Manipulative Inquisitor ideas

By Oridaellin, in Dark Heresy Gamemasters

Posted at

I'm building a campaign around an armchair style Inquisitor who really never takes to the field and would probably be quite useless if he did.

He is an Ordo Xenos Inquisitor and acts primarily by monitoring threats and redirecting Imperial forces or Acolytes to stop them.

As an example at one point he detected that Freeboota's were about to raid a system near Port Lokhart. He had an Acolyte sabotage a patrol so that they would be present in the system when the Orks would arrive, thus fighting off the raid.

Now most of the early part of my campaign is going to revolve around the players (who are not quite Acolytes) being continually redirected to do Inquisitorial work. Ideally without them ever learning that they are being manipulated. This will come to an end when a rival Inquisitor attempts to shake them for information on their master (who they know nothing about) and are subsequently saved and briefed by a crew of Acolytes serving the Manipulative Inquisitor.

I've got my first session planned: In a series of coincidences (primarily instigated by the Inquisitors Interrogator) the PC's end up on the same ship. The ships engine blows out over (more sabotage by the Interrogator) Yanth, thus starting the pre-planned Yanth adventure from enemies without.

Essentially, I'm hoping you guys might have a few ideas on other ways they could be manipulated into doing Inquisitorial work. I'm very open to ideas that connect to any of the pre-made content, but I'm primarily looking for just general ways of making this work.

Thanks in Advance!

Posted at
In my humble opinion, a big key to manipulation is to know what the characters want. This can be some big long term character goal ("I want to have my own planet!") to something quite basic ("I don't want to die!")


If your Inquisitor knows what the characters wants he can dangle that over their head, or, if you want him more subtle than that, convince the characters that what they're doing is in THEIR best interests. That's the key to a manipulator. He has to convince those he's manipulating that they're really doing it for themselves, when in fact they're doing it for him.


So manipulating the characters could be as simple as the Inquisitor having the information they need to survive, but they need to do exactly as he says.