Playing with Minds

Creepy people were cropping up left, right, and centre in Dark Heresy. The players met a biologicus techpriest heretek called Greimolt who had a grand master plan complex, partially revealing all his gruesome experiments to the acolytes before luring them into a trap. As the old Imperial saying goes: Trust is a prerequisite of betrayal! I wanted Greimolt to leave an impression, which I think he did. I wanted to make his insectoid appearance betray his alien mindset. I think I suceeded, but who knows what goes through the twisted minds of your players?

One player almost killed him with a shotgun blast to the head! Unfortunately for the players, Greimolt managed to escape and the acolytes were unable to follow. So he could become a recurring villain - although, the universe is a big place so they might never seem him again.

The players also disagreed with each other when they were presented with the choice to betray a group of outlaws who let them live in return for their confidence. One player wants to betray that confidence while the other thinks they shouldn't.

Now that they've left the planet Siculi, I'm hoping I can reign my own campaign in to the locations that scream "Warhammer 40,000" to me. While Siculi demonstrated, perhaps, the toil that the faceless mass workforce of the Imperium endures - it didn't symoblise, to me, the grim darkness and underlying madness of the Imperial mindset. You couldn't apply the wacky Imperial proverbs to situations and locations that the players inhabited.

I should think I could make Siculi fit in with my idea of 40k more easily if I had more experience with GMing Dark Heresy. The guys are enjoying it, but a lot of my ideas are visual in nature and I can't really get those ideas across in a few sentences. By the time I'm done fully describing a certain scene, the players would have forgotten the descriptions I'd started with and might even be at a loss to remember why they were where they stood.

They're desperate to know what The Diocletian is.

And apparently I'm a woman beater or something. That's right, a woman beater. Me.

As I was waiting for a colleague who was giving me a lift home on Friday, one of the teachers (with whom I have been naught but friendly) said "Getcher hands out of your pockets, boy!" in a jesting manner. When I complied, she suddenly dived away from me, barrelling into the door. Of course, my face wore an expression of surprise. "I thought you were going to hit me!" she says. I could express only puzzlement bordering on alarm. She did say, afterwards, "I know you're not a violent person." but if that's the case then why did she flinch so?

When I related this tale to some friends of mine over dinner they had a good laugh, of course. Then I asked "Do people really think I would just attack someone like that?" to which the reply was "Well you do look like you could just... you know... go crazy." What? This escalated until I was described as having "a killer's eyes" and "blood on [my] hands" and so on. First I knew of it.

PS: The F.E.A.R. 2 demo was pretty trippy. Awesome graphics, Crysis-parallel stuff (it beats Crysis in my opinion because it runs at such a better frame rate), but it's just more F.E.A.R. and nothing really new.