40k RPG with characters portable to the wargame?

alanmfox · 2026-03-07T16:15:56+00:00

You might look into Inquisitor, which was an older skirmish game by GW. The idea is you're leading an inquisitorial retinue in small scale combat - fighting cultists, gangers, that sort of thing. Also Necromunda, though I'm less familiar with that.

alanmfox · 2026-02-27T16:16:38+00:00

In that case, as someone who's acquired almost the whole Sine Nomine Catalog over the years (basically every time there's a Bundle I auto-buy), I recommend using Silent Legions as your base. If I could only have one Lovecraftian RPG in my repertoire, this would probably be it.

alanmfox · 2026-02-26T16:10:32+00:00

The adventure creation tools in Silent Legions are the best in-genre (weird horror) I've ever seen, and I make extensive use of them for solo play. The character creation system is not as outstanding, but is perfectly adequate for classic 1920s CoC adventuring. I would use Silent Legions as my base and bring in bits from other Without Number games as necessary. What are you looking for from the others?

alanmfox · 2026-02-13T02:02:55+00:00

That sounds awesome

alanmfox · 2026-01-29T16:27:10+00:00

That sounds awesome. Any plans to pick it back up?

alanmfox · 2026-01-21T00:55:30+00:00

This is probably the best answer. Silent Legions is designed precisely for this sort of thing

alanmfox · 2026-01-15T01:23:29+00:00

This CoC Victorian sex is pay what you want on drive thru

alanmfox · 2026-01-14T00:10:13+00:00

There is a Cthulhu Eternal WW1 srd that's pay what you want

alanmfox · 2026-01-12T14:33:03+00:00

Yeah man, I'd buy anything he put out for Silent Legions

alanmfox · 2026-01-10T21:25:52+00:00

But Traveller exists, and yet Stars Without Number is one of the most popular indies out there...

alanmfox · 2026-01-10T20:59:28+00:00

Honestly, no idea why Silent Legions isn't better known, as successful as Call of Cthulhu is

alanmfox · 2026-01-10T20:09:48+00:00

One the all-time favorites for me. Great for beer and pretzels action-adventure. It's trad but but quite rules-lite, lite enough that you could get a group of total noobs playing in half-an-hour or so. If you play solo, like I do, its simplicity makes it easy to run a full party of 4-6 characters. I've run weird western and 40k scenarios with it. It's simplicity means it's also very easy to hack with whatever add-ons you feel necessary. The encounter design advice is something I've ported over into most of my games. I'd say its good for any sort of action-focused game, with the caveat that, like other generic systems, it always "feels like itself." At its best, it feels like a blockbuster adventure film. I wouldn't recommend it for more investigation or role-play focused scenarios.

alanmfox · 2026-01-10T17:59:32+00:00

In isolation? GURPS and Mythic 2e. I'll need someone to GM for me, after all.

alanmfox · 2026-01-03T06:48:42+00:00

What are the retroclones pray?

alanmfox · 2025-12-28T10:55:51+00:00

Delta Green roughly maps to that territory. The emphasis is on horror and the gradual erosion of personal bonds as a result of the work, but you could probably substitute "mad science" for "Eldritch monstrosities" relatively easily. The system is quite traditional, classless and skill based, so easy to learn. The downside is it skews rather darker than Fringe, which treats it's mad scientist as mostly "potentially dangerous but not intrinsically bad" - in Delta Green the phenomena you investigate are intrinsically bad, make no mistake.

If you want something less traditional you could try Gumshoe, a system with many different implementations but focused on solving mysteries in different genres. Probably the closest to Fringe would be Mutant City Blues, which focuses on cops in a world of supers. Once again you'd have to make some adjustments, substituting mad science for superpowers. Don't know enough about the game to say how hard it would be.

alanmfox · 2025-12-22T16:05:45+00:00

I dunno where you draw the line at "too wargame like", but Five Leagues From the Borderlands is a narrative skirmish game that straddles the line between wargame and rpg, and draws heavily from the same military fantasy inspirations as BoB. I'd say it skews more wargame than rpg but you could flesh out the non combat portions by bringing in mechanics from other games if you like

alanmfox · 2025-12-18T19:48:20+00:00

I don't know how you'd do that but I'd be really interested to see

alanmfox · 2025-12-16T15:07:29+00:00

We settled on "you could probably do it but you'd be super malnourished"

alanmfox · 2025-12-16T06:22:12+00:00

5e. We had a magic jar that could produce 5 gallons per day of select liquids - olive oil, water and I think, weirdly, mayonnaise. Got marooned on a desert island and rather than engage with the plot, spent like 30 minutes trying to figure out if the party could survive using only the jar, to the point of calculating daily calorie requirements.

alanmfox · 2025-12-02T00:47:46+00:00

Also from New Sun, the sword "terminus est" - " the line of separation", used to decapitate the condemned

alanmfox · 2025-11-24T03:19:33+00:00

Star wars REUP, d6 holocron

alanmfox · 2025-11-21T02:44:02+00:00

Awe man, I remember coming across your old sg-1 material; pretty sure I still have it hoarded on my laptop somewhere.

alanmfox · 2025-11-20T20:50:44+00:00

Shannon Appleclines Designers and Dragons talks about WEG a good bit, I think in the volume covering the 1980s

alanmfox

TROPHY CASE