[Dullmohawk]

 Hi all,

I just picked up a copy of Black Crusade from the local RPG vendor, and browsing through it with a friend we got to talking about the characters and ideas for how to use them in a game.

Now, we usually place our 40k rpg sessions on the fringe of Imperial Space, a place filled with traitorous scum and other people of dubious origin, so Black Crusade is perfect. But, we're having trouble seeing how the Chaos Space marine types presented in the book will fit in an rpg game as anything other than NPC characters interacting with your human traitors. Of course you could keep the group separated when not on combat missions, the Marine only dealing with inter-Legion politics when not ripping out the throats of Imperial lapdogs with his teeth, but how to go about bringing the characters together? Especially when sneaking about and interacting with other humans is very hard for a 2,5 meter tall killingmachine.

Therefore, my question to you all is: How do you blend in your Chaos Marine your tales of the lost and the damned?

[Van Helser]

I've been reading through Black Crusade on and off for the last wee while, and I'd be inclined to say that running Space Marine and human characters together would be tricky.  Separating the warbands out is one way to go (and in reality is probably exactly what mixed bands would do - small guys gather information, big guys hide until the sewage hits the fan), but as many campaigns can be set on the worlds of the Screaming Vortex, it's maybe not a necessity.  I imagine that walking around in power armour isn't perhaps that unusual (in comparison to your average Imperial world at least).  If your backwater worlds are Chaos dominated then the same could be said.  As the PCs will be trying to achieve infamy, perhaps they will relish the extra attention their appearance draws.  Throwing a few singular moderate to high powered characters at the power armoured types to represent the challenges such brazen shows of power will doubtlessly throw up to keep things interesting.

Not much help, but hopefully some insight for you.  Personally, I'd either go an action-orientated campaign with power armoured types to the fore if you want to stick to a mixed group.   If I were ever to run a Black Crusade campaign, I would build a campaign around humans within Imperial society.  Still has opportunity for action, but there would be far more roleplaying!

Ruaridh

[N01H3r3]

I've been running Black Crusade for a while now, and have known about it for over a year (I was writing the psychic power rules this time last year), so hopefully I can provide some insight.

Broadly speaking, I don't personally see how a starting group can effectively work within an established Imperial settlement - while individually potent, putting them inside the Imperium limits a group's available resources and hinders their ability to gain more, beyond any considerations of character archetypes. The way I've chosen to structure my campaign is as follows: the player characters start with only the gear on their character sheets, on a world in the Screaming Vortex. It's up to them to gather resources and muster a warband (by any means necessary) to wage war on the Imperium or do anything else they want.

Black Crusade, like Rogue Trader, works better player-driven - the players are an authority unto themselves, have the freedom to do as they please, and the responsibility to seek out the things they need to achieve their own goals. If that requires spending some of their time infiltrating a hive city in the Imperium, then its the players' choice and its the players' responsibility to figure out how that'll work. While you can run the game as the opposite of Dark Heresy, that only really covers a portion of what you can do with Black Crusade, and freeform sandbox-style games, with the players defining their own goals and the means they'll use to achieve those goals, strikes me as the surest way to cover as much as possible.

In particular, the rules covering Compacts demonstrate an "everyone gets their moment in the limelight" approach, where the overall goal of the group (the Primary Objective of the Compact) is achieved through multiple distinct secondary objectives, which may be tailored to different elements of the group's strengths, so that different characters have the chance to shine in achieving different things.

And remember, characters begin mutating fairly quickly (10 Corruption for the first Gift of the Gods), so blending in with society isn't all that easy for human characters either.

[Dolnikan]

From what I've read of the rules I make up that the game isn't really about just sneaking about in the shadows and manipulating. It is of course an important aspect but it also is about larger-scale combat. This of course is the field where the Chaos Space Marines will come to the fore. But even on non-combat missions the Marines can still participate(unless one of them is a frothing berzerker, but that is another mater entirely). They will have some sort of sanity which means the ability to interract with people.
Care should be taken however to realize that Black Crusade is not the evil version of Dark Heresy. It shares the rules and the basic setting, but it is a completely different game environment.