EDIT: I've made a new thread for the full release, you can follow along with any post-release updates and get the 1.0 PDF there. Here's a link.

Hey there! I'm currently working on developing a Dark Heresy conversion for Genesys. For those not familiar, Dark Heresy is Fantasy Flight Games' Warhammer 40,000 RPG where you play as members of The Inquisition, conducting investigations and rooting out heresy. It's typically a pretty low powered, horror toned affair, and I think Genesys would be a good fit for it.

Here's a link to the current PDF of the rules. This should be up to date with everything listed below. I'd highly recommend downloading the file rather than viewing it on Drive; it's fully bookmarked and the index is clickable, makes navigating 10x easier.

Here's a fillable PDF character sheet.

Here's a vague roadmap of where I'm at with my development, and what I hope to get done.

Character Creation

• Ten custom Home World options (replacing Archetype/Species) – DONE!
• Eight custom careers, based on those present in the original Dark Heresy – DONE!
• A list of avaliable talents, including a selection of 33 talents not present in Genesys (some newly designed, some lifted from FFG's Star Wars line and altered slightly) - DONE!
• A new skills list - DONE!

Equipment

• Ranged weapon stats – DONE!
  • Ranged weapon attachments - DONE!
  • Special ammunition – DONE!
• Melee weapon stats - DONE!
  • Melee weapon attachments - DONE!
• Grenades and Explosives stats - DONE!
• Armour stats - DONE!
  • Armour attachments- DONE!
• Cybernetics rules - DONE!
• General gear stats - DONE!

Psychic Powers

• Rules for Psykers – heavily based on Genesys’ magic system, and modified for 40k flavour - DONE!
• A Perils of the Warp table for each Psychic Discipline, based on Dark Heresy 2e's unreleased beta - DONE!

Setting Rules

• Rules for Fear, expanding on those present in the Genesys horror tone - DONE!
• Rules for developing, succumbing to and recovering from mental trauma - DONE!
• Corruption and Mutation - DONE!
• NPC statistics for a range of things, from Arbitrators to Bloodletters

This is by no means a definitive list; it’s just the stuff I’m prioritising for now. If there’s something you think I’m missing, tell me, I want this to be a fairly solid base. Stuff like vehicles, exotic weapons, and playing as Xenos or Space Marines or whatever else will come later, probably in a separate release entirely designed to add onto this base.

I'm very open to constructive criticism, advice and any other feedback people want to provide. I'm by no means an expert, so if you think something could be done better, let me know in this thread, I'll take all feedback into consideration.

Nice.

A few months ago I just started a huge campaign for my players and we want to run it on GNS.

This saves me a lot of work converting weapons (and possibly other stuff) myself.

Will there be over damage tables? It's not enough for my face to explode, I need to know how much collateral damage everyone in short range takes due to my face exploding.

I am thinking of redesigning the crit table to be a bit more grizzly. I don't see much need to change the actual crit system as it stands, but I'll definitely look at messing with the table itself, a lot of the results in stock Genesys feel a little wimpy for the 40k tone.

13 hours ago, Tom Cruise said:

One thing I'm contemplating: is the Brawl skill worth keeping in Dark Heresy? Brawl weapons aren't much of a big thing in the setting, outside of the obligatory Power Fists. Almost seems like merging it all into one generic melee skill would be best. Or splitting out heavy and light melee, like Genesys does in fantasy settings. Thoughts?

Splitting it into light and heavy melee would work well in my mind although there isn't a huge variety of two handed melee weapons. It'll still work well enough to make the two handed Khorne cultist feel distinctly different.

One idea I've had regarding corruption is to rejig a mechanic from the older WFRP. You could lift corruption straight from 3E but another idea would be to have a separate corruption pool that works similarly to strain. Once your corruption exceeds your strain threshold, roll on a "corruption critical chart" which could involve mutation or a blighted soul or something equally sinister. Your corruption would then reset to zero and you'd have to deal with the ramifications of your corrupted soul.

2 hours ago, Popdart said:

Splitting it into light and heavy melee would work well in my mind although there isn't a huge variety of two handed melee weapons. It'll still work well enough to make the two handed Khorne cultist feel distinctly different.

One idea I've had regarding corruption is to rejig a mechanic from the older WFRP. You could lift corruption straight from 3E but another idea would be to have a separate corruption pool that works similarly to strain. Once your corruption exceeds your strain threshold, roll on a "corruption critical chart" which could involve mutation or a blighted soul or something equally sinister. Your corruption would then reset to zero and you'd have to deal with the ramifications of your corrupted soul.

That's a pretty solid idea. I'm kind of wary of adding another resource to track; Genesys advises against that, and for pretty good reason. But something like corruption wouldn't come up super often, so I don't think it'd bog things down too much.

Also, fiddled around with InDesign and got a PDF layout I like. Text isn't really finalised, just wanted something to fill the test pages.

Quick update: started work on doing the Archetypes. Still very WIP, but I thought I'd post them here to get some input; don't want to make anything too imbalanced, so input on the design of these would be very useful. Never really messed with Species creation before in my Star Wars dabbling, so this is new territory for me.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1akR9OWvu0bwCE0ypN3Wnwo5ccL9N2tGO379QOGS8FPg/edit#

Also, if there's any important Home Worlds you think I've missed, tell me, I wanna cover most of the important options.

Having played and run a lot of Dark Heresy and as someone planning on running a Warhammer Fantasy campaign using Genesys, this is something I've been giving a lot of thought to. For the most part, I haven't seen the need to really change all that much about the system. The default magic system should work just fine with the addition of just one little house rule (forcing players to add difficulty dice appropriate to their chosen Wind of Magic, to both represent the strongly thematic spellcasting of WHFB and the generally higher chance of it backfiring in the caster's face) and some kind of chart or guideline for the GM to sadistically spend Threat/Despair on breaches in the fabric of reality and the ensuing deluge of the forces of Chaos into our poor spellcaster's feeble, mortal mind. Although 40k psykers are slightly different, 40k is just WHFB In Space so there's really not much in the way of differences between running a Fantasy campaign versus running a 40k campaign.

The biggest problem I see with stock Genesys is the tone and bias of the system. For Star Wars, it was perfect -- light, adventurous, and almost entirely stacked in the players' favor in order to allow them to pull off bold feats of improbable heroism even after the most disastrous of failures. It's almost impossible to die in the system, and even Star Wars' notoriously limb-lopping nature doesn't come up in critical hits all that often.

This is, obviously, wholly inappropriate for a Warhammer/40k setting.

light No, only darkness. Light is heresy.

adventurous Adventure is a dream of the treacherous mind. Obedience is the virtue of the loyal.

bold feats of improbable heroism even after the most disastrous of failures.

Fixing these clear and obviously heretical oversights that the arch-traitors at FFG have seditiously inserted into their Forbidden Tome of Genesys is, I think, actually pretty simple. I'm going to experiment with a simple, flat +50 to all critical hits, in addition to generally more gruesome and brutal description and dice-interpretation. Make healing off damage and criticals a little harder (i.e., require narrative time and energy in order to even make the attempt), and I think the system will instantly be more suitable for safe consumption by servants of the Emperor/Bretonnian peasants.

The rest is just simple GM tone and adjudication. Less bottomless pits to swing over with conveniently-acquired cable, and more utterly gratuitous fountains of blood inflicting 3 Setback dice on all attempts to do literally anything.

Oh, I really dig your works.

Hopefully most is "complete" by January when we will convert our characters and fully start running it on GNS.

I'm planning on having a playable version ready to roll within the next week or two. I might be overestimating my speed there, but I've got a lot of free time over December so it's not too unfeasible. Before January is likely.

I expect this will be a fairly iterative design, and I'll probably do "expansions" for it once I've got the core rules down, but I think a pre-January release for a playable set of rules is pretty achievable.

2 minutes ago, Tom Cruise said:

I'm planning on having a playable version ready to roll within the next week or two. I might be overestimating my speed there, but I've got a lot of free time over December so it's not too unfeasible. Before January is likely.

I expect this will be a fairly iterative design, and I'll probably do "expansions" for it once I've got the core rules down, but I think a pre-January release for a playable set of rules is pretty achievable.

You.

I like you.

29 minutes ago, Tom Cruise said:

I'm planning on having a playable version ready to roll within the next week or two. I might be overestimating my speed there, but I've got a lot of free time over December so it's not too unfeasible. Before January is likely.

I expect this will be a fairly iterative design, and I'll probably do "expansions" for it once I've got the core rules down, but I think a pre-January release for a playable set of rules is pretty achievable.

By Gorka (or is it Morka..?) you mad man. I'd volunteer to playtest.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1akR9OWvu0bwCE0ypN3Wnwo5ccL9N2tGO379QOGS8FPg/edit#

Home Worlds are all done now, although some tweaking for balance might be necessary. May also end up adding some more options, but I think this covers most of the important ones. Twelve options currently, which is a nice amount I think.

Added them into the PDF too, which you can take a look at here if you like;

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O-KQ4dlMe3v90IRleI_2M7RVbUL7F3yz/view?usp=sharing

I take no credit for the flavour text; most of it is lifted right from the Dark Heresy books, and then edited down a little to suit the size. Only one I wrote up was the Fortress Worlds text because I couldn't find one in the books to steal

How would you manage psychic occurrences?

What do you guys think about having psychic powers create Backlash instead of producing strain?

More powerful powers create more Backlash, and once the threshold has been hit, a psychic occurrence happens.

I'm also thinking letting the psyker roll a (probably) D10 while rolling dice for powers.

If the die result is lower than the Backlash an occurrence appears.

I'll further discuss this with my team's psykers, but as of now I'm not sure.

I don't want the psyker just fall unconscious if casting too much, that's not Dark Heresy. hehe.

I don't have my hands on the full rules until I can physically pick up my copy tomorrow, but from what I've gathered throwing the full suite of optional magic rules at WHFB magic/40k psychics looks to be an acceptable minimum for running the Warhammer settings. As I alluded to in my earlier post, I think it's largely up to the GM to simply create the proper level of narrative interpretation on the core rules. For example, a psyker need not "fall unconscious" upon dumping all of his Strain into psychic abilities; rather, such expenditures of Strain should represent a psyker unshackling his powers to a dangerous degree and inviting the full madness of the Warp into reality. Straining out from psychic use should thus be interpreted by the GM as an automatic breach of reality, akin to Dark Heresy's Psychic Phenomena and/or Perils of the Warp (depending on how sadistic you want to be). This should also happen on Despair or, say, 2-3 Threat.

Again, I don't have the full rules in front of me at the moment, but I assume Backlash is mostly just optional damage dealt to the caster. This is fine. Really, you can't over do the self-destructive sadomasochistic insanity that is Warhammer magic/psychics. Throw in some free Critical Hits for good measure, because why not (with an appropriate Chaos flavor, of course)!

So, long story short: Indulge in Psychic Phenomena on 2-3 Threat and Despairs, with an automatic trigger (perhaps the more serious Perils of the Warp) if a psyker exceeds his Strain threshold.

I think adding an extra dice roll to the psychic power rolls kinda goes against the spirit of the rules; for the most part Genesys tries to make each dice roll quite inclusive of everything that happens, using the symbols that come up to determine whatever catastrophic side effects might occur. Generally my design philosophy leans towards adding as few extra things to keep track of as possible; I like the simplicity and quick nature of Genesys, I think adding extra dice rolls and resources to track might take away from that.

I'm thinking of just having it fairly simple; threat causes more minor warp phenomena; the kinda stuff that would be in the Psychic Phenomena tables in the original Dark Heresy. Then Despairs would cause actual Perils of the Warp, the real life threatening stuff. To make Perils a constant risk, every psychic power roll would include one difficulty upgrade by default (the first difficulty die is always red, essentially). I'm toying with whether or not to have actual Dark Heresy styled tables for these results, similar to crits; it'd be nice to keep up the randomness factor, but leaving it in the GM's ballpark to determine the specifics of what happens (with symbols just informing the severity) would be functional enough, and would mean the effects could be tailored to the specifics of the situation and the power being cast.

I do like the idea of having passing out due to strain from psychic powers result in immediate Phenomena/Perils results, that's something I think it'd make sense to put a hard rule on.

One thing I'm also considering is letting Psykers upgrade the difficulty to increase odds of success. Maybe something like one upgraded die = one free success on the end result? I'd have to look at how the math works to see if that makes any sense, but I like the idea of gaining increased odds of succeeding at casting the spell in exchange for ratcheting up the odds of a Despair result massively. It may not work at all though, I need to examine the dice and their faces in a bit more detail and figure out what would make sense mathematically.

I haven't really dug into the Genesys magic rules in enough depth to give any firm views on this yet, though. This is pretty much all vague conjecture, I'll revisit it in more detail when I start doing Psyker rules properly.

Why not trade Upgrade for Upgrade? Purp -> Red, in exchange for a Green -> Yellow (or additional Purps/Greens as per standard upgrading). It represents the brinksmanship gambling of throwing yourself into the Warp/Winds of Magic wholesale; potentially increasing your power by giving you slightly more favorable odds for Successes and the massive increase in chances for more Triumphs, while also commensurately increasing the wild risk of ever more Despairs. One can easily envision the horrifically cataclysmic (read: hilarious) results from a ridiculous 3 Triumph+success+3 Despair psychic roll as our poor, poor psyker annihilates something with an apocalyptic surge of uncontrollable energies while also simultaneously bringing about the conditions required to summon a long-banished Daemon Prince back into reality. Oops.

You could tie this ability to a custom campaign Talent series, ranks in Arcana, or a flat default of probably 2 or so. i.e., you have 3 ranks in Arcana, so you can trade for up to 3 Upgrades in this manner. This all loosely parallels the Dark Heresy system's various incarnations of Unfettered/Pushed powers. Higher risk, higher reward.

On 12/1/2017 at 1:47 AM, BCGaius said:

The biggest problem I see with stock Genesys is the tone and bias of the system. For Star Wars, it was perfect -- light, adventurous, and almost entirely stacked in the players' favor in order to allow them to pull off bold feats of improbable heroism even after the most disastrous of failures. It's almost impossible to die in the system, and even Star Wars' notoriously limb-lopping nature doesn't come up in critical hits all that often.

This is, obviously, wholly inappropriate for a Warhammer/40k setting.

light No, only darkness. Light is heresy.

adventurous Adventure is a dream of the treacherous mind. Obedience is the virtue of the loyal.

bold feats of improbable heroism even after the most disastrous of failures.

My gut thought on this would be what if you swap out the dice "sides" for the party? Generally, rolls are considered in the favor of the one rolling it. 3 green vs. 3 purple is in favor of success. Black dice do not fully cancel blue dice in terms of whats on the faces.

Certainly, training players to view results in an opposite direction would be a bit difficult, but you're easily shifting the balance of success about 5-10% by doing so. Even more if you keep rolls by opposing characters using the base normal dice.

The dice aren't actually slanted in the favour of the party when you factor in the fact that you need more net successes than failures to pass a test. A wash is still a failure, after all. Odds are nearly always slightly stacked towards failure with an even dice pool. If you flipped it the dice would get pretty demoralising, and not in a nice thematic way I feel.

Honestly I don't see maintaining tone as much of a hurdle the rules need to jump. Genesys can do gritty, I'd say it's mostly down to the GM making sure to establish a tone in how they adjudicate rolls.

8 hours ago, BCGaius said:

Why not trade Upgrade for Upgrade? Purp -> Red, in exchange for a Green -> Yellow (or additional Purps/Greens as per standard upgrading). It represents the brinksmanship gambling of throwing yourself into the Warp/Winds of Magic wholesale; potentially increasing your power by giving you slightly more favorable odds for Successes and the massive increase in chances for more Triumphs, while also commensurately increasing the wild risk of ever more Despairs. One can easily envision the horrifically cataclysmic (read: hilarious) results from a ridiculous 3 Triumph+success+3 Despair psychic roll as our poor, poor psyker annihilates something with an apocalyptic surge of uncontrollable energies while also simultaneously bringing about the conditions required to summon a long-banished Daemon Prince back into reality. Oops.

You could tie this ability to a custom campaign Talent series, ranks in Arcana, or a flat default of probably 2 or so. i.e., you have 3 ranks in Arcana, so you can trade for up to 3 Upgrades in this manner. This all loosely parallels the Dark Heresy system's various incarnations of Unfettered/Pushed powers. Higher risk, higher reward.

This isn't a bad idea at all. Only thing I'd be worried about is letting the Proficiency dice get too out of control. Like the devs themselves have identified, the more dice you throw at a roll the more the math starts to break down. But maybe if you just put a hard cap on the number of dice pushing your powers can hit (7 yellows as a hard max?), it'd work alright.

I'm still not sure how I want to tie XP expenditure into this. I'm currently undecided between having a dedicated Psyker skill, or maybe splitting it up into the different Disciplines somehow. A skill for each Discipline seems like overkill, it'd be the XP tax from **** to make Psykers invest in five skills if they want to be well rounded. I definitely want the Disciplines to be represented somehow, though. Maybe different existing skills could tie into different Disciplines? Resilience for Biomancy, Perception for Divination, for example.

Just throwing out ideas at this point, the Psyker rules are probably going to be one of the bigger things to tackle in this conversion, I want to get some brainstorming done before I jump in.

12 hours ago, Tom Cruise said:

I think adding an extra dice roll to the psychic power rolls kinda goes against the spirit of the rules; for the most part Genesys tries to make each dice roll quite inclusive of everything that happens, using the symbols that come up to determine whatever catastrophic side effects might occur. Generally my design philosophy leans towards adding as few extra things to keep track of as possible; I like the simplicity and quick nature of Genesys, I think adding extra dice rolls and resources to track might take away from that.

Actually what I thought, too, while typing. Just spun around some ideas which quickly came to mind.

11 hours ago, BCGaius said:

Why not trade Upgrade for Upgrade? Purp -> Red, in exchange for a Green -> Yellow (or additional Purps/Greens as per standard upgrading). It represents the brinksmanship gambling of throwing yourself into the Warp/Winds of Magic wholesale; potentially increasing your power by giving you slightly more favorable odds for Successes and the massive increase in chances for more Triumphs, while also commensurately increasing the wild risk of ever more Despairs. One can easily envision the horrifically cataclysmic (read: hilarious) results from a ridiculous 3 Triumph+success+3 Despair psychic roll as our poor, poor psyker annihilates something with an apocalyptic surge of uncontrollable energies while also simultaneously bringing about the conditions required to summon a long-banished Daemon Prince back into reality. Oops.

You could tie this ability to a custom campaign Talent series, ranks in Arcana, or a flat default of probably 2 or so. i.e., you have 3 ranks in Arcana, so you can trade for up to 3 Upgrades in this manner. This all loosely parallels the Dark Heresy system's various incarnations of Unfettered/Pushed powers. Higher risk, higher reward.

This is actually really great.

Feels like Pushing . Just as in DH 2nd ED, you strain yourself and pushing your luck — more or less.

The more power you want, the more powerful phenoma/perils can occure. And more frequent.

But what to do if you don't have any more Ability and/or Difficulty dice to upgrade?

3 hours ago, Tom Cruise said:

I'm still not sure how I want to tie XP expenditure into this. I'm currently undecided between having a dedicated Psyker skill, or maybe splitting it up into the different Disciplines somehow. A skill for each Discipline seems like overkill, it'd be the XP tax from **** to make Psykers invest in five skills if they want to be well rounded. I definitely want the Disciplines to be represented somehow, though. Maybe different existing skills could tie into different Disciplines? Resilience for Biomancy, Perception for Divination, for example.

Just throwing out ideas at this point, the Psyker rules are probably going to be one of the bigger things to tackle in this conversion, I want to get some brainstorming done before I jump in.

I don't think having a separate skill for each discipline is wrong.

Within those boundaries they can do whatever they want — more or less.

Psykers already had to buy Psy Rating and Powers. If they wanted to Psy Rating 10 they would have to invest far more than 10k ExP. Non-Psykers with 10k+ are super deadly by then.

The discipline skills then would be subtitudes for Psy Rating and Skill/Knowledge of those disciplines.

All in all, I'd say:

Each Discipline has its own skill.

Pushing = Upgrading Ability to Proficiency while upgrading Difficulty to Challenge.

What's the limit? Generating more Proficiency while creating additional Challenge?

Phenomena : 2 Threat seems too frequently. 3 sounds fine. With each additional Threat giving +10 on the D100 roll on the original phenomena/peril table. Unless you'll create a table using only the "bad" dice. Despair, of course, auto-generates at least a phenomena. And yes, reaching the strain threshold creates an automated Peril sounds fine. Forces the psykers to control themselves more.

But o well, if all fails, there's still that psykana mercy blade. xD

Talents should be created/converted.

On 11/30/2017 at 9:15 PM, Tom Cruise said:

That's a pretty solid idea. I'm kind of wary of adding another resource to track; Genesys advises against that, and for pretty good reason. But something like corruption wouldn't come up super often, so I don't think it'd bog things down too much.

Also, fiddled around with InDesign and got a PDF layout I like. Text isn't really finalised, just wanted something to fill the test pages.

How could one go about getting a copy of this...I am looking at starting a new group and would love to use this as I own all of the Rogue Trade and Dark Heresy books....Also bang up job on the layout!

JP.

@Hugh Salamando Filth I'm liking your ideas a lot, will definitely refer back to that post. Separate skills will probably work just fine, so I may well end up just keeping that. Discipline rolls can cover stuff that doesn't fall into any category, maybe? (The stuff that would be minor powers in DH 1e)

@Synge Thanks for the kind words! Everything will be available in this thread as I complete it; so far all I've done is Home Worlds and Ranged Weapons, there's still a little way's to go. I need to update the OP a bit to reflect where I'm at with development; I'll do that later this afternoon.

For today's update, here's the completed ranged weapon section. Tidied things up, added some fluffy descriptions and images (taken from DH1e's rulebook), tweaked some stats, and redid prices entirely. Let me know what you think of the PDF so far; trying to strike a nice balance between being pretty but still being something people can reasonably print without spending a week's paycheck on printer cartridges. Might release a separate version without the harsh black borders to further enable that, they look nice but they are a lot of black.

PDF Version , Google Docs Version (No flavour text here, pure stats)

The pricing is more formulaic than it looks; I set base prices using Genesys' framework for weapon design, then applied some modifiers; Solid Projectile weapons are priced at 80 percent of base, Las at 75, Bolt at 125, and Plasma/Melta at 150. There's a little fiddling and fudging the numbers done on top of that, mostly rounding things down and jacking up prices a little where Genesys seemed to undershoot, but it's fairly consistent. Let me know what you think of the pricing. I'd say it's not really expected that players will be buying Plasma Guns and Meltas in general; that's the kinda thing which will probably come through rewards from their Inquisitor, or looting from suitably challenging heretics.

Another question to throw to the crowd; what do you think of my current skill list? Posted below. Particularly interested in the balance of knowledge skills, it's a tough balancing act making them broad but not too unfocused.

Athletics
Brawl
Charm
Coercion
Cool
Coordination
Deception
Discipline
Education
Forbidden Lore (Chaos) - Knowledge of the worship of the Chaos Gods, cult practices, the specific rituals and symbols of each god, etc
Forbidden Lore (Warp) - Knowledge of everything Warp related that isn't strictly tied to Chaos worship. Warp phenomena, psychic powers, etc.
Forbidden Lore (Xenos) - Knowledge of the various Xeno races.
Gunnery
Leadership
Lore (Imperium) - Knowledge of the Imperial Creed, and all the various organisations that make up the Imperium
Lore (Heresy) - Knowledge of criminal factions, non-Chaos related heretical behaviour, crime and punishment, etc
Lore (Warfare) - Knowledge of combat tactics, wars the Imperium is and has been involved in, and the various organisations within the military (PDF, Imperial Guard, Astartes, etc)
Mechanics
Medicae
Melee
Negotiation
Operate - Operating Vehicles. Having a dedicated skill for space/air vehicles seems a bit much in Dark Heresy focused game. Outside of the odd shuttle or two they probably won't pilot many flying vehicles, so combining it down into one skill seems appropriate.
Perception
Ranged (Heavy)
Ranged (Light)
Resilience
Skulduggery
Stealth
Streetwise
Survival
Vigilance

Man looking great! I'm gonna see if I can run with this and see how my players like it! Sadly wont be for another week or 2 at best!!

Okay, OP is all tidied up with a roadmap of what I want to get done with this conversion.

Aaaand we have a skill list. A preliminary one, but still a skill list.

Here it is in Google Docs form . Commenting is enabled if you wanna point out typos/screwups right there on the page.

And here's it added to the PDF. Lemme know what you think of how it looks, the quality of the flavour text, etc. The skills flavour text is all actually written from scratch rather than being pilfered from DH books, so some more eyes on it to proofread would be great.