Warhammer 40k for Genesys Redesign New Characters

After taking feedback from T3mpe5t_1140 on reddit, we added a few new characters. This led us to adding some wargear also. The full file is updated too. It can be found here.

Set 01

Set 02

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.

Warhammer 40k Genesys

This is an updated version of the Warhammer game that we were running before. We were inspired by a demo of Wrath and Glory at Gencon. We already dig the Genesys system. We wanted to make us roll less dice and still investigate the Warhammer 40k setting.

The blog has a lot of this content published earlier, but we found it to get a bit out of hand quickly and we had to house rule a good deal of things. This conversion did a better job of bringing it in line with the common Genesys content.

Hopefully more to come in the future.

Click here for the PDF

Orks NPCs for Warhammer 40k played in FFGs Genesys RPG

Our next game involves the mutant...

We started originally with a something I simply called Ork Toughness to give them a +1 Soak. We took the books advice and removed it. Favoring the Adversary talent to deal with defense.

Ork stats we will be play testing in our next game are here

For a higher quality version click here. 

Updated NPCs for Warhammer 40k played in FFGs Genesys RPG

My sons and I updated the NPC sheets for Warhammer 40k in FFGs Genesys RPG after our last game. We created more World Eater Chaos Space Marines and started using Chaos Heretic Cultists.

The way we normally deal with this is to just write down stats we think work in game in the moment. We later go back and compare them to the other NPCs we have created and compare it to a base generic game without the world setting of Warhammer 40k. If it all makes sense, we put it into the below template for future use. If it needs change or more play testing we do that.

Here are the new or updated NPCs.

For a higher quality version click here.

Psychic Powers for Warhammer 40k Played in FFGs Genesys RPG

We have added a Psychic Powers list to our Warhammer 40k game.

Higher Quality PDF Version Here

Some Combat NPCs for Warhammer 40k played in FFGs Genesys RPG

In our latest game my sons were playing Ultramarines sent to assist an Inquisitor into bringing a planet back into compliance. The adventure was described in an earlier post.

Our main approach to this campaign was to make things simple and quick. Low dice pools, fast stats. During this game we had to quickly create Imperial Guards, Chaos Space Marines, and unknown to my sons, a traitor assassin.

Here are the stat cards for these NPCs.

Here is a higher quality PDF

Note: These NPCs are updated in this article.

Updated Magic Spells list for FFG Genesys RPG

We decided to put out an updated magic chart that helps us with the psychic part of our games. We looked at the tables and explanations of the other categories (Arcana, Divine, Primal) and decided what we thought fit for Psychics. We also included the standard categories because its easier to see which spells go with which skills. With our Warhammer Game it was kind of imperative that we had a Psychic Skill.

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Warhammer 40k played in FFGs Genesys RPG

My sons and I did a spur of the moment Warhammer 40k game in Fantasy Flight Games Genesys last night. Genesys is a Generic RPG framework that we seem to be loving more and more. We have been playing around with it quite a over the past few weeks. Our actual game play has been light though. We just dived in last night. We picked up notebook paper and jotted down on the barest essentials for characters and starting rolling.

It was super fast. We simply used RAW (rules as written) for character creation. We had to adjust the concept of starting equipment. Space Marines and all...

We wanted to keep dice count low so we tried to make characteristics in the norm. We considered using the super hero tone in the back of the book. Tones are like genre's in Genesys. Unfortunately, this would have added more dice to count so we avoided that. We decided to deal with the power extremes narratively.

Our Warhammer Grim Dark Future...
My younger son has not experienced the Warhammer 40,000 world so we, my older son and I, briefed him on it. We kept it PG-13. We described The Imperium of Man as an attempt to nobly bring all of lost humanity back together again. We left out the by-any-means part...

War Gear pt 1
Mechanically we started with a Bolter being the center of relative damage. We designed around this afterwards.
We made a Bolter damage 8 and crit 3, short range and gave it the blast and autofire qualities. None of it was precise, but it was crazy fun!

Character Creation
Character creation took 5 min with my younger son and 10 for my older son. The older was making a psyker. We did this mostly RAW. We used the 4 Archetypes and the available and appropriate careers. We distributed appropriate equipment for the game, though it was way under precise power as detailed above.

Adventure and Campaign Design
Collaboratively we created the adventure/campaign. We started with questions. I asked my younger son what is something common a Space Marine would do. He said kill people. We reinterpreted that answer (his mother would not approve...) to something like "Engage in Search and Destroy Missions"... I asked my older son what is something that could commonly go wrong on a mission like that. He said something like "The Squad Gets Overwhelmed". I added the last piece in, just to answer the question why... A
Traitor!

My younger son wants for us to stay rules light. He brings awareness to how much we focus on the mechanics and how little we focus on the fun. The higher detail he feels takes away from the game. He is a big proponent of Narrative over tactical. He is our inspiration for keep it simple. The quickly written character sheets were awesome. We just used notebook paper and started playing. I love his desire for simplicity.

War Gear pt 2
After speaking with Gaming Ronin and Dungeon Musings on the Unofficial Genesys Google+ Community. I added in a war gear hand out. Still trying to keep it simple. This kept things fun while allowing for each group; Humans, Eldar, and Orks to do their thing. It's not precise or power appropriate, but was a great deal of fun and super fast. My older son is the Warhammer 40k expert now. His knowledge has surpassed mine. He reads more than I do. I am so proud of him. :-) He made sure that the Psyker Armor provided protection from the warp and such... It comes in the form of a piece of equipment called a Psychic Hood. I think he said protect from negative effects, and amplify the psykers ability.

Funny story: My older son told me about this after the game. In the game he took a "double despair" critical hit that destroyed a piece of equipment. He cringed at the thought of it blow off his head piece. :-)

The System Now this was something to geek out about as a cool aspect of the Genesys system. The boost die does exactly that. By increasing advantage rolled, it removes threat and thereby reduces negative effects. It may actual add success and advantage representing the amplification.
I enjoyed it so much I put them into a format that my older son and I have been playing with for the past few days. Here is what we have created so far. Contact us if you want a better version.

Here is a higher quality PDF