Has someone made a list of things you can find in the 40k universe. I ask this because I'm trying to run a DH campain but my group keeps trying to use things like GPS's, cell phones, google ( YES google 40k), Hack the internet, public phones, the phone book and the list goes on and on. The main problem is that they keep trying to hack into computers and cant comprehend how techonology is mystified in the 40k.

So I was wondering how you guys dealt with this, becuse my group thinks that I'm just screwing with them when I said no google!

So, the general problem is that your players are totally unfamiliar with the whole 40k background. Welcome to the club, happens the same to me on a game-to-game basis.

First of all, understand that your players are on wrong end of the information food chain. They do not know a thing. You have to help them along.

Second, I would advice you to open up every session with a little scene you describe to them, similiar to those scenes at the beginning of movies. Those that give the viewer a feel for the surround in order to draw them into the mood. Make sure that this scene

a) Incorporates something that is relevant for your adventure
b) Describes technology both low and high and uses many a mystifiying term/describes that rituals are undertaken to awaken the machine spirits.

I did the same for a group of mine whom do not know anything on the game world. After giving them some of such description (pre-adventure) they at least understood that "this 40k universe" is a strange place with strange view on technology.

They now tend to ask a lot of questions before assuming anything...

Ultimately it depends on what planet they are on as to what tech is available.

As to rampant hacking on a world that has that type of infrastructure….

If they fail or miss a tech use test by any degree alarms should ring up the Mechanicus chain of command as Mechanicus Heritek kill teams are being dispatched to their location.

Half a dozen combat servitors, a dozen Skitarrii, and a Mechanicus Secutor should change their new characters view on technology in 40K.

Or you could be nice like Gregorius21778.

Do try to stress the Technology = Magic aspect of things.

To help with the transition I usually will allow the PCs to purchase "personal voxes". Which is similer to a cell phone in the sense that each one has its own private frequancy. However, these can be easy to hack by outside sources. Microbeads can be tuned to private vox links as well in my campaigns (making them bluetooth similer). Such things are always monitered by local enforcers and arabites alike, as there should be no such thing as privacy in the 40k universe. The acolytes could also use Inquisitioral authority to obtain an encrypted vox link, but this is limited to the world they are on, and can be expensive depending on the world and the reasons for why. If they are investigating cult activity in the higher ups of the Imperial Law and Government, their Inquisitor will make it happen and will front the cost, but if they ask for it just so they can split up to buy equipment and screw around in their off time then they not only have to front the bill, but have a **** good reason why they are using their ranks in the inquisition for something so unresponsable.

There are alot of things that, while not formally introduced in the rulebooks and expansions, you can still add. The personal vox links are one of the few that i have, in addition to that i have introduced the idea of "health insurance". As my PCs frequantly are getting hurt, and heath care is damned expensive in the 40k universe (and takes a while to heal fully, months if your in criticals), the inquisition offers them health insurance, which comes out of their monthly pay, but they will have access to government facilites for reduced costs (co-pays). This is a double edged sword, being a card carrying member of the inquisitors health club makes it hard to obtain medical treatments when the group is undercover.

I've run into this problem too. My solution is not to say "that doesn't exist", but offer an extremely baroque, overly-complicated and expensive analog. There is no phonebook, and communications is for most people at best short range (I use vox radios too, with a couple mile broadcast range, just to keep the game moving since I run such an investigation-heavy story right now), or stationary (there might be one "phone" unit in a well furnished apartment, but there's no directory, you have to have a direct number to dial like a vox) and/or expensive. Otherwise, I make heavy use of servitors. There is no email, you dispatch a servitor, who references Imperium files and goes physically searching for the person you dispatched the message to. If you know where they're at, it's semi-efficient. If you have no clue, it could take days or even weeks to get a message across town. It lets me slow PC plans down to fit the pace of my story, and either deny them easy, unchecked progress or give them extra side info about what's going on. I try not to say "no" to super-easy, lay back and let the work come to us plans, because closing off avenues of thought leads to a dreary game. Instead, I have the easiest path take the longest, and deliver the least. My players usually follow up on those methods anyway, and I give them tidbits of trivial information at some point in the future of what's happened, what's going to happen, or what has happened. It's how I get across plot points that the players may have missed that are relevant to the story in the future. It works pretty well.

As far as hacking goes, is there a tech priest who is capable? If not, describe computers as weird lights and numbers, blocks of text or digits that make no sense (binary language FTW!), and playing with the thing is going to be dangerous. Tech Priests would be extremely hesitant to tamper with a machine spirit, and I'd make something like "hacking" a forbidden lore, and the social stigma would be akin to using the warp to corrupt a human soul, since there are machine spirits in everything.

Thanks for the replies! The problem with my group is that they DONT want to read any fluff. And they are also a shadow run group so they tend to think in the shadow run mindset. Also as the other game they like to play is DnD they pretty much built a group like that. We have a Imp. Guardman (fighter) wo thinks himself who until now has no idea what the game is about and is basicaly get nice armor and big gun, a scum (rogue) who got tech use and is trying to use it on everything and steals EVERYTHING, a biomancer who is a combat medic and behaves like one, and a techpriest who's motto is hack the planet. But that I can work with, the problem is trying to get them to stop thinking in modern day terms.

So is there any list of basic things that are diferent in the imperium vs the modern future tech world.

It's such a broad question that it's hard to answer.

There is no internet. There are astropaths.

There are no computers per se, there are machine spirits allowed to interact with holy tech priests and a *few* select normal people. Each piece of "software" is not programmed, there are no programmers sitting in an office churning out code. Each program is individually crafted for *that* terminal, melded, and integrated in with the "machine spirit". Let the scum know he's going to make enemies hacking terminals, because he is essentially committing murder on machine spirits, and the AM values the machine even more than the flesh.

The imperial guardsman is fine, teach him to shout "for the emperor!" going into battle and to have an EXTREME hatred towards anything not human and imperial and he'll fit in fine. The psyker, explain to him that merely being a psyker is kind of like being an elf who walks into a humanis policlub meeting in Shadowrun. He'll understand.

Explain to the techpriest that from a moral standpoint, "hack the planet" for a tech priest is akin to the holocaust (apologies for pulling a Godwin, but it's appropriate here). If you can get him on your side of thinking of things, he'll lean on the scum for you. He's not hacking, he's asking "pretty pretty please" to the machine spirit in the terminal, and essentially praying. The concept of hacking is akin to being able to rewrite God and the Commandments to a Catholic. It should be treasonous and heretical to the Mechanicus.

It's a problem if nobody wants to learn the setting. It might be worthwhile to go back to shadowrun or D&D at that point, because as a GM, you're fighting a steep uphill battle.

Technology should be weird and freaky as well as mundane. Cogitators, use cogitator instead of computer, all have fleshy bits or biological liquids associated with them somehow. Also most cogitators are going to be, IMO, UNIX style command line only interfaces.

My version of a search terminal in a library:

A human torso looks out at you as you ask it the location of a specific book within the dark musty library. Its watery bloodshot eyes stare back blankly at you as a tiny bit of yellowish snot oozes out of its nose and drips on to a roll of yellow stained parchment coming out of its mouth. After the question is asked to the Inquiry Terminal a slight hum can be detected, then the Terminals arms jump to life and proceed to type out the response to your question on the brass and steel typewriter embedded in its torso. As the slightly decaying terminal types out the coordinates of the stack that should contain the book you are after you notice, slightly obscured by the numerous tubes entering the terminals arms and the irritated skin surrounding them, that it bears a tattoo. After the appropriate skill check you know that this tattoo was given as a service award to all the staff of a high ranking member of the Imperial Navy for outstanding service to the Emperor. As a further reward, this adept, who died during a naval battle, was allowed to continue his service to the Emperor indefinitely. The rattle of the keys stop, the arms fall limply from to the side and the freshly printed parchment dangles loosely from the lips of the terminal awaiting the next drips of yellowish snot.

Data networks certainly exist in 40K, along with analogues to cell-phones. The question is, who actually has this technology? Certainly a forge world probably has data-networks far in advance of anything in our age, but the interface decives would also be so advanced as to seem magical. Certainly, the AdMec doesn't operate on windows software, more like an ocean of wifi-information that washes over the whole planet, pumped directly into the brains of the Enlightened by corical imagery and subconscious impulse. This is a group who have been building data-networks for over ten-thousand years, however, so 'hacking' would be no small feat. Furthermore, it would probably be considered a crime of terrible proportaions and the results of being caught would be brutally swift.

On most 'ordinary' worlds, the Imperial athorities probably have access to high-tech and data networks and communications due to the IMperial relationship with the AdMec. The local government, however, could concievably be at any level of technology, although it would probably be unsophisticated enough so as to not disturb the AdMech, who have a monopoly -ideologically and litterally- on this sort of stuff. Even a hive world is, in large part, hovering at somewhere around a nineteenth-century tech-level, with incongruous flashes of the far future here and there. There is really no reason for ordinary imperial citizens to have access to communications or data-networks. In fact, given the totalitarian nature of many hive worlds, it might be in the best interest of both the AdMec and the local government to keep such tech from proliferating.

The Imperium has been under attack from all directions for the past 10'000 years. That would be a lot of time for all the security holes to be closed. And with how the ad mech view progress, I doubt they would be changing things or adding unnecessary new features to the software, so you won't have new security holes creeping in that way.

And if that isn't good enough, the important computers (ie the ones you want to hack) are likely to be physically isolated. So to hack it, first you need past security patrols to get to the computer. By which point much of the data on the computer may be irrelavant since you already have proof of heresy.

In my games things like Public Phone boxes exist, they're in high demand generally, since most of the population can't afford to have a private one. Internet is a general no go. No google, but in a Librarium you might have a stockpile of all the compiled information. Like an uneditable Wikipedia. Cell phones exist as ear pieces, with hand held ones costing more because they can do more and have a longer range.

Gregorius21778 said:

BRILLIANT! that is a great way to work players into the game setting. I have a lot of 40k players that try to carry over stuff from the battle game but doesn't work in non powerarmored civilians. "what do you mean a storm bolter would rip my arm off if I shot it one handed?" Stuff like that or, why their character should be afraid of something like a basic deamon. The universe is a very hard one to wrap your head around but once you get there its like being able to taste colors. You just get a lot more from the game than before.

One of the things I did with my group when they said they wanted to 'hack the computers' was to go back to the origins of the term: long ago (before ENIAC and its' contemporaries), the term 'computer' referred to a bloke at a desk with a slide rule, so I had them having to physically locate the 'computer hall' and avoid security, and then described "a room full of computers". They said they were going to go up to the closest and hack into it. I then described them drawing their swords, and every computer in the room running away screaming, before explaining that 'computer hall' was a warehouse filled with administratum drones, and what they actually wanted to do was access the secure files on the target's cogitator network. Which was located at the other end of a compound filled with now-alerted guards, with automatic weaponry.

Add to that the fact that I tend to describe cogitators as big-ass, clunky mis-matches of steampunk Difference Engines and grainy green/black vacuum tube displays built around thermionic valves, with the occasional (ie: stupidly rare) very slick GUI/holographic terminal in a case that looks like a Victorian monument: all polished walnut-alike, brass plating/tubing and cast iron. The sort of thing that would revel in the name ordinateur .
In all cases, any cogitator that can do anything more brainy than answer simple yes/no questions by accessing a very simple database programmed into it has at least one organic part, often very clearly displayed (in one particularly egregrious example: it had the front of a skull very carefully affixed to the immaculately polished Fedrid pine casing, with what were obviously cheap staples and duct tape).

I let my characters have rather spiffy little vox-units (and micro-bead headsets). I even let them get encrypted models (although I noted that the Adeptus Arbites, the Inquisition, the Officio Assassinorum, the Office of the Scintillan Planetary Governor and a number of sufficiently wealthy/influential private citizens would almost certainly be able to monitor any traffic. And then I told them that since they were in a hive, all the massive metal structures were going to play merry hell with the signal, unless they tapped into the relay network, which would pretty much guaran-God-Emperor-****-tee that other people would be listening in, even assuming that they could find a relay node.

I've also (kind of) used a sort of health insurance: the Inquisition will cover sufficient to get you roughly up and about again, and may negotiate terms with the AdMech Biologis so you can get some decent bionics (if need be), but you'll end up in debt to the Mechanicus, and they'll only settle for... a favour .