Inquisitors Galore: A Review of the Eisenhorn and Ravenor Trilogies

My introduction to the body of Warhammer 40k literature was the Ciaphas Cain books, which is a bit odd in retrospect; while a great series of novels, they are hardly representative of the body as a whole. Nonetheless, I quickly read all six books thanks to generous loaning from Max, and after finishing craved more 40k fiction goodness. After doing some research, it seemed that Dan Abnett was considered the premier 40k author, and that many people recommended the Gaunt's Ghosts series as an excellent starting place.

The series itself is fantastic--I tore through all 13 of the novels in short order, leaving it not only my favorite 40k series, but one of my favorite novel series overall, right up there with Discworld and the X-Wing series. Perhaps even someday I'll get around to writing a review of them.

Anyway, after exhausting that trove, I once again felt the craving for more, and taking advantage of a gift card sitting long un-used, purchased more of Dan Abnett's 40k books, most notably the two Inquisitorial

Sinister Sacrilege: The End

(What, a post not about Starcraft? Heres-*BLAM*)

Last night was (sadly) the final session of the Dark Hereblam campaign, and so now that the plot is over I'm finally at liberty to discuss some overarching things I'd been trying the campaign. First though, a short synopsis.

• #4, played by Kory: A young, talented and most importantly brainwashed and intellectualy stunted assassin
• The Linear, played by Rome: A quiet, trigger-happy man from an out-of-touch space wreck where he was the law
• "Cantor" Remski, played by Jesse: A priest who spread his word through heavy raaawk and flames, and his passion through... flames.
• Callidon, played by Aaron: An optimistic psyker who didn't explode into Daemons, much to everyone's disappointment (especially my own)
• Daret, played by Max: A pragmatic techpriest hankerin' to be a cowboy nerfherder groxherder.

The story began on a Black Ship on its way to Terra (unbeknownst to the above) that suddenly suffered a massive failure, due to the 13th Black Crusade breaking out (again without the PCs knowing). In their investigation they eventually discovered that parts of the Guard unit stationed on board were in fact Genestealer cultists, and eliminated them and the Genestealers with extreme prejudice. After landing they were tasked with following up another section of the same tainted regiment that had landed days earlier, and eventually tracked down the group and avoided a large shoot-out in a saloon, but let the cultists escaped. They pursued, and found the cultists in a firefight with another group of cultists. The 'Stealer cult was finally killed off, and the PCs turned on the other cultists and killed many of them, but not before they finished summoning a Daemon. They managed through extreme cleverness to kill it off, and were sent home, but sent back the next day to continuing hunting down the heretic leaders, since reports of other daemon-summonings were occurring all across Terra. Despite failing abjectedly at investigative skills, they eventually determined found a safehouse of the heretics, which happened to be the main base at the moment. Despite an early attempt at subterfuge the infiltration again quickly turned into a run and gun fight, eventually culminating in an epic confrontation involving a number of heretics, 4 psykers, 4 arco-flagellents, and a heretic leader clad in power armor, as two warp circles seemed to be being summoned. Through a heroic sacrifice by #4 (and much to by chagrin), they managed to stop one of warp circles and kill all the heretics, preventing a flood of daemons from entering the Eternity Gate (the idea was that a single powerful summoning would be quickly noticed by the forces of Terra, but if dozens were occurring all over the planet they could only respond so quickly, so opening two in one location: one to the Warp, and the other (ideallly to the Golden Throne but Warp-magic is rarely so precise) to the Eternity Gate would cause massive massive problems). Fortunately for the Imperium "the Good Guys" managed to prevent this, and also dove heroically through the warp-portal after their fallen comrade, only to find him barely alive in front of the Eternity Gate, being stared at in shock by a number of Custodes and two Imperial Titans. Luckily they managed to avoid getting shot by a narrow margin, and forces arrived to apprehend them and take them away, and thus this chapter of their story ended.

I mean, in all likelihood they were all executed for extreme exposure to the Warp and Chaos, but hey, you never know. They were designed to be somewhere in between regular acolytes and a full inquisitor, and while the former would be executed, the latter definitely wouldn't. You decide ;-)

Anyway, the biggest thing I tried this time around was planning. For the "Inquisitor" campaign, I did a lot of pre-planning, had a cool story and arc planned out, etc. For this campaign, while researching Dark Heresy things online, I found a guide suggesting to not plan and just be spontaneous. I decided I would try it, for better or for worse.

Of course, it wasn't completely without planning. I had to have a little bit of an idea before each session, if only to make maps. But I was never planning ahead more than the immediate session. As stated, this session started aboard a ship. I like ships, because there is only a finite number of places to go and things to do, and I like genestealers, so that's what it was. It was a great way to get used to the system and try out the whole "be spontaneous" thing, so I let my PCs do whatever they wanted, and I think it was a success. We then got to Terra, and although I gave them a bit of direction, once they got to the first location they were all on their own, ending up with things like The Linear pointing a gun at an innocent guard's head to wake him up or the group deciding to rappel up a building to avoid spiders and try to snipe the driver of a tank. I think overall the last few sessions went the smoothest, since I had figured out what exactly did need to be planned and what didn't, and also was familiar with the system and what I needed to do/not do (like not show models on the board before they explored a room). I think we had some great moments that would not have occurred had I not planned ahead, and although I was slightly panicky at times wondering what I  was going to do this session, I always figured out something, and despite the complete lack of fore-planning I think the overarching story is remarkably coherent. This style meant I was able to deal with PC spontaneity well, since I was being spontaneous too.

Another facet of this style was hopefully unexpected by my players, and that had to do with a questionnaire I had them innoncently fill out early on. I held off using it for the first few sessions, but the entire time I had a list like this:

Ways to mess with PCs

-Make a saloon for Daret

Make Grox for him to catch

-Bring #4’s master back

-Bring Boris and Slant in for Callidon

Bring out Catachan Mega-Bees for Callidon

-Arcoflagellents for Remski

Noise Marines for Remski

Transport back to Bio Anthem for Linear

-For fun bring back Brutus, Slant, and/or Grant

The ones marked with a hyphen I actually accomplished, and had the session gone one further I had been contemplating something like the Warp Gate contaminating them but sending them to the Bio Anthem, where they'd have to search for a cure on the Linear's old home while fighting off things like (you guessed it) Catachan Mega-Bees. I think the coolest example of how this worked out well (well, a number of them were cool, but this was was also rail-breaking) was having #4's master reappear an Arco-flagellent. I felt given his master's crimes, such a punishment would have made sense, and since it's hard to perform I figured the likelihood of being sent to Mars to have it done was pretty high, and then to be shipped to Terra (and then stolen) not unfeasible. Remski also being terrified of them helped a lot. When I introduced the fact that one of the "scary guys" in the back was also #4's master, I didn't prompt Kory to do anything about it, I just let him know. He responded with an excellent piece of role-playing where he froze for a number of rounds (prompting much concern from his teammates) and apparently he ended up flipping a coin as to what #4 would do, and got the better result, that of charging his master (and ALL of the remaining combatants) and setting off 3 frag grenades on his person, killing everyone within an 8 meter radius (i.e. ALL of my enemy NPCs). He also disrupted both warp circles, but a well-played Drama Card meant he instead got flung through the portal to the Eternity Gate, which had coincidentally just finished being made. 

The irony was that besides the leader and the arcos (the former having been laughing the entire time) there was just one apiece of the heretics and psykers, and the next turn I actually would have unleashed the arcos, and the turn after that was when the Gates would have finished manifesting, and the Leader would have led a swarm of daemons into the Imperial Palace where an epic showdown between the Custodes, Titans, and swarms of Daemons would have taken place, with the PCs stuck in the middle of it all. But an excellent piece of role-playing prompted by my dickery stopped all that. I'm actually incredibly pleased with it, since despite losing a cool set-piece idea it was a really cool martyr moment that stopped a horrible horrible sacrilege from occurring. And I think now that my players read this they will also be happy they managed to stop that :-P

Finally, on the subject of drama cards, they were much more appreciated than I expected. At the end of one session I offered either one player a fate point (which are far more versatile and, I thought, more useful) or two players a drama card (which can be sometimes bad and always situational). I thought it would be a tough choice, but there was hardly any debate and they went straight for the two drama cards. I'm curious whether had I offered two of either which way they would have chosen. This may however just my players sharing my enjoyment of the drama cards'...well, drama.

Anyway, I know I have more to say about this campaign, but I've already written a lot, so I shall save the rest for another day. I enjoyed DMing the campaign a whole lot, and my players state they did as well, so I hope someday in the future we may once again embark on a quest to rid the world of evil and redeem all the bad guys ;-)

-HTMC

Sinister Sacrilege: The Third Session

When we last left our brave Acolytes, they had successfully fought off an attempt at Tyranid incursion aboard a Black Ship and were now landing on Holy Terra as the 13th Black Crusade erupted around them. Ignoring that major event, they were tasked to keep hunting Tyranids! In case another ship carrying more of the troops that had the Genestealer Cult had made it to Terra. Hilarious hijinks and a lot of bad rolling later, you get this. But our brave Psyker does a lot better at summarizing than I would do, so I turn once again to the GM's perspective on things.

First off, as I've written elsewhere (although maybe not on this blog?) I really like leveling up and advancing and getting shiny new toys. One of the chief complaints with Orpheus that I had was that once you started, it was incredibly hard to really get better, and you were pretty much at your peak from the get-go. Contrast this starkly with DnD 4e, where you're constantly improving both in stats, skills, and if you have a cool DM, equipment. I think Dark Heresy strikes a good balance, since your stats are mostly maxed although you can spend to improve them to a certain extent, but you are constantly learning new abilities (and again, if you have a nice GM getting cool equipment). However, this is besides the point. Since I do like leveling up and stuff, I suspect that it rubs off on my GM style in how I reward my players. The DH rulebook recommends something like 200xp for every 4 hours played, whereas I last session awarded 500 xp for about the same amount of time played. I know in my position I would want to get to the higher ranks quicker, to be able to start to do really cool things, thus I was pretty generous with my doling out (plus, killing a heretic is something like 50xp, I feel that killing a bunch of Genestealers is thus worth a lot more). Unsure of the money thing, I just gave the same amount, 500tg to do with as they wanted (and as I suspected, a lot of them bought armor). I also found the cool set of Drama Cards, which I adjusted for use in Dark Heresy, and I actually want to give them out, since although they can make my work slightly harder in some cases, they're really cool effects and I look forward to seeing how my PCs make use of them.

I suspect in certain ways being generous like this makes life as a GM harder. PCs are better equipped and harder to kill and have more ways to get out of traps, jump rails, etc. But on the other hand,  I feel like it leads to a lot more interesting gameplay with your PCs trying different things. For instance, I gave Max grappling hooks since he asked nicely, and they ended up doing a wall-walk with the Psyker to get on top of the building. I think the group I play with prizes cleverness and imagination over straight killing of things, so giving them more skills and equipment to do this leads to more interesting events. And on the plus side, it gives me an excuses to throw harder enemies at them, which is more fun from my perspective.

The one thing I'm unsure of is how much people like drops vs. buying their own stuff. It's definitely easier for me to let people just buy what they want (and given the Inquisitorial background this makes perfect sense) but I also don't know if people in general prefer to find their own things. I know with the last D&D campaign I played it was much more about person specific drops, but in D&D it's also much more about armor and main weapon, whereas in DH you have a lot more choices and things you could get (such as gun sights, grenades, special ammo, etc. as well as a large range of weapons). If anyone has any insight on this, let me know.

To switch topics, I also tried out something new that somewhat worked. Dark Heresy pretty much boils down to either investigation or combat. The problem with investigation is it is often not controlled in any way. There are ways around that, but things like "you need to find the control panel before the ship blows up" have their own downside as well. Instead, what I decided to try was to punish failed investigations, something that doesn't happen in a normal session. Emma (who would be quite the sadistic GM given her suggestions to me, such as one of the first questions after a session being "Did anyone die? Any serious injuries?) wanted to have her own spiders inserted into the plot (specifically large, radioactive spiders that paralyzed people) so I created the Extreme Mobile Mutant Arachnids. Basically what happened was the cargo hall the PCs were investigating was, well, large, and I assume places like that have vermin. How it worked was whenever a PC would do an investigative roll, if they failed the roll by more than 2 degrees, a pair of EMMAs would spawn and attack, with an additional EMMA for every additional degree of failure.

They were meant to be more annoying then truly deadly, since they were fast but also very low toughness and weak attacks, and the paralyzing could be treated with a simple medicae test. However, for whatever reason the PCs had difficulty killing them, and they also investigated far far less than I expected, and went the more combat route (see: Rome pointing a gun at a Guardsman's head to wake him up). However, I think it worked well and I might adapt the idea for the future.

Also, strangely enough, my rolling was unnaturally luck for my NPCs whereas the PCs suffered from an unending string of bad luck. For instance, the Chimera driver managed to stave off spasming from a psyker attack despite having low Willpower, and an on-fire Guardsman managed to critically avoid getting hit a second time with a flamer... twice (that's two 5% rolls) and given how awesome that is, he put the fires out with his amazing dodge. Meanwhile, Max managed to jam his gun twice in one session (again, that's two 5% likelihood rolls) and various other bad things happened, like Rome diving into a glass window and bouncing off and Kory failing to read a basic written document. Despite these setbacks the PCs still emerged triumphant.

Finally, one complaint about the DH as a system. DH relies on a lot of situation modifiers, especially in terms of combat. I'd been struggling to keep all of them in mind during combat, but given how many different things could be in effect, this was at times hard. Luckily Kory in a move of brilliance wrote out all of them (an impressive achievement) which will hopefully help the others remember them, and between us we'll actually get all of them. I do think in general it's a cool idea, and if you're playing DH a lot I imagine it'd get a lot easier and simpler, but adding a lot of modifiers in general can be a chore and can slow down gameplay. But as I said, hopefully the group working together can alleviate this, and maybe it gives a reason to pay attention during other people's combat turns.

Because I missed last week, we're doing a second session tomorrow night, so expect another update then.

-HTMC

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

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