Hi all!

I'm GMing an RT campaign, and by sheer misfortune, the party has received a Herald of Tzeentch in disguise onto their ship. I decided to make it more exciting, so instead of confrontation, he had choosen to stay hidden, and try to influence the explorers.

My question is, how should i GM these things? How would a keeper of secrets try to corrupt the party? offering valuable information seems like the most valid way, but how does he gets what he and the dark gods want? and how does he do it in disguise?

i want the party to figure it out by themselves without dicerolling, but there are some talents and powers that can ruin it. how can a daemon be detected? the party has only one psyker with limited power, and only NPC navigators, but what about talents like unshakable faith and armour of contempt?

any good advice would be appreciated!

thanks in advance!

A Keeper is aligned with Slaanesh, not Tzeentch.

Which one is it?

As for detection,

Think of physical manifestations, mirrors that crack, plantlife withers and dies, the temperature drops slightly. etc.

And then there's Psyniscience.

Technically Daemons only manifest during 'combat' and instead corrupt from within the warp with visions and prophecies and mental manipulations of mortals. If a greater Daemon has manifested on the player ship then unless it is continually killing of ratings then RAW instability would kick in and its manifested body would slowly crumple...

A Keeper is aligned with Slaanesh, not Tzeentch.

Which one is it?

As for detection,

Think of physical manifestations, mirrors that crack, plantlife withers and dies, the temperature drops slightly. etc.

And then there's Psyniscience.

I mean, I can think of some arguments against it, though.. daemons being what they are. But still. A Khornite Great Unclean One. A Slaaneshi Bloodthirster.

Anyway, just for reference for OP, the Greater Daemon of Tzeentch is indeed not a Keeper of Secrets, but a Lord of Change.

I read about T'Zar the Broker, Herald of Tzeentch in navis primer p. 136. The description is exactly what i was looking for, a subtle spider behind the scene. also warp instability only works, if the Daemon gets damage, so RAW they can walk around endlessly, if they are not attacked.

the main point of my question was what can a daemon do to avoid detection, and what can the party do to detect it. Psyniscience should work, I guess. what about navigators or missionaries? can theyy somehow detect, that the old scion is more than a nice and wise old man?

the other part of the question is, if the daemon gives information, how do the characters get corrupted? directly? like if they accept the advice, they automatically gain corruption points? or it is indirect, like the herald points them toward something evil?

also, does a character sense if he or she gains corruption points?

thanks again for the advices so far!

I'd say its entirely metagaming for a PC to say "hey i just got corruption points, im going to immediately react to what just happened" however it would be fine for the GM to hand out the corruption points at the end of the scene/session so that players don't know exactly what it was that caused it. You can also narratively describe them "after the slave trade discussions with the representative from the Red Schola you feel thoroughly unclean and want nothing more than to return to your quarters on the ship and have a shower".

I'd say the characters would need to act on corrupting advice in a big way before it affects them. If the daemon just says

"Hey kill some kittens lol the kittens are evil and will steal your soul if you don't kill them" that's not gonna do much.

But if the daemon manipulates characters into believing that for example an Inquisitor is corrupted by the dark gods and wields fell weapons to take out loyalist Imperial supporters. And the characters end up destroying said Inquisitor, board their ship and steal all of the daemonic weapons from the stasis vaults. And then take said daemon weapons to another Inquisitor to 'hand in safely'. And it turns out that they slew a staunchly loyal Inquisitor who was collected daemon weapons to dispose of safely and properly. And that the Inquisitor they have handed them over to is actually a radical teetering on the edge of heresy. And that the influx of daemon weapons pushes him over the edge. And his activities now corrupted cause the downfall of several planets or even entire star system....

That's the kind of corruption i think of a greater daemon partaking in. And i'd ramp it up. Maybe 1 CP for starting to follow the advice. 2 or 3 for attacking the Inquisitor. another 2 to 4 for killing and siezing the daemon weapons, same again if they wield any of them for any amount of time. And then like 5 at the end for handing said weapons over the other Inquisitor and then not interceding when they find out whats happening. 25+ by the end of it.

Wow, thanks, really nice things you said! I'm gonna write up some evil-twisted campaign for sure

There's a short story in one of the WHFRP 2nd edition books, ill try and find it and post/link it as that sums up the long, slow corrupting game chaos can play.

If I was the demon, personally, I'd stay away from the people who can most easily detect and deal with me (ie the PCs, particularly astropath and navagator) I'd instead be hanging out with the low officers and/or making **** with the unhappy ratlings. If they get enough time and the general morale of the ship goes low enough, the RT could even have a mutany on their hands as the demon promices one of the upper officers (say the second mate) with the captianship.

Since it is Tzeentch and he is the god of knowledge, let books and such lay around. Each time one of the players have a question, POOF! just the book they need, it could because of their vast library that they have with them, it could be because they are getting influenced, because without knowledge rolls... how do they then know if what they read are true or not, ohh so lovely many things have nuances after all

As mentioned, a daemon cannot stay in realspace for any period of time without something fueling it constantly or without being bound in something, and a herald requires a lot of fueling. So unless you want to break with the 40K fluff, your scenario is impossible.

Also ships have loads of Astropaths and Navigators and their Psyniscience would probably pick up a daemon of that scale.

Not to mention gellar fields - a daemon that had managed to stay in realspace aboard the ship and then was trapped inside the gellar field during warp transit would be cut off from the warp entirely and start to fizzle out of existence

Not to mention gellar fields - a daemon that had managed to stay in realspace aboard the ship and then was trapped inside the gellar field during warp transit would be cut off from the warp entirely and start to fizzle out of existence

I don't know if that's true. A Gellar Field is meant to create a little bubble of reality inside of the Warp, and a very powerful "Keep Daemons Out" warding. The Warp isn't cut off though, Astropaths can still use their powers and Navigators obviously still have their powers too.