Dark Heresy

We ran our first session of Dark Heresy last night with me as games master. Dark Heresy is the roleplaying game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, a dark gothic universe filled with war, heresy and darkness. The players play as an investigative team for a powerful Inquisitor, trying to prevent the fall of the Imperium by preventing heretics, aliens or demons from rotting the empire from within. The background is filled with interesting material and there are plenty of good ideas both at the forums on the official site and at the Dark Reign fan site. Dark Reign is a new site, but it is filled with fan generated game tools and ideas, a real life saver.

I thought the rules work well, it was very useful to have Jeff there to help with the mechanics as I tend to focus more on story. The rules work on a percentile system and almost everything works as a percentage chance. I favor this as it lets you know right from the start your rough odds to do most anything. The only thing not on a percentile system is damage from the combat system which uses a ten sided dice for almost all results. This is a bit limiting, a sword does a d10 damage, so does a laspistol, so does a shotgun so to get around this they have added modifiers for the individual weapons as well as special rules for many of them. Armor and toughness reduce damage done but characters can go down pretty fast in battle if they get hit by bad die rolls.

Last nights game was a simple one, investigate a missing crewman in a cargo hold. This led to blood and combat as the xenos cause of the mystery was revealed. Nobody died (well, no player characters anyway. Life is hard on the NPCs) and I think by the end of the night we all had a good feel for how the combat works as well as other basic game mechanics. I haven’t run a roleplaying game in many years so I had to bite my lip often as the players decided how to investigate, the hardest part of game mastering is shutting up and letting them get on with the game. We have an interesting mix of characters with Jeff’s character emerging as the group leader by the end of the night. Looking forward to the next session.