How do you guys handle rest periods between missions? My acolytes have just finished Damned Cities, and I am allowing them some R&R until they get into House of Dust and Ash.

I'm curious as to how long should I have this break be? They acolytes will expect pay, but so far had limited their equipment access. I suppose I should increase the pool of equipment they could get ahold of and allow them to buy it, but might just give them the equipment. How might you do this?

I plan on having a debriefing roleplay as well, and involving Spectre Cell 17 to start messing with their lives as they begin their investigations into Haarlock on their own. The psyker of the group made a deal with the Mirror Daemon so that will likely come up. A player is getting Cyberneticly Resurected by the Tenebrae Collegium without his knowing so he's an earpiece into their investigations.

Any other suggestions?

My own GM gives us however much rest it takes to get to our next destination and/or however long it takes for our group's Inquisitor to get word to us on our next assignment. This is the Galaxy of Warhammer 40k. For agents of the Inquisition there is no such thing as "downtime." Only lapses where their superior's orders haven't gotten to them yet.

Which I generally agree with. I can't see Acolytes being away from the grindstone for more than a couple of weeks, tops, unless they're travelling to their destination in which case, it's however long the transport takes to arrive.

My own GM gives us however much rest it takes to get to our next destination and/or however long it takes for our group's Inquisitor to get word to us on our next assignment. This is the Galaxy of Warhammer 40k. For agents of the Inquisition there is no such thing as "downtime." Only lapses where their superior's orders haven't gotten to them yet.

Which I generally agree with. I can't see Acolytes being away from the grindstone for more than a couple of weeks, tops, unless they're travelling to their destination in which case, it's however long the transport takes to arrive. When Cybernetics need installing, well, I guess that's something the big I might wait out, or they simply send in the rest of the team.

My thoughts exactly - Heretics aren't waiting for the Acolytes to be fully fit again in order for it to be a fair fight.

In our last DH campaign I had a few years between cases, long enough for the PCs to get some (entirely necessary) bionics, train in some advanced disciplines like forbidden lore (Inquisition) and recover from he horrors they had seen.

I also had each character spend some time performing an individual investigation (by choosing a local planet and taking a chosen very hard skill check) this gave them each a chance of individually uncovering something that would help in the next case.

My acolytes are allowed to take as many breaks as they wish. Of course the universe keeps going. Those orks who you would have stoped from stealing a powerful xeno artifact have now had a year to play around, and very likely turn into some devastating weapon. Those shape shifting xenos you would have killed are now fully integrated into society to the point you will probably never catch them. the imperium of man is at war, and its enemies do not stop. Every day, every hour, every minute you waste not fighting them, they spend fighting you. Nids dont take breaks. Also warp travel can take months, if not years to get you places, depending on where you are going.

Those shape shifting xenos you would have killed are now fully integrated into society to the point you will probably never catch them.

....Well this bodes ill for our group.

Those shape shifting xenos you would have killed are now fully integrated into society to the point you will probably never catch them.

....Well this bodes ill for our group.

Hypothetically.

As I was GM, i usually gave the characters „down times“ off about a month.
More if I thought that they would need a longer time to “learn” all the things they would (XP spending spree).

This downtime was normally wrapped up as a narrative, but I interlaced it with some conversation. I had introduced NPC in the form of Interrogators, other acolytes and trainers which the player characters could build a rapport with and actually TALK about what they experienced and how it felt...and it gave me some curve balls to throw at them to challenge their point of view with a different point of view.

In your case, I would say give them about two month of downtime and let them spend some money and xp. Pick a planet where they stay, give them some chance at mingling with normal society as well. Give each of them 2 or 3 mundance scenes while they are doing their stuff. These can be very short, things you would handle in about 5 minutes of description and interaction. None of them needs to have high consequences. Non of them should have DIRE consequences! It is just meant to make them “feel” like their characters life in the 41st millenium. Have them role a skill during such encounters, but let the result be trivial in regard to what happens in case of success or failure.

That raises another point, do you guys have your acolytes wait for the end of the adventure to spend their xp, or do you allow them to spend it as they get it?

Since I started my DH campaign long before RT 's Navis Primer came out, I had to extrapolate travel times between worlds based on the fragmentary info available in early DH . That led to 'Age of Sail'-style travel times, typically taking 3 months to cross a subsector. So, with these substantial 'time sinks' built in to the missions, I usually don't have more than a few days of 'down time' between assignments.

As for when to spend XP, since my players trickle in over the course of an hour or two each session, we usually use the wait for everyone to arrive to spend XP.

Any other suggestions?

I largely let it be up to my players how downtime unfolds. Typically there's stuff they want to do, but can't really get away with doing while on a mission. For example, my players are very fond of starting their own factions, and raising their standing within established ones that they belong to. Typically this means that downtime ends up turning into a non-mission adventure at some point. And once that hits a lull, I throw the next mission at them.

Other than that, there's character development. And for that we've borrowed from CoC & GURPS.

• Basic time to gain an Advance is 200(-Characteristic Bonus*d10 if there's a governing Characteristic) hours.
• If the Advance is to something the PC has unsuccessfully used since the last period of downtime, the time to gain an Advance is reduced by -50%
• If the PC is receiving professional tutoring in the Advance, the time to gain the Advance is reduced by a further -50%
• If the PC must teach himself, the time to gain the Advance is increased by +50%

That raises another point, do you guys have your acolytes wait for the end of the adventure to spend their xp, or do you allow them to spend it as they get it?

If we are talking about raising a skill "one step" and the skill was one that was either already possessed or BASCI I allowed for it. Let´s face it, nobody would note that you go "10% better" in something. NEW & ADVANCED skills (which meant "sudden new knowledge that wasn´t there before) were something I normally said "no". Talents..well...big "depends on".

But BASICALLY, they spend the xp between missions. That was largely due to the fact that they wanted to plan & get some councelling as well... something that had "bogged down" the game otherwise. Oh, the fact that I withheld "xp for important achievements" till the END of the mission "helped" to foster that kind of behaviour as well. It was a side effect, so. I simply did not wished the players to know that it was GOOD if it might have been something they were in doubt on.

Last but not least, the downtime came with "nudges" of the Inquisitor regarding their "future new assignment"..and thereby with the one or the other "elite advance option". The player did not wanted to miss out.

So basically "yes, the majority of all spending of XP was strongly encouraged to happen DOWNTIME".

How do you deal with calculating time from the Navis Primer in comparison to the Calaxis Sector? Do you just extrapolate the warp route and use an NPC navigator?

How do you deal with calculating time from the Navis Primer in comparison to the Calaxis Sector? Do you just extrapolate the warp route and use an NPC navigator?

I frankly did not give anything about really "calculating" the travel times while I was a GM. My players never into such details, so there was no need to spend time and brain power on these things.

Instead, a "nearby system" was reachable in about a week or two

Something "within the subsector" was reachable twice that time.

Longer travel times could be could back immensly if you had ship with a good navigator and good charts.

Going with traders only making "minor distances" ate a lot of time just for hanging around in the next port, waiting for the next ship to come, to unload, to take up load and to leave (which could take a day each, depends on the facilities of the port in questions).

Thereby, my acolytes usualy ended up spending between one or three weeks "under warp" and every "estimated arrival dates" in the space ports had the addendum "itEw" which meant "if the Emperor wills". Because there was no saying that a ship might not be delayed or even show up much earlier.

I had a look at the RT "times" as soon as it came out...but then just shrugged and went on. It was not like anybody would sue me & I could use my limited time on other things then calculating traveltimes in the warp. LIke, preparing some fluff and descriptive text about a space port they would just stop by for a day or the name and interior of the ship they would travel with.

Sorry that was more to Adeptus B as he mentioned that he actually did that with the Navis Primer.

The Navis Primer is probably more complicated than you want. We use numbers loosely based on an old issue of White Dwarf, distinguishing between the Imperial Navy, Merchant Fleet and Calculated Jumps:

Imperial Navy Merchant Fleet Calculated Jump

Distance 1 Light Year 1 Light Year 1 Light Year

Real Time 1-5 hours 1-2 Days 7-14 days

Warp Time 1-5 minutes 30-60 minutes 1-5 hours

How do you deal with calculating time from the Navis Primer in comparison to the Calaxis Sector? Do you just extrapolate the warp route and use an NPC navigator?

Sorry that was more to Adeptus B as he mentioned that he actually did that with the Navis Primer.

I don't have the Navis Primer ; that's why I had to extrapolate travel times. Both the adventure Purge The Unclean and the novel Scourge the Heretic contain references that it takes 3 months to travel from Scintilla to Sepheris Secondus, so I took that as the 'standard time to cross a subsector from one end to the other. Established warp routes (as depicted on the 'old-timey' map inside the covers of the rulebook) and skilled Navigators can reduce this time, and I throw in a d10 roll for 'weather', with a 1-2 reducing the time (favorable warp currents) and a 9-10 increasing it (warp turbulance).

That's the explanation for our homebrewed travel times. The travel times given in the DH fluff are too slow for the Imperium of Man to continue existing, while the travel times in WD are way too fast for the feel of DH. So we compromised and turned the WD travel times into "imperial Navy only", while just about everyone use the much slower merchant fleet travel times (which are still significantly faster than the DH fluff, but not blink of an eye fast).

For example, the distance between Scintilla and Sepheris Secondus is some 25LY. That makes the transit time in real space 25-50 days, and the transit time in the Warp 12-24 hours - if you use our merchant fleet travel times.

Meanwhile crossing the galaxy with the Imperial Navy doesn't take several hundred years like it would with the travel times in DHs fluff.

I think those travel times are just because of the odd nature of the warp in the Calaxis Sector. So I'm having my PC's go from Sinophia to Solomon. The ship in question was actually going to be a trade vessel oddly enough, transporting supplies from Dreah around the sector. Given these rough guestimations it'd take between 40-70 days? Give or take some days for weather?

I didn't plan on warp travel. Maybe he takes a route from Sinophia to Dreah, docks there for a few weeks and travels normally a month or so to Solomon out of the warp?

Sounds pretty reasonable to me, yeah.

As for the Warp travel thing, I'm not sure I understand you correctly. Warp travel is the IoM's means of Faster Than Light travel. Without utilising Warp travel, journeys of multiple Light Years (or just a single one for that matter) are basically impossible.

I didn't realize that the times meant that while it took that long in the warp a much longer time in real space had passed. Went over my head.

Sounds pretty reasonable to me, yeah.

As for the Warp travel thing, I'm not sure I understand you correctly. Warp travel is the IoM's means of Faster Than Light travel. Without utilising Warp travel, journeys of multiple Light Years (or just a single one for that matter) are basically impossible.

Unless you're Tyranids, Tau or Necrons, anyways.

I didn't realize that the times meant that while it took that long in the warp a much longer time in real space had passed. Went over my head.

Trust me: the less you try to wrap your mind around "the warp", the better

Especially because those things "changes" from time to time in the officiall published material. RT is currently "state of affairs".

I normally complete ignore this "I was one week in the warp but x weeks away in reality" just for simplicites sake.

Sounds pretty reasonable to me, yeah.

As for the Warp travel thing, I'm not sure I understand you correctly. Warp travel is the IoM's means of Faster Than Light travel. Without utilising Warp travel, journeys of multiple Light Years (or just a single one for that matter) are basically impossible.

Unless you're Tyranids, Tau or Necrons, anyways.

Hence the bolded part (IoM = Imperium of Man)

Yeah, my players will be upset if they never get the chance to get paid and spend some cash, which I respect to be fair. I'll just say that they have a few options, either the long trip outside the warp, warp travel to Dreah and smaller craft to Solomon, or Warp travel to Solomon. They'll obviously have the drawback of having less opportunity for their own investigations or earning cash on their own.

In retrospect, they're acolytes and need to learn their place. Their inquisitor may have just decided they're taking the long route to reflect on their own actions read here as (prepare themselves for what's coming next because he's putting them in essentially a suicide mission that is The House of Dust and Ash.)