So we played a game of Black Crusade today. That's the fourth in the ongoing Fantasy Flight series of roleplaying games set in the venerable Warhammer 40k universe. 40k is basically fantasy in space with Space Marines for knights, psychic powers for magic, Space Elves, Space Dark Elves, Space Orks, Robot Undead, and so on. For all that its origins are steeped in "fantasy with the serial numbers filed off" the universe itself has a fairly distinct feel that somehow works even better than the straight up fantasy version of the same setting, imaginitive named Warhammer Fantasy. There's a certain bleakness and darkness to the 40k universe that just draws one in.
As I said, there are four versions of this game. The first was Dark Heresy where in your characters are acolytes of an Imperial Inquisitor and hunt down threats to the Imperium. The second was Rogue Trader in which you become the command crew of a miles long star cruiser and explore the fringes of unknown space, sometimes fighting, some times diplomacizing, and sometimes yes, trading. The third was Deathwatch where you played Imperial Space Marines. And finally, there's Black Crusade where, for the first time, you're playing the bad guys, a bunch of renegade Space Marines and human heretics.
For all that, the introductory adventure doesn't really emphasize your being evil. Structurally, it's a dungeon crawl, and we didn't really act much differently than a Neutral/Unaligned D&D party might. That's fine, though, since we've got a couple of players new to Warhammer at the table, so having the online intro adventure be something similar to traditional styles makes sense. The fact that it seems pretty similar to Doug's aborted Star Frontiers game is pretty funny, though.
Like most percentile systems, you fail a lot in Black Crusade. Most characters, especially beginning characters, can only get a few stats above 50%, so a Challenging roll that applies no modifier to the roll will probably be a failure unless it's falling into your particular specialty, and can still fail even then. While it does give us room to grow, the specter of constant failure was a big reason that Star Frontiers didn't work out, so that's something to watch out for as we go forward with the game. Fortunately that's mitigated somewhat by the Black Crusade characters being much more bad-ass than the Dark Heresy characters whose constant bungling killed that game for us a few years back.
However, the bad-assery of the Chaos Space Marine characters provides another problem. You see, Doug's Chaos Marine has a Toughness of 8 and an Armor of 10. That means he can shrug off 18 points of damage off every attack that hits hi, barring mitigating factors like the armor penetration of the weapon used to discomfort Doug's guy. Considering that a basic laser pistol only does 1d10+2 damage, it requires some work to reasonably threaten Doug. However, my own character, a Psyker, has a Toughness of 4 and Armor 2. And, for that matter, only 8 Wounds (hit points). That means that the damage roll of 19 that's required to so much ad inconvenience Doug will kill me stone dead if it hits my character, or at least screw me up badly. That's a problem that I'm working on trying to fix with advancement experience, but there's only so much I can do per level up.
For all that I still find the system less than it could be, the game itself was interesting, and we've got reasonably well defined characters. Thus, I'm looking forward to our next game in a week.
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