Advanced Dark Heresy 2.0 (with 2.1 update)

Link to the Advanced Dark Heresy 2.1 at DropBox

Advanced Dark Heresy 2.0 (now with 2.1 update)

In Short

Dark Heresy is set into an appealing world of grim future. The original mechanics however become unsatisfying very soon as the combat, investigation, items, psychic powers do not answer to those expectations the lore of the Warhammer 40,000 sets around them. This very comprehensive package includes carefully planned and play tested system that allows far more interesting and challenging approach to this game and the characters. Main features in this package are: redesigned combat with all weapons, items and armour converted to this system too; redesigned use of psychic powers and complete lists of all psychic powers converted to these mechanics; rewritten talents, traits and skills to make the character's far more able and interesting; redesigned character sheets that feature far more interesting way to record your character; rewritten scum career; mechanics to character Influence and Renown; completely rewritten critical effects system and other damage models. Also the new version of the Advanced Dark Heresy features far more faster ways to handle all the things without losing any finesse that was introduced in the first version.

Main Features in More Detail

In the following chapters I will describe the features of the Advanced Dark Heresy 2.1 by introducing the changes that were made to the original system. These changes have received inspirations also from the Second Edition of the Dark Heresy and this package is easily usable with the Dark Heresy second edition.

New damage model

The core for this whole transformation is the new way of handling how the characters suffer the damage. The basics are still there, roll damage and reduce it by the AP of the armour and by Toughness Bonus then reduce wounds. However modified version of the Unnatural Characteristics has altered already many things. In addition to this each armour has bunch of different qualities that makes them far more than just wearing some AP. This is further enriched with Critical Hit system that allows powerful hits to cause critical damage even though the character still has wounds left. This is further enhanced with rewritten talents that more often modify combat results in interesting ways. The grand finale for the damage model comes from the rewritten and very detailed critical effects tables that allow the full fruition of the new critical damage system.

More interesting combat

All the combat actions were redesigned to allow far more careful planning and tougher choices for combat. This is further supported by complete list of rewritten weapons that supports all the new possibilities and makes the whole list of weapons far more interesting since there are lots more to think than just damage and penetration. This is of course supported by the damage model and newly made list of armours which together allow very nice sessions with tactical and detailed combat. The most important thing is that the new system that is introduced in ADH 2.0 is very simple to learn and master. Therefore the combat has remained fast and easy to control though few more calculations is necessary to find out these new outcomes.

Flavoured talents and skills

Skills are given far more smother ways of use where partial successes do exist. Also many talents and traits give far more character to those using them.

More interesting items

As part of this redesign many of the different items and upgrades were given more functions and more details to make their use more flavoured and rewarding.

Nicer way of using psychic powers

The psychic powers were originally sometimes even painfully annoying to use due to the high amount of rolling needed. Here most of the new structure and system is based upon the system that was introduced in Rogue Trader, Only War and later in Dark Heresy second edition. These systems had some little thing that left room for small adjustments and of course the new damage model had some effect on these too. Every power from the original Dark Heresy and some additional ones that were introduces later are written into this new system that simplifies the use into a very fast and fun to use version. That basis is now in the idea where every power has its psy rating requirement and the psyker commits the chosen amount from his own psy rating to focus the power. Basically there are first some calculations to see the total modifier and then the focus power test is made as a simple invocation test that reveals the amount of overbleed and such by degrees of success.

As an additional flavour a large collection of sorcery arcana was rewritten to this system too and the psyker characters have dark path always available.

Also now with 2.1 update the very unique version of Cryomancy discipline is introduced.

Influence and Renown

Since the player characters are in a service of the inquisition and tend to do deeds that earns them surely some influence over time there is now a simple interpretation of this added. Influence grows at very slow pace but eventually the characters are able to leave some simple requests to be dealt with Influence test. Also as the deeds the characters often do are quite likely spread all over the galaxy when given some time and this system of character renown also introduced. This allows characters to lean on their reputation or makes the infiltration more interesting when even random people start to recognise the acolytes.

Redesigned character sheets

Original character sheet were quite terrible and especially characters who manage to survive or start at higher levels were nuisance to their player as there was quite small amount of space for anything. Also recording a career path seemed quite hard, not to mention those characters who like to hoard all kinds of stuff. Newly designed character sheets allow enough room for all kinds of characters and offer space to record all those special features that are introduced in this Advanced Dark Heresy 2.0 system (now with update to 2.1). Every character sheet has a common part that allows recording everything except the character's career. Then there is an add-on sheet for each basic career that features nice way of recording experience by checking boxes along the characters career tree. Also these feature all the modifications that were later made available to the basic careers.

Redesigned Scum career

Scum was originally left without his criminal side unless the player decided to do some occasional criminal acts. Now the career of a scum is filled with nice flavoured and detailed criminal activity that will quite likely get him and his friends into very difficult situations and maybe even sentenced to face prison or death when they are found.

Some minor but remarkable changes

To smaller mechanics needed also rewriting to make them fit this system or to make them more like they probably should have been in the first place. Fatigue has received new rules, as have Righteous Fury, Fate, Burning. Also as a major chance that is more connected to the new damage model are the ways and times for healing. Also with 2.1 update there are now special damage models for cold based damge and heat caused minor damage from environments and such.

Faith Talents

These were introduced to Dark Heresy system in the Blood of the Martyrs sourcebook. This package includes revised versions of these.

Ascension

The original Ascension was rather disappointment to all and those ranks had nothing to give to those characters who reached them. With rewritten talents, skills and skill masteries not mention the Influence and Renown system any ascended career is really worth achieving. Of course this package also features revised editions of the Ascended psychic powers too.

Finally

This new system may seem to be quite large, but mostly this comes from the collected weapons, armour and item lists that were introduced to original Dark Heresy in various books. This system took me about a year to write, but there was this first edition made during that time also. Both these systems were carefully thought through and playtested along some 50 games with characters who lived and lived on from an adventure to another. Now that this work is done is want to share this revised edition that addresses all those things that were left problematic in the original Dark Heresy, Dark Heresy second edition and even in the first edition of this Advanced Dark Heresy.

Hopefully this allows you all to play some far more interesting and advanced games.

Yours Sincerely

Kari Salonen (aka LeGurmux)

EDIT: Updated to version 2.1 to include some more significant changes. This includes Cryomancy discipline with unique appearance and use. Also included are rules for cold damage and lesser heat damage from environments and such. Smaller additions include some items and weapons together with ready to use character sheet add-on pages for many of the alternate ranks. No less important are error fixes for some earlier stuff the gravest of which was totally missing the table for the effects of Fugitive statuses.

Probably my favorite part about these documents is their minimalistic formatting. A crisp white background with few (possibly only the DH logo?) images makes for quick loading times between pages. Good font choice too. Keep up the good work.

OPINION: From my perspective, these documents lean a little too closely to the bonus-happy DH1 days. I have mixed feelings about reintroducing crowd-pleasers like [Lightning Reflexes], [Mental Rage], and [Paranoia] without changing what (I assume) made them problematic in the first place.

They were problematic? :3

Probably my favorite part about these documents is their minimalistic formatting. A crisp white background with few (possibly only the DH logo?) images makes for quick loading times between pages. Good font choice too. Keep up the good work.

OPINION: From my perspective, these documents lean a little too closely to the bonus-happy DH1 days. I have mixed feelings about reintroducing crowd-pleasers like [Lightning Reflexes], [Mental Rage], and [Paranoia] without changing what (I assume) made them problematic in the first place.

Well the very foundation of this lies on the first edition of Dark Heresy and it has adepted but rethought versions of all those so to say "good parts" (like Focus Power, Influence, Renown aka Sublety, Righteous Fury) from the DH 2nd ed. applied.

The system introduces very high amount of different bonuses to here and there to allow far greater variety in possibilities of success.

The career paths are somewhat the strongest implication that this version was built on the original Dark Heresy, though I did not chance this when the new edition came as the highly fixed career paths were far more suited to the unforgiving and totalitaristic world of WH 40,000 than the somewhat more free version that was introduced in DH 2nd ed. which was also very short-lived since the characters were rather maxed out at the point where in the first version they were barely past the half way of their career.

The modified DH 1st ed. career paths also lack this odd balancing trend that struck the DH 2nd ed. which very much made all them more equal in chances and power. I saw that there is way much more to be played when each career has some very strong characteristics that make it far nicer to see how those strengths need to be brought to use while other characters try to compensate the weaknesses.

Many Talents were awful or not so nice with the original system, but I do stand behind the claim that this system makes their existence and wording far more acceptable.

Wow, this is...something. It's like Dark Heresy 1E found the bad ending to Chrono Trigger and embraced it for all it was worth. ("But... the future refused to change.") Few things have made me want to yell at my monitor, "no no no that's not how you do that why did you keep that one hidden error agh!"

Snark aside, it looks like you enjoyed the design of DH1E and wanted to improve upon it. Which I can respect. The problem is that this is marketed as an improvement upon all the other things that FFG has put forward since then, when it's really really not.

-We don't need lots of nigh-meaningless options (hello, Orthoproxy) or weird bonuses (Proven is still terrible as-written) to everything; if there's one thing newer games have done very well it's in cleaning up a lot of those problematic things.

-Buying advances from a chart is still a mess and an adventure in pointless pigeonholing, and I hope that mechanic dies in a fire. (Aptitudes still have issues but cleaning those up is notably easier.)

-Full-auto should not be the end-all-be-all of gunplay like it was before Black Crusade. Making all ranged/melee options into half actions with modifiers based on type was a breath of fresh air. (For reference, my introduction to 40K RP was as a Devastator in a Deathwatch game. Without even hitting rank 2, I was still merely rolling for degrees of success every time I fired my heavy bolter; I never was close to missing with the old full-auto rules.)

-Unnatural Characteristics being multipliers made for wonky balance and some goofy rules exceptions, and I was happy to see it disappear in exchange to cleaner additive bonuses.

-The giant list of skills did not need to be so ludicrous, nor did it need to excessively punish those who wanted to try something that they didn't have the training for with the Basic/Advanced distinctions. (You know, given that the list of skills was gigantic.) Honestly if the GM thinks that someone can't do something with training it's perfectly fine for them to, well, say that. Things like Mastered Skills and the like from DH1E's Ascension were very much rules hacks to get around the problems of skill bloat without having to rewrite the game within the current edition of the game. (Hence DH2E!)

-Various Tech-Priest implants were better served as purchasable gear rather than being one more messy thing in the talent list.

-Fighting with two weapons mostly served to be a series of hoops to jump through for anyone who was interested if you wanted to kill the penalties. I rather liked seeing how DH2E cleaned that whole business up with "take these talents and you'll be fine with anything that fits in a single hand".

-If you were taking social skills like Command, talents like Air of Authority were pretty much required to get anywhere; I'm glad DH2E gutted that talent to make it a standard property of social skills instead.

-Your changes to Critical Damage mostly serve to make things more swingy, which is almost never in the players' favor.

-Influence losses from requisitioning any potentially rare gear are massive.

-"Primitive" armor generally served to be something for the folks with real gear to chew through, and it was better to just admit that it wasn't that good in the first place.

-"Proven", as noted above, is still terrible as-written. On its own this is a problem with the printed TRPGs, except that it actually gets wider use here.

-Numerous weapon properties do nothing but add a bundle of busywork, such as Recoil/Impact/Shield/Numbing/Cover (to name a few).

-Precision TK still exists and is still kinda broken.

-Invocation is a skill again for some goofy reason.

-You've not made a clarification in table-vs.-text on whether sustaining one power gives a psyker penalties or not.

-Psychic powers need not be linked behind weird gates such as specific talents; having a tree structure of dependencies is good enough for gating.

-Burning Apocalypse reprints the most baffling power I'd ever seen in BC, and I'm not certain why you retained it without tweaking the massive drawbacks of IRREVOCABLY LOSING ALL YOUR EQUIPMENT ON HAND.

-The business of scrabbling for every last Throne was a bookkeeping mess and never really fit 40K TRPGs. D&D I can understand (because the whole point was originally to maximize return vs. risk, and money spent vs. money earned was part of that) but if you're intended to scrabble for money then the GM should just say so (and limit the PCs' options).

-Tracking armor damage from critical hits is a bunch of unnecessary busywork, and in practice it's often annoying enough just to compare differing armor values for body locations. (Not hard, just annoying.)

-As with several of the weapon properties, a number of the armor properties don't really help the game so much as bog it down. (Ablative/Blur/Cover/Female Morphology*/Sabbat Pattern Sense Array/Suit/Weak Area, to name a few.)

*I am of the opinion that a number of the sexist things in 40K don't serve the narrative so much as appease fanboys in their Boys Club No Girls Allowed, but that's another story.

Wow, this is...something. It's like Dark Heresy 1E found the bad ending to Chrono Trigger and embraced it for all it was worth. ("But... the future refused to change.") Few things have made me want to yell at my monitor, "no no no that's not how you do that why did you keep that one hidden error agh!"

... * Long story here, but it should right above * ...

*I am of the opinion that a number of the sexist things in 40K don't serve the narrative so much as appease fanboys in their Boys Club No Girls Allowed, but that's another story.

There seems to be something preventing you from handling the idea between meanings for words Advanced and Simplified. You criticize the system as if it was supposed to be Simplified, but when taking some time to think the word advanced actually quite likely does the very opposite by filling all the caps that were likely left to be always considered again and again by the GM.

There is no denying that this system is more upgraded on the base of the DH 1st ed. but since it encompasses all those mechanics that made the DH 2nd ed. game play differ from the DH 1st game play (meaning suffering critical effects even without having wounds reduced to negative, influence, subtlety or renown as I named that, focusing powers as a skill test), it is not totally in the wrong place here either though the system has more unfamiliarity to those who never played DH 1st ed. than to those who did.

For those who prefer storytelling play style the rules matter barely at all since the rules are set by the the ability of a GM and players to tell a good story. Though as many have seen it is not the only way and rules often give nice guidelines for the story to be told and even when dealing with the rules there is still a final judgement given into the hands of the GM. These rules however try and by the experiences received from them succeed to make outcomes such that there is far more rarely a need for the GM to adjust the outcomes to make the story nice.

All those skills and talents are there to let the player and the GM to figure out what kind of a guy the character is and what motivations and so on he has. Whether the actual game play is done by rules or by other means does not reduce the usefulness of this.

The advanced in this system actually means that there are bunch more rules added and the existing ones are made slightly complex as to give all kinds of flavors to the outcomes even when no storytelling style is involved or the play group does not bother to figure that much story to everything. Of course the wide variety in things that can be done or achieved tend to give plenty of seeds for the players and the GM as to how to tell the story and what ideas the characters might employ. Simplicity that I did somewhat advertise merely means that the system is not too hard to learn and master to a degree where it is rather fast to use and serves to give all that flavor.

You did criticize a lot about all kinds different qualities for weapons and armour, but still failed to see that those are there to make the armour easily way more than just some amount of damage reduction and weapons have these qualities to make the damage way more than just damage points that are about to reduce your wounds. The exist to give the story right here and now when dice are rolled for a test. And as per the position of GM to accept all kinds of storytelling to determine the outcomes for the player actions, there comes also the power to grant them whatever skill they might need or even all the skills if so seen fit. These represented career simply describe some sort of average or slightly above that people from 40k universe who do lack the skills and abilities to do all kinds of things that may very well cost them their lives when serving the Inquisition or at least force them to do something else but the thing the player himself might have done. But as it is said the rules are not there to enslave but to make telling flavorful story somewhat automatic and way easier than with always thinking everything by yourself.

And as per your last sentence, I cannot see why you even bother thinking about something like sexism in this game as it is a game. A game about mankind in a all screw-up future where no one knows nothing, psychic powers do exist, deamons kill people, mutants kill people, xenos kill people, people... oh my they do really kill a lot of people and even for pattier reasons than any of the previous, Inquisition determines fates of the people, some dead guy is the all mighty God of Mankind who holds this thing somewhat above total chaos and so on... If there is lots of sexism added to this, then so what? It is still a game with entertaining setting, but there is no need for anyone to play it, if they wish to play in a world with different setting... Nice ain't it?

I can understand where NFK is coming from. I was really relieved when I found out that 2E got rid of the career paths and streamlined the skill system. I am a big fan of elegant, streamlined system that have rules that govern the most situations and leave the more rare ones to the GM or the whole group to decide.

Some of my players where of different opinion and liked the career paths, but came to appreciate the freedom and flexibility that the 2E gives them in developing their character.

But to everyone his own and I can understand the need for a rulesystem that governs everything for every situation, it's just not mine.

But the work you did is really impressive and if it is what works best for you and your group, all the better.

The big skills are dissected again to five bazillion sub-skills, yet Tactics didn't make it . It is, like, I absolutely must fight my way through hours-upon-hours of structured combat even in the most boring situations, instead of just rolling Tactics and let my Tempestus Scions earn their money.

"Elegant" and "streamlined" are two adjectives I would not use to describe DH2e. And frankly, RPGs don't have to be. What they need is proper editing. You can have 30 different tables for stuff, if they all fit on two pages, it doesn't matter, because they'll still be faster to look up than things in a poorly edited book.

As a whole, nicely done, LegumX. We do some things differently, but that does not mean your way is "wrong". High points that stuck out for me were the armour and weapons rebalancing. That is something we may actually import into our own conglomerate of many, many house rules. Bit late to change the rest mid-campaign at 16k XP.

Overall, the modular design and easily legible format is something I prefer in my rules, and the editorial work in this seems superior to actual, published products in the 40k RPG line. I am genuinely impressed. FFG should offer you a job.

As an addendum, I personally think calling DH1's skill list "gigantic" is a good indicator people don't play many other RPGs. It's actually fairly small.

As for complaining about "sexism" in 40k...dear god, not that can of worms again. Please, just...no.

"Elegant" and "streamlined" are two adjectives I would not use to describe DH2e.

Compared to first edition it is. First Edition was (in my opinion) a monstrosity of a rule system. Not GURPS with all rules bad, but still pretty bad. It was unneccesarily complicated and bloated.

And frankly, RPGs don't have to be. What they need is proper editing. You can have 30 different tables for stuff, if they all fit on two pages, it doesn't matter, because they'll still be faster to look up than things in a poorly edited book.

Of course they don't have to be elegant and streamlined. But it is (in my book) a plus if they are. Less rules and less tables mean less running through the books. And 2 tables on 1 page to run through are faster than 30 tables on 2 pages if the books are both edited equally well. So less is (imho) better, as long as there are enough rules to cover the basics.

As an addendum, I personally think calling DH1's skill list "gigantic" is a good indicator people don't play many other RPGs. It's actually fairly small.

No it isn't. I would say it is somewhere in the middle. But that's not he point. The point is, that there were a lot of useless and redundant skills in the 1st edition. Compare the 1st edition skill list with the 2nd edition. 1st has a lot more skills and 2nd covers the same ground with less skills.

I (with my cynical view) always imagined the design process for 1st edition went somewhat like this:

"We need to fill the advancement tables for the career paths, but we don't have enough entries."

"Just make up a few more skills. That will do nicely."

"But we already have anything covered. Maybe career paths are not the way to go."

"Shut up and make up some more skills."

"Sigh."

As is clearly visible, I despised the career path system and am quite happy with the 2nd edition version (it's not optimal, but it works and allows for interesting character designs).

At last I just wanted to say:

As a whole, nicely done, LegurmuX. We do some things differently, but that does not mean your way is "wrong".

I totally agree with that. The work that went into this overhaul is impressive and I highly implore everyone that has issues with 2nd edition to take a look and see for themselves if that is something for them to work with.

In the end, how detailed you want your rules is a matter of preference. My main problem with the 40k line is really an editorial one. It takes ages to find something in the books, and there's no proper quick reference in most of them. This collection, specifically, is extremely well done in that regard, and it takes me mere seconds to find whatever I'm looking for, as opposed to finding out the page it's supposed to be on doesn't exist or there is no page reference, only to table X, which is...somewhere esoterically placed (just some issues had with FFG's 40k lines in the past). .

Wether we consider the skill table small, in comparison to The Dark Eye, or medium, with a different frame of reference, I think depends on what we know and what we play. I definitely would not consider it too big . I do agree there are some redundancies in DH1e as well, but oddly enough, some of them, DH2e doesn't actually solve, but leaves as double skills.If they really wanted to streamline it, they could have condensed it quite a bit further. To me, it seems more that they cut what people didn't use in their own gaming group, which is unfortunate, because things like carouse or singing do feature prominently in our group.

Now, regardless of if someone likes the class system or not, after looking at the sheets themselves, I have to say, the checklist model is superbly simple and makes introducing new players to 40k RPG a breeze. I may just copy it and it should be fairly simple to create a similar format for aptitudes, complete with correct costs (think Chummer). It would make things extra-ordinarily simple and remove the main problem with them (having to look everything up all over the bloody book).

Since there are some groups that have liked my previous work, I'd like to announce that I just released small update to Advanced Dark Heresy into version 2.1. This version includes new cryomancy discipline along with some mechanics for cold and environmental heat that weren't there and also a few fixes to errors.

That's good, but isn't ADH built on 1st edition? You're in the wrong thread, mate.

The website is down, anyone know another way to pick this pdf up?

2nd Editions biggest mistake was screwing up the class system and removing the ranks. Glad to know I might not have to take the time to convert Blood of Martyrs to second edition after Enemies Within screwed up the Adeptus Sororitas in spectacular and nonsensical manner.

I also hope they added Arbitor Senoris as one of the Adeptus Arbitus ranks, because that was sorely missing from the original progression tree.

I was going to ask the same thing, can someone please get the website up and running again or do someone have the files and can share them?

I wonder, if there would be any problem implementing the new Critical Charts and Damage Types (seriously, Impact for autoguns was stupid as was in my humble opinion Energy for coldguns* and coldgrenades) to Second Edition. Is there any difference in Critical Damage Tables across the 40kRPG lines? I have never noticed.

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I'm too quite intrigued to read this document, alas the link is not available

Hi!

It seems that the DarkReign.org has disappeared an therefore I set the zip-file containing files for the Advanced Dark Heresy 2.1 as a public share from my DropBox account. The link in the first post has bee updated and it should be live indefinitely until DropBox dies

I wonder, if there would be any problem implementing the new Critical Charts and Damage Types (seriously, Impact for autoguns was stupid as was in my humble opinion Energy for coldguns* and coldgrenades) to Second Edition. Is there any difference in Critical Damage Tables across the 40kRPG lines? I have never noticed.

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Hi!

The ADH 2.1 introduces reworked Critical Charts and differentiates between piercing, cold, energy, impact, heat, explosive and rending damage types with far more believable and detailed Critical Damage... Mostly those are rather acceptably usable even without using other parts of the ADH, if that seems to be your liking. Though about heat and cold damage one should still refer what is described about them in Rewritten Rules part too.

That's good, but isn't ADH built on 1st edition? You're in the wrong thread, mate.

Hi!

this is definitely built on the first edition but it is also here because many players and GM's seem to like it and the forum for 1st ed is rather dead. Also ADH 2.1 is here since it kinda fits into 2nd edition due to its modular nature allowing leaving out those parts that require reverting back to 1st ed.