This journal seems now to be more about chronicling my gaming adventures than anything meaningful. Turns out that most of what I have to say is best done on Facebook so if you want to follow my day-to-day life you should probably find me there.

So, last night we had a big, big throw-down in our Dark Heresy game. It went. . . well. It went both "well" and "poorly".

"Well" in that we ended up "winning"; "poorly" in that my dude, Father Victus, took something like 25 total wounds during the fight, about four criticals, and had to burn two fate points. He lost his left arm from just beneath the elbow.

Victus, despite being a Red Redeptionist, keeps stats about his exploits. There are tally marks on the character sheet for various things: "Dudes Killed," "Dudes Tortured," "Headshots," "Dudes Burned," etc. All of those went up a lot last night. I think I killed something like 25 people.

(Turns out that a flame-throwing weapon is exceptionally effective at killing masses of goons who are assaulting your position through a narrow cavern.)

Unfortunately, I had to add a new statistic - one that threatens Victus' position as a pure servant of the Emperor of Mankind: Inquisitors Killed.

Yeah. So, you know how we broke some guy out of an Inquisition prison? A prison we had the keys to? Well. It seems someone didn't get the paperwork and decided to hunt us down. A big, bad-ass witch hunter. And he attacked us in the middle of the fight.

So I put him down with a double tap bolter shot to the head.

Changing tack.

I've been thinking a lot about Dark Heresy as a "game". It's very strange, because even though the system is very basic and simple, the game world is some seriously advanced roleplaying. It is absolutely not a "beginner's" game. Go play Dungeons and Dragons for that. Hell, even Call of Cthulhu is an easier game to start with.

The reason is because, in the Warhammer 40k universe, in Dark Heresy, the Imperium of Man is effectively the Nazi party and the player characters are really the equivalent of the SS.

Think about it for a second. Fascist government, riddled with bureaucracy, ostensibly ruled by a hyper-charismatic figure? Check. Hyper-xenophobic foreign policy which encourages the wholesale genocide of any alien populations? Check. People being kidnapped in the middle of the night, put on secret transports, and sent to camps where they are likely to be killed? Check. Ingrained, government-sponsored racism? Check. Forced sterilization in non-compliant populaces? Check.

And the player characters themselves? Dude, we're the fucking bad guys. A secretive branch of the government whose authority oversteps everyone else's, able to commandeer whole legions, whose job it is to root out, "interrogate", and then ultimately execute dissenters?

Totally the bad guys in the story.

Which is why the game is absolutely an "advanced" game. We had a new player start last night, and we had a little chat about it. There are things that my character says and does that I do not and would never do. He fucking *tortures* people. A lot! He likes doing it, too; so much the better that he can do it with religious fervor.

I expect that if most people would be completely appalled if they just observed a game session as an outsider.

And yet, it's one of the most fun games I've ever played precisely because the morality of the situation is so foreign to my own.

Ironic.