Hello all! Nice to meet you guys.

I love the 40k universe, and i especially love the shadowy realm of the inquisitors. (i have a demon hunters army and i have read almost all the novels that are about inquisitors) I even played the Inquisitor game that GW published with the 54mm minis. I even tried to run a RPG campaign using the inquisitor rules as the combat system. So as you can imagine I was ecstatic when dark heresy came out.

So finally i have worked up the motivation to run a Dark Heresy game full of intrigue, secrets, mysteries, and crazy plot twists. A problem is that almost all RPGs that we play at our LGS do not usually have any of that and are usually simple dungeon diving, loot grabbing, princess, saving adventurers. And I don’t know if they can all of the sudden handle a adventure where they have to hunt for clues, develop contacts, and establish secret identities. Clearly i could just run a campaign where they are simply called in when things need to be shot up, but that seems a little boring to me, but i still want to make it fun for them. so i was wondering if you guys have encountered similar obstacles or have any ideas with how to deal with this issue.

Thanks

I had a problem with the first group I gamed with. To sum it into one word it would be- Immaturity.

Half the group was really into the investigation and wanted to follow the clues to the solution, the other half wanted to kill stuff. All of them didnt take on the persona of their characters. This lead to me bringing in two members of an old D&D group to get them into the roll playing mood. Two of the eight former members got into it, the other six didnt. This aggervated me to the point where I just disbanded the group and started with the four decent members, and a few old friends of mine. Now the group I play with is a mix of those who look forward to the eventual combat, but dont sacrifice the scenario or the investigation to kill ****. It makes for a good balance.

So a word of the wise, dont start with a combat scenario. Nor start with anyone that will fight back. Always have consequences for their actions. Eventually the group will get into it.

I used to have similar problem, since my group had played mainly D&D for a long time before I forced them to play Dark Heresy.

First of all, make the game investigation-heavy right from the beginning. For example, Edge of Darkness is way better demo game than Shattered Hope, because first one is murder investigation gone bad and second one is just simple mutant-hunt with even a big bad boss-monster in the end. Players should also be discouraged to just shoot trough every problem they encounter. This is most easy to achieve by having the inquisitor tell acolytes "we need this guy alive so that he can be interrogated" or something similar.

Make the story longer than one-shot right in the beginning so everyone will expect to play the game more than single session. I've made one-shots as demos for new RPGs in my group a couple of times and the result has often been that players expect me to only make one-shots for those RPGs, so it's rather hard to make them play longer stories in those games.

Of course, not everyone is interested in investigation, so there should be at least tiny shoot-out in the end.

Mirac said:

This. Edge of Darkness is a fantastic starting mission, and I cannot tout it's merits enough.

Thanks for the responses guys!

Well im glad i cunsulted you guys first because i was about to do the opposite by haviing them start out by just shooting things then ease them into investigation and mstery solving. but i see how that is bad by setting a mood of shooting things from the very beggining intead of thinking first.

i was planning to run one of the missions from the book just to get a feel of things, then i would move on to what i wanted to be done and it seems like ill run the "Edge of Darkness" mission sense itcomes so hihgly recommended.

thanks a lot and wish me luck!

I thought Shattered Hope was a great scenario. I highly recommend it for starting acolytes. And the ability for a new group to move from Shattered Hope to the three out of Perge The Unclean is invaluable. I firmly believe that if a new GM runs all four then it will give him enough expirance to run an investigation of his own.

Ira said:

Well, I do not have Purge the Unclean and Shattered Hope alone has almost no investigation, therefore I prefer Edge of Darkness to Shattered Hope.