I don't know the exact numbers, but IIRC the adverse affects of Insanity Points do not manifest until you have tens of them. Once you rack up 10, then 20 points, you must roll for temporary mental trauma, but the real phobias and disorders don't came into play until you have lots and lots of Insanity Points (40+).

Same with Corruption. Unless you have 31-60 points, nothing really matters.

Point is: my acolytes are now Rank 6, pressing 7, and they have nowhere near that amount of points. One has 19 IP, one has around 10 CP, but that's it. Most have far less.

Is this your experience too? or do your players rack em up more quickly? It's not like you roll for them often and sometimes the pcs even make their Fear checks and Willpower tests succesfully.

In a Rogue Trader game I run, the Explorator NPC that goes with the group gained 15 Insanity Points last session (It could have been worse, since the maximun she could have learned were 25) and 3 Corruption Points, giving her a total of 31 Insanity and 5 Corruption... That's what you get for trying to download information from a Men of Iron computer into your Cortex Implant's Cogitator. Totally worth it, tough, since they used the information to discover where the Men of Iron buildings where in the Island and they nuked them from orbit one by one.

Now, for Dark Heresy, I suppose it really depends on what your Acolytes will face. If they only fight and interact with humans or mad cultists, they will never face much creatures with Fear, so they won't be gaining much Insanity nor Corruption. On the other hand, if you are cannon fodder for the Ordo Malleus, you better be prepared to face terrible creatures all the time.

It's also worth noticing that in DH you may gain Corruption and/or Insanity just for learning certain Forbidden Lore skills (the text that describes the skill says so), or maybe due to reading some forbidden book.

The Laughing God said:

Eh? Malignancies are brutal.

You're probably Doing It Wrong

So did I for a long time, until I read and re-read the rules for dishing out these points.

Insanity first:

Whenever you fail a Fear test, there is a chance you will gain Insanity Points. Fear tests are not just from Psykers with their Fearful Auras or Deamons, it can be many things, the book gives a few examples (p233):

Disturbing (0) Viewing the scene of a gruesome murder, minor unknown supernatural or psychic phenomena—strange
lights, spectral voices, weeping statues, etc.
Frightening (–10) Meeting someone you know to be dead, being buried alive, major supernatural or psychic phenomena—
the skies raining blood, a painting forming shrieking mouths, etc.
Horrifying (–20) Sudden, shocking and inexplicable death (the man next to you on the shuttle suddenly dies, vomiting
maggots), hideous moments of revelation (finding yourself covered in blood, surrounded by bodies with a meat cleaver in
your hand and no memory of how you got there), the dead rising across a whole planet, etc.

So if you have a Psyker in your party, there is a good chance that many of his unavoidable Psychic phenomena will let you dish out IPs to everyone. And viewing scenes of gruesome murders should happen at least once every session, right? There is a reason why PCs should pick up the Jaded talent.

As for Corruption, it is a little more tricky.

Psykers tend to attract these the most, as every time they roll a Peril of the Warp, they get 1 CP. That one is easy to miss, but regardless of what the effect may be, they get 1 CP in addition to any other they may pick up as a result of Mass Posessions etc.

Warp Shock can cause corruption of you like letting your players face warp beasties, and they fail the Fear test these nasties cause. If you're going light on the deamons (as I have done, preferring more "low key" and human opponents), you will have to resort to Sorcery rituals and forbidden research to "award" CPs.

One of my Acolytes who is a tech-priest have come into the possession of a fragment from a Man of Iron which was confiscated from a heretek Techpriest. Needless to say is that I'm hoping to have him either add it as an implant on himself or somehow connect it with a ship's cognitor. If I can manage this I can be sure that insanity will follow and it will be one hell of a ride.

You could also consider including some tainted environments into the adventure. I'm not talking about daemon worlds or mind-bending xenos ruins (PC's wil be aware about moral danger lurking there, and will take precautions); instead, the taint must be subtle and not evident from the start.

For example:

- A street in the underhive (in)famous for a high number of violent murders could be paved with rocks taken from the ruins of Gehemahnet tower;

- Mirrors in the noble house's summer palace - supposedly blessed by a pious imperial priest - could in reality be cursed by a demented sorcerer;

- Loud-speaker system newly installed throughout the hive-city streets could be wired up to play unholy litanies' fragments at certain times.

And so on. The effects of exposure must probably be kept hidden by GM, since players subjected to the taint are supposedly unaware of its presence. So instead of simply telling something like "you all gain N corruption / insanity points due to wandering in the wrong place at the wrong time" GM should keep a secret track of accumulated "hilarity", only giving players some indirect hints. I.e., he could describe terrible nightmares the players endure the following night, or tell about the constant sense of violation they experience...

Something like that. Just keep in mind that the effects of such taint should be minor - 1 CP/IP per day of exposure, no more - and then the points should only be dished out after a (failed) secret WP roll.

I use two houserules one is from ancien wfrp 1st ed.

1. pc's get 1 insanity for every critical hit they receive

2. named pc's bounce back to -1 crit (so its not cumulative) after e.g. a -5 crit hit (keeping stuff like blood-loss, limb-loss and death in regards of course).

Thanks for the tip about 1CP per PotW roll. didn't know that. Then again, my acolytes have involuntary entered a demonpack that keeps them from dying (for now) and nicely stacks up the CP...

Sorry for potentially being stupid and ignorant but isn't Corrupion strictly a warp thing in the system? That's the impression I had from that section anyway.

Technically it really is.

But since the daemon is sort of a warp-spawn, the pact with it will surely result in a large amount of CP's for players involved (2d10 springs to mind), as will any subsequent dealings with the "patron". Check out the DM section of the core rulebook - the part talking about unholy pacts, daemonhosts and other weirdness; it's all there, if memory serves

wolph42 said:

Actually, that rule only applied to damage done to the head in WHF 1st. I don't see why a burned feet could make you go crazy.

But it was still a good rule.

Why is the semi-noble knight who orders everybody around talking to himself?

Oh, he's taken a few too many knocks on the head

Gurkhal said:

Not Strictly: IP and CP can result by severe failing of WP rolls for fear.

Maese Mateo said:

You don't? I think it makes sense - severe physical trauma can be... well, traumatising.

I think it mostly comes down to how the GM implements them. The system itself doesn't provide many sources of IP or CP outside of certain creatures (fear auras etc), but it's implied that you're meant to throw them at PCs for certain circumstances. Different GMs will or won't apply IP in those circumstances. For example, walking into a room where a group of cultists sacrificed a dozen people in a spectacularly gory manner - one GM won't give any IP, one might give 1, another might give D10 or 1 for every degree of failure on a WP test. Another GM might give out IP for PCs trapped in a trench during a sustained artillery barrage, for watching as Genestealers rip apart (or infect) a group of civilians, or for sitting through a particularly terrible poetry reading.

I never just give them IP, they get them only if they fail their Tests. But according to the ROW you can only get IP in non-combat situatiions if you fail a Wp Test with more than 3 degrees of failure. That does not happen a lot.

For CP one could say that merely being exposed to the source of corruption is enough to warrant them. I've read in some published adventures that performing acts of needless cruelty or depraved violence could also rack up some CP, even if no Warp exposure has happened. How are you handling this?

Radwraith said:

That only work for Fear tests from daemons, which are warp entities (it's even called Warp Shock in the book).

That's Courruption Points.

Insanity points can very well be gained from failing a Fear test resulting from entering a grisly crime scene with body parts liberally scattered around.

I refer to p232:

In addition, if a non-combat Fear Test is failed by 30 or
more, the character also gains +1d5 Insanity Points.

and the Very Bad Things sidebar on p 233

Darth Smeg said:

If you look at the two texts I quoted, you'll see:

Poster 1: Isn't Corruption a Warp-only stuff.

Poster 2:Not strickly, you can get Insanity and Corruption from failing WP rolls.

I thought it was important to make clear that you can only get CP from failed WP tests against daemons, since that's what Poster 1 asked (and Poster 2 said that you could gain CP from stuff non-related to the warp).

Darth Smeg said:

30 or more, that rarely happens, when players still have fate points and such.

The Laughing God said:

It''s reasonably common, actually, depending on how often they have to make Fear tests obviously.

With a party of starting characters forced to make Fear tests most will probably have a greater chance of failing by 30 or more than succeeding (succeed on 31 or less, fail by 30 or more on 61+). That means that every time they have to take a fear test 1 or 2 will probably fail by that much. Sure they may have a chance to reroll, but there''s still a decent chance they''ll fail - and that''s assuming they have any fate points left to use. If they have to make more than one fear test per adventure then they''ll quickly start racking up IP.

While their WP will go up as they advance the fear tests will probably become more difficult.

I actually found fear to be ridiculously effective in my campaigns, with entire parties shitting themselves regularly, so I changed the default difficulty to Very Easy (+30).

The Laughing God said:

Actually, it happens all the time unless you have a Cleric/Missionary with Pure Faith to shield himself from Fear and some power to do the same for his allies.

The standard, a Fear 2 daemon, imposes a -10 to the Willpower Test plus another -10 from Daemonic Presence for a total of -20. An everage DH character has WP 30, which means he has 10% of succeeding the Fear Test. That''s 20% with Fate Point for a +10, and you could re-roll for another Fate Point…there are more chances that you fail for 30 or more than you have of succeeding, even with 2 Fate Points.

A Fear 3 daemon (like the DH core Daemonette) imposes a -30 so the average DH character has 0% chances of succees (10% with Fate Point).

So, players are going to fail their Fear Tests more times than succeeding them.

Until players gain access to Fearless and Resistance (Fear) or Unshakable Faith talents.

*Resistance (Fear) or Unshakable Faith talents: +10 and a free re-roll for a sh*tty roll is still a sh*tty roll. On average you have 10% (20% with Fate Points) of succeeding a Fear 3 Test.

*Fearless: Sure, you are now inmunte to Fear but also can't withdraw from combat. 10 daemons attack you, you are dead because you stay and fight.

Funny as it is, the best way to be immune to Fear is by accumulating Insanity Points. =P

I think Laughing God in living in a parallel world where there is no math.

Let's do the math. Willpower 40 character with Resistance (Fear) sees a Fear 3 Daemon. He's in the Daemonic Presence area,

His chance to succeed is 40 + 10 (Resistance (Fear)) = 50 - 20 (Fear 3) - 10 (Daemonic Presence) = 20%. On average, he will fail with 3 Degrees of Failure. On an average roll on the Shock Table, he will roll 50 + 30 = 80, the result of which is "the character is frozen by terror… the character gains 1d5 Insanity Points."

If he has Unshakable Faith as well, he gets a reroll, which he has a 20% chance of making, His chance of failing both rolls (my math is bad, but I think I'm doing this right) is 64%. His chance of succeeding in the Fear Test is a grand 36%,

Youre missing the point I'm making. But I like your parallel world.

I just got to a lvl 6 with my guardsmen and have 17 insanity points and 9 corruption points. Our GM assign points a bit differently. We gain insanity points as a result of fear, stress, trauma etc., so as a result of some terrible situation or view. We gain corruption points mostly for actually discovering corruption in the system or in ourselves, not from seeing a daemon. To give you some examples:

I got insanity points for the following: seeing a xenos race for the first time, seeing a place of gruesome murder, being almost killed, witnessing psychic fenomena, fighting a daemon, being thrown into flames and more…

And I got corruption points for the following: being hypnotized by a xenos race, finding out high inquisitor of the sub-sector is actually a daemon, blowing up a space station, interrogation and enjoying it…

As you can see, we interpret the corruption as an actual corruption of the system or our personality or our soul. It is not directly bound to the warp stuff.