Begin A New Chapter In The Dark Heresy Saga
July 25, 2013 by brennon
Fantasy Flight Games are taking their Dark Heresy role-playing game to a new level with the 2nd Edition entering it's beta stage. Check out the snazzy new artwork below along with a little bit more information.
This new version of Dark Heresy comes with (taken from the release)...
- Streamlined skills that can be used with more than a single characteristic.
- Fast and fun character creation, with exciting variety through combinations of home worlds, backgrounds, and roles for almost endless roleplaying possibilities.
- The ability to play as an Inquisitor!
- New rules for psychic powers, with each discipline gaining its own unique psychic phenomena table.
- Talent trees that visually help players plan their character’s progression.
- Combat mechanics that give more tactical flexibility and control over performing actions.
- Damage and wound rules that make a character’s health something more than just a number, plus lots of great (and gory!) wound effect tables.
- Vehicles and vehicle combat as an integral part of the core game.
- Easier-to-use NPCs, each with a threat rating so that Game Masters can build suitably challenging encounters.
- And much more!
It certainly sounds like it should be an interesting twist on the original format and while this might make you think they are re-inventing the entire Warhammer 40,000 range have no fear, it's just Dark Heresy getting the treatment.
I like the ability to play as an Inquisitor in this newer edition. This means we're getting closer and closer to a nice playable version of the rules present in Games Workshops own Inquisitor game.
You can get yourself a copy of the beta rules through RPG Now or DriveThru RPG.
Will you be taking on the mantle of Acolyte?
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Very interesting! Been a DH player since I was involved in a playtest group for it, and I like the sound of anything that makes it more accessible – it can be pretty daunting for new players, especially seeing as how a lot of roleplaying games are moving towards greater simplicity in rules.
I’ll have to check the beta out!
Played a session of this with a first time GM (he was brilliant by the way lol) and in the first encounter where we met our Inquisitor one of our more ‘touchy’ companions turned on a newly pronounced heretic and blasted his leg off in a one-shot kill. Didn’t even begin to question him lol.
…it got us into the good books though!
On a side note this was also the campaign where our Psyker triggered so many warp events he was lucky he didn’t bring a daemon into the world. Was mental, but bloody fun.
BoW Ben
Some friends of mine played the current version (I have as yet to have the pleasure) everything was fine up until they all died in their first combat but it sounds like they’re tweaking it a bit. I’m hoping to get a game in soon so I can have an actual opinion (also I’ve been finishing up the Ravenor Omnibus).
the only thing that’s really flawed in DH is the combat mechanics, which slow the game to a crawl. My group have played for over 2 years straight now with weekly 2-3 hour sessions over Skype. We’re in the closing stages of our 5th story arc and getting closer to the 15,000xp “cap” on standard DH. I’m not sure letting players play Inquisitors right off the bat is a good idea (that’s what DH:Ascension was for), as the whole point in DH is that you start on the very bottom rung as a nobody who gets caught up in the… Read more »
I found Inquisitor was a game that didn’t know what it was and had a crisis of identity. It tried to be a role-playing game and a skirmish game all in one and some of the mechanics in the game were so needlessly complex, especially something like parrying. Could have been dealt with a lot easier than it was. I enjoyed Inquisitor don’t get me wrong but I think if you were going to do that kind of thing now it’s better to just get Dark Heresy and play through that with miniatures. I actually like the combat mechanics in… Read more »
I’d actually say that Inquisitors identity crisis came more from players approaching it from the wrong angle. Inquisitor is a skirmish battle game, intended to be played with an RPG mindset rather than a wargamer mindset – whereas most people came at it with the wargaming mindset and focused on trying to “win” rather than crafting interesting stories, hence the GM to facilitate such stories. DH is very much a super RPG, but for combat I would always prefer INQ (even if, yes, parrying was a little heavy on the maths), but it does require much more stringent physicality, whereas… Read more »
I hope it is still compatible with the other systems.
I like the idea of a threat rating for NPCs. I have a hard time as Rogue Trader GM trying to devise combat encounters that are suited to my party.
Our group is starting an Inquisitor campaign in 28mm and Im looking forward to getting back into role playing more than anything else in the hobby righ now. I know another group who play DH and they seem to be having a lot of fun with it.