Blades of the Inquisition, final version.

Blades of the Inquisition, final version.

Blades of the Inquisition, final version.

EMPEROR PROTECT!!!

We did it! Here is the finished document with the rules modifications, crew sheet, and playbooks. Anything that is not included here works exactly as in standard Blades in the Dark. Except retirement. Duty is eternal, so you either die an Acolyte, or become the Enemy. Have fun!

You can adapt this to both Askellon and Calixis (or to a Sector of your own design). Hopefully someone will make good use of this! Annnd I’m also done spamming about it 😛

If you guys have question, ask them down here 😀

Also, if I ever add or change something, I will probably put updates in the comments section of this post.

Now go out there and purge some heretics!

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2bP0GsXwg9xcnczMFRNUHJMRjg

67 thoughts on “Blades of the Inquisition, final version.”

  1. Been having some really sour and sour BitD games lately. May take this at as an alternate approach to try to shake my game master karma out of its funk.

  4. This is really cool! I was just thinking that someone should make a DH hack after RollPlay did a oneshot of the (incredibly complicated) system.

    I think there’d maybe still be room to add Crews based on the ordos or something, or just the general theme of the game, but this looks really good!

  6. Ганс Андроид sorry, the arbitrator id was pretty much a given. You can treat the arbitrator as having it, just as the psyker bearing proof of their sanctioning. 🙂

  7. Stephen Davey I did this specifically because of that session. Maybe Geoff will try this one too? 😛 I don’t think I’ll make other crews (mainly cause I put all my ideas in this one), but if inspiration strikes me I might write down a Sister of Battle playbook. We’ll see, for now I have other projects to work on 🙂

  10. Ганс Андроид I would probably treat those as long-term projects. You know, having the techpriest “work on them”. Same as extra mechadendrite options and similar stuff. After all, rebreathers, bolters, melta & stuff are also missing (assets to acquire). Truth is I never liked those Techpriest “mods” being treated as feats or talents.

  12. Ганс Андроид Yup, I see what you mean. Techpriest was really hard to make, to be honest: I had to choose between 1.full self-improving evolution and 2. self-improvement mixed with versatility and crafting. I chose the second 👉👈

  13. RoosterEma it happens BitD and Dungeon World really hinge on improvisational material between game master AND players. I was getting leaned on VERY heavy as a GM to tell them what to rather really playing to find out and it wore me out because Doskvol is so new to me. 4dkay I have a lot more background to pull from so I think that comfort level may smooth things a bit more on the conversation between GM and players.

  14. Jamie Mathews you actually highlight a common problem in RPGs: when the setting is very extraneous to the players, the GM has to make everything happen (unless the players are VERY assertive). That’s why I love my Star Wars games: everyone knows what they want and has some solid reference to base their choices upon. If I say “stormtroopers kick down the door” everyone goes full alert and dives for cover. If I say “the Lampblacks kick down the door” they need to remember what the Lampblacks are, I need to explain it, and you risk killing the momentum.

  16. RoosterEma Absolutely! They haven’t fully grasped the factions so seem at odds with who they are willing to piss off by acting against them. As a result they usually try to find info on unaffiliated targets. I think they’ll grasp chaos cults, genestealer hybrids, and rogue psykers easier.

  18. David Schirduan it can pretty much adapt to any sector where inquisition has their hands full of work to do. Which is most frontier regions 🙂

  20. John Harper thank you very much, Sir! My favorite part was coming up with Corruptions (“free thought” was there for a while, eventually replaced with “dissent”) and writing the Psyker. I shared it on Geoff’s twitter page too! He strikes me as quite the 40k fan 😀

  22. Mark Cleveland Massengale it’s mostly about having to be the worst person ever fighting against even darker things, all the while hiding the fact that there might be some human “softness” left within you 😛

  24. Heiko Qd LOL, none apart from me doing this in the span of four days and forgetting them. Anyway, if you underline which traumas you have, you also can count how many you have 😂

  27. Cool! I’ve listed this on my Hacks & Add-Ons round-up — if you’d like to fill in your name and more of the game description, that would be great 🙂

  31. RoosterEma That’d be great 🙂 You can edit it right into the document.

    (Normally I’d do it myself, but I’m super-overwhelmed for the next week or so, and don’t have time to read through the PDF :-/

    A lot of why I keep the doc is to make sure I get back to cool Blades stuff later 😛 )

  32. This is the one mod that I want to play even more than Blades itself. Good work Rooster! Will let you know when I kick this game off.

  33. Kai Poh I am unworthy of such praise!! 😀 I actually had a chance to test this a couple weeks ago, went pretty smoothly (but I suggest you define the biggest faction players of the sector ahead of time, and maybe start with a hive world or something like that in order to have the characters be able to easily call upon their contacts!

  34. This looks excellent! I just discovered BitD because of this hack, and I’ll most likely run it straight very soon. Do you have any suggestions for applying this to a Rogue Trader setting instead of the Inquisition?

    It seems like it could work quite well, with various factions struggling for control over a (sub)sector, and your dynasty branching out from a small starting hold.

  35. Tarald Røste another member of the Blades community was working on a Rogue Trader hack (Blades in the Grim Darkness I think it was called). It’s a pretty straightforward conversion, One just needs to decide how to handle the crew and factions! Also, the crew sheet should probably be the Ship itself.

  36. So we gave this a spin this weekend, and I think it went allright. Some questions:

    – How would you handle really big weapons, like assault-cannons/lascannons etc? I just ruled they took 3 gear-slots and increased effect.

    – Armour: Do you just re-use the defaul blades rules? Regular armour: 2 slots, one box, heavy armour is 5 slots and 2 boxes?

    I think with the typical “heavy firepower” approach we have to 40K in general, and the tendency to suffer harm/consequenses even on successes (that aren’t 6es) we found our characters sucking up stress/harm pretty quick. I think I need to increase the usability of armour somehow..

  37. Tarald Røste Heavy weapons such as those, if one doesn’t want to simply include them within Large or Unusual weapons, might be the reward for a long-term project or Acquire Asset roll. That’s why I didn’t include them by default.

    Armour works as indicated on the sheet, which is identical to Blades’. You might want to have armor negate instead of reducing Harm, but yeah, the game was supposed to be heavy on Strain. It’s Call of Cthulhu 40k after all!

  38. RoosterEma That’s pretty much how I handle things in my mining planet campaign. The local guilds have the right to keep a lot of weapons, so gangs end up getting hold of the occasional heavy stubber or worse. But my PCs would need to roll Acquire Asset to beg, borrow or steal an old heavy weapon (which might not be well maintained). And yes they would count as Large Weapon at the least.

  39. Cool. Thanks for your inputs!

    A more interesting question is: Just what exactly characterizes a Terror-mission? My group naturally chose Terror as Favored Operations (and Interrogation chambers as their boon), and we had a chat about Battle vs Terror ops.

    So far (just one semi-rushed mission) they’ve just decided to go high on the bullet-count and collateral damage on a raid on a drug-lab suspected of producing some nasty hallucinogenic drugs. But I have the feeling Terror is more than just “not subtle” 🙂

  40. Terror is about applying intimidation to communities and populations – you have to think bigger than just one gang or group of heretics. Let’s say I have a cult that worships xenos mind-worms, operating within the Deep Tunnel slums in my planetary capital of Aduwa. They extort local residents for protection money, they deal with drug gangs for stims and medicines, and they pay some corrupt local officials to look the other way.

    The cult has already been hit by our Adepts once, and has gone to their safe houses to prepare for war. Our Adepts decide to hit the support structure of the cult. They call upon contacts with the local Arbites and get the ruling nobles to look the other way as they sweep through the tunnels with fire and chainsword.

    They send cohorts and arbitrators around to knock on neighbourhood houses, doing random searches. They raid the gangs, sending a message that they will be hit hard if they don’t stop doing business with the cult. They pull a random suspected official out of his meetings in the middle of the day and read him a list of charges in the middle of a busy market square and execute him with a flamer where everyone can see. Then they start going through the slums with dozer-blade trucks, relocating or simply booting out families located at the fringes that are most likely to be extorted.

    That’s a whole bunch of missions aimed at draining the cult’s lifeline dry.

    See this analysis of counter-insurgency against communists in Malaya for some inspirations. http://warisboring.com/were-getting-the-malaysia-counterinsurgency-all-wrong/

  41. First of all, Kai Poh those were some kickass ideas.

    Simply put, Terror is terrorism. Specializing in it means your guys want to be feared, to enforce the Emperor’s will through devastating, unforeseeable, physical and psychological warfare. A fringe world is brimming with heresy and the sector has few resources to send there? They infiltrate the planet and trigger a civil war. A community tolerates psykers and mutants? You put them in chains, drag them in the square and burn them alive. You make sure everyone sees that, so that they’ll never even consider following in their steps.

    You make ally fight ally, turn brother against sister. You “optimize resources by leveraging human emotions”, and can make a squad look like an army in the enemy’s eyes.

    “Your innocence makes you guilty of wasting my time” and all that 40k stuff.

  42. Any chance the original source files for the playbooks/instructions are available for others to use. Im working on a hack for Rogue Trader and I love your work. 🙂

  47. RoosterEma I just found this hack; it looks amazing! I’ve been working on an Apocalypse World hack for Inquisitorial henchmen, then I came across BitD, which seems to fit really well! I’m currently trying to pull the flashback mechanic into the AW hack I’ve been working on. There’s so much to dig into! Great work on this.

  49. RoosterEma is there any reason acolytes start at Tier 0 Weak instead of Tier 0 Strong like in regular Blades campaigns? My players have gotten a bit tired of the slow progression and the lack of useful healing (Tier 0 and Tier 1 surgeons are kind of lousy). It’s understandable that at the beginning things should be tough and gritty but I would have thought Throne Agents would have things easier than street scum, rather than starting even weaker… that’s one complaint I’ve heard from my group.

  50. Kai Poh I honestly can’t remember if that rule is there because that’s how it worked when I started building the hack, or if I just thought you should spend your first days as Acolytes one step away from being purged. Now that I have dabbled with Blades for a while, starting at Strong is pretty reasonable!

  51. RoosterEma My players will be glad. I can get them out into Tier 1 sooner. Then I won’t feel so bad about threatening them with trouble from Tier 4 guilds and Tier 5 nobles. 🙂

  52. Posted this in the wrong group earlier, but here’s feedback on our gaming experience with Blades of the Inquisition:

    First of all, I love this game. Been playing a few sessions with a talented GM with encyclopaedic knowledge about 40k, and it also helps that I’m planning to start an Inquisition army soon for 40k (I know they suck, but I play for fluff not for tourneys).

    What I have a problem with however, is the healing system. At this stage it feels too punishing, and healing is so slow that in the early game it’s actually super common to get into new missions with all members carrying Harm 1 baggage from last mission. The other choice would be to take a longer time to heal, but that’s fundamentally un-fun, because that kills any urgency in the plotline, which, given how most 40k stories go, is immersion breaking.

    And before you say we’re too gung-ho during missions, we actually played an infiltration style cell, and we’re proud to declare that we’ve only revealed our inquisitorial status ONCE in the campaign, and that was to another inquisitorial cell. We do things on the down low and generally try not to get into too many fights, though fights do happen frequently due to the nature of the dice rolls.

    So here’s the thing: the “micro” system (rare complete successes in dice rolls, pushing for stress, etc) seems to encourage taking risks for interesting plot and character development, but the “macro” system of healing during downtime severely punishes that kind of playstyle. I like fluff development mechanics where I can see my character devolving into other things, but getting into a mission having to roll everything with 1 less die means I’m forced to play conservatively, which might not always be what we want in a mission.

    I suggest that the healing cost be reduced (cheaper doctors, less salary cost, etc), or add another tier of harm so there’s a little more buffer for the acolytes.

  53. Ruben Tan The healing system is Blades’ default, so you can spend Salary to improve the results of a healer roll. Or grab the Chirurgeon special ability! By the way, starting a mission with Harm from the previous one is normal and expected; however, if you’d rather not have that, you can implement the rule of armor and resistance rolls completely negating Harm instead of reducing it by one! Hope this helps!

  54. RoosterEma yeah, I did all that. My contention with this is that the healing mechanism is a contrast to the stress mechanism, especially in a game like inquisition when you’re expected to pull some really crazy shit all the time. Our GM’s experimenting with giving our cell a little boost to see if this can balance things out, and I’m also brainstorming on what could possibly be a better mod to the default blades structure.

    Will post more after testing the changes. Once again, thanks for making this mod, we’re having tons of fun!

  56. We have a unique situation where Ruben’s and his fellow players went mostly inactive and I recruited another five players to start a new terror-focused cell on the same campaign world. So when Ruben rejoined we now had two separate Acolyte cells with different upgrades operating in the same game sessions! We can see the difference clearly – just by having a permanent surgeon cohort, Ruben’s cell has a leg up on healing at Tier 0. Even so, it is a struggle to keep healed up. When you look at the new cell in comparison, they have it even harder and they usually do badly with their their Acquire Asset roll, resulting in a drug-addled Tier 0 doctor patching up their injuries in the middle of a filthy Obscura den…

    It also gets really interesting when I have to track faction relationships for each of the two Inquisition cells separately!

  57. Incidentally, I implement resistance rolls as completely stopping all harm sometimes on a case-by-case basis. If the acolyte has cover nearby and is able to leap behind it, all damage is prevented. If the acolyte is up front in the open with virtually no good way to avoid getting hit, a resistance roll only reduces harm by one level.

    But my acolytes have not always been fortunate to keep out of harm’s way. I think I need to stress on the importance of armor.

  58. Oh hi Kai!

    Yeah, I think not being able to keep out of harm’s way is intentional for the blades system. You’re supposed to use injuries like a currency in game to do things, and in isolation I’m fine with that.

    The balance here is that if the long-term consequences (hard to heal harms reducing dice pools) become too punishing, it discourages the game from being played the way it’s supposed to be played (aka take stress or roll for interesting consequences in game).

    I like the dungeon world’s consequence on every dice roll style, but am looking forward to get more games in for blades to see if the macro/micro systems work well together in the long run.

  59. Ruben Tan I think that the difference in Tiers will really start to come through once we play on through another dozen sessions. I get a feeling that as your cell improves you’ll be able to get more done with each Acquire Asset and healing roll, meaning your downtime actions will get more powerful. It’s a game that will scale well and the contrast in capability when you are at, say, Tier 2 or 3 should really show.

  63. Lex Permann nope. The game doesn’t take place within a specific sector, and I wanted fans of both Dark Heresy editions to be able to play with those settings.

  65. Lex Permann yeah, honestly there’s often no need to map out an entire sector. I mean, a single hive is like three giant cities one on top of each other, you can have plenty of adventuring right there. Then when you switch season you can focus on a different planet, depending on your inquisitor’s assignments 🙂

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