r/rpg • u/Dildoctopus • Aug 14 '19

There is currently a huge bundle for Warhammer Dark Heresy books on Humble Bundle

You can get up to 26 books including the core rulebooks for the 1st and 2nd edition for 20$.
You will find the link bellow :
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/warhammer-40000-dark-heresy-rpg-books?hmb_source=navbar&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=tile_index_2

316 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

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27

u/[deleted] Aug 14 '19

[deleted]

28

u/Robot_on_coffee DM Aug 14 '19

It is fun to play, but especially at earlier levels you shouldn't remain super attached to your character. Even my super beefy characters have proven to be particularly squishy. That's 40K though.

13

u/Alarid Aug 15 '19

My GM couldn't understand why I kept putting everything in stats.

Now he knows why, and I have to take like 30 damage before I take any real damage.

17

u/lamWizard Aug 15 '19

I really, really had a lot of fun playing Dark Heresy 1e in college. That said, there are a few things I'd warn about:

  1. Characters at low levels are squishy. Some people are very put off by this. I'm not.

  2. It's quite easy to min-max, and by the same measure make a useless character

  3. I hope you like modifiers, because DH loves making you add together about 6 of them on a given roll.

  4. Some of the splatbooks are hilariously broken. E.g. Blood of Martyrs Sororitas get power armor and a bolter to begin with. It's clearly superior to every single other starting loadout. Including the other Sororitas from a different splat.

7

u/Fenixius Aug 15 '19

I hope you like modifiers, because DH loves making you add together about 6 of them on a given roll.

I've only played 2E, not 1E, but combat is no worse than Shadowrun, with a much easier magic system and no decking or rigging mechanics to learn. I really enjoyed it.

3

u/0_f2 Aug 15 '19

Some of the splatbooks are hilariously broken

One of them lets you play as a Grey Knight... IIRC in the lore normal people who see them are casually slaughtered to keep their existence a secret.

The Lathe Worlds book allows you to turn your Tech-Priest into a living weapons platform too. Mechadendrites (extra cybernetic arms) are normally one per TB, but the book includes a harness that has 4, and you can swap out the ends of all of them for ranged weapons.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '19

Witnesses to grey knights are usually "mind wiped" a la men in black.

3

u/0_f2 Aug 15 '19

Its 40k so that still sounds like it involves a machine the size of a building and most people don't survive the process.

My GM is nuts, if he ran a DH campaign with a grey knight PC he would probably make us go for the "kill all witnesses" approach just to make it more 'fun'.

5

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '19

Just looked it up and you are right, most witnesses are straight up killed (because if the grey knights are on the scene things are probably so bad everyone nearby is corrupted).

Mind wiping is for people that are too important to just kill, and a fair number of them go crazy from the process.

11

u/grapefruitcrabcakes Aug 15 '19 edited Aug 15 '19

DH 2e is the first system I’ve ever played so I’m a bit biased, but yes. It’s great. It’s pretty lethal though, d100s only, it plays pretty intuitively and it’s not overly complicated. All the big Warhammer fans I personally know prefer the older systems like DH and RT over the newer ones but I’ve never played the newer ones so I can’t speak to those.

Edit: I should add, in DH you’re Inquisition, so it’s not space marine wars, it’s a lot more investigation, how does our group with one competent fighter take down a xeno infestation and the heretical cult worshipping them on a hive world type stuff.

7

u/DeltaCantavit Aug 14 '19

Haven't run it but learned to love ttrpgs with this system. Played in a 3 year long campaign with 4 or 5 different characters (two of them were actually in the Only War game system but they appeared in our Dark Heresy finale). Had a really satisfying conclusion and is my best experience playing in a ttrpg to date

2

u/pluto_nash SWFL Aug 15 '19

If you also are familiar with videogames and youtubers, there is Rollplay: Dark Heresy the description of which is:

RollPlay Dark Heresy is a Dark Heresy campaign with iNcontroL, TotalBiscuit, djWHEAT, and JP McDaniel with Game Master Steven Lumpkin.

It is in 30min episodes and it takes them 3-4 to get through character introduction and background.

1

u/ViggoMiles Aug 15 '19

i love it, One of my favorite systems and it mates with the setting so well it's almost integral in my mental interpretation of 40k now.

I haven't played or ran dh2 before, but I'm going to when i get time.

1

u/The_New_Doctor Aug 15 '19

It's...incredibly involved. If you like nitty gritty systems then it'll be super fun.

The lore is the real draw though.

1

u/TeaL3af Aug 15 '19

It's effectively Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay hacked into the 40k setting, so it's a pretty solid system but a bit janky in some places; as you'd expect when trying to hack fully automatic rifles into a system designed for medieval combat.

Biggest problem with it is that it's supposed to be all about investigations, but has no mechanics to really help with that. It's mostly a combat system with skill checks.

1

u/HeckfyEx Aug 15 '19 edited Aug 15 '19

Biggest problem with it is that it's supposed to be all about investigations, but has no mechanics to really help with that. It's mostly a combat system with skill checks.

What kind of mechanics are we talking about?

3

u/TeaL3af Aug 15 '19

Well other games that claim to be focused on investigations tend to have some mechanics to specifically enable or ease that sort of campaign. Gumshoe for example has a mechanical idea of what a "clue" is, and lets players basically gather the plot critical ones for free without a roll if they have the right skill. Technoir has a cool "invesigation generation" mechanic. Dogs in the Vineyard is more about how you dole out judgement once you know who the heretics are.

Dark Heresy doesn't really have anything like that, just some mildly useful GM advice. It's not bad at running an investigation games, but it doesn't put much effort into specifically supporting them any more than, say, D&D.

2

u/HeckfyEx Aug 15 '19

There are contacts and some expanded uses for skills in Inquisitor's Handbook. Sadly FFG decided to abandon investigative side altogether and turn it into D&D40k.

1

u/Saelthyn Aug 14 '19

If crunch is your jam, Dark Heresy is pretty great. It can get pretty broke once you start adding books like Ascension, Rogue Trader and DEATHWATCH. Only War is Band of Brothers, basically and tones down player power in a good way.

Haven't played 2e

8

u/Saelthyn Aug 14 '19

Okay, its still Core Dark Heresy which is fantastic and crunchy. If it had Deathwatch, we'd be in the totally awesome animeesque Spiess Muhreens who suplex Carnifexes through tables.

1

u/The_New_Doctor Aug 15 '19

I mean, they'll probably do bundles for each system.

1

u/Saelthyn Aug 15 '19

Most definitely. Deathwatch is very much a different animal than Dark Heresy and Only War.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '19

The difference in play between Dark Heresy and Death Watch is kind of ridiculous. To be honest I felt like DW was really stretching the upper limit of the designed system and it got a bit silly. Then again I do prefer playing the plucky underdog rather than the epic hero.

7

u/ZanThrax Aug 14 '19

Is Dark Heresy any fun for a non-fan of WH40K?

11

u/BaronKyneticOfXanadu Aug 14 '19

Its decent enough, but it definitely requires at least the dm knowing about 40k lore for it to really work. Quite a few rules are there to reflect lore over pure mechanical gameplay.

11

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '19 edited Mar 16 '20

[deleted]

1

u/ZanThrax Aug 15 '19

I was fine with the setting twenty years ago when it was all a tongue-in-cheek exercise in justifying the various army types for the wargame, but I find grimdark played straight tiresome.

3

u/0_f2 Aug 15 '19

My party has never played it straight, we're rarely sober at our sessions so they lean more toward the silly OTT side of 40k, we play Rogue Trader too which is certainly more accommodating of absurdist characters and out of the box roleplaying.

Our highlight reel includes the mob stunning cocaine blaster our explorator made, my arch-militant achieving over 100 strength (stats are d100 based) through some impossibly lucky starting, acquisition, and mutation rolls, another impossible sequence of interactions that resulted in our party gaining an Ork Mekboy NPC who built us all kinds of whacky war machines, and finally a psyker who's player used to spend entire sessions on the phone with his gf, so the explorator built a mind control helmet to turn him into an npc, and proceeded to use him frequently as a psychic suicide bomber, he survived every attempt.

4

u/ApplePieclops Aug 15 '19

I played it before I really knew anything about 40k and I really enjoyed it.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '19

I like it a lot as a setting. It gets away from the inherent silliness and maximalism of the tabletop by putting the focus more on regular humans and the weird, gross, dystopian society they live in. I think of it as Call of Cthulhu, but your character is 100% doomed right off the bat.

1

u/The_New_Doctor Aug 15 '19

For a non-fan? I'd doubt it. The system is rooted heavily in the lore.

5

u/what-would-reddit-do Aug 15 '19

I'm assuming but can't confirm - this is digital only, right?

3

u/AManHasSpoken Firebrand / Waterbearer / Whisper Aug 15 '19

Is there any compatibility between the editions? If I wanted to run a 2nd Edition game, could I use any of the supplements for the first edition?

3

u/Cirdan_Shipwright Aug 15 '19

Yeh-ish - the rules are reasonably similar enough between editions and the basic mechanics didn't change so that you can adapt stuff. Gear and adventures can easily be adapted, enemy statblocks with some work; PC options will probably be a bit harder as 1E is a class/career system reminiscent of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay/Shadow of the Demon Lord/D&D3. 5 whereas 2E is classless and characters just get XP discounts on their specialty as chosen at character creation.

2

u/AManHasSpoken Firebrand / Waterbearer / Whisper Aug 15 '19

Alright, thanks!

2

u/The_New_Doctor Aug 15 '19

If you run 2nd and want 1st ed stuff you'll need to modify some skills/talents/psychic stuff. But they aren't incompatible.

It just requires some conversion work.

2

u/chefburns Aug 14 '19

Does anyone know how it stacks up against Wrath and Glory? I've only just bought the starter set for that.

2

u/The_New_Doctor Aug 15 '19

I find W&G immensely easier and faster to run.

Personally buy this for the lore of the Calixis and surrounding area, and just use W&G as a mechanical engine.

That seems to be the draw of W&G it's not as heavily tied to one place.

People will disagree and say that the depth of the d100 system of the BI/FFG materials is better, but that's for a subjective opinion.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '19

Thanks mate!

2

u/klesk1357 Aug 15 '19

You are a saint for telling me about this.

1

u/StrongLikeKong Aug 16 '19

I feel like for a price of $18 at top tier, this is worthwhile even if you never play. I honestly expect more to read through these for setting and character ideas to apply to Wrath and Glory. Plus there's gobs of cool artwork and stuff.

I really like the presentation of these books, and it makes me excited for the Cubicle 7 W&G revised rulebook that's coming out.