I think their are a couple of issues with using Sisters of Battle as being the way of haivng a female character. Aside from the limitation of choices it leaves that player, it also creates a situation that flies a bit in the face of the roleplay. Every game a scenario would have to be concocted to give an explanation for why a single individual Sister of Battle is running along side the toughest most veteran of alien hunting space marines. While there is an overlap of threats between what the Deathwatch and Sisters of Battle seak out, each originate from different Ordos of the Inquisition and tend to avoid interaction. You have to consider each as almost being like the SWAT teams of the CIA and FBI; they'll only ever work together if forced by a higher authority. For anything other than a one off game it would become convoluted to explain why such combined action is required.

I don't like enlsaving a campaign to a settings details, latitudes to invent are important for personalizing; its just when you go too far you may be playing the game in name but not in spirit. It is almost as much a "sin" to allow something that doesn't fit as it to disallow something that does. If we were playing old school D&D and you were only allowed to play a human character, what would be the point. So if you play a game that focuses on a particular faction or force within the 40k setting, what is the point in not playing that faction.

I like the idea of putting something on the table to make female characters I just don't belive SoB are the best option. I think the two ideas that have been voiced that I'd push are either a high level assassin or a female Ordo Xenos Inquisitor. Both of those create the opportunity not only for the player to roleplay female but the oppurtunity to have a character that emphasizes abilities that Deathwatch lack. Then it just becomes a matter of giving the player enough start experiance to balance them as well as necessary.

Blood Pact said:

Ah the delicious irony of a chapter designed to fight daemons and Chaos in general despite being founded from an amalgam of flawed, and in some cases heretical, gene seeds.

Adepta Sororitas with the Denounced and Condemned background from Radical's Handbook ; probably ascended to Crusader and, maybe to fit in better, take the Hunter of Aliens trait instead of Scourge of Heretics . She could then be the "field-liaison" for the Inquisitor she serves. Or, hell, Sororitas ascended to full-on Inquisitor , or at the least Interrogator.

The background would help explain why she's "deployed" alone, as the Sisters and Ecclesiarchy would tend to withhold support from her. The ascended career choices would allow for good integration with a Deathwatch kill team, even if it's likely to cause some disharmony at some point.

Just an idea.

-=Brother Praetus=-

GM = Emperor

what he says goes or the adaptus custodes comes and prods buttock. any pc negotiations to be handled by the inquisition with review to the imperial tarot.

Female costodes? Actually that might work, we have never had anything about where they came from.

UncleArkie said:

As far as I can figure out from the few sources we have about them, each Custodian Guard is the product of extensive and individually-tailored augmentation. Each one is built from scratch, where the Astartes are mass-produced (relatively speaking). As noted in The First Heretic , individual Custodes are somewhat greater in skill than individual Astartes, but the Astartes are trained and indoctrinated to fight as a group, while the Custodes are individuals whose only common link is the Emperor - even when side-by-side with other Custodes, they fight alone.

aka_mythos said:

Nah, wouldn't be a big issue. You wouldn't need seperate reasons every adventure. Just have some overarching reason the sis is with the kill team on a long term attachment, perhaps there is some kind of Ordo Hereticus connection to the campaign arc?

Once a good plot is worked out it would preclude any need for future 'excuses' for the presence of the sororitas' presence.

I'm putting together the campaign for my DW game and group. My girlfriend is going to play a Space Wolf Devastator. I offered the idea of playing an Inquisitor and a Sister of Battle and she said, "pffft."

Aren't Custodes 1st generation space marines? I thought the heirarchy was as follows:

1. Emperor (all powerful psyker with natural physical prowess of marines)

2. Primarchs (sons of the emperor. Only slightly less powerful than the emperor. Immortal.)

3. 1st Generation Space Marines/Custodes (made after primarchs were sent into the warp. Each made with the genetic material of their primarch but power level is scaled back a bit. Considered immortal, but due to brutal lives, tend to die before lifespan can be tested. )

4. 2nd Generation Marines and beyond(current space marine manufacturing process. Allows for mass production of marines using gene seed of prior marines. with successive usage gene seed deteriorates over time making for slightly mutated or less powerful breeds of marines. Long lived, but not immortal.)

So my understanding of Custodes were they were pulled from the same stock as the first generation of Space Marines. The ones that were bred prior to the Horus Heresy. While the implantation process may have been the same for earlier generations, they were stronger than later generations because of the closer ties to the Primarchs original gene seed.

LeBlanc13 said:

Emperor

Primarch

Custodes - Larger and tougher than Space Marines, they are grown differently and trained differently. I've read that they aren't very good at working teams like Astartes are.

Space Marines - The only difference here is that some space marines were born much earlier and helped the Emperor retake Terra and start the crusades, while some younger ones were born from the individual Primarch's homeworlds.

LeBlanc13 said:

As far as I'm aware, the Custodes are enhanced warriors of the kind that helped the Emperor reconquer Terra, though refined to make them as powerful as they possibly can be given their human origins; the Primarchs were created after Terra was reunified, created entirely from scratch to surpass any enhanced warrior, and the Astartes were created after the Primarchs were lost, the geneseed crafted from the remnants of each Primarch's genetics.

That's something that's always bothered me: how do you have 'remnants' of someone's genetics? Particularly if they're genetically engineered supermen? I mean, given how important the Primarch Project was, even if the lab was blown to smithereens, one would think that they would keep backups and samples off site in a secure location.

It's not like chaos whisked them off as soon as cellular division took place.

BaronIveagh said:

Remember this is the Grimdark future. The Emperor didn't keep backups.

BaronIveagh said:

As far as I'm aware, the suggestion is that genetics alone do not make the Primarchs; the scraps and samples and traces of their creation could not recreate them without the undefined something else that the Emperor infused within the carefully-wrought genes, in a process too difficult, dangerous or costly to recreate.

Even with backups and samples - which are likely what the Emperor created the Astartes with - the Emperor could not have just started over and created new Primarchs, at least not at that time.

It's grimdark, not stupidmoron. ... Maybe that's how the Astronomicon works: it's like that thing the Riddler built in one of those last godawful Batman movies: it sucks the intelligence out of the Imperium and leaves them all barly able to tie thier own shoes.

Something tells me the Emperor was smarter then that though, since a single lab accedent could destroy years worth of data, and it might happen before your even finished with the project...

As far as the genetics: eh... Fabius Bile was able to clone Horus. I havn't been able to find where the Emperor adds Chemical X to his primarchs. Whatever it might have been, it probably wasn't psychic. Before their corruption, only one of them evidenced any abilities along those lines.

BaronIveagh said:

And wasn't he the reason for the lab accident?

BaronIveagh said:

Fabius Bile cloned Horus, yes... but did he do so correctly or flawlessly? Did he create a perfect facsimile of the Warmaster? On the other side of things, did he tap into xenos or daemonic lore to aid him? We know very little of the event, and thus can only speculate as to the details.

As for the Emperor's 'additional component' for the Primarchs... frankly, if you only equate "psychic" with "psychic powers", then I fear for your imagination, particularly as it's a long-standing element of the setting that all humans are fundamentally psychic on some level, even if they are incapable of manifesting powers.

The Warp can be turned to any purpose, so long as they who wield it have the absolute strength of will to shape it as they desire. The Primarchs have been noted as being awe-inspiring, even painful to look upon. Sanguinius and Konrad Kurze both possessed precognitive abilities. The howls of Russ are more than sound alone (demonstrated during the sacking of Prospero), while Corax has been demonstrated to be able to steal his presence from the perceptions of others, going unnoticed if he so chooses. Everything there sounds very much like they come from the warp, that they are psychic in origin, even if they are not the narrowly-defined notions of psychic powers.

My wife has no problems with playing a male, remember kids. It's role playing, do what you like.....Don't make simple thing difficult, have fun.

Rationale for an Alpha Legionnaire being in Deathwatch? Black Shield.

They show up like a picnic basket baby on the doorstep, say "I'm here to join up" and they are in for life, the book even mentions one becoming a Watch Captain, there's all you need.

The fun part about heresy like this, is it makes EVERYONE second guess EVERYTHING they've had a hand in, and a Watch Captain has his hand in quite a bit.