Hi guys , various questions have been brought up by my players (GM'ing Dark heresy is awesome) throughout the course of my campaign and i'm hoping you guys can help mainly with some ascension related stuff (really awesome book, but odd in places)?

1. Does the backpack item in the main rulebook allow the character to carry an additional 50kg of equipment as it is a source of debate by the wording? silly i know

2. Ascension: Is the stormtrooper starting hellgun a cadian hellgun? is the arbirtrator power maul a basic one or the ultima one? silly question but the descriptions can be a little vague?

3. Can you combine Heightened Reactions with Unnatural Agility for a crazy initiative roll? or is just the unmodified agility bonus?

4. Do i go by the Ascension experience tables or the dark heresy ones? there is a debate whether the players have upto 13000 xp or 15000xp to spend?

5. What do best quality implants do? the main book only seems to go up to good quality one?

5. Background question: Can you have an Untouchable space marine? just curious, i can't see why not, but wondering what you lot might think.

And as a in-group house rule there is no vindicare assassin, way too horrible for a player character. weirdly, just when i finished a one-off adventure with the party as a group of specialised chaos cultists (each a different cult allied together to take out a major foe) FFG announce Black crusade! i'm certain they have Psykers or something...

Targetlock said:

Yes, the power mauls in Asc is a top tier weapon unless you make something better.

Targetlock said:

Yes, add Heightened Reactions and Unnatural Agility for the "I go first" characters.

Targetlock said:

If you are going into Ascension use those tables.

Targetlock said:

GM's option. Best Quality is kind of an anything goes/How good do you want it to be gray area.

Targetlock said:

At one point the general consensus was no. My opinion is no, the Untouchable would be too damaging for morale to be effective in an Astartes unit.

thanks for the help, as regards to the Untouchable thing i was thinking it would make an interesting gene-seed flaw for a cursed founding chapter.

I don't know of any exploration as to how multiple Untouchables act around each other and are affected. Whether the general unease of being around an untouchable will bother another untouchable or not. The Sisters of Silence and the Distaff are the only large groups of nulls that I can think of that work together but nothing is ever touched on as to group dynamics.

For Astartes a null should have a horrible effect on Cohesion.

Maybe a null Astartes should reduce a squads cohesion by 1/2 if he joins it and no cohesion may be regained while the null is a part of the squad, any command tests for a squad with a null are one step more difficult while a null squad leader has all command tests two steps more difficult?

I understand the idea, but I think it's one of those things that should be more hindrance than help.

Targetlock said:

In RoB there is a alternate advance called Kill-Marine that goes out solo to support investigations and what have you, this might be were I would introduce a Null-Space Marine. It could also be possible to later become a null through a dark pact, warp incident ect. If any chapter would embrace Nulls I would think maybe a very radical successor of the Black Templars, or possibly some originization like Grey Knights could have use for one(though they would lose psker ability, being totally null would be a reasonable trade-off when facing daemons).

Targetlock said:

That sounds good, but not sure the background fits it clearly. There aren't any chapters listed that deffinately become psykers by virtue of the geneseed, the best they have are a couple of chapters that have much higher instance of psychic powers. Untouchables are similar to psykers in their genetic expression but even rarer.

It was discussed at length on another thread.