So I'm looking to run a Dark Heresy game sometime in the next few months. Which set of adventures do people think are better to kick off a campaign with: The Haarlock's Legacy set or Purge the Unclean? I don't own either yet, just read a few reviews on RPG.net and elsewhere.

I'll admit, some part of me wants to re-cast the WFRP "Enemy Within" game into 40k, since that is my favorite adventure arc of all time. Just to give people a sense for the sort of adventures I like.

I'm afraid I don't know terribly much about 'The Enemy Within', but I will add that the second of the Haarlock adventures isn't *hugely* related to the Haarlock Legacy set* of adventures. The flipside of this 'not terribly important' aspect seems to be that it's also one of the more rounded adventure books. The details of the planet Sinophia itself give an excellent idea of the atmosphere whilst the adventure is very investigative but also very...complete. There's alot of scope with it, alot of room to improvise and add your own bits too, but not much in the way of necessity to do so.

I've heard people mention that they feel the Purge trio are somewhat lacking in their robustness, that the GM must do a fair spot of 'plot hole plugging' on their own terms too, but as I've not played through them as either player or GM, I feel a bit of a backseat driver commenting in that manner.

So, to summarise: The Haarlocks Legacy are thorough and enjoyable, but to do the whole thing is *very long*, I found. Having said that, the second adventure (Damned Cities) is surprisingly small-scale and can be readily tackled by new players (of low rank, new characters or even simply people utterly new to the game and universe). Off-hand, I don't think I can sing the praises of "Damned Cities" too much, it's a solid investigative adventure with decent 'all round' opportunity.

* As well as the three separately published adventures, there's also "The House of Dust and Ash" in "Disciples of the Dark Gods" which is pretty important for the series.

None of them are something I would "advise" anyone

"Rejoice" from Purge is quiet allright, but I dislike the rest of it
"Damned Cities" from the Haarlock line is something I like, but I have a distaste for the first and do not get worm with the last one.

If you are into "campaign set up", take "Haarlock". But do not start with "Tattered Fates" but start with "Damned Cities". Later, you will see why.

I you haven't already run it I would suggest starting with Edge of Darkness which can be downloaded from the support page here on ffg. It's a well written adventure thats good for starting players, and after running it you might have more of a feel about what you want to do next.

Save for that I haven't read the Haarlock books, but Purge is ok I guess, more for inspiration than anything else. As Gregorius I like Rejoice (the first adventure), and the second adventure has some nice ideas but doesn't really come through, while the third never seemed interesting at all for me. The whole meta-plot that binds them together feels pretty much slapped on at the last second and could just as well be ignored.

It is too bad Enemy Within long out of print. It is an excellent series of adventures that deals a lot with chaos cults in the Empire. Thematically it has a lot of stuff that fits the Dark Heresy style, even if it is set in the fantasy world.

From the mediocre responses I'm hearing, I may invest in Disciples of a Dark God and Creature Anathema instead and roll my own. The more I think about it, I can probably do a good set of adventures that are loosely inspired by the Enemy Within books I own. None of my players will have read or played those before.

I really dont like either. All the Haarlock adventures seem to be wave after wave of really powerful foes to fight. With little plot other then "oh no, evil here too!" and a menacing villain mumbling "somethng something something Haarlock Legacy" which never really materializes for me.

The pros however. Tattered Fates: Campaign Advances Rules

Damned Cities: Pretty good overall adventure, if you can avoid the nose pulling.

Dead Stars: Crappy overall adventure, but some nice background and neat characters.

Same goes for Purge the Unclean, it had a nice feel overall, but little climax. The Dark Eldar were a nice early Dark Heresy xeno foe, but the space marine in the game made them seem like punks.

I actually find that WFRP 2E adventures make excellent material for Dark Heresy themes, such as Paths of the Damned, Barony of the Damned and The Thousand Thrones.

I find many of these DH/RT campaign (adventures) try to be more epic then they are and fail at that goal, while the lesser epic adventures can be elevated to epic status easily enough. I think a strong big bad recurring foe is necessary to make a campaign really work.

The following is purely my own opinion.

Purge the Unclean:

Decent enough book, and a reasonably good inspiration for a GM new to the 40k universe in getting him started (which I was). However, the meta plot is badly underdeveloped, leaving it as essentially 3 stand alone adventures. Unlike many others, I actually like Baron Hopes because it gives you the option of introducing the PCs to a very sympathetic and progressive character (the Baron) and then being ordered to do their duty and execute him at the end of the adventure...very Dark Heresy in my opinion.

The first adventure is also a pretty decent source of inspiration for making any adventures revolving around the noble elite, although actually using the story itself will require a bit of polishing up by the GM.

The Haarlock Legacy:

3 books, vs just the one from PtU. Expense is worth taking into consideration.

The Haarlock Legacy has a far better developed meta-plot, but suffers (in my opinion) from the Authors wanting to give GMs as much freedom as possible. This results in the GM needing to do a fair amount of work as well, almost to the point that it would be simpler to envision your own campaign and build it upwards from there. It does offer a lot of characters, source information on various worlds and a good basis for making a great campaign...just be aware that if you run it straight out of the book you're likely to have a "meh" experience (again, my opinion on it). Because the plot is "mysterious" to the point of being boring it can easily disappoint (imo). The plot culminates in a dramatic choice...but some people who've run the game have reported back that this final climactic choice barely registered with their groups. Certainly a lot of that is on the GM, but as I said...the books themselves really don't help a new or inexperienced GM in fully realizing the plot.

If you already have a strong, interesting plot line that you like, I wouldn't invest in any of these books to be honest. Disciples of the Dark Gods can definitely be recommended, but it sounds like this plot line of Enemy Within is indeed perfect for Dark Heresy...which means the only thing you would get out of PtU and the Haarlock books would be source info for a bare handful of planets and environments. In other words, useful but not even remotely worth the cash you would shell out.

I found a lot of use an inspiration out of Purge, heavily modifying the adventures there to suit the group so I thought it was a worthwhile buy as people had a lot of fun, myself included.

The Haarlock trilogy I just dunno what to do with, there's a couple of NPC's and Planets in them which I might use and there are some interesting ideas, but the adventure overall wasnt something I'd run as it reminded me of some of the worst parts of old D&D modules that used to piss me off as a GM and player. Basically, stick a huge hook in a PC's mouth and drag them through it kicking and screaming, wake up somewhere horrible with no gear and no fault of your own, then punch your way out... I think if I ran them I'd be lynched.

I wouldnt say 'dont buy them' but by the same account, dont buy them unless you're willing to drag out a big mallet to beat them into shape to suit your group because there are quite a few elements to them which will just end up death traps.

Alot of good points here.

PtU: I actually liked the backstory of the last part alot, even though the adventure itself was not very fun or well designed. The first part was also pretty good, but needs some serious work to be playable, and as said the Big Bad in the first adventure is pretty much disconnected from the other ones.

Tattered Fates: I liked the intro, and so did my players despite the heavy-handedness of it. As long as it's not done too often, it can bring alot of tension, especially for characters that are experienced (starting chars are so weak there is enough tension already). I mean, how often do you see the party's assassin take out 8 armed and armored goons by using an improvised stone/rope flail and a monodagger? By himself, mind you.

The rest of it was a series of confusion, combats, and the unavoidable end which left the PCs with very little information about what's going on. As one said, these adventures are so myserious and "dire" that they become boring.

House of... : Better than TF, larger and more time consuming, but also suffers from the fact that the players might not understand what's going on and can solve the adventure by fighting and being in the right place. So enjoyable possible interactions with NPCs, especially if you add some of your own, but in the end it boils down to fight and flee. And more OOOOH Haarlock is scary! Beware! With no actual information of the overarching plot which is so vague even the GMs.

Damned Cities: This is the best Haarlock Legacy module yet, probably because it has very little to do with Haarlock Good athmosphere, murder mystery, challenge befitting a fairly inexperienced team but also fun for the higher rank PCs... yeah. I won't say it's that thorough though, it seriously lacks fact boxes at encounters/scenes telling it straight to the GM (no a murder mystery should not be a mystery to the GM!), and it could use some more info here and there and maps for the actualy necessary combat encounters (instead of just one for the optional encounter).

Even so, this module is good as a standalone adventure and don't require that much work for the GM, especially one good at improvising. This also has the advantage of having a clearly understood plot the PCs can learn about and understand with very little ominious vague foreshadowing.

So my conclusion is that you're probably better off making your own campaign, but the modules can be nice as one-shots or be tweaked into your campaign by ignoring the whole Haarlock thing. Instead I'd advise using something out of DotDG, radical enemy inquisitors or some xeno threat as the main campaign enemy. Even the Tyrant Star becomes a bleak and vague threat compared to an insidious "enemy within" or criminal/heretical organizations that can turn several planets.

Good luck, and have fun!

I've run most of these adventures, here's what I found with my group.

As stated, Purge the Unclean hints at an overall story arc, but doesn't have one.

We enjoyed Shades on Twilight. I personalized it a lot for my group (which I do with any published adventure) and we had fun with it. I added some criminals looting the space hulk that had bad history with the Arbeit in the party. The dark eldar pirates became a recurring feature of my campaign.

If money is no object, get and read the Haarlock legacy. I found the adventures fun but not great. We skipped the last adventure.

IMHO, the best DH GM book is Disciples of the Dark Gods. Very inspirational for my DH and my RT campaign.

The adventure The House of Dust and Ash was a lot of fun, and my players really enjoyed the auction. Master Nunsuch was a very memorable NPC. Scared the players silly. One PC carried over to my RT campaign, and they have the items they got in the auction in their starship's trophy room.

deinol said:

Hi,

under this circumstances, I would suggest "Discples of the Dark Gods" over "Creatures Anathema". "DotdG" provides you with complete cults/organizations which offer more inspiration for campaignes then a a creature-file can give you (although I really-really-really like CA and it DOES
offer some rules for forming a campaign..well, it gives you a three-step-approach). And since all "Discpiles" come with enemy/creature stats of their own...

Especially the "Cults" provided in DotdG will be helpful for your plan

"Temple Tendency" offers a hardliner religious revolt planing to make the imperial cult the ONLY ruling body once more
"The Logicians" (from "Edge of Darkness") are ful-fledged here and provide a pro-Tech-cult
Diverse Necrotic templates for Necro-Cults of different flavours (weakest section, so!)
"The Beast House" gives you Beastsmugglers with a more sinister twist to them
"The Amaranthin Syndicate" provides you with a hidden xenos organization (xeno not revealed here for spoiler reasons)

I think there were more, but I cannot remember

Okay I must rally to the defence here of the Haarlock trilogy If you like epic adventures, meta-plots, lots of character and atmosphere, the Haarlock’s Legacy trilogy will not disappoint. Btw the adventure I liked best is the prologue adventure that is in Disciples of the Dark Gods: House of Dust and Ash.

But generally speaking, I find all of the published adventures require a lot of tweaking and changing. In Purge the Unclean, the ongoing story arc between the three adventures is so weak as to be almost non-existent. In the Legacy adventures, I have trouble with acolytes having to do nothing to have clues fall into their lap, secrets being given away way too quickly, and elements which are meant to create tension and atmosphere not working if you use them as described.

However, I don’t mind. I always approach published adventures as basic material to work with and to change, elaborate, or turn around as desired. This is what I enjoy doing as GM, and I’ve not yet read an adventure which I found completely unusable or uninteresting. Using the modified Haarlock trilogy as a campaign with lots of your own adventures in between will be a very rewarding experience.

The Laughing God said:

Gotta second this. I have been having alot of fun running (and occasionally playing) through both story arcs. The real key here (as with ANY pre-published material) is to customize and tailor the adventure to your group and add some of your own "meat" to the "bones" that the books provide. The first two adventures in Purge are a blast (especially REJOYCE!); The third has some potential but falls rather flat as presented. Dust and Ash plus the Haarlock trilogy are pretty cool IMO, but as always you need to add some of your own material to them. Our group's psyker didn't especially enjoy the "Red Cages" part of the series, but since the player is now pretty enthusiastic to run it for their own game I don't think the adventure was at fault (just one of the *spoiler* details).

The other thing that evil GMs can do here if they want to roll their game into a more "crossover" type is to run the entire Haarlock's Legacy campaign arc and make one of the PCs a potential heir to the legacy... This way there is a *chance* for someone to earn a Rogue Trader's warrant chock-full of excess baggage the hard (and memorable!) way.

Don't misunderstand me. I'm running Haarlock right now as well, and both my group and I are enjoying it immensely. To me it has been well worth the money.

But this is at least in part driven by the fact that I as a GM bought the full trilogy, participate on these forums and did a huge amount of work on my own meta plot. There are several aspects of both Tattered Fates and Dead Stars that have (or will) received major overhauls before my players go through them.

This in itself is not a terrible thing, since I tend to do a lot of editing myself anyway. But both of these story arcs practically require the GM to do this, which is a bit disappointing, and possibly harmful for a novice GM who tries to run the campaign "as is". Without that GM work, the meta plot in both PtU and Haarlock are either non-existent or so mysterious as to border on the irrelevant.

As I've said elsewhere, Haarlock's meta plot tries to be too many things at once. It means that a great many of the "mysterious revelations" and "dark portents" lose their impact, or even their importance. If the GM has fine tuned his meta plot, he practically has to rewrite some of these encounters or rework them to suit his plot. If he hasn't done that work, the statements standing alone are so obscure that its hardly memorable.

I do also agree that Haarlock makes an awesome transition campaign from DH to Rogue Trader. I'm definitely planning on offering that to my players, once they reach the conclusion of the saga as an alternative to Ascension. I think the transition to Rogue Trader (still with some plot lines intact, and especially with a wealth of background) will make for an interesting change of pace rather then just DH-Overpowered.

Bladehate said:

As I've said elsewhere, Haarlock's meta plot tries to be too many things at once. It means that a great many of the "mysterious revelations" and "dark portents" lose their impact, or even their importance. If the GM has fine tuned his meta plot, he practically has to rewrite some of these encounters or rework them to suit his plot. If he hasn't done that work, the statements standing alone are so obscure that its hardly memorable.

I think indeed that as a GM you have to start providing answers sooner or later. There is only so much prophetic ranting, dire warnings and mysterious hints that a group can absord.

Bladehate said:

Bladehate said:

Same here. Just starting work on Damned Cities. The bridge I use will be the Empty Men incident on Sinophia, since they are still involved in tracking down the Churgeon and the Logicians ever since Edge of Darkness.

[ Bladehate said:

I think indeed that as a GM you have to start providing answers sooner or later. There is only so much prophetic ranting, dire warnings and mysterious hints that a group can absord.

ZillaPrime said:

As the psyker (scholar bracnch) for my group, I also hated the red cages part. Why ?

Because my character became nothing more than excess baggage for the duration. I don't recall any of my skills or talents being useful outside combat. In combat the other players were only slightly inconvenienced once we found clubs, and were all using lightning attack constantly. Me, I didn't even have swift attack.

In other cases where my powers weren't an option I had a lot of gear that kept me useful (even if it was just shooting things with a lasgun). But with that gone I had nothing.

Later on the gm had pity and decided that I could have some of my powers back. As a biomancer this meant that I had toxic siphon back, so I flushed the rest of the drug from my system. The rest of the underground battles became too easy.

That is one of the things I dislike most about the blunt, tactless way in which the adventure begins .. everyone is captured and all their gear is stripped, psykers are rendered helpless with psy-dampening drugs and tech-priests have their augmentations switched off. So callous and non-imaginative

Personally, I liked the Red Cages part, although as GM I might be biased. I know the psyker player didn't enjoy losing his powers temporarily, but I think all the players enjoyed the desperation part. It was mostly the Assassin and Scum that prospered (even though they both lost the best equipment), but our psyker is not useless in melee (battle psyker!) and the arbitrator was never that good in combat to begin with, using laspistol mostly before this.

Note though that I let them retrieve most of the stuff they lost during the red cages, especially the guns and blades they had any relationship with.

Well, my group has been assembled by Silas Marr to investigate the Haarlock legacy, so their priorities are a bit different compared to other acolyte cells. They have just finished HoDaA, and they will most likely opt to investigate the Haarlock holdings on Sinophia (Damned Cities) next. During their investigations here, I fully intend to let them get hints about Gabriel Chase on Quaddis + the Grand Conjunction, and then offer them the chance to infiltrate the "hard way" via Magyar Mashrek and the Beast Slavers. Obviously, as a Nobles' retreat not just anyone can get to Quaddis...especially on very short notice. The players have met Magyar in HoDaA and although they're not friends...they at least are familiar with him.

This way I have the players choosing to go all "Where Eagles Dare" on Tattered Fates rather then just ram-rodding them, and it also let's them keep most of their current gear safely stowed away for after they resolve TF. This way I keep TF mostly intact but by the players' own choice rather then a railroad.

I'm currently GMing Haarlock Legacy and it is probably the most rewarding GMing I've done in my entire life. I wouldn't blindly reccomend it though, I'll try to explain what makes me enjoy it so much, and you can consider for yourself if you would like it.

A lot of the awesomeness in the Haarlock campaign comes from our gaming group. First, we are all old GW geeks, with an average of around 15 years in the hobby. We really appreciate the settings cynical grim-dark aspects, fascism and fanatiscism. Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, we are all fans of H.P. Lovecraft. Most of us have played Call/Trail of Cthulhu campaigns and we all appreciate his way of writing horror stories. This includes indescribable horrors from beyond reality, dark omens, spiralling downwards into insanity and feeling like a very minor player in a very major drama. Third, we are very experienced roleplayers that enjoy having a fair bit of sandboxy freedom where the initiative (at least in the immediate moment) lies with the players. I'm also quite fond of expanding on a prewritten setting/campaign to weave in our earlier stories. Fourth, we really enjoy playing long campaigns. We set out with the idea that we would be playing 5-8 hour sessions, once or twice a month for about two years.

The plotholes are few and quite easy to patch, even if I'd have loved a collected timeline for the campaign. Most of the NPCs and villains act in reasonable ways, have proper motivations and personalitites that makes them easy to roleplay and improvise plans with whenever my players deviate from the beaten path. There are plenty of both implicit and explicit room for expansion on the plot in the book by adding elements of my own. The descriptions are wonderfully heavy with grimdark, especially in Dead Cities.

There are a few negative sides. Most noticeable is that the violence of the opposition is generally way too weak to pose any sort of threat to a group of competent conflict gamers that are interested in actually reading and optimizing the combat and equipment rules, but that's very easy to fix. I usually roughly double any numbers of combat opponents and up all statistics and equipment one step in quality. There is a lot of background and meta-plot information that I feel is missing or is at least very shoddily collected. Many parts of the adventure would have benefitted from a clearer timeline (like the time between the murders on Sinophia). Dead Cities needs some GM-added Haarlock-hooks to feel like a solid part of the trilogy.

The only thing I'm divided over is that the writers keep things secret from even the GM. This does of couse help in that it gives me a sense of mystery as well, but it really would help with my GMing if I knew how things were connected. Luckily it seems that all the reasoning and second guessing I did while we were playing House of Dust and Ash fits quite well with what was described in the rest of the campaign books as soon as they were available. But even with all the four books + lots of extra material I'm still not feeling informed properly. If I was a cynical person I might assume that this is intentional in order to keep the GM hooked for buying the next set of books that explains another slice of the meta-plot of the calixis sector...

So, my reccomendation would be this: The Haarlocks Legacy comes into full fruition when you play it in a with an experienced group that appreciates the grimdark and the lovecraftian aspects. You as a GM needs to be willing to read and think a lot. Start with reading and thoroughly understanding all the four adventures, including any references to organisations in DotDG and other DH-books. Then read everything that Lovecraft has written. Then read "The definitive Haarlock's Legacy speculation [AND SPOILER!] thread" in the GM sub-forum here on FFG. Sprinkle with reading some of the huge meta-plot workings of the 40k universe on for example Lexicanum. Then you make a bunch of notes and think some more about how you want the blanks to be filled and what personal elements you want to add. Then you are ready to start GMing. Make sure your players understand the scope of the campaign, the amount of time and enthusiasm they are supposed to put into it. Make them read a bunch of Lovecraft (if they have not already). If you want to do the Haarlock this way, it is very likely it will be one of your best roleplaying experiences ever.

About the start of Tattered Fates. I made it a part of a plot of their Inquisitor. He has contacts in the Beast House, so he had noticed odd requests for targeted kidnappings and told the players that they were going to be kidnapped as a way of infiltrating, but that he had no idea where they were going to be taken or who ordered the kidnappings. So they got to leave all of their stuff and be brutally kidnapped in a setup. It is of course possible that they were actually targeted by the Pilgrims, or that their Inq knew something about one or two of them being related to Haarlock and had figured out that that was the common denominator between the targeted kidnappees...

Mellon said:

It's a clever but well-known writer's trick ... feed players with tidbits of information, so that with each new revelation the puzzle becomes clearer, while still keeping a sense of dread and mystery, and most importantl, leave it to the players to imagine the horror themselves. That technique comes straight from Lovecraft and Chambers.

I like it as much as it frustrates me

I posted a review of Purge the Unclean here:

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/14/14709.phtml

ZillaPrime said:

This is exactly what happened with my group. I decided on a player Haarlock when I ran The House of Dust and Ash. After we finished that I found my group wanted to move onto Rogue Trader at some time. I told them to wait until there was more support, but sure, I'm all for it. At that point my Haarlock PC "retired" to be trained by Silas Maar as a Rogue Trader. They took "Ship in Arrears" and guess who they owe money to? Inquisitor Marr.

Not only is Rogue Trader Haarlock loose on the expanse, he named his ship The Tyrant Star. Tends to get noticed.

By the time Dead Suns came out we were chomping at the bit to try Rogue Trader. I read it and decided what happened and what Marr would tell the players.