Monday, August 3, 2020

In the Grim Darkness of the Future There is a Lot of Roleplaying

The Lads and I play a lot of RPGs and we like to toss in side games in new, unusual, etc. systems to mix things up. At Christmastime my father-in-law picked up a set of books at a FLGS/used book store and we ended up with FFG's D% system Warhammer 40K core books and a few splats. Nice guy, my father-in-law.
  Sam started running Dark Heresy and immediately enjoyed the 'beer & pretzels' feel of the game and system. The setting is so loveably over the top, the mechanics that perfect combination os 'dead simple idea' combined with '40,000 weird options to complicate things', and the bodycount so freakin' high that all I could think of was playing a Call of Cthulhu setting with Paranoia rules. I adored the Void-born psyker with an hysterical paranoia about open doors and such deep hypno-conditioning that under stress he is forced to recite the Litany of Pressure Sealing Bulkheads I started with so much I almost felt bad when he finally rolled Perils and blew up, taking a room full of cultists with him. But I did laugh.
  After a few games of Dark Heresy Sam tossed in Black Crusade. If you ever wanted to play a villain so cartoonishly eeeee-viiiiil that a mocking laugh while he twirls his mustache is restrained, play Black Crusade: it does to Chaos Space Marines what Mel Brooks does to Nazis. 
  After about 7games over 5 months I decided to throw my hat in the ring and broke out Only War (or, as we call it, Purely Cannon Fodder) and run a regiment. Deciding that the Grim Derpness has been causing a lot of chuckles I made a Penal Battalion that has everything going for it you'd think: Light Infantry, perpetually understrength, and green. Really embracing the setting the lads made a bunch of gonzo characters with Promethium Bill, the religious fanatic who volunteered for the regiment in hopes of using his personally-purchashed flamer on heretics, pretty indicative of the level of seriousness.
  After just 2 sessions Jack has us rolling up guys for Rogue Trader because we figure that the 4th-5th characters in each setting will be part of a massive crossover fairly soon.

  

3 comments:

  1. My online group tried out a few of those games. My crowning achievement was tripping an Eldar Corsair with a handful of ball bearings.

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  2. I've always held a secret ambition to play as a feral world Artillery Regiment in Only War but I have yet to make this a reality. The rules got better with each iteration of the game, with Black Crusade and Only War at the Zenith. Dark Heresy was by far the most interesting setting but the rules themselves needed the Errata.

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