I have a question for all you veterans

I haven't Gamemastered anything in this game yet, but I now have three adventures laying around.

Illumination (from the core book) , Shattered hopes (from the web) and Purge the Unclean.

I want to play them all, but in what order do you suggest? Or should I skip anyone or even get tattered Fates right away?

I know that the Core book suggest to go from Shattered hopes to Illumination, but what about Purge the Unclean, that one is a follow up on Shattered hopes is it not?

Thing is I don't have that much spare time in my life now so I don't have the time to read through them all and then decide. I rather get some hints to where to start.

Any suggestions welcome.

I would strongly suggest to leave "Shattered Hope" out. Full stop. This time the old proverb "you get what you paid for" is true for this freebee. It is a dungeon crawl you should not use at all. Unless you are into tinkering with it.

"Illumination" should be played before "Rejoice! For you are true" from Purge the Unclean. There is some (rather...random...) link from one adventure to the next. If you forget about this link, however (some alien tech in the cards of the Seer from "Illumination") everything should be fine.

As I always do, I advise you not to buy "Tattered Fates". At least, not for the standard retailer price. The module is far far to costly for its size.

I would second the motion to leave Shattered Hope out. Start with Illumination for sure. In addition to Purge the Unclean, there is a mission, House of Dust and Ash, in Disciples of the Dark Gods that you could run. I haven't read this adventure, but it's worth mentioning.

I generally recommend in order for the published adventures:

Edge of Darkness, Illumination, Rejoice For You Are True! (from Purge), some adventure of your own devising based on your PCs, Shades on Twilight (from Purge), and finally Baron Hopes (from Purge).

Tattered Fates is the beginning of new cycle and it takes ones PCs in a whole new direction...

Ah, sweet "Edge"! How could we forget!

I second to TS Luikart here: "Edge of Darkness" is a very good adventure, especially since you can get it for free. Of course, you have to come up with some map on your own (for the final "theatre"), but all in all it is a very nice, "sand box" style adventure.

Another vote for Edge of Darkness. You can get it here . Download the original rather than the full colour one, or if you do download the full colour one it has a typo in the section " Why she is so frightened " so you'll need the original to fix it.

Great little adventure. Easily modded with, messed around with & altered to fit the party. On Dark Reign you can find extra handouts. Somewhere (on Dark Reign I think) there is a map of the sector without the place locations (essential as the handout in the adventure gives away the important locations).

"Shattered Hope" is sooo 1980's D&D it is scary! There is another adventure with the GM screen called "Maggots in the Meat" (I think). Which is very poor. Designed for a low level part that puts them against a 3x high level bad guys plus a randomly generated alien??? However the GM screen is well worth it as it doesn't have too many typos and I also use it as body armour during nuclear testing.

Oh here is a good thread on the published adventures. Finally if you haven't download the errata from the DH support site .

Have Fun!!!

Checking Edge of darkness right now. Thanks for mentioning that one, I had entirely missed it.

Seems like my First session will start much later then expected so it will give me time to plan ahead and prepare well.

Thanks for all your suggestions.

Also, I believe "Illumination" has a way to tie-in "Shattered Hope"; I was kind of hoping to start with "Shattered Hope" when I get a group going (especially since most of us have been playing 4ed D&D), so it might be a nice transition from the heavy dungeon-crawling... to the real meaty RPing that "Illumination" seems to foster.

There are a a number of issue with shatter hope. One it's not very good. Two there are at least 2 ways for the PCs to die simply from a failed skill roll. Three there is a way for the PCs to kill the entire team near the end if they aren't playing attention. A GM use to the system can salvage it, but for players and a gm new to th setting it can be bloody.

Can i just say that I am playing a long running campaign and I am leaving Illumination until about halfway through. The simple reason is that I have made the seer Aristarcus a main character (in fact an Interrogator and close ally of the PC's Inquisitor).

The way Illumination is presented your PC's have a fair chance of realising he isn't acting normally which ruins some of the fun of what happens to him. By making him a 'friendly face' his fate will be more dramatic (hopefully).

As for the tech link to Rejoice for You are True you can just make it generic xenos tech which the Inquisition are suspcious of.

Baldrick said:

Could you please expand on why Maggots in the meat is bad? i got it and was considering using it (and shattered hope) but since the veterans suggest not touching it with a 12 foot pole i open to ideas. PLease keep in mind i have Gmd one game only (4 episode campaign of my own design that didn't go so well conceptually) so i was just curious about maggots

Ryorus

Maggots in the Meat is one of those adventures that you get out of it what you put into it. I have heard reports from other GMs that they were disappointed with it. My results were pretty darn good.

********* SEMI - SPOILER INFO BELOW Access restricted to Inquisitor grade personnel. Please verify identity. ********

Welcome Inquisitor. System access granted.

The key to this adventure is setting a mood and simply having fun with the intro portions. Our group's techpriest still twitches at the mere MENTION of "salt water" (and no, he did not fall in). Lots of fun scenery and contrasting Imperial technology flavour to be had here, especially if you play the locals up a bit. The middle portion is a bit weak and is some rather limited investigation. If you do any creative writing, the investigation phase is definately a good place to start.

Ultimately this leads to the point of the adventure. Horrible, evil, grossly-overpowered xenos doing awful things for strange xenos reasons! The main horrible xenos are really nasty and are not really something that the acolytes are likely to be able to kill out of hand. The balance point here is you get to generate a whole mess of terrible xenos "pets" for the baddies to make use of. Is your team fairly squishy? Make some creepy weird alien pets to confound them. Your team is death on legs? Make some horrible slashy, stabby, acid spitting murder-beasts. There are handy charts included if you want to generate random critters. The other balance point being that the terrible boss-xenos have no real desire to die and will attempt to flee if things go bad.

You get to stage the final confrontation in a creepy old mega-windmill. The combination of "what is inside" and the rickety stairs make for an interesting battleground. Lots of creepy horror, difficult to kill big-baddies and a nice stream of strange (and customized to your group!) xenos pet-beasts. I set up a CD player with the "Aliens" soundtrack on repeat before the game and turned it on using a remote as the team entered the mill. I even managed to time the first attack with the music, the result being a player nearly jumping out of his chair!

The end result for our team was one big-bad alien dead, all of the pets dead, the acolytes battered and scared and two more big-bads having escaped them. They were terrified that they had failed their mission, "we are SO dead!" and all sorts of great pathos. My acolytes work for Inquisitor Skane of Ordo Hereticus and have gotten used to either the Inquisitor or more likely an Interrogator handling mission debriefs. I had a full Inquisitor of Ordo Xenos show up (in only a few days!) with his full retinue in tow in response to their report. Now they are REALLY concerned... What have they stepped in, and just HOW dead are they?! The team had captured a xenos-collaborator during their mission. I had the Xenos Inquisitor ask a quick series of fairly simple questions of the prisoner, then promptly draw his bolt pistol and blow the poor bastard's head apart, then casually walk out of the room. Now they were ready to crap out Baneblades! It was then revealed that the fact that they managed to kill one of the boss-xenos AND live was considered amazing, they are known to the Holy Ordos, but officially do not exist.... So keep your mouth and your thoughts private! The "You mean we did good?!" "They are NOT going to execute us?!" and "We fought WHAT?!" moments at the end of all that tension were a GM's joy!

Yes, I have deliberately not named the species involved. For those with propper clearance, they are known as <EXPUNGED> and are documented more extensively in <EXPUNGED>. (I saved the stats for the pet-beasts I generated for this. They WILL be making a return at some point. Yes, it was that cool.)

ZillaPrime said:

Okay, I can see where, with the proper GM, and the proper prep, this could be an awesome adventure. But let me just take a moment to comment on it from my group's perspective, as players.

The only reason the party even survived the encounter in the windmill is because our GM is irrationally soft-hearted when it comes to killing off characters on their very first adventure. Yes, that's right, it was our characters' first outing, rank 1. By the end, at least three of the characters should have been dead, and one should have been dancing jigs around the planet, stark raving mad. I have never seen such a flurry of burnt fate points. Now, I will grant you, our group is notoriously rash and pig-headed, so there was little chance we were going to run away ... our own stupid fault, I know. But, I just don't feel the unnamed "xenos" at the heart of it are appropriate for such a inexperienced and under-equipped party. That said, I will admit that from a horror standpoint, it was tops. But even so, if the GM hadn't fudged a great deal, two thirds of the party, possibly more, would have been permanently retired from one encounter.

So, my take on it is, it is a good adventure, but only for a somewhat more-experienced, and slightly better-equipped party. Say, rank 3 characters, with at least 1 upgrade from starting equipment. Just my two cents.