For those of you who were unable to play in the last session, here is a rundown of what has occurred so far:
The Acolytes were all made to wait in a large room at the Inquisitorial HQ to meet the Inquisitor they would be working for. He made them wait for several hours, during which time most of the acolytes positioned themselves about the room in a paranoid fashion as if they fear that a band of minotaurs might burst in and attack them at any time. One of them might have peed in a corner, but that has not been confirmed.
The inquisitor arrived flanked by creepy hunched figures wearing hoods that obscured their faces, and briskly walked past the acolytes barely pausing long enough to give them his name (Sebastian Marque) and their assignment on a data slate. The Cleric acolyte tried to be polite and offer a hand shake but the Inquisitor just brushed past and left.
The Acolytes glanced at the data slate which stated their assignment was to investigate possible warp activity at the sight of a newly built cathedral in the settlement of Stern's Hope on Iocanthos with one of the Inquistor's own cadre members, a psyker named Aristachus.
The Acolytes boarded the star ship Brazen Sky and headed for Iocanthos. Immediately the cleric decided to start singing some hymns to the Emperor, but sadly sounded more like a grox with it's hoof stuck in the mud. During the flight they met a pale greasy fellow who offered his assistance in making their trip more pleasant, and the Scum immediately tried to find a way to rob him. Another acolyte tried to assist by distracting the fellow, but stuttered and stammered so much that it just made him nervous and so he left.
When it was time to make planetfall on Iocanthos the acolytes were offered sedatives to make the drop less distressing. The Scum immediately snatched one, but saved it for later. The Techpriest took one as well, but like the Scum hid it in his robes. The only other acolyte to take the offered pill was the Cleric who just slipped it to the Scum, who seemed like he just really liked drugs I guess.
Everyone accept the Arbites violently vomited on themselves and each other during the drop to the surface. The Techpriest actually ended up passed out and had to be carried out of the dropship after landing and given an IV of saline solution.
The acolytes quickly aggravated the local bureaucrat who greeted them, but were met by a servitor requesting that they follow it to Aristachus. During the journey through the crowded streets they were confronted by a naked disheveled man who was spouting some nonsense about a king of crows and pity the poor fools. The Guardsman tried to step in front of the crazy man as he started to leave which bothered some local blue faced youths who jumped the party and tried to punch them in their faces. The party responded by hitting the youths with axes, and staffs mostly. The Scum shot one, and the Psyker wracked one with pain from using her mind. Several of the youths were badly wounded but no one died and the local police showed up and dragged the youths off. The police would have dragged the scum off for shooting guns off in the street but the Arbites convinced them that it had been the youths that had fired the shot.
The Acolytes eventually met up with Aristachus who was polite and kind to them and told them they would need to head out on a two day journey through the desert to the Cathedral location and would leave in the morning. The Techpriest was able to perform the sacred rites of the machine spirit and get Aristachus's truck started and the party headed out into the desert.
Then my dog got sick and we had to call it early. We'll pick up again next week heading into the desert.
Saturday, June 22, 2013
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Basic rules for Dark Heresy for those who can't be bothered to read the book
I haven't run a ton of RPGs, but all the ones I have run had the advantage of gathering the players in one central physical location. That allowed for at least a quick verbal run down of the rules before the game started so everyone had an idea of how to play. Since we won't have that luxury I thought I'd write up just a quick set of the basics. I still recommend reading the character building section of the book so you can pick an archetype that appeals to you, but don't worry too much about game mechanics. If all goes according to plan you should just be able to describe what you want to do and I'll tell you what you need to roll in order to succeed.
For Dark Heresy you only need two 10 sided dice per person for the whole game. If are unfamiliar with oddly shaped dice but have a typical D&D dice set there should be 2 10 sided dice in it, one numbered 1-0 and one that goes up by tens, 10, 20, 30 etc. So if you were to roll a 20 and a 5 you would have a total of 25, 70 and 2 would be 72, and so on and so on. If you don't have a die that goes up by 10's just pick one die to be the 10s place and one for the 1s place (it helps if they are different colors).
Every test in Dark Heresy will be made like this, and the goal is to roll low. So if you are trying to lift something heavy over your head and you have a strength of 40, you would need to roll 40 or lower in order to succeed. They more difficult the task you are trying to accomplish the more difficult the test will be. Something heavy like a refrigerator would something like a -30 modifier where an oreo cookie would have a +30, so to lift the fridge you would have to roll under 10 and to lift the cookie you would have to roll under 70.
Of course those are silly examples and lifting a cookie would not really require a test, but you get the idea.
Degrees of Success/failure
Another important concept is degrees of success and failure when testing. for every 10 points you exceed your goal you get an extra degree of success. When shooting rapid fire weapons you get an extra hit for every degree of success, when interrogating a subject the more degrees of success you get the more information he will divulge. So if you were firing a rapid fire (+20) lasgun at a target at point blank range (+30) and you have a ballistics skill of 36 and rolled a 56 you would succeed with 3 degrees of success hitting your target a total of 4 times.
Hit locations and armor values
For determining damage things get... a little weird. first you flip the number you rolled (so the 56 becomes a 65) and then compare that to the hit chart which shows where on the targets body you hit. Don't worry too much about that part, again I'll do that for you. So just for an example lets say you hit the bastard straight in the head, cool right? Wrong! He was wearing a badass helmet and nothing else because...because...I can't think of any reason for him to do that, but who can fathom the followers of chaos! So if your gun does 1D10+2 damage and you rolled a 5 (equaling 7 because math), but he is wearing a helmet with an armor value of 4, you are already down to only 3 damage getting through the helmet.
Toughness Bonus
Is that enough to get through his thick skull though? All players and NPCs get to subtract their toughness bonus from any damage they would take as well. Your bonus is whatever the 10s digit in that characteristic is. So if you were a little weakling with 21 toughness your toughness bonus would be 2, if you were a hulking feral warrior lord with a toughness of 46 then your toughness bonus would be 4. So as long as the naked guy in the helmet has a toughness of 29 or less your shot would at least injure him, anymore than that and the combination of his helmet and thick skull protect him entirely.
Critical Damage
Combat will happen at times, but should be avoided if possible as you are not superhumans and are quite fragile and easy to kill. If you get injured enough to go below 0 wounds you don't automatically die, but every time you take damage that puts you further in the negative you have to roll on the critical hit table. Sure you might get lucky and just get stunned, but there is also the chance that you will roll the result that has your head pop clean off and your body continue running around spraying your teammates in blood forcing them all to take fear tests or start going insane.
Surviving the unsurvivable
While your characters are not superman and thus can be killed just as easily as any other human being, they have been picked out by higher powers for a purpose. What that purpose is may not be known, but generally someone out there wants you to stay alive long enough to accomplish something. To represent this you have fate points. Everyone starts out with a number of fate points and they refresh at the beginning of every game session. You can use them to re-roll missed hits, cure yourself of some wounds, recover from stun effects, and various other useful things. In more dire situations you can "burn" a fate point. This means that the point will be destroyed and your pool will refresh to one less each session now but this can be used to survive something absolutely ridiculous such as being launched into the vacuum of space or shot in the face by a tank. Surviving doesn't mean that you will come through it all okay though, you are still going to have some horrific injuries or missing limbs and those affects will be permanent (although in the future augmetic limbs are easy to come by). Rule of thumb, don't get shot by tanks or launched into the vacuum of space, but if you do all is not lost. Just most is lost.
Insanity!
You are going to witness some scary or horrible things and when you do you will gain insanity points. Get too many of these and you will start to develop permanent mental illnesses. If you get 100 insanity points your mind fractures and your character ceases to function. At this point the character is effectively dead. Don't worry too much about insanity killing your character though because the more insane you get the less scared you get of things so the less likely you are to go more insane. Insanity points can be removed but it is usually at a high cost.
Corruption
Corruption is similar to insanity in that if you get 100 points of it your character will no longer be playable. This time though it's not because your head pops off, or you got so scared of the gibbering creatures in your head that you become catatonic, no this time it's because you are on your way to daemonhood. You are no longer one of the "good guys" and now are exactly the kind of thing that your little band of adventurers is trying to kill. Corruptions can be gained by doing foul deeds, or just being too close to the raw energy of the warp. Corruption points are permanent and there is no way to remove them.
I didn't proof read ANY of this so sorry for the probably trillions of mistakes and nonsensicalities
Monday, June 10, 2013
Welcome friends from locations all across the globe!
...well welcome friends from the western 2/3rds of the United States since that seems to be what we are currently limited to at the moment.
Not all of you are very experienced in pen and paper RPGs so the goal of this site is to provide resources to help get you more familiar with them to lessen the learning curve when you start. For this first post I am just going to go into a little background on the 40k universe that our first campaign will take place in.
IN THE GRIM DARKNESS OF THE FUTURE THERE IS ONLY WAR
The universe that Dark Heresy takes place in is a bleak future in which mankind is beset by all kinds of unimaginable horrors. The Imperium of Man encompasses millions of worlds, all sworn to the service of the God Emperor who has sat motionless (but don't say he's dead) on a golden throne for 10,000 years.
Originally things had gone great for mankind. We spread all throughout the galaxy, starting colonies on a myriad of different planets. Technology was being discovered at a breakneck pace and we had just discovered warp travel. Basically warp travel allowed us to travel through another dimension to get to a far distance at incredible speeds. The only way to navigate through the warp though was through use of psykers, mutated human beings capable of tapping into the other dimension and drawing on its powers.
We spread out far and everything was wonderful, until the psykers started getting too powerful. Their abilities allowed them to start controlling people's minds and manifesting deadly energies with a single thought. This caused huge wars and uprisings and there was so much psychic disturbance that it actually created "storms" in the warp dimension. These storms blocked the psykers from seeing through the warp and thus made all warp travel impossible. Now all the colonies of man were spread out among the stars with no way to travel or even make contact with each other. This went on for thousands of years and all of the colonies developed in their own ways without any influence from each other. Technology entered a dark age where people no longer knew how to design or repair machines, and so ancient technology became highly revered. The most advanced equipment are relics from thousands of years ago, and the machines that are still capable of producing new equipment are among the most prized treasures in the galaxy.
Earth (known as Terra) was consumed in huge wars, nuking itself so many times and so badly that the oceans evaporated. Most of the surface became a barren wasteland, but enormous suborbital plates were built and cites were built on them so life on earth continued, as did the wars. Eventually one of the many warlords became exceedingly dominant. He used genetically engineered soldiers of his own design and crushed all others vying for control of the plant. He declared it his goal to rebuild the empire of man, by rejoining all the colonies of man together under one banner and banishing all superstition and religion. His hope was to bring in a new age of science and reason, at any cost.
The Emperor created genetically engineered sons to lead his genetically engineered supermen on their crusade to unite all humans, and obliterate those that resisted or were too tainted from interactions with alien races. Everything seemed great, thousands of worlds were brought to heel and it seemed like nothing could the Emperor and his Primarch sons.
Then everything went bad again. Some of the Primarchs rebelled, aligning themselves with the Emperors favorite son Horus causing a galaxy wide civil war. The traitor primarchs discovered that there were entities that were living in the warp dimension, and made bargains with them for power and glory twisting them but making them unimaginably powerful. The traitors fought all the way back to Terra and laid siege to humanities homeworld. In a final showdown the Emperor and his son Horus both managed to mortally wound each other. All the Primarchs either turned to the chaos of the warp to become demon princes, were killed, or vanished and the emperor was interred in the golden thrown. The traitor legions fled to an area of space known as the eye of terror and periodically launch raids into imperial space, still attempting to destroy that which they feel abandoned them. The emperor never moved, and a thousand lives are sacrificed daily to the golden throne to keep his psychic presence alive. The imperium now worships him as a god, and is more fanatically religious and superstitious than ever.
With the forces of mankind split, they were no longer able to press on with the crusade to unite the galaxy, and were no longer able to fend off all the hostile alien races that inhabit the galaxy. So currently the Imperium of man is a decaying yet still huge force in the galaxy which is regularly under attack from giant bug monsters, space elves, space orks, evil metal skeleton guys, demons from the warp, and their own twisted chaos space marines from the Horus Heresy. Basically it really sucks to be a human, you are most likely going to die in some horrible way, but you're cool with that as long as it doesn't also steal your soul into a screaming hellscape of perpetual misery.
The inquisition exists to protect people from the horrors of the heretics, aliens, and demons and they pursue their duty rigorously. It is not unheard of for an entire planet to be exterminated just on the possibility of a chaos taint. "It is better that a thousand innocents should die, than a single heretic go free" Or something like that, I don't have the actual quote.
You will not be playing inquisitors (at least yet) you will be playing the inquisitors lackeys. They disposable people that he sends out to gather information or die in horrible ways at the hands of some horrible monster. Live long enough though and perhaps one day you will be the one sending lackeys to die!
...well welcome friends from the western 2/3rds of the United States since that seems to be what we are currently limited to at the moment.
Not all of you are very experienced in pen and paper RPGs so the goal of this site is to provide resources to help get you more familiar with them to lessen the learning curve when you start. For this first post I am just going to go into a little background on the 40k universe that our first campaign will take place in.
The universe that Dark Heresy takes place in is a bleak future in which mankind is beset by all kinds of unimaginable horrors. The Imperium of Man encompasses millions of worlds, all sworn to the service of the God Emperor who has sat motionless (but don't say he's dead) on a golden throne for 10,000 years.
Originally things had gone great for mankind. We spread all throughout the galaxy, starting colonies on a myriad of different planets. Technology was being discovered at a breakneck pace and we had just discovered warp travel. Basically warp travel allowed us to travel through another dimension to get to a far distance at incredible speeds. The only way to navigate through the warp though was through use of psykers, mutated human beings capable of tapping into the other dimension and drawing on its powers.
We spread out far and everything was wonderful, until the psykers started getting too powerful. Their abilities allowed them to start controlling people's minds and manifesting deadly energies with a single thought. This caused huge wars and uprisings and there was so much psychic disturbance that it actually created "storms" in the warp dimension. These storms blocked the psykers from seeing through the warp and thus made all warp travel impossible. Now all the colonies of man were spread out among the stars with no way to travel or even make contact with each other. This went on for thousands of years and all of the colonies developed in their own ways without any influence from each other. Technology entered a dark age where people no longer knew how to design or repair machines, and so ancient technology became highly revered. The most advanced equipment are relics from thousands of years ago, and the machines that are still capable of producing new equipment are among the most prized treasures in the galaxy.
Earth (known as Terra) was consumed in huge wars, nuking itself so many times and so badly that the oceans evaporated. Most of the surface became a barren wasteland, but enormous suborbital plates were built and cites were built on them so life on earth continued, as did the wars. Eventually one of the many warlords became exceedingly dominant. He used genetically engineered soldiers of his own design and crushed all others vying for control of the plant. He declared it his goal to rebuild the empire of man, by rejoining all the colonies of man together under one banner and banishing all superstition and religion. His hope was to bring in a new age of science and reason, at any cost.
The Emperor created genetically engineered sons to lead his genetically engineered supermen on their crusade to unite all humans, and obliterate those that resisted or were too tainted from interactions with alien races. Everything seemed great, thousands of worlds were brought to heel and it seemed like nothing could the Emperor and his Primarch sons.
Then everything went bad again. Some of the Primarchs rebelled, aligning themselves with the Emperors favorite son Horus causing a galaxy wide civil war. The traitor primarchs discovered that there were entities that were living in the warp dimension, and made bargains with them for power and glory twisting them but making them unimaginably powerful. The traitors fought all the way back to Terra and laid siege to humanities homeworld. In a final showdown the Emperor and his son Horus both managed to mortally wound each other. All the Primarchs either turned to the chaos of the warp to become demon princes, were killed, or vanished and the emperor was interred in the golden thrown. The traitor legions fled to an area of space known as the eye of terror and periodically launch raids into imperial space, still attempting to destroy that which they feel abandoned them. The emperor never moved, and a thousand lives are sacrificed daily to the golden throne to keep his psychic presence alive. The imperium now worships him as a god, and is more fanatically religious and superstitious than ever.
With the forces of mankind split, they were no longer able to press on with the crusade to unite the galaxy, and were no longer able to fend off all the hostile alien races that inhabit the galaxy. So currently the Imperium of man is a decaying yet still huge force in the galaxy which is regularly under attack from giant bug monsters, space elves, space orks, evil metal skeleton guys, demons from the warp, and their own twisted chaos space marines from the Horus Heresy. Basically it really sucks to be a human, you are most likely going to die in some horrible way, but you're cool with that as long as it doesn't also steal your soul into a screaming hellscape of perpetual misery.
The inquisition exists to protect people from the horrors of the heretics, aliens, and demons and they pursue their duty rigorously. It is not unheard of for an entire planet to be exterminated just on the possibility of a chaos taint. "It is better that a thousand innocents should die, than a single heretic go free" Or something like that, I don't have the actual quote.
You will not be playing inquisitors (at least yet) you will be playing the inquisitors lackeys. They disposable people that he sends out to gather information or die in horrible ways at the hands of some horrible monster. Live long enough though and perhaps one day you will be the one sending lackeys to die!
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