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Is this the right place for this..? Anyhow..

Ok, so, I'm thinking of getting this RPG game, so I was wondering if there are any players of it on here? If so, any tips to what books (apart from the core book) I should get, and just some easy starter tips for both the GM and players. (I have D&D experience but have no clue how this would translate to DH)


So yea, anything you can tell me about this really would much appreciated

OH, and anyone know of a good forum about it?
(and a european store i could get it at? since black library has been picking their noses for over half a year now when it comes to their site)

I was at CONception (an RPG con on the south coast of England) just after DH came out. There was a giant stack of the books for sale on the morning of the first day - but they were very expensive, so I decided to think before buying.

When I went back to the booth an hour later every single one had been sold.

Anyway - DH is pretty cool, it has a ton of flavour text and a workable system. It's not like the d20 system you know from D&D but it's fine for what it does.

The big problem is that the characters are supposed to be Inquisitorial Acolytes.

If you've read Eisenhorn - or indeed any other fluff about the Inquisition you probably imagine that said acolytes are serriously badass customers.

THEY ARE NOT. The characters in DH are weak, dreg-like things. The scum of the universe. They are pretty much unskilled, hopelessly outmatched and generally too poor to afford one magazine of bolter ammo. And yes, for some reason the Inquisition makes its acolytes pay for their own ammunition.

I STRONGLY advise you to buy a copy of the more recent Rogue Trader game. You can use that game to play Inquisition agents and feel much more like being an agent of the Inquisition should be. (You can also play a Rogue Trader, which is bags of fun).

Actually if you want Inquisitor level cahracters (Vindicare Assasins, Inquisitors, Interrogaters, Magos, etc.) then you need the new book called DH: Ascention. It just came out and extends DH (where you start as acolytes) into the realm of high level characters (above level 8), which is where DH core rulebook ends. Rogue Trader is really about mid level characters (lvl 5 - 13)and is a seperate rules set that adds more emphasis on ship to ship combat and things like that.

So basically I suggest getting DH core rule books and trying that out to learn the rules then step up to Ascention whenever you feel like it, but be warned being more powerful means you come across more powerful enemies that are just as likely to kill your "powerfull high level" character in one turn as hard creatures in the DH core rule book were to your low level characters. So its not like D&D where your character gains so many fricken hit points and abilities that he can virtually shurg off anything somehow. In DH, RT and Ascention you can still die to a well placed grenade, gun shot or trap at any moment but thats why you have fate points.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
In terms of what books to get I'll break it down by player / DM:

Player:
- DH core rulebook = Should get a copy when possible but can share one a few times to try it out.
- Inquisitors Handbook = Great addition to the core rulebook for players. Lots of gear, weapons, kits, and character packages. Battle Sisters! Nobles! Mind-Cleansed! Combat Servitors!
- Radicals Handbook = Good for players who like to give their characters a bit of a darkside. Contains radical gear, weapons, powers, alternate career paths, starting packages, etc. Lots of neat stuff.
- Ascention = Good for planning your charcters long term goals but only if the campaign is going to last long enough to make it to level 8+ or if you want to start a high level campaign. But you still need the core book to create characters and for the rules.

GM:
- DH core = Yes.
- Inquisitors/Radicals Handbooks = Allows you to give a better variety of gear and flavour to your NPCs/Campaigns.
- Ascention = Needed if you want to run a high level campain (but you also need the DH core rule book). Also good for giving you an idea of the power of various opponents/ranks like Inquisitors, Eversor Assassins, Heralds of Khrone, Daemon Princes, etc.
- Creature Book = Decent gives you a good diea of how powerful various types of xeno races are and some classic creatures/daemons. Helps flesh out campaign ideas.
- Disciples of the Dark Gods = Great for background info, NPCs, Handouts and other goodies that make a GM's life easier.
- Harlock Adventure series = So far decent contained advtentures that mesh well with almost any campaign.
- Purge the Unclean (Multi Adventure Book) = Has a couple of unique adventures in it that can be scaled relitively easy to any level characters. Decent for the GM who doesn't have time to prepare.

DH is pretty amazing, if expensive.
The character power level may be a bit of a problem, but not much. Your Inquisitor shouldn't be sending you after anything much harder than a few mutants at low levels, so super-expensive bolter ammo isn't really needed, and with all the bonuses for aiming ect. hitting things isn't as hard as it first appears.
RT is the go-to thing for the player that wants to have plasma weapons right off the bat (and their own friggin' ship) but it is a lot less fun for the GM, IMHO. It's hard to come up with challanging stuff for a group of people with their own frigate and thousands of peons, and it is really hard to manage everything on such a huge scale as well.

I do agree - DH is a fun (or so I should think - I've read it, bt not played) but it definately lets down the - shall we say - typical expectations.

Inquisitors and their retinues are a BIG DEAL in the fluff.

If you want to play a soldier, you're probably hoping to be a stormtrooper with a hellgun, carapce armour and ten years experience fighting xenos on every rock from here to Cadia.

Tough, you're actually a wretch one week out of boot-camp with a flintlock musket and a copy of the uplifting primer. Now go fight that chaos cult...

It's not bad, so to speak - but it's probably not what people expect when they imagine playing the forces of the Holy Inquisition.


As for Rogue Trader - bags of fun. I'm playing it now (Lord Captain Hyperion van der Dyne, at your service) - the GM made a very wise choice. He set the game in Segmentum Tempestus and then created his own subsector that has been engulfed by warpstorms for thousands of years, until just now.

He's not managing us at all, he's just given us a sandbox and said 'go play'.

I do however, think that RT is the better game for playing Inqusitorial Acolytes. The fact that you can also play Rogue Traders is just bonus.

Two games in one! Can't say fairer than that.

I will do a shameless plug here and say that when you have played through a campaign of Dark Heresy I strongly recommend Rogue Trader that was released from the same company last year. It's a really good game to continue with if you really liked Dark Heresy since it uses the same system. Ooh, and it has kroots and Cruisers. ^^

I would second playing RT over DH. DH has good stuff in it, but it is so low-intensity it isn't very fun. A Rogue Trader starting character is equivalent to a DH character with 5000 xp. Consider that you get roughly 100 xp per hour of play, you can see that it is quite a jump. Being based on a percentile system of the d100, it is not as fun with your rolls aiming for 30 (as it is in DH) or below as opposed to 50 or below (A decent rogue trader skill level).

FoxPhoenix135 wrote:but it is so low-intensity it isn't very fun.

Such a nonsense comment.

You get out what you put in with an RPG. All DH does is provide the framework. If you can't get anything except a 'low-intensity' game out of it, then that's the fault of either the GM, the players, or both.

FoxPhoenix135 wrote:it is not as fun with your rolls aiming for 30 (as it is in DH) or below as opposed to 50 or below

Except that you'd have to be doing something wrong to not get some good modifiers on there. A Full-Auto Gun at Short Range. Bingo. Instant +30. Now you're hitting on 60's.

The 'low level'-ness of DH is greatly, greatly exaggerated.

As a Gm for a DH/RT group I can say that you really do want to get most of the core books, although Creatures Anathema is a might bit on the powerful side for lower ranking DH characters however it can be interesting for higher level characters and RT characters. As far as players go the two books I would suggest as must haves are the core book and the Inquisitors handbook, with the Radicals book and ascencion being interesting additions if your characters are getting that close or are running a radical inquisitor as the for the campaign.

Rouge Trader requires far more input from your players as they are in control of an entire ship, and thus have a far easier ability to derail a campaign by not having any idea what they want to do. In addition space combat can easily get kinda boring since most of the time only two or three members of the party are actually doing anything in my experience, the RT/ Voidsman is piloting the ship and the Arch militant is manning the guns, with the RT telling one of them not to suck (i.e. giving them the +10%)

Have you tried RT, HMBC? I doubt it. You would like it, really you would. I was pissed at first that my GM wanted to run a RT game (requiring me to buy the book) but after playing it I found it was a bit more sandbox and thus more fun for me. If you like railroaded stuff, DH is good, but RT is just a better game IMO

Again, you get out what you put in. If you're getting railroaded in DH it's because your GM is either lacking in imagination or the other players are either too stupid or too lazy to do anything about it.

And claiming that DH is a 'railroad' in the first place is quite absurd because you can railroad anyone in anything. RT is not immune to that.

I own RT and I have read most of the book and honestly I can see it being fun, but really, we're playing DH at the moment and having a blast. There's nothing wrong with the game (assuming you don't have any major hangups with D100 percentile systems), and the myths about 'You will die' and how 'weak' characters are are just that - myths.

With a strong GM and a group of players who want to further both the story that's been set up and the characters they've created the game will work.

I always thought have the characters being relatively weak was sensible. This isn't the Inquisitor's personal retinue such as you see in Eisenhorn and Ravenor, but a collection of low level minions with the potential to not die while doing the Inquisition's work. You don't even work directly with the Inquisitor at the start in most games. The idea is that you work your characters up to the point where you don't suck anymore.

I must admit, I've yet to look at the Rogue Trader rules too closely, but I like Dark Heresy well enough. Then again, I'm an avid player of Call of Cthluhu so the idea of a giant tentacled freak popping out of someone's head and violating the whole team in horrible ways is pretty much my idea of a Friday Night RPing session. I'm used to being outclassed by whatever I fight. I know the manly arts of running the hell away when I don't have a chance.

Dark Heresy is a good game,but I prefer RT.Soon when my holidays begin maybe I'll start to write the full from the books onto the Lexicanum.I began to write the Scintilla article,but I got bored and stoped.

I agree with HBMC - DH is a *blast* having playe dthrough a series of campaigns (TechPriest tank at your service - hovering when you weigh hal a ton is fun ) that, unless your GM is a doofus, dying (while it can happen) is as much of a concern as other RPs - if your GM wants you to die, you will do. otherwise you dont.

Now back to fitting augments to willing (honestly) subjects. I put my own cranial best qual cortex implant in doncha know, and im only slightly insane (until i add the bypass, then all is good. unless it goes wrong...) - however I have occasionally mixed up my powerfist mechadendrite with the surgical laser one. Luckily it was only a guardsman, eh?

Well, I got me a PDF of the core rule book, Note, I am not using this for a game or anything, purely for reading up on the mechanics and such.

What I've seen so far when it comes to characters being "weak" it's more that you need to actually use your brains to get certain bonuses on your shots etc.

Anyhow, I will most likely be the GM first time around, cause I'm the 40K lore guy for our group, but, I hardly have any DM/GM experience. Any tips?

So you just said yourself that you hadn't played it HMBC... so how can you judge which is better? I am just saying it was more fun for us to play RT than it was to play DH. You get your own starships man!

This isn't a DH vs RT which is better topic, please stop going OT about it.

RT is something I might look into later.

You have got to realize that in RPGs you always start out at level one and have to work your way up the ladder to get to be a big bad a$$.
So in that way DH isn't too bad. As a beginner you are not going to be going after the Dark Lords of Chaos, but maybe the Girl Scout group who refuses to sell mint cookies. After a few rounds of dealing with that, maybe you'll get an upgrade to flashlight inspector of the local sewer treatment plant. After that, prehaps a promotion to Squig Spading assistant (second class)...
The game is what you make it, and it is getting better.

dutch
squig spading assistant (first class) to the stars.

I think its a great game but as with all RPGs you need to take some liberty. I tend to run DH as an adventure / investigation but if the group wants more investigation (Puzzles, hidden motives ect.) I'll give them that. If they want more adventure (less blabbin more stabbin) I'll give them that to.
Also DH tends to be rough early on so help the players out a bit, remember you are not the evil mastermind enemy as GM, you are the referee.

I sold all my Dark Heresy stuff on Ebay a while back. The RPG is amazing from a conceptual perspective. The system is its fatal flaw. If Fantasy Flight Games overhauled the system, it’d be the best RPG of all time in my opinion… and that’s coming from a guy who’s been playing D&D and Storyteller games since childhood (among numerous other less well known games such as Marvel Superheroes, DC Universe, Gamma World, Star Wars, and several others I can’t even remember their names)

I just can’t get past the system though. It’s easily the worst system of any RPG I’ve ever played. No one wants to sit down after a long and stressful work week to experience their role playing character fail at everything they do from gathering information to shooting a cultist at point blank range.

“Wow! This is fun… I’m an Assassin who couldn’t kill a drunk cultist let alone a high-priority well protected target.”

“I can’t WAIT for the next session when my Arbiter not only fails to gather any information about what he’s investigating, but gets his head exploded by a lucky baseball bat swing.”

“I’m the lucky guy who chose to be an Adept so, not only do I lack the ability to do anything remotely exciting, but I fail to perform the actions that are of little to no help to the group ANYWAY!”

It’s one of the few games where you can create your character with the best of intents and loftiest goals only to discover you not only suck – but you SUCK at sucking.

To top it off, the book’s like $45. Save your money and experience epic fantasy adventures in D&D or dark and twisted plots in any one of the Storyteller supplements. Hopefully FFG will release Dark Heresy 2.0 sometime in the next few years and the game will actually be fun to play – If you’re dead set on doing something in the 40k universe, buy a book from the Horus Heresy and read it out loud to your friends while you sit around eating snacks. It’s pretty much the same experience as Dark Heresy except your friends don’t have to get frustrated by building up the anticipation of actually getting to do something only to suffer one crushing failure after another until someone ends up getting really unlucky and having their arm chopped off or having their leg vaporized.

Could some 40k CRPG be made from the concept of Dark Heresy,

I'll agree with Incarna. The issue is a fatal flaw which is why you have to take a lot of liberty. Generally I give players a +10/20 to their skill as it says that an unmodified task represents a difficult one, also the adept is 100% useless, get rid of it. It can be a lot of fun, it just has to be run by a free lance GM, a by-the-book GM will kill the enjoyment.

incarna wrote:I sold all my Dark Heresy stuff on Ebay a while back. The RPG is amazing from a conceptual perspective. The system is its fatal flaw. If Fantasy Flight Games overhauled the system, it’d be the best RPG of all time in my opinion… and that’s coming from a guy who’s been playing D&D and Storyteller games since childhood (among numerous other less well known games such as Marvel Superheroes, DC Universe, Gamma World, Star Wars, and several others I can’t even remember their names)

I just can’t get past the system though. It’s easily the worst system of any RPG I’ve ever played. No one wants to sit down after a long and stressful work week to experience their role playing character fail at everything they do from gathering information to shooting a cultist at point blank range.

“Wow! This is fun… I’m an Assassin who couldn’t kill a drunk cultist let alone a high-priority well protected target.”

We had that problem for a session before we'd properly figured out the rules. Once you start applying the right modifiers, and start acting to get as many modifiers as you can, you become quite effective.

Then you go up in experience a couple of times, start buying better gear and modifying it, and you become extremely deadly.


There are issues with Dark Heresy, though. It's a rules heavy game, and a lot of modifiers can apply to an individual role. This means the players and the GM will need to be on the ball, or else you end up missing a lot of important stuff and getting the result completely wrong, like incarna did above. Personally, I couldn't be bothered with the bookkeeping at the end of the day, and took the core of the system and streamlined the hundred odd skills and traits into about a dozen.

The second problem with the system, actually, is that skilled players will be far more deadly and far more effective than players with a moderate knowledge of the rules. Not every group dynamic will tolerate this.

I don't play rpgs at all but I rather enjoyed reading the DH and RT books.

I've found DH to be more of a 'think about how to do this' and less a charge in one. Combat is something to be avoided unless you are very, very sure it is the best option. It doesn't tend to end up that way, but that is the plan at least.

RT is a lot more flexible... the downside being it's a heck of a lot easier for the players to inadvertently do horrible things to the GM (instead of the other way around). First RT session we managed to completely utterly destroy the carefully plotted campaign with just 5 rounds of combat starting a few minutes into the game. And half the party is going to be in the medical bay for a few weeks. Oh, and we managed to blow up the recurring villain and accidentally get the arbites after us as we fled the planet...

If you have a member of the group playing a psyker, make them read the psyker chapters back to front. It is they're own set of different rules. Impress on them the reasons that people not knowing you are a psyker is a good thing and powers should not be flung around a lot: they have a gate to the warp in their head, opening it means things come knocking. And while hilarious, managing to roll 'tech scorn' around the techpriest and seizing up all their implants makes him hate you. Especially when he has artificial lungs. <.<

Both are good fun if you're willing to roll with the punches.

incarna wrote:I just can’t get past the system though. It’s easily the worst system of any RPG I’ve ever played. No one wants to sit down after a long and stressful work week to experience their role playing character fail at everything they do from gathering information to shooting a cultist at point blank range.

“Wow! This is fun… I’m an Assassin who couldn’t kill a drunk cultist let alone a high-priority well protected target.”

“I can’t WAIT for the next session when my Arbiter not only fails to gather any information about what he’s investigating, but gets his head exploded by a lucky baseball bat swing.”

“I’m the lucky guy who chose to be an Adept so, not only do I lack the ability to do anything remotely exciting, but I fail to perform the actions that are of little to no help to the group ANYWAY!”

It’s one of the few games where you can create your character with the best of intents and loftiest goals only to discover you not only suck – but you SUCK at sucking.

Exaggerated prattle.

DH's flaw is that, as someone said, it's a heavily 'rules based' RPG, with a lot of tables. But with a GM who actually works with the system you can have games that are fine and avoid the ultra-hyperbole of 'sucking and sucking'.

Agreed with HBMC

While yo uhave failures (and its boring if you always suceed), if you are intelligent and have a reasonably clever GM the system works very well. Luckily our GM helped playtest and write some of the rules (as well as some for RT and the next one...) so we have a headstart on that count

So you need to look at buying better equipment to give you the edge, look carefully at synergies between equipment - damn them, they made an RPG where you have to *think* about RPing! How dare they!

RT is a *cool* game, and before long you are kicking ass with the bes tof them.

I liked DH. I am currently working on converting it to the ST nWoD system though. Should be interesting.

I love the horrible atmosphere of the Dark Heresy game. The rules system is badly designed but after a while you learn how to make it stay out of your way. It's also rather silly to try to powergame the system, since it's so broken from the beginning and there are always bigger fishes that can eat you. What the rules system does excellently is that it lets you die in horrible ways rather easily, or go crazy.

In order to enjoy DH you first have to get rid of any concepts of heroic fantasy. You will not be heroes vielding ancient swords standing valiantly against the hordes of darkness on top of a pile of slain cultists, the wind blowing your hair in rythm to the theme from LOTR. You will be miserable, undertrained, unskilled citicens dropped in at the deep end of the pool-of-chaos-and-destruction. And all you will accomplish with your deaths and suffering is to keep the fascist imperium of man running in it's status quo for a little bit longer. Once you can laugh at your characters horrible existence and really enjoy the fact that there are no good guys DH becomes an excellent game.

During 20+ years of roleplaying and God knows how many different systems only one rpg ever (the swedish Mutant, UA edition) has inspired me more than DH. It is simply awesome.

You asked for forums. fantasyflightgames.com and darkreign40k.com are the two biggest DH forums I know about.

H.B.M.C. wrote:

Exaggerated prattle.

DH's flaw is that, as someone said, it's a heavily 'rules based' RPG, with a lot of tables. But with a GM who actually works with the system you can have games that are fine and avoid the ultra-hyperbole of 'sucking and sucking'.

Flippant twaddle.

My description of the game is accurate. Some people have made some assumptions that I wasn’t running the game correctly. I was – 100%.

The beauty of the narrative aspect of the game does not exempt the system from criticism. I’d wager I’ve played more Dark Heresy than 95% of those who own the books and my rulebook was published by Black Industries, not Fantasy Flight. I’d make the assumption that, it is most of the people in this thread who are not running the game correctly or house ruling their way into a semi-playable system.

The system is junk and it’s a real shame. RPG developers at Wizards and White Wolf have revised their RPG systems through the years and if we look at Dark heresy through rose-colored glasses than, when/if Fantasy Flight gets around to making their revisions, the voice of the community will be a bunch of 40k fan-boy’s who aren’t willing to look at the game objectively.