Release: Core Book 3.3

I’ve finished work on the latest update to the Dark Heresy for Genesys Core Rulebook, the 3.3 release. You can find it here; [LINK]

The changelog is located here, but here’s an overview of the big changes.

  • The main focus of this update is to rebalance psychic powers. The goal was to make psychic attacks more satisfying, and make Perils of the Warp more common. This has involved a bunch of balance changes to psychic powers. In broad terms, the following changes have been made;
    • High Perils of the Warp results are significantly more likely to occur.
    • Pushing cannot add advantages to skill checks, and each time you push a power, +5 is added to the Perils of the Warp results.
    • Most Additional Effects for psychic attacks have been modified to not require advantages to trigger.
  • Outside of this it’s mostly correcting typos and other minor issues, not much to write about.

Some of these psychic power changes may seem drastic but I’ve been field testing them in my own campaign for a while and they’ve been working well. It’s still pretty hard to make your head explode unless you’re being very reckless with pushing.

Let me know what you think! If anyone spots any typos or other oddities, please let me know via the comments section below, or you can just message me directly through the contact form on this blog, or by adding me on Discord.

Hive Worlds Preview

Hey all, long time no see!

I’ve got a Hive Worlds preview for here, a pretty chunky one. I’ve dumped all the currently finished content into one PDF. It includes;

  • Chapter I: Hiver Origins in its entirety. This is mostly the same as my last post, with the addition of the Gene-Forged Elite Advance (to represent Goliaths and other genetic freaks).
  • Chapter II: Abhumans which is also finished. Contains rules for playing as Beastmen, Ogryns, Halflings and Squats. There’s a few abhuman-specific talents too, and some general rules on playing Abhuman PCs.
  • Chapter III: Trading Post, the armoury chapter. Only the ranged weapons and ammunition sections are done here, still got a lot of work to go.

Let me know what you think! Probably goes without saying but this is all pre-release content, so it’s basically a first draft and may change, although I think it’s mostly pretty polished as is.

[Link]

Hive World Preview: Character Creation

Hey all, just dropping in to provide a little preview of the Hive World book. I’ve completed the first draft of the Character Creation chapter.

This chapter details the following stuff;

  • Hive World Origins: A set of new backgrounds to be used in place of Home World options from the Core Book. They include Hive Ganger, Indentured Worker, Mechanicus Enclave, Merchant Guilder, Midhiver, Ministorum Upbringing, Spire Outcast, Underhive Scum and Wastelander.
  • Obligation: Adapted Obligation rules, taken from Edge of the Empire. I figure these are a great fit to represent the complex social ties and criminal activity inherent to hiver life.
  • Unsanctioned Psyker Elite Advance: Custom rules for playing an Unsanctioned Psyker. These make being a psyker riskier, but more powerful.

I’ve included a Drive link below, let me know what you think! Next I’ll be working on the Abhumans chapter.

[Download Link]

Development Update – Jan 2022

Hey all! Thought I’d post a quick update of where I’m at with the Hive World book. Work has been very intense lately (I work in healthcare so it’s been a bit chaotic for the last little while) so I haven’t got as much done as I’d like, but I’ve been chipping away at the book and have a couple of little snippets of content to show off.

Firstly, here’s a few of the Hive World origins I’ve developed. The idea is that these supplement the core book options, not totally replace them. Lets you have a campaign where everyone comes from the same world without it getting too dull.

There’s a few more I plan to add. The final book should have the following other options;

  • Merchant Guilder – Characters attached to various merchant guilds.
  • Sump Scavvie – Weirdo mutants from the underhive.
  • Wastelander – People from the derelict scavanger communities in the wastelands on the outskirts of a hive city.
  • Abhumans, including Squats, Ratlings, Ogryn and Beastmen.
  • Probably also some form of “middle class” background I haven’t come up with a fancy name for yet. People from families that do important Imperial jobs but aren’t quite nobility. Your enforcers, Administratum clerks, etc.

I also made this little table on a whim; a quick way to generate areas in the lower areas of a hive, for if you need some random encounter ideas when the party wander off the beaten path or get lost.

That’s all I have for today, but I plan to make a post soon detailing some updates to the core book’s psychic power system that have come out of playtesting and a lot of fiddling with spreadsheets and dice calculators.

Expansion Plans: Hive Worlds

After thinking on it a bit I’ve made a plan for what I want to focus on with the next expansion. I’ve decided to do a splatbook focusing on running Hive World campaigns, which will also act as a bit of a gear expansion.

Largely the content in here is based on stuff from Necromunda, but rather than provide Necromunda specific content I figured this would be a good opportunity to generically provide guidance on hive city campaigns. So a bit of a “Necromunda with the serial numbers filed off” approach.

See the below image for an outline of what I plan to include!

Release: Chambers Militant (Beta)

Better late than never, right? Here’s the preliminary release of the Chambers Militant book, which contains rules for playing as Deathwatch Marines, Grey Knights, and Adepta Sororitas.

[Mega Link]
[Google Drive Link]

The reason I’m labelling this as a Beta is that it’s fairly likely the book has a number of design/balance issues. Space Marines really push at the edge of what you can reasonably represent as a Genesys PC, and so they break a lot of the Genesys design rules completely. This means they’re likely a bit broken, but I think the best way to figure that out is playtesting! So please give me any feedback you have, it’s all super useful. I read every comment on here, and you’re welcome to contact me using the webform on this website (it just sends me an email), or to message me on Discord.

Here’s the intro chapter’s descriptions of the contents, if you’re wondering what’s included:

  • In Chapter I: Elite Level Play, guidance is given for how to properly integrate these powerful warriors into a campaign featuring regular members of the Inquisition
  • Chapter II: Deathwatch provides game mechanics for creating Deathwatch Space Marines. Along with special rules for creating and playing as the supernaturally capable Astartes, this chapter includes character options for every founding chapter of the Adeptus Astartes.
  • Chapter III: Grey Knights provides rules for creating the powerful psyker warriors of the Grey Knights, the Chamber Militant of the Ordo Malleus. This includes rules for their powerful psychic powers, governed by a new psychic discipline; Sanctic Daemonology.
  • In Chapter IV: Adepta Sororitas you will find expanded character options for bringing the Battle Sisters of the Adepta Sororitas to life. This includes new Careers, Elite Advances and other options.
  • Chapter V: Faith and Fury provides rules for Faith Powers, potent miracles manifested by those truly devoted to the God Emperor.
  • In Chapter VI: Elite Talents, new talents specific to members of the Chambers Militant are provided, including a range of talents focusing on the unique capabilities of the Adeptus Astartes.
  • Finally, Chapter VII: Elite Armoury provides statistics for the potent arms and armour used by Grey Knights, Deathwatch and Sororitas.

Development Update – June 2021

Hi all! With the 3.2 release done, I thought it’d be good to post some thoughts about future releases, and where I’m at with stuff I’ve previously worked on.

Firstly, Chambers Militant. Tonight I’ve been looking through it, and it’s pretty close to done! Content wise, it’s pretty much complete save for some final work on Faith Powers, which I think I might be able to get done within the next week or so. I’ve got a lot of motivation to work on content at the moment so I think I will be able to get it out.

Chambers Militant is a pretty high power level splat, and it does a lot of stuff Genesys isn’t really designed to handle well, so I expect it might be an unbalanced mess! I don’t think it is, but I do think it’ll need some solid field testing. To that end, I’m probably going to call the initial release a beta (as much as that even matters for fan content), and I’ll be looking for some solid proofreading and design feedback. I figure it’s better to get the content out there considering how many people have been asking for it, and then I can always update things down the track.

Once Chambers Militant is done, I have a few book ideas. Here they are, vaguely sorted in order of how motivated I am to make them.

  • Necromunda – I want to make a book focusing on Necromunda, and games set in hives in general. Mostly, this is an excuse to adapt all the cool gear from Necromunda that never made it into the core book. But I’d also like to flesh out the idea of running campaigns set entirely in a hive. So I’d like to expand the archetype offerings beyond the basic hive world option in the core book, to offer a wider range of hiver backgrounds. This will include Abhumans, although I do already have rules for them anyway.
  • A monster manual of some sort – I’d like to expand the NPC offerings, especially with Chambers Militant increasing the need for high-level NPCs to deal with. I have two thoughts on how to handle this. Keen to hear what people would prefer!
    • One giant tome, covering all the different NPCs in the 40k setting. Likely something I’d update and expand on periodically. This has the advantage of being a really useful, solid GM resource. Would be a big undertaking and likely take a while, though.
    • Separate, faction-focused books like the Ordo Xenos Threat Briefing: Tau book I released ages ago. This has the benefit of being a lot more focused, and allowing room for adding gear and special rules too. Probably more of a managable scope too, but it does mean a more limited subset of NPCs released gradually.
  • Adeptus Mechanicus – I’d like to write a little gear expansion, covering all the weird armaments of the AdMech (both from 30k and 40k content), and expanding on rules for cybernetics a bit. Might also feature some elite advances for skitarii PCs.
  • Malus Codicium – I’ve talked about this plenty before. I want to make a book for more radically aligned PCs, focusing on chaotic stuff. Sorcery rules, daemon summoning and binding, daemonhosts, daemonic pacts, all that nasty stuff. Lots of horrid Chaos relics and gear, too. I’d likely provide a broader range of Daemon statistics in here too (basically everything in the Chaos Daemons codex), as they’d interact with the other gameplay systems in the book.

Keen to hear what people are interested in, or if people have ideas of their own they’d like to see me work on!

Fan Content: Reference Sheets

Wanted to take a moment to share these really brilliant reference sheets made by A Ninja on the Genesys Discord. Based on the most recent release (3.2) of the corebook, these sheets seem like they’ll be really useful for all of you!

  • Personal Combat Reference – A really useful reference sheet for running combat, has all the basic information you’d need for running most combat encounters. [LINK]
  • Psychic Powers Additional Effects – This document just combines all the Additional Effects tables for the different psychic powers in one convenient document. Really useful reference for psyker players, the psychic power rules can be a little hard to wrangle sometimes, hopefully this helps! [LINK]

I’ll try to make a habit of spotlighting cool custom content like this in future, if you’re aware of anything worth highlighting please feel free to reach out!

More word about future expansions coming shortly!

Release: Core Book 3.2

I’ve finished work on the latest update to the Dark Heresy for Genesys Core Rulebook, the 3.2 release. You can find it here; [LINK]

The changelog is located here, but here’s an overview of the big changes.

  • This update focused heavily on talents. The entire talents chapter has been reworked to be easier to read, with each tier starting on its own page. Many new talents have been added into the mix, too; 59 new talents total. Some of these are adapted from Keyforge, some from Wrath and Glory, and some were originally meant for Chambers Militant but I decided to move them to the Core Book and leave Chambers Militant for the Astartes/Sororitas exclusive talents.
  • A couple of the talents are taken (with permission) from Sunfall, a Genesys Foundry product that is very well put together and worth checking out. Thanks to Anastasia for letting me borrow some of her ideas!
  • I’ve added a range of Tier 1 talents which grant career skills. A lot of people have asked for these over the years. I have mixed feelings about them, but it’s easy to just houserule them out of your game if you prefer not to use these types of talents.
  • Several talents have been tweaked for balance purposes, or removed entirely.
  • Interludes received some balance tweaking.
  • The psychic attack houserules I posted earlier in a blog post are now integrated.

Let me know what you think! If anyone spots any typos or other oddities, please let me know via the comments section below, or you can just message me directly through the contact form on this blog, or by adding me on Discord.