Setting up a campaign

A major part of the inspiration for running this campaign comes from the tales of a campaign that is a bit of a local legend around GEAS. There was a campaign that had gone on for years and years, with more players taking part at various time in it's history than you could shake a stick at. Politics and adventure and all the really good stuff that you want from a game. I wanted that.

So I took what OOC rule I knew of that this game ran under and adopted them as my own. Pretty much this comes down to you can play in the game if you're vouched for by a player already in the game. GM has no say in who plays.

Now obviously I had to invite the initial players and when the first few I invited didn't have any real idea who else they wanted to play with I got enough other players involved to get the game going. But now that it is, these are the rules.

The other thing I knew I needed to do was have a clearly set out story arc. I'm terrible at doing this. I tend to have a very vague idea of a single scene and figure out how to get that scene to happen. And then players happen to my plans and those scenes never happen anyway. This time I was going to put in the work. And I have. I'm maybe a third of the way through the plots I have already written. I still have to do prep between games and unexpected stuff happens or the next plot I was going to use doesn't fee quite right for the party yet etc but I have plot waiting to be used and so if an adventure comes to and end before I expect it to I have back up plots. It's making running the game much more enjoyable and much easier.

Some other stuff has come up since the game started as well. Two house rules and a tool that I'm still trying to get used by the players.

House rules so far...
Accurate basic weapons to additional dice of damage for every three degrees of success not every two. It just makes more sense once you realise how easy it is to get that sniper shot up to 80 - 90% chance to hit.

Fullauto fire can only allocate three hits to any one target. Larger targets can have extra hits allocated and smaller targets less to a minimum of one. Again this is to stop Fullauto just being the only sensible way to fight. It's still a massive advantage but not such a big one that people using single shot weapons can't compete.

Both of these rules were recommended to me by one of my players who has been running Dark Heresy pretty much since it came out and is a fantastic GM. I thought about the for quite a while but in the end they just made sense.

The other thing I'm trying to get going is a wiki for the game. I was inspired by the wiki for the Rogue Trader game I'm playing in which is fantastic. It has so much stuff on it it's slightly scary. Almost all the characters have pages, the ship has a page, four of the characters have IC logs detailing the events of the game. It adds a massive amount to it. Unfortunately I'm not getting as much buy in from my players, even with XP rewards for putting up backgrounds and such like they just aren't going for it with as much enthusiasm.