This new book goes into much greater detail in explaining efficient ways to run a new campaign to Dark Heresy. This doesn't come as a surprise to me as FFG has years of experience under its belt now with multiple RPG games. What is interesting is that all of the improvement are just not taken from the 40k line of RPG's but also from the Warhammer Fantast RPG as well from what I can tell.
The game clearly marks all types of narrative events that are to played out.
Social Encounters
Exploration Encounters
Travel Encounters
Combat Encounters
and Down Time
These are all basic things that must be accomplished to run a game, but there is great detail that each section has dedicated to it for a GM to utilize and give basic insight on how to run them.
There is a lot of good information here for new and experienced GM's to use.
Two things that are new are Influence and Subtlety. I mentioned them breifly before, but there is a whole section dedicated to explaining how they are used.
Influence is a characteristic, but cannot be gained to using EXP to increase it, only by doing certain actions in the game like stopping a heretic or saving a planet, etc. On the other hand you can also lose Influence. Don't fail!
This is a representation of your contacts, resources, and reputation and can be used to requisition something, intimidate someone, or help with investigation.
Subtlety is something that the GM keeps track of in secret. this is a chart of 0-100 and depends on how the characters act. Do you go in with signs of the Inquisistion tatooed on your forehead or do sneak in a cargo box Metal Gear style...
You can gain and lose subtlety over the course of a mission. Do you use false identities or do you try to openly intimidate someone and constantly start fights...
Fate, Fear, Insanity, and Corruption are explained in great detail as well.
There are some changes to to how Fear, Insanity, and corruption work, but it would take me too long to try and effectively explain it, so not going to try. Know that there are now Fear effects for differant types of Fear being caused instead of on Fear Chart, and they cause differant penalties that are very straight forward. . In the Beta book there are some issues with the explanations and references to other pages that are incorrect (like pg 127 referencing itself for more information on fear and the fear explanation in the narrative tool section references a page in the armoury that has no info on fear).. I hope this gets fixed.
Building Combat Encounters is a great new tool that has been included in this book and is very welcome as this has been one of my greatest problems with playing the 40k RPG's especially Deathwatch.
There is now a Threat Threshold and this is computed by taking the rank of the threat and multiplying it by the total number of PC's. The encounter rank that is the average rank of PC's in the group should be at equal levels and this should create a balanced encounter. There is nothing wrong with going a rank higher to pit the PC's against though.
So now that you have the threat threshold (say 25). you use this number to determine the adversaries, or hazards the PC's will face. This is done by all NPC's having a threat level.
So you just add the threat level of the NPC's you want to use until you reach the threshold number. This may take some tweaking to get perfect.
The new book also has a new list of NPC's to throw against the acolytes and includes various threats.
All in all I have to say that I am very impressed with the new direction of the book and hope that many of these improvements get implemented into the other book.
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