What Nice Flagellations You Have – a Dark Heresy actual play
On Friday night, I got to play some Dark Heresy at last (tick another geek resolution off the list). Dark Heresy is the Warhammer 40,000 (commonly abbreviated to 40k) roleplaying game and I’ve been a big fan of the setting, if not the wargame rules, since high school. For the uninitiated, it’s basically a gothic horror sci-fi game set in a universe where everyone is fairly horrible – there’s lots of nasty demons, corrupt officials and generally bleak outlook. While none of the other players had ever played 40k before, luckily for me one player had done enough playing of the PC 40k game Dawn of War to get a sense of the setting which helped. In the RPG, you play ‘acolytes’, the agents for an Inquisitor who tasks you to seek out heresy, corruption and alien influence largely though extreme violence. Most of this is going to involve a fair amount of ’40k-speak’ I’m afraid so bare with me and I’ll provide links where I can.
I’ve got exactly no experience on running one-shot games so I enlisted some help at RPG.net and set to work. The problem is that running a one-shot in a system you’ve never played is tricky – especially when the key advice everyone gives you is ‘use pre-gens’. Making characters took forever, but I got some good advice at RPG.net and then at Dark Reign, and whipped up five options for what turned out to be three players. I got:
- Mae, an assassin with a long las (sniper rifle) and twin chainswords;
- Constantine, a cleric; and
- Able, a psyker.
I ran a guardsman called Octus to help round out the party and my poor, slaved over Arbitrator went unused. All the PCs were rank 4 – that’s where Dark Heresy characters get to start using some pretty cool things – heavy weapons, prominent psychic powers and the like. I played up the ‘grimdark‘ nature of the setting a bit too much I think, but the caricature helped people get into the appropriate mood.
The mission was pretty simple: go here, clean out the traitor heretic scum from these tunnels and come back alive – in other words a dungeon crawl. And while I thought I’d prepared adequately – 5 encounters, with some easily removed, pre-generated characters and a fairly clear linear plot with little room for distraction my friends proved, once again, that they can fuck up the best laid plans.
They snuck down the stairwell and listened at the metal door, with Mae and her heightened senses hearing some low chatter and grumbling form the room beyond so Able decided to use his Frightening Aura power so they could scare their enemies once they got the door open.
Now, as fans of Dark Heresy and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay know, supernatural powers are dangerous things. In Dark Heresy even time you roll a 9 while trying to ‘cast’ one of your psychic abilities something bad happens. In this case, Able’s party mates were driven into a frenzy and threw open the door and charged without a care for their own survival. This clearly made things a bit difficult – they ran right to the line of barrels the gang members who had been paid to wait for them had put up for cover. While they recovered quickly, Able managed to then accidentally cause an earthquake and then call down a mass possession – a psychic attack lasting 11 rounds on everyone within 100 meters by rolling 9s for the first three things he did in the game.
The game went, well, not down hill but certainly a little weird from there. The PCs proceeded to the next room, filled with exploding barrels and gun servitors (heavily armed cyborgs) while the possession was in full swing meaning that half of them were on the ground being ravaged by psychic pain every round. Not the smartest tactical move, but certainly an interesting option.
Unfortunately, real life intruded a bit and we didn’t get to finish the scenario as people needed to head off to children and partners. Everyone seemed to have fun though and I got to try out a game that’s been on my to do list for some time and although I didn’t get to drive them mad and/or dead with the final demon encounter, we did get the aforementioned psychic phenonema to entertain us. The best line of the night has to be the one I included in the title of this post:
What Nice Flagellations You Have
Dark Heresy includes a ‘talent’ some PCs can purchase which enables them to temporarily increase their Willpower in return for doing themselves damage – very flavoursome and appropriate for the setting.
Which brings me to rules. Dark Heresy has a lot of good stuff in common with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (unintentional effects of magic/psychic powers) with some nice additional extras (automatic fire, fatigue). Some of the same problems still exist however – even at rank 4 we still had a lot of missing shots from both sides and once parry and dodge rules come into play it can take a long time to resolve combat. When a hit does connect, it can be brutal (especially with open ended damage dice) and after a lot of the enemy gang members passed out from fear of the psyker and as a side effect of the psychic storm, they met their ends pretty quickly.
I’d like to run another Dark Heresy game sometime soon – perhaps as a small, 5 or 6 session campaign rather than a one-shot so I can do more investigation and the like. Like the fantasy version, the rules are serviceable with a few bright spots rather than fantastic rules I’d use for everything, but we certainly had a lot of fun in my older Bretonnia game so I think we could have a good time here as well.
6 Comments to What Nice Flagellations You Have – a Dark Heresy actual play
Hey Nick
Thanks for the game. I thought it was fun: especially the unintentional effects, which are particularly entertaining in a one shot.
In a 5-6 session campaign these effects would introduce a great tension: between using the pyschic powers but having a game long enough where the consequences of mishaps could be long enough in effect to make you pause before shooting off another firebolt.
Like you say, I think the system isn’t well geared for lots of combat. The bretonia games has been setting heavy and combat light, and worked best of any of the warhammer rpg campaigns we’ve played.
Petter WässMarch 18, 2009
Nice to see that the scenario went well.
DH is one of my favorite games and psykers make it even more fun and random as well as very, very dangerous.
My longest running campaign had a psyker who eventually ended up:
Missing eyes (could see anyway)
About 100 corruption points
About 50 insanity points
A pretty nasty deamon lodged in his head (Tip: do NOT pick up deamonweapons with your bare hands!)
Giving about 20 insanity and 50 or so corruption points to his long suffering party mate (a tech-priest who honestly hated the psyker’s guts)
Killing the better part of an Imperial Guard regiment with a psychic misshap
Killing of about 20 innocent bystanders with another misshap
Sacrificing 5 people (usually allies)to appease his head-deamon
Finally dying in a self-created firestorm when he tried to sacrifice the poor techpriest to the deamon.
I love this game!
Tom ClarkMarch 20, 2009
Thanks for this report, Commisar M. I was rather busy quelling a Zoat rebellion on the night, but look forward to meeting your hardy adventuring comrades soon.
Petter – One of my instructions to the players was that some one had to pick the psyker.
Simon – to be honest, there’s some options for combat we didn’t explore because … I forgot. Suppressing fire and the like. They’d be interesting to try out. But over all the whiff factor stays too high – miss, miss, miss, hit dead isn’t actually more fun than hit, miss, hit, hit, hit, hit, hit, dead.
ChrisOctober 31, 2009
Later on when you get to the point where you are actually creating NPC enemies for the party it will probably get better. Myself having played a psyker though have found that my GM HATES the abilities of psykers, as he attempts to make me useless…but hey a psyker with 70WP is a force to be reckoned with, especially with psychic blade ( d10+14 pen 14 Rending use WP instead of WS to attack,AND it takes no hands to wield)
I think when you get more used to it you will find more appropriate enemies that do not die in one shot, like the Orks in creatures anathema that was released around summers start.
Dark Reign is a great site to pick up additional information as well since they have PDFs of different weapons, as well as information for playing a Space Marine campaign like what I am currently working on. If you like more combat oriented play SM is better than Inquisition, but you can put twists in to make it so they still have to use there minds and not just shooting.
But yeah, as you learn more this game is AMAZING, and I’ve been addicted to it for the last year.
NickNovember 4, 2009
We only played the one off at this point (and now I’ve moved to Singapore) but I’d like to get into it as a player. Although now Rogue Trader is out maybe I’d prefer to play that!
March 18, 2009