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Well... I'm laying out plans for the next few sessions of my Rogue Trader game, and I think I agree with a couple of the PCs: things are building up to a major Chaos incursion on T'au itself. The last few weeks have been about the Tau Empire beginning to crumble under a Chaos invasion, spearheaded by the Iron Warriors. Perturabo has set his sights on the Tau Empire, and last week's session saw a heretic Ethereal with warp sorcery, an entire team of Crisis Obliterators, and a possessed Hammerhead. Definitely one of the stranger scenarios I've found myself contemplating showing in a game. A joint Imperial/Farsight invasion to stop Chaos from overtaking T'au completely.
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Jan 14, 2015 02:01
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That sort of poo poo happens against the Tyranids all the time. If possible, the Imperial forces simply turn on their xenos allies shortly after the common foe is defeated.
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Jan 14, 2015 02:45
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Or once the defeat looks assured. Can't be letting those filthy xenos have the satisfaction of victory.
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Jan 14, 2015 02:50
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Hodgepodge posted:That sort of poo poo happens against the Tyranids all the time. If possible, the Imperial forces simply turn on their xenos allies shortly after the common foe is defeated. My group's setting and story have been running fairly differently from the normal 40k setting, and the PCs have been working towards establishing the Farsight Enclaves as the Imperium Secundus' first Xenos Protectorate - basically subservient second class citizens but treated relatively well on their established worlds while contributing auxiliary forces to the Imperial military. Treating them much like abhumans, really, and Farsight's pragmatic enough to consider it a reasonable deal rather than face annihilation at Imperial hands once the Chaos incursion is dealt with. He knows the Enclaves will lose a war with the Imperium, Secundus or normal. As it is, I'm strongly considering making Aun'Va himself a lord of Chaos.
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Jan 14, 2015 02:52
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As I recall, the canonical explanation for the Tau lack of a connection to the warp is their brain chemistry. So were a servant of Chaos to use a drug to neutralize that, they'd have an in. Sounds like something Slaanesh and Tzeentch would cook up during a game of evil space demon poker.
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Jan 14, 2015 05:29
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Hodgepodge posted:As I recall, the canonical explanation for the Tau lack of a connection to the warp is their brain chemistry. So were a servant of Chaos to use a drug to neutralize that, they'd have an in. Sounds like something Slaanesh and Tzeentch would cook up during a game of evil space demon poker. This seems to be one of many clues that they are all brainwashed.
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Jan 14, 2015 05:36
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Hodgepodge posted:As I recall, the canonical explanation for the Tau lack of a connection to the warp is their brain chemistry. So were a servant of Chaos to use a drug to neutralize that, they'd have an in. Sounds like something Slaanesh and Tzeentch would cook up during a game of evil space demon poker. In my game, it's a warp-tech implant Perturabo designed. It also conveniently drives the subject insane in short order and makes them obedient to Iron Warrior commands. Perturabo came up with it when he set his sights on the Tau Empire, his strategy being to corrupt the Ethereal caste first and the rest of the Empire would follow. It's worked, by and large, but the PCs in the game have been a monkey wrench that are now joined by the Farsight Enclaves and Imperium [Secundus].
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Jan 14, 2015 05:40
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Didn't Peturabo gently caress off to be a demon prince or something?
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Jan 14, 2015 05:44
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Yeah, but Daemons love loving with reality.
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Jan 14, 2015 05:48
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Cythereal posted:In my game, it's a warp-tech implant Perturabo designed. It also conveniently drives the subject insane in short order and makes them obedient to Iron Warrior commands. Perturabo came up with it when he set his sights on the Tau Empire, his strategy being to corrupt the Ethereal caste first and the rest of the Empire would follow. It's worked, by and large, but the PCs in the game have been a monkey wrench that are now joined by the Farsight Enclaves and Imperium [Secundus]. I thought IW were Undivided, not Tzeench?
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Jan 14, 2015 05:55
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FrozenDorf posted:I thought IW were Undivided, not Tzeench? They are. Perturabo's taking down the Tau Empire of his own initiative. It's a Dark Mechanicus style thing and derived from the Obliterator virus. Hodgepodge posted:Yeah, but Daemons love loving with reality. This is more or less Perturabo's reasoning, yes. He's destroying the Tau mainly because he can. On a practical level, the explanation the PCs got from one IW is that Perturabo's blooding a bunch of new Iron Warriors and field testing some new equipment. Destroying the Tau Empire was a suitable way to see how things worked outside of the Warp. It's like a big training exercise, but with added planetary devastation. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 06:05 on Jan 14, 2015 |
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Jan 14, 2015 05:59
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Cythereal posted:They are. Perturabo's taking down the Tau Empire of his own initiative. It's a Dark Mechanicus style thing and derived from the Obliterator virus. My bad. Just had a hard time breaking out of the usual thinking of SIEGE IT.
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Jan 14, 2015 06:10
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FrozenDorf posted:My bad. Just had a hard time breaking out of the usual thinking of SIEGE IT. I've been playing Perturabo as quite a bit smarter than he ever came across as a loyal primarch. He resented the Imperium from the word go, and much of his attitude during that era came from Perturabo actively loathing the Imperium and the Emperor. As such, he felt no reason to avoid casualties among people who had vowed to serve the Imperium. On his own and fighting for things he actually believes in, Perturabo is every bit as brilliant in all forms of warfare and tactics as any of his brothers. There's still a marked emphasis on siege tactics and calculated warfare, but Guilliman has noted in the campaign that he never appreciated Perturabo's true prowess. He only ever saw Perturabo fighting for a cause he didn't believe in and actively resented.
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Jan 14, 2015 06:16
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Hodgepodge posted:As I recall, the canonical explanation for the Tau lack of a connection to the warp is their brain chemistry. It's spiritual more than chemical. They just have weak, nearly imperceptible souls. Whats a soul, how do psykers know Tau have weak ones, and what else can you do with souls? Great questions, if you're a Mechanicus yearning for the pyre.
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Jan 14, 2015 06:17
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:It's spiritual more than chemical. They just have weak, nearly imperceptible souls. Whats a soul, how do psykers know Tau have weak ones, and what else can you do with souls? Great questions, if you're a Mechanicus yearning for the pyre. Whatever the cause, a Demon Primarch can likely fix it in short order.
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Jan 14, 2015 06:39
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My players may have convinced me to run a Black Crusade game, but it's probably the book with which I'm the least familiar. I get all the mechanics and everything, but I wonder: is it more common to have games set in the Screaming Vortex or out in the Imperium? It seems like the Screaming Vortex is nothing but Chaos v Chaos competition, and it also seems to imply that travel out of the Vortex is difficult. That may just be my 2 AM overtired reading of it, though.
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Jan 14, 2015 16:02
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If they want to attack the Imperium and burn slaves of the Corpse Emperor, let them.
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Jan 14, 2015 16:19
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VanSandman posted:If they want to attack the Imperium and burn slaves of the Corpse Emperor, let them. It's not really an issue of letting them. I think it's what we all actually want. It's just I had hoped that the default setting for it wouldn't be so weirdly restricted.
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Jan 14, 2015 16:30
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The problem with being in the imperium is that BC loves to give you mutations that you cannot hide... UNLESS you get Illusion of Normalcy. It makes Infiltration a royal pain in the rear end.
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Jan 14, 2015 16:33
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Thinking about Perturabo's specific motivations and Chaos god alignment has gotten me thinking: Undivided daemon princes strike me as rather silly and a bad idea outside of very rare, very specific instances like Lorgar, so I'm thinking about making Perturabo a daemon prince of Slaanesh. I'm thinking about using him for a very different portrayal of Slaanesh than Fulgrim's sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll. Perturabo is a brilliant artistic and technological visionary who only wants to build, resenting being forced to instead destroy. That sounds like grounds enough for Slaanesh to get some hooks in, and Perturabo would present a far more refined sort of daemon prince of desire: a gentleman of wealth and exquisite taste who lives in a palatial mansion filled with priceless artwork, much of it depicting his accomplishments and structures he personally built. Not debauched and crude like Fulgrim, but every inch as callous and hedonistic - the elegant socialite or self-satisfied billionaire CEO as opposed to Fulgrim's more base desires.
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Jan 14, 2015 17:42
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A sybaritic overachiever who is deeply unsatisfied with the way things are being run. Perfect breeding ground for heresy.
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Jan 14, 2015 17:55
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Whenever somebody rolls with a Slaanesh concept that doesn't involve extremely deviant tendencies I'm very pleased. I've always thought they focused too much on the shock factor when it comes to Slaanesh. The artist who loses all social controls when it comes to their art. The freedom fighter who just ends up fighting for freedom against all things, for all beings. The mechanicus acolyte who cannot stop pursuing perfection in function. The cook who stops caring about what his ingredients are as long as it adds a new taste to his meals. Slaanesh is pretty much always portrayed as the God of S&M instead of the God of Excess and it makes me sad.
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Jan 14, 2015 18:04
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Now I want to run a DH game with Chaos PETA as their opponents on some agri world. "All these grox that feed entire sectors and IG regiments deserve to be FREEEEEEE!"
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Jan 14, 2015 18:11
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The RPG line has been pretty good at making Slaanesh not be about just S&M. Like the Daemon Prince who ascended by being so solipsistic that she was able to consume multiple Keepers of Secrets until Slaanesh noticed how self-absorbed she was and rewarded her. Aetenism and the Ruination of Imperfect Beauty from DH are great that way, aimed at wasted scholarly talent and bureaucrats and wastrel nobility and artists respectively. Actually GW in general only makes S&M Slaanesh's aesthetic, and that itself is a connection to the Dark Eldar. Meanwhile you have stuff like the Noise Marines; that Daemon Prince who is a crazy-rear end daredevil on a Harley; Lucius, who consumes anyone who feels a shred of pride for defeating him; and so forth as the actual representatives of some of the many ways Slaanesh rolls. The fans ruin everything. So make Slaanesh awesome.
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Jan 14, 2015 18:27
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Cynic Jester posted:Whenever somebody rolls with a Slaanesh concept that doesn't involve extremely deviant tendencies I'm very pleased. I've always thought they focused too much on the shock factor when it comes to Slaanesh. The artist who loses all social controls when it comes to their art. The freedom fighter who just ends up fighting for freedom against all things, for all beings. The mechanicus acolyte who cannot stop pursuing perfection in function. The cook who stops caring about what his ingredients are as long as it adds a new taste to his meals. Slaanesh is pretty much always portrayed as the God of S&M instead of the God of Excess and it makes me sad. Totally agreed. You just need to look at crazy poo poo like Noise Marines (and your own excellent examples) to see how excess as a concept can be extrapolated without resorting to making GBS threads DICKNIPPLES and Warhammer 40K: Rough Trader (that literally just came to me as I was writing this, hahahaha). It's right there in his very genesis. Indolence and dereliction of one's moral compass in the name of pleasure (of course, social retard plus pleasure obviously must always equal sex), not Super Pinku's Mega-Virile Mammary Extravaganza. That said, there is a part of me that can't help but interpret the old tabletop wargame Acquiescence psyker power as "o hay btw your unit just came to death"
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Jan 14, 2015 18:36
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Honestly, the 40K games in general and Black Crusade in particular are some of the least pandering-to-the-cheesecake-crowd RPGs on the market which, when you consider the whole Slaanesh thing, is kind of funny to think about but there you go. Like if you go to /tg/ then anytime Slaanesh gets brought up it's nothing but dongs and tits (and cocaine) 24/7, but in Black Crusade? There isn't even really any porny artwork, no Nipple Clamps of Exquisite Agony or corpsefucking prestige classes or anything like that. Despite being a game all about playing "the bad guys" BC is much better about presenting that idea in a non-catpiss way than even publishers like WotC or White Wolf have been able to bring themselves to accomplish.
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Jan 14, 2015 19:25
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CitrusFrog posted:A sybaritic overachiever who is deeply unsatisfied with the way things are being run. Perfect breeding ground for heresy. That is roughly my take, minus the sybaritic part. I'm rolling with Perturabo's depiction in Angel Exterminatus, which casts him as a true artistic and technological visionary - he idolizes Leonardo da Vinci and is his equal if not his master. But, and this is a hell of a but, Perturabo is eternally frustrated that reality never quite lives up to his dreams. Even the grandest design, flawlessly executed, just can't help but not be perfect to Perturabo's imagination. Now, as a daemon prince of Slaanesh, his designs can be perfect. He's free to do as he pleases, something he could never claim as a mortal even during the Heresy - shackled first to the Tyrant of Olympia, then the Emperor, then Horus. Unchained and free to do what only he desires, Perturabo is far more dangerous and cunning as a daemon prince than he ever was as a mere primarch. Thus Guilliman's comment a couple sessions ago that he never truly appreciated Perturabo as a leader and strategist. He never saw Perturabo fight for a cause he believed in.
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Jan 14, 2015 19:29
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Kai Tave posted:Honestly, the 40K games in general and Black Crusade in particular are some of the least pandering-to-the-cheesecake-crowd RPGs on the market which, when you consider the whole Slaanesh thing, is kind of funny to think about but there you go. Like if you go to /tg/ then anytime Slaanesh gets brought up it's nothing but dongs and tits (and cocaine) 24/7, but in Black Crusade? There isn't even really any porny artwork, no Nipple Clamps of Exquisite Agony or corpsefucking prestige classes or anything like that. Despite being a game all about playing "the bad guys" BC is much better about presenting that idea in a non-catpiss way than even publishers like WotC or White Wolf have been able to bring themselves to accomplish. Don't forget that female guardsmen are front and center in OW alongside the men, and are generally wearing the exact same uniforms. The only semi-scantily clad one I can think of is the Catachan Heavy Gunner gal for the HG class, and that's because she's a Catachan; she's wearing the same uniform as the rest of them. If there's one thing FFG does a good job with in general, it's avoiding the scantily clad cheesecake characters (for the most part) and making it clear the Imperium mostly cares about you having two working hands to fire a lasgun, not race or gender or whatever.
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Jan 14, 2015 19:29
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Kai Tave posted:Honestly, the 40K games in general and Black Crusade in particular are some of the least pandering-to-the-cheesecake-crowd RPGs on the market which, when you consider the whole Slaanesh thing, is kind of funny to think about but there you go. Like if you go to /tg/ then anytime Slaanesh gets brought up it's nothing but dongs and tits (and cocaine) 24/7, but in Black Crusade? There isn't even really any porny artwork, no Nipple Clamps of Exquisite Agony or corpsefucking prestige classes or anything like that. Despite being a game all about playing "the bad guys" BC is much better about presenting that idea in a non-catpiss way than even publishers like WotC or White Wolf have been able to bring themselves to accomplish. Huh.... yeah your right. Even the the Slaneesh book itself doesn't reach the lows that D&D 3rds Book of Vile Darkness did *shudders*
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Jan 14, 2015 19:38
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Exactly, even the sourcebook that's ALL ABOUT SLAANESH YOU GUYS doesn't have, say, a fleshy vagina on the cover or savage genitalia mutations, no
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Jan 14, 2015 19:43
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Night10194 posted:Don't forget that female guardsmen are front and center in OW alongside the men, and are generally wearing the exact same uniforms. The only semi-scantily clad one I can think of is the Catachan Heavy Gunner gal for the HG class, and that's because she's a Catachan; she's wearing the same uniform as the rest of them. If there's one thing FFG does a good job with in general, it's avoiding the scantily clad cheesecake characters (for the most part) and making it clear the Imperium mostly cares about you having two working hands to fire a lasgun, not race or gender or whatever.
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Jan 14, 2015 20:40
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In one of my campaigns there was a black crusade on Calixis led by a warband of Emperor's Children who had become fixated on martial perfection out of a sense of nostalgia for their reputation in the pre-heresy days. Oh, no interest in redeeming themselves, just in becoming a Legion once again and adopting the martial perfection of a past-era as an ethos, including leading (and being worshipped by) mere mortals as auxilia to their forces, and imposing an aesthetic vision on those they ruled. They worked pretty well as antagonists, all things considered, and helped shape my player's view of Slaanesh as more than 80s-cocaine-sex-dungeons.
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Jan 14, 2015 20:53
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I'm reading a hams novel right now that has some Deathwatch guys hesitantly working with Eldar which is pretty cool, but every third or fourth chapter is lovely Dark Eldar stuff about Elf Queen Dirtleg of Sex Mountain sitting in living chairs that want to gently caress their occupant while watching prisoners sexfight
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Jan 14, 2015 21:00
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That said, having a dude who's schtick is: 1. Owns a motorbike with guns on it and 2. Rides like a loving maniac all the time being a daemon prince is 40k as gently caress. Doomrider challenging your characters to a race across a shattered landscape should be part of any campaign, IMO.
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Jan 14, 2015 21:12
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Pharmaskittle posted:I'm reading a hams novel right now that has some Deathwatch guys hesitantly working with Eldar which is pretty cool, but every third or fourth chapter is lovely Dark Eldar stuff about Elf Queen Dirtleg of Sex Mountain sitting in living chairs that want to gently caress their occupant while watching prisoners sexfight Well, there's your problem. There's nothing good about Dark Eldar as written.
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Jan 14, 2015 21:15
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Elukka posted:Interestingly this seems to have been a conscious change at some point. The RT core rulebook is full of boob armor and combat high heels (and every man is Huge McGun) but they improved on it a lot even by the RT expansions. The male character art is a lot better now too. My (least) favorite example is the Japanese-looking assassin on the DH 1.0 cover for who some reason has pigtails.
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Jan 14, 2015 21:31
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Hodgepodge posted:My (least) favorite example is the Japanese-looking assassin on the DH 1.0 cover for who some reason has pigtails. Those are not pigtails, those are topknots. I will have you know that topknots have a long and glorious history in Warhammer 40k, and clearly the assassin on the DH has two of them to demonstrate how badass she is.
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Jan 14, 2015 21:37
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Out of the top of my head, the Arbitrator in DH1.0 and anything Sisters of Battle ever have boob armor too. Which is weird, I don't remember the latest Shiria Calpurnia art having boob plate. Edit: Also the Ordo Hereticus inquisitor in the core book.
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Jan 14, 2015 21:56
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Ashcans posted:Those are not pigtails, those are topknots. I will have you know that topknots have a long and glorious history in Warhammer 40k, and clearly the assassin on the DH has two of them to demonstrate how badass she is. Abbadon has a topknot and he's king poo poo of evil mountain.
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Jan 14, 2015 23:03
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Azran posted:Out of the top of my head, the Arbitrator in DH1.0 and anything Sisters of Battle ever have boob armor too. Which is weird, I don't remember the latest Shiria Calpurnia art having boob plate. I could honestly believe that Sisters of Battle having blatant boobplate armor is an official GW edict at this point. On the long list of dumb pandering poo poo in RPGs Sororitas titarmor is kind of down there in the lesser offenders, I mean it could be and has been way, way worse, but it's still sort of dumb. Probably it's an outgrowth of GW's mini sculpts being kind of, well, like GW sculpts. Everybody's a dumpy potato caricature of a person. How do we make it clear that these figures are female? Big ol' fleur-de-lis titties!
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Jan 14, 2015 23:14
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