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He's the gang leader in the holloways whom Bequin encounters. A big genetically engineered mutant, or posing as one at any rate. He wouldn't be seen in normal society, and is generally surrounded by other mutants and lowlifes.
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Nov 11, 2014 07:34
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:Yeah I mean the actual hardcover, which I bought at a fire sale. I don't know if I want to run a module or not yet and haven't had time to finish reading all the BC stuff I have. I actually ran that adventure with some friends. In retrospect, it wasn't really the best adventure to run for people who'd never played BC before. They really thought the whole 'corrupting the planet' sequence was awesome and really climactic; but generally disliked almost everything else (including the system).
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Nov 11, 2014 13:25
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Night10194 posted:Yeah, I'm doing that. I mean when I set out, say, 4 of the same token linked to the Murder Servitor (Melee) sheet I set up, if I take 3 wounds off one token it takes them off the other three since they're linked to the same sheet. Hm, that's actually quite odd. I do the same thing but I'm not running into that problem. I'll try to test it later today and see if I can reproduce it.
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Nov 11, 2014 14:27
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Wasn't there a Forsaken in one of the Space Wolf novels, the one where Ragnar meets up with some Dark Angels? He was hiding out as a sheriff or something at the time. I remember wondering why nobody, including multiple Space Marines, and Dark Angels, seemed to notice.
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Nov 11, 2014 15:45
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What's weird about 6 foot Alpha Legion is that I distinctly remember that in Gaunt's Ghosts, the average imperial guardsman is like 2 metres tall. I got the impression that was pretty normal in the Imperium and I chalked it up to 40 thousand years of natural selection in the grimdark universe, and a whole Dark Age of Technology's worth of widespread genetic engineering meaning that pretty much everyone in the Imperium was a 7 foot bodybuilder.
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Nov 11, 2014 19:17
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Doodmons posted:What's weird about 6 foot Alpha Legion is that I distinctly remember that in Gaunt's Ghosts, the average imperial guardsman is like 2 metres tall. I got the impression that was pretty normal in the Imperium and I chalked it up to 40 thousand years of natural selection in the grimdark universe, and a whole Dark Age of Technology's worth of widespread genetic engineering meaning that pretty much everyone in the Imperium was a 7 foot bodybuilder. The average guard being 2 meters seems high. The DW book says that the average Space Marine is 2.1 meters tall in their armor (with very little variation marine to marine).
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Nov 11, 2014 19:27
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I personally view the 2 meter tall hero-commissars and stuff to be an artifact of the Schola Progenium and other high-tech worlds feeding people steroid-laced food.
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Nov 11, 2014 19:37
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Guardsmen (and women) vary as much as the planets of the Imperium. It's one of the reasons the Guard are such fun.
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Nov 11, 2014 19:41
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2.1m in their armour seems pretty short. 6'10" and a bit. Discount two inches on the bottom for stompy boots, maybe two more on top for helmet and they're only about 6'6. Not even tall enough to turn heads in most places. I think I prefer them at a scale where 'normal' humans are always craning their necks to talk to them. Up around 7.5-8 foot. Maybe 9 foot tall in full terminator suit. Of course, there's always the other option. Normally, the only people who ever see a space marine out of his armour are the utterly devoted chapter serfs. Maybe they're not really that different at all. Maybe they're just normal people with a few organ grafts and endless indoctrination throughout their teenage years, stuck into armour beyond understanding. They're well trained sure, but super-human? All armour, propaganda and mythology. The "black carapace" is just bluster for being able to accept the neural conditioning and shunt in your brain that lets you use it to full capacity. That's what they extract when they recover a gene seed. The little, irreplaceable bio-machine they thrust into your youthful brain and hope it takes. Maybe you'll even live long enough for it to replicate itself and the copy can be shoved into some other poor child whose brainwaves are similar to the scans they took from you all those years ago.
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Nov 11, 2014 20:16
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It just makes more sense from a stature perspective for Marines to be 8 feet tall. It's abnormal enough that people anywhere should be frightened of them by their very appearance.
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Nov 11, 2014 20:40
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yeah, I thought the astartes standard was at least 8 feet, with nine nearer the average
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Nov 11, 2014 20:52
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Pretty sure the Black Library books often say they are 3 meters tall. And yeah average height in 40k leans to tall and marines are often said to be "head and shoulders above the tallest human in the room" so they are pretty drat tall.
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Nov 11, 2014 21:06
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Maybe the rest of humanity is just manlets. You can always tell which people are Inquisitorial agents because they're over 5'4"
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Nov 11, 2014 21:14
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We are the squats.
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Nov 11, 2014 21:15
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Guardsmen at 2 metres are either void born with brittle bird bones, or 'roidgrox-eating, bullet-making GBS threads imperial heroes like Gaunt and the ghosts.
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Nov 11, 2014 21:18
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Tias posted:Guardsmen at 2 metres are either void born with brittle bird bones, or 'roidgrox-eating, bullet-making GBS threads imperial heroes like Gaunt and the ghosts. 6.5 foot tall humans: Either freakish space babies or superheroes.
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Nov 11, 2014 21:37
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Average male height of 2m puts them ~15% taller than modern humans. It's a pretty big deviation, especially when they're meant to be coming from impoverished and/or heavily polluted backgrounds.
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Nov 11, 2014 21:43
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2 meters as standard heights of guardsmen seems like some author not understanding the metric system and assuming 6ft = 2 meters!
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Nov 11, 2014 21:58
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:6.5 foot tall humans: Either freakish space babies or superheroes. As a non-space-born, 6 1/2 foot tall human, this sounds about right.
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Nov 11, 2014 22:21
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Kaizer88 posted:2 meters as standard heights of guardsmen seems like some author not understanding the metric system and assuming 6ft = 2 meters! Honestly as an American, I initially thought "lol yeah two meters is six feet, that's not freaky, idiot midget goons" before actually doing a quick conversion in my head (at least I can do that!!) I don't think there are that many American 40k writers though, so that doesn't really explain anything.
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Nov 12, 2014 01:26
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MaliciousOnion posted:As a non-space-born, 6 1/2 foot tall human, this sounds about right. Given that at 6'5 I can't shop for shoes in human stores...
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Nov 12, 2014 02:24
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MaliciousOnion posted:As a non-space-born, 6 1/2 foot tall human, this sounds about right. Empty quote. Although with my particular set of powers sometimes I feel like a superhero in a garth ennis universe. quote:Honestly as an American, I initially thought "lol yeah two meters is six feet, that's not freaky, idiot midget goons" before actually doing a quick conversion in my head (at least I can do that!!) I don't think there are that many American 40k writers though, so that doesn't really explain anything. 1m=1yard, 2km=1m, 1kg=2lbs. SCIENCE! (If people hadn't hated Jimmy Carter with a fiery passion we'd have had metric by now) Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Nov 12, 2014 |
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Nov 12, 2014 02:30
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To be fair, if the 40K setting bore any resemblance to reality however tangential humans in the year 40,000 would almost certainly be physiologically different from 2014 humans. That said this is why I generally ignore listed measurements for things in 40K because they're almost always some stripe of dumb. People are normal people, space marines are towering transhuman angels of death. "Short for a space marine" should still be unusually tall, even if it's within the realm of human plausibility, and even an "only humanly" tall Astartes shouldn't just be tall but built like a brick shithouse too.
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Nov 12, 2014 02:31
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Ronwayne posted:
In the grim darkness of the future, there is only the metric system.
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Nov 12, 2014 03:00
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loving Reagan, man. Half of our loving problems. I actually think that there should be some version of space-imperial units used by the general Imperium, with the Metric system being only for the well educated/a theological Mechanicus doctrine like binary. At some point GW should really decide just how backwards humanity is, because they seem less so every time some grunt says "oh that's your basic cold-fusion generator."
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Nov 12, 2014 10:40
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:6.5 foot tall humans: Either freakish space babies or superheroes. In case I was being unclear, I meant entire groups of guardsmen who for some reason are all 2 metres tall. Their deviation would go from 1.85 to 2.15cm or something instead.
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Nov 12, 2014 13:57
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Tias posted:In case I was being unclear, I meant entire groups of guardsmen who for some reason are all 2 metres tall. Their deviation would go from 1.85 to 2.15cm or something instead. Wow, way to hate on the Cadian Globetrotters!
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Nov 12, 2014 14:22
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Isn't the average guardsman is 2 metres tall thing from the Gaunt books? I remember Tanith people being described as being taller on average than most people form other planets.
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Nov 12, 2014 14:24
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Waci posted:Isn't the average guardsman is 2 metres tall thing from the Gaunt books? I remember Tanith people being described as being taller on average than most people form other planets. It's been a while since I've read them but I actually remember it the other way round. The Tanith First and Only were like 6ft plus on average and they were being dwarfed by their heavy infantry sister battalions who came from noble houses.
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Nov 12, 2014 15:38
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Clearly Guardsmen are like Orks. The longer they fight, the bigger they get. Also, I put up a Deathwatch recruit! Esser-Z fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Nov 12, 2014 |
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Nov 12, 2014 16:31
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Doodmons posted:It's been a while since I've read them but I actually remember it the other way round. The Tanith First and Only were like 6ft plus on average and they were being dwarfed by their heavy infantry sister battalions who came from noble houses. Really? I guess you could go with Imperial nobles having undergone 10 000 years of genetic engineering and magic medical technology, but I could've sworn the Tanith were described as being unusually tall, at least compared to Ghosts from elsewhere.
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Nov 12, 2014 16:37
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As someone who is 6'10, the way marines are presented in pretty much everything from books to images puts them far, far above me in terms of height. 8 feet at the very least. When I was working out and actually had muscles in the army, I weighed in at 160 kilos. I wasn't super beefcake, but in pretty good shape. Most fluff lists marines at anywhere from double to quintuple that without their armor. Marines are huge. Them passing as regular humans is about as likely as me passing as a midget.
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Nov 12, 2014 19:50
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They're perfectly capable of passing as normal humans when it is narratively convenient for them to do so.
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Nov 12, 2014 19:52
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It really matters who you're trying to pass them off to. "This is my mutant friend" will work on 99.9% of humanity. Most will not even ask. Remember, this is a universe where the likelihood of seeing a space marine in any context is very low, with hearing anything about them not being much more likely. When you factor in the billions of mutants floating around and the weird defects that can occur on various planets, roughly no one will care unless they are looking for space marines. There are of course seventeen Imperial subfactions that are even more secretive and elite than space marines, but nothing in the setting makes sense when examined closely. So if it would disrupt your no doubt carefully-planned game to constantly be worrying about who recognizes the space marine, you're well within your rights as a GM to just handwave it.
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Nov 12, 2014 21:27
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Hell, it's possible to spend xp to start with the Hulking mutation in Rogue Trader, making your character as big as a space marine in power armor. Having a huge mutant bodyguard also doesn't seem that farfetched, if you want to use that as your disguise.
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Nov 12, 2014 22:19
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The most telling difference between an unarmoured marine and a big mutant is the marine's mightier-than-thou attitude.
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Nov 12, 2014 22:33
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In general I just think of 40k as being so packed full of people with weird implants/modifications and from such a weird range of planets and other places that just being a big guy isn't going to draw any attention. Like you look at Catachans and those are apparently some regular dudes, and then on the other hand you have everything John Blanche ever drew for this setting, and suddenly a guy who is 8ft tall is only worth remarking if you are on some backwater planet that doesn't see much traffic and doesn't have slag-pits filled with mutating underhivers.
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Nov 12, 2014 22:36
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I know Inquisition War had them passing of an unarmored Imperial Fist as some sort of genetically engineered mutant servant, admittedly on a backwater Imperial world. I'm currently playing a campaign as a pampered 17 year old naval cadet turned Rogue Trader and since I don't have Forbidden Lore (Xenos) I'm playing it that my character thinks the Ork in our crew is an Ogryn that somebody painted green as a joke.
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Nov 13, 2014 06:25
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That's a perfectly in-setting way to approach things as the Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer describes Orks as weedy, scrawny creatures of marginal threat and who are you to argue with the Munitorium?
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Nov 13, 2014 06:29
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Even on a world that's not in the stone age, a marine could mumble something about having "worked" for a Genetor when questioned. The other party would need some pretty high level of knowledge about both marine physiology and the adeptus mechanicus to be able to tell the difference and call bullshit on that.
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Nov 13, 2014 16:40
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