As many of you will know, I've written a little supplement for Dark Heresy which depicts in all sorts of gory detail the Tyranid menace...

Well, as of this weekend, I've updated it. Feverish work and access to the Rogue Trader rulebook have conspired to bring you version 3 of Unearthed Apocrypha: The Great Devourer (version 2 came out just after Creatures Anathema), now updated to reference material from both Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader alike. The single biggest change is the addition of an entire section on the bio-ships of Tyranid Hive Fleets, converted across from Battlefleet Gothic as best I can, but there are little tweaks and adjustments all through the document, which now spans 72 pages and 28,010 words.

As always, it's available from my webpage, which is linked to in my signature, at the bottom of this post.

Feedback is always appreciated.

To all the GMs out there who might use this supplement, enjoy! To all the players who'll be facing the wrong end of it, good luck... you'll need it.

It seems I am not the only one that is very interested in this excellent work. You page is currently experiencing a bad case of:

Sorry, Service Temporarily Unavailable.
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

So I'm a very happy gm, because you have created a new version of this excellent sourcebook . But it is making me skittish and annoyed that I am not allowed to look at it right away.

As recently as yesterday I was looking for a way to send a private message through these boards (can't be done btw) to thank you for the work you put into version two of this document. I have used it extensively for planning the third chapter of my huge campaign The Emperors Pride.

Thank you! Your work will cause huge amounts of fun for our gaming group.

I am happy to say the site is working again now and I've just downloaded my copy

After a quick flick through first thoughts: nice job! And the bio-ships are enough to give even the most hardened Rogue Trader nightmares

DW

Urm it's not working for me

Ah, there I got it. It looks awesome!

Mellon said:

It can be, it just takes a bit of searching. If you go into your profile page, and then your friends list from there, then you should see an icon in the shape of an envelope next to everyone you have listed as a friend on the forums. That's the private message function.

Mellon said:

For you, perhaps; your players might not be so thankful. Either way, I'll face the music for my work sooner or later - a friend of mine is running an intermittent Dark Heresy game where all the players (myself included) are Imperial Guardsmen, and last session, he revealed that a Tyranid invasion was on the verge of beginning. Fortunately, the squad's meltagunner was quick on the draw, as he managed to vape the Genestealer we found before it could do anything (extreme luck... I mean one in a million odds sort of luck).

To everyone else... please be patient with my web page. As it's a geocities page, the bandwidth is limited and lots of traffic in a short space of time can cause issues. I'll be moving my web page within the week, as Yahoo is closing their Geocities service on the 26th, and that should hopefully help with this annoying little issue, but until then, there's not much I can do about people's problems connecting to the page.

In this campaign (of your friends) are all the characters actual guardsmen, or are they all (just) attached to the Imperial Guard, such as Engineseers, Battle Psykers, Priests etc? It sounds an interresting idea. Oh, and where is it set, somewhere within the Calixis sector (a war-world) or elsewhere such as the Margin Crusade?

When I click on the "Great Devourer" link this is what I get:

The web page you are trying to access doesn't exist on Yahoo! GeoCities.

If you continue to have trouble, visit our help area for information and assistance.

Bummer, I was really looking forward to this...

Meatpuppet said:

If anyone is still having trouble, I've now made the file available via Dark Reign as well. I'd still prefer people to use my page to download my work if possible, as it means I can track how many people are visiting my page to look at my work and get that nice, satisfied feeling when I find out that there are lots of people doing so.

I downloaded it from the original website without problem.

It looks very impressive and I'll read it as soon as I can (at the moment I'm busy with WFRP)... Thanks a lot for sharing!

No1, I'd like to send you a PM so I guess per your educational post here about that system, I will send you a friends request!

Dead link for me!

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Thanks, I'm downloading it right now!

Awesome stuff! Downloaded withe the squat stuff. That opens ups some good pc opportunities for my players.

Thank you!

**** fine work as usual sir.

Very interesting and very professionally done. Unfortunately this document is of no immediate use to me. However, I have one question to ask. Why is it that you are not doing something professionally along these lines? I see you doing very well at it.

Psion said:

The issue with doing this professionally is that getting 'in' is more difficult than it seems. The overwhelming majority of the competitions that a lot of writers get into the industry with are scenario ones, and I can't write adventures - the way I GM isn't conducive to that sort of forward planning.

The first (draft) release of The Great Devourer saw my Lictor rules form part of the basis for the Lictor rules in Creatures Anathema, and I'm continuing to work with the premise that if I keep producing things like this to a decent standard, and get noticed by those with the power to do something, sooner or later, I'll get somewhere. As it stands, I enjoy it anyway, and will keep writing whether I get paid for it or not.

As an aside, I've just spotted an omission in the Bio-ships rules - fire arcs. I'll correct it in the main document and re-release an updated version later this week (when I get the time), but for the time being, all Prow weapons fire into the Front arc, all Thorax weapons fire into the Front, Port and Starboard arcs, and all Abdomen weapons fire into the Port and Starboard arcs.

For those still seeking to download The Great Devourer, or any of my other supplements, I have now moved my webpage (mainly due to Geocities closing down in 3 days' time, but partially due to frustration concerning these bandwidth issues). All of my work can now be found at http://www.n01h3r3.com

N0-1_H3r3 said:

*nods* Thanks for the tip and yes, adventures are hard to write for. You have to be sure that the players will go a certain way, plan for alternatives if they don't, design a city or planet from the ground up and give it lots of interesting things to do, and think of all the possible questions a player may have for their GM. In short, it's much easier to just stat up a monster, race, or character class and say to the GM "you figure out what to do with this."

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Well, maybe you could try writing the setting first, then putting the adventure in afterwards. I suspect that Edge of Darkness was written this way.

Serps said:

It's more that the way I GM is very freeform - I'll come up with the major 'landmark' events that the group are likely to encounter, the broad plot points, etc... but beyond that, I wing it, using my experience, judgement, memory and ever-expanding archive of sample NPC stats to achieve this as seamlessly as possible (with inevitably variable results). The Great Devourer comes partially from that ever-expanding archive of sample NPCs and adversaries - great lists of character profiles in word documents, which sometimes amount to a hell of a lot more.

Because I GM in such a free-form manner, and pretty much always have done, the nature of more structured adventures are somewhat unfamiliar to me. Even in situations where I've created the setting (during the very early Dark Heresy playtest, I came up with an entire planet for my group to run around on rather than use any world in the Calixis Sector, which was at that time placed in a completely different part of the Imperium and founded during the Macharian Crusades), my tendancy has still been to rely more on my improvisational skills than my ability to plan.

But enough about my foibles, and more about my creations... feedback is appreciated, and would be mandatory if I had my way

There's a problem with the tyranid ships: you didn't vie the slots or weapons firing arcs.