Yeah, I’m really just trying to get spears down priced below swords. That’s my goal.

Some tweaks:

• Spears now have Accurate 1, Defensive 1; brings them more in line with their Terrinoth counterparts. Damage and crit remain unchanged.
• "Primitive" low-tech weapons, including knives, spears, staffs and truncheons now use 0.2, not 0.3 as their multiplier.
• This brings spears down to 50, staffs and truncheons to 35, and knives to 25.

Now to redo the pricing of ranged weapons too because I'm painfully aware there's some maths errors in there 😅

Awesome! I hope you take my comments as enthusiasm about the project. It’s really great and we’ve been having a lot of fun with it at the table the last month or so — we are four sessions in.

I really appreciate the feedback, it's a big help.

Also, as a general update, we're getting pretty close to release at this stage; it's pretty much content complete, I'm just going through and tweaking layouts to make sure everything fits together well, shunting some content off into sideboxes instead of the main text, checking for typos and balance issues, that kinda stuff.

The Melee Weapon Attachment weapon attachment may want to get lowered since melee weapons are lowered in cost. I really have no idea what appropriate pricing for it is — 100 thrones, maybe? That’s roughly in line with the decreases in cost across the board.

For anyone curious, here's the running changelog I've been keeping, which gives a rough summary of every change you can expect to see.

Second edition is good to go! I'm releasing it as a beta for now, just to allow for the fact that there's undoubtedly a bunch of mistakes in this initial release which I can address with feedback.

Ultimately I didn't end up making the big changes to Influence gains mentioned earlier, but there have been some tweaks to the wording to hopefully provide some greater clarity. Might be something I address in a future update, but I'm happy with the system as is for now.

- LINK -

Here's a full changelog.

Changelog 2.0

Please let me know what you think!

Going forward the plans are;

• Finish off the Chambers Militant and vehicle expansion books, and release those.
• Get to work on Malus Codicium, my take on a Radical's Handbook type expansion.
• Continue to update and refine the core book.
• If inspiration strikes, I might do a few more little monster manual type expansions like the Tau threat briefing. We'll see!

Really open to suggestions or comments, it'd be good to know what people want to see.

Also, big credit to LelouchVee for putting together a Russian translation of the character sheet. I've added it to the OP, but if anyone wants to take a look, you can find it here .

Thanks so much for putting this together. I'll be running a game using these rules in a fortnight. Couldnt do it without all the hard work that you have put in

Thanks heaps Tom for the ton of work on this - now can prep for my group after our current game.
Much appreciated!

It's great to see you back in action!

I've been thinkng about running a Dark Heresy campaign in Wrath & Glory for the past few months, but now that you've released this, I'm not so sure about the system.

I have a minor nitpick regarding the Corruption rules: I played in a campaign last year using your ruleset, and hardly anyone retained corruption between adventures. We even fought a rogue psyker and a group of nurglings and daemonettes summoned by sorcerers, but I feel the corruption recovery is too lenient as we interpreted the rules. There is no stated difficulty for the Discipline check, is that supposed to start at Average or Trivial? If the latter, I'd suggest starting at Simple or Average, so only acolytes with high Willpower and Discipline are able to escape the downward spiral of corruption that is service in the Inquisition.

Second Edition makes Corruption Recovery something you have to choose (rather than happening between every mission by default), in lieu of other forms of recovery or reward, which should make that problem, well, less of one. Take a look at the Downtime rules and see what you think, might be that addresses your concerns.

Well, I stand corrected. Turns out I can't read

Anyway, thank you so much for the amount of work you've put into this! I'm looking forward to the Chambers Militant expansion.

Here's a summary of what I've got planned for Chambers Militant, by the way.

Looking great!

A little update; I've been working on Wargear for Deathwatch Marines, both the gear itself and how you get your hands on it.

Firstly, here's the first draft of the Ranged Weapons portion of the Deathwatch Armoury. You'll notice these damage values seem pretty damned absurd, but it's worth bearing in mind a standard Space Marine has Soak 11, so we're dealing with fairly inflated numbers compared to stock standard Genesys, a bit of a natural consequence of trying to show off such varied power levels. The difference in damage between civilian weapons and their bigger Astartes counterparts was based on the stats used in Black Crusade, which is the best example I could find of hard numerical measures of the difference between say, an Acolyte's boltgun and a Space Marine's boltgun.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1nbw5J7e1gjmffNkmNmvhkTEYm81N3MiI

Below is a first draft at the rules for how to handle acquiring gear in the Chambers Militant; a Battle Sister isn't going to go out and buy a Godwyn De'az pattern bolter from the local Hive weapons dealer, so they use a system based on Renown. (Might need to view the image in a new tab for it to be readable).

Thoughts? Critique? Let me know what you think!

I think for both Deathwatch and Grey Knights, we need more rules support for being a Space Marine - whether or not the PCs can be members, the GM might want fully fleshed out rules for permanently attaching NPC allies to the party, so they're not working with just a quick and dirty NPC statline. Here's my attempt:

Geneseed Organs: While these are not cybernetics, any increase from a geneseed organ counts as a cybernetic increase, and hence will not stack with themselves or cybernetics, and cannot raise a characteristic above 5, unless otherwise noted. They are listed separately so the GM can more readily modify a Space Marine who may be missing some (such as an Imperial Fist). Geneseed mutations of some known chapters are included to give a starting point.

• Secondary Heart: +2 wounds.
• Ossmodula + Biscopea: +1 Brawn, +1 Resilience.
  • Black Dragons have an overactive Ossmodula. They are Mutants with the Bone Blades Malignancy, but the bone spurs are permanently extended, so they do not suffer wounds each time they attack with them.
• Haemastamen: +1 Athletics.
• Larraman's Organ: Space Marines do not bleed out. The Critical Injury table is now 126-140: Gruesome Injury.
• Catalepsean Node: Needs half as much sleep as normal, and can go up to 2 weeks without sleep before needing to roll against sleep deprivation. When recovering strain via Cool or Discipline (i.e. via rest), Advantage symbols also heal 1 strain, not just Successes.
• Preomnor: Decrease the difficulty of any Resilience check made to resist the effects of ingested toxins twice. Net advantage symbols on Survival or Streetwise checks to forage for food and water may be converted to successes on a 2 to 1 basis, but any food and water found this way is neither edible nor potable by normal human standards - count them as Easy ingestion toxins that inflict Critical injuries if the consumer fails the check (the Marine should normally succeed without rolling, as he reduces the difficulty to a step below Simple).
• Omophagea: Consume flesh and blood to recover memories from the corpse as determined by the GM; the flesh must still have viable DNA. Memories are usually completely random, but the Space Marine can attempt a Discipline check to recover specific memories or additional detail, which has a base difficulty of Hard, upgraded once, as the Mind Scan effect of the Compel psychic discipline.
  • Blood Angels and many of their successors have an overactive Omophagea. They must succeed at a Hard Discipline check not to both consume their enemies and attempt the Discipline check to recover specific memories. If they fail (either to resist the urge or to experience specific memories), the GM may spend 1 Despair to give them the Zealous Fury mental trauma, or increase said trauma by one step. Blood Angels start with the Frenzy talent, even if their talent pyramid would not normally permit it.
• Multi-Lung: Reduce the difficulty of any Resilience checks to resist airborne toxins once, and survive without air for thirty times as long as normal: a Space Marine can breathe water, and can typically hold his breath for an entire encounter. Treat him as environmentally adapted to thin atmosphere. If he passes his suffocation threshold, he suffers 1 strain per round while suffocating, rather than 3.
• Occulobe: Ignore penalties for poor lighting, not including absolute darkness, and +1 to Perception and Vigilance when Vision is the prevailing sense.
• Lyman's Ear: Ignore penalties for noise, and +1 to Perception and Vigilance when Hearing is the prevailing sense. +1 Coordination.
• Sus-an Membrane: On a 141-150 on the Critical Injury table, or with a Hard Discipline check, the Space Marine enters permanent stasis: he will not die due to the End is Nigh critical injury, does not age, and does not need to eat, drink, or breathe. He is considered permanently incapacitated and sleeping, and is totally unaware of his surroundings. The Space Marine will exit this state only when the appropriate drugs or hypno-therapy are administered; Space Marine Apothecaries are normally simply taught this, but otherwise it is a Hard Forbidden Lore check to figure out what the appropriate treatment is.
  • Imperial Fists do not have a Sus-an Membrane. However, they start with the Durable talent at rank 1.
• Melanchromic Organ: Decrease the difficulty of any Resilience check made to resist ionizing radiation (such as gamma or ultraviolet) twice.
  • Raven Guard have a malfunctioning Melanchromic Organ, giving them white skin and black eyes. Only decrease the difficulty once for them. They inexplicably distort reality around them; Raven Guard start with the Knack For it talent at rank 1, assigned to Stealth.
  • Salamanders have an overactive Melanchromic Organ; decrease the difficulty three times for them instead. Salamanders have pitch black skin and red eyes. They also have slow reaction times; when rolling for Initiative using Vigilance, add 1 Setback.
• Oolitic Kidney: This works like a Chem Gland cybernetic implant that only produces de-tox, but no Discipline check is needed to activate the organ.
• Neuroglottis: +1 to Perception and Vigilance when Smelling or Tasting is the prevailing sense. +1 Survival.
• Mucranoid: Space Marine Apothecaries know how to make the drug that triggers this; otherwise, it is a Hard Forbidden Lore check to know it. When triggered, the Space Marine essentially sweats out an environment suit: he is environmentally adapted to heat and cold, and suffers only 1 wound per round while exposed to hard vacuum, rather than 3. However, he suffers 1 setback die to all Agility checks.
• Betcher's Gland: This is a ranged (light) weapon, allowing the Space Marine to spit a slightly corrosive contact venom. Space Marines with this Gland are immune to this venom's blinding effect.
  • Damage 3, Crit 6, Range Engaged, Burn 6, Slow-Firing 1. If the Marine makes a called shot to the target's eyes and hits them (i.e. not any eye protection the target is wearing), the target must make a Hard Resilience check; if it fails, it is Blind for 1 round per Failure plus 1 round per net 3 Threat.
  • Imperial Fists do not have a Betcher's Gland.
• Progenoids: These have no mechanical benefits to the Marine - he simply serves as an incubator for both of them.
• Black Carapace: Treat this as an arbitrarily large number of Interface Ports combined with a Mind Impulse Unit.
• Hypnotherapy: +1 Cool, +1 Discipline.

Space Wolves: Space Wolves inflict the Test of Morkai on their Aspirants, which forces them to become Exorcised Mutants as a result of both daemonic exposure and consuming the Canis Helix. They do not roll for their Exorcism Malignancy, nor can they choose their Mutant malignancy; the two malignancies are Bestial Hide and Razor Fangs. Space Wolves also have Claws, allowing them to make unarmed attacks using the Knife profile, provided they are not wearing gauntlets to get in the way. Their Fangs may be used to deliver their Betcher's Gland venom - treat them as Toxic 3, but instead of resolving the wound/strain damage Toxic normally inflicts, resolve the blindness effect of the venom.

Blood Angels: Blood Angels have a mutation in their Omophagea, causing them to be Mutants, and the long-lasting psychic imprint of Sanguinius' Death renders them Exorcised as well. Like Space Wolves, they cannot choose their Malignancies; they have Bloodlust and Cannibalistic Urge. When a Blood Angel suffers mental trauma, it is automatically Zealous Fury. They start with the Frenzy talent.

Black Templars' geneseed is slightly Untouchable - not enough for the Elite Advance, but anyone with psyker abilities who receives their geneseed dies a horrible death, and anyone who has their geneseed will never develop psyker abilities. This includes psychic talents and Wyrd.

I didn't get into Grey Knights since the current ruleset doesn't cover Sanctic/Malefic, so it's challenging writing a rule forcing them all to be psykers.

And here's the first pass at Astartes melee weapons.

It looks great so far, but I'd recommend giving most, if not all astartes weapons the Cumbersome quality, just to reflect that they are meant to be used by such super soldiers and not the average human.

Check out the sidebar in the ranged weapons chapter I posted about using Astartes weapons as a human.

Oh my bad! I missed the link and only saw the pages you posted. Carry on doing your great work!

Would you mind going back and updating the printer friendly sheet once you've got the deathwatch weaponry settled?

Hey there, here's a quick update; everything I've done so far for Chambers Militant.

- PDF Link -

Currently we've got -

• Vague and incomplete guidelines on how to integrate these powerful combat focused characters into a party.
• Rules for how to manage equipment for Chambers Militant characters.
• Theoretically finished rules for making Deathwatch Marines, including a full set of Home Chapters (replacing Home Worlds), Careers, and an Elite Advance covering the things which make Deathwatch Marines special.
• Ranged weapons, including a variety of ammo types.
• Melee weapons.
• Weapon attachments.
• Armour, including some extensive rules for how power armour works, along with artificer armour, terminator armour, and scout armour.
• Armour attachments.

Still need to do all the remaining Deathwatch gear, and then some talents, and theoretically the Deathwatch part will be done.

Next on the agenda will be Grey Knights (a much smaller job now I've done so much Space Marine related groundwork), then Sisters of Battle (also a smaller job, but I want to design a system for Faith Powers which will be a big job on its own).

Also obviously this is a very incomplete document so expect a lot of weird quirks. Still feel free to point out any issues you can see, I'm sure there's typos and balance issues.

So, after being pretty frustrated with a certain 40K roleplaying system, I decided to give this thing a try and ran a game in our FLGS last night. Despite some setbacks, it went amazingly! It was only my third time running a Genesys game, so some of the confusion was on me - I do need a few seconds to interpret the particularly tricky pool every once in a while.

I ran the first session of my homebrew sandbox-ish adventure where the Acolytes are a freshly formed 'Last Resort' cell in a hive city on a world lying in the path of an oncoming Tyranid Hive Fleet. The (very, VERY) radical Inquisitor in charge has contacted them via a pre-programmed servo-skull, proposing a most sinister mission - the hive they're in must fall, so the rest of the planet starts crumbling down with it over the course of a few solar years; all just so the 'Nids are denied as much biomass as possible, all without the already stretched sector Navy having to spend resources on an Exterminatus. The cell was provided with info about a few most straightforward ways to 'glory' (overthrow the Hive governor and make sure a weaker one gets the local throne; indirectly support one of the local Chaos cults by wiping out two others; or just blow the entire place sky high), some additional background info on the city, and a pointer at a shuttle they will receive access codes to once the process gets going. A Void-Born Psyker, a Feudal World Guardsman, a Forge World Assassin, a Highborn Cleric and a Fortress World Arbiter started their common path to damnation or ascension there.

What followed was a rather tense confrontation between PCs about their agenda, culminating in a nice compromise plan of "Let's trash some cult or that one fight club in the Lower Hive, get recognition for it, use our acquired notoriety to get close to the governor and convince her to get off the planet with us; or just shoot her if she declines". In the middle of the planning process the party found their not-so-safehouse being attacked by a hired gang, whom the Acolytes proceeded to butcher with a well-thrown grenade and a liberal application of telekinesis, further getting info about the cult that hired the thugs from the unconscious body of the last surviving scum with telepathy. After that they pooled in their starting cash and spent most it on getting some bits and pieces of equipment from the black market and stormed the cult compound pretty thoroughly - only getting bogged down in the cult leader's private sanctum with his two Mutant Abominations blocking their path, almost killing the party's Cleric, but the firepower and liberal use of frag grenades eventually (barely) prevailed.

Well, that's the fluff out of the way. Now onto some mechanical aspects, from combined reactions of the players and me.

• SYSTEM . All be damned, but the system in general works better for DH than the actual DH. In six hours of gameplay never was there a moment where a player felt as useless as they would be with a similar character in DH1e or 2e - they still failed miserably almost half the time, but it always made sense and led to tangible outcomes, propelling the story forwards. As a DM, it certainly helped me both keep up the desperate atmosphere and introduce just enough levity on the fly; while the players were definitely happy to feel their own agency even in failure, all by providing me with ideas on interpreting their results. So - a definite 'Aye' for Narrative Dice System there.
• BALANCE . Haven't had any significant issues in one session, although Psychic Powers in general felt a little bit too potent to me - a psyker managed to come out of Character Creation with 2 points in both Telekinesis and Pyromancy and one more in Telepathy, hasn't failed a single psychic check over the course of the game, Pushed 3 times on every check and never ran into PotW. Devotional Icon psychic implement might be just a touch too strong IMO.
• EQUIPMENT . Apart from the aforementioned Icon, the only issue I could point to would probably be the Variable weapon trait - after the three-mode lasguns in OW, this felt a bit lackluster. I would honestly expand it to give another mode - adding Pierce (+)1 and Unreliable on top of the first two Variable settings.
• CHARACTER OPTIONS . Not too many, not too few, nicely done in general. Characters felt really distinct just with their own spreads of skills and tier 1 talents, even without Elite Advances being in play. A minor gripe one of the players voiced though was the absence of the mechanical differentiation of the languages present in the original FFG WH40K line - Low and High Gothic, Hive and Ship dialects and so on. I personally wouldn't be really bothered with it, but the obvious solution to me would be to put one or two languages as starting languages for each of the Home World options and have a separate Tier 1 talent to acquire more.
  What would be nice, though, are some new uses of Story Points . I personally like how every human archetype in Genesys Core has their own unique way of interacting with those, and feel kinda bummed about there being so little additional use for Story Points in DH/Genesys. If nothing else, I'd come up with some way to use Story Points as minor (and major in case of SoB and such) acts of faith.
• NARRATIVE TOOLS . Sadly, we haven't had the chance to test any of those yet (even the Fear checks were all successful), but I'm already eyeing up the Influence/Renown mechanics to use later. I'd probably keep them behind the scenes for now, just to use as guidelines for myself.

Well, to sum it all up, it was quite an outstanding experience for both me and the players. The gang agreed to play for a few weeks and we'll see where it brings their little cell.

We interrupt your regular, Space Marine themed programming, to bring you... A reformatted NPC chapter. Well, a look at what that'll look like, anyway. I realised that section was getting pretty neglected so I've put a lot of work into rejigging it.

Here's a couple of samples.

Anyone working yet to mount this ruleset into the character generator by SkyJedi?

Great to see you back at it, @Tom Cruise !

If I might make a suggestion regarding the NPC section, have you considered doing only a single adversary per page? Personally, I don't think it's handy to have stats from a single NPC run across multiple pages. Especially when you have to flip the page. I've been reading through the Warhammer Fantasy 4th Edition rulebook, and their NPC section is just so clean and easy to use, with only one NPC per page. Just an idea, of course.