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.

Additional Magic Effects

Another creation to simplify and group stuff we seem to use frequently in our games. My sister plays a Night Elf Druid in our World of Warcraft family game. She is always trying to figure what she can do with her magic. She usually just casts lighting. :-\

So I created this grouping of all the magic or paranormal additional effects. Hoping this helps!

And I hope my sister at least tries chain lightning... :-)

A bit ago I also created a spell list that supported a Psychic skill we put in our games. Check it out here. 

A Simple Character Sheet We Have Been Working On

My oldest son and I have been working on a simple character sheet.

We removed a lot of stuff that people who were new to the game struggled with.

Space Combat Cards - Originally Made for FFG Star Wars RPG

We struggled with the complexity of FFG Star Wars Space Combat when we first used the system. I created these cards to help. We just print them out and put them in sleeves and people can have in front of them all the maneuvers and coolness that they can do.

We hope these help someone!

World of Warcraft for Genesys Alliance Archetypes and Species

We usually just sit down and start playing a game. We don't take a ton of time to flesh everything out for the entire setting. This has served us well. When we decided to do a game in World of Warcraft we simply tried to figure out the Archetypes. We knew the careers would work out easy with the core book.

We decided on using some of the storyline for the current expansion and began a game in Stormwind. We had fun with the concept of guilds. They were more like companies. Some large and powerful. Some small and scrappy. Contracts and Reputation became a big focus. Reputation is right out of the online game. Low reputation doesn't get you treated as bad as it would in a table top rpg though. Contracts were like taking on quests.

So far it has been a blast.

This is pretty much all we had to start with.

Don't try to get it all right. Play it to prove it was the right thing to do. Fix whats broken later. 

World of Warcraft for Genesys Talents

Our most recent family game has been set in World of Warcraft. It was inspired by the CelebriD&D game with Terry Crews set in World of Warcraft. If you are not familiar check it out here.

We have added some talents to the game to support a few extra features. Amon is playing a Night Elf Death Knight. He wanted to represent his taunt ability as a Tank. We just figured it out the first game, in the middle we decided to work out a talent to represent this.

My sister is playing a Night Elf Druid. She really enjoyed the talent Knack for It. She wanted a version that worked when she was casting spells in combat. She was willing to pay more experience for it and have it be less powerful. This felt a bit balanced so we did it.

See below.