Campaign:Band of Guardsmen

Prelude

After three years of planetary siege, Perditus IX, the last world in which the Macharian Heresy persisted, is finally conquered: the last bastion of a forgotten conflict, that began nearly a millennia ago and that almost everyone else in the Galaxy believes to have ended several centuries ago.

Which is why this dirty, bloody and inglorious clean-up job was left to a bunch of regiments of the Guard just as near-forgotten as the conflict itself. Barely remembered by the Munitorum and the red tape, barely supplied, barely acknowledged, virtually left stranded in the impossibly remote Halo Stars.

Now, the last fortress of the last Warlord of the Macharian Heresy is destroyed, and the ponderous bureaucracy of the Imperium slowly catches up. In the conflict, several dozen regiments from different worlds have seen action. With barely any reinforcement received in the last years, all these regiments ended up being enormously understrength, with some having barely a company left, some barely a few platoons.

Eventually, from the meanders of the Administratum, an order comes: Your efforts will be shortly required elsewhere. Your losses will not be reinforced. Instead, all the remaining Imperial Guard forces on Perditus IX are to be merged in a new Regiment, appropriately named "Perditus IX Mixed Regiment". The Guard Regiment founded farthest away from the Light of the Astronomican.

At that point, however, it probably doesn't even count as a Regiment anymore. It's just a bunch of people from the myriad different worlds of the Imperium, grouped together out of simple expedience and necessity.
A band of guardsmen.

Explanation

This game is experimental. I don't know if the concept will work or be interesting.
We'll play on Thursdays, starting 2100 GMT. The game system will be a mix of mostly Dark Heresy with a bit of Rogue Trader, but we will not be using conventional chargen. More details on this further down.

Characters

Empty character sheet

Houserules

• Bolt weapons are all Tearing.

• Melta weapons are Tearing and have +4 Penetration at Point-Blank range.

• Plasma weapons follow Rogue Trader rules: they overheat on a 91+, and when they do they either deal their damage with penetration 0 to your arm, or you can just drop them. In either case, they can't be fired the next round. They can't jam, and anything that would cause them to jam overheats them instead. They don't normally have the Recharge special quality. However (and in this we differ from RT rules) on a roll of 100 they explode, as per a 9-10 roll on the Weapon Overheating table.

• Psychic powers can be used in a Fettered or Unfettered way. Unfettered is by-the-book as per DH. Fettered means you suffer a -1 to your Psy Rating, but only a roll of 91-100 on the Psychic Phenomena chart causes a Peril of the Warp, instead of 75-100. (75-90 becomes "nothing bad happens".)

• There will be houserules on career personalization, but I will discuss them at a later stage. For now, consider just that you will be allowed some Elite Advances at a very reasonable XP cost to personalize your character properly, as long as said Elite Advances make sense.

Backgrounds

Your character background, which I'd like to see simple, short and poignant, should follow these guidelines:

1) Civilian Life: Who were you, where were you from, and what did you do before joining the Guard?

2) Enlisting: How and why did you join, and in what kind of unit?

3) Boot Camp: How was your training?

4) Tour of Duty: Give a very short account of the interesting and noteworthy things you were involved in during your time in the Guard, including how the Perditus IX Campaign was from your point of view.

Your character can be ranked anything up to Lieutenant or equivalent rank in the IG chain of command.

Character Creation

This is how character creation will work for this game. Please keep in mind that all rolled values will require my supervision (of course).

1) Home World: If you come from a homeworld that doesn't quite fit any of the four standard choices (which is likely) feel free to ask for a custom choice.

2) Characteristics are rolled, but, after rolling, your dice result total is adjusted to 105. If you have less than 105, you add one point to your lowest characteristic, then your second-lowest, then your third-lowest, and so on, never adding more than one point to the same characteristic unless your starting total is 95 or lower. If you have more than 105, you likewise remove points from one stat at a time, never removing more than one point from the same stat unless your starting total is 115 or higher, but you can decide the order freely. If your rolled set of stats doesn't fit your concept, you may reroll it up to two other times.

3) Freely select a career path (even careers that would normally not be allowed for your home world, like a Cleric from a Feral World, or a Void Born Guardsman, as long as your concept makes sense). If you think no career path fits your character, talk to me and we'll see if we can make a custom one.

4) You automatically have 12 starting wounds.

5) You automatically have 3 Fate points.

6) You will be assigned starting equipment, instead of having a budget or standard career starting gear, though you can make requests. What you get will be based on your skills, talents and character background, and represents the equipment issued to you by the Departmento Munitorum. But, in addition to all this, you are also allowed to have 15d10 thrones' worth of extra stuff, representing mementos, personal items, and things that you have scrounged on the battlefield and somehow managed to keep a hold of. If you want something specific, or something that's not listed in the book, ask.

7) You start with 2000 XP.

8) You might either roll or select freely any result from the descriptive tables (Build, Age, Colouration, Quirks, Feral World Superstitions, Hive Class, Planet of Birth, Void Born Craft of Origin) and make up details on your own. You can decide whether to roll on the Imperial Divination table or not.