Up until about six months ago I was running games using the Dark Heresy and its related products. In truth it was a Rogue Trader game, but functionally the same game with some tweaks.

I noticed that with the newest core books the drift of the rules, particularly in character creation, and idly suggested to my group that those rules would be used in the, to me notional, second edition.

I was not wrong.

If you are familiar with Dark Heresy from before there are only two changes you need to be aware of, Character creation is wildly different, and they have moved from the Calyxis sector to the much darker seeming Askellion system.  

That is it.  The numbers, the general methods of game play, all remain the same.

For those unfamiliar:  Dark Heresy uses a percentile system to resolve actions, where the base numbers are derived from your stats rather than being independent of them, and the talent/perk system is used to determine your capabilities in combat, and beyond, above and beyond the vanilla rules.

So let us speak of the changes.

The final 'core' rulebook of the old edition was Only War, which did away with the massive lists of level based skills and talents, and introduced a somewhat more complex and flexible system of key words and tiers.  DH2 takes that a step further and in a vastly welcome move elminates almost all the remaining vestiges of classes. Almost.  In Only War, the big splash page classes were almost misleading, a remnant of the old system, a remnant that has since been phased out.  Oh, you still have classes, but they are even more abstracted.

Lets walk through the system, shall we?

As before you chose a type of home world. As a welcome change, they included some of the expanded homeworlds in the core, such as Forge Worlds.

Now: They've eliminated the old tables of modifiers to attribute scores. The original DH was the only one to actually change the roles, instead of simply applying modifiers.  That's not to say that Homeworlds don't apply modifiers to attributes: They do, it just they've done away with the tables and numbers. Now you get three attributes, two with + and one with a -. This is somewhat less intuitive to interpret, but essentially merely represents a 5 point shift from the starting 25 points for each stat. For people who will be playing this alot I can see the new style of presenting information as being slightly more utilitarian.

As before, your Homeworld also affects your starting Fate Points, only here we see the first actual mechanical change.  Rather than giving you a small variable range of points, you have a threshold value and an Emperor's Blessing value. The Threshold represents your starting and maximum number of fate points, and the EB value represents your chance of increasing your threshold on Fate rolls. Its a minor change, but I think its a good one.

Previously a homeworld provided a laundry list of mechancially suspect 'bonuses', such as counting certain skills a familiar or whatnot. Now there is only one bonus, and most of the ones I saw were distinct. For example, a Feral Worlder ignores the 'Primative' quality of melee weapons he is personally using. The Forge Worlder, on the other hand gets an additional skill. Anything that reduces the amount of complexity here is welcome, and the whole weird subcatagory of familiar skills from homeworlds is now done away with, which is a net improvement.

Wounds are essentially unchanged here, but unlike before it seems your homeworld no longer restricts your starting career, though it does list a number of recommended 'backgrounds'.  I can find no bonus or penalty for using or ignoring those recommendations. I approve of opening creation this way and still providing guidance for players and GMs.

The big change to creation comes with the next step, choosing your 'background'.  At first glance this appears to be your new class system, but it is not. Anyone familiar with the lore will find the backgrounds to be familiar, including things like 'Adeptus Arbites' and so forth.

To understand Backgrounds it may help to detail the evolution of the game design. Later in the Dark Heresy run they released 'class' based books, such as the Book of Judgement (Arbiters).  These books had a variety of 'elite' classes based on various roles found in the various factions, and included ideas for campaigns based on that them. This meant you could be playing an Arbites character who was really just an Adept (intellectual) or a criminal... presumably an undercover Arbiter, which tossed the class system on its ear. Not badly, of course, but all the same.

With Backgrounds they seperate out who you worked for, prior to joining the Inquisition, with what you actually did for them.  This makes fine tuning your game for certain themes much easier, and allows for more complex characters without adding significant complexity to creation.

There is more too it, as well. The Only War skill/talent system works on accumulated key words, which works in the Only War rule set when certain keywords come from your regiment and others from your 'class'. Without that very rigid setting you need some other way to give characters their first key words, and backgrounds are that method.  This also gives you your starting skills and talents, which used to fall under Homeworlds.

Then you go to your class, called a Role here. Actually, the change in name is relevant as it really does change in focus from an all encompassing description of your character to a focus on what your character actually tries to do within the group. Aside from stripping out the massive and often poorly edited tables of skilles and talents, with teh near arbitrary level breakdowns, your role generally defines most of your aptitudes (keywords) and gives you a unique 'bonus', which functions like a role specific talent, often triggered by fate points.

One of the more interesting, and deliberate, facets of this breakdown of the creation system is that it really opens up your character. You generally have two chances to 'hit' a specific type of character here, which gives you three possible outcomes.  What do I mean?

Take being a psychic. You can start as a member of the Astra Telepathica (background) or as a Mystic (role), or take both...  or neither. Four ways to be a Psychic. If you just take the background you aren't necessarily psychic yourself, though you can be (more on that in a bit). If you take Mystic you are automatically a psychic. If you take both you are automatically sanctioned instead of being a rogue. If you take neither you can still take the psychic elite advance and be a very specific sort of psychic... such as a psychic assassin.

Contrast with the previous edition, where all psychics were sanctioned members of the astra telepathica, and all members of the astra telepathica were psychics...

As was increasingly the norm as the system evolved, you get a number of choices within your larger choices that help customize and refine your character. So an assassin can be a sword wielding killer or a sneaky sniper, based on how one choses his aptitudes and starting skills.

At this point your character should have some half dozen aptitudes, a core foundation of skills and a bare minimum of talents outside of the very specific ones gained from homeworld and role.

This leads to the next step, which is spendign starting XP.  Previously DH gave four hundred XP, which was leagues weaker than any other Core book creation, and meant most starting characters were only barely competent at, well, anything. Now you get 1000 xp, which works better.  Of course, this leads to the most complex part of the Only War system.

Every skill and talent has two 'aptitudes'.  Each character may have zero, one or two of those aptitudes listed on his sheet, and the number of matching aptitudes sets the xp cost of buying or improveing the skill or talent. However there is another variable, which is the tier.  For skills Tier is represented by the increasing level of training, while for Talents it is specific to each talent.  This means a given 'level' of a skill may cost anywhere from 100xp to 1200 xp, with talents having a similar range based on their tier.  Even attributes are tied back to this aptitude system.  

While I will say this is a much better system than the old method of looking everything up on class specific master lists, it isn't without its own problem. Simply put there is no quick way to get skills and talents.  I would recommend, for groups with only one book, that the pages 80 and 81 be photocopied and handed to each player to speed up creation and leveling.

As for the skills and talents themselves, they haven't changed much from DH1.

Another option for starting XP however is the Elite Advance. One of the more baffling parts of DH1 was the role of the Inquisitor himself, and DH2 addresses this. There are three elite advances listed here in teh Core book, Inquisitor (costing 1000 xp, or all your starting allocation), Psychic (costing 300, but given freely to Mystics) and Untouchable... who has his own list of special talents to chose from (also costing 300 starting xp).

Moving on: In the equipment chapter the biggest change is the lack of prices on equipment. DH2 has fully internalized the Influence/Wealth mechanic that was introduced in Ascension. They don't really explain it until much later, and as I've noticed the trend, it is often hard to determine what, exactly, your Influence actually is.  However, one curious, but welcome, change is that Influence can now be tracked and used on a player by player basis instead of automatically being a mere group score.  Otherwise the equipment chapter is much as it always is.

I will note here that there has been a significant change in the general art direction in DH2. There seems to be much less art, and the art that exists, such as here in Equipment, seems to be much grittier and darker. Gone are the clean shiny plates of yore.

After equipment you find psychic powers. Pleasantly they haven't follewed the trend of the previous core books, and have retained the vast array of discipline powers, allowing psychics to retain their 'flavor'. The bloated list of minor powers is gone, as is the occasionally confusing method of knowing how many powers you have. Now its a simple XP for power exchange.

In the section explaining Influence (much less detailed than the Ascension rules, though clearly unchanged otherwise), they introduce a group mechanic for subtlety.  This is a welcome addition, and seems relatively simple and straightforward, though one might like it to have a little more... punch.

Without playing the game extensively I didn't see anything different mechancially in the combat chapters. There are minor tweaks in things like Traits (generally, but not always NPC/monster abilities) and Mutations, and it does seem that they've made an effort to make NPC/Monsters much less Talent dependent for combat.

Which brings me to Askellion.  Frankly I find the change to a new sector rather annoying on the face of it.  Calyxis wasn't without its flaws, not least of which was the rather non-starter threat of the Dead Sun (or whatever it was...) and the overhype of the Haarlock family.  That said it had all the baroque and grimdark weird I needed for a settled 40k sector... only, and bizarrely, lacking the breadth of history it should have had.

That said: Askellion is much more Grimdark. There is a real sense of decay and rot, of failing doom that is all too appropriate for an inquisition based game.  The persistant threat of a massive, long running warp storm cutting of worlds and changing the warp routes is a much better environmental threat.  Dropping the idea of an iron fisted patriarch like Lord Governor Marius Hax for the isolated and possibly delusional Prefectrix Anastasia XX gives much more room and weight to the Inquisitions actions. Moreever the plot seeds littering the sector information have more scope and greater dangers than the bug hunts of Calyxis.  There also seems to be some framework in place for using Rogue Trader here in the future, with greater development of the existing warp routes in mapping the sector.


Overall DH2 fixes most of my nuisance complaints about the previous edition, and is clearly far better thought out and developed. That said, if you had serious structural complaints (as I did), they may not be addressed at all. This is still a Warhammer Game, which means lots of trait and skill bloat and very lethal combat rules, with psychics self-immolating all too often. Pleasantly, aside from the various sub-classes introduced in almost every previous book, not only can you use every existing DH supplement, but the writers actually encourage you to. Things have not been rendered truly obsolete.  I hope that future supplements will spend less time trying to expand the character creation, which led to serious bloat.

While I can't escape some cynical thoughts about the raw money grubbing aspect of releasing a new edition so soon, I feel that the book itself a worthy upgrade, filled with enough serious changes and new information to earn its existence.

It is ridiculously pretty. Amazingly gorgeous to look at.

Mechanics-wise, it doesn't do anything for me. Too bloated, too heavy, too dense, too many talents. Really needs a thorough stripping-down.

Thanks for the review. It confirms my suspicions that my DH 1e book, like my WFRP 1e corebook, will be all I will be needing.

Askellion sounds very good - especially the warp storm issue, but I liked that Calyxis looks so quiet on the surface and certainly, the core book allowed me to run with what's beneath the surface.

Kinda like the first act of a horror movie.

Quote from: Ladybird;788201It is ridiculously pretty. Amazingly gorgeous to look at.

Mechanics-wise, it doesn't do anything for me. Too bloated, too heavy, too dense, too many talents. Really needs a thorough stripping-down.

ditto--would probably just use BRP if got the chance to run DH.

This was an impulse buy for me at Gencon, but now it is getting auctioned... It really does nothing to address the underlying crankiness of the system.

I'll disagree with you, Khaleb.  I might say instead it doesn't do ENOUGH to fix the creakiness of the mechanics.  Character creation, being the focus of their revamping of course, is much more flexible and smooth.  

Having GM'd Rogue Trader for over a year, I noticed that the NPC writeups were a lot less heavy on talents in the prebuilt adventure, which is another area that makes for significant improvement, this time during game play.

The issue with DH was not the Character Creation system IMO. Its rigidness actually helped deal with the bloated mechanics - talents, skills, equipment, combat, psychic powers. It sounds like they have only substantially changed the one thing that was OK and ignored all the rest.

to each his own, man. I hated the original character creation system. I also noted that it led to unforced errors from the writers.

That said, I do think the current system of spending Xp based on key words is somewhat fiddly and harder to intuitively grasp. I mean, understanding the idea is simple, but putting it into practice, at least as of Only War, required some ugly trial and error.

DH needed to be far less complicated, faster and smoother in actual play because its CoC 40k and needs more room for roleplay and investigation, and I'd argue for deadlier combat.

Oh well, is it time for Zweihander in Spaaace?

that's quite odd. I found Rogue Trader, using the exact same combat rules, to be almost a little too lethal for my group. As a GM I often found myself 'soft handing' NPCs to give the players a chance to win without TPKs. In RT this meant surrounding the Captain with entire platoons of NPC armsmen to take hits for him, since his advancement schema meant he had 1st level wounds (seven, to be exact... or well within 'instant death from a pop gun' in 40k terms) all the way to, I think, level five or so.  Even at the high end, when we had a deathwatch Space Marine character, a fight against a modestly competent and equipped NPC came down to 'who hits first in the second round'.  Never mind things like the Slaugh, which at least one critic of the game protested were virtually unkillable. Incorrectly, but...  In CoC terms, the Slaugh are on par with such low level monsters as Migo.

Seriously: Even high level characters can be dropped with a single attack. You want deadlier? How??? Everyone starts with Cancer and has to roll vs death every hour of game play?? *

Smoother? yes, that would help... though at some level I think organization and presentation matter.





* I keed, a little. I have deadlier games on my shelf, but DH is near the top end of lethality.  Its one of the very few games I have where a player character can kill himself the very first time he does his schtick (psychics...), and never really gets any safer.

You are right on the psykers being deadly enough to themselves from the start and always on from there.

In my DH games, I just haven't felt the same level of danger in combat as I do when I run WFRP 1e. Perhaps the lethality of guns has just influenced the players more, since my DH crew were all CoC players.

Hmm...I will have to run a DH one-shot at a con and see how the lethality goes with a random bunch of players...whose PCs all have cancer. Fuck it, they have Nurgle ebola instead.

Psykers basically have a portal to hell in their mind, though; the Imperium's hatred of them is justified (Maybe if it put more effort into training rather than vilifying them, or let the Emperor ascend to godhood so He could empower them personally, it might be able to do something about that... but forward planning is not the Imperium's strong point).

I could sympathise with a player who lost their character the first time they tried to do something psychic, but it's risk / reward, and a 40k fan wouldn't expect playing one to go well, it would be a disservice to the setting. The chance of doing so in-game is probably exaggerated over that in-setting, of course, but such things tend to be.