When I run a game of dark heresy I find that I have difficulty describing or even handling all the things that are just absolutely massive. Which interestingly enough I notice is most of the setting. It's not a big space ship… no it has a crew of 20k. It's not a cathedral it's fortress that holds non-stop sermons for 10,000 at a time. The place the players need to investigate? That's big too. Need to attack some place? Best to soften it with artillery first because this place is meant to withstand a riot from 4,000 much less 4.

So while my game runs I notice I just have this grinding feeling in my head whenever I describe some thing on the fly. Then my brain starts to process how massive it must be and all the implications of it. I'm sure the trailing off and the scuzzy drive noises coming from my skull add a lot to the enjoyment of the session for my players but I personally would love some tips!

So let's hear it. How do you handle scale? Both in describing it and handling how it would obviously impact missions.

(Awhile back they needed to park their car on a hive world and I realized that even a parking garage would be an engineering marvel on a world with a population of 20 billion all packed within a few massive megastructures)

The way I do it is to pull things back a little to a scale I'm more familiar with. i.e. cheat. Basically I treat a hive is a big collection of shopping malls, appartment blocks, office blocks and factories with a roof over them. Think of batman or spiderman scenes in new york, and put buttressed arches or a roof on top. Use atmospherics like smog to limit the true extent of the place.

Throw in some massive statues, well-shafts and grand vistas and you're there.

Describe the scale, focus on what matters.

Don't get lost or overwhelmed by the scale of things. Keep focused on what is important for the players, leave the rest of the scene to the players imagination. They will fill in the gaps better than you can, and they may add to it with questions they ask you.

Describe three major features that are important to you and fill in anything the players ask about. Keep it general and vague. Everything has certain traits that will always be there and depending on your players they will know these and start running with them.

EX: The Cathedral of the Twelve Spires is a massive Gothic Imperial cathedral a mile to each side and three miles tall. Twelve impossibly thin spires stretch out to the sky, covered with statues of saints that loom over the populace below. The massive main doors are each 100 feet tall and allow 10,000 of the Emperors faithful to enter and exit the main hall unimpeded every hour on the hour.

So what we have:
- massive cathedral a mile to a side and 3 miles tall
- twelve spires, covered in statuary
- an array of main doors that allow huge numbers of people in and out constantly

Things to keep in mind:
- something designed to keep out 4,000 isn't going to keep out 4
- allow the players plan a chance to succeed
- a huge structure requires huge maintenance and security, this means gaps to exploit
- those impossibly thin spires, as seen from the ground, are probably big enough to land a small transport on
- redundancy and automation are the life blood of a hive (think automated car park ala iRobot)

For truly mindstaggering scales, remember that a picture tells you more then a thousand words. For example, the dooropening to that Cathedral would look very impressive when you put a character into it on scale.

In gameterns that same doorway would impose a grand obstacle when you try to enter when it is closed and locked. Blowing your way through a massive door that weighs thousands of tons of massive adamantine would require some impressive firepower. (Ever seen movies about atomic shelters and their doors?) Firepower that is not likely to be found in the hands of the acolytes. However, there will undoubtly be smaller scale doors that are for the convenience of the staff or visitors and those can be breached more easily and after some guardrooms and tunnels you would enter through another small door inside the Cathedrals Apex. Never mind that it is big enough to make a convenient hangar for a dozen 747's

Go ahead and describe the staggering scale of the Imperium to set the mood, but contrive reasons to limit the 'action' to manageable locations. If the mission takes lpace in a hive city, for instance, by all means describle the massive spires, built up century after century like a colosal coral reef, with a dizzying maze of arteria carrying uncountable thousands of faceless dregs to and from each back-breaking workshift… but when the Acolytes finally locate the suspected heretic they are looking for, make it occur in a small, cramped tavern.

-And if you need a break from the oppressive huge-ness of the Imperium, just send your players on a mission to a Frontier World, and relax in some D&D-scale environs for a while…

Really appreciate the help guys. What about the villians? In one of my games the villian is a man within the Eccliesarchy. He's a corrupt individual who investigates "the unfaithful" and exacts punishments on them. Being 40k of course he has whole hab blocks that would do his bidding or else suffer some extreme punishment.

This guy has so many mooks between him and them. Originally I didn't think this would be a big deal but I realize he's difficult to "touch" at least physically. When they finally get the evidence proving he's a traitor I imagine the players would find it much more satisfying to meet out justice personally instead of just calling in the authorities to make the arrest.

More tips!

Depending on how high this man is in the hierarchy the normal removal of him could become problematic. He could rule the equivalent of a town to a large country such as the USA. Trying to get him out could result in things like the hunt for isama bin laden, the defeat of the third reich and possible even worse.

In such cases, Assasination seems to be the most logical solution. The Empire did create an office just for that. The officio Assasinarum. However, if they want to do it themselves the pc's would need to sneak in, think about cold war spy movies and books for inspiration. It would involve inflitration into hostile environments, false papers, hidden weaponry and quite possible a logn investigation to find your target without triggering his equivalent of the KGB. Then when they hound him to his stronghold it would be guarded by thousands of loyal priests, flagellants, clergy and well trained soldiers. A frotal assault with anything less then an IG company or a Deathwatch kill team is suicide. So once more they will have to sneak in without causing an alarm. Get their target and manage their escape.

I have been in a teram with just this problem. In then end it became a Hive-wide fight, involving the PDF, the IG, A platoon of Space Marines, lots of crazed cultists, a couple of demons and a holy relic from that same SM chapter to put things right. At which time we all hit Ascension levels and the Campaign finished but it was a great climax!

Alternatively, the players might decide they can't take the enemy head on and use more…. underhanded… approach.

For example, they can worm their way up into the inner circle of the heretic in question (they ARE acolytes of the Inquisition and therefore are bound to be resourceful enough to rise high and fast through the cult's ranks). Or they can set up the heretic to actually look like one, using infiltration & sabotage skills and a little bit of… ahem, sorcery… to stage enough damning incidents to actually overthrow the villain.

And, at last, there is always the possibility of organizing and staging an uprising (a War of Faith of sorts, if you like) against the cur. There is some poetic beauty when a heretic is ripped to shreds by a mob of frenzied mutants doing the dirty work of the Emperor… the very same mutants who will be cut down later by the almighty Holy Inquisition later. One shot, two kills

Outright heresy aside, try introducing the "Hide, Seek, Exterminate & Get Away With It" elements into the gameplay, as Sister Callidia already suggested, and you'll be fine.

Hmm… A lot of the suggestions focus around being sneaky. I notice careers like the guardsman are not particularly good at that sort of thing. I could try being more lenient.

I remember playing another roleplaying game where the hacking was very easy. Per the game design no encryption would stand up to an attack by any one given enough time. The better they were the faster it would go. The game actually had a sub section where they looked at the implications of the rules on the setting. Being that obviously the security technology was just absolutely not up to snuff. Much like how it was difficult to defend against guns until modern body armor appeared much much later.

I suppose I could at that same time conclude that my 40k setting has woefully pitiful security practices and the techniques and tools to protect all these places are just not adequate. It's not because they aren't trying to keep people out it's just that the scale of the situation is used against them. Good food for thought.

Thanks everyone I think I know where to go with this "Scale" business now.

The scale of the setting matters, but the timbre, tone, and scale of what the PCs are doing matters as well. If you are worried about things being to big in scale in terms of opponents, such as your ecclesiarch with hab blocks under his control, that may be because they are (at least for Dark Heresy). Acolytes don't bring a lot to the table, even high level ones.

Therefore, I'd either break their mission down into smaller steps, like replacing a mid-level priest under that ecclesiarch with one of their own, or consider one of the alternative systems: Rogue Trader or Ascension. Ascension is built for larger conspiracies, and RT is built for much grander scope as well. That's all just the plot elements though, what about the geography you ask?

Sure, the vista of a "scene" in one mission may be huge. Let's look at something I ran in one of my games: a planetary outpost on a death world. The environment couldn't support life so the Imperium built a huge dome on the planet. The dome itself is miles across (on the inside) and thousands of people live there, but when the PCs walk into the equivalent of a hotel, that's still human scale. When they need to go to the massive Mechanicus Librarium across the dome, they have to deal with finding transportation and getting inside the Librarium, but once they're inside the book shelves and aisles are still human scale, they're just thousands of shelves (due to the size). Eventually the scale matches the people who created it: humans. The question/challenge is just where you find that scale within the enormity.