Hi!

Any character at Black Crusade starts with a long heretical way after him/her, 7000 xp can be earnt in several years. So, I was thinking about starting at 0 xp, with the Dark Heresy book (as it uses characters from 0 to 14k xp) with some major twitches (Black Crusade Rules and habilities).
My idea is to start with a world recovering for the wounds of a Chaos invasion, when some Imperial servants (The PCs) realize how monstrous is the Imperium, maybe through watching IG tactics about men-waves directed to death, its despicable actitude about the servants and in favour of nobility...The Imperium most visible defects.

The first problem would be 0 Infamy-->0 Infamy points-->Instant Death by Arbitres maze.
As a solution, I though of giving the PCs a daemon artifact with little power, but enough to keep them alive as long as they keep the daemon fed. The daemon will also work as a source of power and a hook to keep them united.

The campaign will go from every Heretic begining, the time when an Imperial Servant starts thinking by him/herself. So the PCs will start from gathering followers, producing home-made weapons, and then will go to harness Corrupted Arbitres Cadres and finally, they will command a Planetary Uprising.

Of course, Chaos Space Marines wont be available as starting PCs (they have far to experience even as newly converted Marines)

So, what do you think?

DISCUSS!

Well,

If you are interested, I posted my world and setting here

Hope this helps!

Well,

If you are interested, I posted my world and setting here

Hope this helps!

Problems await you. DH used a completely different pricing scale for advancements, and some things got rolled into implants, so the careers from DH will end up all over the place on the power scale of BC. Not to mention, some careers are going to look pretty poor once you excise all the skills that are now rolled into bigger skills, and take out the talents that don't have BC counterparts.

If you really want to run a low-tier game about heretical beginnings, just run a DH game sans the Inquisition. Use the modified Corruption rules from Radicals Handbook to make the Chaos more alluring. Then, when you think you've had enough of such a prelude, close the story, and let the players reroll their characters using proper BC rules. Don't use the character conversion rules, they are horrid, just let them start anew with their old character in mind.

This way, you have your game of lowly heretics without all the trouble of balancing a crossover. Which is a pain in the butt for 40k games - they claim to be balanced around summary experience levels, but they're all over the place.

I think it would be much, much simpler to just start with normal BC characters, and run the campaign from there. Other than that, it seems like a really cool idea.

DJSunhammer said:

That's definitely the preferred method. Starting Heretics may be pretty high in terms of experience, but they're not high enough to dismiss the perils of an Imperial Underhive, let alone all the institutions out for their blood.

Also, this whole exp comparison thing falls flat when you consider in each system, the same Talents and Skills are priced differently. DH starting characters wouldn't still be 400 exp if the game used BC's costs.

It actually wouldn't be too hard, you just have to write some new archetypes and reduce the starting stats to 20 and use the advancement system as is, you maybe wont end up quite at 0xp but you can get close. Id probably give the player 1000xp to start with instead of 400 due to the different pricing. Thats actually one of the nice things about this system as its quite easy to change the starting power levels.

Kaihlik