Dabbling With Heresy

This weekend gone marks my return, after some considerable absence, to GMing. My play group (currently consisting of Bren and Coz) have allowed me to run Dark Heresy, the 40k RPG from Fantasy Flight.

I've been pretty nervous about running anything after so long but decided the best approach was just to do it like I was taught to swim, jump in and see what happens.

After some playing with the character generator both of my players settled on the role of Arbiters. So now I basically have Judges Dredd and Hersey running around the Calixis sector. The first game session, although a little slow went well and I really feel that this game has potential.

There are a few key points that really draw me to this game:

1. The Mythos, the 40k universe is wonderfully rich with a healthy mix of sci-fi and fantasy elements that allow for dark humour and even true horror at times.

2. Random character generation. I've always loved this aspect of games; it’s incredibly liberating and good for breaking players out of their comfort zones. I love games that actually encourage role-playing, there's nothing worse than that one player who just rolls the same dull warrior in every single game. As an unrelated note perhaps the best game I've ever played for random generation has to be the now well OOP Cyberspace bye ICE.

3. Combat. It's brutal, violent, bloody and most of all deadly to players.
Again this comes down to my love of actually role-playing, if going in with guns blazing just gets you killed you’re far more likely to use the old grey matter to solve a situation.

I'm looking forward to continuing the game now, feed back has been positive and hopefully this could become my next big game.

Ongoing projects

Sometimes I wonder if I might just be taking on to many projects. Over the last two years I seem to have taken a giant, feet first leap into a hobby I thought I'd outgrown long ago.

Miniature war gaming seems to have taken over my spare time, my life and worst of all my wallet.

Now I'm not saying that this is a bad thing but I have a major problem with my collecting attention span.

So here's a run down of the current projects:

Space Marines: Currently working on my own Astartes chapter, The Son's Of Ignis. The whole lot now makes up the full 2nd company of the chapter plus 1st company elites.

Space Wolves: A small specialist force collected more for the enjoyment of painting them. My Wolf Lord already won a local GW painting contest.

Thousand Sons: Again a specialist army more for display than gaming.

Tyranids: Now stands at a healthy 2000 points of close combat goodness. Not a single gun in the army.

Necrons: 2000ish points, mostly complete but awaiting the new codex.


On top of this I've been working on a whole host of classic board games all requiring painting.

Hero Quest
Advanced Hero Quest
Space Crusade
Space Hulk

As time goes on I'll upload some photos of my work and progress reports on the armies. I'm also planning to scour the web to find as much info as I can to expand the board games and share them with other people.

That's all for now.