Black Crusade Ramblings

I recently got my hands on a copy of the 40k RPG "Black Crusade", by Fantasy Flight Games, and, not being too familiar with any fansites for it, I figured I'd come here to ask the few questions I have built up for it.

First of all, can anyone give me a list of the psychic displines/powers that can be found in FFG's other "40K Roleplay" lines? Dark Heresy, Death Watch and Rogue Trader? I'm not looking for details, just the names (and, if possible, the books they're in) would do.

Secondly, I recently purchased a copy of "Tome of Corruption", the Chaos sourcebook for the 2nd edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay; would the rules for Chaos Gifts/Mutations from that book be at all compatible with Black Crusade, or would I basically need to take inspiration from Tome of Corruption and houserule it to work under Black Crusade's system?

Third, I've been thinking on some houserules for Black Crusade and I was wondering if I could get feedback on them?

• An unaligned Gift of the Gods that grants the Regeneration trait

• An unaligned Gift of the Gods that allows the character to then roll on a randomly chosen aligned Gift of the Gods table, rerolling "Mark of X" results; this can even allow followers of one god to be gifted by another. This houserule is inspired by the most recent (as of this posting) "Warriors of Chaos" sourcebook for Warhammer Fantasy, in which gifts, boons and other favors aren't restricted exclusively by gods any more.

Finally, given the fact that there are supposedly many, many variets of Unaligned Chaos Daemons as well as the famous Aligned ones, is it at all viable to use various fictious monsters from other settings as their basis? For example, Daemonic Beasts based off of the Hounds of Tindalos from the Cthulhu Mythos, or Dhohanoids from Cthulhutech, or even monsters from Dungeons And Dragons?

Not!Hounds of Tindalos actually appear in one of the Dark Heresy books (Creature Anathema if I remember correctly). They're Hounds of Tindalos in all but name. I also had my players fight a daemonic entity (essentially a lesser Warp god, equal in power to a greater daemon of the big 4) based on the Haunter in the Dark in a Deathwatch game.

edited 2nd Dec '12 4:22:48 AM by Nomic

You would probably need to modify the rules to get Tome of Corruption to work.

I appreciate the help I've gotten; I have Tome of Corruption, now, so if there are any tropers willing I'd like some help to work on incorporating ideas from it into Black Crusade.

Out of curiosity, if I wanted to make a reward that grants immunity to fire damage, how might that work? Reading over the rules suggests it would basically function only as "any attack with the Energy description doesn't work".

I'd probably limit that to attacks that can cause the victim to catch fire, like flamers and such. Immunity to flames shouldn't really cover las or melta weapons. That would likely be one of the most overpowered gifts in the game otherwise, especially for human heretics who aren't taking on Marines with bolters.

Of course the vanilla game has a ton of gifts that can absolutely shatter the game's balance.

Like pseudo-daemonhood. Why does a gift that makes you take on the appearance of a lesser daemon (and gives some daemonic traits and weaknesses) give you fear rating of 4 is beyound me (actual lesser daemons are fear 2, fear 4 is reserved for greater daemons). Makes any combat against non-fearless enemies (pretty much daemons and marines) a total joke since the average enemy (with willpower around 40) has a 10% chanse of not failing the fear test, and a very high chanse of failing it badly enough that they spend 1d5 rounds puking, faint for the duration of the fight or just die out of heart attack.

And the ones that double degrees of success on certain tests can be crazy. I was running BC once and had a Slaanesh aligned, Fellowship and social speced Apostate get Hermaphrodite. It doubles degrees of social success and the guy was regularly getting 12 degrees of success on his tests. Diplomancer doesn't even begin to to describe it.

We have that too, but I havent found it a huge problem. This is 40k, after all, and the space marine trying to disembowl you won't stop just because you asked him very nicely. It does help them to convince potential allies to join them, but that's less of a balance problem than the 10th level psyker that goes blowing everything up (it's also very easy to avoid Perils, as long as you don't push it. There's a not even that rare weapon in the Tzeentch sourcebook that allows you to ignore phenomena if you cast them on fettered of unfettered).

Rogue Trader with a teleportarium and teleporter beacons.

"We teleport back to the ship and nuke the whole site from orbit just to be sure" being the answer to everything not involving other spaceships doesn't even cover it.

RT rulebook atleast offers some tips to prevent the players from abusing the hell out of the teleportarium. Most official adventures also make teleport landing as dangerous, if not more so, than just taking the shuttle to the ground (you really don't want to get your coordinates wrong and teleport inside a solid object).

Of course the easy way to curb the overuse of "I kills it with my marcobatteries" is to place all the valuables on the surface.

I remember somebody posting a recap of a game where the players were exploring an ancient temple on some forgotten planet, and solved every problem they encountered by teleporting scores of redshirts from their ship. At one point they just threw enough expendable menials at the death traps untill they stopped working. Of course the place turned out to be a temple of an ancient Chaos cult and the thousands of sacrifices ended up waking the daemon bound inside, which corrupted the still alive redshirts (not very hard since they were quite happy for a chanse to murder the Rogue Trader). Long story short, the redshirts/cultists tried to kill the players and summoned a greater daemon, the players barely escaped with their lives and bombed the site from the orbit untill there was nothing left but a mile wide crater.

Mind you, I'm not saying that's a bad thing. That's pretty much how you expect RT adventures to go.

Any GM who has seen has a single episode of Star Trek The Original Series knows how to screw up teleportation with plot devices.

edited 26th Dec '12 11:16:37 PM by Rationalinsanity

And that's without the teleporters takin you through hell.

And since RT is kinda like Grimdark Star Trek, the best way to demonstrate that would be by killing tons of red shirts.

edited 28th Dec '12 7:15:39 PM by Archereon

Does anybody want to do a Black Crusade session/campaign on Roll20, if they have access?