Our group had a minor encounter (effecitvely a bunch of thugs in an alley) that went horribly wrong last night when the Psyker botched a roll and got everyone within 90 meters having their minds ravaged by Daemons for 17 rounds. In each round, it was roll WP or do nothing and gain D5 corruption.

This resulted in the Sororitas getting 35 corruption, permanent distrust and mutated eyes (darkvision), the guardsman got over 40, fear of holy artifacts, wasted frame and toxic blood, the Psyker over 30 and the Brute mutation, the assassin 20 but he passed his malignancy, and the Techpriest (who had armour of contempt) only took 8.

As all but the Guardsman player (me) actually LIKED thier mutations, the Psyker decided not to spend fate to reroll. The GM allowed me to burn fate to avoid the effect. Even the Sororitas player wasnt bothered about losing access to her holy powers. After the game the usual debrief followed with a discussion of precisely when the Inquisitions corruption testing will detect these and what will happen to the mutated characters.. Will they be executed / imprisoned or what? And how does normal society react to mutations such as these. And given that mutations are widely expected to be very bad/obvious things, how can some be viewed as "bonuses" by players?

Whats peoples opinions?

S.K.

Oh, and i should add that this happened in an alley between market plaza's and affected upwards of 500 citizens of the city we were in too...

Wow, you're fu ...n to play.

Well, since none of the mutations is plainly visible your clear till you have to report home for a routine health check. THEN your screwed. As long as your Inquisitor is not a Radical your Boss is most likely to simply execute you since you've been defiled by the Warp. A Radical on the other hand would use you without batting an eye, since fire must be fought with fire. Expect to get thrown into more difficult situations from now on.

Since the effect was not only on your groupt but on over 500 people in public there'll be some panic, a little rioting, and an investigation by the Adeptus Arbites and the Ordo Haereticus. That means your PCs can also get checked by those groups and/or other Inquisitors.

I'm surprised the Sororitas didn't spend a fate point to ignore all Corruption gain for the duration of the encounter. That's what Pure Faith is there for.

As for what happens, well, that depends on your Inquisitor. If they're a puritan the the Emperor's Mercy will be in store for you.

As stated before, there really is no standard. Hell, there really is no standard screening process. It varies from Inquisitor to Inquisitor. Some might ave a psyker poke about your soul every 24 ours and take your head if so much as a bruise shows up wile another might not even care how much the warp has mucked wit you until such a time as you just become too big of a nuisance or piss of to serve some daemon somewhere. For me, in most generic situations where my PC's would be scanned by a psyker or some such, above 10 and below 30 is seen as someone to not trust while anything above 30 is seen as a tool of the warp.

As for normal society, well, again, it depends on where you are, but unless said society is chock full of heretics, if your mutations become known, you will be viewed with distrust, disdain, and disgust at the very least. Those in the know about mutants (FL (mutant)) would loath and hate you for you are the most despicable kind of mutant, the Warp Mutants touched the warp and trafficked with things man was not meant to and you could be seen as the harbingers of doom. Mutants that are actually tolerated are always 4th class or lower citizens. The soroitas could be executed by her order (the sisters have a bit of a rep for being fairly hard-liners on the whole mutant issue, or any issue really) and, at the very least, allowed to atone for her sins (a chance to take the Sister Oblatia alt rank). Likewise, if her order learns the hows and whys of her damnation, the psyker could end up on their pyre along with the rest of you. The sisters have never really had an easy going live and let live attitude towards corruption, especially when it happens to one of their own and very well could decide to purge the root source of her corruption, tat source being the witch and his/her accomplices (the rest of the party). This whole corruption daemon thing, this is the reason the Soroitas prefer to burn psykers as to look at them ;-)

Now, how can such be viewed as a bonus by players? Because, hell, it can be damned cool! The sister has freaky cool eyes that see in the dark and an excuse to shave her head and go on some wild bad-ass quest for a martyr's death chock full of purging and loathing -that's just pure cool. A player is not their character and bad things happing to a character can be a good and fun thing for the player. Granted, if you got a mutation and the next scene the GM just ices your character right then and there, it can't be seen as good. But if your allowed to continue and deal with these new twists (hehehe) to your characters and the additional complications they bring, like hiding them from other inquisitors, your character dealing with their own self loathing and hatred, a chance to see tings from the other side of the fence, etc, then they are most definitly a good thing. A character changing (even in such drastic ways) and growing in unexpected directions is always a good thing unless the experience of playing out these changes takes the fun out of the game -that last bit is solely up to the GM and the players.

What I'd be more concerned with is not what happened to your characters but those 500 other folks! Dear gods, man, but 500 people having daemons poke about their gray matter is how stories about the fall of a hive or world begin! Who knows what the daemons put in those peoples heads and, even worse, which folks still have one nesting in their brain.

Hell, after my groups former psyker manifested Warp Whispers around civilians, they ended up having to hunt each citizen down and "censor" them -that is to say they made the psyker murder each one (they weren't going to get any blood on their hands, it was all on the psyker). I thought she'd have difficulty killing the single mother of five, but it was really the brutal murder of a teenage girl in front of her bad-boy lover that got to her. It took the girl 10 minutes to actually die -good times.

The main rulebook mentions that exposure to even a little corruption can be enough to drive npcs to madness, so it sounds like riots and destruction will be on hand, eventually leading to an Arbites-led purge of the whole area.

You could get off somewhat scot-free if your Inquisitor is a radical, except for the Sororitas. If she goes back to her convent she will almost certainly be found out and purged. I guess it's time for an assignment to the Inquisition indefinitely.

My group had a situation similar to this. The players caused mass mutation to lots of civilains in their area (players avoided the worst of it due to good WP, some talents and a fair bit of luck). Upon the inquisition finding out about these mutations amongst the civilians i actually sent my group to investigate something they had actually caused, this led to a great scenario of the players trying to think up some lie they could stage to explain the mass mutation and avoid revealing that they caused it.