What I find most compelling about Dark Heresy and to a lesser degree the other Warhammer 40k tabletop RPGs is that they showcase parts of the Warhammer 40k setting that are for obvious reasons completely unrepresented in the most popular part of Warhammer 40k, the tabletop wargame. The fiction there paints the Imperium of Man as an impossibly vast fascist dictatorship where trillions toil in obscurity, corruption is rampant and life is cheap. We don't really get much more than that, other than the occasional snippet about life on planets where war is happening.
Dark Heresy not only explores what life is like on planets where there are no massive wars with beefcake space marines being heroic and Imperial Guardsman dying by the thousands for silly war goals, it also gives a framework for running proper adventures in them. The general loop is that you are a group of Inquisition goons called Acolytes, the most disposable and lowest rung on the Inquisition ladder. Your boss gives you a job, such as finding the source of an illegal relic trade, hunting down and unearthing a cult or covering up all trace of some alien sighting. You are then set loose, often with no proof of your authority as part of the Inquisition in order to keep you as disposable as possible, and told to get it done.
This guy walks up to you in the club and accuses your gf of heresy what do you do?
When I got in to Warhammer 40k RPGs Dark Heresy's second edition had not quite come out yet. At the time I didn't really care for the idea of the game, it is certainly the most familiar of the 40k RPGs to someone used to more popular titles like Shadowrun or DnD, but I wanted the new stuff, the crazy stuff. I loved Rogue Trader and as an Imperial Guard fanboy I also loved Only War.
By the time I decided I wanted to try my hand at a Dark Heresy game Dark Heresy's Second Edition had already been out for a while and had in fact recently met its untimely demise. Fantasy Flight Games, who had been making the 40k RPGs since shortly after the first Dark Heresy edition came out, had lost the license and there were rumours of a fun new game on the horizon called Wrath and Glory (you can find my thoughts on that one here). I was pretty upset by this, at the time simply because this meant that Rogue Trader was not ever going to see a second edition. Rogue Trader has, to put it bluntly, not aged well at all. It has a lot of problems that are not insurmountable but require a lot of work and willingness to compromise from the GM. I will probably make a post about this at some point all to itself, but I think it is important to mention here for reasons I will get into in a second.
Anyways after running a one-shot game of Only War with a new online group (which ended in hilarious tragedy, again a story for another time) we decided we wanted to try another one and moved on to Dark Heresy Second Edition. The game as it stands is the core rulebook plus three primary splatbooks, one focused on each of the three Ordos of the Inquisition. Enemies Within is about the Ordo Hereticus, tasked with stopping insidious cults to the ruinous powers, Enemies Without is about the Ordo Xenos who protect the Imperium from the more nefarious and difficult to engage effects of alien presence, and Enemies Beyond is about the mighty Ordo Malleus, who have the unenviable task of protecting the Imperium from the raw manifestations of the Warp, the direct influences of the gods of chaos and the machinations of daemons. The system is fantastic, all of the 40k RPGs share core rules that were updated as each new edition came out and DH2 has the best and most balanced/streamlined version of most critical rules like weapon rate of fire, fate point usage, and so much more.
Maybe...I could be your alien biomechanical monstrosity tonight...?
I ended up running this game for about a year and had a blast doing so (since i love to self promote you can check out the first part of my attempt to write this game up as an actual-play story here). After three general "arcs" the game hit a very natural conclusion and as much as we liked the characters and the story we agreed this was an excellent point to end the game and moved on to other systems.
At the beginning of all of this I hadn't even considered the first edition of Dark Heresy. I knew there were people who still absolutely swore by it and did not like the second edition at all, but with any multi-edition game you have a crowd that is comfortable with where things are and refuses to change, so I didn't put too much stock in it. I never played it or Black Crusade and only a tiny bit of Deathwatch, so my entire experience with the older 40k RPGs was Rogue Trader and as I outlined above Rogue Trader is a goddamned mess. Why would I subject myself and my players to that?
There were some things about Dark Heresy 2nd that rubbed us the wrong way. One thing that kept coming up over and over was the difficulties a currency-less system provides. In Dark Heresy 2nd Edition there is no tracking of money, each Acolyte has an Influence attribute and they make tests using this to acquire things. Influence is supposed to be an abstract measure of contacts, reputation and actual physical wealth that you leverage in order to get people to give you things. It functions very similarly to Rogue Trader's profit factor, albeit on a much smaller scale. There are certainly good lore reasons for this to be the case, worlds in the Imperium are extremely diverse and the idea that all of them would have the same currency let alone the basics of capitalism in place for random offworlders to walk in and start buying stuff is a stretch to say the least.
The main issue we kept having was that the party was always under deep cover. So deep in fact that I think they only ever actually told people they were part of the Inquisition on maybe 3 occasions and these people were all either ranking Imperial Officials or close confidants they were protecting. This was despite that fact that each of them had a Rosette, an official badge of office only very high ranking officials have that are basically impossible to falsify (it was not until later I realized this technically made them all Interrogators and not Acolytes, but that's really a matter of semantics). Given that, how do you leverage your reputation and contacts on a world where no one can know you are there at all? And if it is a matter of having some abstracted amount of currency why would different members of the party have different values to roll against? How do you justify them failing a roll to acquire something not terribly rare if they ostensibly have some cash?
Hold my pistol I'm gonna go ask this guy if he has any spare change
After grappling with this for a little while in the second act of the game when it actually began to matter the most I simply fell back on implementing my own money system. The party obtained some untraceable cash and I let them spend it as an alternative to making Influence tests for certain things. Obviously on most worlds you can't just go to the gun store and buy a Godwyn-Diaz pattern boltgun for twenty bucks but it worked very well for more mundane things, and the acquisition of exotic stuff tended to be more concretely set into specifically questing for it. This seriously deincentivised the Influence attribute but no one seemed to really mind and the game ran better for it.
There were other things as well, such as the how generally obtuse the Aptitude system was to use, but I accepted it as a necessary evil of the system. After all it allowed much greater character flexibility compared to the older version's more rigid level-up tables which was certainly a good thing in my mind.
Back to the present, I am still in several games with said group but another few friends mentioned they wanted to run a game and one of the options that came up was Dark Heresy. I am not exactly a forever GM but I am certainly the only GM I know with the same fondness for the 40k RPGs and I never could find another person to run it so that I could actually play. I was thrilled about this, but a little surprised when the GM said he was most familiar with 1st edition so that was what he wanted to run. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and check out the core rulebook.
I was blown away. Everything about the first edition was better than the inexplicably horrible expectations I had built up in my head. It certainly shows its age in a lot of unpleasant ways, but after giving the character creation rules a solid once-over I became extremely excited. I think the most surprising thing to me was that the feel of the game was very different from the second edition. It felt more pulpy, more gritty and dirty and down to earth. Acolytes in 1st edition start at a lower power than in 2nd edition. They have less abilities and FAR less gear. And the money system oh lord the money system. Having throne gelt as a standard currency rather than an abstracted stat telling you your odds of getting stuff is a really damn nice change. As an underhive Scum ganger my character ended up with a single throne to his name after buying a very small amount of ammunition for my starting autopistol and autogun. Unless you are starting as one of the few classes that have a good amount of wealth to their name you will likely begin the game in poverty and be forced to scavenge, steal and save as you attempt to enact the will of your Inquisitor.
The impression that I got is that character death is more commonplace than in 2nd edition, and it is not unusual for characters to have only a single Fate Point. I was told to approach the game more like Darkest Dungeon than a DnD campaign. Obviously you want to nurture your best heroes and keep them stocked and equipped, but at the end of the day some of them are going to die and the group will carry on without them.
Another thing that surprised me was the level-up tables. The game works by a class and rank system, each class having different "levels" as you spend XP and each level having its own table of upgrades you can buy, relevant to their discipline. I went in knowing this was the case, and out of the gate I hated the idea of the system because of its implementation in Rogue Trader. In RT the level up tables for each class are extremely shallow especially at level 1, have very few good options to begin and require a whopping 1000 XP invested to reach the next rank (Writers Edit: I was wrong its actually 2000XP to reach rank 2 holy shit). Every time I ran Rogue Trader I hacked this to some degree in order to make the starting levels less shitty to play, and I assumed DH1 would be the same.
On the contrary DH1's tables, at least the ones I looked at, have much better options for starting levels. Additionally you only need 500XP per level, and since you start with 400XP to spend you will hit your second level after only one or two sessions depending on how stingy your GM is with Experience Points. And they are oh so easy to use. Look at cost of thing, pay cost, get thing. Simple. In DH2 you are technically free to buy any attribute, skill or talent but you need to cross reference your own aptitudes with the two aptitudes attached to whatever it is you want to buy, then look at the table that decides how much the upgrade costs based on number of matching aptitudes and that is how you determine the cost. You can technically take any upgrade at any time if you can afford it, but things outside your character's scope of focus will be very expensive.
The two systems are polar opposites, DH1's is very easy to use but confines you to your class table unless you can convince your GM to give you a special exception, and DH2's is a massive pain in the ass until you become very familiar with it but in exchange does not limit you nearly as much. I certainly see the merit in the second edition system, but after suffering with it for so long the simplicity of the DH1 tables is so refreshing.
There are still some things I am very leery about on the mechanical side. Dark Heresy 2nd edition struck a very good balance with how weapon fire worked. Single shots were more accurate, bursts were slightly less accurate but could cause multiple hits on very good rolls and full auto fire was the least accurate but could cause many hits easily on a good roll. It is a little counter-intuitive that spraying your opponent with bullets makes you less likely to hit than a single shot, but it makes some amount of sense when you consider the difficulty of aiming a gun firing full auto and always struck me as more of a balance decision rather than a realism one. One of the biggest complaints about DH1 I have found is that full auto fire gives a bonus to hit AND can cause multiple hits, so there is very little incentive to do anything besides get a bigass automatic and spray your enemies down over and over. Possibly realistic, but really misses out on the nuance of the roles different firing modes have in DH2 combat.
The face of a man who starts with 10+1d5 dollars to his name and rolled a 1
In spite of all this I find myself excited for the game. The feeling and tone of DH1 has pulled me in in a very powerful way and I can't wait to see if I manage to keep my Metallan Gunslinger Hive Scum alive past the first level. Obviously this is an incredibly lopsided introspective since once system I ran for a year and the other I have made precisely one character and fawned over the rules a bunch so take from it what you will. I'd love to hear your own experiences with the two, and anything to look out for in the 1st edition rules!
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