Trekkin
2013-06-22, 01:22 PM
I'm considering running a Dark Heresy game, and one of the things that's always kept me away from it in the past is how the Imperium works, the Inquisition in particular; my players tend not to like hidebound theocracies. We all like the setting in theory, but there isn't really a place to put my players where they won't get terminally heretical out of pragmatism -- and as much as that's fine, I find my games work better when my players' actions are generally approved of by their support structure, and DH doesn't look like it supports a Ciaphas Cain/ Gaunt's Ghosts - style Imperium.
As a way around this, it occured to me that it might work to have them operate under the auspices of the Mechanicum, albeit a Mechanicum less against innovation than they appear to be. Going off Titanicus, Mechanicum, and similar, it doesn't look like that huge a jump to make the Omnissiah an acknowledged anthropomorphization of "the sum of all knowledge" or similar and make the official equivalence to the Emperor even more of an outright lie than it already is, which lets official AdMech doctrine tacitly permit safe innovation /experimentation as long as the Imps don't notice; thus the explorator fleets and similar. That way I can let my players muck about discreetly with the technology and they won't rail against the Mechanicum's technological stasis; they'll accept caution over modifying a Titan more readily than they will a religion based around venerating decrepit machinery.
It also lets me explain away the ridiculousness of the Titans and the ships by way of their being constructed by an entire civilization of people who think technology's cool for its own sake. In essence, "because they could and giant robots are awesome".
I'm thinking it works like this: given the more puritanical Inquisitors' tendencies toward burning first and investigating later, the Mechanicum's Inquisition basically works to minimize collateral damage to AdMech assets. I can bounce the players between "liaising" with the Ordos, autonomously investigating incidents in Mechanicum space to deny the Inquisition a reason to meddle, and outright running rings around the Imperial Inquisition, keeping a step ahead of them and planting evidence to redirect Inquisitorial attention away from Mechanicum affairs. It lets me have them under Mechanicum purview without making them all cybered up to the nines, anyway.
This pretty much mandates running the players' boss three steps beyond Radical, but it also gives me a way to have the Imperial Inquisiton be both a help to and a headache for the PCs; with all the ways the AdMech has of correcting heterodoxy and repurposing useful personnel, they insist on wastefully destroying everything. It also means the AdMech works like the Spartan educational system: Tech-heresy isn't necessarily a problem, but being caught by the Imperium practicing tech-heresy certainly is.
So how bad an idea is this? I know it's a departure from canon, but is it a fatally contradictory one? What stops making sense if this is the case in my game?
And how does "Mechanicum equivalent to the Inquisition" translate into bad latin?
As a way around this, it occured to me that it might work to have them operate under the auspices of the Mechanicum, albeit a Mechanicum less against innovation than they appear to be. Going off Titanicus, Mechanicum, and similar, it doesn't look like that huge a jump to make the Omnissiah an acknowledged anthropomorphization of "the sum of all knowledge" or similar and make the official equivalence to the Emperor even more of an outright lie than it already is, which lets official AdMech doctrine tacitly permit safe innovation /experimentation as long as the Imps don't notice; thus the explorator fleets and similar. That way I can let my players muck about discreetly with the technology and they won't rail against the Mechanicum's technological stasis; they'll accept caution over modifying a Titan more readily than they will a religion based around venerating decrepit machinery.
It also lets me explain away the ridiculousness of the Titans and the ships by way of their being constructed by an entire civilization of people who think technology's cool for its own sake. In essence, "because they could and giant robots are awesome".
I'm thinking it works like this: given the more puritanical Inquisitors' tendencies toward burning first and investigating later, the Mechanicum's Inquisition basically works to minimize collateral damage to AdMech assets. I can bounce the players between "liaising" with the Ordos, autonomously investigating incidents in Mechanicum space to deny the Inquisition a reason to meddle, and outright running rings around the Imperial Inquisition, keeping a step ahead of them and planting evidence to redirect Inquisitorial attention away from Mechanicum affairs. It lets me have them under Mechanicum purview without making them all cybered up to the nines, anyway.
This pretty much mandates running the players' boss three steps beyond Radical, but it also gives me a way to have the Imperial Inquisiton be both a help to and a headache for the PCs; with all the ways the AdMech has of correcting heterodoxy and repurposing useful personnel, they insist on wastefully destroying everything. It also means the AdMech works like the Spartan educational system: Tech-heresy isn't necessarily a problem, but being caught by the Imperium practicing tech-heresy certainly is.
So how bad an idea is this? I know it's a departure from canon, but is it a fatally contradictory one? What stops making sense if this is the case in my game?
And how does "Mechanicum equivalent to the Inquisition" translate into bad latin?