Hi, I'm planning to start a campaign and would be grateful for some advice. My university gaming club have been playing a number of Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader campaigns the last years and there is a lot of 40k miniatures played each week at the club.

Dark Heresy is a great game but as soon as you gone trough the career paths by the book once or twice, it feels especial at low levels at a boring limitation. "Oh. I taken every thing that fits my character concept at this level... I suppose I take some more wounds." To me, roleplaying isn't about slow grinding, and system limitations.

So for my campaign I'm playing around with the idea of a campaign where the Inquisitor and his/her organization is expected to know certain skills. A scum Inquisitor running his organization in a criminal ,manner and expecting all of his organization to pick up the skills of a criminal as well as whatever else they doing, Or a polypsykana Inqvisitor only hiring psykers.

From a rules perceptive the Characteristiv improvement chart from one path and get to pick advances from both career paths.

In the Polypsykana case a character could make an Assassin/Psyker (or an Arbitor/psyker, or an Adept/psyker or...). Pick either the Assassin or the Psyker Characteristics advancement chart at character creation and during play pick advances from both charts.

I think this would give the campaign a lot of flavor. “The scum campaign”, “Psyker campaign.”

or “The Noble campaign.” And give some more freedom to the players. Yea. It will unbalance things to but play balance isn't a big concern in our play style. And yea, if they pick psyker thing will be very interesting, but since they got other skills as well in this case they can rely less on psychic powers.

My players will get decide and talk about what Career path they have in common..

From what I thought so far I got to ask you two questions: Will it work? And do you got any awesome tips for this campaign?

I'm currently running a campaign using the Dark Heresy rules that ignores the career system almost entirely. I used it as a starting point for character creation, but gave a free hand to elite advances. Once play began, I've turned advancement over entirely to elite advances, allowing characters to develop as the players desire and the game flows. I have had no problem with it.

That said, my players are not the type who are inclinded to make the most optimized combat character (or really optimized anything character) but rather tend to develop a character concept and run with it. Therefore a free form character advancement system works for us. If your group is of a similar mind, I believe the system can survive it. After all, NPCs are not restricted by the career path system, so you can freely give the antagonists whatever skills and talents they need to challenge the players.

One side note, a thing I have found that works well in free form character systems, is that I find encouraging characters to specialize and designing adventures where everyone has a chance to shine is very important. That's my experience anyway. Your milage may vary.

I'm actually a free form level girl, but the collections of player i got now isn't yet it would be a possible thing to discuss since me as a game master wouldn't have a problem with it.

Another thing I've tried, in working up to free-form dark heresy was creating "elite advance packages" which covered the roughly the first two ranks of the other careers. So, if you wanted to have a psyker-assassin, you could be a psyker with the assassin elite package or visa-versa depending on which career was you primary focus. That worked well too and might help players who crave the structure of the career paths.

I like the idea of customising the character classes, as I could see characters becoming a little "samey".

I've been toying with the idea of "multi-classing" for a future DH game. Allow characters three ranks in a RT class, then a transition package into an Ascended DH class. Arch-militant/Stormtrooper could do well in the absence of any Vindicares.

Don't forget about elite advances and what characters might take reasonably. I found those worked wonders for customising PCs.

I think your game would be better served by asking your players what "theme" they would like the game to have as a unifying point, then sit down before your first session and cook up a nice "elite package" that all the characters gain access to via "special training" or whatever their new boss put them through. This way everyone still has a nice distinctive character Career and branch but they have a common list of skills and talents that they can select from at will.

I use this method to reward players for giving me nice well-thought out backgrounds (that I can hang plot development on!) with a customized package they can train from in addition to their selected Career path.

Thanks for your advice. I had my first meting today and the result can be seen in "The scum campaign". I understand some of the consideration of the risk of the characters coming samy, but i dont think its a big risk. People just gotten more to pick from..

The solution I settled for was:

Dualclass towards scum.

Buy anything from any other path at same level for 200 xp more than it normally would cost you. Unless it seems unlikely.

600 stating xp

+200 xp if they got a picture

+200 xp if they got a themesong/theme songs