Sinister Sacrilege: The Second Session

Last week was the second session of Dark Heresy, although in terms of my overall campaign planning it was more like session 1.5. However, we did finish the session plot arch and apparently everyone enjoyed themselves. For another excellent summary see that other guy's blog. But again from my perspective as GM, some other things came up during the session that I felt like I should comment on, so I shall.

The first has to do with players. Although I already know they can be surprisingly inventive (especially the group I play with) I got lulled back into a false sense of security the first session, since everything pretty much went Blaykakudori (Blaykaku means Blake's Plan). This session was full of surprises, though, from having Jesse's character start a rock concert to attract the attention of some heretical guards, Aaron attempting to go Inception-like on an unconscious Navigator, and Max made a smart but not expected by me move of accessing security records for the ship. All of these were very good ideas and most of them ended up gaining the PCs some advantage, but also meant I was constantly adjusting, which was interesting. The Inquisitor campaign I did was much more railroaded, almost like an on-rails shooter, whereas this session was designed to be "you're on a ship, go whereever you want." Thus the more interesting ideas.

Probably the most unexpected one had do with Inquisitor Schuld (alternatively called many other things by PCs, who have an annoying habit of never remembering any NPCs name). My plan for him was to be a nice friendly trainer Inquisitor just for the ship-board portion of the campaign, and then once the Broodlord and Genestealers rushed onto the scene, he would valiantly take on the Broodlord and they would mutually murder each other. What I didn't expect was for my PCs to ignore the Genestealers (and be finished with the Servitors and Guardsmen) and focus their entire fire for a turn on the Broodlord. I obviously couldn't just let them do that without any effect, so the Broodlord ended up seriously mauled while Inquisitor Schuld (or Badassius if you're Max) waltzed in and finished him off. So in effect, my PCs saved an NPC I had earmarked for death. I suspect this will have significant ramifications later. I guess the moral of the story for me is be prepared for anything.

Another factor that I'm forced to be conscious of is game balance, not in the sense of difficulty but in activities. I have 5 PCs, all with different talents and foci, and it would be bad form to focus on one are too much. For instance, a couple of the PCs are definitely combat-focused, whereas one is pretty much all out of combat mischief. Overall they're lacking in people-skills (as they found out when their friendly cleric went AWOL and the person with the best people-skills was, of all things, a Tech-priest) and are stacked more so in the ranged department (again found out when their cleric disappeared and they all stuck to ranged fire). I think this last session struck a good balance, with about 2 hours of investigation and 1.5 of combat, and future sessions will hopefully be somewhat more tailored to skills they have and enemies will also be made with them in mind.

Finally, a third problem I encountered (that hopefully wasn't a problem) was again linked to PC initiative and creativity. Obviously I had a lot of background planning and stuff done, in terms of what has happened before the "session" starts and what is going on during it. Obviously this was meant to be discoverable by the PCs, although they can't do it naturally. The problem arises when they either fail their skill checks or they don't bite on the hooks you give them. For instance, had they investigated the cargo room before attacking it they likely would have learned about the weirdly broken boxes, but they didn't follow the hints I dropped and choose to go later purely on the attack, and thus not be able to investigate. Thus the Genestealer attack probably seemed a lot more out of the  blue than I intended, although hopefully my after-action debriefing made it make a little bit more sense. Although I didn't hear any "wtf's?" from the players, when I brought them out I totally had a "seriously guys this has an explanation, trust me" mindset. And of course Rome choose to question things like shift schedules and guard rotations, something I had never considered at all. So moral of the story is again don't plan on PCs necessarily investigating where you want or asking the questions you'd think they'd ask.

But, as I said, it was another great session, and brought to light (as you can see) a number of issues that'll hopefully make future ones even better. Emperor knows where the merry band of "The Good Guys" will end up next (hint: it won't be pleasant).

-HTMC