seeking aid to develop 40K RPG rules for Genestealer Cult PCs

[OGIHR]

FAIR WARNING: I HAVE NO SKILL AT BREVITY

I have a game I'd like to be able to run, but first I would need to write the rules for it. I'm already decently familiar with the various RPGs in Fantasy Flight Games's now-defunct 40K RP line, but the specific focus I have in mind falls between the cracks of those games. And I'm hoping to enlist the aid of other 40K-GMs on the forum who would be willing to help me develop those rules.‎

For the game I want to run, the Player Characters would all be members of a Genestealer Cult, but I want to emphasize that I am NOT looking for a "villains game"...

While I find the setting material for WarHammer 40,000 fascinating, I utterly reject several of the assumptions of Games Workshop's writing staff. Most notably the assumption that the humans are by any measure the good guys; instead I see countless indications that the Imperium as a civilization is organized around the singular purpose of mass-producing human sacrifice to fuel their god's personal war against all four of the other major gods of the setting.

To quote from page 14 of the free quick start booklet for the 8th edition rules: "There can be no bystanders in the battle for survival. Anyone who will not fight by your side is an enemy you must crush."

Which means that non-combatants are required to be classified as enemies. That everyone who isn't actively working to "Kill for the Emperor" must "Die for the Emperor". Just the most recent small piece of evidence supporting the interpretation that their entire civilization is devoted to mandating human sacrifice in their god's name. Not remotely what I'd consider heroic.

And that's before you get into the backstory of the Horus Heresy and the Golden Throne, and the question of how the legendary Psyker whose personal symbol was the Eye didn't know how Divination visions worked...

I also utterly reject a big chunk of the writing for the Tyranids, which paints them as too evil to have any motivation beyond being bad guys for the good guys to heroically murder. Instead I believe that any alien too different from us for us to understand them is also too different from us for them to understand us.

As a life-system in which sentience is found in the gestalt of the hive mind, the Tyranids can't fathom how to communicate with any life-system in which sentience is found in an individual body. So the logical reason why they have indicated no motivation aside from "the us am hungry, the us need food" is not due to a lack of content on the subject, but rather due to the impossibility of direct communication between such different sorts of being. 

Similarly, I reject the premise in the 7th edition Genestealer Cults Codex that the reason why Purestrain Genestealers sneak aboard refugee ships when a world falls to the Tyranids is because they're terrified of their reward for victory. Not only because they're infamous for being virtually fearless, but also because, as pure Tyranid bioforms, they're genetically hardwired for being part of the Synapse network, so they'd know that upon the death of each Tyranid body (within an area of Synapse coverage), the body's memories are explicitly uploaded for reprinting in all future clones of that bioform. Spiritual immortality, hardwired into their DNA. 

Therefore, rather than blithely accept that virtually fearless killing machines flee for their lives because their overself is so evil that when it runs out of enemies to kill it'll turn on its own people just because that's the evil thing to do...

...I choose to believe that the "singular unfathomable consciousness" of the Tyranid hive mind, which is capable of genetically-engineering new breeds of living weapons on demand in the middle of a battle...

...Understands the most basic principle of agriculture; that holding back a little from this season's harvest is what allows you to plant next season's harvest. So those Genestealers sneaking aboard refugee ships aren't fleeing in terror. They're planting next season's crops of worlds to harvest. 

Looking at it this way, if there's room for the observation that "understanding of agriculture must come before understanding of genetic engineering" to fly over the heads of GW's writing staff, there's plenty of room for subtler observations to elude them, and thus endless room for a game to show a different context which grants any motivation at all besides "go be evil" to the Tyranids and the Genestealer Cults. 

So the Genestealer Hybrid PCs in this game shall have no reason to see themselves as the villains of the piece, because their goal is to bring about the arrival of the godlike being which will elevate them into immortality, albeit immortality of a form which those hybrids with any sense of human individuality could never hope to comprehend. Thus all the confusion and terror when the Purestrain Genestealers (who lack that sense of individual identity) turn to initiate the harvest of their uncomprehending brethren. 

For the rules of the game I have in mind...

Genestealer Hybrid models in the wargame most closely parallel Imperial Guard models, so my starting point shall be the Only War RPG. But their innate duality between the human sense of individual prowess and the Tyranid sense of telepathic interconnectedness seems best served by adapting the "Solo Mode vs Squad Mode" mechanics from the Deathwatch game, and their history of random mutations to be a little more-genestealer (an extra arm on some models), or a little more-human (some Acolyte Hybrids lack Rending Claws), or even a little more-Tyranid (feeder tendrils and Metamorph bioweapons) feels like it might be best served by adapting the mutation rules from either Rogue Trader's Navigators or Black Crusade's daemonic transformation rules (although I've not actually read the latter, to say for sure). 

There should also be a special Talent to model the impact of the Genestealer Kiss being applied to a properly-human character (be they NPC or a PC built out of another game's corebook), but I do not intend Purestrain Genestealers (let alone the Patriarch) to be available as PCs, due to the fact that their purely-Tyranid minds are even more alien than an Eldar or Kroot or Ork explorer in Rogue Trader. 

I have written a narrative backdrop for the Genestealer Cult in question, and I plan to use the Regimental Creation rules in Only War to provide all the PCs with the trait allotments to model that backdrop. Details available upon request.

I'm am however uncertain whether to have all the Guardsmen classes be Neophyte Hybrids by default with a Support Specialist class to model an Acolyte Hybrid PC (like the Ogryn and Ratling classes), or if I should borrow the principle of "Ogryn World" as a Homeworld option which allows for Ogryn characters to have a normal Guardsman-type class while still being an Ogryn. If the latter structure, then it would make sense to start character creation with a choice between the four generations of hybrids, retooling the classes as necessary to fit the Aptitudes and Talents inherent to the chosen generation.
‎
Example: Acolyte Hybrids in the wargame have the option to replace their Rending Claw + Cultist Knife with a heavy demolition tool that gives them basically Power Fist effectiveness in melee. If being an Acolyte Hybrid is a Support Specialist class, then Acolyte Demolitionist would be a Talent which must be taken at character creation (since it changes what body parts they were born with); but if Hybrid Generation is a race-feature separate from character class, then the Demolitionist would be a variant of the Heavy Gunner class specific to the 1st- and 2nd-generation Hybrids. 

These are the issues I'm working on as I tackle this project. Would anyone like to contribute their thoughts?

 

[knasser]

FAIR WARNING: I HAVE NO SKILL AT BREVITY

I have a game I'd like to be able to run, but first I would need to write the rules for it. I'm already decently familiar with the various RPGs in Fantasy Flight Games's now-defunct 40K RP line, but the specific focus I have in mind falls between the cracks of those games. And I'm hoping to enlist the aid of other 40K-GMs on the forum who would be willing to help me develop those rules.‎

For the game I want to run, the Player Characters would all be members of a Genestealer Cult, but I want to emphasize that I am NOT looking for a "villains game"...

While I find the setting material for WarHammer 40,000 fascinating, I utterly reject several of the assumptions of Games Workshop's writing staff. Most notably the assumption that the humans are by any measure the good guys; instead I see countless indications that the Imperium as a civilization is organized around the singular purpose of mass-producing human sacrifice to fuel their god's personal war against all four of the other major gods of the setting.

Okay. I'm going to interrupt to say that I don't think humans are meant to be Good Guys. WH40K is a vast, sprawling setting and you get things like the Gaunt's Ghosts novels where it's all written from the point of view of Imperial Guardsmen and so yes, humans are the Good Guys. Especially as the enemy is almost unanimously Chaos in those novels. But from a wider, top-down view and non-human centric writing in the setting, of which there is lots, I don't think it's even meant to be the case. Keep in mind that WH40K is British. British don't do open sincerity. The British are stained in irony. It suffuses them the way tea suffuses a dunked biscuit. From the very start, the WH40K setting has been over the top, super-dark satire. The heroes of humanity are genetically engineered ubermensch religiously indoctrinated to serve a dead guy worshipped as a saviour. The Inquisition are essentially Catholic Space Nazis purging heresy and mutants. There are no Good Guys amongst the factions. The closest you can probably get to Good Guys is, ironically, the orks.

To quote from page 14 of the free quick start booklet for the 8th edition rules: "There can be no bystanders in the battle for survival. Anyone who will not fight by your side is an enemy you must crush."

Which means that non-combatants are required to be classified as enemies. That everyone who isn't actively working to "Kill for the Emperor" must "Die for the Emperor". Just the most recent small piece of evidence supporting the interpretation that their entire civilization is devoted to mandating human sacrifice in their god's name. Not remotely what I'd consider heroic.

The quote you picked out could be word for word copy from any dictator or zealot you care to pick - you'll find variants on it from the Nazis to Islamic State to militant communists. It's very definitely put in as satire.

I also utterly reject a big chunk of the writing for the Tyranids, which paints them as too evil to have any motivation beyond being bad guys for the good guys to heroically murder. Instead I believe that any alien too different from us for us to understand them is also too different from us for them to understand us.

As a life-system in which sentience is found in the gestalt of the hive mind, the Tyranids can't fathom how to communicate with any life-system in which sentience is found in an individual body. So the logical reason why they have indicated no motivation aside from "the us am hungry, the us need food" is not due to a lack of content on the subject, but rather due to the impossibility of direct communication between such different sorts of being.

Similarly, I reject the premise in the 7th edition Genestealer Cults Codex that the reason why Purestrain Genestealers sneak aboard refugee ships when a world falls to the Tyranids is because they're terrified of their reward for victory. Not only because they're infamous for being virtually fearless, but also because, as pure Tyranid bioforms, they're genetically hardwired for being part of the Synapse network, so they'd know that upon the death of each Tyranid body (within an area of Synapse coverage), the body's memories are explicitly uploaded for reprinting in all future clones of that bioform. Spiritual immortality, hardwired into their DNA.

I'd say you're missing a great opportunity to achieve what you want here, which is to make the Genestealers "not villains".

Genestealer cults typically preach a doctrine that wonderful sky gods are going to come and free them. Consider things from the cult's perspective. They exist within a society that would kill them without question were they exposed. They carry the genes within them that arrived from the unknowable depths of Space. The Tyranids, to genestealer cults, are essentially the Heavenly Host, the Messiah and the Book of Revelations all rolled into one. They grow and broadcast their psychic beacon calling to be saved. And then what arrives? An all-devouring swarm that seeks to break down their bodies as food and absorb their psychic knowledge and identity into a ravenous hive consciousness, destroying them as individuals as their bodies are similarly absorbed.

It's a Tragedy. A grotesque, bloody tragedy. That is entirely in keeping with the Grimdark nature of the setting. So if you want the players to not be villains, I say you HAVE to separate them from the purpose of the Tyranid Hive Fleet which is to consume everything in its path. The Hive Fleets may or may not be capable of understanding humanity, of communicating with it, but Genestealer hybrids certainly are capable. There's no excuse of not understanding for them. If you want them to not be villains then you have to make them not servants of the Hive Fleet, but unknowing victims who are about to be betrayed by their gods.

Therefore, rather than blithely accept that virtually fearless killing machines flee for their lives because their overself is so evil that when it runs out of enemies to kill it'll turn on its own people just because that's the evil thing to do...

...I choose to believe that the "singular unfathomable consciousness" of the Tyranid hive mind, which is capable of genetically-engineering new breeds of living weapons on demand in the middle of a battle...

...Understands the most basic principle of agriculture; that holding back a little from this season's harvest is what allows you to plant next season's harvest. So those Genestealers sneaking aboard refugee ships aren't fleeing in terror. They're planting next season's crops of worlds to harvest.

The original version of Genestealers had no direct connection with Tyrannids. Later they were revised to be this Aliens style monster for the Space Hulk game. Their first integration with the Tyranids was to make them psychic beacons for the Hive Fleets. They drifted through Space on Hulks until found and then inadvertently transported to a planet where they would simultaneously weaken the governments and organizations of that world and, through their growing numbers, generate a psychic homing signal for the Tyranids. They were so much seeds as they were a combination of scouts and infiltrators. IIRC they could hibernate on a hulk for centuries.

Looking at it this way, if there's room for the observation that "understanding of agriculture must come before understanding of genetic engineering" to fly over the heads of GW's writing staff, there's plenty of room for subtler observations to elude them, and thus endless room for a game to show a different context which grants any motivation at all besides "go be evil" to the Tyranids and the Genestealer Cults.

I don't think it flew over the heads of setting writers. As given above, they already had a purpose which makes sense. And Tyranids don't do "agriculture". If they did, they would be carrying out the cycle of planting and harvest you talk about in their own galaxy, not forced to travel to ours having eaten everything where they come from. Tyranids don't do "sustainable". They strip every shred of organic matter from the worlds in their path leaving uninhabitable dust bowls. They then move onto the next.

So the Genestealer Hybrid PCs in this game shall have no reason to see themselves as the villains of the piece, because their goal is to bring about the arrival of the godlike being which will elevate them into immortality, albeit immortality of a form which those hybrids with any sense of human individuality could never hope to comprehend. Thus all the confusion and terror when the Purestrain Genestealers (who lack that sense of individual identity) turn to initiate the harvest of their uncomprehending brethren.

I believe that purestrains also have an individual nature. A cult may have a single purestrain at its heart, which grows to become the Patriarch. I'm pretty sure that is an individual. It is not until the coming of a Broodlord that you get integration into the Hive mind.

For the rules of the game I have in mind...

These are the issues I'm working on as I tackle this project. Would anyone like to contribute their thoughts?

It sounds like a fun concept for the game. I can't suggest much mechanically as I stopped the FF series after they shelved their original 2nd Ed. DH which I liked a lot and replaced it with DH 1.2 . But fluff-wise, I would suggest playing down the connection with the Hive Fleet. Serving something that you KNOW is going to genocide every living thing around you doesn't fit well with being "not villains," in my opinion. Far more effective to have the poor cultists genuinely believe in some Rapture that is coming and believe that by infecting others / persuading them to join the cult, they are actually saving those people. Genestealers and Hyrbids function as individuals normally. They can't pretend they are unable to interact with humanity.

EDIT: I do suggest you give Purestrain 'stealers a significant bonus to Perception tests, by the way. Because we all know to be four-armed is to be four-warned.

 

[OGIHR]

Allow me to further illustrate what I mean by not-villains.

Let's assume for a moment that not only do the Tyranids have a motivation beyond "the us am hungry, the us need food", but furthermore let's assume the motivation is heroic. Crazy, I know. But hear me out.

Something has drawn them from another galaxy, to ours. We know that proper Tyranids "do not draw power from the Warp in any fathomable way" (6th ed Tyranids Codex, page 69), and also that when the Chief Librarian of the Ultramarines did a mind probe on a Tyranid Warrior, he saw "the terrible sentience it had in place of a soul" (same book, page 13).

Many years ago, I read a short story which was a companion piece to John Carpenter's film "The Thing", written from the POV of the alien creature, which existed in multiple bodies that shared an identity and were able to divide and re-merge as needed. And this story ( http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/ ) is where I gained the understanding that the alien couldn't understand us any better than vice-versa. It's a horror story of a lone space traveler trapped on a world where the native lifeforms violate all known laws of nature. And this story is the reason I got interested in Tyranids in the first place.

Tyranids don't have individual souls, like all the species native to the 40K galaxy do. They also do not draw power from the Warp the way "normal" Pyskers do. I propose that these facts are tightly interrelated.

It's a bit "chicken and the egg", but either the Tyranids lack of souls causes their home galaxy's Warp not to contain differentiated Powers to be invoked by Psykers, or the homogenized Warpspace causes the native species not to have individual souls. Either way you look at it, I figure that one of those phenomena is directly a reflection of the other.

Tyranids exist as a gestalt, a Hive Mind. Many brains, with one aggregate identity. Which causes the word "self" to acquire a very fluid definition.

An individual Tyranid Warrior exists as its own sentient mind, evaluating the battlefield and picking out targets for its Barbed Strangler. But it also exists as an appendage which the Hive Tyrant overhead can control as easily as it adjusts the spread of its wings. And that Warrior in turn sees the Gargoyle flock that's just moved into its Synapse radius as an appendage of its own. Each of the Synapse creatures functions as an Overself to the Instinctive Behavior creatures under its control, and also functions as an adjunct-self to the Synapse creatures above it in the chain of command, with the primary ship-body in orbit serving as the Overself to the Hive Tyrant managing the harvest on that battlefield, and so on until you get to the ultimate Overself of the entire Tyranid life-system as a whole.

From the Tyranid perspective, the "self" is the aggregate. Every body is just an appendage.

From the Tyranid perspective, individual bodies don't have identities, only aggregate life-systems do. So eating one of the bodies of another life system CAN NOT be considered murder; at worst it's vandalism or theft of building materials. At best, it's how one Hive Mind life-system maps the neural architecture of the other, to discover how to communicate with each other.

Lictors use their Feeding Tendrils to eat brains, and acquire the knowledge of the prey. Some Genestealers also have Feeding Tendrils (both in the models, and in 7th ed's First Curse formation's random benefits chart), so it logically follows that some Genestealers are able to acquire knowledge the same way in the fluff (if not in the actual gameplay).

When the Tyranids harvest a world, they acquire the knowledge of the prey. From the Tyranid perspective, a world whose knowledge is acquired is a world whose knowledge becomes immortal.

From the Tyranid perspective, the number of worlds they've destroyed is zero. From the Tyranid perspective, every one of those worlds has been SAVED. From the Tyranid perspective, THEY ARE THE HEROES.

I theorize that the Tyranids are on a rescue mission. That after all the life-systems native to their original galaxy had merged into one great aggregate of a galactic scale, they came across the intergalactic void in response to the telepathic voice of an unknowably distant life-system. A voice calling out for rescue from the limitations of existence in a single form.

They think that this voice was lamenting being unable to leave the surface of its world, to explore the galaxy. They can't imagine that this voice was railing against being trapped in a virtual corpse strapped into a golden throne.

But they have decided that they're coming to help this voice which needs them.

Such a shame that all of this voice's bodies keep incinerating the bodies they offer for it to eat in order to establish a communications protocol so that they can determine what the specific need is for their assistance. And after so many iterations of the native life system displaying a complete inability to engage in the only known natural means of communication between sentient life-systems, is it any wonder that the Hive Mind has decided that the life-system which calls itself "Man" is a horror?

(Now take a quick look at the last paragraph on page 7 of the 6th ed Tyranids Codex, and compare to what you're about to read.)

That this life-system is a cancer eating away at this galaxy. That with each millennium it spreads further, leaving depleted, poisoned worlds in its wake. That this horror, this abomination, has no sign of thought or purpose beyond the need to infest new worlds, on an unimaginable, galactic scale. And that all the Tyranids can do is try to stop the waves of unthinking slaughter that the native life-system unleashes upon its galaxy by instinct. By harvesting and repurposing this life-system's biomass into forms which are capable of proper sentience.

Before it discovers how to travel to other galaxies, and destroy all sentient life in the entire universe.

----------
Now, from this completely non-canon point of view, who's the heroes and who's the monsters?

Assuming you're willing to meet me half-way to Crazy Town, the point about creatures who don't recognize individual identity being unable to recognize the crime of murder is still valid. From the Tyranid POV, they've destroyed zero worlds; instead they've saved them from the perils of mortality. Saved them one screaming Guardsman at a time.

So, I don't see a "grotesque, bloody tragedy" in the belief that the ones coming from beyond the stars to save them... are coming from beyond the stars to save them.

The only tragedies are that a Synapse creature like the Patriarch can't fathom the possibility of his adjunct-selves not embracing the process of having their memories absorbed by his Overself and rendered immortal, and that his hybrid children can't fathom the form their promised immortality will take.

Too alien for us to understand them is also too alien for them to understand us. All glory to Peter Watts.

 

[knasser]

Allow me to further illustrate what I mean by not-villains.

Let's assume for a moment that not only do the Tyranids have a motivation beyond "the us am hungry, the us need food", but furthermore let's assume the motivation is heroic. Crazy, I know. But hear me out.

Something has drawn them from another galaxy, to ours. We know that proper Tyranids "do not draw power from the Warp in any fathomable way" (6th ed Tyranids Codex, page 69), and also that when the Chief Librarian of the Ultramarines did a mind probe on a Tyranid Warrior, he saw "the terrible sentience it had in place of a soul" (same book, page 13).

Many years ago, I read a short story which was a companion piece to John Carpenter's film "The Thing", written from the POV of the alien creature, which existed in multiple bodies that shared an identity and were able to divide and re-merge as needed. And this story ( http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/ ) is where I gained the understanding that the alien couldn't understand us any better than vice-versa. It's a horror story of a lone space traveler trapped on a world where the native lifeforms violate all known laws of nature. And this story is the reason I got interested in Tyranids in the first place.

Tyranids don't have individual souls, like all the species native to the 40K galaxy do. They also do not draw power from the Warp the way "normal" Pyskers do. I propose that these facts are tightly interrelated.

It's a bit "chicken and the egg", but either the Tyranids lack of souls causes their home galaxy's Warp not to contain differentiated Powers to be invoked by Psykers, or the homogenized Warpspace causes the native species not to have individual souls. Either way you look at it, I figure that one of those phenomena is directly a reflection of the other.

Tyranids exist as a gestalt, a Hive Mind. Many brains, with one aggregate identity. Which causes the word "self" to acquire a very fluid definition.

An individual Tyranid Warrior exists as its own sentient mind, evaluating the battlefield and picking out targets for its Barbed Strangler. But it also exists as an appendage which the Hive Tyrant overhead can control as easily as it adjusts the spread of its wings. And that Warrior in turn sees the Gargoyle flock that's just moved into its Synapse radius as an appendage of its own. Each of the Synapse creatures functions as an Overself to the Instinctive Behavior creatures under its control, and also functions as an adjunct-self to the Synapse creatures above it in the chain of command, with the primary ship-body in orbit serving as the Overself to the Hive Tyrant managing the harvest on that battlefield, and so on until you get to the ultimate Overself of the entire Tyranid life-system as a whole.

From the Tyranid perspective, the "self" is the aggregate. Every body is just an appendage.

From the Tyranid perspective, individual bodies don't have identities, only aggregate life-systems do. So eating one of the bodies of another life system CAN NOT be considered murder; at worst it's vandalism or theft of building materials. At best, it's how one Hive Mind life-system maps the neural architecture of the other, to discover how to communicate with each other.

Lictors use their Feeding Tendrils to eat brains, and acquire the knowledge of the prey. Some Genestealers also have Feeding Tendrils (both in the models, and in 7th ed's First Curse formation's random benefits chart), so it logically follows that some Genestealers are able to acquire knowledge the same way in the fluff (if not in the actual gameplay).

When the Tyranids harvest a world, they acquire the knowledge of the prey. From the Tyranid perspective, a world whose knowledge is acquired is a world whose knowledge becomes immortal.

From the Tyranid perspective, the number of worlds they've destroyed is zero. From the Tyranid perspective, every one of those worlds has been SAVED. From the Tyranid perspective, THEY ARE THE HEROES.

I theorize that the Tyranids are on a rescue mission. That after all the life-systems native to their original galaxy had merged into one great aggregate of a galactic scale, they came across the intergalactic void in response to the telepathic voice of an unknowably distant life-system. A voice calling out for rescue from the limitations of existence in a single form.

They think that this voice was lamenting being unable to leave the surface of its world, to explore the galaxy. They can't imagine that this voice was railing against being trapped in a virtual corpse strapped into a golden throne.

But they have decided that they're coming to help this voice which needs them.

Such a shame that all of this voice's bodies keep incinerating the bodies they offer for it to eat in order to establish a communications protocol so that they can determine what the specific need is for their assistance. And after so many iterations of the native life system displaying a complete inability to engage in the only known natural means of communication between sentient life-systems, is it any wonder that the Hive Mind has decided that the life-system which calls itself "Man" is a horror?

(Now take a quick look at the last paragraph on page 7 of the 6th ed Tyranids Codex, and compare to what you're about to read.)

That this life-system is a cancer eating away at this galaxy. That with each millennium it spreads further, leaving depleted, poisoned worlds in its wake. That this horror, this abomination, has no sign of thought or purpose beyond the need to infest new worlds, on an unimaginable, galactic scale. And that all the Tyranids can do is try to stop the waves of unthinking slaughter that the native life-system unleashes upon its galaxy by instinct. By harvesting and repurposing this life-system's biomass into forms which are capable of proper sentience.

Before it discovers how to travel to other galaxies, and destroy all sentient life in the entire universe.

----------
Now, from this completely non-canon point of view, who's the heroes and who's the monsters?

Assuming you're willing to meet me half-way to Crazy Town, the point about creatures who don't recognize individual identity being unable to recognize the crime of murder is still valid. From the Tyranid POV, they've destroyed zero worlds; instead they've saved them from the perils of mortality. Saved them one screaming Guardsman at a time.

So, I don't see a "grotesque, bloody tragedy" in the belief that the ones coming from beyond the stars to save them... are coming from beyond the stars to save them.

The only tragedies are that a Synapse creature like the Patriarch can't fathom the possibility of his adjunct-selves not embracing the process of having their memories absorbed by his Overself and rendered immortal, and that his hybrid children can't fathom the form their promised immortality will take.

Too alien for us to understand them is also too alien for them to understand us. All glory to Peter Watts.

I apologise that my reply will be so brief to such a long post, but essentially my reply is that I get it. I got it the first time. I read that Thing fiction a long time back and Peter Watts is one of my favourite authors. Yes, all of what you say might make sense from the Tyrannid perspective and if you want to run a game with genestealer cultist PCs who embrace that viewpoint, no worries. The point I was making in my first reply is simply twofold. Firstly, the hybrids canonically don't share that viewpoint so if you want these to be the PCs but for them to be 'not villains', it wont work. Not unless you change canon so that they do have a hive mind. Any individuality on the PCs part and they cannot have this "we're good guys really" mentality based on the above. Secondly, you said you "were not looking for a villain's game". From that I took you to mean you actually didn't want the PCs to be villains rather than to not think of themselves as villains. No villains actually think of themselves as "Bad Guys" outside of children's cartoons. Whether it's Adolf Hitler, ISIL, Chairman Mao or Antifa - everybody thinks they're doing the right thing! If you simply want the PCs to not think they are villains, then any "villains" campaign does that already. Hell, the default WH40K setting does that already because Inquisitors are basically Catholic Nazis in Spaaaace and not even they think of themselves as Bad Guys. So I took you to mean you actually want the PCs to have some non-villain aspect to their goals and personalities. And given that they're going to be genestealer cultists, the only route I see for that is to make them Heaven's Gate believers out to bring people to their Sky Gods. I.e. they themselves are deceived.

 

[OGIHR]

No need to apologize for having those "brevity" skills which I admit that I lack. 

And you are correct that my interpretation does diverge pretty far from canon; but when canon overlooks the prospect that a super-genius intellect (with a proven talent for creative genetics including retroviral adaptation of indigenous biospheres to meet its nutritional needs) could understand the basic principles of agriculture, I choose to wear that divergence as a badge of pride. 

The Brethren of The Maw Which Feeds, both those born to it and those "enlightened" by the Kiss of their Patriarch, actively believe in enriching the life-system of their world. Both because their Patriarch wants to provide his Overself with the richest possible harvest, and because his children believe that a richer more vibrant life system is good for everyone living on their world. Benefits in both the short term and long term, as their Patriarch measures such things. And benefits to both the Brethren and their neighbors, as his children measure them.

Case in point: Metraxinaar Secundus is a Frontier World, with abundant flora and fauna, and their Patriarch has utilized his inherent ability to analyze the biochemical properties of any biomass he ingests, allowing Kissed chymists and medicaes to develop all sorts of medicinal compounds from the indigenous flora and fauna, both for export to the neighboring Agri-World of Metraxinaar Primus, but also to improve the health of the humans within their world's life-system. 

But many of those fauna are quite dangerous, which encouraged the human population to accept the policy of allowing "the unsightly" (obvious hybrids and other mutants alike) to live so they can risk getting eaten by a bear while gathering roots and berries, rather than forcing any "proper" humans to risk their's. Which once again benefits both the Cult and their world as a whole, since hybrids with better-than-human speed, strength, and senses are far more likely to survive a bear trying to eat them. Especially if that bear's ancestors were recipients of the Patriarch's Kiss (no specified limitation to human victims), and so the "bear" recognizes the hybrids as its Brethren. 

So yes, there will be times when the PCs are called upon to do villainous things, like ambushing an enemy who isn't expecting to be classified as an enemy. But there will also be plenty of times where their actions are benevolent in both intention and result. Eventually, if the game lasts long enough, the Hive Fleet will come, to liberate the people of Metraxinaar Secundus from the cycle of constant wars on multiple fronts demanding new regiments of troops tithed for Imperial service every few years. And to reward the Brethren's generations of loyal service by making them immortal. In a fashion. 

They won't be heroes, because they're too willing to kill innocent bystanders. But they're not villains either, because they feel a moral obligation to enrich their world as a whole, and thus do far more charity benefiting the least-fortunate than their world's Imperial-loyalist government would ever be comfortable with.

I should also point out that despite using Only War as the rules base, the characters themselves won't be affiliated with the Imperial Guard at all, instead being employees of the Field Security division of the Safety Directorate of Metraxinaar Outland Infrastructure Limited, the Cult's primary business front. MOI Ltd is a construction company that specializes in fortified roadways through and secure compounds deep in the wilderness, where the various subsidiaries handle the "medicinal resource processing" business that bankroll the Cult's operations, while the parent-company is less overtly profitable due to the expense of secretly training and equipping a paramilitary force to protect the Cult's interests. 

The Maw Which Feeds has always steered clear of infesting the planetary government or garrison, in part due to the ease of secrecy in the outlands, and in part due to their Patriarch's self-loathing for the parts of his own psyche which were engineered to understand and tear down the Orkish society native to the world of his spawning (before the IG's retreat in the face of an Exterminatus order brought him to Metraxinaar Secundus). 

The Patriarch despises bombast to such a degree that he never speaks using his own voice. Instead, he uses his brood-telepathy to place truths directly into the minds of his children, and using them as mouthpieces in those rare occasions when he has words for outsiders to hear. He is the Silent Conductor, and none of his children wear the uniforms of the Imperial Guard. 

----------‎--------------------

In terms of the rules for this game of mine, I've mostly been looking at the Aptitudes, which are the permission-traits used to determine how expensive a given gameplay-trait is to buy with a given character's XP. There's one Aptitude directly associated with each of the nine basic stats (WS, BS, Strength, Toughness, Agility, Intelligence, Perception, Willpower, and Fellowship), then nine for broad areas of skill which aren't strictly tied to a specific stat (Offense, Finesse, Defense, Psyker, Tech, Knowledge, Leadership, Fieldcraft, and Social), plus a General Aptitude that everybody gets. Each possible XP-purchase item gets linked to one of the first set of nine (or is declared General), and one of the second set (or is declared General there). If you have zero, one, or two of the relevant Aptitudes, that determines how much if any discount you get on the XP costs. 

We should all know by this point that Genestealer Hybrids come in four generations from initial infection to the rise of the Magus. From least-human/most-bestial to most-human/most-sociable, before the fifth generation produces Purestrain Genestealers and the Hive Fleet sets it's course for the planet in question. And I want all four hybrid generations to be available for PCs (but not the Purestrains, because they're just a little too inhuman, both in mentality and in their lack of proper thumbs / vocal cords), with the choice of generation having an impact on the character's stats (both up front and over time).

Starting stat value adjustments by generation can easily be adapted from the existing rules for Ogryns/Ratlings in Only War and Eldar/Kroot/Orks/Tau in Rogue Trader, but I'd like the Aptitudes mechanic involved as well. I figure that all generations of Genestealer Hybrids should have Aptitudes for Perception and Agility, because Genestealers are designed for superhuman senses‎ and reflexes. Well, not so much the reflexes with the Aberrants, but it holds otherwise. 

The first generation of Hybrids are the most bestial / least able to pass for human, so I figure they'd get the player's choice of either Strength or Offense (for their bestial ferocity). The second generation grows more cunning, so they'd have the choice of Weapon Skill or Fieldcraft (to better thrive in hazardous conditions). The third generation grows more human, and would have the choice of Intelligence or Fieldcraft. While the fourth generation is the most able to pass unnoticed within human enclaves, giving them a choice of Fellowship or Knowledge. 

This way, all Genestealer Hybrids will be both uniformly genestealer-ish and diversely talented in other areas based on the combination of generation and character class. I will need to retool the character classes a bit to account for each PC already having 3 Aptitudes before the class is applied (since each class in the Only War corebook gives out 7-9 Aptitudes), but that shouldn't be difficult. 

The Only War core rulebook includes 5 classes for normal Guardsmen (Sergeant, Medic, Heavy Gunner, tech/vehicle Operator, and the Weapon Specialist for a vanilla soldier who's good with his chosen variety of rifle) and 7 classes for Support Specialists (Commissar and Storm Trooper for those allowed to attend a proper military academy, Ministorum Priest and Tech-Priest Enginseer for those educated by a sanctioned branch of the state religion, and the Ogryn, Ratling, and Sanctioned Psyker for those with variant genetic makeups). All of the Guardsman classes are appropriate for 3rd-4th generation Neophyte PCs, and the Sergeant is appropriate for 1st-2nd generation Acolytes with minimal retooling. But the Weapon Specialist and Heavy Gunner require significant retooling to fit the melee focus for an Acolyte, while their inhuman hands would prevent them from mastering the skills of the Medic or Operator. And none of the Support Specialist classes fit the Genestealer Cult without heavy retooling to bring the feel of the alien to them.

Since the Support Specialist classes get half the up-front discretionary XP budget of a Guardsman class (in exchange for beginning the game with capabilities that no Guardsman could ever buy with XP), they should be reserved for truly off-the-wall talents that preclude filling any normal role in the unit. Translating the Sanctioned Psyker over to the Magus and the Ogryn over to the Aberrant (in the unlikely event that someone wants to play as an Aberrant) should be pretty easy. But mapping the Primus, Acolyte Iconward, and Metamorph promise to be much trickier. And I'm still figuring out how to do it. 

So, anyone. Questions? Comments? Lynch mobs?