Okay... So about a week ago during my usual Dark Heresy campaign as GM I mentioned to my friends that Deathwatch was coming out and that the option to be Space Marines was finally available, my friends jumped on it and after some long talking and daydreaming (with drooling involved) about being one of Mankind's greatest defenders one of them asked about being Chaos Space Marines. My brain quite literally exploded at the thought, being a collector of Chaos Space Marines for the board game, and instantly started pondering the possibilities. And so began the thought of using the Deathwatch standards, rules, and gear and revamping it to the needs of making a Chaos campaign. I know there is not that much known about the actual book and the rules within but I was wondering, could it be done? I know it would take time to revamp weapons, armor, talents, psychic abilities, and the Marines in general to fit the needs but... what do you all think?

If you take Deathwatch and combine it with stuff in in Disciples of the Dark Gods you'd have a solid foundation. Honestly though I'm always leery of evil-themed campaigns, but if you feel like you're up to it, and that your players can be trusted to not simply play the game like nutjob maniacs, it could work very well.

The problem with "evil campaigns" is calling them "evil campaigns". The real way to play a Chaos campaign is to make it **** sure to players that "evil for its own sake" is not what Chaos renegades are after... at least not in the start. The original renegades had a (at least in their own mind) very solid reasons to go renegade. Lets take a little example from how Horus decided to jump the boat and join Chaos:

During the rituals, Horus' spirit was transferred into the Warp where the chaplain Erebus, disguised as the Warmaster's closest friend Hastur Sejanus, showed him a terrible vision of the future - the Imperium as a repressive, violent and superstitious regime where the Emperor and some of the Primarchs (but not Horus) were worshipped as divine beings by the fanatical and ignorant masses of humanity.

Now when Horus tried to actually stop this vision from becoming true he wasn't actually that evil a dude, now was he? Some might say he was good, even altruistic... The trick here, of course, was the fact that Chaos Gods knew that by showing Horus this vision they would set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the vision actually becoming true... They just neglected to tell poor Horus this.

Now take it 10 000 years forwards and the Chaos Renegades still belive The Chaos Gods are actually the victims of the Emperor's psychic might who had no interest themselves in controlling the material world. They still believe the Horus rebellion was justified and the Imperium in its current form is actually a proof of how right Horus was (and how wrong the False Emperor was). So, when your players can bend their brains around to think that Renegades are actually the good guys and the Fascist Imperium is the evil one... Then you are about to see the beginning of a truly epic Chaos campaign

I have already begun my friends on a regiment of Chaos friendly books, especially ones that point out the 'corruption and softness' of the Imperium of Man. It's gone well so far. I've already had a request for one of them to be a Night Lord (my personal favorite legion) and couldn't help but laugh because the Night Lords 'hate' Chaos (at least some of them do) and hate almost everyone else, which will make for some interesting moments if I can work that into this.

Thanks for the feedback so far and i look forward to more from the masses.

I cant wait to see how this turns out ... Iron Warriors with Servo harnes's and arms.

all my squad leaders will get servo arms.

Polaria said:

While I like your ideas, I have to say that very few renegade Marines fall into such a category. Most are butchers and madmen who have no real notion of benefiting humanity anymore. They fight at the behest of the Ruinous Powers and the Ruinous Powers' agendas are utter madness. So unless the players lean more toward anti-Imperium rather than pro-Chaos, the campaign is going to inevitably take on a very evil tone that will involve the slaughter of untold numbers of innocents for no real purpose other than to satiate malign gods.

Bah! Nothing but Imperial Propaganda.

At least that's one way to approach it.

Dulahan said:

You could certainly approach it that way. Though to do so would involve throwing out a lot of canon.

Atheosis said:

Not necessarily. It just requires that the protagonists are in the first stage of it before they get into the gribbly stage.

Kage

Atheosis said:

Evil for its own sake is myth. It does not exist. Even the most demented mass-murderers of all time were acting perfectly logical in their own mind . This is very important thing to notice. Gamemaster of any game has a very big responsibility because he or she is effectively characters senses. The players get the world-view you, the GM, put into their head. Now this is the very key of it all. Worldview of a person, any person, is his or her subjective take on reality. It is not objective and this is where the Chaos Gods operate. In essence you have to lie to the players so that in their subjective reality they are doing the right thing.

I'll give an example from my current Dark Heresy campaign. The players have in last mission taken part in Slaaneshi rituals, forced another Acolyte (who was lobotomized earlier) to take part in some more Slaaneshi rituals and executed a couple of dozen innocent Ecclesiarchy clerics and Adeptus Astra telepathica astropaths. They did it because Inquisitor told them that these innocent people had information on how one Inquisitor had been supporting Chaos cults and started a rebellion involving a whole Hive world. No matter how I'll wrap my head around it it is still an evil thing to do. Acolytes executing people on Inquisitors command for nothing more than following another Inquisitors command... The only question that remains is if it is necessary evil. The Acolytes believe it was. And, as long as their subjective reality matches the objective reality in key points they are right. However, I would not have to lie in more than one sentence and suddenly the whole construct falls down and to outsider, it all seems like evil for its own sake.

Polaria said:

There's a couple issues here that I'd like to address.

First off, many have claimed that evil for its own sake doesn't exist. Yet I'm left to wonder what that really means? The sadistic serial killer who slowly tortures and ***** women before murdering them, simply because he enjoys it, might not claim to be evil or see himself as such, but in the end from an external perspective he is evil and that which he takes pleasure in is likewise evil. Another example would be Dr. Mengele. If you aren't familiar with the details of what he was guilty of at Auschwitz look it up on Wikipedia. He might have said it was for the sake of science or some such non-sense, but to an outside observer it was simply evil and barbaric, serving no purpose save Mengele's twisted urges. Of course, one can always take a morally relativistic approach, but one should also remember that such an approach is not universally agreed upon.

Secondly, in the case of Chaos Marines, their behavior is usually going to originate in some self-serving motivation. A follower of Tzeentch might desire more power and knowledge. A follower of Nurgle might desire dominion over and salvation from death. A follower of Slaanesh likely seeks ever higher and more ecsatic states of sensation. As you say such motivations aren't themselves inherently evil. The beings they worship are. And the more they follow those desires the more they slide into the true evil of their masters. These aren't the normal human beings of our world, they are supernaturally tainted monsters. Applying contemporary psychology to them is silly.

Within the 40k universe, as with many other fantasy settings, there is undoubtedly evil for it's own sake. The Ruinous Powers are the definition of the concept actually.

Selfist thrill-seeking is still motivation. Not very high-minded one, but it is a motivation.

Sexual thrill-seeking serial killer ***** and murders because he is selfish and seeks sexual gratification regardless of the cost to others. That is still a motivation and whether we like it not in his own mind it is a good motivation. Chaos Gods are born from human emotions and desires. They are not evil aliens. They are actually as human as humans themselves. It still doesn't make the humane .

Nothing in universe happens without cause and effect. When apple drops out of the tree and hits the ground it happens because the tree grew there, the apple grew into that branch, it ripened up and gravity overcame the tensile strenght keeping the apple attached to the branch. Good and evil exist. But good or evil for its own sake don't. Every story must have beginning and every action must have cause.

Morally relativistic approach is not agreed on because too many people in the world mistake understanding and accepting. I don't make that mistake, because I think we, as people, have to understand lots of things we don't accept in order to prevent them from happening.

The point in all this rambling was that Chaos campaign has the inherent problem that because there is no big reason "we do horrible things to save humanity from even more horrible things" you end up in a sort of dead end of gratuitous splatter-horror unless you purposefully take the leap and try to see behind the What Happens into the Why it Happens.

Polaria said:

This, I vocally and emphatically disagree with.

The Chaos Gods are not simply born from human emotions and human desires - afterall, Slaanesh was specifically born from Eldar emotions and desires.

More than that, Chaos predates humanity, and consequently cannot solely be a reflection of human emotion.

Beyond that, a Chaos God fundamentally differs from the psychology of a mortal in one, very important, way. A human experiences a wide range of emotions... a Chaos God is composed of a single broad emotion. Khorne is rage without restraint, without purpose or reason, and without any context. It does not rage against anything... it merely is rage. Everything else attributed to Khorne is either the perceptions of individual worshippers attributed to it (which, given the nature of the warp, means that it occasionally embodies them as well... but nothing so consistently as its core nature) or a natural extension of its core nature.

Khorne - because he's the simplest and most straightforward to explain, and thus a good subject for an example - is fuelled by the rage of each and every sentient being in the galaxy to some extent or another. In turn, it fuels rage, inspiring and invoking it where and when it can. Those who devote themselves to it have a greater connection - they are fed by its rage, and the rage they feel feeds their lord in return. Sooner or later, that Khorne worshipper finds that the profane rage of his master is overwhelming everything else. That Khorne worshipper kills because he hates and rages. His fury has no natural cause, it merely is , a murderous rage that knows no beginning nor end. He may once have had a purpose to that fury, but no longer.

Pure emotion is something that is utterly alien to us - every emotion we experience is tempered and coloured with others, and with context and purpose and reason. Chaos lacks those things, and is not sentient as we understand sentience. It exists outside of space and time, in a realm where such things are vague suggestions at best.

Cause and effect are essential parts of the universe... but when the Warp gets involved, things change; the timeless nature of the immaterium mean that the same cause can create echoes of effect across the history of the material universe. A single thought or deed ripples through the Warp and has an effect on the distant past. An effect can be its own cause, a vicious cycle of causality that continues forever... in short, the Warp makes such things as cause and effect uncertain and fragile...

Polaria said:

Yeah, I noticed part of the sentence was amissing not long after I wrote it and tried to edit it the way it was supposed to be but the forums had just taken the edit button away. I so wish the edit function would have a little longer statutory limit than the 5 minutes it sometimes seems to be

Correction: Chaos Gods are born from human emotions and desires and Chaos renegades are originally humans (or marines). They are not evil aliens. They are actually as human as humans themselves. It still doesn't make them humane .

So unless the player characters are Possessed or Daemon Princes (hope not) they will still have human motivations. Twisted, maybe, but still human.

Polaria said:

Being a Buddhist, I would say is that there is no single cause for anything, but an infinite chain of causes. Likewise, I would say that good and evil are but dualistic concepts that have nothing to do with the true nature of reality. That said, I'm not particularly interested in applying Buddhist metaphysics to an over-the-top sci-fantasy setting about a universe in perpetual war. I find the use of contemporary Western Philosophy in such a context rather pointless as well, but to each their own.

I prefer the more clear-cut and canonical approach to Chaos. That of it being a re-envisioning of the classical Hell and the demons therein. Such an idea has nothing to do with how I personally see the nature of things. This is, after all, a setting that is heavily based off of Gothic European themes and ideologies, not one based off of modern philosophy/psychology or ancient Asian religion/philosophy. Of course, it's also a complete fantasy.

In the end though, there's nothing saying you can't approach 40k from a post-modern perspective if you like. Just keep in mind that such an approach isn't really in keeping with how the lore has been developed over the years.

Polaria said:

The lore however is rather clear on the corrupting influence of Chaos. A renegade Marine may well have human motivations but the Ruinous Powers will quickly warp such motivations to insanity and beyond. Such a situation is not limited to Possessed or Daemon Princes alone. Even the lowliest servant of Chaos quickly loses his/her humanity, only to become a kind of puppet for their god's urges.

By the way, regarding what you said in your other post, I would also like to point out that the notion that emotions are human and therefore the Ruinous Powers are human operates on what I see as a faulty premise. Emotions aren't human as far as I'm concerned. They are energetic patterns that arise within the psyche of a human (as well as other beings), but they are not intregal to a human being. A human would be no less human without anger or lust. Likewise a human would still be a human if they didn't experience sadness or happiness. In fact, within many Eastern traditions an enlightened individual (which could be seen as the ultimate expression of what is to be human) is seen to be one who has been freed of emotions (not quite how I see things, but it is a common view in various traditions). Make of that what you will.

Atheosis said:

The lore needs villains. A good story need defined evil (or at least devined "them") for the conflict to develop. There is nothing wrong with putting evil-for-evils-sake villains into stories when you need something to shoot. Now the problem arises when you have such one-sided Great Evils in the fluff and you try to run a story from their viewpoint (like the original Chaos Campaign in question is supposed to be). Then you pretty much must twist the fluff one way or another in order to make the campaign sensible and the characters identifiable.

Sure, you can theoretically run a campaign where the idea is to commit horrible atrocities in each scenario (just because they can) and then try to figure out something even more horrifying for the next scenario. I don't know how long it would last, though.

Chaos Power Armour ap 10?

collar of khorn, imune to psykers powers and force weapons become power weapons.

I think when it comes to Chaos marines there needs to be more keeping track of individual vs. group corruption, playing off the cohesion system. If you go too heavily cohesive, you end up something like a unit of beserkers... if you end up too divided by pursuing drastically different temptations the group will fall into disorder with members killing each other and cohesion lost... while if you balance it you end up with something similar to Abbadons personal guard, who each represent different temptaions of chaos each with powers from different gods yet still able to function as a group. Its power grab, a race to gain the most favor amongst chaos to become most powerful and assert command over the group.

This sounds similar to the idea one guy here had, an elite group of orks called the Deff-wagh... in mega-armor and all.

A few chapters come to my mind to do cohesive Chaos Kill-Teams.

- Word Bearer (obvious, the converters)

- Night Lords (the raptors, scavenger, lords of fear and dread, hit and ran attack stile)

- Fallen Angels (Dark Angel traitors still hiding within the Imperium mostly )

- Alpha Legion (The lords of infiltration)

- Thousand Suns (sorcerers looking for knowledge)

etc.

I think any Legion could be used but anything other than Black Legion or a Red Corsairs type group, forces a very vanilla starting point for character creation. Black Legion allows the different powers of chaos to coexist and comingle more than the others. For a game there needs to be a basis for the intermixing of different backgrounds, Black Legion allow it, Red Corsairs are defined by it.

Thousand sons is Tzeentch only. While Nightlords, Word Bearers, Alpha Legion, and Fallen Angels tend to shy away from worshiping the chaos gods on an individual basis prefering different "undivided" interpretation, their modus operandi leave less diverse character creation. Rule stand point, how is any one Fallen Angel different from another?

I would say inventing a new elite unit of the Red Corsairs or Black Legion, is the fluffiest way to approach it... call them the Blackguards (blag-erd) or something like that. Set them up such that they have varying origins and cults to choose from. From a game designer stand point you might have a good number of named cults that interpret each chaos god in different ways.

An Iron Warrior stalking with a melta gun with a servo arm on his back.

You could use the Souldrinkers as a GREAT example of how this concept would work itself into a loyalist group of Marines and turn them against the Imperium.

Instead of turning against Chaos when asked to join it, as the Souldrinkers did, you would have embraced it. Why the Souldrinkers turned from the Imperium is very much so easy to understand... and yet, they didn't see the Chaos strings that were pulling them until it was almost to late.

I would swing the story very deceptively, Souldrinkers style... maybe even start the group out as a Loyalist group.. then have the Imperium do something to them that shakes their faith in the Imperium. This would slowly side them against the Imperium... then introduce the puppet-master at the right time and see if they fall to Chaos or they turn against all people who are not them.

Could get very interesting indeed.

miss dee said:

Night lord with a paire of lightning claw is more sexy IMO!