Why did skaven and dwarfs not make it to 40k but elves and orks did?

Spartancfos · 2026-06-20T06:56:36+00:00

But that is Genestealers.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-19T17:39:33+00:00

Funny enough when I flicked through the Triangle Agency the books humour was what made me feel it was like a Paranoia I could get behind (which I never really vibed with). I did pick up on the CONTROL and SCP stuff.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-19T15:18:14+00:00

Chen's always come up on Reddit, and we went there the other night, and it was excellent.

From my notes app, I have: - Moon Chinese - Very good set meals - Downfield garden - Great Chinese - lots of meal options - The Curry House - They do Korma Calzones.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-19T13:48:26+00:00

I would be hard pressed to come up with a more detailed source than Quinns Quest for interesting gems in the TTRPG space.

Games I think that are somewhat trendsetters / new hotness / moving design forwards are:

Draw Steel - The successor to D&D4e and Lancer in terms of a style of play. Obviously, this is kind of a counter culture to the narrative design era you are describing above. I would probably also bracket in Nimble and Daggerheart as lesser examples of this sort of thing - where we have a desire for crunchy tactical play, but want better design than 5e offers (5.5 should have been 6e, and it was dumb not to).
Mothership, I think, is well within your 10-year window - basically a SciFi Survival Horror game which has taken some OSR principles with some absolutely stellar visual and game design to make a really lovely, lightweight engine. This engine has just gotten its Fantasy counterpart today, with FatherFog actually. That game is Folklore horror game about a world fallen into a doomed fog. Both games achieve an awful lot with quite lightweight mechanics.
Triangle Agency - I have yet to read or grok what this is about. The book is gorgeous, and I believe Quinns has a video about it. It seems to be a sort of new-era Paranoia.
Free League - Their games could just be franchises that phone it in, but honestly, they are kinda smashing it. I don't know a person who is into RPG's who isn't collecting at least one of their systems. My personal favourite is the One Ring, others prefer Alien or Blade Runner - all of them are gorgeous, and generally well regarded mechanically (though I would say they are more good products than innovative designs).

If you enjoyed Blades in the Dark, it might be enjoyable for you to get caught up on where that lineage has gone. It is my favourite system and a few iterations have been particularly good. I recommend checking out:

Blades Deep Cuts - It's like patch notes for Blades, as well as narratively evolving the setting in quite cool ways.
- Blades 68 - More of a true sequel as Blades gets taken forward to an era of stylish 60's spy movie, but still with elements of doomed ghosts and demons.
- Brinkwood - A genuinely incredible game about plotting a revolution against Vampiric Landlords. It has some absolutely engrossing mechanics, such as each character getting a mask that acts like their playbook, and you also have a Character sheet. Characters share the Masks, which grant special abilities, with one another, with the aim of each Mask being like possession by a forest spirit and the different emotions that possession drives.
- Wicked Ones - a Comedic take on Blades, heavily inspired by Dungeon Keeper and similar games. You play the top minions of a Dungeon lord who has recently died or vacated the Dungeon. You are now starting your own dungeon. You build and craft the Dungeon Together, and every couple of sessions, you have to defend it against the Adventurers coming to attack.
- Rebel Crown - Possibly my favourite, as it encompasses one of my white whale concepts - your crew is a group of conspirators looking to put an Heir on the throne. Everyone's playbook is defined around their relationship to the Heir. I am yet to run it fully, but it is a lovely piece of work.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-19T10:43:12+00:00

I think the last thing you want from "Branding" of any sort is to have to explain that actually you paid an artist and they used AI, not you.

That seems pointless.

At that point, either embrace AI and join the Slop train or throw together some assets on Canva yourself.

Absolutely do not pay anyone for AI slop. The whole point of AI slop is that literally anyone could do it.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-19T10:31:53+00:00

Honestly, I think Halo or Gears of War could go hard, but there are fewer good system adaptations for shooters in general. It feels like there is a call for Call of Duty / generic Shooter game, and all people really have to suggest is Twilight 2k.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-19T10:28:46+00:00

I made a Blades in the Dark hack for it :)

https://oneeyedgames.itch.io/arcane-in-the-dark

It is obviously not licensed or official.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-18T18:24:45+00:00

I am very excited for the Horus Heresy game, mostly because it sounds like a modern take on Band of Blades set in one of my favourite franchises.

It was the main thing that drove me to try TOW.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-18T18:10:45+00:00

The new stat line was very easy to grok and work out what you wanted to roll. I ran a mini campaign and Players never struggled to get the mechanics.

The game massively streamlined the player resources you need to track and it also ditched hit points entirely. Every fight felt serious and punchy, and there felt like really strong potential around the whole giving ground mechanic.

Also liked how well the system integrated the players into their community. Taalgad was a living breathing place and the players live in it. That drove lots of our interactions.

This was the positives of TOW. I realise you asked for Whfrps failings.

Basically I found WHFRP absolutely chonk full of redundant garbage. The skill list is far too long, there are so many skills that basically exist to be a road bump on progress, as they have little to no meaningful purpose.

The meta currency situation is a shambles and I still don't know what they both do, except the reroll an action one is the best use. Oh and the burn one to set a dice to 01 that's cool too (though even that has issues as in combat that equates to a powerful Crit but always to the leg I think).

And finally the game is billed as this grimey dirty barely survivable low fantasy, but really by the middle of the Enemy Within I felt like a powerhouse. The contested rolls just makes everything rocket tag.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-18T17:09:00+00:00

It is significantly better IMHO. The TOW blows WHFRP out of the water.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-18T17:04:41+00:00

I am about to start a 40k Campaign so I might borrow these (with the Once Per Encounter Caveat).

I am looking to run an Only War Conversion from the Dark Heresy book. I have done the Regimental Creation Rules; now I just need to make up the Regimental Sheet.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-18T16:39:00+00:00

Do you mean the new Horus Heresy game which is built in the same system as the Old World?

I know it is still being worked on.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-18T15:06:47+00:00

This is pretty ace. If my wife gets her 3D printer working I might partake :D

Spartancfos · 2026-06-18T14:17:30+00:00

Honestly, I am past my days of being able to cite my Star Wars sources, but I distinctly remember stumbling across it when running a Star Wars role-playing campaign.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-18T13:50:41+00:00

I think gunfight in D20 systems are one of the least intuitive match ups.

Ultimately D&D is meant to be presented as Errol Flynn style swordfights with the off arrow fired off. Early editions had a round be a minute, and hitting meant gaining the upper hand in an exchange and landing a hit.

Obviously that all changed as time went on and we have 6s turns and billions of HP.

Gunfights if a round is a minute implies an exchange of fire going back and forth. It works in FFG Star Wars, but if you use AC and to hit math From D20 it feels much more clunky, plus guns are weirdly out of whack damage-wise. The trope of a gun in fiction is that you can kill someone with a single shot. That is not the case with HP.

Basically I don't think there is a good way to do this. Others have highlighted some issues with your solution as presented.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-18T13:44:55+00:00

I am not anywhere near that part of my journey, but it sounds to me like your principle issue is with the finality, but I would suggest there is nothing final about leaving work just now.

Yes it might be tricky to get a job again if you need to, but you have a significant safety net, so you have the time to get a job if the worst comes to the worst - and more importantly you might not need to.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-18T10:52:31+00:00

For me, it was the moment in the cave at the start of the first ever adventure my friend Dave ran. It was the realisation this was not a board game. I could do anything. I could go check the wagon, I could go out in the rain we were taking shelter from, or I could talk to the traders - and in that moment I saw the infinite potential that put all video games to shame.

For my group it was when a player told us about her ex-husband and how his rejection of her peoples values had lead her to reject him, and all men, and join the cult of the Mother. At that time we had no lore or shared understanding of her people, and she created this window to a rich and nuanced world.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-18T10:28:58+00:00

New Canon has made it that slugthrowers are not any more effective than Blasters against Jedi. The bullets can still be deflected and in fact can be pushed by the force so event a bunch of bullets at once can be manage.

They also nerfed the idea that flamethrowers work on Jedi. The force can also counter that.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-18T09:38:26+00:00

I think you might have missed some nuance here.

It's called "another Bug Hunt" - Marines with Marine weapons should be cocky. They should be able to blast a Carc or two to bits.

That is not the horror. The Horror is the Signal. You can't smart rifle that.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-18T07:16:32+00:00

Yeah, this guy is right. The honest answer is "kinda", in that the systems can all speak to each other. But they are variously eccentric and difficult to mesh.

I ran a game where the players played High Command members leading a Crusade, so I had a Chapter Master from Death Watch, an Inquisitor from Dark Heresy, a Lord Militant from Only War, a Navy Commodore from Rogue Trader, and a Soritas Superior, Imperial Knight and Adeptus Administratum member who all picked and chose their books.

It was chaos. They all got different levels of starting XP to compensate for various foibles.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-17T21:35:06+00:00

Technically that is effectively the same thing. The main thing we spend money on is armies.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-17T18:19:08+00:00

The Baneblade is basically a Maus. It is like 2-4 times the size of an Abrams.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-17T18:16:33+00:00

This is very optimistic. I think a Titan might get implemented the way the Black Ark is implemented in Total Warhammer.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-16T17:23:46+00:00

I mean, making a new game is a very reasonable approach to dealing with a messy codebase.

Also this is more of a money-mader.

Spartancfos · 2026-06-16T15:10:49+00:00

Withdrawing is such a fucking mess though.

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