On 5/22/2020 at 9:29 PM, MaxXIII said:

I love your work! I am going to create a beginner game (like the star wars ones) for it to introduce Genesys and dark heresy to my group! If you have a character I'd like to honor your work by including it as a pregen or NPC. I will be creating tokens for the beginner game, so you'd get a drawn token out of it.

You can check out my art style here:

https://www.instagram.com/maxschmuecker/

Keep up the good work!

I don't have any particular characters that I'm super attached to or anything, so there's not a lot I can add there. Awesome to hear you're working on a beginner adventure though, if you feel up to sharing please let the people in this thread know when you're done, it'd be a really handy resource.

On 5/23/2020 at 12:52 AM, MaxXIII said:

Forgot to tag you @Tom Cruise ...

Also as a follow up question: have you thought about a supplement for space marines/death watch?

Would be super cool for warband campaigns to have them.

Scroll up a few posts 😛 It's very much in the works. Grey Knights too!

On 5/23/2020 at 7:53 PM, LelouchVee said:

According to good ol' Lexicanum:

So my first instinct would be to create a sort of 'downward spiral' situation for them. Prove you're the best - or grind yourself to dust trying. Basically I'm thinking something along the lines of:

If an Iron Hands character ends an encounter in a retreat or loss, or the encounter he participated in ends while he's unconscious, he decreases his strain threshold by 2. This reduction lasts until he installs a new piece of cybernetics (preferrably replacing an organ or body part connected to the reason he failed or fell unconscious). The effect is cumulative, and each piece of cybernetics cancels out only one instance of reduction.

And some "abuse control" for part 2:

Iron Hands characters cannot willingly uninstall cybernetic from their bodies. If a previously installed piece of cybernetics has been destroyed of forcefully removed from an Iron Hands character, he upgrades difficulty of all Presence and Willpower checks once until a new implant replaces the lost cybernetic .

Perhaps there's a more laconic way of formulating it, but it escapes me for now. Anyway, this way a character has to install a new augmetic to mitigate the effect of a given failure - eventually getting over his 'safe' augmetics limit and either reducing his strain threshold further and further as a form of damage control, or, well, trying harder not to fail at stuff anymore.

EDIT: Also, with the fresh announcements for 9e, I guess Assault Marine could be a career for both old marines and Primaris now 😄

This is a pretty solid suggestion, although one thing I'm wary of is creating mechanics around needing to acquire cybernetics, as the way Chambers Militant characters acquire cybernetics is a lot more limited than the mechanics typical characters use. As Chambers Militant characters don't really have much in the way of a standard system to acquire gear (no money, all their gear is "on loan" from their parent organisation and can be swapped out between missions), I've moved to having them acquire cybernetics via a ranked talent (replacement limbs and etc for injuries are free though, naturally). So putting Iron Hands characters in the position of needing new cybernetics to offset their penalties feels pretty brutally punishing.

What I ended up going with was leaning into their tendency to judge others as harshly as they judge themselves, which often leads to them being aloof ***** who see everyone else as inferior (while also somehow seeing themselves as inferior, they seem like a healthy bunch!), so I went with this;

And on the note of 9e, one thing I had been thinking about is dumping the distinction between Primaris and Firstborn careers, and just having more generalist careers that address the common themes. Like, both have generic bolter-wielding troops (Tacticals and Intercessors), both have forces who focus on melee with light weapons (Assaults Marines and Assault Intercessors), both have heavy weapons troops (Hellblasters and Devestators), etc. Would be easy enough to make general careers, which would be more in line with what the core book does anyway.

One other thing I've been thinking about career wise, is that as it stands Apothecaries, Chaplains and Tech-Marines get some exclusive gear, and the other careers get nothing. I'm wondering if it'd be worth giving each career a nice little exclusive bonus to offset this (something equivalent to a Tier 2 or 3 talent, nothing too good). Normally I'm against this in Genesys as I like how open ended things are, but when some careers inherently have access to exclusive stuff due to the fluff, it might help to even the scales a bit.

8 hours ago, Tom Cruise said:

One other thing I've been thinking about career wise, is that as it stands Apothecaries, Chaplains and Tech-Marines get some exclusive gear, and the other careers get nothing. I'm wondering if it'd be worth giving each career a nice little exclusive bonus to offset this (something equivalent to a Tier 2 or 3 talent, nothing too good). Normally I'm against this in Genesys as I like how open ended things are, but when some careers inherently have access to exclusive stuff due to the fluff, it might help to even the scales a bit.

I run WFRP with Genesys and I added a free talent to each career, inspired by WFRP 3rd Ed. For the Wizard and the Troll Slayer, I added a ranked Talent, that is exclusive to them to handle the progression in that career (my adaption will probably never be finished and as cool as yours https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/xVHfyoVh ).

Wow this is amazing! i really really enjoy this! Just wondering is there a full compuled version of all the materials?

And also can I check, how would you fit in the deathwatch char creation into the standard char creation? Im a bit confused how to get the elite advance for deathwatch when creating a deathwatch character unless starting with extra xp... or am i missing something? XD.

There's no compiled version of everything, and I'm pretty unlikely to make one honestly, it's a pretty chunky core book as is. And the expansions I've made so far are pretty self-contained anyway; there's not really any reason you'd need the Chambers Militant armoury in a normal campaign, for example. You couldn't use any of the stuff in it with normal Acolytes anyway.

As for Deathwatch Marines, you need to start with extra XP, that's the design intent. They'd be wildly imbalanced in a typical starting Dark Heresy party. You also need to have a pretty decent Renown score or they wouldn't actually be able to access any gear. The full book will spell this out more explicitly, here's one of the pages that covers the XP and Renown requirements (although the data for Grey Knights and Sisters of Battle is a placeholder as I haven't finished their rules).

Ahhh i see, thanks!

that makes me curious, did you have ideas to make info for the other space marine chapters? For campaigns focused as space marines maybe for example?

Or even campaigns as other species like eldar or harlequins...?

If you use the chapters in the Deathwatch rules as an example, you could pretty easily build your own chapters using the archetype creation rules in Genesys. If you take the Xenos Hunter rule out of the Deathwatch advance you've basically got a standard marine (you'd probably want to reduce the XP cost by 15 or so as well, to compensate).

As for Xenos PCs, there's no rules as of yet, but you could pretty easily build them as archetypes using the normal Genesys rules. For xenos species that are particularly exceptional, you might want to add in a mandatory elite advance like with Deathwatch Marines.

Oooh i c. Very new to genesys(just discovered the rulebook ystd XD), so i’ll have to read about more to understand, but sounds interesting!

Quick question for everyone - once the Chambers Militant book is done and dusted, is there any content you particularly want to see?

I've got lots of plans of my own but I've never really asked what content players are actually keen on seeing added - I'm very open to ideas, although I will ultimately prioritise stuff that I'm interested in, whether that's because it's something I want for my own games, or something that seems like a cool design challenge.

4 hours ago, Tom Cruise said:

Quick question for everyone - once the Chambers Militant book is done and dusted, is there any content you particularly want to see?

I've got lots of plans of my own but I've never really asked what content players are actually keen on seeing added - I'm very open to ideas, although I will ultimately prioritise stuff that I'm interested in, whether that's because it's something I want for my own games, or something that seems like a cool design challenge.

Are you familiar with Black Crusade? Considering most of the mechanical heavy lifting has been done with regular humans and Astartes, I wonder whether it would be a challenge to design their Chaos versions? There is also an Infamy system in there, which is a bit similar to Influence/Renown, but for the purposes of appeasing the Dark Gods and becoming a Daemonic Prince, of course!

4 hours ago, Tom Cruise said:

Quick question for everyone - once the Chambers Militant book is done and dusted, is there any content you particularly want to see?

I've got lots of plans of my own but I've never really asked what content players are actually keen on seeing added - I'm very open to ideas, although I will ultimately prioritise stuff that I'm interested in, whether that's because it's something I want for my own games, or something that seems like a cool design challenge.

I would be interested in xenos player options i love harlequins so XD.

or maybe something like the rogue traders rpg? Not a full conversion per say, but maybe a supplement or something that allows one to sync rogue traders and inquisitors together and have PCs of both...?

Rogue Trader had rules for playing an Orc or a Tau character.

2 hours ago, Tkalamov said:

Are you familiar with Black Crusade? Considering most of the mechanical heavy lifting has been done with regular humans and Astartes, I wonder whether it would be a challenge to design their Chaos versions? There is also an Infamy system in there, which is a bit similar to Influence/Renown, but for the purposes of appeasing the Dark Gods and becoming a Daemonic Prince, of course!

I'm a big fan of Black Crusade! I'd love to do an adaptation, and a lot of the groundwork has been done already. Most of the work would be figuring out Infamy, Corruption and all the Mutation rules, the actual character creation, gear and etc could be pretty easily ported over.

I've been planning to do a book focusing on Daemonic stuff in more detail; sorcery rules, daemon weapons, possession mechanics, that kinda stuff. Maybe when I get to that I can look at building in mechanics for Chaos-aligned PCs, or at the very least it should lay a lot of groundwork for a proper Black Crusade conversion in the future.

2 hours ago, Von3679 said:

I would be interested in xenos player options i love harlequins so XD.

or maybe something like the rogue traders rpg? Not a full conversion per say, but maybe a supplement or something that allows one to sync rogue traders and inquisitors together and have PCs of both...?

One thing I've considered is offering Xenos player options when I do more of the books like the Tau expansion I did ages ago. It'd be pretty easy to slap in a few archetypes for the different Tau castes in there if I ever revisit it to bring it in line with the newer editions of the core book. The question of why Xenos characters are hanging around in an Inquisition party is something people can answer for themselves, I guess.

In terms of Rogue Trader I think the main design challenges would be coming up with good mechanics for Profit Factor (not impossible by any means, there's a lot of good examples of money-less systems out there for Genesys), and building in good rules for voidships. Ships would require a lot of work, that's why I ended up leaving them out of the vehicle expansion. I'm potentially keen to do this but Rogue Trader is the one 40kRPG I've never actually played myself, so I'm not super familiar with the source material, might have to do a bit of research.

47 minutes ago, Elden said:

Rogue Trader had rules for playing an Orc or a Tau character.

Dark Eldar and Kroot too, I think? Definitely a solid source of inspiration, and it helps with adding narrative justification to what they're doing in a party of humans.

Haha kind of a personal interest, but would imperial knights be an interesting to do?

It'd be interesting from a design perspective for sure, but I'm honestly not sure what you'd actually do with those rules. In your average Dark Heresy game you're not likely to have any use for a Knight on a regular basis, and your PCs wouldn't really be able to get one anyway unless they were part of the Questor Imperialis (which raises the question of what on earth they're doing hanging out in an Acolyte Cell). I guess a campaign about a squadron of Knights could be interesting but it's basically a different game at that point 😛

I'm kinda fond of leaving Titan scaled stuff in the realm of "if you stat it, players will absolutely find a way to kill it, so maybe just don't".

Ah i see haha. I guess statting a knight would be the thing for a “resource” the inquisitor may call on but thats it.

it wld be fun to play a game for knights though XD. Hopefully sometime in the future gamesworkshop releases an official rpg for that. I think it wld be quite fun to make your own houses and mechs etc

I still have to see any military campaign, that is feasible to play. Just a string of combat encounters doesn't do anything for me. Having an adventure of discovery, intrigue and investigation is more fun for me.

I must confess, I didn't look at any FFG Only War or Death Watch campaign, so I might be biased towards Rogue Trader and Dark Heresy.

First pass at Adepta Sororitas Elite Advances.

The idea is the specific non-militant orders will get expanded on in talents, the Elite Advance is kept generic to cut down on bloat. Thoughts?

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1hhre4IAnCIH-iAXbvBp-HRV4EhKUummD

Here's the Sororitas character creation chapter. Pretty short and sweet, just a couple of elite advances and some character creation guidance.

Awesome work! This is coming along quite nicely.

Have you written up anything on the grey knights, by any chance?

They're next on the list, haven't really done anything with them mechanically yet beyond their gear though as of yet.

Vague plan for them;

• One Archetype option. I thought about ways to give them a Home World or Home Chapter equivalent that lets them have some more variety, but I couldn't think of anything that really made sense (briefly toyed with the idea of basing it on their heraldry, but it's a bit of a stretch). They're a pretty homogenised bunch.
• Six careers - Strike Marines, Purgators, Purifiers, Tech-Marines, Librarians and Apothecaries.
• An Elite Advance similar to the one used by Deathwatch Marines, but with some extra bonuses to represent what makes Grey Knights unique.
• A new psychic discipline (Sanctic Daemonology). Probably no new powers in this, I think the existing powers cover what Grey Knights can do pretty well, but I might add in some Minor Power talents if there's any weird edge cases I think are worth representing.

They'll also get some dedicated talents in the talents chapter when I get to that, and access to all the general Space Marine stuff.

EDIT: Here's a first pass at that Elite Advance.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oiI8tDFYjKo55ScXSPxFae84uNnIopmu/view?usp=sharing

Oh hey Grey Knights are (mostly) done too. Still need to do their psychic discipline, but everything else should be good to go.

Might need to view this image in a new tab to read the text, forums squish it a bit. First pass at the Grey Knights psychic discipline (also accessible to normal psykers).

Quadruple posting, oops.

So I've been working on Faith Powers and would like some input. I'm trying to figure out a system for how you actually go about acquiring them. There's two options I'm currently tossing up between.

1. Just make them a series of talents with pre-requisites. This is a straightfoward and easy option, although it does mean they have to fit within the existing tiers, and most faith powers would likely be in the 3-5 range.
2. Using a system similar to Force Powers in Star Wars RPG, arranging the different Faith Powers into trees. Below is a hypothetical mockup I made of something like that using some of the powers from Blood of Martyrs. This does mean that characters focusing on faith would climb the talent pyramid a lot slower.

Thoughts? Any other cooler ideas?

I don't know if this is off topic and will happily remove this if it is, but I'm looking at running a one shot with some friends who I regularly do star wars with, and one of them really, really wants to play a Ratling, so I wrote a custom archetype/background for it. I'd appreciate any feedback people here have with regards to its balance and feel, as I'm not that familiar with Ratlings at all.

Ratling Background

Br 1; Ag 3; Int 2; cu 2; wi 2; pr 2;
Wounds : 9+ brawn (+5xp)
Strain: 12+ will

XP: 100

Natural sharpshooter : Ratlings begin play with one rank in Ranged (heavy). They may not train this skill above Rank 2 at character creation.

Silouette 0: Ratlings are much shorter than unmutated humans and count as silhouette 0 (-10xp?)

Scorn the Abhuman: While ratlings are imperial citizens. They are looked down upon, both literally and figuratively, being seen as lazy, lecherous and all around inferior to true humans. All social checks to interact with imperial citizens take one setback, two if the citizen is particularly offended by the ratlings mutantcy. (+5xp)

Looks like pretty solid work to me, although I already did make some abhuman stats at one point. Here's those if you want to take a look -

https://docs.google.com/document/d/136RX7WmnS9Gcj_F15BlumAVGgDKzZgIm1zlLSgZkpzI/edit