What is this?
Advanced Dark Heresy is a fan-made "enhanced" ruleset and collection of items/armory/psychic powers/sheets etc to make a sort of a complete overhaul in how the game works and is played. This system is based on the DH 1st edition and if wanting some similarities, the system has many things like Imperium Maledictum has and also there's lot designed from scratch. This ruleset is likely more complex and needs more thinking and calculations, but will offer a lot of depth in exchange.
Adding this here mainly as there have been earlier some at least handful of the discussions where some appreciation towards ADH has been shown. Thus willing to assume some might find this newer streamlined and way more developed and refined version also welcome.
Short description of design and content
I do like the lore around Dark Heresy (with 1st edition to be better written). However both editions left me and my groups lacking as the feel from the rules outcomes in all aspects (combat, investigations, psychic powers, interactions) and character development was not giving such things as the lore would allow you to expect. With these feelings we spent a decade and bit in playing and also simultaneously developed our enhanced version of the DH 1st ed. We call this product Advanced Dark Heresy 2.5 (with couple of previous iterations, but this being the final version). This version hones the d100 system of the Dark Heresy, but makes it far more able to produce exactly what anyone would just want to see happening when weapons or skills are used.
What to expect in Advanced Dark Heresy 2.5
With this version of the DH 1st ed. The combat really gives 40k vibes in the realism (lore wise realism, not definitely real life realism in each case). This was done by working out the combat mechanics, weapons and armours all over and by changing heavily how Toughness, AP and Critical hits etc work. Now easily random hits can be very fatal and it is rarely enough to have still HP left to avoid serious injuries (or death) even from regular hits as they easily turn into criticals when even a bit higher amount of damage is suffered. To support this approach all armour, equipment, weapons, cybernetics etc were rewritten and reworked. Of course a lot of depth to this is given from totally rewritten Talents too.
The characters have a lot of ways to survive the different obstacles and opponents, but as more or less likely to have many deadly encounters, the ruleset has reworked ways to use Fate, new introduction of Resilience Points that allow a lot of possibilities to avoid mortal damage, but they are tied closely to giving some effort to the roleplay towards the goals and ambitions of characters. While to get sudden upperhands the Righteous Fury is totally redone and tied to the Fate. This allows players and GM to far more flexibily gain and reward things with the Fate points as they have many uses and are usually more often permanently lost as their burning has many new aspects while the outright survive-anything has been removed.
We also remade and rewrote all careers, ranks, ascension etc to give a good a nice lore and 40k society feel to each character. This was even more enhanced by rewriting all Talents and Traits and reworking skill uses. Each character path also now is highly asymmetric in how they develop. The skills have many more uses and they provide more flexible way to deal with failure by allowing the success to fade into failure and then to disaster instead of just offering success oor fail. While skills were enhanced, Talents and Traits are now more descriptively giving clear lore to the characters. We chose to create nice character sheets too which are having lots of pages, but still nice enough to use easily. These sheets include multiple parts one common part for all that was there normally and some more and then also there is a career path part where redesigned character paths are easily printed and all advances kept by ticking boxes etc. Moreover there's added inquisitorial career that has its own sheet to describe how the acolytes are doing among the Inquisition. The feel of being Agents of the Inquisition is really concrete when each character has parallel Inquisitorial path they grow into while progressing within their own career path eventually leading characters to become Interrogators or even Inquisitors. While all Ascended careers were also redesigned and rewritten to allow the characters keep also growing past the normal careers as mixes between Inquisitorial path and some other path.
In addition we also adapted several ways to achieve nice outcomes from psychic powers usage and give ease of use. This reworked hybrid model, that has basis in Only War, has very interesting structure to the power lists and provides very thoughtful synergies etc between different powers giving psyker characters an awesome thing to explore. With every single power rewritten and rethought it is quite a nice for any psyker to check.
Finally the rules also were created for adding vehicles so they can be used in dramatic situations like combat without too much hassle, but still with lots of depth to how they work and get damaged.
All the rules are really neat to use and browse as the files are light, printer friendly and most importantly the files give comprehensive lists of weapons, armour, equipment, psychic powers, talents, traits, skills etc, so no need to to go find these.
Want to give this a try? - It is free!
If wanting to give this a try or just check the contents, the Advanced Dark Heresy 2.5 is available for free at RPGGeek.com. Dark Heresy 1st ed Core Rulebook and Inquisitor's Handbook are needed for character creation and for some small concepts, but mostly just antagonists, adventures and lore are needed from these and other supplements.
Advanced Dark Heresy
Advanced Dark Heresy is a fan-made "enhanced" ruleset and collection of items/armory/psychic powers/sheets etc to make a sort of a complete overhaul in how the game works and is played. This system is based on the DH 1st edition and if wanting some similarities, the system has many things like Imperium Maledictum has and also there's lot designed from scratch. This ruleset is likely more complex and needs more thinking and calculations, but will offer a lot of depth in exchange.
Adding this here mainly as there have been earlier some at least handful of the discussions where some appreciation towards ADH has been shown. Thus willing to assume some might find this newer streamlined and way more developed and refined version also welcome.
Short description of design and content
I do like the lore around Dark Heresy (with 1st edition to be better written). However both editions left me and my groups lacking as the feel from the rules outcomes in all aspects (combat, investigations, psychic powers, interactions) and character development was not giving such things as the lore would allow you to expect. With these feelings we spent a decade and bit in playing and also simultaneously developed our enhanced version of the DH 1st ed. We call this product Advanced Dark Heresy 2.5 (with couple of previous iterations, but this being the final version). This version hones the d100 system of the Dark Heresy, but makes it far more able to produce exactly what anyone would just want to see happening when weapons or skills are used.
What to expect in Advanced Dark Heresy 2.5
With this version of the DH 1st ed. The combat really gives 40k vibes in the realism (lore wise realism, not definitely real life realism in each case). This was done by working out the combat mechanics, weapons and armours all over and by changing heavily how Toughness, AP and Critical hits etc work. Now easily random hits can be very fatal and it is rarely enough to have still HP left to avoid serious injuries (or death) even from regular hits as they easily turn into criticals when even a bit higher amount of damage is suffered. To support this approach all armour, equipment, weapons, cybernetics etc were rewritten and reworked. Of course a lot of depth to this is given from totally rewritten Talents too.
The characters have a lot of ways to survive the different obstacles and opponents, but as more or less likely to have many deadly encounters, the ruleset has reworked ways to use Fate, new introduction of Resilience Points that allow a lot of possibilities to avoid mortal damage, but they are tied closely to giving some effort to the roleplay towards the goals and ambitions of characters. While to get sudden upperhands the Righteous Fury is totally redone and tied to the Fate. This allows players and GM to far more flexibily gain and reward things with the Fate points as they have many uses and are usually more often permanently lost as their burning has many new aspects while the outright survive-anything has been removed.
We also remade and rewrote all careers, ranks, ascension etc to give a good a nice lore and 40k society feel to each character. This was even more enhanced by rewriting all Talents and Traits and reworking skill uses. Each character path also now is highly asymmetric in how they develop. The skills have many more uses and they provide more flexible way to deal with failure by allowing the success to fade into failure and then to disaster instead of just offering success oor fail. While skills were enhanced, Talents and Traits are now more descriptively giving clear lore to the characters. We chose to create nice character sheets too which are having lots of pages, but still nice enough to use easily. These sheets include multiple parts one common part for all that was there normally and some more and then also there is a career path part where redesigned character paths are easily printed and all advances kept by ticking boxes etc. Moreover there's added inquisitorial career that has its own sheet to describe how the acolytes are doing among the Inquisition. The feel of being Agents of the Inquisition is really concrete when each character has parallel Inquisitorial path they grow into while progressing within their own career path eventually leading characters to become Interrogators or even Inquisitors. While all Ascended careers were also redesigned and rewritten to allow the characters keep also growing past the normal careers as mixes between Inquisitorial path and some other path.
In addition we also adapted several ways to achieve nice outcomes from psychic powers usage and give ease of use. This reworked hybrid model, that has basis in Only War, has very interesting structure to the power lists and provides very thoughtful synergies etc between different powers giving psyker characters an awesome thing to explore. With every single power rewritten and rethought it is quite a nice for any psyker to check.
Finally the rules also were created for adding vehicles so they can be used in dramatic situations like combat without too much hassle, but still with lots of depth to how they work and get damaged.
All the rules are really neat to use and browse as the files are light, printer friendly and most importantly the files give comprehensive lists of weapons, armour, equipment, psychic powers, talents, traits, skills etc, so no need to to go find these.
Want to give this a try? - It is free!
If wanting to give this a try or just check the contents, the Advanced Dark Heresy 2.5 is available for free at RPGGeek.com. Dark Heresy 1st ed Core Rulebook and Inquisitor's Handbook are needed for character creation and for some small concepts, but mostly just antagonists, adventures and lore are needed from these and other supplements.
Advanced Dark Heresy
Last edited:
