20 Years Later
In 1987 Games Workshop published the first edition of Warhammer 40´000. Subtitled “Rogue Trader”, this seemed like a natural opportunity to field a role-playing game in the imaginatively dark universe.
However, the concept of trading, and basically anything apart from pure war, stayed absent for two decades, with the company firmly concentrating on nothing but miniatures-based games.
After a long gestation period Black Industries released Dark Heresy this week.
The hefty book weighs in at 400 pages, but manages to be very thin on some content (list of adversaries is ridiculously short), at least on a first cursory glance. There’s lots of background information, and rules seem to be further streamlined from the reworked fantasy game published a couple of years ago. But if past performance is any indication, the prolific publisher will waste very little time flooding the market with supplements.
Otto Sinisalo:
In the Future there is ONLY WAR!
Got this off the Local Store yesterday. Pretty book, good design and the choice to focus only on the Inquisition Adepts narrows it down nicely for those of us who haven’t read every issue of White Dwarf. We’ll see how it works when and if I get a gaming group together.
What I love about WH40K is that it’s basically a RPG world designed by a hyperactive fifteen-year-old: ripping off sci-fi and fantasy cliches left and right and turning the volume up to eleven. For the main source of inspiration, visually and thematically, check out Nemesis The Warlock.
Also featuring the sexual politics of Zardoz: SEX BAD! GUN GOOD! ONLY WAR!
January 24, 2008, 11:57lavonardo:
All hail the Emperor.
The focus is both a strength and a weakness, I’d say. Strength in defining the mode of playing (investigative, with big guns broken out when the assignment degenerates into a fireworks display, working for a known patron) and giving the players just the tools for the job.
But for players who want to play in alternative campaigns, there’s basically two routes: a) winging it and b) waiting for the inevitable deluge of supplements. There’s not much wrong with either approach, and I’m sure there will be imaginative refactorings of the game sooner or later on the web. At one point Black Industries stated that there will be three different games for the holistic 40k experience, each concentrating on a different topic of the realm. I haven’t progressed far enough into the book to validate this claim (and am too lazy to google for it right now).
The design method for the universe seems indeed to have been “… including the kitchen sink”, but vast chunks of background and adversaries are missing. For the time being. Nemesis the Warlock-aesthetics are rampant - and somehow the far future, but not really evolved science is disappointing. A “lasgun” or a “generic mind-eating plant as an adversary” do not inspire much sense of wonder.
January 25, 2008, 20:44