Hello to all fellow Gamemasters! I will be running a Dark Heresy campaign for my four player group, and have decided to use the premade adventures published by FFG. The adventures are (in no particular order):

Illumination (from the Core book)

Rejoice for you are True (from Purge the Unclean)

Shades on Twilight (from Purge the Unclean)

Baron Hopes (from Purge the Unclean)

Tattered Fates

Damned Cities

Dead Stars

The House of Dust and Ash (from Disciples of the Dark Gods)

In what order would you run these, in terms of each adventure's difficulty? Illumination is the obvious choice as the introductory adventure, but what about the other ones?

Is it possible to get the acolytes to the Ascension level with these eight adventures?

Are there any major pitfalls a GM could get into while running any one of these?

Any advice would be most appreciated. Thank you!

Hi there

I would suggest:

Illumination (from the Core book)
Rejoice for you are True (from Purge the Unclean)
Shades on Twilight (from Purge the Unclean)
Baron Hopes (from Purge the Unclean)
Damned Cities
The House of Dust and Ash (from Disciples of the Dark Gods)
Tattered Fates
Dead Stars

@AscensionLevel
If you REALLY want to know, simply add together the XP each adventure suggests. And add those you normally tend to give the pc "on top"

Things that might go wrong: [spoiler-ALERT!]

Illumination:
The pc might find out very soon who is the culprit and might try to bring him down. In that case, you might either end the adventure prematurely, turn it into a civil war scenario (as members of the camp start to protect the culprit & attack the pc while the culprit flees into the cathedral)

On the other hand, the pc might simply gun the "final boss" down. Have an eye on what your pc have, plan VERY carefully how to take the most effect of the "finalists" powers... or simply power the thing up.

Rejoice!
The adventure is pretty railroading the pc along the line of clues, so not to much problems here. The pc might kill Theo very early. Simply, let them. And make him return (the body simply left the morgue.... Von Krönen -Style)

DC
The pc will suspect that the"folly" is at the center of things. something that they can find and explains why the tower is strange (i.e a chamber in the cellar where the traveller summoned the daemon.

House of Dust & Ash
You will have to prepare a lot of things that will happen in the House after things go southward... unless, you are good at improvising. Make your self a picture in your mind about the look and feel of the House, so!

Tattered Fates
Be prepared for your players hating you!

I would not mix up the Illumination series of adventures with the Haarlock Legacy. Illumination is supposed to connect neatly to the adventures in Purge the Unclean, but it doesn't. In fact, the three scenarios in PtU are very loosely connected to each other as well. The red thread is [spoiler!] the opposing villain, Eloeholth the Faceless, and the Serrated Query. But you will have to make up everything yourself, rewrite the adventures, to make sure they click together. The piece of fluff in which Eldar Harlequins give information on Eloeholth is exciting, but there is not much else to work with.

The Haarlock legacy adventures have their own connecting themes, which have zero to do with Illumination and PtU. They connect together way better, but even here the GM should rewrite, elaborate and change a lot. Ofcourse, this is the fun part of being a GM

If you do the Haarlock story, start with Damned Cities, then proceed to House of Dust and Ash, then Tattered Fates, then Dead Stars. Add lots of adventures of your own making to tie things together in the way you see fit.

Interesting insights, Gregorius21778 and The Laughing God, it's always nice to read thoughts from experienced GMs/players.

After some further reading through the adventures, I think I will be using the Haarlock Legacy arc as a main story, while the adventures from the Purge the Unclean will be side stories in-between.

Thank you, and may the Emperor guide your path!

I hope I am not the only to notice the correlations between Rejoice if you are True and a specific modern religion of "science" which I will leave unnamed due to their vast legal department?

oh, you mean the [EXPUNGED] ?

Well, you would notice references to all those modern-areapseudo-religious-fringe-groups ... if the **** rest of them would have been as successful as THOSE-WE-WILL-NOT-NAME-CAUSE-WE-FEAR-RETRIBUTION.

Kinda fun to have a RL version of "You know who"

Hubologists from fallout 2 anyone? Zeta scan in progress....

Anyway although the order suggested by Gregorius might fit with the story (except either HoD&A or TF should happen before DC since the event is what caused the Daemon to awaken), it isn't necessarily the order of difficulty.

In my experience DC can be even harder than HoD&A and even TF. It depends a bit on options used, for example dropping Master "youknowho" from HoD&A makes it much easier, and dropping the Cell from DC makes that alot easier. In any case DC was pretty easy to up the challenge, just imagine what the villain SHOULD equip his men with and there you go