Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay

A subset of games set in Warhammer 40,000 setting that are full Tabletop RPG, published by Fantasy Flight Games, using a mechanical system similar to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. The license expired, so there will be no more. Includes several lines:

• Dark Heresy (2008) Player Characters are Inquisitorial Acolytes. The game focuses on themes of corruption and conspiracy. And fighting for your life now and then.
• Rogue Trader (2009) Player Characters are a Rogue Trader with the crew. It's a game of exploration, adventure, and the horrors of the unknown, roaming the uncharted depths of space for gold, glory and the God-Emperor.
• Deathwatch (2010)
• Black Crusade (2011). Player Characters are heretics. Introduced changes that split the series into two groups with different mechanics. Mostly resembles the later group.
• Only War (2012)
• Dark Heresy 2 (2013/2014)

Tropes used in Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay include:

• Abnormal Ammo: Lots and lots, and it mostly adds up with the books. And whole series.
• A-Team Firing: This is the case when any character who is not optimized for gun skills makes attacks with weapons firing on fully automatic. Surprisingly, this is actually one of the more effective combat strategies, as the application of More Dakka to intentionally suppress targets will give the opposing force penalties regardless of how much actual damage it does, allowing those characters in the party who are optimized for gun skills to take careful aim to finish off suppressed foes.
• Armor Is Useless: Averted like the plague. Try walking around without armor - unless you're a particularly feared psyker, you'll find something sticking out of your flesh soon.
  • There are actually some results on the Critical Damage tables that only occur if the character is not wearing armor, or that have a worse effect if the character is not wearing armor.
• Body Snatcher: A disturbingly large number of the given antagonists are these.
• Bulletproof Vest: Although Imperial Guard issue flak armor is derided in the wider fandom as having the protective qualities of a t-shirt against military-grade weaponry, it is actually some of the better armor that an acolyte can start with. Further, it is common and inexpensive enough that a group pooling its resources should be able to afford to equip every member with at least this, it is light enough that even physically frail characters can comfortably wear it, and it provides fair protection across the entire body. Considering how deadly combat is in this game, almost everyone needs some fair protection. This tends to put it into Boring but Practical territory.
• The Corruption: The Corruption Points mechanic.
• Critical Hit: Eight pages of blood-spurting, limb-severing, organ-cooking, bone-exploding charts, though generally these only apply once a character drops below zero Hit Points Wounds. Also includes the more traditional "extra damage on a good die roll" version as Righteous Fury: rolling a natural 10 on a damage die gives a player the chance to continue rolling damage dice until they stop rolling a 10.
  • Chunky Salsa Rule: Taking more than eight cumulative points of Critical Damage will kill you in some horrendously gruesome and awe-inspiring way. Such as, oh say, "Both head and body are blown into a mangled mess, instantly killing the target. In addition, if the target is carrying any ammunition it explodes dealing 1d10+ 5 Energy Damage to anything within 1d5 meters." And that's just at 7.
  • As 1d4 Chan puts it:

"It has the best critical hit charts ever made. You don't even need the rest of the game (although it is all good, it's just a LOT). Just start a campaign, wing it, and whenever anyone gets a good hit, roll on the critical hit charts. Holy fucking hell, did boiling bone marrow just turn my femur into a frag grenade? Fuck."

• Deadly Decadent Court: Par for the course among the Imperial nobility on more established worlds, but this is the particular hat of the hive world Malfi, who take it Up to Eleven. They are not necessarily all evil, but it is an environment in which one must lie, mislead, backstab, and maintain the courtly Masquerade, or suffer long torments as those who do rip their rivals' houses apart over the course of years.
• Death World: The Calixis Sector has its fair share. Of particular note is the planet Phyrr, where literally every living organism and organic by-product on the planet is profoundly toxic to humans.
  • As well as Woe, which is listed in the core rule book as "A death world. Extremely hazardous." Sounds nice, doesn't it?. Woe is later explained to have nothing but plant life on it. All of which are omnivorous, and can also move about, albeit rather slowly. These ultra deadly trees have been noted to not only shift around overnight like The Brothers Grimm trees, but are also smart enough to team up on larger trees. As far as the foliage is concerned, you are food.
• Dodge the Bullet: Every character gets one "Reaction" move during their enemy's turn. Among other things, this can be used to parry an opponent's attack, or in gun fights used to dodge an enemy's shot. Of course, characters do only get one Reaction per round, which means it can be overcome by More Dakka on their enemy's part, unless that combat dodge is used to Take Cover, which is the practical option when being shot at.
• Dying Planet: The world of Sinophia at the edge of the Calixis Sector was the staging point for the Angevin Crusade that brought the sector into the Imperium millennia ago. At that time, Sinophia's infrastructure and economy were greatly expanded to support the crusade, and the world benefitted as immigrants arrived, industry flourished, and the planet became wealthy and influential. However, as the crusade wound down and the conquered worlds settled fully into the Imperium, the importance and influence of Siophia declined. These days, the world is slowly decaying, in a perpetual economic downturn, with a shrinking population, an unmaintained infrastructure, and various noble houses bickering among one another with none able to wield the influence to steer the planet to recovery.
  • Lathe-Hadd aka "the Silent Forge". Weren't ahead to begin with, then made things worse. Then suffered infestations by the schismaticals (viral AI). Things may or may not have begun to improve.
• Explosive Leash: Explosive collars are an available piece of equipment. If you play a Guardsman, you can elect to start with one still attached.
• Feudal Future: In line with the wider setting, and there are enough of all-out Feudal worlds that they have their own place in the official classification.
• Goggles Do Something Unusual: Photo-Visor/Photo-Contacts appeared in Necromunda, so this had to escalate.
  • Fairly common enhancements: Photo Sight (night vision and glare/flash suppression), that come in shapes from common goggles or even contact lenses to built into helmets of armor and working gear as needed and close second, Preysense (IR-vision systems, good ones look like normal goggles)...
  • Other eyepieces range from trivial like Mono-sight (cable-linked with camera sight on a gun, to aim without sticking your head out) to augmented reality systems like Targeting Monocle (Mono-sight that also is a ballistic calculator automatically taking into account range, wind, etc plus an extra function - either motion predictor, light amplifier, IR or telescopic sight - and looks really posh) or Ocular Catechizer (shape recognition unit that needs to be held on target for a little while, but functionality ranges from identification of vehicles with overlay of helpful notes to highlighting the needle in a rustled haystack, to translation of written text, as long as one has access to relevant source data).
• Gorn: Just read the descriptions in the Critical Hit tables. Combat in this game is not only deadly, it is messy.
• Hand Cannon: One of the generic handguns described in the game is literally referred to as a Hand Cannon. It's a solid-projectile firearm with recoil so powerful it requires a two-handed grip (or special gloves) to be used effectively. It is also the smallest pistol in the game that qualifies for this trope. In expansions, this rule or its variations (handcannon penalty unless Strength>threshold, otherwise normal pistol or handcannon with Strength>threshold, otherwise Basic ^[1]) are applied fairly often.
  • Then there are heavy laspistols, with damage of a full lasgun, only with lesser range and rate of fire (and fed from the same 60-shot power packs), that don't use this rule. Hotshot laspistols qualify even more, due to being not as much "pistol" as a hotshot lasgun shortened to be handy in close quarters; the result is 4 kg piece cable-fed from 10 kg power backpack (or bigger) - and in performance against armored targets is comparable with bolt pistol.
• High-Class Glass: Occasionally, especially the Rogue Traders. It helps that highly decorative monocles tend to also be very functional visors. And that a visor plus interface port (implant affordable even for scribes) together give most advantages of a full Mind Impulse Unit anyone but a pilot or Tech-priest would need: want to double-check prices or local ship routes during a negotiation? Don't even have to move a finger.
• Hologram: Holo-projectors are fairly widespread. Large-scale "holo-lanterns" are used as stationary art pieces or as cinema. While "holo-wafers" the size of a name badge (projectors holding a single holo-pict) are not quite commonplace, but cheap and has myriads of obvious uses from 3D map to pocket altar to assassin's Calling Card.
  • Holographic Terminal: Holo-displays. Used in various command and control centers, advanced portable sensors and expensive home theatre systems. like this. It's also possible to plug a general-purpose holo-projector into a cogitator and use existing input methods, if you don't mind flickering. Crafting hololithic images is also practised as a form of visual art; in RPG it's one of forms covered by Trade (Artist) skill.
• Machine Worship: Tech-Priests.
• Mushroom Samba: Hallucinogen grenades, whee!
• Nanomachines: One more thing mentioned in Warhammer 40,000 materials RPG add or expand:
  • Autosanguinator implants (traditional) have blood filled with injury-repairing machines. They also can be controlled to better effect by those with Mechanicus interface implants, but this involves risk of overworking the system and losing all advantages for a while. Hermetic Infusion (restricted to tech-priests) is a more powerful version, which replaces blood - as such, it makes transfusions and many other treatments designed for humans... inapplicable, though a Magos Biologis can help - not that it's needed often, with major Healing Factor and resistance to material contamination this gives. The hereteks have their own version - Black Blood, using some xenotech.
  • Core Gel (widely used where it's needed, but still contested by some tech-priests elsewhere) temporarily provides universal interface via application to skin. "Universal" here means that while mostly it's a temporary substitute for having MIU, it has a great advantage of working with old systems so incompatible that it was easier to use this expensive stuff that to devise a good adapter for either common data ports or "modern" implanted interfaces.
  • Luma-Crete (probably): needs to be injected into the body at several points, but for a while allows to survive a lot of things up to and including exposure to vacuum, though does not eliminate the need to breathe as such. Mechanically, +2 of Machine trait (which grants armor and resistances) and resistances to heat and radiation(!).
  • Silver Anathema (banned) is known as "mechanical poison" - it causes metal thorns to spontaneously grow in the victim's flesh. Extraction of said metal from tissues at a high rate cannot be healthy either.
  • Malygrisian Bioforging (unequivocally heretical, since it causes genetic damage) grows subdermal armour, increases general toughness and allows to briefly survive in vacuum, but causes dependency on consuming nephium (semi-exotic fuel that in unrefined form is a contact poison) and without tricky maintenance plastic starts growing in all the wrong places, which quickly disfigures and kills the "beneficiary".
  • Simuloptera (hostile) — wild swarms much like Bloodtide, but more of an excessively aggressive predator after being caught in a Warp storm. Terminator 2 style amorphous shapeshifting hivemind thingy, only of arbitrary size and speech-impaired (except via vox). Also, they assimilate useful devices.
• No Range Like Point-Blank Range: Shotguns are most effective at short range.
  • Furthermore all ranged attacks get a +30% to hit at point blank range. Except in melee (pistols can be used in melee).
• Off with His Head: Happens when one scores high on a head critical hit chart. Scoring even higher leads to such pleasant outcomes as nearby combatants being showered with skull fragments and brain matter, the local area becoming difficult to walk through for all the gore on the ground, and the victim being killed so gruesomely that his friends must fight the urge to flee from his killer for a couple of Rounds.
• Short-Range Long-Range Weapon: Very much averted, especially when compared to equivalent weapons from the tabletop game. However, thanks to their special rules, shotguns are still most effective at point-blank range.
• Psychic Powers: Psykers are available as a career path. They're powerful, but using psychic abilities has a chance of going horribly wrong if the Random Number God-Emperor does not smile upon you.
• Reliably Unreliable Guns: Ork weapons are Unreliable for everyone else.
• Take Cover: Given how deadly combat in this game is, and how effective cover is at preventing a character from getting hit, this is practically a necessity against opponents with guns. Even well-armored characters will usually want to get into cover to prevent a Death of a Thousand Cuts from the little Scratch Damage that manages to get through their protection.

1. ↑ as long arm