The Tellian Sector: The Ursulines of Bhadra

One of the PCs in my Imperium Maledictum campaign is an Ursuline priest working for the Empty Synod, and another is a lay Ursuline. I figured I might as well lay out some of the details of the faith.

Imperial Religious Orthodoxy in the Bhadra System

Large portions of the Tellian sector were once part of a stellar empire known as the Varosi Union, which was brought into Imperial compliance in a series of wars across M39-41. The Varosi had a half-dozen major religions and hundreds of minor ones, but most were wiped out during Imperial compliance, except for the three largest, which were transformed and absorbed into positions within the orthodox Imperial cult. The shared Varosi background of many systems and common processes of syncretism, proselytisation, and appropriation means that much of the sector has a common doctrinal and practical basis unusual for the Imperial religion. 

Bhadra's Ecclesiarchy is run from the hive world of Kailasa, and its dominant tendency is known as "Madarianism" after the missionary and saint, Madaria of Nova Terra, who first promulgated it. Madarianism holds that the Emperor was born a human being in a previous incarnation of the universe, but attained cosmic mastery and true divinity through the cultivation of his inner power via nine hundred and ninety-nine secret techniques of concentration, meditation, and visualisation. This allowed him to preserve his power as the cosmic cycle turned, that previous universe came to an end, and this universe was born to replace it.

 

True believers can not only practice these concentration techniques themselves, but transfer the power gained by doing so to the Emperor, in time absorbing the entirety of the spiritual power of this universe and empowering him to create (or transfer to) yet another one, where the cycle will repeat itself. Those who transfer merit in this way are allowed to merge with the Emperor's godhead and will survive after not only their personal death but the death of the universe itself, becoming part of the next one. The Golden Throne is seen as a device that absorbs, purifies, and amplifies the spiritual energies of the faithful, with the Emperor's living body on it a mere relic to aid the less imaginative in their devotions.

The Ecclesiarchy maintains control of the dissemination and practice of these secret concentration techniques, which scholars widely believe to be ancient neuro-cognitive enhancement practices dating (in at least some cases) back to the Dark Age of Technology that were preserved / misused by the Varosi until the Imperium "restored" them to their rightful place as acts of worship and service to the Emperor. 

The richer and more powerful one is, the more "advanced" the techniques one is granted knowledge of, the more merit one can accumulate, and the more right one's rulership and leadership of others becomes. The more commonly known techniques are also the basis of grand festivals where the faithful gather to communally practice them, while Kailasa's churches are full of meditators practicing them under the patronage (and to the accumulated merit of) its aristocracy. 

Kailasa's religious hierarchy dominates the Bhadran system, with the bishops for Kangyur, the void-khans of the asteroid belt, and the sunya-clades and bhava-clades of the moons of Bhadra Quartius all subject to the arch-bishop of Kailasa.  Kangyur serves as a dumping ground for loser, incompetents, and radicals amongst the Kailasan priesthood, with real power on the planet sitting with the diaconate that manages Amalthea Logistics and stuffs the church's coffers.

The Ursulines

Ursulinism is a heterodox religious movement originating on Kangyur amongst groups of mystics out in the Dhawalan lowlands. It has rapidly grown to become the dominant form of folk worship on the planet. This is despite the Kangyuri orthodoxy's attempts to stymie it, which have tended to backfire spectacularly. After nearly a century of failed efforts by its orthodox priesthood, the Kangyuri diaconate has become involved in suppressing it, and is escalating the level of force and compulsion brought to bear on its adherents. This has, of course, simply made it more popular and radicalized its adherents.

The key social basis for Ursulinism is the free population of Kangyur, including skilled labour guilds in Vajra Anchor Point, rad waste nomads, and the lower levels of the megacorporations, but it reaches into the dranj slave plantations and (according to rumour) into the offices of certain megacorporate executives and guild masters. Local Kangyuri priests are often Ursulines as a form of protest against the foreign domination of Kangyur's religious life by incompetents from Kailasa. These anchors of support have tended to mean that while the upper echelons of Kangyur's Ecclesiarchy fulminate against Ursulinism, attempts to move against it run into various bureaucratic and logistical difficulties when commands move into the middle ranks for execution.

Ursulinism is in some respects an ultra-Thorian doctrine, but it has become considerably more radical as it differentiates itself from Madarianism. Ursulinism holds that the emperor was indeed a man who became a god, not across multiple universes but only in this one, and that his coming death will sever the final bonds that restrain his godhood from its full manifestation. Until that time, he manifests as an inner light within the heart of each believer, which accumulates in certain holy individuals who can perform miracles.

The most shocking doctrines the Ursulines hold are that the Emperor's light can purify the corruption of mutation and heal the bleeding soul of the psyker, rendering both pure. This is not necessarily a merciful process, but the Master of Mankind turning even the flawed bodies and minds of lesser beings to his almighty will. When his body finally dies, he will manifest as a great light throughout the universe which will restore the shattered genes and souls of all humanity, and lead them once more on a Great Crusade against the wicked and the daemonic. The most radical Ursulines hold that even certain xenos will bow down before his power on that day, and will join humanity as pious servants of its manifest destiny.

Ursuline Practices

Ursulinism rejects the 999 secret concentration techniques of Madarianism as lesser practices that only inexpertly manifest the all-penetrating holy light of the Emperor (tho' many will still practice them as cover for their true beliefs), and instead favours three key sacraments, known as the Recognition of the Light, the Manifestation of the Light, and the Purification of the Light.

The Recognition of the Light is the key ritual of Ursuline mysticism. It uses the forty-nine prayers of St. Ursula chanted as mantras to open the reciter's or congregation's heart and soul to witness the all-pervading light of the Emperor for anagogical and apotropaic purposes.

The Manifestation of the Light is a set of exhortatory blessings and consecrations suitable for individuals, objects, and places that is believed to imbue them with the power to concentrate and/or amplify the light of the Emperor, manifesting miraculous powers, luck, and blessings on those so imbued according to the strength of their faith.

The Purification of the Light is a healing ritual and funerary right in which the light of the Emperor is invoked to cleanse and purify a sinner, mutant, psyker, apostate, or heretic's mind, soul and body. It is also used to cleanse the souls of those about to die so they can become an angel of pure light in the service of the Emperor after death.

In addition to these three core rituals, there are numerous local versions of other rituals due to the lack of a unified religious hierarchy to promote a single conception. These range from the "First Fruits of the Light", a simple two-line prayer and laying of hands uttered by the Most Blessed Guild of Bulb Installation (Local 504) when they replace light bulbs throughout the Glass Belt's agri-gardens to ritual gladiatorial duels fought with las-cutters in the underhive of Vajra Anchor Point on certain holy days to human sacrifices conducted by the rad waste nomads where the still-pumping hearts of their enemies are cast onto pyres to transform their sins into pure light and heat.

Finally, many Ursulines take the trek on a pilgrimage out to the Dhawala Eco-Remediation Zone in the Dhawalan lowlands, where the faith originated and many of its holiest sites continue. Despite a number of hostile rad tribes in the area, faithful tribes help escort the pilgrims as they visit the Monastery of St. Vinicius, the shrinefields where countless Ursulines are buried in sacred catacombs, and the Tomb of St. Ursula herself, which has significantly expanded over the past century into a sprawling complex, along with many other lesser shrines. It's considered a profound act of faith to create a small shrine during one's pilgrimage, and the broken terrain's many canyons and gorges make carving niches to host the shrine easy for anyone with the time and skill to use a las-cutter or some paint.

Major Ursuline Figures

The Holy Saint Ursula, Our Lady of Dhawala, Mother of Kangyur

The namesake of the movement, Ursula had her first mystical experience at age 12, and died of radiation sickness at 24. Before dying, she managed to dictate many of her visions, a series of prophecies, and her famous forty-nine prayers to her companion, St. Vinicius. She died approximately a century before the Great Rift, in the last 41st millennium. She was initially dismissed by most religious authorities, but one of her prophetic visions was of the Great Rift opening, which revitalised the small Ursuline movement and encouraged its rapid spread. Her most shocking, and as yet undemonstrated, prophecy was of the rapidly coming death of the Emperor's body and his transformation into a god of pure light.

Saint Vinicius the Learned (Officially Unrecognised), Scribe of the Faith, Proselyte of the Wastes

Vinicius was a highly talented organiser, editor, and theologian from Kangyur whose career as a priest had dead-ended under the incompetence of the Kangyuri church, leaving him stuck overseeing a minor monastery in the Dhawalan rad wastes where he encountered Ursula shortly before her death. After her death, it was Vinicius who edited her writings, formulated the theology of the new faith, preached to the waste tribes surrounding the monastery, recruited his fellow monks, nuns, and priests to join him, and organised the careful undermining of Madarian orthodoxy across Kangyur. He spent fifty years essentially creating the new faith from scratch, before dying in the monastery that bears his name. The Kangyuri Ecclesiarchy refuses to recognise him as a saint, and claims that he was a rogue psyker who used sinful powers to bewitch the minds of innocents into falling for his heretical nonsense.

Saint Bola the Contemner (Officially Unrecognised), the Heat of the Emperor's Light

Towards the end of Vinicius's life and only a few decades before the Great Rift emerged, Bola Aramyth was a Kailasan canon lawyer exiled to Kangyur after angering House Bagh-Nam in a dispute with the Ecclesiarchy. At some point after arriving, she converted to the new faith, and became a legal terror for the authorities of the day as they first noticed and began to suppress the emerging Ursuline faith. Bola is most famous for her defense of the Unmartyrs of Vajra, four pious Ursulines who intended to sacrifice their lives by undergoing Ecclesiarchical trials for their faith. Instead, she managed to show the bishop of Kangyur (the trials' judge) had been engaged in heretical practices, dethroning him in the process, while also making such a tangled weave of Kangyuri religious law that decades passed before the orthodox church could straighten out the mess well enough to go after the Ursulines. Her other great accomplishment was to successfully manage to have Ursula canonised by the Kailasan authorities (relying on the fact that the Kangyuri church had not bothered to inform them about the situation). For her services to the faith, Ursulines canonised her in turn.

Sister Lily Huang

The most influential and charismatic advocate of Ursulinism on Kangyur, she is the unofficial head of the faith. Her life's work is to take the scattered folk movements of Ursulinism and bring them together into a powerful and dynamic organisation that can usurp the orthodox church and become the dominant faith on Kangyur, and then throughout the Bhadran system. She is most active in the Dhawalan lowlands, but travels widely across Kangyur meeting secretly with small groups of radical Ursulines, bringing connections to other groups and soothing over their differences. Should the Ursulines succeed in taking control of the planet, she would be the inevitable choice for its new bishop. She is a fierce, uncompromising, and highly charismatic priestess who holds to the most radical doctrines of the faith, and is not afraid to preach to mutants. Rumours swirl around her of miraculous healings she has managed to perform, restoring the tattered genetic code and malformations of mutants to their true, whole, forms.

40,000 Sectors: A Generator

I got Imperium Maledictum, the new Warhammer 40K RPG the other day. It looks good overall, I'll be writing a longer and more detailed review shortly. As part of my campaign prep for an upcoming test of the system, I decided to relaunch the Tellian Sector. To make it bigger, and represent the changes as 40K moves into the 42nd millennium and the "Indomitus Era", I decided I would make an automatic sector generator. 

Here it is, free to the public, as an Excel spreadsheet you can use yourself.

This is based off a heavily modded and "40K-ified" version of the Stars Without Number 1e planet generator. If you know fairly basic Excel (how the INDEX and RANDBETWEEN formulas work, specifically), you can mod it fairly extensively if you don't like the probability ranges I've assigned to various categories. 

To get started:

1) Create a new worksheet and copy / paste the values only from columns L through X from the generator template worksheet to that new worksheet. 

2) You'll want to insert two columns at the left-hand side and copy over the counters from columns J and K on the generator template worksheet so you can keep track of the rate of incidence of each item in each category. Be sure to make this a regular paste (not values-only) so it preserves the counter formulas in K

If you delete it, the counter formula is: =COUNTIF($[column letter]$[number of first row of column]:$[column letter]$[last row of column], [column letter and row number of the entry you want it to track). 

e.g. =COUNTIF($F$1:$F$121, A2) tells Excel to count everything in column F between rows 1 and 121 that matches the value in A2 (which in this table is the word "Agri-World")

Expanding it:

All you need to do is select the bottom row of columns L through X on the generator template and drag them down until you have as many planets as you want. Nice and easy! It's Excel, so I recommend not doing more than about 10,000 at a time unless you've got a top of the line machine. Also, it's easier to handle certain later processes if you do smaller batches at once, so consider making each worksheet a subsector and then generating however many subsectors you want.

If you screw up the formula for any reason and need to rewrite it, all of the columns are basically filled with:

=INDEX($B$2:$B$101, RANDBETWEEN(1,100),0)

Where B2 and B101 are the 100 entries to the left in column B (Planet Type), and RANDBETWEEN generates a number between 1 and 100 and then grabs a corresponding row coordinate out of column B and INDEX dumps the value in that cell, e.g. "Hive World" into the formula's own cell.

De-duping the tags:

This is one of those things where working in smaller batches will keep you sane. Writing a formula to de-dupe rows across three columns is kind of a pain, so you'll need to manually dedupe if any of the Notable Features tags are duplicates on a given planet. There are 100 possible tags, so you'll rarely run into dupes in small batches.

Organising planets into systems:

1) Starting from the first cell under "System", look at the number (n) in it, and count down (n-1) squares, deleting the entries in columns C and D ("System" and "Star Type" respectively).

Here's a picture of what that looks like once you're done:

So you can see that there's a single system with 6 in the System column and an A in the start type with five blank spaces under it. All of the planets that are blank like that are in the same system.

The numbers in the system column are generated by running a simple formula that divides 120 by a random integer between 12 and 120. The formula is here: =120/RANDBETWEEN(12,120)

120 was selected as the numerator because it's the number of planets in my sample sector and the default for this generator. Just change that to however many planets you're actually working with. My recommendation is that whatever size you're working with, the minimum value for the random integer should be set up so that no more than 10 planets per system are generated, and the maximum value so that at least 1 planet is in each system. So if you had 10,000 planets, you'd go with a minimum value of 1000, and a maximum value of 10,000.

Making sense of things:

This is also the stage where I recommend you look at the actual entries and make any manual changes you want. I typically use the counters at the side (it's why I included them) and use a Find/Replace to alter the cell colours: orange for ones I want to reduce, green for ones I want to increase. For example, if there aren't enough Agri-Worlds, I'll identify what I do have a surplus of that I don't want (say, Penal Worlds) and turn some Penal Worlds into Agri-Worlds. So long as you don't misspell things, the counters should automatically update.

Naming things:

You'll want to delete the remaining numbers in the System column (column C), and start punching in names. I have not created an automatic name generator here because it would be convoluted and I've never really needed one myself. Once you have the systems named, go through and name each individual planet, station, etc. in column E

That's basically it.

Summary:

1) Open the sheet, and copy it

2) Copy and paste the values from columns L through X. Once you've done that, delete columns A through I.

3) De-dupe the tags manually.

4) Break the planets up into systems

5) Name the systems and planets

6) Fiddle with entries until you're happy

7) Remember to save your work!

A few notes on the Tellian Sector and this generator:

I intentionally left a lot of the tags more generic rather than less so you can mod them to your own taste. Some of the tags and such also represent my own interests in the 40K setting, and I encourage you to change them if you want something different.. 

There's a lot of Xenos and Hereteks, comparatively low levels of Chaos, and no Necrons, Orks, Eldar, or Space Marines explicitly mentioned. I have small amounts of Eldar and Space Marines in the Tellian sector, but they're custom-placed by me rather than something I leave to a random generator.

There's also a fairly high chance of people having archaeotech levels of technology, and a lot of xeno collaborators because these are what make the Tellian sector an area of interest to the Imperium (for good or for ill).

Anyhow, enjoy! I don't care about copyright, credit, any of that stuff, so use it as you please.

Old Files Now on Google Drive

The Tellian Sector, complete with map, planetary profiles, and a listing of active espionage organisations in the Tellian system itself.

Backgrounds for Moragne, my Runequest 6 / Legend / Mongoose Runequest 2 setting loosely modeled after Angevin England. Suitable for any JAFE (Just Another Fantasy Europe) setting.

My overland travel reference sheet for the Moragne campaign.

The primer for my Moragne campaign.

My potion tables for use with my alchemy rules. These are built off of procedural metapharmacology.

Iron Heartbreakers v. 1.52, my Microlite20 swords and sorcery game inspired by Iron Heroes. It's ideal if you want low or no-magic PCs.

The Necrocarcerus v. 1.1 rules document as well as a map of Necrocarcerus showing rail connections. Also, a copy of the wandering monster table for SAFE AREA DUVANOVIC, a mini-campaign setting within Necrocarcerus that I'm writing.

70%

The answer to the challenge I posted yesterday is 70%.

Two people responded on my blog with what I consider common sense, totally reasonable answers, both favouring 46% but considering the possibility of 66%. Neither is correct. I don't blame them, I blame the rulebook.

What people think happens, what I thought happens for two years after owning the book, is that you roll the character's Fellowship score (since they're trained in the Command skill), plus or minus any modifiers, and a success determines whether or not the target does what you command them to do.

The actual rules in question are hidden away on page 230 (and their location is not listed in the index to maximise one's ease in finding them). Interaction skills change dispositions. Better or worse dispositions act as modifiers to a base chance of 50% (70% if directly supervised) to obey a character, in steps of 10%. A NPC with the Devoted disposition (+20) has a 70% chance to obey the character without supervision, 90% with. I didn't specify the supervision status - my bad, I only noticed it was relevant while rereading the rules yet again. It's the last sentence in the last paragraph in the last column on the page, the only time it's mentioned in the entirety of the rules. Dispositions are also the only social modifiers listed, despite the game's extensive lists of modifiers for other situations (combat, etc.).

The only rules I know of used less in Dark Heresy are the investigation rules (pg. 186). Until I discovered them and suggested that we use them in a Dark Heresy game in 2010, I had never seen another player, in my games or in online discussion, mention or use them (nor since, and I've been keeping an eye out for it). This is unfortunate, because they actually assist players in succeeding in social interactions, boosting the chances that NPCs will comply with their requests dramatically. This helps low-ranked characters who are unable to leverage the talents and attribute boosts they get at higher ranks to succeed socially, and would incentivise players to attempt social solutions to problems that they currently shoot their way out of. The fact that these rules are poorly presented is especially odd for a game that is about a bunch of investigators trying to dig up corruption, using a system known for complaints about the "whiff factor" on skill use, and which encourages players to solve problems by means other than shooting them (though it does encourage a certain amount of shootiness).

The lesson here is: Don't hide a set of rules that will change how people play the game somewhere where they will never find them.

A Challenge That Teaches a Lesson

Thesis: Almost no one who plays Dark Heresy understands how the interaction rules work because the actual explanation of how one gets people to do things socially is both contrary to expectations and hidden.

Do this challenge without looking at the source text (the Dark Heresy rulebook).

A PC with Fellowship 46 trained in the Command skill attempts to convince a Devoted (+20) soldier to obey a command with no other modifiers to the roll. What is the percentage chance that that the soldier obeys?

a) 66%

b) 70%

c) 46%

d) 86%

e) 93%

Follow up: How is this number calculated?

I know the correct answer, and it's always driven me nuts.

Answers can go in the comments or by G+. I'll post the correct answer tomorrow evening.

The Tellian Sector Returns!

The Tellian Sector returns!
The link has:

A big map of the Tellian Sector I created using Hexographer
An Excel 2007 spreadsheet with planetary profiles for 44 systems with 136 described locations
An Excel 2007 spreadsheet with stats for 15 espionage organisations active in the Tellian System (several are sector-wide)

This was created with the Stars Without Number planetary generator. This is the setting I created for my 40K games. I've used it in three campaigns using the actual 40K games (Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader and Deathwatch), and I'll be using it in future when I run 40K games using Stars Without Number.

The Tellian Sector is adjacent to the Calixis Sector, the basic setting for Dark Heresy. Specifically, it is almost directly below it, with its "top" side touching the galactic plane and extending downards. Proximity to the Calixis Sector and the Koronus Expanse allows referees to repurpose material from their Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader books with a minimum of fuss.

Some of the tags in the above planetary profiles are different than in stock Stars Without Number. They are all direct conversions of existing tags - "Unbraked AI" becomes "Silica Animus", the term in the setting for AIs. "Regional hegemon" becomes either "subsector hegemon" or "sector hegemon", "preceptor archive" is "ancient archive", "aliens" become "xenos", "psionics" become "psykers", "pretech cultists" are "tech priest cult", "perimeter agency" becomes "inquisition outpost".

There's also a new tech level, "specialist 4", which is a world with Tech 4 in most respects, but Tech 5 in one or two.

The Tellian Sector tends to focus on the elements of 40K I like the most, and downplay or ignore those elements I least wanted to tell stories involving. There is a lot of malign technology, rogue psykers, Chaos cults, and inscrutable xenos. Orks, Tyranids and Necrons are not present in any great numbers, but there are plenty of Xeno-controlled worlds that could be repurposed to those ends, particularly Washout, Crux Ultima and the Devil's Egg.

The stories I've told using the Tellian Sector primarily focus on the machinations of an arch-heretic named Valentine Illst and his various cronies, particularly a Dark Mechanicus sect known as the Statisticians of Certainty, and a Nurgle cult known as the Black Dawn. Both Illst's core organisation, the Statisticians of Certainty and the Black Dawn are statted up in the espionage organisation section (based on the system in Darkness Visible). If there's demand for it, I can also stat them up as factions using the core rules.

Originally, this was all part of a mega-campaign ("The Navigator of Possibilities") where I would run one campaign / adventure in each FFG 40K system focusing on an interwoven narrative.

The first adventure was a Dark Heresy adventure focusing on a Black Ship that had dropped out of a convoy while transporting a former Interrogator turned heretic, a Mechanicus Magos working for the Inquisition, a dozen or so alpha psykers, and a mysterious artifact known as the Navigator of Possibilities, a communication from the residents of a possible future trying to invade their own past and cannibalise it. The cell managed to stop these foul psyker-vampire mutants from invading our timeline en masse and consuming all life in the galaxy.

The second was a Rogue Trader adventure in which a Rogue Trader crew was asked to find and pinpoint the location of the Statisticians of Certainty, who had captured the Navigator of Possibilities with the help of arch-heretic Valentine Illst. The Statisticians of Certainty had fled into the Lost Worlds, beyond the edge of the Imperium intending to activate the Navigator of Possibilities, travel to the far future, and become techno-gods. This adventure ended with the Navigator of Possibility recaptured, and the Statisticians of Certainty's main fleet crushed, though many of their members escaped. The mysterious pre-Imperial demigod Azar, a supergenius alpha-psyker from the Dark Age of Technology released from his imprisonment on a lost world by the Rogue Trader, was seen vanishing into the future with several of the Dark Mechanicus and the psyker-vampires.

The third was a Deathwatch campaign in which this sudden burst of activity by Valentine Illst was registered by his old foe, an Inquisitor-Lord on Ammis unable to travel between the star due to a daemon's vendetta. A kill team of Deathwatch marines was assigned to hunt down Illst (who is possibly any one of a Xeno pretending to be human, a Silica Animus remotely operating a doppleganger, or a colonist from the Dark Age of Technology resurrected over and over again by infernal science). The kill team captured Titus Hyle, Nurglish sorcerer and master of the Black Dawn, slew several others among Illst's cronies, and eventually captured Illst himself after leading an Imperial naval fleet into the Black Atlantis dyson sphere.

The Black Crusade game, if I ever run it, will be about breaking Illst free of the Inquisition's headquarters on Ammis, and recovering the Navigator of Possibilities from the same.

The Only War adventure is a secret until I run Black Crusade, but will involve Illst and his cronies once again. Azar will show up here again, and the nature of his mysterious connection the Illst matter resolved.

40K Stars Without Number Warrior Training Packages

Arbiter
The character is either a member of the Adeptus Arbites or a similar planetary institution. He investigates crimes and violently confronts the guilty.

Skills: Combat/Projectile Weapons, Combat/Primitive, Culture/World, Perception, Persuade, Security

Assassin
The character is a member of an assassin temple or death cult, or they are a professional killer for pay.

Skills: Athletics, Combat/Primitive, Combat/Projectile Weapons, Security, Stealth, Vehicle/Any

Crusader
A holy warrior motivated by faith. Crusaders are found throughout the Imperium, and are often attached to the Ecclesiarchy or the Inquisition.

Skills: Combat/Energy Weapons, Combat/Projectile Weapons, Culture/World, Leadership, Religion/Imperial Creed, Tactics

Feral Warrior
The character comes from a backwater world, often a Death World, and prefers to use the techniques they acquired there.

Skills: Athletics, Combat/Primitive, Combat/Unarmed, Culture/World, Stealth, Survival

Ganger
The character acquired their skills as part of an organised criminal group where they supplied muscle.

Skills: Combat/Unarmed, Combat/Any, Culture/Criminal, Persuade, Security, Vehicle/Any

Guardsman
The character was a member of the Imperial Guard or PDF or a professional mercenary organisation with similar training.

Skills: Combat/Energy Weapons, Combat/Any, Leadership, Tactics, Tech/Imperial, Vehicle/Any

Pirate/Armsman
The character has worked as a pirate or armsman aboard a voidship, defending it from attack.

Skills: Combat/Any, Culture/Spacer, Exosuit, Navigation, Tech/Imperial, Vehicle/Space

Naval Officer
The character has served as a naval officer aboard a voidship, either as part of the Imperial Navy or a private vessel.

Skills: Combat/Gunnery, Culture/Spacer, Leadership, Navigation, Tactics, Tech/Imperial

40K Stars Without Number Psychic Training Packages

Astropath
The character is an astropath, a psychic communications specialist.

Skills: Culture/Any, Language, Navigation, Tech/Warp

Diviner
The character is an Imperial diviner, a precognitive specialist. Diviners make a good living predicting the future for their employers, both private and Imperial.

Skills: Combat/Warp, Gambling, Perception, Tech/Warp

Medicae Psyker
The character is a psyker-healer. Many of these individuals are sent to the battlefields of the Imperial Guard to serve as field medics.

Skills: Combat/Any, Religion/Imperial Creed, Tech/Warp, Tech/Medical

Psychic Investigator
The character uses their psychic powers to investigate crimes. This may be for the Inquisition, the Adeptus Arbites, or for private interests.

Skills: Perception, Persuade, Security, Tech/Warp

Psychic Scholar
The character is a researcher into the mysteries of psy-power. Many of these individuals dabble in forbidden lore, and are greatly prized by the Inquisition.

Skills: Culture/Any, Religion/Any, Science, Tech/Warp

Shaman
The character comes from a feral world or other primitive background and uses its rites and rituals to activate their psychic powers. Shamans often serve as the keepers of lore for their societies.

Skills: Combat/Warp, History, Survival, Stealth

Sorcerer/Witch
The character is an unsanctioned psyker, who will either fall prey to Chaos sooner or later, or who has already sold their soul to the laughing gods.

Skills: Combat/Warp, Culture/Ruinous Powers, Religion/Ruinous Powers, Tech/Warp

Templar
Combat psykers are in high demand amongst the Imperial Guard.

Skills: Combat/Any, Combat/Warp, Leadership, Tactics

Darkness Visible / Polychrome Review

Darkness Visible and Polychrome are supplements for Stars Without Number by Sine Nomine Publishing (which is a one-man shop run by Kevin Crawford). Stars Without Number is one of the most exciting and interesting science fiction games to come out this decade, and I think both of these supplements expand the possible kinds of games you can use the system for.

Polychrome covers the eponymous world, which is a cyberpunk dystopia. You've no doubt seen and read about cyberpunk dystopias before, and can create your own, but if you're pressed for time, there's one premade for you here. There's a description of the world, NPCs profiles, pre-established conflicts for you to exploit,  hooks for why off-world visitors would want to come to Polychrome, all good stuff. Unfortunately, this section doesn't include faction write-ups to use the SWN faction / politics system.

The really exciting parts of the book are the rules additions and game structures in the back half, starting from about page 14 onwards until page 30. You've got rules for "shadowrun" operations, investigations, hacking, new cyberware and other gear, stats for various NPC antagonists and allies, and generators for adventures and NPC resources (one table is called "A Memorable NPC Quirk Is Their..." and another is "What's that Underhab Building?"). At the very back of the book is a PC-suitable handout with the player hacking reference sheet.

This kind of stuff is not unusual, though as always for Stars Without Number the material is both high-quality and extremely gameable. What elevates it above the ordinary bunch of tables, and this is true of most material like this in Stars Without Number books, is the detailed information on structuring play and using the tables as part of that. The information on running investigations is literally one page of text with two columns, and yet it packs more useful advice about how to handle investigations and legwork in cyberpunk games than dozens of similar pages in Dark Heresy. Similarly, the two pages titled "Inside Jobs" dealing with undercover corporate espionage / sabotage almost reads like it was written to cover all the information about these things that Shadowrun 4e left out (for example, how much PCs should be paid) and has a bunch of generic adventure seeds that can be repurposed endlessly, as well as a couple of quick tables to flesh out these seeds. SWN's great strength compared to many other adventure games is its concision and concreteness where other games are prolix and vague, and Polychrome demonstrates that well.

There's also an introductory adventure in Polychrome. I haven't played or run the adventure, so I can't speak to it, but I like that it only takes up six pages instead of say, the thirty-one that the intro adventure in Dark Heresy does.

As fond as I am of Polychrome, I actually consider Darkness Visible the better supplement of the two. If I only had to buy one, it's the one I would buy (fortunately, I didn't have to choose). Darkness Visible is a 97 page supplement about running an espionage campaign. The first chunk of the book deals with the Perimeter agency, which is part of the core Stars Without Number setting. They're an interstellar covert-ops group left over from the previous interstellar human civilisation devoted to preventing technological experimentation from creating existential threats to humanity. I don't use the actual Stars Without Number setting much, so it's of limited gaming value to me, but I did find the section well-written, interesting, and full of gameable ideas. It passed the "Chupp Test", where after reading it, I wanted to play a Perimeter agent.

The bulk of the book is taken up with rules material for running espionage campaigns, and it's a feast of good stuff. There's a subsystem or replacement system for the faction / politics system in stock Stars Without Number that focuses on the resources and actions most relevant to espionage agencies. These rules are meant to by used by PCs to direct the course of the agency they work for, and used properly (as the rules explain), they allow the players to create missions for their characters to go on instead of requiring the referee to come up with them. It's a really well done system, and I encourage other writers to study it as an example of how you can take what initially appears to be a very limited, strictly defined frame for a campaign that appears to provide limited agency (the PCs are operatives given missions by a patron agency) and turn it into a "sandbox" game.

The maltech antagonists are given extensive treatments, including stats, cool new gear, a genetic modifications subsystem and good discussions of how each type of organisation (eugenics cults, doomsday cults, and "godmind" cults focused on unbraked AI) works. There's a lot of work done exploring why and how people might want to tamper with this stuff despite the risks. At the end of this section, there's a version of the Stars Without Number "tags" system for the cults with a random generator.

If you're unfamiliar with the "tags" system, it's a set of randomly generated keywords that are attached to things (mainly planets and factions in the core rules) that have associated entries that suggest friends, enemies, complications, things, and places. These are tied into the adventure generation system in a consistent way so that with a couple of quick rolls you can create entire adventures. The terminology is consistent across books whenever adventure seeds or structures are presented, so you could actually take the tags from the cults in this book, plug the associated subcategories into the adventure seeds in Polychrome or the stock rules, and instantly generate adventures. It's a really subtle, well-done part of the Stars Without Number system that I don't see a lot of people comment on, and it's always surprised me that it hasn't been more influential or studied.

"Tradecraft" is the chapter explaining how to create espionage adventures in detail, and is worth the price of the book on its own. Even if you're not that interested in the Stars Without Number system itself, this section is worth reading through as a very concrete, well done example of how to structure and run espionage / intelligence missions. Once again, it's incredibly concise at 13 pages, with about half of that devoted to specific mission types. After that are rules specific to an espionage game, more background and training packages and some new gear.

What these two books have done IMHO, is turn Stars Without Number into a better system for running Dark Heresy-type games than Dark Heresy itself is. As long-time readers of this blog know, I have a 40K - Stars Without Number conversion, so the idea for me is not a new one (checking my back posts, I just realised I never posted the training packages for warriors and psychics - expect those to go up in the next few days). I think that between Darkness Visible and Polychrome, you now have more rules support for playing a bunch of Throne Agents going around investigating heresy than you do in Dark Heresy itself. If you're currently playing Dark Heresy and finding yourself butting up against what is a very clunky, overly complicated rules system that is mostly available in extremely expensive full-colour hardcover books, it might be worth your time to dole out a much smaller amount of money on Stars Without Number and the two supplements mentioned in this review and switch over. Not only will this be easier on your pocketbook, I suspect you'll actually have a superior play experience.

Gaming Plans 2012

If you had asked me even in university if I would have been able to plan out my gaming plans for an entire year ahead of time, I would have laughed. These days, things are different, and I find that my gaming is stable enough that I have a planning horizon of about 18 months.

In 2012:

Thousand Thrones (Every other Sunday) 

This is an expected 36+ sessions, so I should still be playing it somewhere around a year and a half from now

Emern (Every other Wednesday) 

This is a recent change, and may not be permanent. Emern used to be weekly, but we've had the last two weeks off. School is getting busy for one of the players, and I recently had a player leave due to scheduling commitments, so I'm hoping we can recruit some new blood and fiddle with the schedule to make sure it works for everyone.

Dark Heresy (Once a month on Saturday)

Curtis, the best DM I know, is planning to start coming back to Toronto in April or May to run a heavily houseruled version of Dark Heresy in a custom setting. The group attached to this game was for many years my "main" gaming group, but it imploded in spring last year, lingered in its dying spasms through summer and fall, and died full on in late December / early January. I'm hopeful we'll go from Narsil to Anduril over time.

Dawnlands (TBD)

I was originally planning to run a Dawnlands game in March, but I've been busy with the interview process for a job and some other things. Now that I have the job and a definite starting date, I'm thinking of running the game online per a suggestion by my buddy Jude. I'm thinking it will be every other week, on IRC or another platform if people have recommendations, in 4 hour sessions. I'm looking for text-based platforms instead of speech or video ones, I think. Anyhow, this'll have open recruitment, and I'll put up a post when I'm ready letting folks know.