The third edition (I guess I'm calling it that now) PDF is ready to go! Huge thanks to everyone who has provided feedback, proofreading, etc while I've been working on this overhaul, it's been very helpful!

I would encourage people to download the PDF, as it is fully bookmarked and has toggle-able layers to facilitate easier printing. Those features don't work in Google Drive's document view.

- LINK -

Unfortunately I haven't kept an exhaustive change log for this one, but I plan to keep more detailed errata for future updates to this. But here's a broad strokes overview of changes made;

General

• Whole book updated to a new, full colour format, aping the design of FFG's Dark Heresy Second Edition books.
• Flavour text, player/GM advice and content in general has been expanded throughout. A lot more time is spent trying to contextualise things and explain mechanics, which hopefully makes it all a nicer read.

Chapter I - Creating an Acolyte

• The steps of character creation are given a lot more attention; mechanically these haven't changed, but they are explained better now.
• Careers have been renamed and mostly redesigned. I've gone with much more generic names, primarily lifted from DH2e with some tweaks. They all have a set of suggested talents and gear now, like in Shadow of the Beanstalk.
• Two new careers added; the Fanatic and the Ace.
• Step 1 - Determine Background has been added, with some useful questions to consider when making a new Acolyte.

Chapter IV - Elite Advances

• Wyrd have been removed. Unfortunately couldn't find a way to make it mechanically meaningful enough to keep. Wyrds can be represented pretty well by just dropping only one rank into a psychic discipline and role-playing accordingly.
• Added Gland Warriors.
• Added a set of basic talents for Untouchables to expand their character options.

Chapter V - Armoury

• A new Haywire weapon quality is added, functioning similarly to Sunder but specifically for electronics.
• Low-tech weapons expanded - added Bolas, Bow, Flintlock Pistol, Musket and Sling.
• Plasma caliver and arc weapons added.
• Various other gear added throughout the chapter - I unfortunately did not keep a list of what I was adding during development, but there's a lot of cool stuff now that wasn't in previous editions.

Chapter VI - Narrative Tools

• Downtime Encounters have been renamed to Interludes. Some tweaks to the Interludes rules.

Chapter VII - Psychic Powers.

• This chapter has been entirely rewritten to be standalone - you shouldn't need to reference the Genesys Magic rules when using this chapter, as I found that this was a huge chore in play, flipping between the two books.
• Some powers have been tweaked, with some options added.
• Perils of the Warp is now more deadly; extra despairs add +10 to the roll, not +5.

Chapter VIII - Corruption

• Corruption checks have been changed to be something that occurs at the end of an encounter, not during.

Chapter X - Allies and Adversaries

• Each adversary entry is given its own page now, with a lot more room allowed for flavour text and game-play advice.
• New section for servitor NPCs so they can all be found in one handy place, along with some slightly tweaked rules for handling servitors.
• Suggested psychic powers are detailed on every psychic NPC's profile.
• Some general balance/design tweaks to a lot of the profiles. The first and second editions had an embarrassing amount of typos and rules issues, a lot of that is fixed now.

And here's a Google Drive link to all the individual chapters in a folder, for commenting on with any proofreading feedback/suggestions.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1hRJ9KjaBz7PdhF1KhhpGraQ75YW0xPFm

Keeping it to separate chapters for annotation should make things more manageable I think. Also might be somehow useful for people who want specific chapters on their own?

Awesome work! Much respect for putting all your time and effort in this conversion. you can tell it's a work of passion. 🙂

Will you be putting out a new version of the character sheet as well?

Awesome! It looks really great. 👍

8 hours ago, Veruca said:

Awesome work! Much respect for putting all your time and effort in this conversion. you can tell it's a work of passion. 🙂

Will you be putting out a new version of the character sheet as well?

Yep, I'll give the character sheet a look over some time in the near future. Not sure if I'll do a total redesign or just update it to be more in line with the current mechanics, I don't really like the look of it currently but designing character sheets visually isn't really my strong suit.

Not sure if this is what I want to focus my attention on next but I felt like doing some cover and intro chapter work so I made this 👀

Excellent! Been toying with the idea of running a DH game using Genesys with the old edition that you put out, with this new edition it's not really a doubt anymore about running a game.

Imperial Armour would also definitely have my vote as to what to do next. Both myself and my players always enjoy having vehicles in any setting. If the intention with that supplement is to also add more on foot equipment, whether armor, weapons, and/or general equipment that would be a plus as well. Maybe do something similar to the idea of alternate patterns of equipment? Kinda like in Only War's Hammer of the Emperor.

Oh whoops the Armoury bit was 100% an editing error, I shouldn't post these things at 2 AM 😛 The splat will focus exclusively on vehicles. I don't really see myself going too much into detail with weapon variants to be honest, I feel like that's a bit too granular for the design ethos of Genesys.

Now that I'm revisiting vehicle rules, I'm faced with the problem of 40k's weird balance of infantry scale anti-armour.

Power weapons, melta guns, etc, need to be able to pose a reasonable threat to vehicles, while not being an always instagib on humans. With Genesys' system of 1 hull trauma = 10 wounds, this is super hard to model well. For a weapon to make a dent in vehicles, it needs to have 10+ damage and breach, multiple ranks ideally. This makes it likely to kill PCs in one hit, which is not something I really want to see (and doesn't fit the fiction anyway).

At the time I was last working on vehicle rules, this is the compromise I came up with. What do people think? Are there better ideas?

I've had people suggest previously that I just create separate profiles for power weapons, meltas etc when they're used to target vehicles, but having two profiles for each weapon sounds like the kinda weird clunk that Genesys is not designed around.

An alternative solution I've come to with some help from the Genesys Discord is this, which feels like a more elegant solution than changing Genesys' core mechanics for vehicles.

A new weapon quality to be added to Meltas, Power Weapons and other weapons which need to pose a real threat to vehicles without turning humans into a red mist on impact.

Quote

Destructive (Passive) - When a weapon with the Destructive quality successfully deals damage to a vehicle's Hull Threshold, the target vehicle suffers an additional point of Hull Trauma for each rank of Destructive.

This basically would let me tailor how much damage a given weapon can do to vehicles, while leaving its damage to personal scale threats untouched.

What do people think of this solution?

I've been thinking about this. While Destructive could certainly work, I think you could also just give certain vehicles the Vulnerable trait. For example Vulnerable X [Melta, Power] . A vehicle with the Vulnerable X trait takes X times the damage from weapons of a specific type?

That could be an idea, although I'm not sure if I'd need specific rules for each vehicle; there's not really any vehicles power weapons or meltaguns *won't* wreck.

Also, what do people think of these rules for running people over?

21 minutes ago, Tom Cruise said:

That could be an idea, although I'm not sure if I'd need specific rules for each vehicle; there's not really any vehicles power weapons or meltaguns *won't* wreck.

Also, what do people think of these rules for running people over?

Playing sporadically Dawn of War with the Apocalypse Mod: You get to choose if your Titan would rather ram or stomp on enemy units.

Here's a couple of examples of how I'm planning to lay out vehicle profiles, by the way. Rules definitely not final.

On 4/27/2020 at 4:47 PM, Tom Cruise said:

Now that I'm revisiting vehicle rules, I'm faced with the problem of 40k's weird balance of infantry scale anti-armour.

Power weapons, melta guns, etc, need to be able to pose a reasonable threat to vehicles, while not being an always instagib on humans. With Genesys' system of 1 hull trauma = 10 wounds, this is super hard to model well. For a weapon to make a dent in vehicles, it needs to have 10+ damage and breach, multiple ranks ideally. This makes it likely to kill PCs in one hit, which is not something I really want to see (and doesn't fit the fiction anyway).

hmm ... since this is anti-vehicle weaponry, it is simple not accurate enough for infantry scale ... hence apply full wounds on critical/trimph results.

expressed as a quality:

Anti-Vehicular (Passive) - When a weapon with the Anti-Vehicular quality successfully deals damage to a Infantry-scale target, the target only suffers massive damage (ie. 10 wounds per hull trauma) on a triumph result. On a non-triumph result the Infantry-scale target only suffers 1/5 (?) damage.

It *is* accurate enough for infantry scale, though. People will go from having a high stakes fencing duel with power swords, to cutting a tank open with one. 40k doesn't make a lot of sense 😛

for the power sword case, how does star wars handle those ?

Lightsabers in Star Wars just have breach. They don't really do a lot of work against vehicles with the damage scaling, which isn't so much of a problem there because carving up vehicles in melee combat isn't quite as much a part of the fiction (although you do see your fair share of Jedis cutting the legs off walkers and the like in Clone Wars, which is hard to do mechanically in the Star Wars RPGs).

I think I'm likely to stick with the Destructive trait, it seems like the most straightforward solution out of everything I've seen so far. Doesn't require any rules exceptions, lets vehicles use stock Genesys balancing for WT/Armour/etc, and it gives me a decent level of control over how much weapons can wreck vehicles.

Here's some vehicle weapons. May add more depending on what vehicles I end up including. Everything here is planetary scale unless stated otherwise.

I'll probably gut out the prices and rarity for the final release as these are all purchased as part of a wider vehicle profile (vehicles specify what you can swap out for weapon slots), but I've calculated them for the sake of making vehicle prices easy to work out.

P.S. here's the vehicles I'm currently planning to include for the ground vehicle section. (Bolding stuff as I complete it!)

• Achilles Ridgerunner
• Atalan Dirtcycle
• Atalan Wolfquad
• Autocarriage (civilian car)
• Baneblade
• Basilisk
• Chimera Armoured Transport
• Goliath Truck
• Land Speeder
• Land Raider
• Land Raider Crusader
• Leman Russ
• Razorback
• Rhino
• Salamander Command Tank
• Sentinel Walker
• Tauros Rapid Assault Vehicle
• Taurox APC
• Taurox Prime
• Veloxic Bike

Not looking for this to be an exhaustive catalogue of every Imperial Guard tank ever, looking to just get the broad strokes relevant stuff, and prioritise stuff which might get some use in a Dark Heresy game.

If anyone else has any other good suggestions let me know. Civilian vehicles are unfortunately pretty un-explored in 40k material, but Genestealer Cults vehicles provide some nice examples of what industrial vehicles look like.

So glad you have been working on this again! Good stuff!!!

Thought this might be a fun little design insight for people; working out how to map speeds of vehicles in 40k to the Genesys vehicle speeds scale.

Pulled the stats from Deathwatch, Dark Heresy 2e and Only War (and the Lightning from the Warhammer wiki as it doesn't have stats anywhere), tried to compare these against speed stats in Genesys to get a bit of a scale. Here's the rough scale I came up with;

• Speed 1 = 1 – 15 kph
• Speed 2 = 16 – 30 kph
• Speed 3 = 31 kph – 60 kph
• Speed 4 = 61 kph – 250 kph
• Speed 5 = 251 kph – 2000 kph
• Speed 6 = 2001 kph+

It's a hard thing to map directly as flyers go so much faster than land vehicles, but I think this is a decent enough balance.

Vroom vroom

7 hours ago, Tom Cruise said:

Thought this might be a fun little design insight for people; working out how to map speeds of vehicles in 40k to the Genesys vehicle speeds scale.

*snip*

It's a hard thing to map directly as flyers go so much faster than land vehicles, but I think this is a decent enough balance.

Just popping in to say I am so relieved to see I'm not the only person who does this sort of thing during game design (and even session prep).

It me.

With vehicles it's particularly handy, because a lot of the stats do translate over pretty directly. Like in the 40kRPGs vehicles have Integrity, which is basically just their Hull Trauma Threshold. And I've found that multiplying that Integrity value by 0.45 gives you a pretty good ballpark of what their HTT should be, looking at similar Genesys vehicles.

Handling also maps pretty well, because it's pretty much the same mechanic as 40kRPG's Manoeuvrability. Just in +5 increments instead of +1. So conversion is easy.

Naturally converting stats over directly only gets you so far, and sometimes you need to go by feel, but this at least gives me a solid baseline to work from.