Hello!

After long hours of work I finally have ready pdf-versions of many modifications and game mechanic renewals I have been using when being a GM in Dark Heresy.

Background

Dark Heresy was built on the legacy of WHRP 2nd edition, but had many improvements to its system. These improvements however left many problems in behavior of several things and this has seen many adjustment attempts by numerous GMs over the world. The weak points include behaviour of amour (mainly they only give AP), similarity of many weapons even though they should feel somewhat different, lack of ability to be in grave danger when being fired upon or facing melee, the difference between better and weak fighters and shooters is not that high and so on.

Still, even thogh the game has its problems, the setting of this game is very appealing and friendly to both GM and players. It has that something that makes the players willing to play from time to time. Therefore I have made some efforts to overcome these few shortcomings and now after the work is done I share this outcome with you all so that you might enjoy this advanced gameplay.

Advanced Dark Heresy Game Mechanics

These mechanics include some quite major changes in combat actions and also there are many modifications to weapons and armour to represent the ideas I was trying to overcome as explained above.

Changed mechanics introduce ability to deal Critical Damage even when wounds are not reduced below 0 and changes in ways of how Parry and Dodge work make usage of different combat styles much more possible. In addition to this the differences in combat actions are more significant giving many additional angles to any combat. Changes introduce, for example, damage bonuses due to Degrees of Success and as new element a chance of Counter-Attacks.

This package includes full lists of all Dark Heresy weapons, armour, skills, talents, traits and gear and all qualities etc. modified to support the idea of making weapons actually differ in damage and combat style. Armour is given huge differences and skills, talents and traits have some rework done.

Using this package

This package can be used also partly, but the whole is quite weird if only some parts are taken. So I strongly suggest that you take these advanced rules as a whole or you don't take it.

Hopefully this package makes your gameplay Advanced :)

Yours Sincerely
Kari Salonen

The Package can be downloaded from here: DOWNLOAD ADVANCED DARK HERESY MECHANICS PACKAGE

I checked out the advanced rules sets you came up with.  My compliments on some well setup rules changes.  My group and i looked them over and we are using basically everything youve got in the sets…so far very good as well.  Thank you for taking the time to set all of the modifications up.

Nice to hear that these are of use to other gaming groups too :)

Nice job, miss couple of weapon but overrall its very good

just a little note here: Average roll for 2d10 is actually 11, not 10 :) Just pointing it out since in character creation it is mentioned that you can swap out an unwanted score with an average of 2d10 :) 

To be honest, it just looks like Dark Heresy, with more stuff to keep track of. Sure, you've fixed some problems, but you did it at the cost of making the game slower and more complex. Given that DH is already fairly complex, that isn't a good thing. You also didn't do anything to fix the really glaring problems that DH has. The most obvious one that I can see is that every single one of those plasma weapons is god awful. Recharge on a weapon that barely does more damage than a comparable bolt weapon and still has the potential to kill you? The additional plasma rule doesn't do anything to fix it and is really just… strange.

Overall I'm not a fan. It is much simpler to just port the entire Dark Heresy setting to Black Crusade or Only War.