Hi,

I am planning to run a DH game in the not too distant future.

I want to have a fair amount of politics in my game - my plan is to have their Inquisitor to have a fairly extensive retinue - Various cadres of different levels, Interrogators etc

I would also like them to be in a position at some point to be helping with the hiring of more acolytes and maybe even managing some cadres consisting of recruits.

Now... I can spend the time, thinking up interesting Acolytes or we can all pitch in :-) (i.e. all you lucky people running games already)

Perhaps we can use this thread to list up the Acolytes in some of the games that you are running at the moment? I am sure other GM's will also find this to be quite a useful tool.

Does not have to be full detailed write-ups. Name, Origin, Career, Description and brief background (a few lines). Get your players to send it to you and just copy and paste.

It would be interesting to also know wether the Cadre is of a Puritan or Radical leaning.

I know... lazy I am Promise I will post my bunch of Acolytes, once I have some!

In my opinion, this is how an extensive npc gallery should be done:

aethel.net/darkheresy/npc/

I've just run my very first Dark Heresy game, and the Acolytes aren't particularly well-rounded characters yet, so I'll describe the primary NPC they've been dealing with so far.

Regulator Titus, the right hand of Inquisitor Balthus.
As the Acolytes haven't been introduced to their patron Inquisitor yet (he's too busy, or so they've been told), they take their orders from an Arbitrator higher up in the Inquisitor's cadre. Regulator Titus is stationed aboard an Imperial frigate, Blood Red Skies, which currently orbits the hive world the Acolytes have been conscripted from. He appears to hail from a Hive World as well, as he is forever scratching at the red-raw pollution scars that mar his jaw and neck. He wears a high-necked skivvy under his black arbiter's armour in order to hide this deformity, as otherwise he is entirely unremarkable...

The Acolytes have only met him twice so far, once in a chance encounter where he seemed to be acting as a stand-in security guard (dressed in non-descript IG garb, but with his black skivvy peaking out underneath) manning the airlock, and again in his own quarters, where he revealed his true role as Inquisitor Balthus' right hand.

I plan to have him engaged in a different role aboard ship each time he is encountered, which is intended to suggest that he is deliberately placed in a variety of positions in order to gather intel aboard ship while the Acolytes conduct Inquisitorial business on the ground below.

Titus is wary of the new Acolytes, and very miserly with information, and totally unforthcoming with equipment or aid of that sort. As he personally recruited the Acolytes, ther behaiviour reflects directly upon him, a fact that governs all his dealings with them.

I plan to have Titus begin to appear during their upcoming mission, in similar situations, i.e. posing in other occupations, apparently to monitor their progress...

'tis a good start

That is a nice resource - I will definitely be keeping it in mind for later on.

name: Horatius Richelieu(our GM allowed us to make up names so long as it sounded 40Kish), Gentleman-Adventurer!

career: Assassin

homeworld: Noble-born

Background: born one of the younger sons of a house of Rogue Traders and trained as a moritat assassin. This gentleman-adventurer was the bane of many npc's. Svelte, Dark-Skinned, and with fantastic muttonchops. Be sure to play up his britishness. I managed to get as far as the rank of assassin. Ambidextrous

name: Frastus

career: techpriest

homeworld: forgeworld

background: I partially based this character off of a mixture of Groucho Marx and Bones from Star Trek. He has the Malygrisian tech heresy background and came from a Demesne. left-handed. I began with 40 fellowship, so I convinced my gm, that if I was going to play the combat medic, I would need the charm skill. Remembering that the sheltered upbringing penalty that all progenium characters suffered, my first action was to charm the sororitas for the lulz. (This was post-Cain's Last Stand btw, so the GM allowed it). It played out like a mixture of All In The Family and Brak's parents from the Brack Show, intersparsed with fighting. My character earned the nickname Dirty Old Man and thus was born the greatest sitcom never made. So imagine a cigar-smoking(or whatever they call it in 40K) tech priest/combat medic with charisma and makes up verses("as it says in the book of Thor, "when one takes a penny, one must leave a penny.") and has a thing for sororitas. Try to watch some Groucho Marx if you want an idea of how his character acts, there might be some clips of him on youtube, As for his sororitas lady-friend, any standard, generic sororitas should do, she should be played fairly straight though. I ended up retiring this character at 3rd rank because I was getting tired of playing him after a while.

Name: Spiro Agnew(My gm did not understand the significance of the name

career: arbitrator

homeworld: Nobleborn

background: I purposefully avoided learning anything about the historical Spiro Agnew when playing this character. He ended up turning into what I can only call a combination of Snake Plisken and Clint Eastwood's character from the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. He is a blank. I've only gotten a chance to play this character a few times, but he would make for a great interrogator npc.

I'll throw a couple out: Sgt. Einher van Dred y Bacchanal, Inquisitorial Guard

Career: guardsman, obviously. Rank to be determined (he's an NPC that the players have met but not yet interacted with, aside from a couple of short sentences before getting knocked out by him and his team).

Sergeant van Dred y Bacchanal is a tall, rangy man in his late 60s, with an apparent age in his early 40s. Generally seen either in formal uniform and robes of bright crimson or unmarked grey carapace armour, and always carrying at least three weapons (one openly, one as a hidden backup, and one for when capture and defeat seems inevitable). He has fair hair, tanned skin, dark eyes and a chiseled chin- in short, he'd be the ideal model for IG recruitment posters, if he wasn't working for a higher body.

Raised since childhood by the drill-abbots of the St Drusus the Warrior Scholam on Cyrus Vulpa, his great talent for marksmanship and stoic demeanour got him selected for stormtrooper training, specialising in breaching and entry techniques. Unlike most stormtrooper candidates, he passed selection and was inducted into the Inquisitorial Guard (as opposed to those who fail and get assigned to the Imperial Guard stormtrooper regiments), primarily because there was simply nothing that could shake him, shock him or prevent him from carrying out his duty. While the above description may suggest something of a plodder: competent, unflinching, but lacking in initiative, van Dred is in fact a highly imaginative and aggressive soldier, and a keen and masterful regicide player.

I wrote up the character as groundwork, as I plan to have him assigned as part of the staff of Interrogator Stein (the babysitter I'm going to saddle the party with after their disastrous handling of the farcosia lab in Ambulon) to act as a training officer (give them a reason for buying martial skills and talents, or upping BS) and quartermaster/bodyguard, as well as to lead the kill-team they may have to call in from time to time. As I mentioned, so far they haven't had much contact with him, and probably won't for several sessions (read weeks to months IRL), but better to be prepared.