Actually

I very much like Jon’s current Dark Heresy game. Up until now I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on why I like it so much, until I realised that it may well be because each of the players has two characters. It seems to me that it has several advantages over having just one character: 

1. It allows the player to concentrate on two things. In a normal game half of the party might concentrate on combat and the other half on social skills, but when the player has two characters, it allows them to contribute to and excel at multiple things, so a non-combat session won’t leave the person who made the lunatic combatant feeling left out, as they have another character to fill the role. 
2. When the player has to come up with two different character concepts, they have to think more carefully about how they roleplay both of them. The ways the two characters are played have to be quite distinct, so that it is clear who is speaking. This may well force a player to create characters he may not normally create, in order to do this. None of the characters that I have played in the game I would have played in the same way had they been my only character. 
3. Further, I’ve noticed that Tom and I in particular are playing characters (Nikolai and Crisis) that may not be much fun to play in a game where they were our only characters. At least, I think, we would probably be playing them differently. 

It may not be the case in other game systems though. I can’t imagine a 4e DnD game with two characters each being anything other than a disaster, for example. Dark Heresy is probably a good system in which to do this because it is quite difficult for most careers to become good all-rounders. 

Hmm, at the start I was sure I had more than this, but still, I think that in my next game, if it’s Dark Heresy, each player will have two characters. 

I’ve been thinking recently about running a Dark Heresy game, possibly only a short one, set in the underhive of Volg, taking inspiration mostly from the fluff material in the Necromunda books. 

There would be some idiosyncrasies though. Most importantly, the characters would not be inquisitorial acolytes. What they would be I haven’t currently decided. One of the ideas I have is “Pirates of the Sump Sea”, which sounds promising. Another is that the PCs are passengers on a ship across the sump, or something. 

After hearing Josh and Tom say that everyone has their own 40k, I was trying to think what mine was. I concluded that mine was in the art. I find Abnett’s writing style to be too light in comparison (sorry Josh). Also most of my early exposure to the 40k universe was through Necromunda and the bits and pieces of writing in the books, which were tantalisingly brief but (as I remember) very evocative. 

As said above, the game would draw considerably from the stories in the Necromunda books. Life is cheap, a handful of stub rounds cheaper, and a bottle of slug-derived rotgut cheapest of all. Everything is covered in sewage, pollution, blood and dirt. And characters are the scum-sucking lowest of the low; ugly, brutal and desperate. Desperate or crazy, anyway, and, as Horgh “Scumface” Irnot says, no-one’s this desperate. 

Why Volg? Well, the idea’s starting point was when I read the stats and descriptions of the guns from Volg in the Inquisitor’s Handbook, and thought “why would anyone use this crap of their own free will?” Well in this game, Volg guns are all anyone’s got. It’ll be fun!

Recently, upon the opening of windows, I have experienced a peculiar awareness of the interior surfaces of my nose and throat, also sneezing. I hope I’m just imagining it…

The rearming doesn’t work, damn.

Make that buying windows seven sometime, I got another 30 days trial by typing slmgr /rearm, which can be done twice more! Nice.

I like the tumblr iPhone app, it’s really cool. The only thing is that it doesn’t do landscape, which would be really handy. It’s much better than the lj app though, which doesn’t allow you to view your friends page.

I am considering getting a couple of new 1.5TB hard disks and putting them in raid 0. Which will cost about £180 but will mean that I will have loads of space, and very good security against data loss. Hmm, if I’m going to do this I might as well do it while I’m doing my install of windows 7, which I will be buying soon.