Greetings loyal subjects of the god-emprah

Tomorrow I'm starting a dark heresy campaign with a few friends. I've spent some time acquainting myself with the rules and played bunch of FFs other 40k games before, I've even done some GMing before for death watch.There is one thing I'm not really sure how to handle though.

In the book the last step of character creation is outfitting the characters with a few freebee items, [influence bonus] number of items of scarce or better availability, if I recall correctly. Which is fine, but the adeptus administratum and adeptus mechanicus backgrounds both have an availability bonus when trying to find new gear.

My question is: Should I let that bonus apply to the freebee items as well? The rules seem to imply that, but I don't want my players to get too many fancy toys too early on as I feel that might hamper the players' sense of progression. Has anyone else had this issue and how have other GMs handled this bonus before?

Your insight would be much appreciated.

//

Kyuronous

I am letting my Mechanicus and Administratum characters have items after their special abilities affect the Availability. It really isn't that many items with the Influence Bonus being the cap.

~ alemander

Personally, I can't think of a reason not to let them have it. As Alemander says, its not that many items.

If you don't, you risk having Tech Priests basically looking like they've dressed in their dads work clothes, as opposed to be skilled and well equipped members of the AdMech as the amount of Cybernetics they can get is quite low.

Yeah, I allowed them to use their abilities as well; it is quite important if you want a Tech-Priest type with augmetics to start with.

And remember that there is SO MUCH gear, skills dans talents they can get later on, it's not 2-4 items that will really make them big badasses without anything left to get in the future.

This issue has come up before, and most people seem to allow those bonuses to apply to starting items.

Though the wording of the rules, by themselves, are not 100% clear on this point; if you dig back into the various revisions of the beta test, there was a language revision on both of those special rules which seemed to imply that the intent was that they did be apply to starting gear.

Thank you for your input everyone!

You all make a good point, and considering that the "tech-priest" player will probably want to invest in at least SOME armour too since the forge world background doesn't give you any if i recall correctly, I probably shouldn't be all that worried about him getting too cybered up.

And having played a tech-priest in first edition I know how yummy those cybernetics are. I think I will apply the bonus right away.