Hello, I am OhGodItsHimRun (feel free to call me OGIHR for short). I am getting myself set up to run Rogue Trader for the first time (played a campaign of it once before, and run many other games in the past, but never this franchise's system), and I've been skimming through the various corebooks in the line to wrap my head around the wider considerations of the franchise. I won't talk about my intended RT game here, because it's the wrong section of the forum, but since this is my first post, it seemed right to introduce myself for a moment.

As I was going through the Regiment and Character Creation chapters of the Only War corebook, I found myself pondering how it would fit for modeling a game whose protagonists are members of a Genestealer Cult.

I should point out that take a very different view of the standard assumptions of good and evil in the 40K universe, viewing The Emperor as an arch-necromancer eager to have all humans everywhere ritually sacrificed to increase his available power against the other four Chaos Gods, and Horus as a capable Divination Psyker who gambled horrifically and lost, trying to prevent his father from killing everyone on Holy Terra in a single stroke for the sake of a science project which his father refused to talk to him about, despite both knowing that Horus's Divination visions were worth serious consideration.

So I'm pretty far outside the box before I start actively using my imagination. I've even made a case for the Tyranids to be capable of having a motivation beyond simply being the villain of their own story!

Now, I like the Genestealer Cults army, in both flavor and (most of its) function. And so I'm picturing a game where the Regiment Creation phase is done to model the strengths and weaknesses of the Cult's genetic legacy, while most of the Support Specialists would be invalid for the setting conceit (with the Ogryn being retooled to model the less-human Acolyte Hybrid, compared to the Guardsman build's Neophyte Hybrid). Maybe the other Support Specialists could provide... "understudy" characters to the roles of Magus, Primus, and Acolyte Iconward; but the properly Independent Characters would be above the scope of Only War's character creation mechanics. Anyway...

Given the single-planet focus of a Genestealer Cult story, I'm picturing a need for a lot more variety in mission sorties, so I'm angling toward a vehicular focus for the squad, in which they get to borrow (through the psychic power of the Cult's Broodmind) ancestral memories of operator-skills for the various models of vehicle, allowing each mission-arc to have a very different tone based on the vehicles they're using. With some careful paper-pushing by their fellow cult-members to keep the higher bureaucracy from realizing that this dozen men have such a blasphemous diversity of skills.

So, does anyone think this could work within the basic rules of Only War? If so, any suggestions about how to go about making it work?

Alternately, does anyone think I should never again talk about such a crazy idea? I do not wish to offend the community, if I can help it.

In any case, I won't be doing it right away, as I've got my Rogue Trader game in the works, and I'm too old (and have too many adult responsibilities) to run two RPGs at a time anymore.

Please let me know what you think of my notion.