How do you turn the Horus Heresy, a galaxy spanning civil war with billions of combatants, and the subject of over sixty sci-fi novels, into a roleplaying game? In this exclusive interview, Wargamer sits down with the team at Cubicle 7 to find out how they’re distilling one of the true epics of modern science fiction into Warhammer the Horus Heresy Roleplaying Game.
In Warhammer The Horus Heresy roleplaying game, players take on the roles of Space Marine officers commanding a loyalist battlefleet, hounded from star to star by the overwhelming forces at Warmaster Horus’ disposal.
Cubicle 7’s CEO Dominic McDowall-Thomas and senior producer Pádraig Murphy are both massive fans of Warhammer 40k and the Horus Heresy books, and have worked on the upcoming RPG from the start. Here’s what they have to say.
Core rules
Cubicle 7 already makes two Warhammer 40k RPGs, the gritty, investigation and intrigue focused Imperium Maledictum, and the more two-fisted Wrath and Glory. The Horus Heresy RPG is a brand new game with a different rules engine from either.
“I had one bit of feedback from somebody after we announced it”, Murphy recalls, “couldn’t this just be a campaign for an existing system?”. He’s adamant that no, it deserves its own game.
“You have to be able to save worlds and damn them, you have to be able to render enemy fleets to ash and let them drift lifeless in the void before you”, Murphy says. “If you’re not making those decisions, if you’re not occasionally launching macro-cannons onto planet side installations and glassing a chunk of it, are you really playing the Horus Heresy?”
It will however share a D10 dice pool system with the upcoming Warhammer: The Old World RPG. Characters have a statline very similar to that used in the Horus Heresy wargame, with weapon skill, toughness, and so on. That provides the number of dice the player rolls to take a test, while the character’s skill provides a target number they need to roll equal to or under.
The developers chose the system for its relative ease of use compared to D100 systems. “We wanted it to be fairly accessible, because the Horus Heresy has been such a big success for Games Workshop that this might be the first role playing game a lot of people want to give a go”, McDowall says.
“Dom and I and a couple of other people have been super focused on [this dice system] for the Old World”, Murphy adds, “all of its little nuances were quite fresh in our mind when we went into the Heresy”. They were able to quickly spot ways to use the system to cover all the different kinds of things you will be doing in the game.
And that is a broad spectrum of activities, as the game’s scale telescopes out from controlling individual characters, up through your military forces, all the way up to governing a war fleet.
Characters
Players will each control several characters. First there’s your Space Marine consul, a high ranking specialist officer of the superhuman Space Marine Legions. They’re a member of the war council deciding the overall strategic goals of your fleet, setting the direction for a truly massive quantity of troops. But they’re still a front line fighter, and they’ll lead your ground forces during the battles of the campaign.
Players will also control a mortal companion, humans within the warfleet such as naval officers, remembrancers, or iterators of the Imperial Truth. Murphy explains “a lot of what they’re good at is dealing with things that aren’t violence, or combat, or powerful leadership on the battlefield” – that is, they can do all the human stuff that Space Marines aren’t engineered for.
“They’re able to get into the bowels of your void ship and find out what’s going on with the nascent Cult of the Emperor as a God”, he expands, “or maybe they’re just better at talking to planetary governors as opposed to just expecting intimidating and demanding as a Space Marine might”.
They also give you a way to split the party without splitting the players. “It’s quite a grand scale of campaign”, Murphy says, “if somebody’s trying to deal with the planetary defenses while somebody else is attacking the labs on the moon to try and secure them”, the primary characters may split up, but it will be possible to tag along with a companion character.
Space Marine characters can be drawn from all 18 of the known Space Marine legions, but – for the core rulebook at least – you’re limited to loyalists. “There’s a reason why you’ve been apart from your core Legion formations for a while”, McDowall says: your fleet is a specially created multi-legion taskforce designed to foster cooperation and skill sharing.
It’s also a decent justification for playing a loyalist from a renowned traitor legion: your commander has sidelined you from the main command structure until you can be eliminated later.
You’re all veterans of the great crusade. Part of the process of creating a character is recording their glories from that triumphant expansionist conquest. These are “tied into a little bit of a skill buff”, Murphy says “but also have a narrative impact that includes camaraderie with another legion”. That could of course include the traitors who are now hunting you down – it wouldn’t be the Heresy if you couldn’t be stabbed in the back by a warrior you loved like a brother.
The setting
The initial wave of releases for the Horus Heresy RPG will cover the initial shock and awe phase of the war. “The game opens just after the events of Istvaan”, McDowall says. “There’s a couple of different options that we present for how it kicks off, but you’re immediately in a position where first of all you’ve got to work out which way is up.”
After that, “you’re going to be very reactive… some kind of lead traitor force will be coming for you”. Your goal will start as mere survival, but the mere fact that your force contains a cohort of Space Marines means “you’ve got the means of fighting back”.
That power is also a responsibility: “if humanity is going to survive you’ve got to shepherd those resources – because they’re scarce now – and get them into a position where they can contribute” something more than a glorious last stand.
“I think a lot about where the adventures are going to come from”, McDowall adds. There’s of course the external threat of the Warmaster’s forces. “Then you’ve got just the needs of keeping your war fleet going”, the practical side of things. And there are character motivations: “You’ve got your duty as well, you are legionaries, you’re defenders of the Imperium and there’s a whole lot of Imperium needing defending right now”.
Paranoia will also be a big factor. “Say you turn up at a supply base”, McDowall suggests. “If they know that they’re in the middle of of the largest scale of galactic war, will they give you everything or will they ration it?” And you’ll have to consider “have they been infiltrated? Are there any traitors?” Murphy slyly adds that “the Alpha Legion do like to get the old spray can out…”
It strikes me as very similar to the first season of the 2004 Battlestar Galactica TV series, with a ragtag fleet hounded by an inescapable foe and gnawed at by dwindling resources and enemy infiltrators. It’s a setup that oozes dramatic tension.
Later supplements will progress further through the timeline and explore other theatres of war – I’m personally frothing for a supplement set on Tallarn, though neither developer has anything to say on the matter at this stage. The team intends to go all the way to the end of the war and the Siege of Terra. “The goal will be to do it all in no longer than the canonical length of the Heresy”, Murphy jokes.
The warfleet and strategic combat
Central to your campaign is your warfleet. Even buffeted by the worst warp storms in Imperial history, and pursued by traitors, the sheer power at your disposal gives you a lot of autonomy. The players will have a lot of choices about how to use the forces at their disposal when it comes time to strike.
McDowall says the goal is to give the “feeling of what it would be like to be making those decisions and having to following through those plans”. A military theatre will be abstracted into a series of defensive nodes you’re facing, which might include things like trenches, point defence guns, or natural barriers, all defending a Mechanicum facility with resources or intel you need.
“You’ll be deciding which of your forces are going to go up against each of those features” – and whether to take a fast, audacious, and incredibly risky strategy, such as landing in the target zone by drop pod to totally circumvent the land defenses.
But your resources are finite. “If you’re being good leaders, you’re bearing in mind the state of the war fleet” when you make your tactical decisons, Murphy says. “What sort of resources do we have aboard? Can we replace the losses if this goes badly?” Can you really afford a risky Thunderhawk extraction when you’ve only got one bird left in the fleet?
Personal combat
Some elements of battles will be handled with abstracted dice rolls that quickly tell you whether a military advance succeeded. But as Murphy says, the Heresy is driven by “the individuals and the rivalries that exist between them”.
In this kind of pivotal moment “it’ll play a little bit more like a regular role playing game with traditional combat”, and a good old fashioned duel to the death. The GM guide will apparently have advice on how to cultivate rivalries and build up this sort of drama.
The combat system is similar to The Old World RPG. In that system, when you suffer a hit you’re first staggered, and if you’re hit again you roll on an injury table full of interesting results. Subsequent hits add more and more dice to the injury table roll, increasing the chance of catastrophic injury. But “the way you take damage as a Space Marine is a little bit different”, Murphy assures us, and the rules have been tweaked to “get in all the power armor nuance”.
If you’re a particular fan of Space Marine hardware, you’re in luck – the Player’s Guide has “a fairly extensive armory”, Murphy states. For personal equipment, “if you’ve seen it on a Consul model, it’s probably in there”. Then there are stats for the various strategic military assets your fleet might contain, from sturdy Terminators to human Solar Auxilia. And yes, jetbikes are on the table, as personal equipment or as fleet assets – I checked.
Murphy and McDowall’s excitement for the setting is palpable – the interview ended with us all reminiscing about the Horus Heresy novels and what it would be like to be a Space Marine of the Great Crusade era watching the dream of Imperium they knew collapse around them. “For the survivors, for the real veterans it must have been horrible”, Murphy muses, “even the pride of the legion is gone”.
It’s a tragic story of overreaching ambition, dashed hopes, and all too human flaws, all whipped up into a froth by reality shattering superhuman warfare. It’s a roleplaying setting that promises a bad time in the best possible way. I absolutely cannot wait.
If you want to learn more about the system underpinning the Horus Heresy RPG, check out our interview about The Old World RPG with Cubicle 7: that’s incredibly interesting in its own right.
Source: Wargamer
