Alrighty then, now that I'm in the right forum I have a couple of questions. Are there any good novels that talk about the Culexus assassins? I found the rules for them. They seem terrifying and I want one in my Dark Heresy campaign but the description leaves much to be desired in the book and the wiki description. Do they act like normal people with other pariahs since those are the only people that don't make their skin crawl and run screaming?

The few we've seen in black library fiction tend to have massive personality issues - not surprising given that virtually no-one can stand to be in the same room with them and touching someone will actually kill them.

The one from Daemonifuge is definitely a bit psychotic, complete with off-hand cannibal remarks and dialogue that sounds more like Heath Ledger's Joker than the cold professional most assassins are shown as.

The one from Nemesis is just plain weird. She just doesn't get human society and how it works, and is most upset that her attempts to persuade some vermin on the ship to form a tool-using society fails.

The one in Execution Force.....is actually more or less sane. But Execution Force is a novella with delusions of grandeur, not a novel, and doesn't really go into much detail on the characters themselves.

If they were to meet another pariah.... they'd be surprised, then curious....then probably kill them anyway on general principles. Note that untouchables aren't immune to other pariahs per se.

Pariahs have a 'grade' just like psykers do - in fact it's the same scale, with the Omega Minus being the counterpart of the Alpha Plus Psyker. Untouchables - the kind that provide an area of damped psychic power - will be high (low) on this scale, but not at the top, whereas the sort of individuals who get used by the Culexus temple, especially tech-ed up, are even further out. It's like the difference between an air conditioner and an industrial vacuum pump.

Nemesis has an example of an 'extreme' pariah who kills another pariah with the classic culexus-style soul drain.

That was very helpful. I didn't know there were grades of pariah. I can flesh her out now and mess with the party to no end.

That was very helpful. I didn't know there were grades of pariah. I can flesh her out now and mess with the party to no end.

Indeed. This gets fleshed out in Atlas Infernal - where one of the superweapons Inquisitor Czevak 'borrows' from the Inquisition's storage vaults ('borrowed' on a long-term, non-returnable, basis in exchange for gunfire) is the fetus of an 'Omega Minus' pariah - sufficiently rare that it's basically kept in a life-sustainment stasis jar by the Inquisition on one of their fortress worlds.

It nearly kills Ahriman himself in moments of exposure.

By comparison, not all pariahs are 'immune' to the warp, merely resistant; they have a negative warp presence which could be offset by a sufficiently strong positive one.

Aphrael Stern kills the Culexus in Daemonifuge by letting it have what it wants - kissing it and letting it try to drain her life force; due to her nature as the Daemonifuge, it overloads, burns out and its head explodes.

Equally, in Ravenor Returns, an untouchable maintained by Gideon Ravenor loses his pariah-ness after a close encounter with a (lets be fair) apocalyptically powerful daemon, and in one of the Horus Heresy short stories, a Sister of Silence has somehow 'traded' her untouchable nature in return for sending a warning about the Heresy.

In my games I rule it that blanks are resistant but full blown pariahs are immune. I get real sick of the story changing how things work so I make it set in stone in my campaigns. Black and white, no grey.