Sinister Sacrilege: The First Session

This past Thursday I ran the first session of my Dark Heresy Campaign. A post from the player's perspective (and a considerably more entertaining one at that) can be found out at Mister Flask's blog, but I will add my own thoughts in from the GM's perspective (also skip down below for some additions to what Mr. Flask wrote).

For the record, Dark Heresy is a pen and paper RPG set in the Warhammer 40k universe, and this game features myself GMing and 5 PCs all playing over the internet.

First off, a problem I forsaw but didn't suspect would be quite so large: programs. When I ran Inquisitor (another 40k RPG, but not quite as good) last January, it was text-only and so we ran it exclusively through Vassal (with some Skype group IMing supplementing). We all had had Skype for quite some time, and the 3 PCs (Stormshrug, Flask, and Jesse) had all used Vassal before with me to play tabletop 40k. So set-up was relatively painless.
However, the addition of Voice for this campaign made things considerably more difficult. Although I had tried to make sure everyone was set up ahead of time, here's how things went down.
6:00- Kory and Rome are on. Rome realizes Voxli, the internet based group chat program I had planned to use, wasn't compatible with Linux, which I didn't know he was running
7:00- Rome manages to get Mumble/Murmur (think open-source Ventrilo/TeamSpeak) running on a personal server. We start trying to get everyone to install Mumble.
8:00- Problems installing Mumble continue. We realize not everyone has Vassal up and runnin
9:00- Stormshrug arrives, needs to download both programs. Takes some time.
9:30- Flask arrives, needs to download Mumble. Takes some time
10:00- Rome decides to restart computer since he's made so many changes. Problems occur and the Murmer server goes down with it
10:30- Finally, everything seems to be working, although Flask is having significant difficulties hearing and being heard. We start anyway
11:00- Jesse arrives, downloads Mumble, joins later
12:00- We end.

So despite having everyone try to be on by 8, we don't actually start until 2.5 hours later and only play for 1.5 hours, and probably less than that when you factor in interruptions. However, the PCs were very efficient in that short time frame. Here's my synopsis, since unfortunately Flask left out a couple minor details, probably due to the aforementioned voice difficulties.

PCs awaken on a ship yanked out of the Warp, and are tasked with investigating. They first head to the Bridge and look around, questioning a man who looks like he's in charge (he was actually the First Officer, but the PCs never bothered to ask, for whatever reason). From there they proceeded to the Power Generator Room, which led to the Engine room, only to be blocked to to lack of access privileges. After a lot of diplomacy they managed to secure the name of a commanding officer, and headed to a prison ward to meet with him, and eventually managed to secure the necessary authorization to enter the engine room. They also got hints about strange goings-on on the ship prior to Warp trouble, which presumably occurred during the long period they were in a virtual reality machine undergoing training.

Anyway! Notes on the session from my perspective.

One problem I didn't foresee was accents, strangely enough. Because I was actually having to voice my NPCs, I felt it necessary to differentiate my voice between characters. I tended to fall back on a  British one automatically, for whatever reason, although I think a Germanic one entered at one point. I'm not sure how good/bad they sounded, but it's definitely something to both practice and write down for important NPCs.

Speaking of which, I don't know how much my fellow members have noticed, but I tend to fall back on straight German when in need of a non-standard name (which isn't surprising given my recent Austrian adventure). For instance, my Orpheus character had the last name Gotteson and he was a priest (misspelling intentional), two of my Inquisitors are called Glaub and Schuld, and an upcoming character has the surname von Droß, among other things. I actually don't know how many of them ran these names through translators (and I'm sure they will now), but they're usually appropriate in some way. I don't feel too bad about this though, since even Games Workshop has given us the Death Korps of Krieg and the Mordian regiment (War and Murder, respectively). Although sometimes I feel like I'm getting a bit too particular (not everyone in 40k can be Germanic) it's very useful to have another language to draw upon, especially one that fits well with the universe.

I also designed this session to be a bit more open-world. The PCs managed to find a map in the beginning, and had their choice as to where to investigate. I actually made a number of maps of common rooms in the ship, and the PCs were free to go whereever they wanted. I did have some concern over what kind of options they would take, and did a kind of quick practice run through with Emma (i.e. you're here and this happened, what would you do next?) and the PCs actually matched fairly well what she did, which is pretty much what I was expecting. What I was not expecting was the number of high rolls the PCs managed, including a few rolls I thought they were definitely going to miss since they had pretty high difficulty. They also tended to do a lot more social interaction and less straight up investigating, although I'm not sure if that's the situation in particular or the way I'm setting up the scene, so we'll see.

One problem that I'm lucky I planned ahead for was power and authority. In the 40k universe, the Inquisition has essentially unlimited power and ultimate authority. I guessed (and correctly at that) that the PCs would naturally abuse this as much as possible, which is especially easy while onboard an Imperial vessel where theoretically they have ultimate control. The solution was to make the PCs still in training while aboard the vessel, and thus not be official members of the Inquisition. They naturally still had an Inquisitor boss to fall back on when needed (and they did a couple times) but this handicap kept them from just charging through and doing anything they wanted without repercussions, which made for a much more interesting session, I think.

Overall though, everything seemed to be going pretty well. Once all the electronic problems were resolved, everyone was in character and making smart decisions, and putting asides Flask's communication problems (due to lousy internet) everyone seemed engaged and involved, which I think is in no small part due to the addition of voice. I have high hopes for the continuation of this session this Thursday, especially since combat is likely, and it should be a blast as soon as they make it off the ship (well, assuming they survive that long).

On a final note, the one biggest thing I picked up from Inquisitor (the last campaign) that seems really obvious but I didn't catch onto right away was that as a GM, I'm playing with the PCs, not against them. I think the problem was that as a video game player, I'm by and large used to competitive gameplay, where I'm trying to always "win," although the objective and means may change. Even as a PC in the other RPGs, I was still trying to "win" against whatever the GM threw at us. Thus I went into Inquisitor as almost "me against the PCs," which reared his ugly head when a PC came up with a clever way around a trap, and rather than let him do it I said no because it didn't fit with what I had planned. Obviously this led to a sour mood, and although I realized my error a bit later and "fixed" it, I still felt really bad for a while afterwards. Although there was some RPGs where it is indeed GM vs. PCs, Dark Heresy I feel isn't one of them. The PCs want to be challenged, want the potential to lose, but I don't think they want to feel that the GM is out to get them. Rather, I'm there to set a good scene and give the chance to overcome hard odds, and my enjoyment comes more from seeing the creative ways and approaches the PCs take. I made my PCs put a lot of effort into character creation, and I think it would be hard for both me and them if one of them died (not to say I won't do it if that's what happens, since it is 40k after all, but again that's not my goal per se). An RPG is a social event, and should be fun for everyone, if challenging a lot of the time. And if I want to get my way while still GMing, well, that's what NPCs are for.

Comments as always are welcome! Expect more updates weekly as the campaign progresses.

-HTMC