Bit of a rant, I'm doing a mountain/molehill thing probably.

Ok so for as long as I can recall, despite not naming it what it actually is, most people I know seem to have replaced the name of this with that well known beverage which built half of the British Imperium Empire that is "tea". Only War and BC also reaffirmed it to be made of crushed and dried leaves (as opposed to beans) and gave it no negative or positive effects. It was all fluffy!

Now I'm reading the description here and for a start it seems to evade the notion of it being made from anything at all and suggests that it's more useful for keeping people awake on a night shift, something more accredited to coffee perhaps than tea. It now reduces fatigue and is now MORE addictive than any narcotic in the rest of the book bar none. Even Lho-sticks, which we all know is actually tobacco is not addictive so why has this staple beverage of the Imperium now got such a heavy addition element to it? Now I am aware that there is such a thing as caffeine addiction but usually tea contains far less of it than coffee per ml and yet lho got left out? Frankly it shouldn't have one at all and remained a good RP element in half our games...

Combine that of course with the rules that fatigue leads to death in sufficient levels (p223), in theory you can keep yourself alive with a **** espresso!

Thoughts or is it just the Englishman ranting?

Bit of a rant, I'm doing a mountain/molehill thing probably.

Ok so for as long as I can recall, despite not naming it what it actually is, most people I know seem to have replaced the name of this with that well known beverage which built half of the British Imperium Empire that is "tea". Only War and BC also reaffirmed it to be made of crushed and dried leaves (as opposed to beans) and gave it no negative or positive effects. It was all fluffy!

Now I'm reading the description here and for a start it seems to evade the notion of it being made from anything at all and suggests that it's more useful for keeping people awake on a night shift, something more accredited to coffee perhaps than tea. It now reduces fatigue and is now MORE addictive than any narcotic in the rest of the book bar none. Even Lho-sticks, which we all know is actually tobacco is not addictive so why has this staple beverage of the Imperium now got such a heavy addition element to it? Now I am aware that there is such a thing as caffeine addiction but usually tea contains far less of it than coffee per ml and yet lho got left out? Frankly it shouldn't have one at all and remained a good RP element in half our games...

Combine that of course with the rules that fatigue leads to death in sufficient levels (p223), in theory you can keep yourself alive with a **** espresso!

Thoughts or is it just the Englishman ranting?

Let me try to comb out the points you're making.

1) The books seem to be indicating that recaf is the 40K version of tea rather than coffee

2) Recaf now has rules related to addiction in DH2, as well as rules for preventing fatigue

My responses to these are that 1) recaf will always be coffee in my (American) heart, and 2) drug/addiction rules in pretty much every rpg are utter garbage.

Here is a better rule on how to handle drug addictions, stolen mostly from Fate. Allow your players to declare if they have an addiction to something or other. Whenever that player goes out of his/her way to make the character's life more complicated due to the addiction, award them with a fate point. Whenever you (the GM) decide that the addiction should come up in the story, offer the player a fate point if they'll allow it to come up. Simple as that. Burn all the terrible rules on drug addiction in rpgs to the ground.

Perhaps it's something like coca tea?

Oh I'm happy with any custom rule and I never have an issue making stuff up for it. Just seems like this book has redone the staple beverage. I did indeed almost spit my tea out when I first read it...

From what I've always understood Recaf is any beverage that has an amount of caffeine to keep you up. So it's coffee to me.

As a sidenote, I quit coffee/tea 3 weeks ago. **** addiction.

But yeah, for me recaf is coffee.

I always assumed recaf was coffee, even if I am a Brit.

Yes because 95% of all the worlds coffee is made from crushed leaves isnt it? Point remains, terrible addiction concept that they felt the need to give this a worse addiction and nicotine (lho) gets away with nothing.

My guess is that they retconned it from tea to coffee. I can't find anywhere in the DH2 book which says that it's made from crushed leaves. Was it described as such in earlier books?

[with bored voice:] Computer sais: Coffee !

My guess is that they retconned it from tea to coffee. I can't find anywhere in the DH2 book which says that it's made from crushed leaves. Was it described as such in earlier books?

Only War p199

Recaf is a popular hot beverage that is made from crushed and brewed leaves. The composition can vary from planet to planet, but most blends incorporate some form of stimulant such as caffeine or detoxified pharamoxine compounds. The perfect companion for a sentry’s long watch at night.

Black Crusade p183

DH1 P149

Recaf is a popular hot beverage, made from crushed and brewed leaves. The composition can vary from planet to planet, but most blends have a stimulant such as caffeine as a basic release agent.

I was bored this morning...

Then yea, I'm guessing that they retconned it for some reason.

My guess is that they retconned it from tea to coffee. I can't find anywhere in the DH2 book which says that it's made from crushed leaves. Was it described as such in earlier books?

I don't think it was ever intended to be anything other than tea. That said, I tend to think of it as a stronger tea than what most of us would drink, thus my example above of coca tea.

Must be very strong tea, I'm personally keeping it as coffee in my universe though. Fits better to me.

My two cents:

"recaf" = re cycled caf fee(ine).

This isn't even just a 40k term, as it shows up on the interwebs and even various non-sci-fi stories before Dark Heresy was a thing. Apparently, however, there it was referring to coffee that was re heated, just like decaf is short for decaf feinated coffee. Whilst in 40k I would expect it to be a bit more grimdark, hence the recycled (though it'd make more sense if this was referring to the water rather than the caffeine, I suppose).

My perception is also biased due to being used to Shadowrun's "soycaf"; I pretty much assumed recaf to be the 40k take on it the first time I've seen that term.

That being said, there's a lot of ways to explain the meaning of the term.

tl;dr: someone expected consistency in 40k?

I suppose you could easily say that "recaf" means one thing on some worlds, and another elsewhere. Like how there's two different descriptions for promethium in the Dark Heresy books, too. After all, there actually is tea with caffeine as well.

Who knows, maybe on some worlds, when you order a recaf they'll serve you a pepsi.

Or perhaps it's just a mixture of various caffeinated sources (tea, coffee, ...) and recycled that way, like Lynata mentioned.

I know they do the same with wines sometimes, all the leftovers gets thrown together to create some cheap wine product.

That's even better! A cheap mixture of recycled leftovers - almost a collection of 40k commodity buzzwords. After all, you've got to keep the masses supplied somehow.

Real coffee, from 100% actual beans? Privilege of the nobility.

Perhaps we should just call it a brew?

http://comicsagogo.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/asterix-and-tea.jpg

For me recaf means any caffeineted drink. It could be an energy drink, Irn-Bru, tea coca leaves or coffee. It can also be some kind of synthetic variant of amphetamine that colours the water and tastes bitter when drunk.

Like soycaf, it's not the name it's the world over children are told that this is a "grown ups drink" .

Haha this subject is out of left field but funnily enough quite interesting (I guess unexpected topics often are).

I have to confess I always assumed Recaf was coffee and never actually paid that much attention to the whole made from crushed leaves thing. I like Lynata's take, Recaf made from real beans obviously the privilege of the nobility, them and their bloody high provendar!

I also never considered it could be any caffeinated beverage, which is actually really cool. The next planet my players go to they might be surprised when their recaf is actually Red Bull, with the right amount of warp taint, it might literally give you wings .

"recaf" = re cycled caf fee(ine).

I would have thought that the 're-' stood for 'reconstituted', not 'recycled'.

In any event, screw tea, coffee roolz!

I would have thought that the 're-' stood for 'reconstituted', not 'recycled'.

Like reconstituted milk?

But how do you reconstitute something that didn't have any water to begin with?

(I actually really liked that idea at first because, as I just learned, reconstituted milk does exist, so reconstituted coffee could be a playful reference to it, but then I stumbled over the aforementioned problem ...)

As an addendum (since honestly, as suggested above, Fate has better addiction rules than those of 40K RPGs), recaf is still not listed as addictive in the text. Instead, the penalty to using it is that it's easier to develop a tolerance for it on a day-to-day basis than normal. About what you'd expect, really.

Even though I though I personally think of recaf as coffee, it does make more sense for a game as British as 40K to have it be tea. After all, the British have tea brewing kits as standard inside of their TANKS. It's probably tea.

*SNIP* It now reduces fatigue and is now MORE addictive than any narcotic in the rest of the book bar none.

Recaf isn't addictive in the book. It just has faster diminishing returns. Addictive drugs have an asterisk * next to them. Recaf doesn't. Neither does lho sticks, probably because of a lack of in game effects, but that is a slightly separate can of worms.

The idea of keeping yourself alive via caffeine is rather absurd, which is why you can only really delay fatigue for an hour or so before diminishing returns says no more. Put that down to one turn in combat, and basically you're burning the roof of your mouth to keep your self awake for a few more seconds at the cost of half or more of that turn.

EDIT: NFK mentioned it before i did. I would have liked to have posted sooner but my internet has been acting up horribly for a while

Even though I though I personally think of recaf as coffee, it does make more sense for a game as British as 40K to have it be tea.

I did some more digging on the web, and the term seems to have surfaced in 40k first in the Blood Angel novels (2004+) written by James Swallow, and he seems to like coffee a lot . It's possible that the Dark Heresy team either fleshed out or re-interpreted it as tea when they published their game in 2008, though. Perhaps they sought to retroactively "Britify" it.

As mentioned earlier, the term actually predates 40k, however, and has been used to describe re-heated coffee (or "yesterday's coffee") in other novels. There is even a patent filed 1997 for "recaffeinated coffee", referring to a method of "enhancing" the amount of caffeine in a cup of coffee.

It could just be coincidence, of course - though James Swallow does like to insert interesting real life examples into 40k, like he did with the concept of scrip in his Sororitas books.

After all, the British have tea brewing kits as standard inside of their TANKS.

Curiously enough, I was just watching a suitable episode of Girls und Panzer .

The idea of keeping yourself alive via caffeine is rather absurd, which is why you can only really delay fatigue for an hour or so before diminishing returns says no more.

Even just the deletion of a level of Fatigue isn't too shabby, come to think of it. I remember several games in DH1 where the Test penalty really bothered me and I was just a single level above the threshold. In DH2, where having Fatigue past the threshold halves the corresponding characteristic instead of just giving you a -10, this is even more serious!

I've got it! New power armour feature - recaf auto-injector!

On a more serious note, I suppose I'm actually fine with both recaf as well as lho-sticks not having any acute effects. I see them more as "RP accessories" to add to a character's quirks (worked nicely on my OW Valhallan ), similar to gaudy clothes or a scar or a strange electoo. However, by the same token I then also would not allow them to have any positive effects. What's next, a Willpower bonus from being Well Fed? Is this World of Warcraft?

Addiction penalties in P&P games are, as NimSim already mentioned, somewhat "tricky" as they usually forego a more realistic longterm development in favour of crazy nigh-immediate effects as if there was a need for the universe to care for gameplay balancing.

Off the top of my hat, if I were to give some penalty to recaf and lho-sticks, I'd probably just punish regular users with a -5 Fel for the first day of withdrawal (cranky), plus from the second day onward another -5 to any tests requiring concentration or dexterity (such as analysing the contents of a book or repairing a broken vox). Heavy users may have to satiate their addiction more than once per day.

But I would not do any comedown/dysphoria immediately after the dosage has ceased to affect the user. That sort of stuff ought to be reserved for the really dangerous narcotics. And even there I think it is rather silly that these effects are supposed to trigger within a dozen rounds or so, just to provide the user with a risk in combat. Translated into real time, that'd be similar to heroine users beginning to cry after only a minute(!) of happy-time.

[edit] This post has turned out to be a bit longer than intended. Sorry, I'm rambling again.