The named NPCs are quite interesting characters, and in spite of my fears the players picked up on several clues and were able to work out more or less what was going on without me just feeding them hints. The players meet a number of NPCs, each with some information to help or hinder them. Though it is a bit convenient that things kick off as soon as the players arrive, it does set the scene and immediately got the players' heresy senses tingling.ДЄfter the opening there is an investigation section. The adventure starts with a nice little combat to show the players the ropes, with enemies hopelessly outclassed. In my preparation I drew out a flow chart of probably events, but that largely went out of the window. Though we all had fun with the system, I found the module a little difficult to follow. Most of them agreed it was stronger than the Dark Heresy system and personally I'm pretty set on purchasing the book when it becomes available. Having that much doesn't make the resource feel very special.ДЄll things considered, we liked the system and all of the players said they'd play it again. I'm not sure if there is supposed to be a limit to how much they can accumulate, but I couldn't find it if there is. It's hard to imagine what this represents in the game world - is the Guardsman taking a split second to decide if they should block the blast from the grenade or just take it on the chin? We also noticed that the players racked up a massive pile of Glory, ending the session with 5 or so still in the bank. Some of the mechanics do feel a bit too gamey - to go back to 'Soak', the option to turn wounds into shock is usually the correct one to take, but not always. There are a few things that are not entirely clear, and several rules are suspiciously missing from this version. The Wrath dice, for instance, does not generate Wrath, while 'Soak' to turn wounds into shock feels a bit phoned in. If I have to pick the nits, there are some mechanics that are confusingly or just unimaginatively named. The battles took a while to resolve but I'm pretty sure this would speed up with experience, and was still considerably quicker than the old Dark Heresy calculators at dawn style. The mob mechanic made mowing down chaff enemies simple enough for all the characters while the ability of named enemies to use Ruin to soak or perform special abilities makes them feel like a threat. In terms of balance, it did seem like the four characters the players chose were roughly even in terms of their abilities. It was nice to see this stuff coming into play rather than just being an optional, often sidelined bonus like the Inspiration mechanic in D&D. We also had an interesting use of the Inquisitorial Acolyte's ability to call in a favour from their Inquisitor and had the Guardsman use their ability to take a bullet for someone. The group also made good use of the ability to spend a Wrath point to make a narrative declaration, which to my mind made running the game more fun and cooperative. Everyone loved the character objectives, and by the end all of them had been achieved. The group consisted of 4 LARPers, which definitely helped given the narrative focus of the game. Most of the group is used to D&D 5E so it felt complicated to begin with but I think we all thought by the end that it was actually quite straight forward. I'm pretty sure I got a fair few things wrong, but the players still picked up the core mechanic pretty quickly and felt confident enough to make use of the titular Wrath and Glory resources during play without too much prompting from myself. At the start two of the players had declared that they didn't like dice pool systems, and one had never played a pen and paper RPG, so I think we gave the game a fairly tough task to win the group over. The response to the Wrath and Glory system was largely positive.

Wrath and glory pdf