Greetings,

So fascinated have I become with the 40k lore and the game itself that I'm getting ready to take the first steps and GM my first game ever (never played a P&P game let alone gm'd one before), aside from all the GM specific stuff (how you want things ran and so on) I'd like some thoughts on the idea of playing out the PC's encounter with their Inquisitor.

I'm one for a good story aspect to the game so I want to incorporate the character's background as much as possible and promote the RPing aspect by doing this and even offering some <i>elite advances</i> as rewards for doing it.

Any thoughts on this? Any good GMing advice in general and how to introduce people not familiar with the lore into the game?

Thanks in advance.

It's kind of a broad question you're asking so my broad answer would be: setting and atmospere.

Make sure your settings (locations) and atmosphere (mood, look&feel, themes) are Warhammer 40,000/Dark Heresy. Use the themes mentioned in the core rulebook: there is taint in all things, five minutes to midnight etc. Think of the game as set in a dark medievel scifi setting, where people don't know the nature of the universe only that it is very hostile to mankind, so they put all their faith in the Emperor. Make it grim and unforgiving. And have lots of cults, clubs, orders, fraternities and other organizations with their own weird, suspicious customs as detailed in the core book in the sections on the castes in the Misericord, the mega corporations, even the Sepheris Secundus serf customs , for example.

Allow yourself a lot of time to sketch the atmosphere and the way things look, make sure players are not too hasty to get into combat and pay attention. And as always: be mysterious. The things that are not there, are not explained, are always infinitely more intriguieing than the things that are there, are explained.

For exapmpl, have your Inquisitor carried into a hive spire observation deck with twinkling stars in the sky in some kind of repulsor lift carriage that doubles as a life support device. He wheezes and coughs up blood, his body is a scarred wreck, but still he radiates power and has a razorquick mind with piercing eyes. Not only will the pcs wonder what has happened to him, but it will also foreshadow the terrible consequences of fighting the secret war. If even a powerful figure like that Inquisitor can be brought low like this, what hope is there for the acolytes?

Good luck!

I'm fond of having them being debriefed, and being asked questions that reveal he knows a lot more of what they have been up to then they known. (My Inquisitor has then go through a search during which they are all injected with a memory blocker, and they get psychicly trawled.) He hands out rewards, and punishments. This goes on until someone mouths off or he reveals he know about a major transgression, and the PC discover there is an airlock beneath each of their seats. The poor guy spends a couple rounds sucking void until someone volunteers to insure his behavior...

I'm about to put my acolytes through the same experience for the first time, so I really hope this turns out to be a good resource.

The acolytes already know that someone is spying on them, and they know it's an agent of the Inquisitor, so it won't come as a surprise to them that he knows a lot about them when they first meet.

I love the airlock idea. I'm definitely going to use some form of that in my scenario!

I also really, really want to use the suggestion of introducing the Inquisitor hideously scarred and battered, but I might attempt to portray the toll of his role in the secret war in a more subtle way. Well, perhaps subtle isn't the right word exactly, but I might have them catch glimpses of his form beaneath his heavy robes, showing that he doesn't have any of his natural limbs.

The acolytes have been fobbed off so far with the excuse that the Inquisitor is too busy to see them, but perhaps it could be hinted at that he is simply too frail to be moved from his quarters, ala the Emperor, and that all his work is carried out by servants...

My players just met their Inquisitor and it was both a good and bad thing. Just before they met him, the characters were running through Edge of Darkness and ended up initiating the plaque. Unfortunately they weren't working for the inquisition at the time and interrupted a insquisitorial investigation. So they were captured by a joint strike team of inquistorial stormtroopers and Adeptus Mechanicus skittarri, and taken to the tricorn. The characters were then interrorgated throughly to determine their involvement. When it was determined that their investigation while not totally legetimate was well meaning the inquisitor decided to enlist them and take over their investigation. (They were investigating the existance of Farcosia.) The roleplaying session of their interrogation was pretty fun.

Salcor

My Inquisitor has always sorta been invisible, not there physically but they know if they screw up their boss will bring down the hammer so to say. I've had him bomb the group from orbit when they accidentally killed a contact, this was after forgiving five other offenses the nearly jeapordized the mission. But the Inquisitor ranges from overlord of doom to fatherly figure in my games, sometimes he is willing to council the characters about what they have seen and other times he just makes them forget it.

I plan on having my characters invited to tea...

Well, my Inquisitor is a teensy-bit radical. Not to the point of daemonhosts, but he is quite unorthadox in his approach, especially with pissing off all of the Ebon Chalice to where his mentor assigned a PC Sister to be in one of his cells. The Acolytes have met him, but I plan on having him around quite often, showing tiny bits of his insanity from what made him an Inquisitor (burned down his home village with everyone he knows, including his son whom now haunts him as he opened up a daemonic pact). Nothing too big, but, say, he attempts to do some soothsaying with the Emperor's Tarot, he pulls a card that has his son's face on it, and all the cards immolate. Then the Acolytes would see him right afterwards (since he does prophecies for them with me hinting what they should do and what do come) wondering why his hands are all burnt.

Personally, I like having the Inquisitor giving off those small hints of what's to come, and given a dark atmosphere, he's a bit of a light. Calm, good-demeaning, gentlemen. It's going to be horrible when they face off with him when he simply goes bonkers.

My players have never met their Inquisitor. Through all our sessions, they were briefed by and reported to a high-ranking Interrogator. They didn't even know he was an Interrogator until four or five sessions in, when they discovered something that required more direct intervention by the Inquisition.

Sometimes a total mystery is best.