My gripe aside, I certainly don't mind the game. I just feel they underpowered ranged weapons, to an extent. Especially for an RPG, where often "range and firepower" are the only advantages a tends-to-be-small gaming group can have against tends-to-be-larger groups of opposition.

A boltgun, for instance, does 1d10 + 5 damage. My gaming group's Imperial Guardsman starting character, as of yet without any special abilities to bolster this damage (and without yet spending any XP on enhancing his strength, without any combat upgrades on the weapon like mono-edged, etc), does 1d10 + 5 with a one-handed axe.

The reason for it is simple, they were concerned with game balance, I'm certain. Boltguns (and lasrifles, and all sorts of similar fun stuff) has very nice options for burst fire and semi-automatic fire and full auto fire and all that fun stuff. I LIKE their rules for autofire and suppressive fire and all the rest, don't get me wrong. I like them quite a bit, in fact.

BUT...the fact remains, we're talking about a .75 caliber exploding round, here.

EDIT: Superfly, I know little to nothing about IRC, but the chat on the website just
Connecting...
Unable to connect : java.net.UnknownHostException : oslo.no.eu.undernet.org 6667
-- *** Your ident is disabled or broken, to continue to connect you must type /QUOTE PASS 10302

So... no idea what to do with that.

Yeah, I heard they cancelled the game. Alas.

#2: I hope the "Fantasy Flight" thing comes through because it *IS* a cool liscence and a decent game. I'm mostly famliliar with the novels (having not played the tabletop game), but I'm not holding my breath.

I heard the cancellation was largely becaus of "Black Library" wanting to focus their efforts on the novels and such. Which I guess makes sense as Three Novels takes three writers and maybe one editor and nets roughly as much money (and more sales) than an RPG book which can take an
entire team of people to produce.

Not to mention the fact that PnP gaming is simply in trouble despite what a lot of people want to think. MMORPGs are a big part of it, but then so are publishing costs, and the fact that the efforts of some companies to focus on younger gamers kind of drove people out of the community in general and youth is nothing if not fickled, combined with the fact that the rising prices of books are not something many kids or teenies can easily afford.

Agree with me or not, I understand the logic. We'll see what happens. If worse comes to worse I've got my copy of "Dark Heresy" for my collection.

And yet, with all the planning they must have done..
..They spent months, if not years, putting Dark Heresy together - only to kill it just weeks after it was published.

Either some really bad project management and development, very bad marketing/pr..
..Or just a very coercive person pushing it through the company to get it done.

Nothing else really explains the waste of time, money and manhours.

So I just finished writing a final and came home. Figured I'd watch some TV to unwind. Robotech was on and for some reason it just clicked with the whole Logans world idea from Rogue Trader and gave me a crazy idea for a 40K campaign. Even better it would be a way to work Marines into the game as PC's.

Now I'm assuming that Space Marine chapters are constantly splitting and new ones are created on a fairly regular basis. Not every chapter survives, there are constant stories of dead chapters, new chapters need to be created to replace them.

Now the way I'm thinking this happens is this:
All chapters crusade. The Black Templars are best known for this but they all do it. They also rarely do so as a full chapter. They'll send a company or two, a few squads from first company and stuff like that but not the entire chapter. The main chapter continues to produce new recruits and if a crusade is particularly long eventually the crusading portion of the chapter begins to do the same, just to replace their losses. Gradually however both the chapter and the splinter begin to grow. The splinter eventually become large enough that their chapter banner is returned to their old homeworld and they create their own chapter.

Now the first task of these new chapters is to secure a homeworld. It is a sort of test, a life and death coinflip for the new chapter. Sometimes they find worlds that are easily pacified and offer excellent recruits but other times they encounter hostile forces that destroy them completely. Chapters will often spend decades or even centuries conquering their homeworlds. This is because they must do it completely on their own. They can have no support from the Imperial Guard, other marines, the navy, the inquisition, no one. They lay claim to a single planet anywhere in the Imperium, conquer it and claim full responsibility for it. Unless the chapter itself become suspected of real heresy or corruption itself they're on their own, and if they are suspected of heresy the Imperium is coming to wipe them out too.

Now lets say the PC's are members of a brand new (100 or so years old) chapter. They have recently reached their new homeworld and commenced the assault on it. It's largely human populated but it's completely dominated by something. It doesn't matter what that something is, xenos, chaos, even an massive genestealer cult that is keeping human civilization alive on the planet as a food source. Whatever flavour of baddie you want.

Now the game begins as the PC's participate in a disastrous assault on the planets surface. The assault fleet is blown apart and the marines are scattered across the surface of the planet. The PC's are new recruits. They can either be scouts or newly promoted from scouts. Their dropship lands/gets shot down far away from any surviving comrades.

The basic premise would be that it's up to the PC's to track down other survivors, rally any scattered resistance groups and topple the enemy dominance of the planet with nothing but their bolters and their wits. The planet itself has a kind of mad max post apocalypse feel with scattered groups of humans eeking out a living and trying as best they can to keep their heads down. They don't know anything about the Imperium apart from a few scattered legends spread by rogue traders and stories past down over generations. The enemy dominates their lives and quells most resistance making much of the population itself hostile to the Marines.

The cool thing about this is it really lets the players be the stars and IMO that's what a good RPG is. The PC's get to affect the course of their chapters development in its earliest stages letting it adopt aspects of their personalities, their decisions could affect the weird 'quirks' that every chapter has. This is the one thing that's normally missing in DH. The PC's can't make a difference in a normal game of DH. The 'new chapter' idea however ties them intimately to a single world and by having the rest of the Imperium take a hands off approach it allows them to control their own destiny. It could let them rise up the ranks of their new chapter over the course of the campaign and eventually conclude with them taking the helm of the chapter.

The biggest difficulty I see in this is figuring out how to supply the PC's. If it was a 'traditional' outcast world in the Imperium the tech level would suck ass. While it might be cool to have the PC's destroy a bunch of axe swinging barbarians but what will they do when the run out of ammo? What kinds of marines don't own power armour? While you can keep that going for a while by having them come across scattered drops of destroyed ships, dead comrades and the like you can't keep going like that forever.

One possible solution I could see is having them not completely cut off from the Imperium. The Tech Priests of Mars and their parent marine chapter do help them out with supply drops and some technical assistance but they do not intervene in the fighting. As they reach progressive 'stages' of the campaign and become more self sufficient themselves their contact with the rest of the Imperium slowly increases. For example, once they start gathering their own recruits and providing them with their geneseed they might get a shipment of power armour to equip them. The shipments might begin as drops of ammunition and other bare essentials delivered by daredevil rogue traders willing to dodge orbital fire to reach a hot LZ while eventually entire shiploads of goods will be delivered on landing strips controlled by the PC's.

Anyhow, I've rambled on long enough. I mostly wanted to write this down so I wouldn't forget it. Comments, advice, criticism, and yoinking are all welcome.

Right, I see how the handwaving would simplify things. If it were me I wouldn't have thought of that and tried to run all the combats as tactical exercises and then I guess it'd morph into Wh40K rather than Wh40K the RPG.