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Hello all, I am GMing for a Dark Heresy group of people who are not tabletop players and have no experience with the 40k universe. How can I explain grimdark to the players and get them into the proper mindset for their service to the Emperor?

Give them the core rulebook to read, or (if you have it) read from the introductory narration of the 40k tabletop rulebooks. Each of the recent editions has 1-2 pages that make a perfect base for just setting the mood and conveying the atmosphere.

Additionally, you could also "prepare" them for your campaign by organising a movie night and mentioning the chosen films' proximity to 40k. For example ... 1984 for a general idea of Imperial oppression. About the dangers of Warp travel? Have them watch Event Horizon. Life on a Forge World? THX-1338. Hive world? Blade Runner ... or Escape from New York. The list goes on.

If your players have zero experience with the setting, mood is more important than detail anyways, as they are essentially blank slates as far as the fluff is concerned. There is no canon, as much as certain wikis and a lot of fans would like to have you believe otherwise. Just be sure to establish a "common ground" within your group so that everyone is on the same page. That "daily life" can be so very different from one planet to another allows your players to go wild with their backstories without much interference, although I too would recommend stressing the idea of grimdark as a sort of guiding light.

Best of luck, and have fun!

Again with the "there is no canon" bull gak Lynata...

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Again with the "there is no canon" bull gak Lynata...

How would you define it then, given the quotes provided by Lynata?

 Crickate wrote:
Hello all, I am GMing for a Dark Heresy group of people who are not tabletop players and have no experience with the 40k universe. How can I explain grimdark to the players and get them into the proper mindset for their service to the Emperor?

Distopian, mixed with Big Brother, mixed with Naxi-like fanatism, coupled with Spanish Inqusition, DMV-style bureaucracy, and eternal war.

A definition would be "Grimdark is an adjective used to describe a setting or situation in a fictional work that is considered dark, depressive, violent or edgy"

Also,
http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Grimdark

Hope this helps.

PS; Hope is the first step toward dissapointment.

I think a movie night to get people 'in the mood' is a good one. Not sure about some of the choices (Event Horizon is a good one, not so sure about Escape from NY).

An idea I've considered for a few settings is to run a 'prequel' scenario with pre-gens that somehow ties into the main storyline. Say you're going to have a storyline about recovering an artifact that a chaos cult is trying to taint. Build a group of pre-gen characters and run a short scenario. This gives a few benefits:

1. Your characters will fit the setting. Avoid goofy names, weird abilities, etc. These guys have a life-span measured in minutes, so go with broad characters with easy-to-understand abilities.

2. Learning rules is tough, so everyone can get the basics with characters that don't 'count.' Spending 2 hours building a character then seeing it shredded in the first fight sucks, especially if it's because of a rules mistake.

3. You can foreshadow neat stuff and set up your 'main' story while playing.

To expand the idea, let's go with the idea that the first story involves a relic that has Chaos Cultists trying to corrupt it in a hive city.

Someone here or elsewhere might be able to give you hints to make a good 40k stereotype like a Stormtrooper half-squad that fits the DH rules. You have broad, easily recognizable stereotypes: The Commander, the Big Gun Guy, the Sniper, the Techy, the Tunnel Rat, etc. make a few extra so players can choose if you like, and don't make them player-specific unless you ahve to.

Start in media res I.E. in the middle of the action. "You've been sent to Hive XXX to sweep tunnel 123-456-789 for the source of strange noises. You were dropped off three days ago and have spent that time traveling down a large tunnel, as per your orders. You just found something unusual, a dead body in a purple robe. What do you do?.

Have a scene of investigation, get the characters to whatever you want to see. Maybe they find the beginnings of the cult, or just discover a room where what appears to be an Imperial Saint in armor battling a daemon. It's just some weird ghost-image fight, though, and neither side seems to be winning... Remind them that their mission is to notify their superiors of the Weird Stuff going on., then spring another, smaller daemon hunting them on them.

This is a rigged, railroady scenario. They can't sruvive, btu if they win (which they should...) that could set up the 'real' game. by a message getting back that gets an inquisitor to check out the situation by sending his minions in, who get more freedom to do player-character stuff in a proper adventure.

This is just an idea, of course. Use it as you wish, or not.

I just read the quote from inside the front cover in a suitably dramatic fashion. The looks on all the player's faces throughout the reading made me think that nailed it pretty well.

 dementedwombat wrote:
I just read the quote from inside the front cover in a suitably dramatic fashion. The looks on all the player's faces throughout the reading made me think that nailed it pretty well.

That is also quite an excellent way to set the mood!

They still don't quite grasp just how hopeless everything is. They view themselves as heroes of change and hope rather than workers for the Inquisition. They're used to RPG's where you play that kind of character who is the hero who slays all evil and restores justice to the world.
I'm thinking about the movie night, as well as a few youtube videos that might do well to summarize things.

Well, got with the classic, punchy line of 'everyone's a jerk; especially you."

I ran into the same problem a few years ago when i started to run Deathwatch. Only one person out of my 6 players had knowledge of the 40K setting. The cannon of this setting is so rich that no mere brush over can do it justice enough so i devised a way to get my players excited and in the know. I gave out xp rewards to them for reading 40K novels. 100xp a book. Within 2 months they had all read at lest 2 and we were able to start with everyone have a good understanding of the lore. Most are now hooked to this which makes it even better for our game.

Getting them to read to fluff in the DH core book is a pretty good start.

There's nothing wrong with the heroes being beacons of light in a grim setting, but you can juxtapose their triumphs with tragedies. Don't cheapen their victory, but if they're operating on one planet for example, their actions might make things better, but on the planet next door things have gotten a hell of a lot worse. It's not the heroes fault, but emphasise that they're constantly putting out small fires whilst the blaze that is the 40k universe rages around them.

Zond wrote:
There's nothing wrong with the heroes being beacons of light in a grim setting, but you can juxtapose their triumphs with tragedies. Don't cheapen their victory, but if they're operating on one planet for example, their actions might make things better, but on the planet next door things have gotten a hell of a lot worse. It's not the heroes fault, but emphasise that they're constantly putting out small fires whilst the blaze that is the 40k universe rages around them.

Definitely. Players (and people in general) need motivation. Seeing their character improve is one source, as is feeling like they're making a difference, even if 'making a difference' in 40k is kind of like fighting a house fire with a squirt gun.

As an analogy, a favorite setting of mine is Delta Green, which takes the Cthulhu mythos and adds a whole bunch of conspiracy paranoia and other weirdness to it. The 1st book for the game opens with a letter from a point-of-view character. I won't repost it, because it's long, but it's available online.

The thrust of the letter is that Delta Green (an illegal conspiracy working to defeat lovecraftian entities that want to eat us) knows, deep down, it can't win long-term. But it can fight the good fight, and if everything works, almost everyone gets to live another day. And that's a victory.

That's a sentiment that fits in Dark Heresy to me.

(For the record, being a Call of Cthulhu variant, Delta Green is probably a bit harsher on Player Characters than even Dark Heresy. Death and insanity are the most likely retirement plans for characters.)

If you need to describe it in a setence then: North Korea, but galaxy wide and under constant attack by aliens and deamons.
That ticks all the main boxes anyway.

Stormcrow77 wrote:I gave out xp rewards to them for reading 40K novels. 100xp a book. Within 2 months they had all read at lest 2 and we were able to start with everyone have a good understanding of the lore.

As long as everyone in the group is still on the same page...

There is a lot of inconsistency between the various sources of fluff (see my previous post), which might cause confusion if two or more of your players have read something where the writers had different ideas. However, GW does take care that the outsourced books at the very least convey a similar kind of grimdark atmosphere, so novels could indeed be good to get people into the right mood. Just watch out for clashes in detail.

Crickate wrote:They still don't quite grasp just how hopeless everything is. They view themselves as heroes of change and hope rather than workers for the Inquisition. They're used to RPG's where you play that kind of character who is the hero who slays all evil and restores justice to the world.

Characters being naive and/or idealistic is okay, and possibly even refreshing (or at least offering some good RP opportunity), but the players should know better. A possible solution might be to simply confront them with the consequences of mercy. In a lot of instances, it may be true that the Imperium is unnecessarily cruel, but most of the time this cruelty is simply a reaction to very real threats that are much larger than noble intentions. When the fate of an entire world is at stake, the wellbeing of individuals is of no concern.

So, what you could do is have their mercy blow up in their face. Do not railroad them into one of those crappy "paladin falls" situations that seem designed only to push them into a corner, but just design an adventure in a way where the adversaries exploit the protagonists' naivety for their own designs, either by sending them the wrong way or just by protecting their schemes.

If you play your cards right, you can wreak havoc on your players' expectations. Perhaps that heretical cult they are sent to investigate is harmless, but the local noble coming down hard on them is secretly aligned with Chaos. Or the cultists try to convince the players of this, but the truth is that half the city - including this benign and popular local organisation - has been infested by Genestealers, a la the Universal Brotherhood of Shadowrun. The end goal must be to have your players trust no-one, especially not first impressions, and to have them want to scrutinise everything and look for clues that poke holes into the stories of the people they interview. Because they are the Inquisition, and there is no such thing as innocence ... only degrees of guilt.

 Crickate wrote:
They still don't quite grasp just how hopeless everything is. They view themselves as heroes of change and hope rather than workers for the Inquisition. They're used to RPG's where you play that kind of character who is the hero who slays all evil and restores justice to the world.
I'm thinking about the movie night, as well as a few youtube videos that might do well to summarize things.

You could change games to Rogue Trader. Its possible that they will feel more at home there as the players have a lot more scope, you will also be able to introduce the realities of the 41st millenium in a controlled manner. The Imperium is set up in such a way that being good in a contempory sense will lead to disaster sooner or later so let them be good and then before long Heretics have overrun their colony, the xenos they befriended have slaughtered a hive worlds population for food and there is a coven of tainted psykers whipping up a mutinty in the underdecks.