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atmosphere I was talking about, and that makes it logical that
they look at stereotypical stuff like the aforementioned Fire
Warriors, Space Marines and others. So, I was wondering -
how do you think I should better educate them on "the
purpose" of Inquisitor?
Now, the first thing I’d have said is that Rhinocaps isn’t
doing anything “wrong”. However, I certainly can think of
some general pointers I’d give and, as I scanned the e-mail
over again, I could discern what I thought of as three broad
areas of focus – Inquisitor’s distinction, background, and
freedom – each of which can be both a blessing and a
curse, depending on how they’re each handled. As a
result, I’ve enlisted the help of Ruaridh Dall and Robey
Jenkins (fanatical Inquisitor gamers, games-masters and
writers, both), and we’re going to tackle each of these
three areas with some short mini-essays.
Distinction
As a campaign gamesmaster, what methods do you
use to drive home the unique emphasis of the
Inquisitor game? How do you make you players
understand what the game's about?
Ruaridh: Getting players into the right frame of mind for
games of Inquisitor is without doubt one of the biggest
hurdles a Gamesmaster has to cross, especially with new
players who have perhaps come straight from the
Warhammer 40,000 tabletop game. The competitive
element of most war games leads to a winning-at-all-costs
mentality that really doesn’t work within Inquisitor’s
narrative emphasis. The lack of “points” in Inquisitor
(discounting the quite rightly maligned Ready Reckoner)
can serve to confuse new players and leave them
wondering what reason could there be for not taking a
tooled-up character with stats in the 80s and 90s. The
Battle for the Emperor’s soul sounds like a job for power
swords and boltguns, does it not? Designing characters
for players is an obvious answer, but that can discourage
players from taking part in one of the best elements of the
game - building and modelling their own characters. A
good author sticks to the rule “show, don’t tell” and a good
Gamesmaster should follow that advice too – we are
supposed to be telling grand tales with Inquisitor after all. I
believe the Gamesmaster’s greatest responsibility is to
show the players through their scenarios that having the
best equipped and most powerful characters does not
necessarily result in the most exciting games and stories.
If players find out for themselves that simply taking aim
and killing everyone results in failure they will quickly come
to understand that Inquisitor is about so much more than
Warhammer 40,000 with fewer models.
As I said before, I feel that scenario and campaign design
are paramount to keeping Inquisitor flourishing in its unique
niche. If players are constantly lined up against mooks
with a mission no more complex than gunning them down,
then players are going to treat Inquisitor like a simple
wargame. Gamesmasters have a wonderful opportunity to
introduce the unseen face of the Imperium, and sticking to
the battlefield all the time misses out the true charm of the
Inquisitor game. The rich tapestry of the 41st millennium is
ripe for exploration and should be delved into with relish by
the Gamesmaster. Searching the sulphur deserts of
Nayan IV for the data storage crystals containing the
complete works of Magos Null is so much more evocative
a scene than gunning down the mutie rebels, again. Now,
everybody loves a bit of gunplay, but all too often Inquisitor
can become a game of highest Ballistic Skill wins, and
that’s a shame. Inquisitor games should be exciting,
memorable affairs, and the Gamesmaster can encourage
this with appropriate use of applied handwavium. This
concept rewards exciting play and keeps the game running
at a fast pace, and stops the game becoming bogged
down in dice rolls. Can the free-running death cultist
cartwheel over the gap between these two buildings and
throw a knife down at the twin stubber-toting, one-eyed
bounty hunter below? Sounds great – don’t bother rolling
the action dice. Can the telekine propel himself upwards to
grab onto the landing skid of the Valkyrie as it departs with
the prisoner on board? Awesome. Go for it. If the
Gamesmaster thinks something will add to the spectacle of
the game, then it absolutely should be encouraged. There
is a fine line to tread between helping the game and
favouring one player over another, but if a player has his
models acting “in character” then perhaps he should be
rewarded for playing Inquisitor as it’s meant to be played.
This notion of acting “in character” comes back to the
richness of the setting, especially the fractured and
complicated nature of the Inquisition. There are more
shades of grey in the Inquisition than any subject of the
Imperium would believe, and players should be tasked to
decide where in the spectrum their characters sit, before,
during and after games. Scenarios should challenge
players intellectually – both in terms of working out how
their characters will achieve their goals, but also have them
question their characters’ morals and their motivations. A
character’s beliefs go a long way to deciding the natural
progression of a campaign, and the Gamesmaster should
design scenarios to challenge these notions. Soon players
will be approaching the gaming environment through the
eyes of their characters, not their own, and at that point the
legendary tales from the underbelly of the Imperium will
begin to tell themselves. The Gamesmaster’s next
challenge is keeping his scenarios fresh for further
The battle reports featured in Dark Magenta attempted to
emphasise the “cool factor” of the Inquisitor game. Here,
Arkat Skar gets the drop on Inquisitorial Operative
Susannah Ward, preventing her from easily achieving her
infiltration and data-drop mission on behalf of Inquisitor
Saussure.