Black Crusade: Hand of Corruption

Since I'm feeling curmudgeonly today...

I've now read the first two chapters of "Hand of Corruption" (out of three). In particular, chapter two represents the 'meat' of the adventure, the bit that is advertised on the back of the book.

It's not very good.

Firstly, the boring stuff that needs to be said: this is a gorgeous book, with top-notch production values, decent writing, and so forth. Structurally, it's fine. But there's a problem with the content. In fact, this adventure engages in some of the worst sins of published adventures.

The problem, fundamentally, is that the designers haven't really presented an adventure here. What they've presented is a story, that a group of PCs could be slotted into as the protagonists.

I don't want to give to much away, so I'm going to have to be rather vague here. However, quite often the book provides an illusion of choice. The PCs have to get to location X, so they are given a choice of means by which this can be achieved. But the choice is an illusion: if they do this then that happens. However, if they instead do this then... that happens anyway.

In fact, it's worse than that. Because at one point the PCs are given a Big Goal to accomplish. This goal has several different components, each with its own complications. So, a bit of a tricky one. But it's cool - the adventure has a whole "Prison Break" vibe going on, with lots of scheming factions, and different ways to achieve the goal. The PCs could do this, or that, or the next thing...

Oh, no, they can't. Because the adventure flatly declares, "the PCs decide to solve the problem by..." And it then discusses other possible options, and why the GM should outright ban them.

It's actually a real shame. The book has quite a lot of good ideas in it. Indeed, I reminds me a great deal of a D&D adventure called "Expedition to the Demonweb Pits" - like that adventure, the book itself is really quite poor, but it contains the spine of a truly awesome campaign in there. It will need an awful lot of work to bring it out (chapter one needs completely re-written, chapter two needs some massive changes, and I haven't started on chapter three yet), but that's fine - a homebrewed version would probably be better anyway.

However, my main purpose in buying this adventure was really not to run it, or at least, not directly. Rather, I was interested to see what sorts of stories FFG foresee us using "Black Crusade" to tell. After all, the three introductory adventures are all rather similar, and I can see that getting very old very quickly... but I was having a hard time seeing what else there was to be done.

Unfortunately, having read this, I'm none the wiser. I can see how this story would be interesting and fun, but it seems awfully specific in its nature. But once I've run this campaign (assuming I do), what then? (It looks like my next port of call may be the WH40k novels... but that's a good way down the line.)