I had hoped to run DH this past wednesday; for the last couple of weeks i've been reading the books i've invested in (most of them bar DotDG and CA and the adventure books). But i've been drawing a blank trying to come up with a story that rationalises how the two pc's met each other.
I started writing some notes on the ongoing campaign setting (a hive region called Cankertown, though i plan to spread my wings far and wide as this isn't Eastenders...it's Warty K!). When I started coming up with the character of the Inquisitor something kinda weird happened. I started thinking of Batman! Particularly the crusty old warhorse from Dark Knight Returns.
My ideas have a strange quality to them. There seems to be some - not qutie humour - but that kind of Judge Dredd future shock black humour. Some have aruged this is what 40K should be. But while I don't disagree I find myself thinking that I want the whole 'I shall die for the Emperor!' grimdark nine yards.
It's not a comedy!
Yet the ideas persist: an old washed up inquisitor passed his better days sort of morally 'rescued' by the players into taking them on, as a radical (he's made many enemies, especially among a Nurgle cult) inquisitor (the best kind IMO). He even grows fond of his new servants and will decide not to sacrifice the psyker to the Eldar anti-aging tech he once had to abandon years ago in his glory days (hence being an old man) in order to rejuvenate himself!
Sort of a Ciaphas Cain (ive never read him) meets Bruce Wayne; in the aforementioned Cankertown (a low level hive region probably the size of England), he maintains an estate and myths surround him about a shadowy figure that the lowly downtrodden (ie everyone) takes comfort in. He was once invited to join the Malleus but feared that they'd discover his radical leanings, and he also felt they were a bunch of stuffshirts out of touch with the people the Inquisition is supposed to protect (he's not a philanthropist, he's just not hoi polloi). He has a notable former love interest, from decades ago: the Lady of Stars - a noble woman with part of a daemon inside who, when it incarnates, can see the future. Though the nobility don't know she is technically evil, they enjoy her presence and the 'parlour game' of clairvoyance she plays.
So it's somehwat more Kal Jericho than Eisenhorn.