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.

The Villagers Setting (No More Heroes)

After discussing some fantasy tropes with my sister and watching a live play of Crash Pandas on Critical Role's YouTube channel, I decided to create a setting.

I used a background that fellow games and I speak about pretty frequently. How in the heck would normal people make it a day in our fantasy worlds? Playing a comedic or survival mode game with normal people in a fantastic would be great.

So I created The Villagers. It is still in progress as of this posting but mostly there and playable. Enjoy.

Note: Below is a link to the content. It is still a work in progress. Comments are welcome.

Turning the Setting Sheet into a Online Collaborative Google Document

My sister and I wanted to work together on converting a setting from a book we had both read to Genesys. This is in preparation for her first time running a game. We started with just a conversation on how cool it would be to see some of the things we experienced in the book at the table. We spoke about how those things would work in Genesys.

We have used Google apps for a few other things and decided to make the setting using Google Docs. We knew that we could probably just start playing and wing it. We also wanted the practice so we did it this way. It worked great when I was traveling and we could collaborate online.

After making the better part of the setting, I made a generic version. I hope this helps.

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. 

Character Sheet in Use

This is my sister's actual character from our World of Warcraft family game using the simple character sheet.

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!