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So I got ahold of some copies of the Black Crusade rulebooks and as a Chaos fan, it's pretty great.

However, I do know that it has a reputation for being a "difficult" RPG, and it's easy to see why. The "races" are VERY mismatched, with CSM characters being overpowered in combat, but limited in other skills and pretty hopeless at fitting into any setting that isn't Chaos dominated. The human characters are more versatile and far better at infiltration, but underpowered in combat against CSMs and other powerful threats. It seems like this makes it somewhat difficult to balance adventures to give both types of characters plenty to do.

On top of that, a lot of roleplayers could have trouble wrapping their heads around playing Chaos aligned (often oversimplified to "evil") characters.


Is it best to play Dark Heresy as a sort of "training wheels" to get used to the basic rules before attempting to play Black Crusade?

Might it be a good idea to play with ONLY CSM or human characters and not both? Or would that be too limiting? I'm asking because I was thinking, if I get a chance to run a game, of making it "enemy within" themed and limiting players to human characters who have are working in Imperium territory.

Who here has played the game, or is familiar with it? What are your thoughts?

I've found that in our games, it works best if either everyone is human or marine, in which case everyone is on a level playing ground so the campaign is easier to balance, have a very small number(Maybe 2 in 6 max) characters be allowed to play as marines; these guys are essentially the big guns that tower the frontline, or if there is a heavy number of people that want to play marines and others want to play exclusively humans, have the marines as special assets, so each player can make a marine but must also make a human character, each player can use their marine or human, however they must take it in turns using their marine per mission or, if the players agree, bring along the most capable marine for the situation they expect (Eg, Gladiatorial coliseum for a daemon artefact? bring the Khornate zerker, night raid? Bring the Night lord.)

I have played it as all humans with the enemy within theme you mentioned. It was great fun and not substantially different from many other "espionage/black ops" style campaigns except in setting.