First off I'm stoked to see more 40k from DnU and do I think the setting and flavour is captured really well, both my GM and pkayers (such as "We will all die just hope you are the Emperors grace when you do").
Thanks. Rogue Trader's a great setting, but by design it removes you from a lot of the squalor and decay of the Imperium, and it was definitely my aim to keep the grimdark dial firmly cranked. The Second Edition setting, the Askellon Sector, is explicitly themed as an old, crumbling, barely functional relic, which helped a lot. As did my (at the time) recent play-through of Bloodborne.
We also had a very nice spread of personalities and character types, and the players were on-board with the themes and tone in a big way, riding the very careful line that keeps 40k from being a farce while still being satire.
I'm also curious if this is still pre-gen adventures or not? Feels like things are flowing more naturally now than in the beginning so if it's still pre-gen it's hidden very well.
The Novabella sessions are a slightly edited version of Seeds of Heresy, the free RPG day adventure for DH2. I added some Medical intrigue with the heavy metal poisoning because we had a dedicated Chirurgeon, and did the usual GM-fills-in-gaps-in-pregen business. As I mentioned at the conclusion, it's one of the best canned adventures I've ever seen, and I would heartily recommend it to anyone running DH2 for their group.
The Desoleum sessions are a heavily edited version of Desolation of the Dead from the Game Master's Kit. I basically used the hook (body-processing noble dies surrounded by zombies, clutching a weird alien device) and the set-dressing/NPCs provided, and fleshed out the Desoline xenos, which are only mentioned in passing by the book.
The Ossuar sessions are still ongoing, but they're based not off of an adventure, but from one of the provided Story Hooks in the splatbooks. They give you a basic problem, a few possible story beats, and some enemy statblocks if needed. They're all pretty good, and as a bonus, they give you the planets they're based on as Alternate character options - your character can be
from Ossuar and get a different bonus than a normal Shrine Worlder.
Is it a conscious decision to not have any downtime with yhe crew? So far it's straight from the last mission to next with little room for non-mission interaction between the PCs.
For the most part, yes. Downtime was handled during sessions (during Warp travel, traveling to the xenos ruins, etc) rather than as sessions of their own due to the planned length of the campaign. I felt that a 6-10 session campaign didn't justify an entire off-episode.
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