SPOILER WARNING: If you're playing in my game, don't read.
END SPOILER WARNING
Well folks, I'd written months ago about what it's like to be a novice GM, documenting my experiences so you all could (blamelessly) laugh at my ineptitude. It's been a while since then, and my initial plot thread has ended, leading way to bigger and brighter things, so I thought some of you might enjoy reading how it went.
My players were drawn from my own circle of friends (and by extension, their friends) This has been great in that I made a couple of new friends. Also, when you're nervous about GMing, look at the strangers, not your buddies. You'll feel less nervous. That's my rookie GM hint I suppose. Our cell included:
Ray,my friend, was playing a tech-priest. He spoke in faux-robot the whole time, including buzzes and clicks. I wasn't overly fond of that, but hey.Daire, Ray's brother was playing the psyker. He was probably a bit too mild mannered. Daire also rolled a 9 in every single use of a psychic power but one, until he got a psy rating of 2, and started rolling only one die. Then he rolled one about 3/4 of the time.Tom, probably the least 40k literate player, was playing a cleric. This would backfire very early on.Stephanie, my best friend would be playing an assassin. She was more of a fantasy gamer than anything else. Explains the focus on swords. Last but not least, was Rory, who would play the group's guardsman. He had impeccable 40k lore and is an excellent roleplayer, but was really bummed I wasn't letting him play a fire warrior.
Things started extremely poorly. I'd never GM'd before, and only roleplayed once. It showed, my speech was clumsy, and I spent too much time stumbling over badly written descriptions of scenes, raher than letting their imaginations do the talking. I was writing stories, rather than characters, as I'd not yet received the sage advice to put characters first.
The exercise was ill-conceived, and I was worried we'd have something of a foundation built on sand. The cell were thrown together, seemingly randomly recruited, and no one had any investigation skills, which was killing me. The players made the best of it though, elevating some seemingly minor interviews and investigations into truly memorable experiences. Having said that, there were some oddly humorous slip-ups. For one, the players tracked down a workshop where they knew a heretical murder weapon had been sourced to. They asked (nicely, I might add) the shopkeeper about his business, and as soon as he claimed he was legitimate, and there were no splinter rifles decorating the walls, everyone decided to say "oh, ok sorry to bother you. We must've been misinformed." and turned to leave. I had to make one of them roll perception to notice none of the tools in the shop had been used in some time. The party's first dealings with combat were mixed. The psyker hid, the assassin killed with frightening efficiency, and the cleric, Father Mercutio, ran across the room waving his hammer to be felled by an autogun at point-blank range.(this was to repeat itself in every battle the PC's would have) Heinreich Kryptmann, the shopkeeper, was taken into custody. Little did my PC's know he was to become my Big Bad.
Things mellowed out later, once I stopped writing in regular paragraphs and bullet pointed my entire game. I was able to think up descriptions on the fly and give as much or as little detail as the PC's wanted. They also got into their characters more. The assassin reclassed herself as an underhive bounty hunter, making the acquaintance of a nobleborn gunslinger (her first contact), while the Tech-priest was snuggling up to the local AdMech, making it clear they were his first priority. Things mellowed out, there was no combat, and the leads were being generated as planned. Unfortunately, the most important leads were supposed to be generated by the one I perceived to be the best player, Rory, the guardsman. In a staggering display of ineptitude, he was given a flase ID and sent to investigate the Barbed Chalice Commissariat, as a superior officer running an inspection. He then proceeded to loot the armoury, torure new recruits, throw his weiht around, and insult the quartermaster. He also kicked in a random door and assailed an archivist, so I gave him one or two minor clues, but then failed to visit the intelligence room, and crippled the cell by not receiving the relevant data. I had no choice. My players, much as I loved them, had to be punished.
With their intelligence gather hobbled, the PC's were highly confused. Kryptmann started to go insane in custody (a by product of the halo device he was sporting) and eventually gouged out his own eyes during an interview. before his scheduled execution, he sent my players to die in a well crafted death trap, featuring an abandoned housse, a sleeping battle-servitor, and a berserker thorn. A ridiculous Emperor's Fury saved everyone after the tech priest decided that hitting anything with a spanner is a good way to find out what it does. I was a little disappointed, I wanted to cripple them. At least Fr.Mercutio was down again. The Berserker thorn is very unsettling for my PC's, it's like they all share a morbid fear of robots going berserk and attacking all of them, so I stepped its involvement in the game up, if only slightly.
They were entering endgame. They'd failed to unearth the cult proper, but were aware that the top members were granted halo devices, so were rightly suspicious of krypman's body going missing post-execution. The tension among the players was actually palpable, which I loved. Sessions had really been picking up as my skills improved, and as they in turn grew into their own characters. The PC's learned that an enormous religious festival was coming up, with cherubim being released en-masse into the streets. Of course, they couldn't police this, so the cherubim turned all nearby servitors into berserk killing machines, whereupon cult cells tore into the local PDF and Arbites. The PC's were shocked and confused.... I absolutely loved it. They broke into the local Ad-Mech temple, narrowly avoiding a fight with the cell's own tech priest, and traced the activation signal for the berserker wave to a church in the lower hive. arriving there, a furious firefight broke out with the cult (who they'd failed to suppress and disarm, hence the apocalyptic mass-murder at the parade) which saw Solaria fall, critically wounded by her own team's stray hellgun, and Mercutio finally died doing what he loved- charging into autogun fire, like a complete moron. Tom's rerolled an adept in anticipation of the next game. The PC's confronted the no-longer human Heinreich Kryptmann and *plot twist* ONE OF THEIR OWN INTERROGATORS! No one was surprised, to my disappointment, and both characters were shot before they could deliver a full villain's exposition. Kryptmann, however, being inhuman, ignored his nasty wound and proceeded to rip the group apart, critically wounding almost everyone. A perils of the warp roll from the psyker brought forth a demon, but since he had forbidden knowledge (the warp) and was willing to burn not one, but 2 fate points, I let him direct the entity into the body of the newly expired cleric. He's gotten a metric tonne of corruption for doing so, but it meant my first exercise in complete and total improvisation with no preplanning whatsoever. The newly arisen priest engaged kryptmann in battle, the cell ran like hell, all of them barring the psyker unaware of what had really happened. They sped away as all the windows in the church exploded, and have no idea what happened. They debriefed their interrogator, who will now set about finding out how inept they are. The psyker is having blackouts, during which I'll have him cover up his own mess and make the cell seem more competent (essentially matching wits with the interrogator-in his sleep). The cell has no idea what happened to kryptmann, his berserker array, or Mercutio, but I have a feeling their next mission will be to investigate the massive warp disturbance registered at ground zero...
Everyone loved the final session and has asked the game continue- what choice do I have? The tale of the final battle was something all of my players were telling their friends about in the bar the next day, so I know I did something right.
Welcome aboard. You've officially been pimped. <SNAP>