So last night we had our first session. It was a BLAST! I had taken Weapon Jinx, Fearful Aura, and Healer.

For our first combat, I was very underwhelmed. We were up against zombie guardsmen (essentially) which meant no weapons to jinx. I tried out fearful aura, but it didn't seem to bother them. I was stuck trying to plink away with my laspistol. 28 BS blows.

Our second combat was inside a hospital on a Hive World, where one of the docs was running away. No need for powers here.

Alleyway somewhat outside the hospital where we dragged the Doc. Nobody has interrogate or any related skills, and we needed answers. So I told the rest of the party to go stand watch at the end of the alley, and don't turn around (at this point, they don't know I'm a psyker.) I use fearful aura, and roll a 9. Rolling frost on the phenomena chart. Doc freaks and passes out. Tech priest turns around to see what the big booming voice and frost is from. He stares right at me, and rolls HORRIBLE on his WP to resist the fear. Uses a Fatepoint to reroll it, and just makes it. Epic

Next fight is in a warehouse full of thugs. I use Weapon Jinx, get overbleed, and jam two guns. Ogryn shows up with a chainsword arm, and I jinx that too. Epic.

So all in all, the power selection wasn't a bad choice. Both Fearful Aura, and Weapon Jinx really helped us out. Although I did feel the lack of options when there were no weapons to jinx. I'll be picking up another combat type power with Psy 2 I think. At the end of the session, we were givin 200 xp, with an optional 100 xp if we bring a painted mini to our next session for the sole purpose of using it in Dark Heresy (meaning can't just pull one from our 40k armies.) So....300 xp. Enough to break into Rank 2, and pick up Psy 2. Sweet

Oh, and we picked up 4 Poor quality Autopistols.

Glad you had fun! Remember that you are first level , so nobody is going to be amazingly good at anything. You feel happy if you manage to hit someone in a fight and deal some damage, really. You'll blossom as time goes on and start feeling really powerful.

I always hated laspistols. One of my characters (a Feral World Psyker) wound up burying his laspistol after becoming infuriated with its 'malicious spirit'. I'd recommend most any SP pistol over las. (Autopistol versus Laspistol: same Damage and Pen, half the range, but you can full auto it, which means you can use it to pin enemies. Pinning is excellent fun when facing a gaggle of opponents!) That said, Poor Quality isn't so good. Jamming spoils everyone's fun.

And you can absolutely max-out one Discipline as a militant psyker. Assuming you go into Templar Calix at Rank 4 (so it replaces Savant Militant) you'll be able to purchase a total of 4 Psychic Powers. If you put Psy 4 and 5 into the same Discipline, (and have a WP Bonus of 5 or 6) and buy all those, you'll wind up with a total of 11 powers in that Discipline, and you need 10 to max out. (There are only 10 in the main rulebook, but Disciples adds more Discipline powers to choose from, some of which are pretty awesome).

Of course, you could also just go (for example) Psy 3 = Seal Wounds, then buy Regeneration. Psy 4, you move into Telekinesis and get a power there, and purchase a couple of others. Psy 5, you get Pyromancy and use your final Psychic Power spend to get a second power. You end up with a total of 7 powers across three Disciplines. (Or the third option is going for more powers in just two Disciplines, putting two Psy levels into one.)

You have the option of taking advantage of your WP Bonus for +3 powers in a Discipline you already have, and wind up with more powers overall, but in just one Discipline, or else having a spread of Disciplines but ultimately fewer powers. There's really no right answer, it just depends on how you want to play your Psyker and what will be fun/useful in your game.

You have plenty of time to decide! It'll take a while to work up to a level where you need to choose.

Alright, so I guess I'm a bit confused on how you get to 11 discipline powers by psy 5....with only purchasing 4. You get 1 discipline power with each psy rating increase, and then the ones you can purchase right? Where's it say all this btw? I saw the little blurb about getting 1/2 your WP bonus in minors....but not a whole lot mentioning when you gain discipline powers.

NVM, I found it under the actual Talent descriptions. Psy 3 you get one discipline, and then Psy 4 you get 1/2 your WP in discipline powers. Which means in regards to gaining powers, my current WP of 52 is going to be as good as I can go....since that'll gain me 3 discipline powers. I'll be maxing at 67 WP. Unless there's another way of increasing WP.

Brolthemighty said:

That's right. A WP Bonus of 5 or 6 both yield 3 Discipline Powers when buying a Psy level and putting it into a Discipline you already have (or +1 if buying a new Discipline).

And you have a WP limit in Dark Heresy, as you've seen, but if your group goes on to play Ascension, the Psyker package gives you +5 WP (but -5 TO, so it comes at a price). Also, at Ascension, you can buy a further +10 (to a total of +30 in Advances, combined with Dark Heresy). So, you could start Ascension at 72, then finish at 82. Not bad!

Brolthemighty said:

God lord, are you people playing Verloren Hoop..? http://mr-culexus.deviantart.com/gallery/12423238 Do not worry about readiing, you are past the point where this comic would give you spoilers.

I find it incredibly amusing that you got phenomena at the exact same spot as the original group.

Yeah, that would seem to be it, lol. Anyways, we've been given a total of 300 xp (since I'll be painting up a suitable mini once I can find one.) I'm looking at taking Forbidden Lore (Warp) for my last 100 in Rank 1, and then Psy 2 once I hit Rank 2. For Psy 2, I'll be adding some of the Minor powers that looked good that I couldn't take first. We'll also be getting 500 or so gelt once we complete this mission, so I'm looking at gear.

I've been reading through some threads about gearing, and several have mentioned kine blades. Are these in a supplement or something, cause I can't find them at all.

ascension page 141;

kineblades melee range;WPB*5m damage;1d5R pen;2 wt;0.5g very rare.

"To use a kineblade, the wielder must manifest any psychic power that allows him to lift and move objects (spectral hands, fling, telekinesis and lift are all possibilities). The power is manifested as normal. However, instead of its usual effect, the user animates a number of kineblades equal to half his psy rating (rounding up). He must sustain the power if he wishes to animate the blades over multiple rounds.

The blades hover in mid-air. They must remain within the psyker's willpower bonus *5 meters. However, the psyker may move them anywhere within that zone as a free action Within reason, of course. Kineblades cannot move through solid objects). During the psyker's turn, he may attack with half his blades as a half action, or all of them as a full action (he may not make other attacks if he does this). To attack, he must make a weapon skill test for each kineblade. He can attack multiple targets, and only suffers a -10 penalty for called shots."

"Any search tests made to discover a concealed kineblade are three degrees more difficult than they would be normally."

The above is verbatim from the page, hope it helps

They also do not have an official cost to buy them, being introduced in Ascension's "aquisition" format.

Cheaper, good items would include a Combat Mesh Cloak and a hunting rifle (or long las), probably affordable even with a few addons if 500 throne is burning through your pockets...

Unusualsuspect said:

Eh. If your short on cash, get a poor quality long las with an over charge pack. Why?

Hunting Rifle: 100 thrones, 150m range, 1d10+3 I pen 0 clip 5. (Accurate)

Poor Quality Long Las with Overcharge packs: 50 Thrones, 150m Range, 1d10+4 Pen 0 Clip 20 (Accurate). Can use extra thrones to pickup things like Hot Shots if you want, or more preferably, a Red Dot Laser Sight. Charge packs are, well, rechargeable, and so they end up a bit more expensive but you have a cheaper weapon that might as well be Fire Selector enabled as far as ammo capacity is allowed. Bonus point? Anyways, yeah, Las weapons are Reliable, so when you make them Poor quality they just lose that trait and jam just as often as normal weapons, as opposed to becoming Unreliable like the Hunting Rifle would.

If you have more cash, get Hot Shot packs for the Long Las, or get a Hunting Rifle with RDS, Fire Selector, and Manstoppers to fill em. Fire Bombs are another great and cheap investment. If you can afford Combat Mesh Cloaks they are great, yes, but Flak Cloaks are 270 thrones cheaper and just offer 1AP less. Using an Accurate ranged weapon you should be firing from a position of cover in first place, so you can get away with sacrificing an AP. If you do have around the Mesh Combat Cloak price range I would look at the Hardened Body Glove in IHB under the Hive world section as well - you have no head protection (this is bad), 3AP, but its something concealable under clothing. You've been mind wiped and placed into an Inquisitional team, its a great fluffy go-to acolyte garb. If you guys ever do investigating, its great, since its not going to raise eyebrows like a combat cloak will.

As for other ****:

-If your looking for new minor powers, Spasm and Weapon Jinx are the two most ungodly powerful abilities around. You have Weapon Jinx already, I would get Spasm. Fearful Aura is amazing as well if used appropriately and depending on how your GM treats it, so you seem to be doing fine currently. Deja Vu is likewise extremely powerful. Other good abilities to keep in mind : are you going to be using the accurate rifle at all? Than look at getting Unnatural Aim. You cannot unnatural aim + shoot, but you can unnatural aim + aim, than shoot the next round - +30 unnatural aim, +10 aim, +10 RDS +10 accurate. Gives you +60 to your BS test, and for every 2 DoS you do another 1d10 (up to 2d10 extra). You would likely get another +10 from Short Range, but bonuses cap at +60. Either way, works great, but is somewhat limiting. Inspiring Aura is really helpful for its +20 to Fear/Pinning tests, since those can be rough. Familiar Bond can be quite hilarious as well. GM sends a Carnodon at you? Psyker : "OOH! OOH! MINE! *zaps* Okay he's my pet now."

-If your going for Templar Calix, keep in mind that you may NOT attack and manifest in the same round, unless the manifestation is a free action (arguable by GM), however, excluding Resist Possession, you may *never* manifest twice in the same round. The Templar Calix force sword is very powerful in the hands of a psyker, but the part where it gets ungodly powerful is in its manifestation - you can deal many many many 1d10's of unsoakable damage. This blows apart a hell of a lot of things. However, to trigger this is a manifestation, so if your picking up lots of manifestations to supplement yourself, its a heads up for down the road. Sustaining a power does not cause a conflict, but does raise the casting potential naturally.

-As for Hammerhands, nothing says that Hammer Hands cannot stack with Burning Fist. This means your doing 1d10+4x SB non-Primitive damage. :3 Dangerous stuff, but requires two manifestations to do.

-If you want to be a melee combat monstrosity, take Psychic Blade. Its treated as a normal sword (that you don't have to hold) with obnoxious damage and PEN. Manifest it and wade into combat, make use of Lightning Attack to make three attacks with the Psychic Blade, one attack with Force Sword, manifest the force sword special effect and oh god what do you know its dead. Yes, this basically turns you into a walking melee combat shredded, yes, this means you will likely be focus fired very quickly. :3 Personally I prefer the whole Hammerhands style Psyker, less of a walking death machine, more iconically awesome.

-There is no Pyromancy immunity to fire. Endure Flames is a DoTDG minor ability, not a discipline ability. I largely won't deal with the ensuing facepalm of seeing someone arguing about how Psykers are imbalancing, game breaking and horrible, and than spend several concurrent posts trying to explain how to build the most imbalanced and broken psyker possible. Argh. My mind hurts.

I like the idea behind the Long-Las. I was worried when you were suggesting guns, since my BS is so crap....but the bonuses explains it pretty well. Very good ideas. I've been mulling over how to handle my psyker until I get to the iconic Rank 4. Some very awesome suggestions and ideas. I may take Biomancy instead of Tele just to reign myself back from being TOO ungodly. Biomancy has some great powers, between Seal Wounds, Regen, Agony (for those interrogations) Hammerhands, etc. Still a very fun discipline without getting too nuts. And yeah, the Hammerhands + Burning Hands combo could be a lot of fun. May have to burn a discipline power to pick it up.

Brolthemighty said:

There's lots of ways to get little benefits, crap or not - as stated if you aim (which you should largely always do, since it allows use of the Accurate trait) than you get +30 to your hit (+10 aim, +10 RDS and +10 accurate), and as anything under half range (75m) is another +10, that's already +40 for you to use. If you hit, at all, the damage is respectable, but if you roll well you can do some terrible things (as you can do up to 3d10+whateverthehell).

Glad to hear your making sure you don't over do it Once a character is viable you don't need to min/max it to hell. Personally I rather like the Divination tree; it has a mix of strong combat abilities and some just flat out cool ones - but it can be pretty rough on a GM with things like Dousing, Psychometry, and Personal Augury. Telepathy and Biomancy are likewise really cool - check things like Shape Flesh for a little less direct applications. You can gain traits like Burrower/Crawler/Flier/Quadruped; which are disturbing as hell when you think about it, and thus make some pretty strong memories.

*Shrug*

Honestly they can all be fun, just take something you think works with your character concept and kick some ass with it. The more you jump around with disciplines the harder it is to really expand them though; since you can choose one new discipline (and a power from it) to branch into, or get 1/2WPB in discipline powers from one you've already opened up.

Lol, I think if I used Shape Flesh to gain some of those traits my party would just up and shoot me.

However, my GM has stated that if the party can come up with a good reason on why they would all take it, we can take the Cell Doctrine of Sanctioned Wardens. That way I have less chance of blowing up my head. That is until the Guardsmen with the Grenade Launcher decides to do it.

Alright, so after a good bit of thought, and warp searching, I've had to come to a decision. You see, my GM was going to allow the 300 xp that I spent gaining Living Nightmare to count towards Rank progression. At first, I was pretty happy with this, cause it meant that I could pick up Psy 2 now. However, I keep coming back to a couple factors. First, is that they're not supposed to count towards rank increase. Secondly, is that someone in our group couldn't make it to our first session, so this coming session he'll be a shiny new recruit. After going back and forth all week, I've decided that I'm going to go ahead and follow the book, and not count Living Nightmare towards Rank advancement. Which means of I 300 xp worth of Rank 1 talents and skills. This is what I'm looking at:

FLore (Warp) - I just see this as a must.....since this is what I do.

Meditation - I've got a hefty amount of starting insanity points that I need to work to get rid of. Meditation has no mechanic bonus to that effect, however, the GM has stated that self-reflection and meditation would be a good way for me to some points.

That leaves me with 100 to work with. I'm torn between

SLore (Occult)

Minor Psychic Power - to go ahead and pick up Spasm

Quick Draw - always useful

Stat increase - I'm thinking INT since once I hit Templar, INT boosts go crazy expensive.

What say you?

Brolthemighty said:

What? I never noticed that before.

Indeed, xp spent on backgrounds and buying off Insanity does not count towards your total for determining rank. This leads to all sorts of confusion in our gaming groups, but that's the way it is. Sort of makes sense. The fellow who hasn't bought a background gets to rank up before the rest of us who have the benefits of a background package. I think it matters less and less as the game goes on.

As for your spend, brol, I recommend Scholastic Lore (Occult). It's likely to come in handy for most Dark Heresy games (especially if you're Hereticus or Malleus) and you'll get a bunch of Minor Psychic Powers when you get your next Psy Level, so no need to spend xp when you can wait and get the power later. Personally, I never spent xp on buying extra Minors, preferring to pick things up as I went along.

Brol: Make sure the GM isn't going to retroactively rank him up to catch up to you guys; you might feel a bit silly if you purposely discount yourself 300xp to keep around his level and he starts with the exp you guys have gained.

I would say either pickup quickdraw or spasm - spasm is great, but quickdraw means you can ready weapons as a free action, so every combat you can aim and shoot as required as opposed to spending half an action pulling the weapon. This is great no matter what - pre-templar you are likely carrying guns, post templar you can pull your sword out.

I had been thinking about the point of purchasing a minor power for 100xp last night, and yeah...it didn't make sense. I'll just hold off until Psy 2. Thanks for the advice on that one

I have checked with my GM as well, he said he doesn't believe in giving xp to someone who wasn't there, so that player won't be "bumped" to the rest of everyone's level. An understandable point, to help promote actually showing up for sessions. I think I've figured out what to do, thanks to everyone's help! Here it is:

FLore (Warp) - never in question

SLore (Occult) - I agree that it would seem to be useful in many situations. Possibly even our current one.

Quick Draw - just too handy.

I went ahead and dropped Meditation with the intent on picking it up after several in-game attempts to Meditate without the talent. Essentially getting the knack for it. In terms of mechanics, that would be right after picking up Psy 2 most likely. Thanks again for everyone who has helped get me this far! I look forward to posting updates of how things have went, as well as my continuing queries for the veterans on the boards!

With regards to your planned discipline, if you plan on playing that character for a long time, I suggest not going biomancy because (in my experience) once you become powerful and really good at Seal Wounds, it removes a large amount of horror from the setting and thus somewhat spoils the game.

If you master biomancy, have a discipline focus, power well, and WPB 6 or more, you effectively already have about 13 to15 out of the threshold of 20. If you do some invocation (WP60, skill+20, psyfocus+10 gives you a 90% chance), you can use the power with a single die.

For me, it is extremely thrilling to have most people in the party be heavily injured or fearful of being injured that much. However, once you start healing everyone for roughly d10+6 (sometimes double or more with overbleed) during combat, the party becomes almost invincible to small arms - this allows you all to either breeze through everything almost always at full health, or insta-die to autogunners rolling 01 or stray grenades (which would have killed you anyway).

Once you become uber-medic then the party will practically never again worry about their health chipping away. This removes the buildup of danger, the suspense of mounting weariness, and essentially saps horror out of combat.

I will note that at lower levels the thrill of a players life sometimes hingeing on a successful (but unlikely) Seal Wounds or Healer roll is great, and the temptation to pump up the power with MOAR dice is good too.

Seal Wounds could be modified. Give it a higher threshold, or better yet problems with using it repeatedly a la Healer.

I'd read about that before actually. However, I'm not sure if it'll be an issue for our group....since most of them are unlikely to even LET me heal them...unless its from the brink of death. It's yet another thing to think about though.

I absolutely agree that it could be an issue for a game group, that it could take out some of the horror, but in our longest-running game, I've had Seal Wounds since midway through Damned Cities (Haarlock 2) and believe me, whilst I was able to manifest it pretty much at will, there was still plenty of fear and horror. And plenty of player death (mitigated by fate points). In fact, in a climactic battle, the entire party died (mainly because I died first, and then there was no one to heal them).

It depends on your group, but I think Biomancy (and specifically Seal Wounds) can work just fine. Our game isn't heavily combat oriented (maybe 30-40% combat and 60-70% investigation), so for large parts of the game there are other psychic powers that would be more useful.

Also, don't forget Perils of the Warp. The more dice you roll (and if you want to heal yourself and your group, too, you need to roll a fair amount of dice until... well, probably Ascension, really) the more risk there is of them coming up 9, and then the fun begins. This always made me wary of using my powers (maybe too much so) but it acted as a balancer for me.

Just my experience, but having played two psykers with Seal Wounds (and one for some time before they erratad the Threshold), I'd say it can work just fine, and not spoil the game at all. It just changes things.

I guess I'm overplaying how "unhorrific" seal wounds made things. I'm probably influenced by my most recent experience with it which was Ascension where fettered getting sealwounds +1 or 2 overbleeds was the average.
So yeah, don't worry about me.