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You're all Guardsmen conscripted from a quiet frontier world. You're basically cowboys whose formal knowledge of the Imperium at large comes from reading the Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer. Have fun!
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May 15, 2018 04:36
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Pssh: You're all imperial hive worlders who work 12-hour shifts between going to mass, until you collude hiding a beautiful and whimsical fish xenos in a bathtub. Then some of you die in the ensuing shootout with the Inquisition and the rest are drafted by a radical. You're basically clueless and terrified 
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May 15, 2018 07:53
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MizPiz posted:What would be some good campaign hooks/storylines for a group who doens't know anything about 40k? This is something I'm throwing out for an eventual move, so broader advice would be the best. I talked about untouchables a few pages back. I know it's unlikely in the lore because they're so rare, but how about a party of untouchables in service to an Inquisitor, like Eisenhorn's Distaff? The Inquisitor (you as a GM-controlled NPC) discovers a bunch of untouchables (your players) on some backwater planet. Even though they're ignorant bumpkins, the Inquisitor finds them useful simply because they are anti-psykers. He makes them follow him around like attendants, protecting him from witches and daemons with their simple presence. Over time, he educates them in the ways of the Imperium so that they will become more useful. Because they're pretty much immune to corruption (take my advice and make this a house-rule), he more readily discusses the existence of daemons and Chaos, even if they're not actually hunting daemons. He is also more forgiving of minor heretical remarks because untouchables are too rare and valuable to excommunicate for small reasons. Bequin was just a hooker until Eisenhorn recruited and trained her. Kurzon fucked around with this message at 12:29 on May 15, 2018 |
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May 15, 2018 11:28
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Perhaps start the group as a local law enforcement team - maybe explicitly Arbites, who are easy enough to explain as Judge Dredd - on an unremarkable backwater planet who find something spooky and are then conscripted by an Inquisitor investigating the same spooky thing.
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May 15, 2018 14:22
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Kurzon posted:Which RPG are we talking about? Let's say Dark Heresy since JcDent covered Only War and the other three require some familiarity with the setting. As for the hook, it seems like the PCs would be in too passive of a role to make it interesting. Given the setting, I also don't want to make things too easy for the players or involve a ton of exposition. They'd deserve some mulligans, but I want a campaign that doesn't require me to guide the PCs or explain the lore when something happens (unless the players are just curious). The ideal would probably be one that emphasizes the horror over everything else.
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May 15, 2018 14:39
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MizPiz posted:Let's say Dark Heresy since JcDent covered Only War and the other three require some familiarity with the setting. put them through a gellar field failure during a long interstellar haul you don't have to exposit if you just describe things like the the prayers imperial sailors tend to scratch into the walls of their workstations and bunks, a lower-deck preacher who roams the halls fortifying souls against the terrors of warp travel, an old void-salt npc who talks about the time the dead started crawling out of the recyc vats or terribly beautiful daemonic faces started molding themselves into the bulkheads then something catastrophic happens aboard and the players get a full on introduction to the laughter of thirsting gods in the 41st millenium
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May 15, 2018 14:44
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zeal posted:put them through a gellar field failure during a long interstellar haul Start a game of Apocalypse World. The players are underdeck crew/hangers on on an Imperial starship. Play for a while. Do the Geller Field thing, the survivors get introduced to Imperial culture.
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May 15, 2018 14:50
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Do the gellar field failure. Make a stack of pregen characters and hand them out as you kill their characters with stuff that would normally be lovely and unfair like bulkheads blowing out and getting shredded by demons a regular character isn't equipped to fight. Then have them create their PCs who hear about the ship re-entering realspace years later and have to go salvage it or get something important off it. That way they get familiar with the setting, get an idea of how lethal things can be at the extreme end of things, and get to briefly try a gamut of skills and stuff to see what they like.
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May 15, 2018 14:53
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MizPiz posted:Let's say Dark Heresy since JcDent covered Only War and the other three require some familiarity with the setting.
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May 15, 2018 15:22
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Easiest thing to do is to start them on a backwater agri/mining world with early 20th century technology level apart from a few lasguns. The world grows/digs stuff for the glory of the God Emporor which gets transported off world. Every generation they have to raise a guard regiment to go off fighting. Because they are country bumkins all they need to know is the very basics of worshiping the right bloke. The rest can be added in when needed. Have them be in the guard regiment with tales of slaughtering the Emporors's enamies and then be back in time for the harvest 😀
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May 15, 2018 15:56
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The problem with that is: What use would an Inquisitor have for a bunch of know-nothing bumpkins? Inquisitors deal with very difficult and exotic problems. In the rulebook, there are all sorts off suggestions for giving your acolytes compelling skills that make them attractive to an Inquisitor: psychic powers, technical expertise, investigation skills, combat prowess, institutional connections, etc. The only skill your bumpkins all have to offer is that they know how to handle a lasgun. Yeah, every party needs at least one warrior, but it needs a mix of talents.
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May 15, 2018 16:15
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Or on the flipside, a bunch of clueless new psykers sent out on missions by their  Inquisitor, who's very sink or swim about it. "If the mission succeeds, great, that's one problem solved. If it fails, it purges the weak, also great, that's a different problem solved. This plan is great and there is no possible way this could backfire, I am a genius."Presumably the endgame is Give them some creepy Untouchable bodyguards for a bit of extra challenge.
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May 15, 2018 16:16
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"These bumpkins are Important" is exactly the kind of thing Tzeench would tell a radical Inquisitor just to gently caress with him.
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May 15, 2018 17:11
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Re: Random Bumpkin recruitment. I've always wanted to start out a campaign with a "Recruitment" vignette, wherein an Inquisitor takes groups of randos (convicts, disgraced guardsmen, washout psykers, etc), strapps bomb collars on all of them, and sends the lot out on a ridiculously hazardous assignment with a short timeframe to complete before the collars *pop*. Those that complete the job and survive (hopefully, the PCs) would then be the new Retinue to an extremely assholeish Inquisitor.
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May 15, 2018 17:22
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Alternatively, a kind but eccentric inquisitor who genuinely believes that the naivety of podunk farmhands will shield them from the horrors of the universe.
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May 15, 2018 17:35
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I think you guys are throwing too much wild, high lev poo poo at people who have no idea of the setting. Inquisitors as an introduction? I think the best suggestion was to start as arbites from some simple, slow world investigate some dudes breaking the law, introduce chaos as a cult or some tainted item and have them investigate/kill the associated people with said item or cult (or join them, blood for the blood god and all that) and than have a daemon pop out, nearly kill them all, and have an inquisitor step in as deus ex machina and go from there with all your psyker, crazy inquisition stories. When they finish the Arbites portion maybe give them a chance to reclass or redistribute skills into what they like to allow some flexibility, write it off narrative wise as extensive training and than send them off on wild adventures.
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May 15, 2018 17:56
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I'm not 100% certain that a party of people new to WH40K should include a psyker in the party. Having a psyker means that if you're going to play the setting straight at all, your players are going to run face-first into the fluff. Psykers are feared, psykers are treated like poo poo, psykers are hunted, and there are entire branches of the Imperium dedicated to snuffing you out/plugging you into Big Daddy E and snuffing you out that way/weaponizing you/abducting you for funsies. Plus, the basic rules do take some time to wrap a new player's head around, and the psyker rules just add another layer of administration that overcomplicates things. Not to mention that there are some nearly-mandatory talent picks for starting psykers that make them slightly safer, but require some experience with the system to know that 'I want to make my Psychic Phenomena roles pretty predictable' or 'I want to re-roll a Perils/Phenomena check, even at the expense of most of my health' are objectively good things to beeline for. All of this, of course, doesn't even consider the fact that fate is fickle - a new player rolling a psyker is probably going to become the daemons within the first session or two and inadvertently wipe the party. What's worse, it will probably occur when all they wanted to do was pick up that gun over there - with their mind(!) - just to be cool. Waroduce posted:I think you guys are throwing too much wild, high lev poo poo at people who have no idea of the setting. Inquisitors as an introduction?  Inquisitors roll pretty deep in the fluff, and that's without even considering all of the various possible factional flavors of Inquisitors that exist. Space cops are pretty simple though, and you could even start them in media res with them kicking down some doors and starting on a weirdly, horribly wild goose chase. Alternatively, one could start them off as a bunch of relatively stout but short - some might even say squat - people living idyllic lives, working in the mines and having relatively medieval levels of technology. All of this changes one day when a giant metallic spike falls from the heavens and starts spewing out taller but frail people who are poisoning the land and the minerals while your townsfolk begin mysteriously disappearing. What's more, other tall, frail people start descending from the heavens on metal boats to fight these other folks - but at least they're not shooting their magical red beams at you (unlike those other rude dudes). LuiCypher fucked around with this message at 18:17 on May 15, 2018 |
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May 15, 2018 18:07
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With respect, I think you guys are vastly over-estimating how complicated 40K fluff actually is. It doesn't take that much explaining.
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May 15, 2018 18:45
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i think most people can get by if you explain that it's sort of a mashup of Judge Dredd, Alien and Event Horizon set in the dizzyingly far and insanely terrible future
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May 15, 2018 18:47
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In the earlier dark heresy books, a lot of acolyte groups were one or more steps removed from the inquisitor anyway, and were recruited by someone in their retinue. There was also very much a "throw poo poo against the wall and see what sticks" approach to acolytes. So an interrogator might recruit a cell on bumpkin-world because they need something done there, and if they prove capable then get them some more equipment/education/whatever so they could be used in other situations. If not....well, just recruit a new cell on the next mission world and see if that one shakes out better. If you're wanting more of the iconic 40k stuff thrown in right off the bat, it seems like the new RPG is referencing the dark milennium stuff quite a bit and how random groups are kind of thrown together by necessity in the galactic disruption. Given how diverse the imperium is, you can probably just give them the broad strokes of an archtype (space marines, admech, etc.) and describe their interpretation as a quirk of that region's chapter/forgeworld/whatever.
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May 15, 2018 22:05
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dont even fink about it posted:With respect, I think you guys are vastly over-estimating how complicated 40K fluff actually is. It doesn't take that much explaining. It is and it isn't. Really, the setting is constructed in a way that you could play it more or less any way you want on any given planet, or have as much overlap between one thing and another as you want. There is rarely a straight yes or no answer to a lot of questions like this, which can kind of help to keep the stories rolling, imo
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May 15, 2018 22:16
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I hear the upcoming Wrath and Glory RPG will have this thing called "Tiers"? From what I've heard, characters don't level up by earning experience points, they just decide what Tier they want to play at for the campaign, and they calibrate their characters accordingly. Is this correct?
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May 15, 2018 22:16
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Kurzon posted:I hear the upcoming Wrath and Glory RPG will have this thing called "Tiers"? From what I've heard, characters don't level up by earning experience points, they just decide what Tier they want to play at for the campaign, and they calibrate their characters accordingly. Is this correct? Well we don't know exactly how XP works, but Tiers determine the power level of a campaign. As an analogue, Dark Heresy would be tier 1 or 2 starting out where Rogue Trader would be something like a 3 and Deathwatch would be Tier 5. You can tier up a character so they'll be more appropriate, so like, a Guardsman with a plasma pistol, Inquisitorial contacts, bionic replacements, etc. There's an article on their website about it.
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May 15, 2018 22:18
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Kurzon posted:I hear the upcoming Wrath and Glory RPG will have this thing called "Tiers"? From what I've heard, characters don't level up by earning experience points, they just decide what Tier they want to play at for the campaign, and they calibrate their characters accordingly. Is this correct? Yes. If you want to play an extremely grizzled tier 1 guardsman in a tier 4 game, you Ascend 3 times take a Scar each time to show how badass he (or she) is. This is 40k, so Scars are good.
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May 16, 2018 00:14
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I highly doubt that there won't be an XP system at all in a brand new 40K RPG, but what it sounds like they're doing away with is that thing where you'd make a higher level character by literally starting with a baseline character and then having to assign 10-15k XP worth of advancements. Instead you pick a Tier and there's a shorthand system in place to get everyone at the same general starting point, so you can have mixed parties of Guard vets and Space Marines and Sororitas and tech-priests and whatever in the tradition of numerous pieces of 40K fiction.
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May 16, 2018 02:51
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S.J. posted:It is and it isn't. Really, the setting is constructed in a way that you could play it more or less any way you want on any given planet, or have as much overlap between one thing and another as you want. There is rarely a straight yes or no answer to a lot of questions like this, which can kind of help to keep the stories rolling, imo Regardless, the basis of the setting is clear and departing from that basis is largely lipstick or missing the point of why you opened the box in the first place. As an example, I'm not sure where the interest in starting on a "normal" 40K world is coming from unless you're going to gently caress that planet up immediately as frame of reference.
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May 16, 2018 03:30
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I think I shared this story before, but the time I introduced new players to 40k setting I did it with Rogue Trader. They were all familiar with Star Trek, so I told them as a Rogue Trader you're like the enterprise exploring new worlds, only to financially exploit them. They would often ask what Imperial society would allow, and I would tell them, but then put on the caveat that your warrant lets you have a lot of leeway. "Imperial society would dictate you kill the xenos, but your Warrant lets you trade with them." Didn't last long, but my best friend, knowing nothing about Chaos, decided he was going to try to get as much corruption as the arch-militant as possible on the hopes of getting some of the strength or toughness increasing mutations in Rogue Trader, and not the negative one. Rest of the players kinda played along until it got to the point where he was trying to make a deal with a daemon that was guarding a ship they were trying to salvage. Then the Navigator found God (Emperor) and rallied the rest of the command crew to subdue him. So what I am saying is Rogue Trader lets you drip feed in 40k lore, without situations where players feel hamstrung by what they are doing is "illegal".
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May 16, 2018 13:33
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I've got a nice mix of people well-versed and completely-oblivious to 40k lore for my RT players. I've started off pretty easy with them but I've made it quite clear that the 'purge all xenos/for the Emperor!' style of play isn't actually what RTs are all about and that they have an awful lot of power and influence compared to the vast majority of humanity. Also one is an Ork and one is a Dark Eldar so they're never going to be the Emperor's darlings.
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May 16, 2018 14:34
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I wonder what Tier Ravenor's retinue would be at. (Or, what people thought they were getting with Dark Heresy.)
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May 16, 2018 15:29
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moths posted:Alternatively, a kind but eccentric inquisitor who genuinely believes that the naivety of podunk farmhands will shield them from the horrors of the universe. This right here is why 40k is good
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May 16, 2018 15:30
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Lord_Hambrose posted:This right here is why 40k is good Each time they meet him he's increasingly distressed at how his plan isn't working, especially after one of them ends up dead. He eventually succumbs to chaos.
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May 16, 2018 16:21
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Dawgstar posted:I wonder what Tier Ravenor's retinue would be at. (Or, what people thought they were getting with Dark Heresy.) iirc tactical marines are supposed to be tier 3. i'd say each of the Eisenhorn/Ravenor trilogies, in Wrath&Glory terms, show the tier 3 action that levels first Eisenhorn, then Ravenor, up to tiers 4 and 5. Gideon't Tier 4 scar is the damage that put him in the suspensor chair I reckon
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May 16, 2018 16:42
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zeal posted:iirc tactical marines are supposed to be tier 3. i'd say each of the Eisenhorn/Ravenor trilogies, in Wrath&Glory terms, show the tier 3 action that levels first Eisenhorn, then Ravenor, up to tiers 4 and 5. Gideon't Tier 4 scar is the damage that put him in the suspensor chair I reckon Fuuuuuuck, that’s perfect. And the face thing is Eisenhorn’s?
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May 16, 2018 17:02
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S.J. posted:Each time they meet him he's increasingly distressed at how his plan isn't working, especially after one of them ends up dead. He eventually succumbs to chaos. How far in do they learn they’re not his first (or second, or third...) group?
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May 16, 2018 17:06
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PantsOptional posted:Fuuuuuuck, that’s perfect. And the face thing is Eisenhorn’s? that was probably gregor's tier 4 scar. the rush job augmetics that get him walking again in the final Eisenhorn book are his Tier 5 scar
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May 16, 2018 17:10
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head58 posted:How far in do they learn they’re not his first (or second, or third...) group? It's never confirmed, but they keep finding clues that any number of other groups have existed (or currently do exist).
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May 16, 2018 20:19
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Running into other acolyte groups is the coolest poo poo, especially at higher levels where anyone keeping pace with the PCs is going to be just as baroque as them. Enter the vault to get the mcguffin only to see a bound demonhost, a man with a robotic pet tiger, and a Dr octopus looking techpriest, none of whom you've ever seen let alone know what their deal is.
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May 16, 2018 20:41
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Pharmaskittle posted:Running into other acolyte groups is the coolest poo poo, especially at higher levels where anyone keeping pace with the PCs is going to be just as baroque as them. Enter the vault to get the mcguffin only to see a bound demonhost, a man with a robotic pet tiger, and a Dr octopus looking techpriest, none of whom you've ever seen let alone know what their deal is. Death Cultist: "You know, if we kill them to be on the safe side, they probably ARE guilty of something. Emperor knows we are." Arbites: *Nods thoughtfully*
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May 17, 2018 00:37
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Werix posted:I think I shared this story before, but the time I introduced new players to 40k setting I did it with Rogue Trader. They were all familiar with Star Trek, so I told them as a Rogue Trader you're like the enterprise exploring new worlds, only to financially exploit them. They would often ask what Imperial society would allow, and I would tell them, but then put on the caveat that your warrant lets you have a lot of leeway. "Imperial society would dictate you kill the xenos, but your Warrant lets you trade with them." One of my good friends who's deep into 40k fluff uses a similar approach, and he's also had some pretty good results. This is probably the easiest/safest recommend for introducing new players, because you don't have to do anything differently than what Rogue Trader does by default.
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May 17, 2018 17:52
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I won't lie. The covers for the books look pretty.
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May 24, 2018 18:27
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