MILLANDSON said:

MILLANDSON said:

I don't think I could personally come up with much that excedes variations on stock locations with a few tweaks, in half an hour. My players expect a certain degree of quality and depth when it comes to settings, coming up with a truly memorable and different setting takes thought and time, I don't care who you are. I bet if you asked people like Dan Abnett they'd probably agree.

I don't think every single little detail is needed for a location to be credible and useable, for example I tend to think a setting with a good minimum playable level of detail was Quaddis in Haarlock 1. It could have been detailed more sure, but it was detailed to a playable level, it was also imaginative and different feeling. It felt unique, but plausible. Not easy to achieve with 40k. I bet it took time to create.

The better 40K novels strive to show a setting with depth, that feels real (in the sense of the setting) and lived in, that goes beyond just 'a grimey hive world', or a 'jungle death world', or whatever. Coming up with flavour text, ideas, names, cultures, specific locations, specific characters, specific monsters, etc etc all takes time to do well.

Sister Cat said:

Nope, I'd say you have it in a nutshell.

Adam France said:

I'm in the "more fluff" camp too. I understand FFGs desire to stagger out Sector details over a number of publications, but I'd still love a Sector Sourcebook.

Maybe a midway position where FFG produce a sector sourcebook which provides detailed setting for 50-75% of the planets in the Sector, while leaving the remaining worlds permanently "blank canvases" for GMs to create their own settings or worlds? Just a thought...

Your +10 attempt to invoke my nerd rage has crticly failed! lol Sorry u dont like the book dude.

Loki73 said:

Bombernoy said:

Of course, here comes the interesting question, if you have lightning reflexes and unnatural agility (x2), do you triple or quadruple your initiative bonus?

Dak Rogers said:

As much as I hate to say it, I am also int eh "worst" supplement category.

My reasons are simple. When Knowledge Is Power came out last year, Ascension was the book that struck me as the most interesting premise and the one with the best possibilities. It was the book I was looking forward to. Now that I have it I find most of its "ascending" rules to be unoriginal, unimaginative and down right trite.

Other parts of the book are excellent, but what I was hoping for turned out to be pitiful.

Peacekeeper_b said:

1. It gives more character options.

2. It allows my character to ascend to Rank 16.

3. Cool new weapons.

That's enough for me. I guess I wasn't so hyped up about it that I expected too much from the product. I got pretty much what I expected.

I like it.

After reading through Ascension once I feel I will enjoy it, but it definitely does not live up to the hype from the past year. My biggest gripe is with the Magos class though. Can anyone honestly expect tech-priests to have a 30 Fellowship, let along 50 in order to qualify for all those peers/etc? My current tech-priest (around 10k xp) has a 9 fellowship (not by choice, crits hurt). He can never upgrade this, and thus not take a good portion of the talents offered in Ascension. I can't be the only tech-priest in this boat. I can't say upgrading fellowship would ever be my characters priority, but I think having talents that don't fit the design of tech-priests is really indicative of a poorly thought out class.

My other question is,although not specifically Ascension related, why does being a peer or friend of an organization depend on fellowship? Tech-priests have obviously never had a lot of fellowship but are somehow the organization that the Imperium is arguably the most dependent on.

Emprah_Horus said:

Frankly, the penalties faced by Tech Priests to fellowship are really detrimental to a lot of builds.

Since implants cause the most frequent reductions to Fellowship (injuries aside), as an option it's possible that with your GM's permission, you could apply Fellowship reductions due to implants as a penalty in fellowship related tests as opposed to actually subtracting them from the total.... If used it would allow GMs to allow the Tech Priest to use his natural fellowship with interactions with other Adeptus Mechanicus NPCs and characters while still retaining the penalty to other tests.

This might help a little to meet the Ascension requirements as well for it's advancement options.

Any other thoughts out there on this?

LeBlanc13 said:

Sister Cat said:

That is fair, and I think the planet stuff in Lure of the Expanse (for Rogue Trader), if FFG did the same for planets in Calixis, would work fine. As you said, enough to give you solid info to work from without any development, but leaves enough open for other GMs to personalise them a little.

We House Ruled that Techpriest implants still cause a negative to Fellowship but when dealing with other Techpriests (or Technophiles for that matter) they actually add an equal Fellowship bonus since the character is being viewed as closer to the perfection of the Machine. I am not sure if that will be enough to help out the Peer/Good Rep Talents with a Magos though.

-Cynr

You triple it. Each one adds a multiple of one. Lightning reflexes is essentially unnatural agility (x2) that only applies to initiative. I think Ascension is the one that covers the fact that if you have something like that you get triple and not quadruple.

It seems like you'd quadruple them - factors applied sequentially instead of all at once (your agility bonus is twice what you'd normally have and your Initiative is twice your agility bonus) get multiplied. This can be seen with the Initiative of the Eldar of Creatures Anathema and that flying spiky big daemon thingy in either CA or DotDG which gets both its Daemonic and its Unnatural Toughness traits applied to calculate its toughness soak.

Cifer said:

Having read over the various parts of Ascension I can see that the Magos' list abilities are flawed in that he doesn't seem to actually have access to them, but other than that - 'worst' supplement of the line? Really?

This book seems to add a lot of fun new ways to play DH, and although it might be rough around the edges (found some pretty basic formatting errors in the rank charts), it's not a bad book at all.

BYE

Hmm, Im still not sure about this, if that where the case then... O sweet jesus, I can never be anything but first.

...exactly until you meet mister "20 initiative" Dire Avenger, who introduces you to his Exarch.

Cifer said:

Post script - of the other 4 copies of this book purchased by my players...2 of them really disliked Mastered Skills and Paragon Talents (note that neither of them plays an Assassin or Magos).

PPS : Besides the adventure in the book, the only real fluff is yet another treatise on Monodominants, Amalathians, Recongregators, etc, etc, etc...that we have seen in SOOOO many other works. How many times are we going to go back to that well before you tell me something new FFG?

I love FFG for all its other work....truly I do...but here there is only disppointment.

Cifer said:

I see your mister 20 initiative and raise you my 304 Initiative Preternatural Awareness Psyker :

54 (WP Bonus 27 * 2 Invocation) + 55 (5.5 * 10 Psy Rating) + 4 (Power Well + Discipline Focus: Divination) = 104 / 10 = 10.4 increments of Overbleed 10 * 27 WP Bonus + 27 = 297 + 5 Agility Bonus + 2 Paranoia = 304 Initiative

On a completely unrelated note, the abomination that is "Love can bloom" 4chan fanfic now seems to be semi-canon. P155 has a quote by the Vindicare code-named LIIVI. Well played, FFG, well played

Idaan said:

The LCB references alone make Ascension indisputably the best supplement FFG has ever produced regardless of balance issues. Keep em coming!