Ok, here is my problem,

I have a player who would like to play an alternate psyker in my Rogue Trader game rather than the Astropath transcendent (he doesn’t like the flavor of the class) and the navigator is already taken. Now, chapter 6 of the RT base book details several different options for playing a psyker: Sorcerer, Renegade Pskyer, Imperial Sanctioned Pskyer, Latent Psyker, etc.

Then, the book conveniently doesn’t present rules for playing any of them except the Astropath and the Navigator. The chapter briefly references Disciples of the Dark Gods for the rules on Sorcery, and the Dark Heresy for the Sanctioned Pskyer; which I feel is rather a bit of a cop out and forces the player to buy an entire book for only a small set of relevant rules.

After talking it over for a bit with the group we decided to chip in for a copy of the radicals/dark god’s handbook (which has rules for sorcery). After thumbing through both it turns out that manifesting and sorcery power gives the player 1d10 – willpower bonus corruption points.

This presents a massive problem, because there is a feasible chance that after manifesting roughly 10 -15 sorcery powers I’ll have to take his character away because he will be completely corrupted by the warp (and the mutations and malignancies that go with it).

So, this is where I come to you, how can I play an alternate psyker in Rogue Trader? The group kind of brainstormed a couple of options to get the post started.

1. Play a Sanctioned Psyker from Dark Heresy and mess around with the career progression/ origin, and port a bunch of powers over to Rogue Trader.
2. House rule the Sorcery rules and allow the player to buy off corruption points in a manner similar to buying off insanity points (or removing the corruption penalty entirely). Perhaps flavored as seeking redemption form the Emperor, Ritual fasting and meditation, etc.
3. Play a non-psyker career and just give him a Psy Rating as an elite advance.
4. Or we missed something in the book that addresses my concerns. If this is the case just point me in the right direction.

This is just a starting point and we could use some help from all the 40k veterans out there, any new suggestions, critiques, and implementations would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks Everyone,
Jason

P.S. Also, if anyone knows how to covert the “threshold” of psychic powers from Dark Heresy into Rogue Trader, I didn’t completely understand it and if someone could explain the conversion of psychic powers in a little more detail that would be awesome!

Below is what I did for my campaign when a player wanted to play a non-astropath. It should be noted that when the player took a close look at the psyker rules he decided he liked the astropath's near immunity to warp related mishaps.

Rogue Trader Sanctioned Psykers (non-Astropath)
The Astropath career may be used as a sanctioned psyker with the following modifications:
-The psyker may take any 1 Discipline and 3 techniques from the Discipline. No technique costing more that 200xp may be selected.
-The psyker gains the Telepathy Discipline or if he already possesses it he gains an addition technique no more than 200xp.
-The psyker does not get the Soul-Bound trait, or See without Eyes traits. He is also not blind.
-The psyker starts with a 3 psi score, and when psi rating advances become available to the Sanctionite the available psi score is one higher.
-He may not take the Rite of Sanctioning, but may take warp affinity.

Dalnor Surloc said:

Why would they start off with Psy Rating 3? They already get the benefit of not being restricted to 3 disciplines.

If you have a character that starts of with the Wyrdling mutation, that might do it. It starts you off with Psy Rating 2 and 2 Psychic Techniques. You could make any further techniques as elite advances. If they go with Tainted as their Lure of the Void on the Origin path, they have the option of taking that mutation for 200xp. I think that's what I'll do, because I've been interested in the same thing.