Hello everyone.

My friends and I decided to look into Dark Heresy. We've never played anything like it before.

My main question is, do you use models and a playing board of some sort? Or what?

We have made our characters. We have dice. What else do we need?

The Book, dice, pens, and paper is all you really need to play. I would recommend some not-so-good for you food (pizza is always a safe bet) and beer (if your of age and all) is almost as vital as those dice. Other then that and a bit of imagination and the desire to play pretend, you have all of what you will need.

From here, make sure one of you is the game master (GM) and read up a bit on pgs 218-229. There is also an introductory adventure in the back of the book that the GM can run you guys through once he/she has read up on the GM's section. Models and boards aren't needed as. for the most part, the game takes place in your head. The GM describes the world and the supporting characters and acts as the main star character's (PC's) senses. he/she will describe what the PC's see, hear, feel, taste, and smell. He/she will describe how people respond to them, what happens when one of them dose something to effect the environment, etc. In other words, it's like playing pretend, only with a rule book telling you how ;-)

You need your dice, and your imaginations. And one of you needs to be the GM.

You don't need a board or minis, tho' they can help.

you can just describe the action to your players, and they describe what they are going to have their characters do to you.. You need to be descriptive enough for them to know what's happening. And they need to as well.

If you're not THAT descriptive, grab your graph paper (you can get a blotter pad of quadrile... about $8 at W*M) and draw the map on graph paper. Use some kind of position indicators (Carcassone Meeples work just fine if you use a 1"= 1.5m or 1"=2m, or 1/100; Lego Figures work fine, too.)

Or use a whiteboard. Or scratch paper and just a sketch.

If you can't get enough to run combats without minis and maps on the table, Minis are a reasonable add-on.

And remember, not every encounter is a shoot-em-up. Some should be "talkies", getting the information the players need to them by them interacting with the NPC's.

And remember also: the GM is all the characters that are not controlled by other players. The players should work together to overcome the situations the GM presents, and the GM should see to it they work to tell a story, and that player actions have meaning to the story. If they don't want to pursue Mr. Big Bad, then fine. Let them pursue his minions... but have the evidence keep feeding back to Mr. Big Bad.

Besides everythng already said:

I would advise to pre-generate a couple of names. I guess you play "Illumination" (the one in the book) first.

Use the name-tables in the character-buildung section of the book and "role up some primitive and imperial names". From time to time, you pc will start to interact with people you did not "prepared", so having a list of (valuable) namens spares you (the GM) a lot of stammering and dice-rolling. Since "fancy" WH40K-Names are hard to come up. The people in the imperium just do not tend to have names like "Jack Smith" or "Jane Porter".

Oh!

And perhaps you (the GM & the group) should get familiar with the combat system. Just take your ready chars and play a "training shoot out" in a street against a heavy, some scum and a mutant abomination (see NPC-List). So you will have your "initial discussions and miss-rules" in a situation where it does not count