I have been running a dark heresy campaign and we have reached the third and final edventure, all the players except one have chosen to side with a radical inquisitor and become outlaws, in this third adventure they are going to a nightmare world in the koronus expanse to seal a daemon away, nut it accurs to me that this scenario is really more suited for a deathwatch game then a darke heresy game so i was thinking should i combine the two systems so the players can still develop their heresy characters and play deathwatch characters is it possable to combine the systems in that way?

Sean Miller said:

Yes. I plan on doing the same with my RT game; have a bridge crew for space combat (as the tech-Priest/Senechal/Missinary are not *that* useful in void combat) and when they make planetfall, they go back to their normal characters.

So your Acolytes can run around finding clues about how to seal that deamon, and the DW kill-team can then go in and seal it, using the acolyte's discoveries to complete the job.

that does help but i guess what im asking is, how would i combine the two systems and is it even worth it

I suppose the question is: What exactly do you have in mind? i.e., where would your games overlap?

If you're thinking of letting both groups of characters encounter the same opponent, it would be important to keep in mind that DW NPCs are geared for DW and thus are massively more dangerous to a DH group, whereas DH NPCs would seem much too weak for a bunch of Marines using DW rules.

In case you just want to run two games with a connected storyline, I'd simply set it up like that - two separate games, each with their own rules, their own characters and their own XP pools. Have them take place in the same campaign, with the Marines potentially operating under intelligence obtained by the DH characters and/or directly requested by their Inquisitor (thus enabling one game to influence the other), but don't let them encounter the same enemies.

Sean Miller said:

I customised the DW marine advances by knocking them down to scout marines, lot less powerful, some implants haven't grown yet, running around in carapace, slapped the crap out of the bolter damage and they work just fine for what they are. But there's more background, history and development for them so they're not canned, 1-dimensional stat blocks in power armour.

This runs parallel to a very long running DH game (basically re-started at rank1 since Inq HB came out) and the PC's are nearing ascension. From experience, DH PC's, even very tooled up ones with blasty psykers, assassins and guard, cannot compare to the sheer amount of **** that gets wrecked by marines... even after fixing it up so they don't insta-kill hive tyrants with bolt guns.

To run a full marine next to an acolyte, even high rank ones, you have to be very careful about what they're carrying in terms of equipment. The other thing to consider is that an astartes anywhere will stick out like dogs balls even if he's in normal clothing, so they're literally a huge liability in conventional investigations and dead weight if they stay out of sight. At some point I'll probably have them running side by side to some extent, but I'm not entirely comfortable with it happening too often.

thanks you for the help, i have decided that it would just be too much work two combine the two and it would really steal the spotlight from the acolytes but future deathwatch games that i plan to run will be related to the acolytes story