Dark Heresy: Is Less More?

Black Industries has announced that their Warhammer 40k RPG line will be ending with the publication of its third book in September, less than a year after the release of the Dark Heresy corebook. There’s a part of me that reacts to this announcement with “Finally…some restraint.”

If there’s one thing that I learned decisively from cleaning out my basement and shipping four boxes of stuff to Noble Knight Games for store credit, it’s that splatbooks are the parasites of the gaming world. I’ll be among the first to admit that Deadlands and its stepchildren Hell on Earth and Lost Colony were excellent games. Any game where your PC can become a renowned gunslinger, have his brain put in a jar by a Mi-go in a crossover adventure, and then have a robot body built around that jar that runs off the stuff of lost souls and become brain-robot-sheriff of a small California town is a good one. Were they good enough to require 20+ sourcebooks each? There I’d have to say no. Even more perniciously, this was the era of the infamous metaplot, where games were not simply games, but grand storytelling sagas whose narrative secrets were slowly revealed in these ever-growing piles of sourcebooks. You had to catch them all…or you were going to be without crucial setting details. White Wolf mitigated this syndrome somewhat in the later years of World of Darkness v.1 by giving the metaplot separate sourcebooks of its own, but continued to churn out splats for every aspect of every game it published until World of Darkness 2.0 wiped the slate clean.

So from that point of view, I say “Bravo” to Black Industries for stopping at three: corebook, player’s guide, and monster manual. As I age and become consumed with “adult” concerns like medical bills, saving for a house, and maintaining my car, I’ve increasingly become a sucker for the self-contained game. If a fire consumed most of my RPG library tomorrow, I could still run a perfectly fine game of D&D with just my three corebooks. While I’ve never been a huge fan of GURPS, it also runs on the same principle. Both games are toolkits, and while the source material for them is plentiful, most of it is optional.

The part of me that isn’t rejoicing that I only have to buy three books does, however, have concerns. In creating a game based on the massive 40k setting, Black Industries had to choose between a tight or focused approach. In stopping the line with three Dark Heresy books, they went with a focused approach: an inquisitorial retinue. For a ”casual user” of the 40k universe like myself, that’s fine. I don’t have much more ambition for the setting beyond the “Call of Cthulhu with Power Armor…in SPACE!” campaign model Dark Heresy provides. A more dedicated 40k aficionado, however, is going to outgrow that model very quickly. What happens when he wants to focus his campaign on the Adeptus Astartes? Or run a completely non-Imperial campaign with Tau, Eldar, or (Lords of Kobol help us) Ork PCs? There is, of course, plenty of useable fluff available from the tabletop wargame, but in this case I think one or two extra books might actually be a good thing. Black Industries themselves addressed this problem in their Warhammer Fantasy line by releasing Bretonnia and Kislev sourcebooks for people who didn’t like the Empire’s “Holy Roman Empire…with ORCS!” feel

The aspect of this that truly fills me with foreboding, however, is the part of the announcement that states that Black Library Publishing (of which Black Industries is the RPG division) gave the word to cut the 40k line in order to concentrate on its novel line….despite the fact that they sold all of their online store’s copies through preorder, despite the fact that everything I’ve seen indicates that the game is selling like crazy, and despite the almost universally positive reviews I’ve seen of it. This, to me, says one of two things:

1. Black Library Publishing is having financial issues, and they’ve decided to cut some corners by abandoning an initially successful, but still untried RPG line to concentrate on their established, successful, and far more mainstream-marketable novel line. If so, WFRP players have cause to worry.
2. RPG sales mean so little to Black Library in terms of profit that they feel they can afford to cut the line off after three books, regardless of demand for additional material.   

  Both are tough scenarios, but I fear the second more than the first. Games can easily be revived when their publishing rights pass on (Hogshead Publishing, for instance, did yeoman work keeping WFRP alive until Black Industries assumed its mandate). The second theory, however, is a symptom of a dying hobby. If an established and popular setting like 40K can’t generate enough profitability to remain a viable publishing option, the pen-and-paper RPG community is either frighteningly small or frighteningly apathetic.

On the bright side, I suspect we’re going to see a lot of fan-created online support for Dark Heresy long after Black Industries abandons it. Hopefully Games Workshop will relax some of their more draconian internet policies and allow it to flourish.

Edit 1/25/08: Dark Heresy and several other Games Workshop properties have found a new home at Fantasy Flight Games.