Following on from my previous article, I’ve covered the most basic careers (Assassin, Guardsman & Scum) and move onto the next three: Adept, Arbitrator and Cleric.
These careers are where things start to become more complex and, seemingly, difficult to play without a good grounding in the 40k universe and/or roleplaying. Even a long-time fan of the 40k wargame could struggle, since taking the role of a zealous member of the Ecclesiarchy is rather different to moving that squad of Space Marines out of cover and flaming some greenskins.
However, these three careers can easily be made more simple by thinking of them in more familiar terms, rather than as part of the 40k mythos. Some players will no doubt be fine and able to come up with character concepts that fit the universe and into the Dark Heresy game, but others will hopefully find these articles helpful!
Adept
The Adept is an interesting class, since you can do so much with it. While it might seem that playing a learned academic would need the kind of background knowledge that would necessitate decades of poring over game rulebooks and back issues of White Dwarf, it’s really not the case. The crucial fact to remember is that 40k is a very medieval universe, and the Adept is all about specialisation, as far as gameplay goes.
In game terms, the adept will start with some vague general knowledge and end up with much more detailed knowledge about specific aspects of the Imperium. However, for roleplaying purposes, you can just make it up. When the game calls for your knowledge you can make a skill roll, but the rest of the time? Your adept can be filled with the arcane knowledge of millenia past, so the knowledge you roleplay him as having doesn’t need to have any relevance to the Imperium of the 41st Millenium.
Often, the Adept will lead an existence like that of a medieval monk, but one who has stumbled into intrigue much like Cadfael; he could be a logician skilled in ancient machines with all the eccentricities that this entails such as someone from Hackers or Whistler from Sneakers.
A great concept for an Adept is someone much more at home in their cloistered existence, who relies on someone else to take care of all the details like gunfights, monsters and car chases. Marcus Brody from the Indiana Jones series, or any nervy computer nerd comic relief from a big blockbuster action movie, like Boris Grishenko.
Anyone familiar with Call of Cthulhu could easily transplant a twitchy researcher who has Learned Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. If you envisage your adept spending time as a Chirurgeon then any of the dour pathologists from police shows such as CSI or Morse would be suitable inspiration for a concept, or rather more sinister medical students recruited by an Inquisitor wanting to use their skills and also to keep a close watch on them.
Arbitrator
As with the Adept, it’s easily possibly to play a representative of Imperial law without having a lot of knowledge of the details of it. Specifically, the remit of the Arbitrator is to investigate crimes against the Imperium, witchcraft and corruption… which you can easily pick up ideas about from the main rulebook without needing to know about smaller petty crimes and the ins and outs of Imperial law.
The original inspiration for GW’s Arbitrators is pretty clearly Judge Dredd , but there are plenty of other concepts for the Arbitrator player. Whether you’re wanting to borrow from The Wire (a low-ranking Arbitrator, picked by an Inquisitor perhaps because he’s above the usual corruption, or as part of some political game going on in the high echelons of the Imperial bureaucracy), CSI (in the same way that the characters in CSI all seem mysteriously competent at every last aspect of police work, the Arbitrator fills the roles of beat cop, investigator, SWAT team and indeed judge) or even The Sweeney for a rough-edged Arbitrator who is keen on violence to get the job done and would shoot you if you even tried to bribe him.
A more thoughtful Arbitrator who tried to avoid the violence and leave it to others could end up being like Inspector Morse, whilst The Shield could serve as inspiration for the Arbitrator a little more keen on violence.
Whilst the description of the Arbitrator definitely leads towards the more muscle-bound investigator, it’s a simple matter of picking skills carefully to end up with someone more at home in Law & Order than the fast-paced glitz of the original Miami Vice or the more gritty and violent remake and you could even end up taking a more hard-bitten film noir style take on the Arbitrator.
Cleric
The Cleric is a great opportunity to really have fun in the 41st millenium. To paraphrase Douglas Adams – the thing about the Imperium is, it’s big. Really big. A Cleric character needs to follow the Emperor in some form. That’s really it. You can worship the Emperor as sun-god, as some kind of battle deity, as an all-knowing architect and creator – there are endless variants of the Imperial Cult and options for making up your own obscure sub-sect. There is a lot of crossover with the Adept if you’re playing a more sedate priest, so concepts from there are equally applicable, but then there are roles only really suitable for a Cleric.
There are rabble rousers dedicated to rooting out evil in all its forms like Frollo in Hunchback of Notre Dame or any of the many portrayals of the Spanish Inquisition as well as messianic priests, particularly one of the more muscular persuasion who leads with sword and flame. The obvious inspiration would be Joan of Arc or indeed any charismatic leader. Think of Henry V inspiring his troops with Kenneth Branagh’s great oratory or military pep talks. Crusader knights, as in Kingdom of Heaven are a key inspiration, or for the more politically oriented priests, think of Cardinal Richelieu in the Three Musketeers or the Machiavellian machinations of the Vatican during the Middle Ages.
Borrowing from pop-culture depictions of mystic rituals, whether Masons, Kabbalah or even the supposed extremes of Catholicism all make for starting points for a 40k Cleric. As with the Adept, you can make up a lot of what your character knows and believes in, since the Imperium is large enough that anything someone could believe or study is out there somewhere!
Whether trying to play an honest priest caught up in events bigger than him, or someone trying to be a great leader of men who wants to sacrifice themselves for the cause, Cleric has many options and enough available skills that it’s easy to specialise while keeping it different enough from the other combat careers and even focusing entirely on the study and oratory, if your play style runs that way. Some of the later advances even allow for crossing over with some of the specialised aspects of combat, so you could aim to make a warrior monk, as seen in endless Kung Fu films.
In the third part of this series, I’ll cover the three careers that in my opinion can come across as the most difficult to play, particularly without an in-depth knowledge of the background – Imperial Psyker, Tech-Priest and Sister of Battle.
Tags: dark heresy, introduction
This is an excellent article. I prefer more dungeons and dragons in my RPGs, but this is making me want to at least pick up the DH book.
I thought they stopped printing Dark Heresy? Is that still true or did they decide to start it back up?
This is a really great article, and it totally makes me want to play Dark Heresy. If my local gaming group does a mini-campaign, I’ll seriously consider going along.
MML: GW dropped DH about ten minutes after it was released, but they at least had the brains to sell the rights to Fantasy Flight Games.
They produce DH and its expansion books, as well as the forthcoming Rogue Trader RPG (and WHFRP), and has a bunch of GW-related board/card games too.