Loosing My Warhammer Virginity with Dark Heresy

I always quite liked the idea of Warhammer. More specifically, I liked the idea of Warhammer 40k, because giant, genetically altered badasses wearing power-armour are always cool. Chainsaw swords are even cooler.

On the other hand, I lived in the middle of nowhere, the nearest Games Workshop was 40miles and a £10 bus fare away and my school’s gaming club fell apart shortly after I started there. By the time I moved to University and civilisation, I was entranced by other far more interesting things, such as alcohol, girls and student politics, so gaming of all kinds got pushed to the side. Still, as a red blooded sci-fi geek, I retained my love for all things muscular and power-armoured.

Don’t look at me like that. You know it’s amazing.

Anyway, when a friend offered me the chance to join in a Dark Heresy game, I jumped at it, despite knowing nearly nothing about the system or setting other then that it’s set in one of the darkest sci-fi dystopias known to man. And large armour is a key component to the setting.

Being the gigantic geek that I am, my immediate reaction was to seek advice about the game on twitter (follow me @Games_of_State), and track down a copy of game book. What can I say? Turning to books for advice is the true sign of geekiness – as is digesting the entire 400 page book in less then 24 hours. Woops.

Anyway, after two days of reasonably frantic prep (thanks to Uncle Bear for his Dark Heresy articles and Bob for a book loan) I felt that I had at least enough prep done to feel reasonably comfortable gaming with a group who I’d only just met. Thankfully, I was right – there was still some stuff that I wasn’t too sure of, but nothing that caused problems (or at least not that I noticed anyway).

I was playing someone else’s character though, which made me a bit uncomfortable. Firstly, because I had no idea if the guy was going to be coming back and I didn’t want to mess up his character, and secondly because said character is an Assassin.

Now, I don’t really do sneaking. Stealth mechanics annoy me. I like my characters to be blunt instruments, with heavy armour and short range weapons. Not lightly armoured, long-range sneaky bastards. On the other hand, this is a good thing – I had to think more about my actions, it expands my roleplay repertoire and I was certainly more useful in the situation we landed up in then a heavily armoured character would have been. Even if I did fail my concealment check and end up exposed on a tree branch a great number of meters about the ground as possible hostile forces closed in.

The downside is that the character doesn’t really have any back story and I’m really struggling to come up with one which isn’t too clichéd. I’m kind of stuck between the idea of honourable Robin Hood type and psychopathic thug. He was raised on a Forge World, which doesn’t really help matters, Forge Worlds being chiefly the domain of the Tech Priests. I have another week and a half to come up with something, but any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

The GM did say that once they were past the current portion of the campaign, I’d be able to roll my own character. I quite fancy a go at the Tech-Priest class, which appeals to me because of the zealous devotion to the Ommiassiah (literally the God in the Machines) and the fancy cybernetics which they get access to. On the other hand, Tech-Priests are meant to be very stand-offish with other classes, so I suspect it wouldn’t be the easiest or best class to role-play at first. We’ll see though. I’m wanting to do things by the book, which means rolling dice to determine origin, class etc.

I enjoyed the session a lot. The GM was good, I seemed to get on OK with the other players (despite being nervous about stepping on toes – although that is only fitting for a lowly assassin when two Clerics of the Imperium are present) and I really like the 40K setting. I’ve also been invited back to play with a slightly different group this week in what has been described to me as “medieval superheros”. I’m less sure about this game, because I’ve never been a big fan of superheros, not being a comic book geek (well, except for Namor).

We’ll see. Good times anyway. And thanks to Omar.