I've had trouble finding any dates in the Only War book. The timelines that were released for Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader were very nice to have and I'd love to see one for Only War. Anyway, what would be the starting Imperial year for the events of the Only War corebook?

Anybody? Is it around 815 or 816.M41? About the time of the Dark Heresy corebook?

817.M41, actually. They drop a mention in Hammer of the Emperor. I'd been wondering too!

Thanks Spinner! I like to place my games within the framework of the game designers as much as I can since they have been so good about adding new content. What are your thoughts about the Hammer of the Emperor book? Does it add a significant amount of new story background?

I quite like it, actually! There's a lot of fun stuff in there - background for some of the Fantasy Flight homegrown regiments, which was great to read. The Brontian Longknives are a little more terrifying than I'd though (they're big fans of ritual scarification), and the Scintillan Fusiliers work great if you need someone on-base for the squad to hate. There's no big expansion for the worlds in the Spinward Front, but there's a lot of little nods to other things, like a story throughout the book in the style of the just-recruited Guardsman's account of a regimental founding making a veiled allusion to the Achilus Crusade. Lots of little winks and nods to Eleventh Hour in the Scintillan write-up, too. Mostly crunch, but there's good fluff if you know where to look.

My favorite part was definitely the new regiment rules, though. There's one horrifically expensive regimental type that gives everyone in the squad a Sentinel as part of standard kit! There's rules for creating Rough Rider mounts and different patterns of standard equipment, too, which look interesting enough to try out and help build regimental flavor.

Sencho said:

Dark Heresy takes place ~815M41. The GM's section doesn't say when it has to take place, other than to say that the GM should decide if it is before, after, or during the events in the Apostasy Gambit trilogy from Dark Heresy (as the events are to monumentous to have gone unnoticed).