I got my copy of Ascention this week and for the most part I am pretty happy with it. My BIG concern relates to the advances available to the Magos ascended career path. In particular about half the options seem to be variations on "Peer" and "Good Reputation" and thus utterly inaccessable to the vast majority of Techpriest characters. Peer requires a minimum Fel of 30 and Good Reputation requires a Fel of at least 50!

We are talking about a Career that not only de-emphasizes the Fellowship stat, it outright strips the stat clean and leaves the bones out to bleach in the sun. Many of their cybernetic augmentations and upgrades lower the stat and the career completely lacks the ability to spend XP to buy it back up, not even for some punishingly brutal amout of XP. I was rather hoping after seeing the Magos teaser a few weeks ago that there would be some special trait or talent a Techpriest could buy that allowed them to ignore the Fel prerequisite for certain select groups (The Adeptus Mechanicus at the VERY least!) but so far I have been unable to find anything like this in Ascention.

Peer is at least mathematically POSSIBLE for some Techpriests. Assume they had an above average roll that was assigned to Fel and went out of their way to avoid augmentations that lower the stat, then for such a character they can at least make use of the Peer talents. On the other hand, it is not possible under ANY circumstances for a Techpriest to have a Fel 50, so Good Reputation on their charts is just plain cruel! Assume the Techpriest character is a hiver and managed to roll maximum on Fel: That gives them a 45 and NO possibility of ever buying an advance. No other combo of origin paths comes even close to this.

Math and statistics aside, it is also very much against 40K dogma and fluff for Techpriests to be "cute and cuddly". Not that they are in any way close to this in DH, but making roughly half of their available advances dependent on being a cyborg-care bear seems really stupid!

I am thinking of making Peer (Adeptus Mechanicus) at a minimum avaialable to the Magos REGARDLESS of Fel stat. Just because your presence causes spontaneous heart attacks in puppies and children does not mean that other Techpriests notice or CARE! Personality and emotional response are merely the weakness of flesh, after all.

I noticed this as well as the fact that some of the careers have the unnatural x3 to a trait but not its x2, which is a pre req.

Hi There!

Zillaprime, the Magos does start with the Peer (Adeptus Mechanicus) Talent.

Bombernoy, could you cite an example?

FFG Ross Watson said:

Indeed they do... I wrote my first post without my copy of Ascention in hand. It still leaves my major point that the typical Magos does not meet prerequisite for about half of their career tree and has no means of offsetting this.

Ahh, Upon closing inspection I found where the unnatural was hidden. So never mind to that one. However I still think there should be a way around fellowship for the Magos.

Isn't it cruel to note that, with a maximum Fel roll (and hiveworld background), you are exactly one Fel advance away from Good Reputation? But since you can't get that you're stuck on ground level by only one advance.

Also, I dispute that techpriests can't be somewhat convincing in an argument. Just look at bonded emissaries (at Fel 41 I'm quite interested in this rank). I think that the current techpriest lineup of advances (pre-ascension) shows you can build a negotiator-techpriest with Deceive, Barter, and only miss out on Charm, which to me is the only "care bear" fellowship skill I see in the game. If I, as a Magos, wanted someone to charm the pants off someone, I'll send a Bonded Emissary instead. Otherwise, a techpriest by rank 8 already has access to enough 'convincing' skills as it is. So, as I see it, all the important stuff is there (the 'less nice' talky skills) in the core techpriest advances.

That doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of their career advances are literally impossible to achieve, which is a poor oversight IMHO if this is true (my group has no need of Ascension for the time being, so I'll likely wait it out for another few thousand XP). I'd advocate granting the Good Reputation talent to the Magos if he/she specifically went out of their way to majorly benefit that organisation on a wide level of influence, or maybe mitigate their Fellowship scarring if they can get better quality bionics.

But then we're leaving RAW territory and entering the realm of GM Fiat (here be dragons!), and as such all discussions become moot anyway as they fail to adress a rules-based problem objectively :

Speaking as the Tech-Priest / future Magos (weather I like it or not, Sages take 30 Fel) of Zilla's group I can safely say I feel like I will become some what of a dead weight to the group come our Ascension. I have played my character as personable as possible, being friendly to those that he even has conflicts with. But that doesn't change the fact that he's as scary looking as all bloody hell, and thus is stuck with a 22 Fel rating.

What this basically means for me is that of my roughly 90 positive cost skills that become available to me as a full fledged Magos roughly 40(!) of them are not even possible for me to purchase. That is almost half of my class unavailable to me, all decided by one single stat that I am incapable of improving. I know the lore and all that, but that still doesn't explain this painful game mechanic for a class that was not only built to the exclusion of Fellowship, but to the detriment of it as well. I have dozens of ways of damaging my Fel but not a single way to improve it. And my biggest problem with all that is that even my own people of the Mechanicus consider me far to freaky to deal with above the peer level.

How does the Mechanicus even function if this is the case? Not only does the rest of the universe think they are too freaky to deal with for most forms of interaction but they even find themselves off-putting?

Right now the most I can hope to do for this game system built around Influence and Fellowship is to sit in the back, doing my best to make sure I don't rack up any negative associations, hoping something techy comes up that only the mighty and fearsome Magos can do... and then go back to my corner as I scare small children, women, animals, men, and some ogryns too badly to interact with them.

I personally feel that there should be some difference when handling how Tech Priests deal in social situations. In my group's games, we use the logic skill in place of charm and deceive when dealing with AdMech.

In that vein, a good house rule might be to substitute intelligence pre-req's for the fellowship requirements where appropriate.

To be fair, the "no Fellowship upgrades for tech-priests" thing was written before FFG took over. I'm not sure how they managed to make most of the upgrades for a class that revolves around dealing with machines rather than people social in nature at all, though, let alone ones mechanically dependent on a stat the class can't even take. Filling any tree with varients of a single talent seems like a rather large oversight in the first place. I really don't need to shell out money to figure out how to give players a bunch of Peer (whatever) talents.

On the other hand, I seem to remember seeing art of Magos Land, who discovered the STC fragment which contained the Land Raider series of vechicles. He more or less looks like a normal person.

Ah, here it is:

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/File:Arkhan_Land.jpg

ZillaPrime said:

Huh ? You are kidding right? No, obviously you are not. This is not good. Not good at all ...I guess I have to try resurrecting my secondary T-P character, who is a Bonded Emissary with a reasonable Fellowship. There goes the first plan for ascencion...

Not that this affects your point in any valid way at all, but I managed to construct a manner in which a TP could have 53 Fel.

Hive Mutant Homeworld: 20

Roll: 20

Major Mutation Roll: Degenerate Mind 10

Divination: 3

Rolling that combination is about as likely as a Rank 1 PC taking out an unbound Daemonhost, but I enjoy trying to figure these things out.

(One could also contest the Degenerate mind typo as a typo, I know.)

Without a mutation or divination the best you could do would be 45 to start(hive worlder, roll of 20), I suppose there might be a background package that lets you get to 50, but I'm not sure, and with no way to advance fellowship,you would start at 45 without the ability to gain good reputation. On top of that, there are very few people who will really build there tech priest this way do to the lowering of other more vital stats(toughness, int, bs or ws)

Seems like an oversight of FFG here. Of course when you deal with tech Priests, Fellowship is not the most important deciding factor if the person is worthy to listen to. So I would allow the Magos ascension to take any talent requiring Fel 30 or 50 when the skill they want to purchase is about dealing with their own kind.

Sister Callidia said:

You know, there are a couple of options dependent on the open mindedness of your GM.

One option would be to simply allow the tech-priest to purchase fellowship advances at the same cost as that of a Rogue Trader Explorator. Or, if that doesn't float your GM's boat, see if he'll let you buy them as elite advances using the Explorator's advances as a baseline. I mean, if Exorcised and Redemptionist and the like are elite advances, why not a characteristic advance?

Or, if you are sitting at 45 Fellowship, don't take Access Denied or Rite of Clear Thought for your transition package; instead take Hero of the Inquisition, which gets you an increase to Fellowship.

There are always options for those willing to look at things creatively.

-=Brother Praetus=-

I have always just let the Tech-Priests just buy Fellowship as on of their highest cost advances, seemed fair doing it like that.

Sister Callidia said:

That might be true on a person-to-person basis in the Mechanicus (although I personally view the mechanicus as a cult of squabbling guildsmen trying to backstab each other while coercing favours and dobbing their peers in to get themselves ahead). Once you start having Mechanicus agents dealing with non-Mechanicus subjects, especially organisations lower on the 'Imperial Hierarchy' than a Planetary Governor, your ability to personally relate to living people is more important to your social prowess than your ability to recall 500 years worth of medical advances, or call a legion of Skitarri soldiers because you know the officer leading the regiment. That's Intimidate, not Charm or Barter.

Personally, my only real gripe is that Good Reputation is based on having a high Fellowship to begin with, as I see "Good Reputation" as just that: you have a reputation amongst [subgroup taken] that is generally positive due to knowledge of you and your actions with that group. I would've made it less Fel-intensive (maybe the same as Peer, to show that you need a slight modicum of social grace) but just restrict it to higher ranks (where it is usually) where you would actually start to deal with organisations on a level to warrant such notoriety.

The fact that techpriests can't advance their Fellowship is to me of less import than the fact that in order to be generally well-known by an organisation in a positive light, you practically need to be a social god (Fel 50+).

The Hobo Hunter said:

Or just be useful/nearly irreplaceable. What's the Departmento Munitorum going to do? Just stop working with a Magos because he's a jerk?

Yanma said:

Well, then you wouldn't have a Good Reputation then, right? Good Reputation means that the organization likes what you you, generally. Shouldn't need super high fellowship but should need good conduct towards that organization.

numb3rc said:

By the strictest definition of reputation they wouldn't have to like you at all for you to have a good reputation. Perhaps you have a reputation for getting things done in a timely manner. Or your ability to produce high quality Las-Guns is well known amongst the Munitorum. You don't have to be a nice guy to have this kind of good reputation.

Yanma said:

You have a point. What I was saying is that you have to have a reputation for something. It doesn't have to be amicability but it has to be fairly easy to deal with you, at least compared with others of your kind. Otherwise, the organization would see you as not as good a choice for a service as other individuals, who may get Good Rep.

Either way, we agree that the fellowship prerequisite really shouldn't be required.

For now I am holding out to see if someone from FFG comes up with an official or at least "semi-official" ruling on this issue, since Filidan's Techpriest is still a few thousand XP from Ascention at the moment. If by that time nothing has come up I may just have to whip out my Crozius Gamemastrium and whack on the Techpriest core career a bit....

In particular I am contemplating unlocking Fellowship advances as an "elite package" based roughly on a "one step worse than the Explorator" theme. Sure, that makes Fel advances brutally expensive, but at least they would be possible! Given how much stuff in Ascention costs the numbers seem reasonable enough. 750-1000-1250-1500-XX-XX Not certain how to price the "heroic tier" advances just yet, or even if they should be there at all....

Using Int in place of Fel within the AdMech is a good idea, so I will definately contemplate borrowing that idea. This is one of the three original characters still in my game and the player has reliably showed up for every single game session and always contributes to the missions in useful ways. I would very much like to keep him fun and viable once the fancy placesettings start hitting the tablecloth.... At least in his own clanky, awkward sort of way.

Another idea is perhaps counting the +10 bonus from Peer to count towards hitting the Good Reputation prerequisite with the same organization. That way you only need to have a Fel 40 and Peer.... Since GMs are supposed to approve XP use before it hits the character sheet anyways that should be sufficient to control when the character makes friends with a faction and avoid any potential "abuse" situations from such a change.

In such a situation, as a GM I would simply change Prerequisities of Fellowship to Intelligence (so Fel 30 to Int 30, Fel 50 to Int 50), etc. and when using such abilities and talents allow my techpriest to use intelligence instead of fellowship, as even fluffwise it is more logical than techpriest improving fellowship. Remember that in this universe, people don't like talking to techpriest - they just do it because of duty, curiosity, quest for knowledge, gaining technologies, etc. They are not interested so much in techpriest's personality or social skills, but rather in their knowledge. From the other side of the barricade, techpriests rather seem to try to mimic some of the people's bahaviour (like magos Bure in Malleus) or study some social relations in order to better interact with normal humans, but still all this is based on their intelligence, not fellowship.

Please excuse my ignorance ... but I was looking through the Ascension book last night and could find an explanation for one of the advancement types I saw. What is Unnatural [characteristic]? Just a +5 to a stat when you take it?

Thanks for the help, cheers!

Dak Rogers said:

Unnatural doubles the BONUS for a stat, so lets say you have strength 40, but you also have unnatural strength x2, when striking with a melee weapon you get 8 damage from strength now, instead of 4. The exception being the Unnatural agility does not affect movement speed, only Unnatural speed does.