I thought long and hard before preparing a DH campaign. To say that it is morally ambiguous is an understatement. In a lot of games the inquisitors would be the bad guys or at least NPCs that you would be very wary of. DH asks people to play those characters.

Do you ask your players to make powerful moral judgments?

Although the literature speaks of worlds being destroyed and millions of innocent lives becoming collateral damage, would you present your players with that sort of dillemma in practice?

Have you had players go off the rails?

I remember a religious friend of mine once being appalled that I was role-playing. His priest had told him it was evil or devil worship or something. Well, that was D&D. I wonder what he would say about DH : ).

from france

i comme from a country where according to wikipedia that i quote here "60% identified as being Catholics, 31% identified as being agnostics or atheists 10% identified as being from other religions or being without opinion, 4% identified as Muslim, 3% identified as Protestant, 1% identified as Buddhist, 1% identified as Jewish."

-it s a game it s not reality and it s not evil. if such was the case then watching adult, horroro movie or any movie denying the existence of a god should be labelled as evil. it s a opinion and not a fact.

_ it s diffciult to judge what is evil and wxat is not in real life because of cultural differences . remnber that one taboo for a persone of x culture is perfectly normal for a personne from y culture. so in a game it is more difficult.

- does watching coriolan from shakespear is considered evil by that priest? no? so where does it put the notion of evil because coriolan is all about sex, ****, murder, torture, betrayal and son on. shakespear roman periode is pretty gore. yes? so this priest is a little extremist if he connot differenciate between games, theater and art from reality. more precisely from his perceived reality of the world.

just my atheist thought

Well, in DH, the characters work for the secret police of a regime that is theocratic, authoritarian, xenophic, militaristic, and so on. Not exactly good guys by modern-day, Western, standards. This doesn't mean some of the people they are after aren't much, much worse (like, for example, the Pilgrims of Hayte).

Imo, moral dilemnas may arise when dealing with people who got recruted by a cult without their consent or without knowing what the cult was about. Same thing with peaceful Xenos.

I'm only at the beginning of my campaign and I'm dealing with players who are totally new to the WH40K setting so I'm doing things slowly. But I plan on introducing the moral element at some point (once they are comfortable with the basis of the setting).

I have no doubt they will eventually embrace Radicalism

I do hate to admit it, but as a GM I do love watching my players careen off the rails.

For example, after Baron Hope our cleric accumulated enough IP to start having horrific nightmares. It started with him walking through the mines, bodies everywhere, following the Baron. Finally, he came up to a small hill where the Baron stood staring up at the sky. The player and the Baron talked for a bit. What started out as a friendly chat soon turned accusatory, telling of how the PC's actions had doomed this world and all it's people. The nightmare ended when the black sun came up, illuminating a landscape littered with gravestones. The Baron the turned the cleric, half his skull missing from a bolter shell, and said, "Behold your Imperium!"

So yeah my games tend leave my haunted, as they question the rational of "the ends justify the means". Sometimes it spills over into real life debates but I consider that a bonus. After all, if my players didn't think for themselves it wouldn't be a very interesting campaign.

the 8 spider said:

What we learn from this is people writing for wikipedia can't add and don't do thorough research.

That's 110%.

Back on topic. Moral dilemmas are the "bread and butter" of this game. I think the harder the decisions the players are forced to make, the better the game is over all. I love when our group agonizes over how we want to handle situations.

It's good roleplaying and good fun.

LeBlanc13 said:

Yes. Our group agonizes over the decisions all to often. It typically revolves around "do we try to discreetly go about achieving a goal, or do we let the Guardsman and the Assassin off of their respective leashes?" Even the Tech-Priest has become a bit more bloodthirsty of late; though that has likely come about from frustration at things.

-=Brother Praetus=-

Brother Praetus said:

Hey, when you've got six limbs, one of which is a gun and the other a giant drill, digging for Ore and playing with old tech just feels like a waste. XD

Interestingly, for me, it wasn't my players who had trouble with the moral issues of DH. It was me.

Faced with moral questions, my players just numbly accepted their role as "cogs in the great Imperial machine." The one PC who did question things ended up accepting the excuses and justifications of the Imperial authorties as "good enough" to overcome (or at least bury) her moral reservations. On the other hand, I (a childhood member of the Rebel Alliance) found myself sympathizing with the rebels and heretics.

The game actually crashed and burned under the weight of the moral conflict between a Recongrigator GM and Amalthian players.

Next time, I will be clearer about be running a game that is solidly aligned with the rebels.

from france

to aswser you it 110% because some are estimation and so their is a potential error included.

Actually the 110% comes from a messed up sentence structure at the end of the text. The muslims, protestants, etc are not in addition to the 10% others, they are the 10% others.

Anyhow, back on topic again. You can always introduce moral choices in small doses. The Shattered Hope intro (I think its that one, the one with the mutants in the mine) has one such thing. A terrified miner found close to the source of the mutants. Do the characters kill him since he could be corrupted, or do they spare him? Damning entire worlds is for full inquisitiors after all, not low ranked acolytes

DavidJones said:

I've only got one word to sum up on that matter...

"Torquemada"

We're ultimately playing a DH game where characters are somewhat 1-2 steps removed from the church and probably anyhere between 1-10 steps removed from anything that could be considered piety. We're a colourful mix of church sanctioned terrorists, contracted assassins, dirty priests, dodgy detectives, bloodthirsty mercenaries and crooked cops... oh and that guy over there the race traitor, he prefers to be called a sanctioned psyker but being a filthy mutant hopefully knows his place not to speak unless spoken to while we burn some mutants out of their slums we don't like because god tells us to. But mostly because its profitable.

In fact, the best incentive really is a few dollars and the vain guise for some of making humanity a better place in the process. You could argue we're vehemently intollerant, money grubbing scumbags but that would be really unwise because we've also got a nice quiet business on the side of blackmail where if you don't like what we're doing. We can simply brand you a heretic, burn you, your friends, your workmates, family and pets alive on a fire, then seize all your assets. In fact, I'd be ashamed if acolytes didn't when given the oppertunity to do so because in the eyes of their inquisitor, (provided they get away with it) are probably underachievers.

No on likes an underachiever

I fear sometimes the whole morality bit gets lost on my players. This is my old Vampire the Masquerate group, and, well, ends justify the means is putting it lightly. I am half worried that once they hit Ascension level, well, Exterminatus will be the answer to everything.

Ah, but every time it's used- its accounted for in front of the high lords of Terra in something akin to the worst kangaroo court in existance, the penalty for not showing up for the court case is to have the perpetrators arse killed with any means at the Imperiums disposal... and they have some very formidable means possible. My players met a resource of the high lords, they never want anything to do with them ever again!

The only real justifiable cause for Exterminatus being dragged out is something like a massive warp-incursion on the surface or close enough to pollute the population by its presence or the very big, sharp end of a Tyrannid incusion. Anything else, the Imperium will simply just grind away at over time with eleventytrillion Imperial Guard and Navy resources until whatever was annoying ends up dead or goes somewhere else.

from france

but we where on the topics not the part that deals with the games but the part that deals with the priest reaction towards the rpg. just a short answer because i am at work.

I've tried to start DH games several times and the first session is character building and an explanation of the setting. Once the players hear the party line, "purge the unclean, the mutant, the witch, the demonic, the heretic" and realize its not your typical happy go lucky SciFi setting, few of them come back. Out of 6 opening sessions, i've gotten 2 games, but it was with people who understood what the game was about and either enjoyed the morally ambivelent feel of the game, or liked the idea of rebeling againest the system that created that aditude. We'll see what happens if i can get a game 3 going

Well, morality is taught. To be moral means that one is conforming to what is right and ethical...in their society, culture, religion, or what-have-you. In the 40K setting, blasting away planets or people who only "might" be tainted a tiny bit is the right thing to do. That doesn't mean it's ok to kill innocent people for the heck of it. But if it will allow the empire to survive one more day, killing innocents to make sure the witch, heretic or alien is destroyed, is ok. The moral choices that players make are not the same as the moral choices that the characters are faced with. For a character the decision to allow a seemingly innocent mutant child to live, because it is just a child, it isn't the kids fault he/she/it was born a mutant, etc., might be a moral choice. But it might not be. It is their job to destroy the mutant, and it is culturally allowed, no expected, to kill the child. The characters are chosen to be acolytes or Throne Agents because they stand out and are able to think on their feet, so to speak, so it is feasible that they might pause when confronted with such a choice.

Morality is certainly a central cog of my various DH games. Forcing players to make tough choices and justify them is half of my fun as a GM. Hard choices on a number of different levels.

Doing the right thing from a moral perspective vs following the law.(Baron Hope was so much fun from this perspective.)

Having to chose to kill NPC friends instead of allowing them to be captured/tainted/used by the enemy.

Telling half truths and sometimes outright lies to their allies so that their inquisitorial duties are met.

Keeping secrets from each other as players.

Killing a group of innocents who witnessed horrors, rather then allowing them to live and perhaps be infected by the evil they saw.

DH to me is a game which is largely based on morality, and the conflict in morality in the halls of the Holy Ordos. Not merely in terms of Radical vs. Puritan or specific factions, but also in terms of the style in which the Inquisitor and his retinue utilize their power.

I once had my acolytes working for an Istvaanian inquisitor (they didn't realize until late campaign). He had given them instructions that were fairly vague, go here, kill them, gather this (don't look at contents), acquire this item, etc. Of course, they eventually determined they were gathering components to some sort of warp related weapon, and (believed) that they were trying to stop its use. Eventually, it came down to the Inquisitor telling them to use it (he wanted to cause a warp incursion, and "recruit" those who survived). The players literally sat there for 3 hours, no rolls, just talking about what they wanted to do. It was fun.

On the part about the church and its issues with gaming... Well, as a Christian, I don't really see what the church's problem is with RPGs. I mean, I run games with the pastor's son (who actually got me into 40k like 12 years ago). The game is only as evil as you let it be. Sure, I'd prefer to not larp out some daemonic binding ritual, but I have no issues playing a radical campaign. RPGs are basically a group activity in the exercise of the imagination, with the use of a set of ground rules so that someone can't just mary sue themselves into being the Emperor. Yes the setting may be dark, but its pure fantasy. I think the church has just taken specific notice to the few occasions where people who actually have issues with track of whats real and fantasy, and certain (crazy) people, the "do it for the children" types, got it in their head that tabletop gaming is bad. After that it just takes a few vocal people to say D&D is evil, and without a strong voice within the church to defend that RPGs are not particularly bad, it just stuck internally. At this point I think that kind of think has died down, I'm surprised to hear it again at this point.

KommissarK, I can speak from where I live. That this is still a very common trend, granted though it's died down a little more. It's still a strong anti-rpg location around where I live.

However, I sadly must report that the only reason as to why it's still a big deal around my home is because of the whole "Mazes and Monsters" deal never really left the minds of people.

Now in regards to Moral Calls in DH, I'm personally a fan of allowing the players the chance to make a choice. 'Specially when it looks like regardless of how it'll turn out, it gives me plenty of wiggle room.

Honestly I have to agree, the anti RPG stygma is still alive and well where I am at as well. Hell after 20+ years of gaming my mother still refers to my gaming stuff as those books.

A lot of great feedback there, so thanks for that.

I do think that DH requires more care as a GM than a lot of other RPGs. IMO players need to get into their characters and live them, so it's not easy to just say "well, that is just the setting". It is the players making the decisions after all. Of course you have to accept it is a sinister setting where the ends are frequently used to justify the means. It just shouldn't mean it is morally acceptable or easy.

If your group encountered a world where everybody had 12 fingers, how would they react? How many fingers does a deviant mutant need to have? Or a terminally ill child with a very mild psychic power? Does he die aboard a black ship? Or in comfort at home? I'm not saying these should be central to the plot, but they are the sort of moral dillemmas I would expose players to. I guess there has to be a genuine choice, with a risk of discovery, if the choice is to be properly weighted.

If my group didn't bat an eyelid when confronted with a moral dillemma then I don't think I could GM it. There needs to be more to DH than toting guns and mindlessly following the orders of a murderous bigoted regime. In other words, the characters still need to be human beings.

Glad I could help out. While in regards to the moral judgements, it's always been my call to make sure that my players know the setting almost in and out. As well as make sure to understand that every action they have, gives me plenty of wiggle room to make it bite them should I wish.

First thing to remember: it's a GAME.

If people want to get into it as an RPG, and intensively roleplay their character, then great. If they want to run around in circles yelling "Flame the Heretic!", let them. You're going to get both kinds and some others as well. Some people are playing for the fun, and others for some level of intellectual stimulation that they don't get from their daily jobs.

Me, I like to RP. So I'm running a female Templar with delusions of grandeur... a Paladin if you will (although the group I play in call her a whoreadin. Was it my fault that she lost her virginity when she was 15, trying to infiltrate a Slaaneshian pleasure cult?). Yeah I used to have the same issues with the game, but remember it's just a game. Dive in, have fun, and blow off a little steam (blow up a few characters?).

Denmar1701 said:

Hear! Hear!

Frankly I'm quite flabbergasted by the numerous mentioning of strong regional 'anti-RPG' sentiments, that's just too funny and scary at the same time and makes me suspect that it can only be somewhere like Iran or.. the US.? ^^

But all tongue-in-cheeck aside, in my opinion the morality of a character comes from two things:

a: The general morality of the player

and

b: The ability of that player to empathise in a detached manner; i;e. acting or role-play.

I also find it very interesting in the moral choices a player will make in line with his game character but I doubt that any player I know has lost any sleep over any RPG decision, ever, let alone having a small personal crisis about it. It's just a matter of being mature about it and seeing it for what it is, a game.

Of course I've had harsh or cruel player decisions be met with gasps of consternation, outbursts of disbelief or just outright swearing in shock but it never was met with personal trauma. If that happens, that person needs some professional help to separate fiction from reality.

Usually the best moderator in a morally difficult situation is peer pressure from the other players as chances are high that not àll of your players deeply enjoyed dismembering insects when they were a child.

The most recent situation I've had like that was entirely player-driven; The players found a though-lost and hidden settlement of the descendants of Imperial Colonists. They were still very faithful to the Emperor but they were producing raw- and processed materials for a BloodAxe Ork clan that were extorting the colonists. The colonists were separated from the rest of the Imperium for more than a century and were basically alone on a planet infested with Orks. The Blood Axes discovered the hidden settlement and offered death or coorporation. Fearful for their lives, the colony reluctantly started supplying the Orks. This discovery resulted in a lengthy discussion between the players, where the opinions were split 50/50 between showing understanding for these colonists or treating them as heretics for working for Xenos Scum and making sure all of them are punished by the Inquisition or to solve it right there and then by executing the village elder.

I never hinted at or introduced this dilemma, the players just took it upon themselves to work it out from their character's point of view and the discussion ensued, much to the enrichment of the game but with zero effect in their personal world views...

Phew, rant mode off 8-D

I like to immerse myself in whatever game setting I happen to be playing/running at the time. Part of that is to get to know and understand my character's viewpoint and thoughts on how they react to things around them. It should be pretty obvious that I approach Dark Heresey much differently from Star Wars or Changeling. For one thing, the characters live in different game universes with very different "natures of reality", come from vastly different (even alien) cultures and have very different controlling forces acting upon their natures (and souls).

So when I am playing Dark Heresy (my main group) I am an elite Cadian soldier, born and bred to lead others into battle in the name of the Emperor, recruited into the Inquisition and eventually entrusted with a Rosette of my own. I am an unflinching killer of men... and far, far worse. I do not fear death, for all Cadians are born to die in the Emperor's service. I do not flinch from the call of duty, for who else is strong enough to bear it's burden? I will take a life to save ten, such is the nature of command. I will execute the guilty without regret or remorse, for such is the price of failure and treason. We are at war for the very survival of our species, there can be no civilians in such a conflict, for everything is at stake!

Obviously there is alot of myself in that, but it has the darker stains of the 41st millenium on it. My character can (and has) done things that I personally would have some difficulty doing, and more than a few that I would be surprisingly comfortable with if not for the legal repercussions in the modern era.

When I am running Dark Heresy then things get even more pronounced. I am every Grand Admiral of the Fleet, every callous noble, every freak cultist, every heretical killing machine and every random passerby that my group encounters in a game session. In short, I am many very, VERY bad people! This is a game, and it is my role to portray such people and things in the course of play. Morality is measured by the society that a person is raised in, so for many of the characters I portray they are acting in a perfectly MORAL fashion... For Imperial citizens! For that matter, it is perfectly natural and acceptable for an Eldar Farseer to condemn an entire Imperial hiveworld housing billions of souls to death by either action or inaction in order to lay the groundwork for one important being to survive elsewhere in the galaxy so they might do something important in one of many possible futures. To the Eldar mind, such a decision is not only moral, but also emminently rational as well. Of course if we are dealing with orks then morality is not an issue. Just yell "WAAAAAAAAGH!" and get ta' crumpin', ya gits!

I can say with absolute certainty that I make VERY different decisions and actions when I am portraying an Inquisitor versus when I am portraying a Jedi Master. And those actions are most likely moral, at least in the eyes of their parent societies. Interestingly enough, both the Inquisitor(s) and the Jedi are willing to kill for VERY similar reasons: To protect those that they defend. The difference is where collateral damage gets involved. A Jedi flinches. An Inquisitor silently grieves for the innocent souls, then orders the Cyclonic Torpedos be launched while sipping from a hip flask and watching from a massive gothic viewport.

I have heard some of the anti-gaming arguments over the years, most of them full of ignorance and fear. Music too. "Judas Priest music made my kid kill himself!" No. Neglectful parenting killed your kid. They are alone at home for 16+ hours every day and lock themselves in their bedroom with massive piles of openly displayed drugs and pariphenelia and several LOADED firearms! They are involved in all sorts of violent and self destructive acts for several years and have NO interest in girls. Yeah, Judas Priest is clearly the cause of this... Oh, and of course that Pixies and Ponies book that was on junior psycho's bookshelf burried under four layers of mysteriously stained tinfoil, yeah, that is also a cause!

For those who don't know me offline, I am an Orthodox Jew. I obviously have no moral issues with playing RPGs, even the dark themed ones. I would NOT allow someone's ten year old to play in my DH game though! I have gamer friends who are Mormon, Catholic, Quaker, assorted pagan faiths, agnostics and some that I honestly don't even know what (if anything) they practice. If I play a game with horrible monsters and very bad people forming doomsday cults and worse, well, that is just fine as long as everyone is having fun. If I decide to form a cult to get in a little "realistic LARPing" THAT is where a line has been crossed. Heck, I would even argue that "old school" D&D was far more morally questionable, since there was virtually zero consequence for slaughtering things indescriminantly and a very substantial reward for being needlessly ruthless. "I just need to kill 58 more guards and then I will become a far more powerful wizard! Oh, plus I get to keep all their stuff too!". The fastest way for a Thief to gain levels (happened in a game I stopped playing in years ago) was to wait until the other players had introduced their characters, wait until they go to sleep, then sell the Mage into slavery! "Hey, I just beat a first level mage totally solo, plus I gain an XP for every gold that that spellbook is worth, since I am totally selling that! So according to this, I am now level 7 and the rest of you chumps are level 1. Anyone have a problem with it?" It is far more moral in my eyes to blast a bolt-shell into someone's brain because they were conspiring against Humanity itself.

But how can a practicing Jew (or Christian, or Mormon) serve in the military without violating their faith? The major reason this gets asked alot is a simple translational error that has persisted for literally hundreds of years now, so it has become rather entrenched. "Thou shalt not kill." is what most of you have read in the KJB. The original Hebrew more accurately translates to "thou shalt not MURDER." Killing is expressly allowed under certain circumstances, and sometimes even mandated. Murder however is NEVER justifiable, since it is an inherently selfish act. It should be noted that even sanctioned killing is never to be considered an enjoyable thing and it leaves those involved ritually impure and thus incapable of participating in certain rituals (including Temple services) and indeed even some basic interactions with the community at large until such a person ritually purified themselves.

"In all things in life, first and foremost it is imperative to know thyself."