Hello! I'm new to the forums and to Dark Heresy. I've been playing Tabletop Warhammer 40k for a few years now and wanted to get into a more serious rpg. Compared to DnD this has been a cakewalk to learn!

I have a few friends who are interested, but they don't have the money to buy a rulebook. I was considering just teaching them the core rules as we go, but in order for them to realize their full potential they need to always know what they can do, what it costs to do that, etc. Is there anywhere I can find a collection of all the important tables in the Core Rulebook? (Ie Combat Actions, Weapons, Armor)

You may photocopy pages from the rulebook just for use of your players.

Page 189 - Combat Actions

Page 185 - Fate Points

Page 130-130 - typical Ballistic Weapons

Page 139 - Melee Weapons

Page 145 - typical Armour

Page 146-147 - typical Gear

Page 148-149 - typical Drugs and Consumables

Page 150-151 - typical Tools

For the Psyker:

Page 165-168 - Minor Psychic Powers

Page 169-180 Disicpline Psychic Powers (but I'd photocopy just one Dyscipline - the one Psyker has chosen)

For my players I have also photocopied their Class Advance Schemes, as well as the whole Skill and Talent sections so that they could come up with advances for their characters on their own. In short - photocopy anything a particular player may need to play and develop his/her character without much of your attention (because planning advances at the beginning of the session or at the end of it can prove to be quite time consuming).

Hope that helps.

I'm pretty sure permission is only granted to photocopy the character sheet from the back of the book.

FFG prefers if everyone owns their own copy of the book.

I'm pretty sure what you are suggesting is considered illegal. Why not just suggest this player download the book as a torrent file?

That response may be a little harsh...

The character advance schemes, for example, can be found on FFG's own website:

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=70&efcid=3&efidt=13924

LeBlanc13 said:

I didn't say "Photocopy the whole book and give it to them" (This is Torrent) but I just recommended photocopying some pages for the sake of a session. As far as it is your own book and you give it to the players you trust it's just photocopying the book for home use. It's the same as making a second copy not to get the original destroyed. You are allowed that, as far as you don't distibute it. Moreover, I stressed photocopying just for the use of the players, not sending it to the internet or giving it for free on the street (that means you can give it to them at the beginning of the session and collect it in the end). For the sake of not ruining own book, for endless looking at skills and talents and so on, or holding it at the front of the players at all times. What would you suggest? Writing the rules onto the piece of paper? It would be the same case.

But I guess FFG's opinion in that matter would be pretty the same as yours. **** the world. <went to destroy the copies and hope his rulebook won't fall apart soon>

Edit: I'd like to stress that every DH book I possess is an original from FFG, not a printed torrent or photocopied book of my friend. Every month I make myself strictly collect money to buy an original copy (because in my country it costs plenty of money especially for a student). Why? Because I love DH and I respect FFG too much not to pay for their products. I hope I made that clear. All (now gone) copies of the book were mine own and they helped me run the session - they were only for the HOME USE.

Actually what you suggested is fine Reilly considering by law you can photocopy upto a Chapter of a book for personal non-profit use. Plus that link Revak posted was stickied by FFG so one would assume they're cool with it.

Really? Thank you. It made me feel much better.

Darkshroud said:

Actually, depends where you are In the UK, since the copyright laws are a lot stricter than in the US, the suggested "print off all these tables" would be illegal unless verbal or written (like it's written on the character sheets) permission was given. Personal non-profit use isn't a sufficient excuse to do it legally.

Of course, if you're not in the UK, that doesn't matter for you

MILLANDSON said:

I know the UK is harsher with a lot of laws than other places but the British Copyright Council themselves state that most authors and publishers will consider it fair for an individual to make a single copy of up to one chapter from a book or five percent of a literary work, if greater, for the purposes of personal use like research or private study etc.

It's covered by "fair dealing" in that as long as they don't copy it and sell or stick up on a website and charge then it's ok. So even if you're in the UK it's fine. Though you couldn't print them off for every player you can do it for a couple of important things like for example I copied the combat actions sheet and have it sitting in the middle of the table for my players to read every session.

From what I understand they specifically print permission to copy for personal use on the Character Sheets cause you're gonna copy them loads of times.

Where it gets tricky though is the game now being published by an overseas company and I'm not 100% on the differences as the stuff I mentioned generally applies to UK works. It's not really a huge problem for me though since I own the Black Industries rule book lol.

Darkshroud said:

And what you mentioned still applies to you if I'm not mistaken. The laws of the land where a crime allegedly occurs is what matters, not the laws of the land where an allegedly wronged individual resides unless the alleged crime occurred in that same land. I'm fairly certain that this would apply to copy right law as well. Just look at the Damnatious fiasco: the fan film was shut down by GW because of the implications of German copy right laws (the land the film was made in), not British copy right laws (the land of the alleged wronged party).

Know the laws of your land and fallow them and you'll be fine. If something's legal in your land and not in anouther, under normal circumstances you won't suddenly find foreign nationals from that other land black-bagging you to haul you away to their country so you could be tried under their laws.

Firstly, my group has a quite a few copies of the DH core book and IH. I've got a huge stack of all the other sourcebooks. (Waiting for Dark Stars)

However the main problem we face is that when you are running combat, things will bog down. A lot of the rules are spread around the books & the errata.

So for each rulebook I created a combat helper. Mainly it's a combat rule index which points the players to the correct pages of the rule books or errata. I also for each rule put a sentence or two describing the fundamentals.

[so the hint sheet gives you the basic premise of the rule with the link to the page of the rule book for the full chapter & verse]

If you create you own for your rulebooks I suggest you put links to:-

• Combat Actions
• Initiative rules
• Fate point use
• Combat difficulties
• Range calculation (errata)
• Fatigue effects
• Levels of damage (Light, Med, Critical) & healing
• Grenade rules
• Dodging
• Area Effect Weapons
• Two Weapon rules
• Suppressive fire, Overwatch & Pinning
• FYI we have our own House rules in there (firing into melee with Auto weapons)

When players put new weapons on their character sheet they should also put down the page and book reference.

I'd love for FFG to bring out a combat helper, or maybe action or weapon cards similar to WFRP 3rd Ed. You can see some fan stuff in Dark Reign.

For all other stuff, skill tests, talent use, weaponry we use the books direct. The above just helps out the group during the combat.

Hey Baldrick

Your combat helper looks quite impressive.

Would it be possible to have access to your hint sheets?

Meatpuppet said:

I would love to. However as some of the description sentences on the we're directly lifted from the relevant section of the rule book I'm not sure on the legalities of sharing it. Can someone clarify?

Anyway I'll err on the side of caution for now. However I will say it only took around 30-60 mins to write up. Also I choose the rules that we have the most referencing to.

I encourage all GMs if they are having problems with sessions bogging down for rule checking (especially in combat) that they produce a sheet for their rulebooks. My main advice is just put the basics on it and keep it to a single piece of A4; any more is too much. If you are writing a lot to get the point across, just instead reference the rulebook & page #

Baldrick

PS I will put in the excerpt from the range section of my sheet. (Since it was in the errata available online & our errata sheets keep getting lost I reproduced it in full in my sheet)

Range (see errata sheet) is:-
All weapons are given an effective range on the weapons tables
point blank is below 3 metres in range (unless short range is under 3m)
short range is below half a weapons effective range,
long range is above twice a weapons effective range,
extreme range is above three times a weapons effective range
and maximum is four times a weapons effective range.

The lasgun for example, has an effective range of 100m. Short range is 3-50m (from point blank to half the given range), medium is 50-200m (from short to double the given range), long is 200-300m (from two to three times the given range) and extreme is 300-400m (from three to four times the given range).

well i can understand his confusion - the combat actions alone take a lot of getting used to - maybe its worth taking a look on dark reigns website, theres a lot of player and gm written guides and downloads on there, one my group still uses is their list of combat actions

http://www.annebo.dk/Pages/Roleplay/Downloads/Dark_Heresy_Combat_Actions.pdf