance tests if the former is higher.
As you can see, Fellowship can be useful both for dialogue and combat scenarios depending on your Archetype.
Should You Raise Fellowship in WH40K: Rogue Trader?
I would strongly suggest you increase it as much as possible on Officers and similar Archetypes, since their combat abilities scale with it directly. Furthermore, if you want to excel in dialogue scenes, occasionally solve social problems without combat, and score better deals for your party, then you might also think about raising it.
That said, I wouldn’t generally recommend raising Fellowship if it doesn’t directly benefit your character’s class abilities as it does for Officers. If you need the “face” of the party who’ll cover social encounters you’ll get an Officer companion in the form of Cassia pretty early on who has a high Fellowship stat.
This is a great example that you shouldn’t spread your characteristics and skills too thin but should instead focus on a specific one or two for your main character while allowing your party to fill in the gaps. I’ve found that specialization in one stat works best since only a single character with the highest relevant stat is used in a skill check.
At the end of the day, if building a non-Officer character with high Fellowship sounds fun, go right ahead. Just know that they won’t benefit from it in combat and your other main Archetype characteristics might suffer. That concludes my Fellowship stat guide for Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader. For more RT guides, check out our top 10 weapons in the game or my Arch-Militant and Bounty Hunter builds.
