Heavy Reading

I don't remember the last time I read so much. Taking in all the material in the Dark Heresy rulebook is currently occupying some seventy to eighty percent of my free time. I've just finished reading the chapter on "Playing The Game" so now I'm on to "The Game Master" which should be a very important chapter since I'm going to be the one running this game. After that there are chapters on "Life in the Imperium", "The Inquisition", and "The Calixis Sector". I might very well read the example adventure too since it will give me an idea about the kind of structure a Dark Heresy game should have.

I didn't even read the WFRP rulebook as much as I've read this one. I suppose I never really ran the game so I didn't need to be an encyclopedia and I had my own Dungeons and Dragons campaign to work on at the time.

Having enjoyed the setting of Warhammer 40,000 for over a decade now, I've picked up quite a lot of background information on it. But there are still so many things I keep discovering while reading Dark Heresy. And not one thing seems out of place or cooked up as a last minute detail. The Warhammer 40k setting is just so deep and diverse, and there is a Lovecraftian air of hopelessness that hangs over everything. At one point I was entertaining thoughts of starting a WFRP campaign (but not one set in the Old World) and after three or four sessions of fighting chaos cultists, one of the Black Ships lands out in a field near the players' hometown and they get picked up as Acolytes because of their victories over the aforementioned cult.

The diversity is such that you can have your campaign, or even just a single adventure, set on a world infested with dinosaurs hunted by the locals who used spears and longbows, or a feudal world in which only knights may use the "holy lasguns", or a hive world teeming with exotic inhabitants, dangerous mutants, rebellious gangsters, world-wearing bounty hunters, and cut-throat nobles, or a cathedral world run by the ecclesiarchy, or a war world struck by the terror of constant battle in the 41st millennium, or a cemetary world littered with mausoleums and graves, or a death world covered in unforgiving jungle, endless swamps, active volcanos, or violent meteor storms, or a forge world of the adeptus mechanicus... there are so many possibilities. And those are just some settings; what about plots, antagonists, intrigue, dark secrets, support characters, and the Inquisition itself. Each element is so rich with potential for diversity.

So, yeah, I'm getting more and more excited about actually playing it. But that might not happen for a while since there is so much to read and plan. I know my players will want to play as soon as possible but I don't want to rush it. There were elements of my D&D campaign that I had to rush - and you could tell.

In other news I've played the demo of The Witcher and I'm definitely going to get it once I've gotten my hands on, and played, Fallout 3. The reason I won't get it until then is because once Fallout 3 comes out I'll not want to do much except play it (unless it somehow turns out to be abysmal), and if I'm part way through The Witcher at that point then it'll likely ruin the experience. It's the first game (apart from Tomb Raider - kind of) I've heard of that has been remastered so to speak. As in, they released The Witcher Enhanced Edition with rewritten and rerecorded dialogue, improved quests and GUI, etc. just because CDProjekt thought they could improve on an already impressive game.

There are some things that I really liked about The Witcher. Things like the non-human racism, the fanatical zeal of the religious types, the variety of characters and the interaction with them, the importance of alchemy to Geralt, the lack of superawesomemagicflamingswords, the day/night cycle, the meditating, the hostile villagers... of course there were one or two things that stung me. Like the fact that monsters seem to run around everywhere you go (at night anyway), so you have a monster-heavy world like your typical D&D setting. Running around the same village over and over got tiring when I had to travel from one side of it to the other. It wouldn't have been so bad but Geralt has a thing for fences and won't vault over them to take a shortcut.