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Hi there,
Did you ever try to link a Dark Heresy campaign with a Deathwatch campaign ?
I'm DMing a Dark Heresy campaign, and my players discovered a necron necropolis, awaking.
So, in the next game, they will have to repair the communications, and warn the Imperium about the necrons .
However, my players can't really fight necrons (as they are too powerful for level 3-4 players), or play after that (they can't survive a war against the necrons).

I had the idea to link this campaign with a deathwatch game or two, representing the reinforcements coming thanks to their action in the Dark Heresy campaign.

Any tips ?

Is Deathwatch worth it alone ? Or should I better invest in Black Crusade and forget my idea of linked campaigns ?

It can work as long as you don't mix the two in a single session. Marines are way too powerful for DH characters to walk around with, so keep them separate. But by all means mix the stories. I've thought about doing that myself.

Ah ah no, I never wanted to mix the two, don't worry^^
Rogue Trader character are really more powerful than a DH one, I don't even imagine a Space Marine !

 godardc wrote:

Is Deathwatch worth it alone ?

No. It's an awful system.

It might work as a one-off, say 1-2 sessions with quickly made (or premade) Space Marine characters who drop in to save your DH heroes. If you give them more time they'll break the game.

However, players maybe will have difficulties adapting to weakling DH characters after having a taste of Marines...

I can't comment on the systems themselves, but the idea is a great one. We did exactly this ten years ago but using a home-brewed D20 Future ruleset for the two sections.

We investigated a chaos cult, made some allies with some Tau, I secretly murdered our allies when no-one was looking because aliens are bad, inevitably it all went tits up and demons were summoned. We switched to marine characters for a couple sessions and had a great time blowing things up.

It was a nice change of pace from the sneaky investigation of the first bit, and it was great to be ridiculously overpowered for a couple weeks, but I would recommend keeping the marine sections short and sweet so the players don't come to hate their weaker PCs. That campaign is still memorable ten years later, so I say go for it!

Yeah that would be my suggestion as well. IMO it was a big mistake from FFG to attempt making Marines 'compatible' with DH & RT systems. It just made rules horribly cluttered and cumbersome and they still wouldn't be compatible because single Neophyte would easily wipe out a DH party. Deathwatch should have been a stand-alone system.

Backfire wrote:
IMO it was a big mistake from FFG to attempt making Marines 'compatible' with DH & RT systems.

Elaborate on this please. All the games use the same rule base. By default they are compatible with one another, but vary in power level.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Backfire wrote:
IMO it was a big mistake from FFG to attempt making Marines 'compatible' with DH & RT systems.

Elaborate on this please. All the games use the same rule base. By default they are compatible with one another, but vary in power level.

Yes, this is the problem. To increase Marines to suitable power level over human characters from RT and DH, they came up with enormous load of special rules, feats, talents, gear etc. which cluttered the game and made it impossible to balance. Yet it is for no use as you cannot mix & match RT and DW characters, because Marines are so much more powerful that it wouldn't be meaningful. So what was the point of making them nominally compatible?