The best part was the on-book character, as well as we other 3, were officially sanctioned “slaves” of a rogue trader. (We didn’t consider ourselves slaves, of course. We were in it for the “teefs” and the “waaaaggggghhhs.” The planet was named Megiddo. The inquisition sent some investigators there. The RT was there to collect an old debt. The Inquisition really didn’t like a bunch of Orks running amuck in their business. We challenged a bunch of them to fight, but none of them wanted to take us on.
We did manage to kick the ass of some sanctioned mutants and space marines. But we didn’t really kill them. The mutant was dropped below 0 health and dying, but my doc stitched him up and gave him mechanical arms. Because, hey, he fought bravely, and I respected that.
I also got to play a Deathwatch member in another 40K LARP run by the same people. Good times.
Yeah, but in my experience, LARPers are on average more socially adept, better looking, and have better hygiene than tabletoppers, at least at conventions.
Haha, I threatened my players that if at any time any of them wanted to play an Ork Freeboota, or bring an Ork on board the Righteous Endeavour, then I reserved the right to start randomly generating snotlings, grots and squigs in random parts of the ship due to the Orks shedding spores as they moved (or were moved) around the ship. And that if they didn’t then move quickly to contain the infestation, the grots would start to evolve until Ork Boyz started spawning and taking over key parts of the ship infrastructure - say the water reclamation facilities or the port side gun decks.
I still may do it, just for shits and giggles. Have the ship hit and holed by an asteroid, and if they don’t clean it all up have some greenskins start popping up and causing shenanigans.
But that’s the thing - for the most part, the Imperium knows its own tech in the same sense that the average PC user knows about microchip architecture or OS layers.
They know that if you do this, then that happens ; and they know that if you flip this switch then that machine spits out a bolter, but they don’t really have a clue *why *it happens or understand the scientific principles behind it.
They know that assembling this set of parts in that order results in a working tank and are afraid that experimenting with different parts might anger the Machine Spirit and make him prevent the existing patterns from working any more.
The tech priests also know that when that part breaks down, then you chant to appease the Machine Spirit and perform the Ritual of Changing That Part but don’t really know (or try to find out) why that part is needed or if the machine could be tinkered to work without it. They might not even understand that the *important *bit of the Ritual of Changing That Part is, well, replacing that frelling part. As far as they’re concerned, it could be the lighting of the candles or the chanting of the litany or the threefold smacking of the exhaust plate with the blessed wrench, or all of the above. Doing it all is known to work, the instruction booklet says to do it all, ergo you do it all. Don’t try and fix what ain’t broke, marine, we’re already so deep in the shit that we need pressurized SCUBA gear !
As to why that is, well, the Imperium as a whole is very luddite and anti-innovation because researching and innovating implies having an open inquisitive mind and open minds start asking questions like “is the Emperor really helping us, when it comes right down to it ?” or “who gave Commissars the right to shoot random people in the head with a portable rocket launcher, exactly ?”.
Also open minds sometimes literally explode, manifest horrors from the Warp or reawaken ancient evils, so there is that. Blessed is the mind too small for doubt.
I’ve mainly played the roleplaying games and the Space Marine video game, rather than the tabletop stuff.
I love the bleak setting, and the way it depicts millions of people living their lives in servitude of one specific goal, such as building Titans or refining corpse starch. It has a sense of scale that is sometimes missing from Sci-Fi. I love the Eisenhorn books and his journey through cool different planets.
The roleplaying games were the first I played that weren’t Fantasy, so it was a refreshing change to be killing Orks rather than Orcs, and the low-level grittiness of Dark Heresy is my favourite type of game - where a long-term goal might be to upgrade to a better class of helmet or a gun that isn’t horribly inaccurate, and one wrong move could lead to your head exploding or having your arms mutate into tentacles.