Crimson Shade and max initiative

If I dose one of my dwarfs up with crimson shade and he rolls a 12 on his 2D6, can the +1 initiative he gets from that take him over his racial max? Can he get +2 if he repeatedly takes Crimson shade and rolls 12?

RAW, yes to both. That is what we use in my group - ymmv. My group is all pretty competitive though, so no one uses drugs because they use too much gold that could be spent on items with a better return.

RAW the only thing capped by racial maximums are the stat increases from leveling. pretty much everything else will take you over. Note, however, that getting, say 1 increase from Crimson Shade and then leveling up I will *not* take you over - *only* Crimson Shade or something similar can do that. This is because the rules do not distinguish permanent I from Crimson Shade and I from levelling except in that I from levelling cannot take you over racial limits.

That seems like a well-reasoned answer! I had wondered if it was possible to juice a dwarf up absurd amounts of crimson shade and seeing how high I could get his initiative, but it would be a very long and expensive prospect.

It is indeed both of those. Every so often a new player comes along and says "Man, I can get my dudes brokenly high initiative!" and begins forming a Crimson Shade dealing gang. I have seen it pulled off exactly twice in a good two decades or so of gaming.

It is quite powerful if you can pull it off, but given the high risks and high costs of undertaking it and the cool stories it tended to generate if one did, we decided to leave RAW alone.

It would be one-in-thirty-six to get even a single initiative boost, and it's pretty uncommon for a campaign to go that long. I guess you could give a guy multiple doses per game…

When we aren't doing fixed-length campaigns we have what could loosely be called an 'open' campaign. It is just warbands that people bring along and play against others that happen to be there. I suppose technically the campaign has been going for 20 years or so, but with the rise and fall of various warbands and people coming and going and losing their warbands and getting bored or experimenting with something else or finding their old warband they had from back before they had a girlfriend and found the roster while cleaning something out etc. it is not very, ummm... well, there is no overarching story line, that is for sure.

Generally what happens is a warband is played until it is either A) too powerful for anyone to have fun playing against or B) too hard to remember all the skills and injuries and equipment all the models have, or C) it is beaten too much to be fun recovering from, or D) the roster is lost/destroyed by accident (coffee, beer, and tomato sauce are common killers).

An example, one of my first Marienburg warbands got to the point where all my heroes were mounted on warhorses, had tomes of magic, and each knew at least two spells and could cast them through the heavy armour they were wearing. Anyway, the story we made for them was that they became so rich and powerful they went off to the Border Princes and founded another College of Magic - The Arcane University of Thaumaturgy. And thus was born my fantasy army, as it happens.

That is amazing! I love the idea of successful retirement. Building a fantasy army out of it is even better.

I have a similar sort of story, though in the other direction... My Dwarf Miners descended into the tunnels of some ancient Dwarven ruins in search of wealth, but kept getting beaten by the resident monsters. Their battles are now just efforts to escape the tunnels & get out from underground. I've decided their efforts to get out from the tunnels would lead to its logical conclusion, & those Dwarf Miners are the ancestors of my Kharadron.