The Factory - Campaign rules

[Swarbie]

Ok, so I'm going to take a plunge into Inquisitor (at 28mm) with a campaign, and I'm going to try and drag a couple of my friends in too. The campaign is going to take about a week or maybe two weeks in-universe, and consist of around 8 scenarios all up.

I'd just like to get a couple of opinions on two rules I'm going to have affecting the campaign as a whole. So please, tell me what you think.




Campaign-Wide Rules

Psychic overload: Assuming the character does not use his psychic powers, a character who has lost Willpower to psychic overload will regain D10 points of Willpower every hour, up to his original value.

Sanity: Each PC starts the campaign with a Sanity value of 100. If a PC is a psyker, they will instead start with a Sanity value of 90. Encounters with daemons, xenos, etc, may cause a PC to lose between D3 and 3D10 points of Sanity depending on the nature of the encounter (GM's discretion). In addition, activities such as examining the corpses of cultists bearing a Mark of Chaos, remaining in the presence of a Terrifying character or being forced to kill innocents may also cause PCs to lose Sanity. Attacks and psychic powers that cause damage to a PC's mental statistics can instead be used to reduce that PC's Sanity instead. A PC may choose not to attend a scenario and instead spend time praying or talking to a counselor/psychiatrist. If they do this, they regain 2D6 points of Sanity, up to their original total.

If a PC's Sanity value falls below 50, they permanently lose 2D10 Nerve and Willpower. If their Sanity falls below 25, they must roll on the Hallucinogenic chart if affected by a Telepathic psychic power or if they encounter a Terrifying character. If their Sanity falls to 0 or below, the PC becomes a shivering wreck, drooling and chanting incomprehensible verses. They may take no further part in the campaign.

[Dust King]

Like the sanity idea, although the context would be interesting, what's the basic outline of your campaign?

I'm running a campaign at the moment with a similar system and can offer a couple of suggestions. People react to pressure in different ways, you might like to try basing the affects of loss of sanity on a table with different effects (the dark magenta psychology article could be a good starting point). So instead of having characters all suffering from the same penalties you have them developing all manner of different psychosis as the campaign goes on. For example having a aged psyker find himself afflicted by such rage that he charges headlong into the enemy (Wp test or he's frenzied for the turn) or having the guard veteran begin to suffer flashbacks when under stress (Ld test or lose one action that turn). It's up to you but having a variety of afflictions can really spice up the system.

The other thing is keep the point tallies hidden from the players. Instead of being another tally they have to keep an eye on they will become paranoid and worried. Players suddenly finding out that sending the same powerful character into danger again and again has had serious effects on him, making him unstable can add a bit of flavour to the setting. Especially if finding out who's about to lose it is something the players actively have to work at.

Basically what I'm saying is I love the idea, but suggest you try moving it more towards the role-playing side of things and away from the "another set of numbers" side.

Then again, do whatever seems natural to you.

[Swarbie]

Thanks for the feedback. I've got a brief introduction to this campaign already posted in the In The Field section. Basically, the campaign will be me and two friends playing three servants/Acolytes of an Inquisitor. They have been sent to deal with rumours of a Chaos outbreak in a hive-city.

When they reach the city, the situation will become clear. Thousands of people have simply disappeared. Most of the populace is living in fear. The Arbites are forced to barricade themselves in their Precincts as mobs rage against their situation. Things will progress to the Big Reveal within two weeks in-universe as I send the PCs deep into the underhive to search for the heart of the corruption.

The campaign will heavily involve the forces of Chaos; even in the opening scenarios I'm going to use to get us used to the Inquisitor rules set. I don't want to give too much away (although you're not actually gonna take part in the campaign . . .), but I'll give you one clue: daemonhosts. Plural.

As the PCs won't be veterans and they're gonna be up against some quite horrific stuff, I decided to include a way to show the effects of the Great Enemy on their sanity. I'm going for a really dark, horror-film feel here; lots of suspense, build-up, occasional bursts of actions and then a horrifying revelation.

[InquisitorHeidfeld]

The Sanity side of things looks like a variation on the basic Call of Cthulhu system, although on first scan I took it to have been developed from the WFRP system on a percentile rather than point system...

A couple of things I'd pick up:

Psykers start lower than everyone else - presumably to represent the effects on their sanity of their more intimate contact with the Warp... But I would have thought that that same contact would, to a degree, innure them to its horrors, Primaris Psykers are not generally raving loons after all.

By the looks of things you're aiming to have everyone drooling in their porridge before the end of the campaign - either that or you want people to percieve the risk that that will happen, why such large ranges and early onset?

Near death experiences are not having an impact, is that to reduce the impact (while still maintaining the threat) or is it because you don't expect many near death experiences to be survived?

[RobSkib]

These are some nice ideas, I may have to borrow them for my own campaign

In return, I'll give you an idea I use for my own campaign: keep a track of their ammo and don't let your players see! It's not as much book-keeping as you might think, and will make players very wary about using their ammunition. You can allow players to check their ammunition for actions equivalent to half the weapon's reload, and if you're feeling generous, give them D6 rounds back for common weapons from looting, las weapons can recharge slowly during the day and so on.

If you're going for a real survival horror campaign, there's nothing like dropping a 'click click click' noise when a player goes to fire a weapon at the newly revealed bad guy! And of course, if your players try to mentally keep count of their shots, you can always add a few extra tallies in there while they're not looking. Even the best of us lose track in the heat of battle...

[Swarbie]

@ InquisitorHeidfield: Actually, I kinda came up with the Sanity system on the spur of the moment. I've never played  Call of Cthulhu or WFRP. I'm planning on there being only one PC who's a psyker and who will not have a great deal of experience but a talent for banishing the taint of Chaos. He's still learning to ignore the visions and voices that come with being a psyker, so he'll be a little less stable mentally than the other characters.

I want there to be a decent risk that, if the characters are not cautious enough and run headlong into cosmic horrors, they will find themselves losing their grip on reality. If they end up drooling, this will obviously change the storyline of the campaign quite significantly; I feel a campaign should overall tell the story the GM wants to tell, but should also be changed by the characters' experiences and developments.

I don't expect a lot of near-death experiences to allow the characters to get back on their feet - the campaign is short in-universe, so if a character loses an arm he's not likely to get a replacement for the duration of the campaign, and he's not likely to recover enough to fight without missing at least two games. However, I think any NDEs will probably cause a drop in a character's Sanity, or perhaps simply make them more cautious in the future depending how close the NDE was and what enemy was involved with it.

@ RobSkib: Thanks! That's a good tip for ammo, plus I think it'd add to the atmosphere. As for the "click click click", one character's going to be armed with a bolt compact with between 15 and 35 rounds all up depending on the PCs' choices, but he'll know when he runs out of ammo (it's a single shot weapon). The other one will be a psyker with Gaze of Death as one of his powers, and the last one will probably have a shotgun/autogun. That guy will be the target of "click click click", I think, although he might avoid it if the player roleplays him as being careful with his ammo.


Since Inquisitor is the RP equivalent of an action film, I have a question to ask. If I pit the PCs against a bunch of NPC Guardsmen, could I simply say that any hit to the head, chest or abdomen that causes two or more injury levels will take a Guardsmen out of action, using the normal results for arms, legs and groin?

[Holiad]

Small point about the psykers- sanctioned psykers have been rigorously screened by the blackships, with mental stability as one of the big factors, and a predilection towards insanity would be one of the factors most likely to have them flagged unusable and assigned an appropriate hideous fate. With that in mind, I'd be inclined to assume a psyker working for the inquisition, having met the blackship's standards, is of at least average mental stability, or even a bit higher. An unsanctioned psyker is a possibility, but even for a radical inquisitor would have to be exceptional to justify the risk.

Regarding the NPCs, keeping track of full injuries to them is likely to grow tedious and time consuming with more than a few of them, so simplifying the damage system is highly recommended, possibly even more than you propose.

[Kaled]

For the NPCs I'd suggest using the rules in Architecture of Hate (available in the usual archive if you don't have it already).

[InquisitorHeidfeld]

On the NPCs front, as Kaled has mentioned, there are some rules available but I'd suggest running with whatever you think works for "Unnamed mooks".
The closest I come (I use the old WFRP rules as a basis and play Inquisitor primarily as a pen and paper RPG) is to make pinning permanent for some types of NPC, they aren't there for a fight to the death, the first proper excuse they have to write themselves out of it they'll generally take.
I know people who use a damage threshold (any single attack which causes more than a certain amount of damage takes the "mook" out of action regardless of remaining wound levels...etc.

[MarcoSkoll]

Simple rules for NPCs are really recommended. I personally find the Architecture of Hate rules have a few problems, but they're a good start - although the GM may well have to step in if there's some unfortunate knife fighter whose D6+SB is only causing minor results ("All or nothing" eliminations being one of the bigger problems IMHO).

I'm working on an alternative version (which I may well use at the 2011 IGT) that addresses some of these issues and even seems a bit faster to play, but I'd probably take over this thread talking about it if I let myself.

[greenstuff_gav]

Simple rules for NPCs are really recommended.

who came up with the "NPCS always get 2 Actions and do anything on a 4+" rule that floated around for a while?

[MarcoSkoll]

Not that simple though...