Could a talented Tech Priest "hack" servitors that belong to others?

For example, upon reaching the scene of a potential conflict, could he approach the gun- and combat- servitors stationed around, and slip them some new instructions. Something like "Protect me" or something similar?

How would you handle a situation like this? Would servitors stand by while foreign and unidentified persons (with metallic tentacles) fiddled with their brains? Would they be programmed to resist all others? Are they keyed to an authority token somehow? (Like the remote control on a car key)

As a GM, I would have in place some fairly intense restrictions on "hacking" - this is the 40K universe afterall, not Shadowrun .

Preparation:

Firstly, the character would either need to be a techpriest with a particular focus in servitor construction and programming, or someone with contacts able to procure the required equipment.

Next, they would need to spend time constructing or acquiring the doctrina-wafers for the commands he wants to give to a servitor. This willinvolve much time and many skill checks.

at this point, the character has the necessary equipment to begin attempting a hack

Performing the hack:

The servitor will need to be subdued by a method that keeps its cranial implants intact - a haywire grenade is not a wise choice.

A couple of skill checks to open up the skull, replace the doctrina-wafer with the prepared one, then close up the skull. The player can keep the old wafer if they like, but there's a chance it broke during the procedure.

and there you go. Of course, unless very special care has been taken, the implanted wafer may have been damaged and may malfunction. Hilariously.

Yes, it's very long-winded, but it's not something you want players doing often, otherwise you're going to have to start excising servitors from your setting lest you give your Mechanicus players a standing army to march around. At least I don't make them do programming flowcharts.

I assume it would be possible to re-programm them. But I cannot imagine that a combat servitore would allow Joe Everyone to fumble with him.

What I imagine is that you only persons with a matching code phrase would be allowed to initialize the rites of maintenance. Perhaps along with wearing a Amulet ("signal giver") of Autority over the battleservitores in question.

A "civilian" modell might be easier to lay hands on, so. Especially if you are a Tech-Priest. The talent "Binary Chatter" has to be good for something!

This sort of thing comes up in the novel Legacy. A fight breaks out between two tech-priests and the more senior one is able to subvert the control of one of two combat servitors away from his opponent using mysterious means (sonic cascades loaded with Mechanicus override codes, perhaps?). The other priest reasserts control by activating a deep seated core command, but that doesn't change the fact that servitor "hacking" seems to be possible.

In game terms I'd require someone to have the Binary Chatter talent or a physical link to the servitor. Then it'd be a Tech-Use test, difficulty depending on who the servitor belongs to and how complicated the routines its programmed with are. Secter Tongue (Tech) may also give a bonus to this roll, though now I think of it perhaps it should be a Secret Tongue (Tech) check rather than a Tech-Use one.

The Player in question is a Tech Priest, and he has (or will have) Binary Chatter.

But I am reluctant to just let him "chat" with servitors around him, and try to bend them to his will. On the other hand, I can't see the need to "replace their brains" either. Obviously the rightful owner of a servitor can issue commands to it, and it might be possible somehow to fool this authentication ritual somehow.

On a related note: Can anyone except the Mechanicus prepare and maintain servitors? Would that imply that anyone with a servitor has made a purchase or a contract with the Mechanicus at some point (or bought the thing second hand or on the black market)? If so, it might be a bit .... iffy for the Tech Priest to mess around with equipment delivered by the mechanicus under contract... hmm

Gregorius21778 said:

Exactly! I haven't found any other mention of the instruction of servitors in the books anywhere. Maybe I haven't looked very well, but it seems like a pretty useless talent as is.

I have thought that it could allow the tech-priest to condense lengthy, verbose messages (with plenty of if-thens and contingency instructions) into a very short, modem-like screetch. This would allow a Tech Priest to give detailed and exhaustive information to his automations in the heat of battle, at almost the speed of thought (Free Action, I would guess).

But apart from that... meh.

Opposed Tech-Use is what comes to mind for me. To represent the "coding" know-how of the persone programming the servitor and the person trying to "hack" it. Binary Chatter would likely be needed for hacking without a hand-wired connection to the servitor.

You could also throw suprises at them by implimenting things like Security. I'd use only a basic opposed Tech-Use test for low-level maintenance servitors. Add more layers to the test the more important or powerful the servitor is likely to be. A Praetorian Battle Servitor tasked with protecting some vast data-vault is likely to have many layers to security and encription in place to reduce the chances of it being hacked, it may even have booby traps in place to ensure it doesn't!

So if you are planning on allowing players to be able to hack Servitors, I recommend thinking about how sophisticated the programming of a given servitor in the setting is likely to be.

I don't think it should be easy at all. If anyone with some training in tech-use coud hijack servitors willy nilly, they wouldn't be widely used across the imperium.

Nominally the exclusive domain of Mars, but I do see the "cool" in having some heretk/reclaimator sort "hacking" the brains of a servitor. This would be a lengthy operations, and would need proper facilities (hiding), and not something done in the open.

However, for a Tech-Priest... I dunno. Haven't decided yet. They're not that rare, are they? And they all turn wierd and untrustworthy all the time... don't they?

The ~28,000 years of advancement strikes me that Imperial Servitors will be slightly beyond current hacking thinking. Indeed, the popular idea of 'hacking' is simply not really a viable thing in itself today, let alone in 40k!

Now, for this purpose (and largely any interaction with 'any sort of machine spirit'), I'd propose largely opposed Tech-Use tests being still the main points. If your techpriest is 'invading' the system, massaging the machine spirit in a style like trying to bypass security measure, your Security is going to be a crucial skill. More important than anything in this regard, I think things like Logic, Security, Tech-Use, Charm and even Intimidate are important skills to consider. The trick is then in substituting them at the right place. I'd certainly reward players for suggesting innovative ways to enamour a machine spirit (or indeed a Servitor's 'programming'). A Difficult Charm followed by an Ordinary Logic and then a Challenging Tech-Use could well be enough to allow them through. A poorly defended/programmed Servitor would then be easily accessible (in terms of Charm), but it could be an extremely difficult Logic test in an effort to navigate the mess of Logic (though someone with tons of Insanity points might find this easier...).

Suffice, I'd ad-lib a few methods wherein you can swap 'em about depending on what sort of system you're looking at. 'Background' servitors should be really rather difficult, but keeping a few options open so that you can provide canny players with useful opportunities to use some of their more obscure/unused talents may be a rewarding thing to do. Just the ideas of 'badly programmed', 'badly lobotomised', 'residual heresies' and so forth might be enough to liven up an encounter.

Highly perceptive techpriests, for instance, might notice idiosyncracies in nearby servitors and thus as a GM you can offer up more opportunities for innovation and 'cool stuff'. Keep it fun and at least possible , though with enough room for hilarious problems now and again just to keep folks enjoying themselves.

Darth Smeg said:

On the related note, in the books there are two examples of devices that can subvert a servitors programing: the Berserker Thorn and some bad needles. Both are used exclusively by hereteks (the Logicains and the Tech-Witces of Ammicus Tole) and considered to be highly heretical objects by the Ad-Mech. With this in mind, it would seem that the priesthood on the whole is very touchy about folks mucking about with servitors which seems to point to them still having a vested interest in said servitors. In other words, it's highly likely that such servitors are owned by the mechanicus and contracted out or leased by other agencies... except for the arco-flagellant wich are gifted to the ecclysearcy and a lot of the cherubs they tend to gift out to high ranking churchmen as political maneuvers and what-not.

Also, keep in mind that, at the very least, it will take a mechanicus trained (and as such, someone whose working for the mechanicus for the rest of their lives) technomate to maintain the servitors and insure they are in working order day after day. Therefore, you can assume that all servitors have a handler somewhere near by (barring certain rare extreme situations), someone who maintains them, their programing, etc, and this individual, if not a tech-priest, answers to one who answers to a magos who answers...

So, if you don't want to go the replacing the brains rout, in "hacking" it, the individual can try to duplicate the process of issuing orders that the servitor will fallow. A lot of skills have been listed for this, but one that could be of immense help, especially if you go for a complex string of code or pass phrases would be Scholastic Lore (Cyphers) which is all about codes and breaking them. What ever the method of order recognition, the servitor would not simply sit ideally by if the intruder gets them wrong or starts muching about with it's head.

Just think about what's done today on web sites. If you get your password wrong say 3 times, then you have to contact someone to unlock the account or answer a security question. For the servitor, that might mean the servitor contacting it's handler with a quick data squirt informing him/her that the wrong command codes have been given and here's some information about the source of the wrong codes or it could result in the servitor and all others in range asking the fallowing security question: "Can you get the command codes right while dodging these 200 bullets?"

Either way, the PC wouldn't be able to just whilly-nilly hack servitors in this instant as those that really matter would have some strong command protection and a near-by handler as such servitors are probably vital in some way. The "hacking" roll would have some serious negatives based on how important/dangerous the servitor is or can be and failing that roll could, at best, result in technomats and security personal being alerted to the tampering (which might be heretical... at least to the magos with whom the contracts for the servitors were signed), and at worse, result in that servitor and all others asking for the correct passcodes while launching mad amounts of ammunition at the "hacker".

This is 40k: if you forget your password, your computer will shoot you in the face ;-)

Darth Smeg said:

I say "yep" and " they are called Technomants" .

Seriously, I suppose anyone who owns a servitore to either employ at least a Technomant to look after it... or to bring in it for "maintenance rituals" to a Technomant. Same is true for any machinery more complex then a machine gun.

This imposes, however, that the Technomant in Question either has been given some kind of authorization (like an "amulett" or a certain code phrase specific for THAT servitore) or that there are things like "factory default passcodes". Similiar to our modern day equivalent in computer operating system (I remember shutting down a labtop of a colleague in business school from remote since I expected him he did not changed the remote administration password after purchase... boy, was he mad!)

If you assume the same to be true in 40K servitores, civilian models might be "hackable" with speach if the owner (or Technomant) was sloppy/unqualified. But again, I do not expect this trick to work on combat servitores... unless they are retrofitted/scavenged/somethiing...

Our Necromunda game has a Heretek PC. All this chatter about Servitors will come in handy. Thanks! (Note that I have nothing to really add, I just appreciate all the talk that will help me so much once the inevitable Servitor Hacking incident comes up.)

I have allowed it twice, once when the Servitor was running on base routines being conrolled by a virus, the techpriest was able to connect with them while it was engaged with another target and remove the virus which basically left the "owner" field empty, he then just made himself the owner. The second time the Techpriest had a set of Inquisitiorial override controls and used it on Inquisitorial Praetorian battle servitors.

The first time the servitors were torn apart in a running gun battle, the second were mounted on a wall so they were only useable for the time that they were in the relivant room.

I basically allow it in extenuating circumstances where it can make sense, in the second case I had engineered the controlling myself so of course I allowed it. In normal circumstances he would just hit a wall and stop.

Kaihlik