The Warhammer 40,000 universe can be an intimidating one.   Given the vast array of cultures, ideologies and beliefs covered by the Imperium and protected by the light of the Emperor, it can be difficult to work out exactly what you want to play in Dark Heresy.  An Inquisitor can recruit anyone, anywhere, so if you can be absolutely anybody, how on earth do you work out what to play?   If you roll randomly for your career path, you could end up with something you have no idea how to play, or even how it fits into the universe.

If your players are familiar with 40k but not regular roleplayers, or if they’re roleplayers who’re unfamiliar with the 40k universe, there are a lot of choices to make and it can, at the start, be tough to find a hook to hang your character around.   Coming from a wargaming background, if you’re starting Dark Heresy because you’re a big fan of the tabletop 40k game, it can be a very strange transition since the familiar space marines and bolters of the wargame are the near untouchable elites that your characters will most likely never even see in the roleplaying game.

The Dark Heresy game played by the book is at a very different kind of level to the wargame, and is less about sweeping battles, epic conflict, superheavy tanks and high commanders as it is about the individuals living their lives in the Imperium of Man.   In this article, I hope to give a few suggestions and ideas for how to pick a career and roleplay it in the universe of Dark Heresy.   The first part of this is to go through the various careers, and to relate them to modern day inspirations.

The basics of what you need to know for role playing in the 40k universe are very simple – the Emperor  protects humanity, and you pray to him.  That’s really all that there is.   If you’re from a more civilised part of the Imperium then you might well know more, but there are untold worlds where this is all they know, and sometimes even this is cloaked in allegory and mysticism.   You might live on a world of steaming jungles, praying to your sun god in the hope that one day you are taken by his sky warriors to join the mighty armies fighting across space.

Such a closeted character could be seen as a challenge to play, but in fact it actually can work for you if you’re unfamiliar with the setting since your character’s wonder/confusion at the multiplicity of worlds in the Imperium would mirror the player’s.   Some careers would seem to demand more knowledge of the setting than others, but there are often ways to work round it so that a new gamer can find a way to think about his character as more than just a collection of numbers on a page, and someone new to 40k can slot their character into a universe that’s been crafted by various writers for over two decades.

Obviously, starting characters don’t have too many points to spend, and most of the examples will be beyond a starting Acolyte, but hopefully this can give you an idea for the kind of familiar archetypes that can be put into Dark Heresy, so you can see the character where the character may end up, and you can play through the career to get there (since no one starts off as the one-man army, ultimate killing machine or genius, you have to work at it…)

The three simplest careers for character concepts are probably Assassin, Guardsman and Scum, particularly for those new to roleplaying or 40k.

Assassin

40,000 years in the future, there are many people who will pay to have other people’s lives ended prematurely.  Together with the over two ’simple’ careers, it’s quite easy to fit modern examples of this career into Dark Heresy.  If you were a cool calculated killing machine like Agent 47 from the Hitman games, a dour but practical gunman with an otherwise quiet life like Léon the cleaner or a quirky and talkative gunman as in Grosse Point Blank, you could easily have lived your entire life on a backwater world with little knowledge of the Imperium other than the laws you broke and the rituals and prayers that everyone knows.

A perceptive Inquisitor might have noticed you while travelling through and recruited you to his cause, taking you off-world for the first time.   If all you’d ever known was murder on your isolated world, you could (as a player) learn more about the Imperium as your character did.    Think of the scene in the film Nikita where the heroine is following someone around a shop, copying her because she is unfamiliar with how to act in normal society, or the awkward social interactions of Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men.

An Assassin could easily be recruited purely on his skills, inducted to function as a weapon to be deployed by the Inquisitor.  He may have no need of interpersonal skills or knowledge of other cultures and world.  Together with Guardsman, it’s a good career to start out with if you want to see how the game works.  You could follow the orders of the Inquisitor or more confident players, acting confidently in combat but deferring to the others after that.

Guardsman

In many ways the simplest career to make a character concept for.  A soldier, another number in the endless ranks of the Imperial Guard.  If you were inducted from a quiet world then spent the rest of your life until the game starts under arms, all you’d need to know as a player would be the army such as Kurt Russell’s character in Soldier.

To be honest, for a Guardsman, there is really one one thing you need to do as a player unfamiliar with the game, and that’s to watch Starship Troopers which pretty much perfectly captures the atmosphere for a “one man among many” type of Guardsman.  Any war movie could serve as inspiration, but Starship Troopers is about as 40k as you can get without a lawsuit.  The third book of the comic The Ballad of Halo Jones is also a great example of what war would be like in the future for someone coming to terms with life as a soldier in a meaningless war.

As examples of hard-bitten veterans, Predator and Aliens show examples of the kind of upstanding xeno-hunting warriors that the Inquisition would recruit in a moment (if they didn’t need mind-cleansed)

For someone taking the one-man-army type route, Rambo and Commando are the obvious inspirations, along with the many, many imitations.

Almost any war film or TV show can serve as the inspiration, from the the once-competent but now aged veterans of Dad’s Army (age and lengthy periods of inaction being a great explanation for why you don’t have high level skills after years in the Planetary Defence Force, to a relative rookie amidst the jargon-laden action of Generation Kill, which could easily be translated into the 40k universe.

Scum

Such a wide catch-all class, there are nearly endless inspirations for Scum characters.  As with Assassins, they could easily be people who previously lived a life on just one world, never travelling and never getting involved with the bureaucracy of the Imperium, save to avoid arrest or worse.  From scheming villains like Fagin in Oliver Twist and Stringer Bell/Avon Barksdale in The Wire, to con men like Maverick, to fixers, dealers, goons and mobsters like the Mafiosi and Made Men of the Godfather and various Martin Scorcese films such as Goodfellas, Casino and The Departed.

A simple street thief, rural highwayman, stealthy cat burglar or stick-up artist like Omar in The Wire or any of the wannabe gangsters in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels – all could be fit into the 40k universe, prized for their unique skills that an Inquisitor would not be able to find on the right side of Imperial law.

Zorg, in The Fifth Element,  Bruce Willis and Danny Aiello in Hudson Hawk and Chow Yun Fat in Once A Thief could all be the basis for interestingly different Scum characters, but there’s no reason that Scum absolutely have to be on the lower levels of society.  They may fraternise with low-born criminals, but they could easily be someone educated and well-off using the poor and needy to their own advantage.

For a more social type of Scum character, someone who is all about the interpersonal skills, making them a smooth-talking but dangerous person like Mr Morden in Babylon 5.

In part two, the slightly more complex but still easily playable classes of Adept, Arbitrator and Cleric.

Tags: introduction

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