Requete
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Posts posted by Requete
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The whole idea of "enemy powercreep" or "where are all the orcs?" syndrome (you only see wuss monsters at Level Wuss, and then you only see extreme monsters at Level Extreme) has always bothered me. It's one of those things where you can "see the sound boom in the shot"... i.e. where the virtual world is exposed as purely fictional and you lose the appeal of exploring and interacting with it.
To me, this is solved through the use of scope and complexity. Wuss level characters are sent on fairly straightforward missions, or into places likely infested only by those baddies they are likely able to overpower. Extreme level characters are sent into far more hostile situations, or situations that are very complicated and require resourcefulness and finesse to solve.
As I see it, at first you're dealing with cults, heretics and the like. Then, as the characters prove they can handle it, they get sent on more difficult missions... maybe more difficult because they involve rumors of more powerful things like Chaos monsters or genestealers, or maybe more difficult because they are more sensitive. For example: you must root out the heretical cult that dominates the government offices of Hive Chicagius without spreading word of it among the populace, who are restive and near to revolt. There's a mission for high-level Inquisitorial agents that still only deals with cultists. However, these cultists run the local government... so not only do the good guys not have access to those resources, the bad guys do. And you have to accomplish your mission without driving the current social situation over the edge, because for whatever reason the =][= doesn't want to see that hive revolt right now (there's about to be a big anti-Xenos crusade launched and Hive Chicagius is where they produce power cells for las weapons, or whatever).
Just being tough and able to hit what you shoot at is not enough for some missions of extreme importance. In fact, in the Imperium guys who can open a can of whoopass are pretty much a dime a dozen. But the problem is that Delta Force can't solve every problem. Sometimes you need James Bond. It's not just a question of killing lots of things... you will need to do that, and sneak by some other things, and utilize some complex technological devices, and smooth talk your way into someone's confidence, and trick your adversary, and avoid your adversary's tricks, and know the airspeed velocity of an unladed (Calixian) swallow.
In short, they have to be multi-talented, clever and even subtle. That's a whole lot harder than merely being lethal. Don't just artificially ramp up the number and power level of the PCs' foes... instead ramp up the complexity and sensitivity of their tasks. In the end, it's pretty obvious how you deal with a genestealer. It's not so obvious how you deal with a heretic who holds a hostage deemed "not expendable", is a ranking officer in the Imperial Navy and has framed you for treason. Both situations may be ultimately concluded by pulling the trigger on a flamer, but in the latter situation only a top shelf crew is going to ever get close enough to pull that trigger... and that's what makes it an adventure for top tier characters.
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Well, I got the Inquisitor's Handbook in the mail today (Creatures Anathema, which I ordered at the same time, is arriving in a couple days).
I see why y'all recommended the IH so unreservedly. It's completely chock full of witch-burning goodness. I'm sure that it will be very useful.
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Dezmond said:
anyone who doesn't think 10' marines who can kill an armoured company with a single pelvic thrust is both a valid interpretation of the source material and a potentially very popular one is just being difficult.
That's a lot of baloney (or bollocks, depending on where you're from). Your interpretation is hyperbolic and unsupported. Even diehard Space Marine fans don't carry on in your ridiculous manner.
You are adding nothing whatsoever of value to this community. Shape up or ship out, man. I know you know the difference between a good and a bad post, because your posts are so deliberately bad. If you come around here just to screw things up then you're being extremely rude and inconsiderate. Why would you want to be that?
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DocIII said:
And your fifty foot diaklave (hell even the **** term daiklave) does not come from 40K. These goofy things have no place in anything outside of bad cartoons. The daiklaive and all of its similarly physics defying absurditity giaganto swords are one of the dumbest lookings/ lamest conventions I've ever seen in sci-fi or fanatasy. The minute on of these stupid things turns up in anything that is not a farcical parody, I change the channel.
Nothing personal Dez, but just about every EXTREME TM! thing you espouse as defining space marines is like embarassing clown shoes strapped onto the Astartes you claim to love.
"This one goes to 11."
Agreed here as well. I like Space Marines. I'm putting together a Salamanders force for the wargame right now.
Space Marines are supposed to be powerful. In fact, I'll even grant that they're supposed to be a bit more powerful than their wargame stats suggest. But they're not anime characters, and the 40K universe is not an anime cartoon. A comic book, yes. But "buster swords" and saucer-eyes and wire-fu? Not so much, no.
When I think of a super character like Marneus Calgar, I think of an Ajax, an Achilles or a Hector. One of the few mighty standouts. When I think of the Space Marines, I think of the Myrmidons. Not invincible and not immune to casualties, but a lot better than other warriors.
The problem for the Imperium is the scale of its adversaries. In the world of mythical Greece, you can reliably come up with at least one Theseus capable of disposing of the minotaur. The minotaur and its ilk are true monsters, one-of-a-kind things. But in the 40K universe, there might be a whole race of minotaurs and they have machineguns and space ships. So you need more than just a hero, you need an army of heroes. Or else vast legions of disposable citizen soldiers. Fortunately for the Imperium, they have both.
But there's no evidence that any Space Marine can weild a 50-foot long power phallus, I mean sword, and split whole planets in half. 40K is already far enough over the top! If every Space Marine were basically an anime character, the future would go from grim and dark to merely absurd.
I'm anxious to see what they do with Deathwatch. But, and I can say this from long experience with role playing games, you do 3 basic things in these games: Talk, Explore and Fight. Talking is interacting with NPCs, magical talking fixtures in the dungeon, townsfolk, other travelers, whatever. It can teach you things about the game world and help you accomplish certain goals. Exploration means finding things that were hidden or unknown; it could be mapping a dungeon level, finding a hidden area or learning some secret about people, places or history. Fighting is, obviously, combat against opposing forces.
Any game that only does 1 of these 3 things is going to get boring. A lot of games that have come out lately either emphasize only Fighting, or only Talking. These games are pretty limited and get stale pretty fast. Just fighting all the time is boring. Getting railroaded from one fight to the next - who cares? I'll just go play Call of Duty. Likewise, only Talking to NPCs and never doing anything can get old pretty quick, too. Then it's basically a fantasy soap opera. Now, Exploring is the widest category and probably the most fun taken on its own (at least for me), but even that would get boring if there was never anyone to talk to or any threat of danger from adversaries. Really you need all 3 for a balanced game.
That's why I'm excited about Dark Heresy. It very readily makes use of all 3 modes of play. I think Rogue Trader will as well, though I'm a bit less interested in the theme. Deathwatch has an interesting theme, but the premise will probably be the most limited. By the time the Space Marines show up, the time for discussion is pretty much over. But we'll see what they do with it.
The promise of combining all three games is pretty interesting as well.
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Dezmond said:
+++++40k isn't about winning, its about the cost of surviving+++++
Yeah right. Thats what sells all the space marines.
Good point. Those space marines all look so happy and well-adjusted.
Marneus Calgar looks like he's going to break out into his rendition of "Good Ship Lollipop" any second now.
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Thanks. That makes sense, especially since I suppose that Calixis is a bit of a backwater. The planet described is the mainworld... and everything else in system is either even cruddier or less developed than it.
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I'm not sure if I misread the Calixis sector map... the map appears to be of star systems, but the entries in the rulebook talk about individual planets.
Surely there's more than one world per system?
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Back to the original issue...
I think that Insanity Points are all about the hold you have on reality. As that hold begins to slip, you suffer delusion, compulsion, unreasoning fear, etc. You don't perceive or cope with reality appropriately. Thus the definition of sanity vs. insanity depends on what reality is actually like.
Corruption is very interesting. It seems to me that the issue is purely one of dealing with the Warp. If you mess with the Warp, either with powers or entities or knowledge, you get corrupted. If you don't mess with the Warp, you are free from the taint.
This is fascinating because it casts the whole struggle of the Inquisition in a rather absolute light. Think of Call of Cthulhu: who are the good guys? Arguably (on this sort of view), the good guys are the guys who oppose the Great Old Ones. The bad guys are the guys who work for the Great Old Ones. End of story. Therefore, a "good guy" could act in such a way that he makes Pol Pot look like Mother Teresa... but he's still a "good guy" because he fights on the side of Man.
Philosophically I don't agree with it but it's a fun way to set up the game: being a "good guy" has nothing to do with morality. It's purely a question of which side you're on. If you play for Asgard, you're a Lawful. If you play for Jotunheim, you're a Chaotic. Simple as that. The "good guys" may do nice things more often, and obviously whether they win or lose determines whether there will be any more backyard cookouts, puppy dogs and football games in the future, but to be "good" is essentially a tribal affiliation.
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Peacekeeper_b said:
But Ill take a beer, just ship it to
Peacekeeper B, Afghanistan and lable the box NOT BEER. Stupid Army rules!
Wish I could send you a beer! Keep your head down, brother.
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Well, thanks to all the rave reviews, when I ordered Creatures Anathema I went ahead and ordered the Inquisitor's Handbook as well.
My wallet is annoyed with all y'all.
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I'm no 40K expert, but it seems like it would be a precarious balance. The Inquisitor has generic "snoop around, expose and eliminate heresy" authority. But the exercise of that authority seems to depend partly on other people cooperating. Naturally some will cooperate out of goodwill, and many more out of fear (since the more insignicant you are, the easier it is for an Inquisitor to destroy you... nobody is going to raise an eyebrow if an Inquisitor kills a ventillation duct cleaner and calls him a cultist). If someone chooses not to cooperate, then the gauntlet is in a sense thrown down. The Inquisitor can probably usually have them arrested and tortured, but that may be dangerous if they're powerful.
Calling an Exterminatus seems like it really requires the cooperation of the Navy. So say you call one and then, when you are supposed to make your case to the admiralty, you don't have any evidence and they regard your claims with suspicion. Then I imagine they'll delay you while they send someone to the subsector Inquisitor Lord to appeal. The Inquisitor Lord, for sake of politics, will almost certainly have to "look into it" or else relations with the Navy will get really chilly. So the Inquisitor Lord looks into it; maybe he overrules you.
If you get overruled by your boss too many times, that fact might get around. Suddenly you won't be so scary anymore. And your boss might come up with fun little assignments for you, like rooting out the Garbage Cult of Trashulon IV (if he likes you and just needs to make you eat some humble pie)... or maybe a really dangerous assignment (if he doesn't like you and wants you to either get killed or start pulling your weight).
Politically, the whole question seems really complicated and interesting.
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warpdancer said:
Sorry but 2 of your Claims are not true
Requete said:
This structure makes an interesting contrast with the other big totalitarian player in WWII, Nazi Germany.
later in the war, 1943 Hitler integrated his own Politofficers, the NSFO, Nationalsocialist leadership officers.
The NKWD troops were an independent formation, parallel to the red army.
Fair enough... I'm not very familiar with the NSFOs. I'll have to look into them.
As far as the NKVD... yes, it did have its own rifle formations in a seperate and parallel organization. But it wasn't fielding its own armored divisions... the SS was practically a second army. The NKVD formations were not significant by comparison.
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Peacekeeper_b said:
Anyone who has had a more then two paragraph conversation knows that my all time favorite book for RPGs is TSRs 1985 classic Unearthed Arcana! It had new character/PC/Race/Class options, new equipment, spells, rules and information about religions and monsters.
So naturally I compare the Inquisitor's Handbook to the Unearthed Arcana. New careers, origins, PC options? Check. New rules and equipment? Check. New religion information? Check.
And of course my webpage (soon to be relaunched, previews up next week I hope) is titled Unearthed Apocrypha in honor of Unearthed Arcana.
So to me, Inquisitor's Handbook is the Unearthed Arcana of the Dark Heresy line and my favorite book so far.
Heck, it even has the same shoddy binding!
Heh... it's funny because the section on Polearms is really the only section I like much out of that book!
But you guys have sold me... so many glowing reviews. I'll get CA first because I know that I'd much rather have a monster manual than anything else, but I'll get IH after that. I don't have a campaign planned as of yet so I'm sure I'll have IH well in advance of actually getting something going, unless it's just one-shots.
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Senior Cardinal Ignato said:
“What are your feelings toward Radicalism opposed to Puritanism?”
“Are these terms defined well enough, even to bring up to debate?”
“Does each Ordos of the Inquisition require one ideal over the other?”
Inquistor Heinrich Kramerius to Cardinal Ignato sends greetings. As an Amicus Tribunalis I submit the following for your worthy consideration:
What we battle first and foremost is the taint of Chaos. Chaos is the motivating force behind the misdeeds of heretics and the criminal violence of the xenos. Chaos is the Archenemy of Mankind, may the Emperor watch over us. To strive against this taint and defeat it at every turn is our sworn duty.
How does the taint spread? Gentlemen, it spreads through contact. It spreads by reaching a certain state of potency and then transferring itself through the connective tissues of the Empire, which is to say the souls of men, repurposing all it touches to become both its food supply and its vehicle. Everyone knows this.
Thus, the Inquisitor stands to Chaos as does a Doctor of Medicae to cancer: he cannot cure it except to eliminate it. Chaos must be destroyed utterly and absolutely wherever it is found. But while the Inquisitor is like a doctor, he is also, in virtue of being a member of the Imperium, may the Emperor watch over it, like a cell within the plagued body. And he is a highly mobile and important cell at that. Thus it is doubly important that an Inquisitor not become infected by Chaos. We need look no further than the case of the heretic Quixos to see what terrible disasters can befall us if this is allowed.
A Doctor does not infect himself with a disease in order to cure it. He does not ingest a cancer in order to fight cancer. An immune cell within a body does not become cancerous to overcome the body's cancer. No... the only hope of defeating cancer is to excise and annihilate it utterly and completely.
Now, some would say that Puritans are counter-productive, as if we call Exterminatus upon any world that has a single Chaos cult. That is of course a complete fabrication. Only when an entire world is past hope, or if the very survival of the Imperium is at stake, is an Exterminatus called down. If that were not so, the Inquisition would be merely a branch of the Imperial Navy.
Sadly, among the many plagues inflicted by Chaos upon those in its grasp, the first plague is upon sight. When a man, even an Inquisitor, falls to Chaos, he first loses his ability to see things in the proper perspective. Slowly and subtly his deeds will be perverted, and he will think himself faithful even to the Emperor, only to discover his own treason when it is too late. Chaos is so formidable a foe because it does not begin by corrupting the will... the corruption of the will is its final act. It starts by blinding and confusing those it drags down.
That is why we must safeguard against it always. "Puritanism" is merely the word for the path that remains free of the taint of Chaos. "Radicalism" refers to the path that becomes contaminated by Chaos in a misguided and foolish attempt to combat Chaos. But you cannot fight Chaos with Chaos... you must fight it with Purity and that alone.
And thus to answer the questions of the worthy Cardinal, it is manifest that Puritanism is the only path that remains free of heresy, that Puritanism and Radicalism are aptly defined, and that each Ordo of the Imperial Inquisition, may the Emperor watch over it, must employ Puritanism and only Puritanism less we allow the taint of the Archenemy to be loosed within our own walls.
As we are all no doubt devoted servants of the Emperor, I am sure that none of the respondents will object to my submitting the names of those who have argued against Puritanism and in favor of Radicalism to the proper authorities within the Ordo Hereticus.
The Emperor protects.
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I really appreciate the responses so far. It sounds like a lot of people like this book alot.
I am trying to "read between the lines" so to speak, because I know that my role playing tastes are a lot different from some other people. For example, many people like the more recent versions of D&D precisely because of all the almost numberless character options... whereas one of the things that I like about my favorite edition of D&D (the original 1974 booklets) is that there are only 3 character classes and to differentiate your characters you pretty much have to use your imagination and make stuff up.
So I'm big on making stuff up, and not so big on added rules (once a rule is written down, my freedom as a Judge is constrained; once a character special option has been laid out, no one can any longer do that "for free" because it's cool). When I hear about more character options... I dunno. It just sounds like a lot more rules to keep track of! Whereas hearing about a ton of guns is interesting to me because guns are fun to think about. And monsters... you can never have too many monsters!
Anyway, I'm still pondering. I'll almost certainly get CA before this one, but I'm considering getting IH eventually based on the strong testimonials (even if I suspect that my tastes in general are in the minority).
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I've got the core book on order. My probable next purchase will be Creatures Anathema. My question is whether I need to get the Inquisitor's Handbook at some point?
I'm a "rules light" kind of guy. My general preference is to have a number of generic options that could account for a wide range of specifics, rather than having a rule for each specific thing (i.e., I prefer the option "Soldier" to a number of options like "Soldier: Infantry", "Soldier: MilInt", "Soldier: Scout/Sniper", etc. because I think that how you build your Soldier will basically suggest what your MOS was).
That being said, I have heard that there are a number of new weapons described in the book. Anything that's a "must have" from the perspective of 40K fluff?
Anyway, tell me why I should definitely get this one, or alternatively why I can safely give it a pass.
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Hey... I haven't played DH yet (though I want to) and I'm no expert on the Imperium, but I can give a little information about how commissars worked in the Red Army in WWII, which is what I assume they're based on. Obviously this info doesn't necessarily apply 100% to the 40K universe, but might be a good starting point for thinking about it.
A commissar was a "political officer", but he existed outside of the normal chain of command. A commissar had to be a member of the Communist Party and be dedicated to its ideals. There was a command structure among commissars, but this chain of command was parallel to and independent of the military chain of command. Thus the commissar was essentially a Communist Party official who was allowed to stick his nose into the conduct of military operations.
The commissar's main responsibilities were to ensure adequate political indoctrination, promote good morale (of a specifically proletarian sort) and most of all make sure that the officer he was watching over was doing things properly, both in the sense of following communist teachings and doing what the Party wanted him to do.
Within the TO&E, the commissar and his staff comprise a headquarters element. The smallest unit to have an attached commissar was the company (a company is commanded by a captain and is composed of platoons each led by a lieutenant; platoons are further subdivided into squads, etc.). Thus above the several company commissars in a battalion would be the battalion commissar himself, who was attached to the battalion HQ. Above the battalion commissar would be whichever commissar was in charge of the regiment, and so on up to the "top brass". So you might think of it as a parallel officer corps, where the lowest rank is captain.
Probably the two most famous Red Army commissars of WWII were Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, both of whom ended up running the Soviet Union later in life.
This structure makes an interesting contrast with the other big totalitarian player in WWII, Nazi Germany. The Germans did not use political officers as such. Instead, the Nazi Party had its own entirely separate army, the Waffen SS. The SS had its own divisions, its own commanders, its own resources and was basically just a wholly separate entity from the Heer (the regular German army). Of course, the higher commands (Germany had several "top brass" groups that essentially competed for favor politically within Hitler's administration) had to then juggle these two separate organizations (army and SS) and have them somehow work together in military operations (not helped by the fact that they usually didn't like each other very much). This is kind of similar to the situation of the Imperium having totally distinct military organizations such as the Space Marines and the Sisters (please not that I'm not comparing them to the SS except insofar as they are autonomous military organizations).
Anyway, perhaps that helps.
Crazy awesome weapons your party/team uses
in Dark Heresy
Posted
This thread is cool. It not only gives me good ideas for kitting out my own Imperial heroes, it's also a good antidote to the "power level of acolytes" thread. Since acolytes with the right gear are apparently mowing through Bloodthirsters the way Chow Yun Fat mows through gangsters... and none of them have even made Interrogator yet!