Enthusiastic Amateur

We’ve been playing a lot of Warhammer 40,000 RPGs in the last few years between Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader and even a little bit of Only War and the one thing that has been a constant is our disdain for Chaos as a concept. If you’re not an aficionado of the setting let me give you the elevator pitch. Chaos is a force of evil powers who rule the Warp, which space ships use to travel faster than light, and each represents some terrible force that threatens to tear apart the world of order. Slaanesh is pleasures, pains and indulgence, think Cenobites from Hellraiser. Khorne is war, bloodshed and martial prowess, Nurgle is pestilence and decay, and Tzeentch is lies, trickery and sorcery. Subtlety is not really their strong suit, Khorne is covered in blood and skulls, Nurgle is all scythes and distended bellies etc etc. The problem is that with this lack of subtlety it feels less like a force that corrupts people, which it’s depicted as in much of the lore, and more cackling ...

"In the grim darkness of the 41st Millennium there is only war." So recently I’ve been trying to hack the 40k role playing games into something less heinous. For those not in the know let me just say that whilst their system is at least functional and makes sense, it tends to be maths heavy, uses a d100 system that is a bit too easy to distort and break by stacking multiple bonuses and is just generally quite clunky to use as a GM. My hack, which I’ve dubbed ‘Fabula’ until a better name comes along, has two objectives. To make the game accessible to new players and to make it simpler to run for GMs. For that part it does seem at least that this initial playtest, in which my group played Bounty Hunters of various stripes playing one of a group of archetypes, achieved this goal. The only really useful note from the session was that often characters, with the exception of the Wyrd (an unbound psychic), seemed to repeat the same actions largely because they didn’t have ...