Saturday, July 20, 2019

Warhammer 40k for Genesys Redesign

A couple of years ago my oldest son renewed my interest in Warhammer. We started reading the Horus Heresy books and are pretty far in. We loved the world setting but every game that seems to come out for this setting is super heavy. For us, there was so much learning the rules that we never got to feel the game.

Genesys is by no means rules light, however, we already knew it and loved playing with the system. We created a bunch of tiny settings and have been posting them. Warhammer was one of our favorites.

Technically we created the first content on paper then transferred it to OmniGraffle to make it look cool. This original content can be found here. A community member named Drainsmith stated that he used Adobe InDesign on a podcast about Genesys and so I picked it up. Working with my older son, we recreated our Warhammer content. We added a few playable starter characters. We simplified our character sheets. Our original idea towards simple character sheets can be found here. In this version we made it so it can be printed front and back. You get to see your narrative side of your character on one side of your sheet and your action/combat/skills side on the other. The entire file is designed to be saddlestitch printed. We focused on balancing it inside its setting and not making Space Marines roll a ton of dice. We also wanted to make sure that players could chose to not play a Space Marine and still function in the game. While most of this is narrative, (it is not always best to be an unstoppable killing machine) some of it is in the setting mechanics. This has been fun for us and is A way to approach it. We by no means assume it is THE way. We also know that there are other setting that have far more detail and content. This one is ours. Its fairly small. We enjoyed it.

Another great tool that we found useful was this Warhammer 40k wiki.