Further Thoughts on Black Crusade

Since my previous post, I've made some very significant progress with "Black Crusade". It turned out that a lot of the issues I was seeing were down to creating five Space Marine characters in sequence. These characters do indeed have a huge array of fixed powers and gear, and so end up quite homogenous. However, as soon as I moved on to the human characters, things became a great deal more flexible. So that's good.

In the end, I decided to stick with the 'official' character sheets, mostly because I don't currently have time to do a revised version. However, if I am ever going to run the game again, especially for more than a one-shot, a better character sheet will be a must. In the meantime, I have done a 'cheat sheet' for each character, detailing all the relevant terms from the character sheet.

The rest of the prep for the game is reasonably well in hand. However, I'm a little disconcerted at the scarcity of opponents in the book. I suspect part of this is that the game may be intended for use in concert with the other games in the universe, but I don't think this should be assumed. Certainly, I'm inclined to think that Fantasy Flight really need to put out a "Monster Manual" for this game pretty urgently.

(They've also made the key error of providing the antagonists with a long list of skills, talents, and traits, without explaining what these are. As WotC discovered about a decade ago, this saves a little space at the cost of a huge amount of utility. Everything the GM needs to use a given monster really should be included directly in the stat-block - even if that means cutting down on the number of individual monsters. Tsk tsk.)

The upshot of all of this is that I'm reasonably confident that the game will be ready for Saturday, and I'm reasonably happy that it will go well (at my end, anyway). However, I think I'm extremely unlikely ever to run this game again - the atmosphere is great, but the weaknesses inherent in the game engine, coupled with the lack of any clear idea what the PCs should actually do, leave me with little incentive to go back.

A shame. I was really looking forward to this game back before I actually saw it.