Introductory Post

Hi, I'm Edgar, and this is my blog.

I've written quite a bit of material related to Warhammer 40K Dark Heresy campaigns I have run for my regular group. I'm going to put those up with additional explanations of the content when that seems warranted.

A lot of what I have done in Dark Heresy came from things I've read, other games I've played and GM'd, and my attempts to push back against WH40K "canon." I love the 40K universe, but it can sometimes start to feel limiting and a bit one-dimensional. Also, as one of my players observed recently, about playing members of the Inquisition, "We're the bad guys." He's right. It would also be correct to say that the forces of the Chaos Gods are also the bad guys, and that frankly the whole lot of them are a bunch of dicks.

Despite the fact that we, as gamers, may be ambivalent about the good/evil divide, Dark Heresy doesn't really worry about ambiguity. You're either with the Inquisition, or you're an enemy. Period. While there are radical elements in the Inquisition, they also are "good guys" who are using the means of the "bad guys" to serve The Emperor. This creates the ambiguity, but the overall tone of the game revolves around the choice of serving The Emperor or serving His enemies. This is something that sort of breaks the game for me, at least in the long term, in that there's not really a game world separate from the published world, as-presented by the WH40K literature.So what does one do about that?

In my case, I've tried to tweak it to allow for things I want to happen in the world to get laid upon the rest of it. For example, I've created a set of rules for non-psychic sorcery. The material for this was drawn from Warhammer Fantasy RPG (2nd ed.), self-authored materials, and the existing Psyker character class and "magic" system. The result was a document about 100 pages long combining all of these into a set of rules for a sorcerer class, and a break with the established WH40K version of the psyker as magic user. I merely said, "Hey, there used to be rules in Warhammer Fantasy. The Dark Heresy psyker rules seem to have "forgotten" the origins of magic found in Warhammer Fantasy. So, I wrote rules to make that connection explicit and to add a new element to Dark Heresy. I'll post some of those later, as well.

In any case, the Dark Heresy stuff will come first, with a bit more from Rogue Trader (another game in the WH40K universe). After that, I plan to be playing some Dungeon Crawl Classics. I'll do some module play-throughs, but then want to establish a long-term campaign in a world of my own making.

In any case, I hope that whoever reads this stuff enjoys or otherwise benefits from it.