Greetings, brethern,

while reading the teaser material for the second part of the Apostasy Gambit, I wondered if it always needs to be "THE FATE OF THE SECTOR" being at stake.

Personally, I am quiet contempt with things threatening to overthrow something minor....say... a hive or a colony or perhaps a world or major city. Because if enough loses like these lead to a slow death of the Imperium. Reading this "the whole sector" thing starts to tire me.

How about you? Same view or to the contrary?

I suspect that for official supplements it has to be "fate of the sector" in order to ensure the material has the maximum possible appeal. Otherwise it's hard to justify your Acolytes taking time out from investigating a Genestealer cult on one side of the sector to look into a heretical preacher on the other.

Both are valid points.

I think that overhyping the importance of a campaign is pretty common. Especially in view of the support material published in discussion of the changes. The Haarlock trilogy is a great example of this...oh sure, the return of Haarlock COULD be a sector shaking event but the FFG material really comes up short in backing up such an event. Too much of it is short-formed or put over on the GM to work out. I'm the type of GM who modifies any published scenarios extensively if I choose to actually use them...but for a published adventure/campaign to actually require this is just pure laziness in my opinion.

That said, in Dark Heresy a campaign has to be pretty serious to warrant uprooting the characters...but of course, if it really is "fate of the sector" you gotta wonder where the hell one of the 300ish Inquisitors in the sector are at? That sounds like the sort of thing they'd take a hand in personally...not just send some of their underlings...

So yeah, I don't think FFG have it easy in this case, when it comes to writing campaigns. The campaigns have to walk a narrow tight rope between important, but not so OMFG VITAL that the characters would get sidelined.

I would imagine its a lot easier to come up with RT campaigns with a wide mass appeal.

I suppose that - aside from the obvious appeal (in line with the new approach FFG seems to have taken towards DH) - the campaigns are also made "more important" because they are (a) campaigns, thus meant to be big things spanning months of weekly games and several character levels and (b) meant to be interesting even for Ascension characters. And Ascended teams frequently do have their own Inquisitor.

I too think that it would be sweet to see a few distinctive "low level" adventures, but I would think that these should be single shots "for in-between", not full blown campaigns spanning multiple books.

Well, they have a made a couple of very good low level adventures. Edge of Darkness gets mentioned a lot, but it deserves the credit.

Its proof that FFGs writers are able to make some very tightly knit and interesting adventures for the small scale...but that still feel quite WH40Kish in their scope. Failing to foil the Logicians in EoD can have some pretty nasty repercussions after all...

On the opposite end, there's Lure of the Expanse for RT. Which in my opinion is a really well done piece of work, and one I'd love to GM (with some modifications here and there...). There's a great deal of freedom in the RT setting, and Lure manages to emphasize that while still driving its plot forward.

I think where FFG runs into trouble is in making actual campaigns for DH. At the moment they're trying for mass appeal, and a large scale. And in my opinion the material "as is" of these campaigns has not had the impact that Lure + their intro one shots have had. They have too many gaps, and although some areas do offer great detail there are others where the GM really has to do a lot of work. Not that I mind the work since I typically do it anyway...but if I was purchasing the Haarlock legacy for example, and expected to run it straight "out of the box" I'd be pretty disappointed with the results, I think.

Obviously this is all opinion, and very subjective.

At the same time, I tend to love most of the FFG material. As someone who ever only played the Epic TT about 15 years ago, my WH40K knowledge is not the best. At the same time, there are a lot of Black Library novels that can both inspire and further distort the setting. So for me, the adventure and source books are great ways to establish what WH40K RPG actually is, and the gazeteers in the Haarlock books and other published works have been great resources in that way.

I agree that The Fate Of The Sector can be overused as a plot device. I think you have to have an alternating mix of minor and major plot outcomes to have a well-paced campaign. Once you've rescued the Sector a half-dozen times, where can you go from there?

-And Bigger isn't always Better. It's been a while since I've seen Psycho, but I'm pretty sure that Norman Bates only kills two people. Compare that to 2012, where they destroy the whole freakin' planet, and yet it has drastically less emotional impact than a 40-year-old movie about a looser with a knife...

It's pure inflation. Sooner or later you will get threats on a sector-wide scale, especially in published adventures, because it has maximum appeal and because it promises an exciting climax. But once you've gone there, there's no going back with the same group. Scouring a hive warren for mutants will just not do it anymore after you've stopped a threat so dire it could have doomed the entire Calixis sector and beyond.

It's also a matter of scale. Once your acolytes reach Ascension, naturally the cases they do for the =I= will have a much more serious magnitude. It's kind of a backdrop premise in the campaign.

When I write my own campaigns, I always enter too many multi-session over-arcing threats, and I have to choose which ones to drop and which ones to continue

I was chatting with a fellow who suggested that his Acolytes (players) had direct influence on the course of events in the Sector, unbeknownst to them. While one supply ship failed to get from point A to point B or one man was killed and considered "collateral damage," that meant someone didn't get needed supplies or a deal wasn't made. These minor events affected other events and in the end, b/c the Acolytes were laying waste and destruction, they suddenly found the Sector erupting in civil wars and uprisings. So even on Hive worlds, common goods like bullets and lasgun clips were becoming short supply b/c each governor had to put a clamp on the goods to use them to keep the various said planets up and running. So by there very actions, the Acolytes were hampering themselves, yet if they did nothing, the sector would be consumed in the flames of war. The universe runs on irony. So in a way, the Fate of the Sector is in the balance all the time.