Dungeons: the Dragoning 40,000 7th Edition

Dungeons: the Dragoning 40,000 7th Edition is a crossover between a shitton of media that the creator (Lawful Nice) liked. The main influences are Warhammer 40,000 and Dungeons & Dragons (especially Spelljammer and Planescape), though bits of Exalted, World of Darkness, Mass Effect and various other stuff also appear. It was released on an April Fool's day causing much confusion and caution among fa/tg/uys who were expecting a faceful of Touhou futa but instead got a couple hundred pages of fuckawesome.

The announcement thread starts out with 'yeah, whatever' until Lawful Nice posts the *.pdf, which triggers a truckload of "oh my god this is real." 8.8MB pdf file, 314 pages that are small but have actual content.

Alpharius: Why. Why was this made. And why is it so good.

Lawful Nice: Truthfully? I made it on a dare.

This PDF. This ruleset. This...thing of terrible, sublime beauty. This is the Bible of /tg/. It is all that we are; our very soul and essence.

A thousand thousand thousand posts from now, when somebody looks back upon the smouldering hole in the intertubes that was 4chan and asks "Hey, you, fatty in the wolf-and-moon shirt, what the hell was /tg/?"...we will press this file, carefully preserved over the generations, into their hands.

Works like this are enough to make a man believe in divine inspiration.

The Backstory

The city of Sigil

For ten thousand years, the Lady of Pain has silently ruled the city of Sigil, master of the hub of the Portal network despite the petty wars of the gods. The city of Sigil is the largest metropolis in the Astral Sea, untold millions making sacrifices to sustain it and ensure the continued survival of their people in the face of a hostile multiverse. From hundreds of Crystal Spheres, teeming with the Clueless and monsters, refugees and oppressors alike come to find their place in a larger galaxy, to find treasure, fame, and fortune amongst the planes. Beset on all sides by foes of such malice it would sear a man's soul to know but a fraction of their blasphemies, only the strongest and most ruthless survive. Foes from within and without seek to overthrow the Lady's rule, throwing themselves on the Throne of Blades in vain efforts to destroy in a moment the eons of her rule. The Great Devourer comes from the Far Realm beyond the Astral Sea, driven to consume all before it and Ork savages surge from their barbaric empires to pillage and slaughter. The vengeful Eldarin cite prophetic visions as they raid and destroy even their own cousins, and an ancient evil arises from tombs sealed at the dawn of creation.

In the grim darkness of the great wheel, there is only war.

There was once a race called the Syrne. They were pretty cool, and invented stuff. Then they got into war with the C'tan. The Syrne created Orks, Eldarin, Gnomes, and Dragons (Who further created Dragonborn and Kobolds), and the C'tan created the Modrons. The fight ended with Syrne extinct and the Modrons sealed. Then the Dragons ruled everything until the Tiamat Heresy, a civil war between the two main bosses of Dragonkind, Tiamat and Bahamut. Bahamut won, but the Dragon Empire was shattered. The Eldarin claimed the remnants, and nothing happened for a while except when the Aboleths attacked and were repelled with the invention of Tieflings and Aasimar, essentially SPESS MEHRENS. The Eldarin then orgied up Slaanesh. Their race died, except for those who left on Craftworlds, those who settled to a more primitive state and became Elves, or those who were protected by Lolth and became Dark Eldarin. Now newer races, like humanity and the Tau are taking up the centre stage. Meanwhile the Modrons are awakening, the reincarnations of the Syrne are appearing, whatever killed the Syrne and Modrons is coming back, and shit is getting real.

Crunch

Characters have 9 characteristics divided in three categories: Mental (Intelligence, Wisdom, Willpower), Physical (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution) and Social (Charisma, Fellowship, Composure) which are reminiscent of the White Wolf system; alongside an assortment of skills also divided in these three categories and which seem to be taken from the W40K RPGs. Both the characteristics and skills range from 0 to 5, characteristics always being at least 1, this being like in World of Darkness games. The game uses a roll and keep system, expressed as XkY. Using a dice pool of d10's equivalent to the sum of the corresponding skill and its tied characteristic the player rolls all of the dice and keeps an amount equal to the characteristic and add the result of those dice for their roll, as in 7th Sea or Legend of the Five Rings. For example, a character trying to drive a car with 4 dots on Dexterity and 3 in their Drive skill would roll 7 dice and keep and add the value of the highest 4 (7k4). The objective being to roll over a target number, which is for an average skill check 15. Ballistic, Weaponry and Brawl rolls do not use a characteristic, instead being just the value of the skill itself being rolled and kept, with the character level added as rolled dice if one is proficient with the weapon they are using.

Every player character has an Exaltation. The benefits and abilities granted by these exaltations aren't as heavily weighted, starting as just some small nifty bonuses to have (like a free rank in a magic school) but eventually developing into very powerful tools and powers that can outright break the game (like an Atlantean being able to cast magic as a free action or a Dragonblood transforming into a full fledged dragon) if the player is willing to expend the experience cost. All Exaltations have a pool of resources (Vampires have Blood Points, Werewolves have Rage, Chosens have Favor, etc.) that can be spent for things like recovering health, adding dice to a roll or for exaltation-specific abilities.

Character advancement is a point buy system like in World of Darkness, but with a twist, characters can only spent experience points on the characteristics and skills that their class allows them to. The class system works similar to the system of Warhammer Fantasy RPG. Each class has some requisites for entry (for example being a cleric requires two points in both Forbidden Lore and Academic Lore), imposes restrictions on what the character can learn and upgrade, like magic and sword schools, and allow the player to learn feats that enhance their capabilities like in Dark Heresy. Once a character has purchased all the required feats (many classes have optional feats) from a class they can move to a different class if they have the prerequisites for it. Most classes have 5 levels, or tiers, the level of the character equals that of her highest class that she has completed.

average low level encounter

Magic is divided into the classical seven of D&D: Abjuration, Conjuration, Divination, Enchantment, Evocation, Healing, Illusion, Necromancy and Transmutation. Mechanically it's like casting psychic powers in Dark Heresy. The amount of spells is staggeringly low, there are 5 levels for each school, and only two spells per level save the last, which is only one, although the second book added one more for each level for each school, but this is offset by these spells being really powerful, if not game breaking, and being able to be cast repeatedly. To balance this the game has a Physic Phenomena table that the character has to roll on every time they keep a 10 when they cast spells, causing a huge assortment of effects that range from annoying to incredibly dangerous if the magician is unlucky enough to get into the perils of the Warp Table (which being a roll of over 75 on a d100 is more likely to happen than one would think). While the Physic Phenomena are noticeable less deadly than in the Warhammer RPGs it is still capable of inflicting much pain upon the caster.

Now onto combat. Characters have static defense equal to [(Dexterity+Wisdom)*3]+10-(size*2) and a Resilience stat equal to the average of their level+size plus 1. Static Defense is the target number to beat when attacking that character and Resilience divides all incoming damage rounded down before being applied to hit points (a character with 4 resilience taking 22 damage would divide it and suffer 5 wounds), the result being that large characters are easier to hit but suffer less damage in return. Combat is the main attraction, having as many actions in combat as, once again, the W40K games and that's not including all the possible special attacks, spells and feats.

Rolling to hit, then the enemy rolling to dodge (which adds half the rolled value to Static Defense), then rolling for damage and doing a sum (then subtracting the armor), a division and then subtracting the hitpoint loss seems convoluted on paper but it actually flows pretty well while playing, except if you are surrounded by retards.

It helps that the game is actually quite lethal, the most puny handgun being a 2k2 (which becomes an 8k2 if fired on full auto) and a normal mundane sword being at least 4k2 (and that's only if wielded by a character with the lowest strength possible) will deal around 18 damage on average, and considering that the average resilience is 4 and the wound average for starting players is 10 then you see why combat rarely lasts more than two or three turns. Thank god for the existence of fate points that can be spent to survive death a limited number of times, albeit here they are called Hero Points.

There are many more things that could be mentioned: the alignment system, exploding dice, backgrounds, critical tables like those in DH, spell combos, Sword Schools and Gun Kata, the bestiary that has both Dark Mechanicus Techpriests and Zoanoids, the social combat rules and more. It is a very crunchy game that runs on "you can play anything", geared for high power characters and surprisingly favors a lot narrative-style combat. It certainly favors more people who have already some experience in RPGs and /tg/ stuff, if only to get the references.

Protips:

-Sword Schools and Gun Katas are the way to break the game with melee and ranged characters respectively. More than a rigid set of techniques, they're a list of advantages and disadvantages which can be mixed freely to create your own maneuvers.

-Being so similar to DH, one would think that equipment like powerful weapons is very important, but that's not the case.

-Remember your fucking feats. If you have a feat that makes you deal more damage with all attacks its your fault if you don't account for it. GMs do not have to remind you of what you have constantly.

-Just have fun, really, you can play anything and it will probably work (we are not held responsible in case fun results in adverse effects. Take in moderation and consult with your GM)

Characters

Book 1 "Dungeons: the Dragoning 40,000 7th Edition" includes the following:

Races: Human, Aasimar, Tiefling, Eldarin, Dark Eldarin, Elf, Ork, Dragonborn, Squat, Halfling, Tau, Gnome.
Exalted States: Vampire, Werewolf, Atlantean, Paragon, Chosen, Promethian, Daemonhost.
Classes: Fighter, Magic-User, Rogue, Cleric, Peasant, Mercenary, Ratcatcher, Scholar, Initiate, Bard, Assassin, Guardsman, Paladin, Barbarian.

All these in addition to Feats, Racial Feats, Assets, Hindrances, Spells, Spell Combos, Psychic Phenomena and Perils of the Warp, Sword Schools for the Weaboo Fightan Magic, "hearthstones" that play like the Materia from Final Fantasy VII, Spelljammer detrius as components in a RIFTS setting, Modrons as Necrons, Sabbat Thug in the same monsterlist as Heretical Adeptus Mechanus and Mind Flayers... and is that a Morrowind reference in the flavour text? Excuse me I have to lie down.

Book 2 "For A Few Subtitles More" introduces even more options:

Races: Thri-Keen, Kenku, Kobold, Dryad.
Exalted States: Wraith, Dragonblooded.
Classes: Courtier, Monk, Druid, Arcane Knight, Magitek Gunman, Sniper, Sheriff, Heavy, Tech-Priest, and some shit from Star Trek.

108 more feats, including stuff you see in Star Trek episodes, 45 more spells, and Gun Kata which are the firearms version of the book of Weeaboo Fightan Magic.

Book 3 "Big Book of Brew" Is a (now defunct) homebrew addition by the forum users on LawfulNice's forum, and includes a myriad of new Races, Classes and Exaltations. However it was deemed very unbalanced and had to be almost entirely purged. Thus instead of consolidated content the forum is making a clean up of all the homebrew creations and is currently trying to sort out everything that has been created. The list of new additions has grown too much to be contained here in its entirety, exaltated states range from pretty interesting and great stuff to absolutely skub, new races are mostly not bad and not a game-changer addition except for a couple of asinine ones (duckmen, really?); classes are more often than not so specific in a task that, ironically, end up inferior to the official ones due to crippling overspecialization, or have complicated feats exclusive to them that serve to make combat more difficult to follow a la D&D4e style; and Sword Schools and Gun Kata are usually stupidly redundant, but despite these criticisms overall it's all well thought out and balanced and not bad to add some specific stuff. As a seasoned player and GM, yours truly recommends using the homebrew stuff as little as possible and adding what fits your campaign only, but definitely it shouldn't be neglected.

(some) Races: Arachne, Alternian, Carapacians, Caryatid, Changelings, Cyclops, Daelkyr, Dhampyr, Duergar, Dullahan, Durulz (the duck people), Dusklings, Fairies, Ferrans, Genasi, Gith, Ghouls, Gnolls, Goblins, Goliaths, Kitsune, Kor, Kroot, Kythons, Limulian, Lizardmen Lupin, Matango, Minotaurs, Neogi, Ophidians, Pleiadians, Quadav, Rakasta, Reticulans, Sahuagin, Sasquatch, Satori, Shiva, Skaven, Slaad, Slugs, Slyths, Trow, Ungor, Vanaras, Vemiurges, Vespid, Vizards, Warforged, Youma
(some) Exalted States: Avatar, Champion (alias Kamen Rider), Condemned, Death-King, Demiurge, Evoluder, Mummy, Psion, Sage, Symbiote, Nephilim, Phoenix, Solar, Strigoi, Time Lord, Undaunted, Witch.
(some) Classes: Adventurer, Blackguard, Deathknight, Dragoon, Duelist, Fury, Maid, Psycho, Rassler, Sohei, Warlock, Hacker, Punk, Noble, Huntsman, Sailor, Flight Controller, Helmsman.

Download

• All three books are hosted here on the 1d4chan wiki. Praise be unto the host(s) of this great website! Simply click the thumbnails to bring them up.

• 

  Core Book

• 

  For a Few Subtitles More

• 

  Big Book of Brew

• Great Homebrew library - A link to the updated homebrew stuff in the forum. Beware of the circlejerk.

Homebrew

Outlaw Star RPG - A homebrew modification of DtD40k 7e based on the magitech universe of Outlaw Star. If you don't know what Outlaw Star is, all you need to know is that there are fucking SPACESHIPS WITH ARMS.

Links

• LawfulNice's blog, including download links and update news
• LawfulNice's forum archive of the first forum
• Proboards forum the current place for the discussion of DtD and its homebrew
• sup/tg/ archive of the original release announcement on /tg/
• sup/tg/ archive of the second release announcement on /tg/