Quote from: CRKrueger;901992...the current status of 40k canon is thinner and less well-designed then your average 80's Saturday morning cartoon show.  The whole setting is backdrop, a very well-painted tapestry with the thickness of onionskin.

You've given me the inspiration to run a DH game in Cartoon Action Hour 3!

"Next time on Darkest Heresy, Inquisitor Marius sends the team to Hive World Figaro, when Tech-Priest Rapidius realizes that XENO X IS ACTUALLY HIS BROTHER!"

Quote from: Crüesader;902056So while we're bullshittin' here- how you guys feel about running a game through Skype and the Tabletop simulator?

Quote from: yabaziou;902126Time zone consideration. I'm in France, and I'm pretty we do not share the same time zone. It is a pity because I acually would have give it a try ! It would have been a better use of our time that bemoaning about the craziness of the current culture war (in with I will sinde with the victor, as I wound to do as a French man euh person ! ^_^) !

If you're gonna play it anyway, I want it recorded and shared. FOR THE GREATER GOOD! :cool:

Quote from: AaronBrown99;902133Tech-Priest Rapidius realizes that XENO X IS ACTUALLY HIS BROTHER!"

I laughed. This doesn't happen very often.

Quote from: CRKrueger;901993Also, a lot of the Only War abilities deal with Comrades, a "NPC who really isn't an actual NPC with stats but really a set of powers and abilities the main character uses".

How do these work in actual play? Especially compared to just having a regular NPC sidekick?

D&D 4e had that somewhat with familiars / companion animals and I wasn't fully comfortable with how it played out.

Quote from: Crüesader;902017Ever watched the Youtube series If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device?

OMG that is hysterical!!!

Quote from: Spinachcat;902464How do these work in actual play? Especially compared to just having a regular NPC sidekick?

D&D 4e had that somewhat with familiars / companion animals and I wasn't fully comfortable with how it played out.

In all honesty, it's kind of weird.  They can be used for certain things and most of the time, that thing is 'meat shield'.  Not very useful, you can do cool 'recon/lost' missions without them, I believe.

Consider for a moment, that there must be a dozen canonical depictions of the golden throne.  Now supposing they actually built a dozen of them just to deal with the tourist demand.  Then, just suppose that rivalries grew up between the various support staff factions and nobody remembers which one contains the actual emperor.

Quote from: David Johansen;902478Consider for a moment, that there must be a dozen canonical depictions of the golden throne.  Now supposing they actually built a dozen of them just to deal with the tourist demand.  Then, just suppose that rivalries grew up between the various support staff factions and nobody remembers which one contains the actual emperor.

Awesome idea. It would explain "death to the FALSE Emperor" warcry, kind of iconic among the ranks of Chaos Marines.

Speaking of which: In one of my versions of the WH40k's world the Emprah is actually forced to act like a beacon of light. There was no a clash between him and Horus, it was all part of an enormous intrigue and a an abduction perpetrated by various factions (Cult of Machine played vital part in this).

The Warmaster was gravely wounded when he attempted to protect the Emperor. The TRUE loyalists were forced to flee and they disappeared in the Eye of Terror, where they fell victims to Chaos. Since then, all they want is to bring back the natural order of things, with the Empire of Man being led by true, alive God-Emperor, rather than this rotting carcass they perceive as an abomination.

Oh, and Horus survived. As a Cypher he tries to reach him to give him a Coup de Grace.

In the meantime, betrayed by his own men, the Emperor is bound to the throne. He slowly kills his own cells in an attempt to escape and be reborn. And those Psykers gathered across whole Empire are sent not to sacrifice themselves to sustain the Emperor, but to prevent him from killing himself. It's a war for each of his cell.

I used this story arc for more than a single group in DH - usually they were sent to deal with heretical sect, along the lines of real-world Cathars, and during their adventures, they slowly uncovered additional pieces of this puzzling story. Unfortunately, I've never managed to pursue it too far. Oh well...

Just to be clear, Only War isn't bad.  There's a wealth of good stuff in there, much of which is transferable with minimal tweaking.

Of course at a certain point, Only War devolves into this...

[video=youtube;jCMNWAJiz5Y]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCMNWAJiz5Y[/youtube]

How is the speed of combat in Only War compared to Dark Heresy or Warhammer Fantasy?

Quote from: Spinachcat;902924How is the speed of combat in Only War compared to Dark Heresy or Warhammer Fantasy?

It's about the same as DH, but companions do play a role.  I can't speak on Warhammer Fantasy, I've never played it but I hear good things.

Quote from: yabaziou;902022More musing form me on W 40K !

Using DW to do a questing knights/Graal quest campaign. Insisting on the fact that each player selects a  different chapter from the others players and not necessarly chapters that got along. Give each PC a background that compels them to go through this goal regardless of the risk involved for them (an personal request from the Chapter Master, a vision from the Primarch, a solemn oath, etc). Then send them across the galaxy, fighting vile xenos (but sometimes parlay with them) to fulfill the Emperor's Will. Put some extra focus on each chapter ritual, belief and mystery.

I'd play this in a heartbeat.  Just kind of embellish the fanaticism?  As long as we got some decent shit to beat on, some cool relics to snag, and all the cheesyness of Space Marines?  I would so do this.

Also, 'Only War' is best played under the influence of alcohol.  And when a group of GI's play it?  It's more like this:

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Something interesting I found a while back, thought this would be an okay place to drop it.

Quote from: Baron Von Evilsatan;903477The Mechanicus does NOT have the technology. They haven't been living on some fancy paradise planet since pre-Fall. Mars is an anarchic nightmare shithole the moment you leave the safe zones into the kilometres of labyrinthine corridors beneath it full of rogue machinery, self-aware and malevolent AI from before the Fall, and the daemon programs of the Heresy. EVERYTHING in the databases is fucked. The databases are fragmented over the entire surface to the extent that it would be impossible to see one tenth of the total files in the ludicrously extended life of a Magos even assuming that they are completely safe to visit. And they are not.

The files have been corrupted into madness by the Fall, and the unleashing of the most potent informational warfare systems ever to exist to defeat the Iron Men. Nearly all of Mars was rendered uninhabitable, what they live in now is built on the top of the ruins. They send archeotech expeditions in to find shit, nearly all of them never come back. The sheer number of rogue war machine running around in there is sufficient to rape the mind. Then came the Heresy, which was not earth-exclusive. Mars as the second most critical planet in the Imperium was the site of fighting nearly as ferocious as on Terra, with Mechanicus loyalists and Hereteks fighting tooth, nail, and mechadendrite everywhere. Ancient machines were unleashed, viruses both normal and daemonic unleashed into all the computer systems. Nearly every single stored record on Mars was rendered unusable, and those that survived are half the time self-aware and don't like you, or daemonic and actively try to kill you.

If you come back with a schematic, it is almost certainly gibberish, and if it isn't, it's probably corrupted into uselessness. If it does come back whole it was probably malevolently fucked with so that instead of a Lasgun power cell it's a fucking grenade set to detonate the second you finish building it. Why do you think they want off-world STCs so damned much if they had them all here? The fucking Heresy is why. Off-world they only have to contend with the Fall's war and its effects on the machinery plus twenty thousand years of degradation with no maintenance. But at least off-world it'll probably just not work instead of actively seek to kill you.

Why do you think they seek to placate the Machine Spirit? It's because it exists. The fragments of trillions of self-aware programs, flourishing during the Dark Age of Technology and shattered by Man in his war with the Iron men, imprisoning the few who had not set themselves irrevocably into the machinery, a prison smashed wide open by the Heresy. Everything that can hold programming in the Imperium has a shard of a program in it. EVERYTHING. And you'd better fucking please it or it will do everything in its power to make your day shit. Sure, if it's a Lasgun it'll just not work or start shooting off rounds by itself, but if you piss off a Land Raider you can say bye-bye to half a continent. They apply these principles to things without spirits by habit, since they're so used to dealing with tanks that if not talked to just right might go rogue and annihilate the Manufactorum before they can be killed.

This is why they do not like ANYONE fucking with technology, because it is so rare to find anything that just works it is critical it not be compromised. That, and they do not have the actual knowledge to fuck with it intelligently, just through experimentation, which inevitably leads to slaughter. Pressing buttons to see what works is fine in a 21st century computer, but it is a very stupid thing to do at the helm of a 410th century starship with the destructive power to end solar systems. The entire knowledge base of humanity was lost. Not forgotten, but outright lost. Everything at all, poof. Nobody knows anything because the Fall fucked everything up and the Heresy double-fucked it. To rebuild the theoretical framework needed to design new technologies that don't kill everyone near them would require starting from the ground up. They don't have the time, and they never have.

This gets on to the point of war and what it does to technology. Someone will parrot that it makes it go much faster. Yes, it makes practical applications of technology go much faster. It also utterly stops all research on the scientific theories behind those technologies. This means that when war chugs along for a decade or two things get done. It means when it goes on too long you run out of theories to turn into technologies, and then you run out of technologies to apply. You stagnate. When you have been fighting in a war for survival in a drastically overextended empire, this is what happens. You are desperate for any extra materiel that can possibly be produced. Half your entire fucking military might went rogue, smashed the half that stayed, leaving you with the tattered shreds of a war machine to keep hold of an empire that was reaching straining point with an army far larger. There is no time for the sort of applied research programs that took Man twenty five thousand years to develop, in a time of unprecedented growth and prosperity.

This is also why the Adeptus Mechanicus insists on cargo cultism. It's because when you are dealing with things you barely understand because everything you knew about them was destroyed it is the safest and most reliable option. The rituals do not exists for mysticism, they exist because they are the most practical means of building, repairing and maintaining the equipment they have with the knowledge surviving. You don't understand why pressing that button makes it go, because the manual tried to take over your brain and the copies are all unreadable and the research base that would let you reverse-engineer it does not exist and cannot be built.

Why are the Tau doing so well with their technology? Because they had peace. Eight thousand years unmolested by any enemy and they were helped the entire time by the most advanced biological race in the galaxy. Give the Imperium eight thousand years of peace and I can guarantee you it will be harder than it was during the Great Crusade.

Since some still don't get the idea, try this:

Build a library, fill it with all human knowledge. You take it elsewhere when you need a book from it, but the book is only a simplified copy. You don't understand the real book, and you don't need to. Nobody takes the real books anywhere because why would you, when there's a whole library there?

Now that library goes rogue and the maintenance machinery starts killing everyone any-fucking-where near it. Where the fuck did they all come from, you swear to god there weren't this many, and there weren't because they're using the library's information to fight their war. The government fights a battle that destroys the planet against these robots and tears apart the library to stop them using it, only to be destroyed in the process. The library is leveled, cast into flames, every book burned and every computer virus-laden.

Then comes a man who worked there. He talks to the few surviving library workers, assembles their information, and starts rebuilding a city around the library and expanding it as the librarians find little scraps of paper and fragmented bits of files that stuck together just right read something. They rebuild a library from scrap on the ashes of the old. It isn't a shadow on the glory of the old, but it is all they have.
Then the city turns on itself, kills its master, and the librarians turn to rage. Half of them kill the other half and destroy the remnants of the library because where they're going they won't need science. Everything burns, and the city is left to a scattered few survivors, walls open to the world, with the hungry predators circling.

The Adeptus Mechanicus is the sole surviving librarian, desperately scrabbling through the ashes of paper and splinters of hard drives for anything to help him and the city he needs to survive just a second longer.

The Imperium isn't grim because things suck by choice and could be fine if a sensible person came along. That sensible person wouldn't survive fifty seconds of the reality. The Imperium is grim because every single shit decision, every single sacrifice, every single death, every single man woman and child suffering a shit life in the worst conditions imaginable, is the absolute best that can be done. It is a study of the worst happening to everyone and what part of your humanity must be sacrificed today just to stand a chance of survival, and all it asks is whether or not it would have perhaps been better to die.

Quote from: Crüesader;903517Something interesting I found a while back, thought this would be an okay place to drop it.

Ah, Baron's take on AM.

When I first read it, I thought to myself that it'd be damn awesome to bring back Ray Bradbury and make him work with Harlan Ellison on some sort of WH40k lore compendium.

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That's an excellent description of warp travel!

Quote from: RPGPundit;903852That's an excellent description of warp travel!

Ya. WH40k might be a parody, but it doesn't mean it can't be brütal.

I'm not sure how much into lore you are, and how high WH40k stories sit on your pyramid of interests, but here, a few observations concerning my favorite formation: Death Korps of Krieg.

Quote from: Crüesader;901807I'll be up front with you:  Military focused games like Only War get to be really boring, really quick.  It's all about accomplishing a combat mission, or something to that effect.  Really, the closest you can get to 'intrigue' is some inter-rank/inter-regiment/inter-cultural disagreements and perhaps you discover someone's a traitor.  And then you shoot them. Maybe it was my GM, maybe it was the options he had- I can see that, after reading through the book a bit.  Trust me when I say this:  Military life is pretty fucking simple, maybe not boring- but it's pretty simple.  Maybe it's that- I don't see the 'cool' that other people will.

Local RPG club has done a lot of RPG campaigns set as Only War and they are always a blast. Reason is very simple. Since everyone has been in military and seen how it works in real life, making it into a black comedy is frighteningly easy. And klet's not forget the fact that WH40K is essentially a black comedy.

Combat missions are something not played at all. Instead games take their cues from real life military fuck ups we all have seen and/or witnessed in our lives mixed with strange set of craziest ideas you can do when you are a teenager without adult supervision.

For instance, troops have heard that today is a "Burn a Witch Day". Thus they start impromptu witch hunt by looking for someone/anyone who can be blamed to be a witch and thus they burn dozen or so people who look like others. In another day they find that there is a freezing snow so they go out and ski downhill on top of dead ork bodies competing which squad does it with most squaddies. And finally there were Melta Bomb curling between platoons. Then you can have surprise your buddy and strange him day when you all stalk others and surprise them by attacking from behind and trying to strangle them...

So use your own (and your friends) army service memories to fullest and mix them with some ideas from Nazi Pulp novels.