Reading – Dark Heresy Game Master’s Kit

NOTE: I first wrote this years ago. (We don’t discuss the number of years.) It’s here as part of the “all in one place” exercise I’m slowly working on.

Recently, I posted a review of the Dark Heresy Character Folio. A small, non-essential product, I wrote that review because I couldn’t find any reviews of the product online and – primarily – because writing the review was a good way for me to pound out some words without requiring too much in the way of brainpower.

This isn’t a review that I was able to put together without switching on at least some of my brain. No, writing a review of the Dark Heresy Game Master’s Kit* required at least some thought, if only because it took reading the adventure – titled “Maggots in the Meat” – several times before I finally settled on an opinion. You see, the adventure both bothers and interests me all at once (it’s a railroad, but I can see why the authors took the steps that they did, due to space constraints and the fact that this is basically the “introductory adventure” for the series). But I’m not ready to go into the adventure yet, so you’ll have to either keep reading through my thoughts on the non-adventure portions of the product or skip ahead a few paragraphs.

The Screen

Heavy, beautiful, and durable are the words I would use to describe the screen (that is, if I was told that I could only use three words; fortunately, this is the internet so the only thing preventing me from rambling for hundreds of words is the fact that I have a short attention span and I really need to stop wasting time). The outside of the screen is covered in full-color artwork (including the Dark Heresy cover art, the Inquisitor miniatures game cover, and some other older artwork). It’s attractive artwork, and gives the players something to look at during the game. For more on having fun while gaming just visit this website.

The inside of the screen, four panels, is covered in several tables, including tables for:

• Hit Locations
• Falling Damages
• Test Difficulty
• Critical Tables (an index only, and not the actual tables, which is disappointing but understandable since the tables require 8-pages in the rulebook)
• Cover Types
• Weapon Craftsmanship
• Ranged Weapons

And that’s just one of the four panels. As you can no doubt guess, this is a useful, functional screen. Pretty much what you expect from GM screens these days (since the hobby has had three decades of experience in crafting screens, you would expect more of them to be more useful than they are, but you know how it goes).

Physically, the screen is very solid and uses a thicker stock than the covers of the core rulebook. I don’t see how anyone could complain about the overall quality of the screen. (Though some of you already have.)

The Booklet: Appendix Section

The 32-page booklet – printed in B&W on a heavy, glossy stock – is broken into two sections, an adventure and an appendix (which is further subdivided into three sections). In the interest of delaying discussion of the adventure, let me take a little time to look at the appendix first.

The Slaugth. An alien race described as “quasi-humanoid shapes composed of seemingly hundreds of writhing, half-melded maggot-like worms covered in viscous, necrotic mucus,” the Slaugth are featured in the adventure and this section (only two-pages in length) of the appendix exists solely to give the GM a little information on the race and the statistics for the Slaugth Infiltrator.

Creating Your Own Xenos Creatures. This eight-page section of the booklet provides GMs with basic guidelines and tables that can be used to design new aliens, either intelligent xenos or monstrous beasts, as well as one sample creature. It’s an imperfect system that requires the user to think through the steps and not just make rolls on random tables (I say this from experience, having used the system to write a short article for Pyramid magazine shortly after Dark Heresy* was originally published), but it’s perfectly adequate and useful by any experienced, creative GM. Creating a creature requires six steps – Choose Type, Roll Characteristics, Choose Form and Size, Roll Xeno Classification, Roll Distinctive Features, and Finishing Touches – and designing a new creature shouldn’t take a GM more than 15-to-20 minutes once he has an idea and is familiar with the process. I’m hoping that the upcoming creature book, Creatures Anathema*, will include an expanded version of this system, but if it doesn’t that won’t be a strike against the book.

Rules for Poisons & Toxins. Arguably, these two pages should have appeared in the main rulebook and not as an afterthought in this booklet. Still, what’s done is done so we’re stuck with useful rules in this supplement, and we’ll have to make the best of things. Poisons and toxins have three statistics – Speed, Strength, and Effect – and require the victim to fail a Toughness test (modified by the poison or toxin’s Strength) before they take effect. The rules for using poisons and toxins take one page while the second page lists nine “Infamous Poisons of the Calixis Sector.” There’s not a lot here, but there is enough that a GM could use the information as a guide to creating new poisons.

The Booklet: Adventure Section

NOTE: Players should stop reading now. Go away. If you read this, and your GM decides to run the adventure, then you may not have any fun during the game. You have been warned.

Taking place on Acreage, a “dark and dismal feudal world,” this adventure sends the players to investigate who (or what) is behind a series of attacks on a city set in a swamp. The adventures background, which consumes two-pages of the adventure, goes into some detail on the world including the setup of the city under external threat – a siege – and an internal threat – the previously-mentioned Slaugth are within the city where they are coming out at night and collecting corpses and killing those are not yet dead. Unfortunately for the citizens of the city, the ruling prince is so involved with the siege that he hasn’t bothered to look into the mysterious murders. Using that idea as a springboard, the adventure background section closes ominously enough with:

“Whilst the prince has not heeded the signs, others have. Word has reached the attentive ears of the Inquisition. Enter the Acolytes.”

The Adventure Starts. The adventure itself starts when the players land at Emperor’s Island, a spaceport set on what’s described as “a mighty oil rig or man made island” and the first clue that this adventure cuts corners wherever it can. The setup instructs the GM to get the characters to the spaceport in any way that works, suggesting that this may be the first time that the PCs meet each other. Since this is technically the first adventure sold for the game (Shattered Hope, the adventure from the “quick start,” doesn’t count, since printed copies of that are difficult to find these days though the PDF is available for download here, if you need a copy), it’s acceptable for the adventure to be vague on how the players reach the world and meet, but it’s still disappointing that the authors didn’t invest another paragraph or two in suggesting more options to the GM.

While at the spaceport the player characters should explore the setting, searching for – and collecting – what ever information they can find about their target city. This is the adventure’s honeymoon period (especially if it’s run as the first adventure) and the author’s know it, going so far as to say:

“The Acolytes can spend as much or as little time as they like exploring the island. This can be an ideal chance for them to get to know each other and you shouldn’t feel that you need to hurry them to the docks and get them on their way to the mainland. Players could also use this time to try and purchase extra equipment or indulge in some gambling or carousing. It is also a good chance to try out the characters’ social (and possibly combat) skills.”

The text in this section provides the GM with some tools to lead the player characters around the spaceport – including a rumors table that can be accessed if the players pass a Routine Inquiry Test (as a first adventure, it would have been nice if the text pointed the GM to the appropriate pages in the rulebook, but that’s not a necessity) and statistics for NPCs who exist solely to get into a scuffle with the player characters.

The section closes with a set of guidelines that the GM can use to lead the players to a boat which will then take them to their target. The actual journey is glossed over, and it is assumed that the players will make it to the city where they enter the middle act of the adventure.

The Adventure Continues. Olrankan, the city at the heart of the adventure, is under siege (as has already been mentioned). If you’re expecting the players to blast their way in, flying past siege engines and shooting a path into the city, you’d better prepare yourself for disappointment because even though the adventure mentions the idea of fighting their way in, there aren’t any rules covering vehicle combat or suggestions on how to handle vehicle combat. In fact, the one bit of boxed text that addresses the idea of a fight includes statistics for the generic “Musketmen” who have surrounded the city, and suggests that instead of fighting the players would be better off sneaking into the city.

Of course, that’s only if they disregard the actual “entering the city” approach that the authors present as the best option: bribing the mercenaries who have the city under siege. Yes, what could have been used as the first great battle of the adventure is instead a calm, almost boring event in which the players let the NPCs work out a deal (unless, of course, the players come up with the idea of bribing the opposition, which feels like the wrong approach when you’ve just finished shopping for a new gun).

Regardless of how they go about getting past the blockade, eventually the player characters enter the city where they can begin asking questions about what the hell is going on around here. It takes a lot of talking and exploring the city – which is described but not mapped – before the player character gather enough information to lead them to the final scene of the adventure, the Old Sky-Mill.

The Adventure Concludes. Regardless of how they find their way here (maybe following tracks that lead from a bloody wall, or maybe information acquired from interrogating “corpse farmers” who collect the dead and sell the bodies to the Slaugth), the player characters will end up at the Old Sky-Mill, an “ancient, imposing structure” that is, I’m happy to say, mapped. It has to be, though, since the location is basically a dungeon complex within which the Slaugth and their “pets” – alien creatures that are not described but, instead, waiting for the GM’s creativity (from the “Getting Started” section of the adventure: “You will also need to generate a few aliens for the Slaugth to use as pets using the Alien Generator found in the Appendix”) – sit back and wait for the battle with the player characters.

The adventure assumes that the player characters fight their way to the top of the Old Sky-Mill and that they kill most – but not all! – of the aliens. This is important since allowing some of the Slaugth to escape will give the GM the chance to extend the adventure by sending the player characters into the swamps on a bug hunt. Once the players have had their fill of killing aliens, the adventure closes with the player characters notifying their Inquisitor that the mission was a success.

Thoughts on the Adventure

As a way to teach the game to new players, this adventure is adequate. It runs the players through skill tests, combat, and pretends to give them an opportunity to hunt for clues and question the locals. It’s a railroad, but then it has to be since it covers only 15-pages and in that space manages to detail a spaceport, a city, and a small, three-story dungeon complex. All of the necessary bits for a good adventure are in place, but all of the bits are glossed over and/or missing depth.

The most annoying part of the adventure, for me, has to be the entrance into the city. You see, I feel that the authors made a mistake in loading the player characters into a vehicle and then pitting them against other vehicles, without giving any guidelines or rules for running vehicular combat. A GM who wants to make this scene a little more exciting would do well to download the PDF, Dark Heresy Apocrypha: Vehicles & Riding Beasts, which was released free on the Black Industries website earlier this year. (I don’t see it on Fantasy Flight’s site, but the file has to be available somewhere online.)

It’s not a great adventure but it’s also not a terrible adventure. Instead, I see this as a mediocre adventure that makes some bad choices. With a little work, a GM should be able to clean up the rougher parts of the adventure without too much trouble. I recommend focusing on the setup (find a better way to get the players to the world), connect the scuffle at the spaceport to a later stage of the adventure (either by having the thugs that the players fight escape and then place those same NPCs at the “get past the blockade” scene or making the “corpse farmers” and thugs the same people), and fix that damned “enter the city” scene. The final scene, at the Old Sky-Mill, is okay, but it could be improved by either making the conflict more interesting (this would also be a good place to bring the thugs from the spaceport back into the picture, saying that the player characters have been followed and trapping them between the thugs and the Slaugth) or more dangerous (instead of several minor alien pets, give the Slaugth a couple of really big, nasty pets).

Thoughts on the Screen as a Whole

Overall, the Dark Heresy Game Master’s Kit* is a useful product but not a vital one. If you’re the type of GM who must have a screen, then obviously you need this if you’re going to run the game. If, rather, you’re a bit more relaxed in your gaming style and rarely – if ever – sit at a table, then this could be useful for the poison and alien creation rules, but you can feel safe in giving the adventure a pass. If you need an adventure, hit the Fantasy Flight website where you can download two different adventures for free, and it’s reported that more adventures are coming.