Dark Heresy

[Ranokin]

Does nobody play this here? I got my first taste of it recently and I desperately require more.
So, I want to see if the Dark Heresy community on fantasy grounds is a hibernating beast or completely non-existent. No specifics on time yet, just testing the waters.

[Dr_Babylon]

Have never played. Would tremendously appreciate the opportunity. Notion of desperate characters with deck stacked against them very appealing. Madness, betrayal and doom a near certainty. At least, that's how I read it.

Understand players are more common in European timezones.

I suppose this isn't much help to you...

Dr Babylon

[Ranokin]

The player characters in Dark Heresy are in a unique position as acolytes of the inquisition. On most imperial worlds the Acolytes have a tremendous amount of authority, and can usually requisition whatever support they need from the local governing body, from hardware to soldiers.

At other times, the Acolytes are undercover and can not afford to expose their position in the inquisition, there could be many reasons for this, perhaps they wish to infiltrate the society of the world they are on, or perhaps the locals are hostile to imperials.

The Acolytes themselves are not anything too special. Mere mortals fighting against just the slightest influence of the dark gods of chaos. Were they to truly attract the Chaos Gods attention, even the weakest daemon of the warp can drive men insane just by being seen.

The enemy is incomprehensible in nature and vast in power, you've certainly got your work cut out for you.

[Dr_Babylon]

One wishes to be damn certain of how much authority the Inquisition holds in a system before invoking its name. When pursuing corruption one's footing is seldom as stable as one would hope. For some reason, this makes me think of Apocalypse Now / Heart of Darkness. The jaded man pushed beyond limits he didn't realize still existed.

Then there's the thought that you can't dig in the muck without getting dirty. Something about serving the light but walking in shadow to do so. Always liked the Imperial Psyker path. At best, a valuable resource when applied correctly but feared and even despised (at least in the beginning). I've said it before and I'll say it again: sometimes monsters must be slain by monsters. Interesting to me to explore the motivations of a character in that position. If not principles or will, what drives them on?

Forgive me. The hour is late and I have become somewhat more melodramatic than usual.

Dr Babylon

[Ranokin]

Psykers were very appealing to be at first, but I have heard terrible horror stories of what happens when psychic powers go awry. One in particular has stuck in my mind:

Wall of text incoming.


Having to point a kill-squad at women, children, screaming men, and everything in-between, seemed to do the trick and help the psykers player understand her responsibility. She still ended up getting Mass Possession once for something pointless though... in a hive no less... at least it was a section used for storage more then anything, but it still had an impact.

While she was the only PC present and managed to get out of the zone of corruption after only 2 rounds by going down really fast, I still didn't want such a breach to end as a "lol, what a close one" moment. Their PC's next mission: clean up a possible warp incursion at the location the psyker messed up. Due to a web of favours owed and the needs of the cells Inquisitor, their Interrogator knew what/who had caused the incursion but destroyed that evidence. He still needed all other parties that were in the area "censored" and he couldn't use any official channel to do such, otherwise it could come back that the psyker was involved and that would only make their on-going sticky situation even stickier. End result: the team had to hunt down 22 civilians who had been identified as being in the region of the psyker's mishap and murder (censor) them... and I made sure it was absolutely brutal.

The team helped the psyker identify and track down each citizen that had been in the area, but that is where they stopped, in the other room. They knew who's fault this was and she was going to have to clean up her own mess. There were a good few pathetic combatants and would-be serial killers thanks to the daemons in their thoughts but their were also a handful of incredibly "hard" murders scattered throughout. A priest who they found in his chambers whipping pustulous flesh from his back sobbing sobbing out prayers of penance. He just told the psyker he knew why she had come and thanked her for finally arriving. He turned his back and began praying waiting for her to deliver the Emperors Mercy. That one's sad state got to her as she realized she was most definitely the one who did that to him and the reason he had to die now. The other "hard ones" weren't so easy. There was a lone mother of 4 children who would probably die without her, two children that I thought would be the end-all-be-all of painfully hard to kill, but it turned out that a 14 year-old girl was the one that hit the psyker the hardest -she also turned out being the most brutal of the murders... er "censorships".

The girl had ran from her hab terrified of what things she had begun to see and think since that strange indecent and ended up running to her illegal love, a young apprentice-technomat greaser who's work-gang preformed sacred maintenance-rites on macrohaulers that passed through their district (he was a gas station attendant in other words ;-) ). Together, they had hatched a plan to stow away on a macrohauler and leave that dark hive behind for one of the miraculous and exotic "other-places on the out-and-out" that he had heard tails of from the crews of the macrohaulers.

The team eventually caught up to the girl the night before she would be departing and, while the rest distracted her boyfriend's work-gang, she snuck in to where the two love-birds were sleeping. While cloaked in darkness and chameleon, began using Constrict on the girl so as not to alert the entire technomat compound... at least limited the number of dice she rolled. I think that's what ended up making it so bloody brutal though as the girl kept making her Toughness checks after a round or two leaving the psyker to just constrict her again, and again, and again. She eventually choked the girl to death, but not before she had stumbled half way across the room, then flopped and twitched almost the rest of the way to a weird mechanical shrine to the God-Emperor, her face turning a purplish hue, strange ready croaks and quacks coming from her throat past froth coated lips as she clawed at her own neck to try and breath. The few respites she was granted before the psyker applied constrict again were filled with her pleads and prayers for help all the while the technomat tried to help her, to force air into her throat, prayed to the Emperor for help, screamed for the Emperor to help, threw things at the assumed spirits assailing his girl, tried to attack those spirits with his las-cutter, all to no avail -he never did spot the psyker cloaked and hiding. Once the girl had stopped twitching and thrashing for a good few minutes and the technomat was laying across her sobbing, she quietly slipped out of the room and rejoined the rest of the team who had been busy keeping the rest of the work-gang distracted.

After the rather drawn-out and brutal choking of the girl, the player looked at me hallow eyed and said that she couldn't believe no one had stopped her character from doing that, that she actually just strangled that girl to death. She felt quite dirty after that and did state that it was almost too intense and would have been if it hadn't been for the lighter more comedic interludes and other scenes I broke the more vicious murders up with. However, her psyker didn't use a single power for 2 sessions after that and the first thing she bought when she hit rank 6 was Favoured by the Warp.