Post #2882833
2026-05-17 13:59 UTC
Dark Heresy is probably the best of the games and the only one I’ve tried running in the past. 40k does Call of Cthulhu, essentially, with the PCs as more-or-less hapless minions working for the Inquisition. Maximum potential for sheer gothic excess of various kinds but it can be hard to keep the right amount of tongue in cheek over the long haul. Plus the rules are fiddly and there’s too much focus on combat
Rogue Trader is probably the most interesting. A wide scale game with lots of scope for larger-than-life characters and agency for the PCs. But the whole merchant-explorers thing gets uncomfortable pretty fast in the context of 40k
The other games are Deathwatch (military roleplaying as Space Marines), Only War (military roleplaying as troopers), and Black Crusade (play cultists of very unpleasant chaos gods), none of which have much interest for me
Replies (1)
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@ghost_bird@weirder.earth 2026-05-17 14:24
There’s a wider stylistic problem too, in adapting the wargame(s) setting for rpgs. It’s good marketing for the game to have factions in a wide range of styles but when you try to smush them together in an rpg it’s much harder to make them work. I like Orks and Tau precisely because they’re in dialogue with the default 40k setting but if you use them in an rpg you’ve got to deal with the sudden swerve to cartoon logic or hard-ish SF that they bring Dark Heresy tried to get around it by adding new and more gothic sinister alien threats, but the pressure to add regular 40k favourites was evidently too much.