What do you think about a Heretek becoming an Abominable Intelligence?

By Ibero Maurus, in Black Crusade Game Masters

I'm thinking it would be an interesting thing to have happen in my game. I'm not at all clear on how to represent such a thing mechanically for player use. Thoughts?

I know that False-men and Schismaticals are in the old Creatures Anathema book. One of my unaligned PCs is basically an arch heretek and just reached 100 Infamy but has ~17 corruption, I was thinking of letting him ditch is full conversion body for the ship instead of waiting for him to build up the necessary corruption to become a Daemon Prince.

Technically he isn't abominable AI, it's just a human AI in a machine body whereas a true AI is a full construct.

In regards to ditching his body to be placed into a mechanical frame though, I see no issue with it but the consequences should be suitably painful especially on the sanity given that he will lose all physical sensation and be trapped within a machine especially if it is a ship. For a machine with logical constraints this is not an issue but he isnt and there will be repurcussions on his state of mind. It may also inhibit his role in the story depending what you add him to, also human minds are only so powerful, a single human mind cannot have the mental capacity of a full bank of supercomputers needed to operate a ship and even if they tried the strain could cause them to expire.

I see no real problem with letting him sleeve into the ship. Sure, there's likely to be some shock at dealing with a wholly different body, but over time he'll get used to it. (With banks of supercomputers he will have a lot of room to think, so to speak.) I'd represent this by letting him replace crew stats with his, and inflicting temporary disorders/distraction penalties for a session or few.

The greater point is on how he might interact with anything that's not within range of the voidship itself. If he's fine with making a collection of remote-controlled drones/robots for forked copies of his mind, however, I'd just have him stat up as a Daemon Prince in the normal way. Then the ship gets to be his main body, and the "Daemon Prince" drones get to be how he interacts on away missions and the like.

@NFK

Someone's been playing some Eclipse Phase :)

But I am inclined to agree with you. If you can link him into the main cogitators of the voidship then he should be fine, after temporarily going nuts from the senory input. Orrrrr maybe he's just fine because the ship is still handling the input and he's just directing it

@filliman: GMing, actually, though I've also read the Takeshi Kovacs novels.

But my thrust was primarily that you can get used to just about anything, so long as you have some kind of interaction and are capable of interacting back. (Lacking those is exactly why Chaos Dreadnaughts go crazy in the first place.) Shoving your mind into a bunch of powerful cogitators might feel weird given the differing architecture, but it's by no means impossible or nonviable. Remember, after all, that one possible Gift of the Gods is Mechanoid, which transforms you into a machine. There also exist a few life-extending technologies in canon that involve replacing various bits of your body with machines - even sometimes part of your brain. (Like Good Quality Cerebral Implants.)

Thus I'd not be too concerned about quashing it for lore reasons; the real issue (as noted above) is finding him a way to interact with things beyond just being the 40K equivalent of Sovereign from Mass Effect.

@filliman: GMing, actually, though I've also read the Takeshi Kovacs novels.

But my thrust was primarily that you can get used to just about anything, so long as you have some kind of interaction and are capable of interacting back. (Lacking those is exactly why Chaos Dreadnaughts go crazy in the first place.) Shoving your mind into a bunch of powerful cogitators might feel weird given the differing architecture, but it's by no means impossible or nonviable. Remember, after all, that one possible Gift of the Gods is Mechanoid, which transforms you into a machine. There also exist a few life-extending technologies in canon that involve replacing various bits of your body with machines - even sometimes part of your brain. (Like Good Quality Cerebral Implants.)

Thus I'd not be too concerned about quashing it for lore reasons; the real issue (as noted above) is finding him a way to interact with things beyond just being the 40K equivalent of Sovereign from Mass Effect.

Instead of Sovereign or Cortana, you'd be looking for Andromeda or any of the other Commonwealth warship AIs in Andromeda Ascendant, or the 40k equivalent thereof.

In Mass Effect I suppose the closest equivalent would be EDI in ME3, with being fully connected with no restrictions to the Normandy and having the synthetic chassis.

Actually ... you're basically turning yourself into a Cortana-equivalent with permanently uploading yourself into a computer system. So ... you should probably build yourself a highly advanced, extremely customized robotic chassis to operate remotely or with a fragment of yourself before you go about uploading yourself.