To enter the witchhunter career, you either have to complete the zealot career (in which case you have at least one insanity) or have aquired an insanity somehow. Why? I understand that witchhunters are portrayed as fanatics and so forth, but why the roleplay railroading? I know that I can just ignore the rule in my campaign (which I might).

Krogan said:

There are other careers that lets you do the same as being a Witch Hunter, Investigator being one, but to actually be a Witch Hunter you'd have to be pretty fanatic really. It's not your average saturday night adventure, where you find a Nurgle Cult and kill them, it's wiping out entire villages, if you deem there might otherwise be a risk of a Chaos Outbreak. It's shooting babies, that has shown even the slightest taint of chaos.

These people are feared across the entire Empire, and not due to their docile nature, but due to their often VERY over the top "cures" for signs of chaos.

These people don't just hate chaos, they'll give up their lives to root it out. They'd rather kill themselves than risk falling to temptation. They are fanatics, and thus I think it's quite okay that you need to be a fanatic somehow to enter the career.

But... the rules are not there to hold people back, but to be used as guidelines, so I recommend breaking them any time they restrict your idea of fun.

Isn't it more troubling that any insanity card will satisfy the requirement ?

Ivan Kerensky said:

Most (or all) insanities can be made to fit a Witch Hunter in my oppinion, and if the player wishes to join the ranks of the Witch Hunters he has to show devotion (to Sigmar) and somehow make the insanity fit the character in a good way.

As I'm not at home so I can't check my insanity cards, but I am sure that it is possible to make (almost) all insanities fit a Witch Hunter very well.

And I want all my Witch Hunters to be insane, they should be.
If the player wish to have control over how the characters insanity manifests, choose the Zealot and buy "the right one", otherwise a randomized insanity will provide the player with an interesting role playing oppurtunity: "How can I make this insanity into something (fanatically) religious?" which can be just as (or even more) interesting.

There is another way to look at this, of course. Generally, an insanity is a result of terrible trauma or some other encounter with something horrific. That's how people get insane in WH, right? And that means their brain has been broken (at least a little) by what they've seen. Any insanity fits because the insanity implies a brain-breaking level of encounter with the horrors of the world in the past. The witch hunter is willing to do anything - ANYTHING - to drive back those horrors at any cost because they have encountered (and been broken by) the very worst the world has to offer.

Being a witch hunter and being insane are not causal things - they are both symptoms of the same thing: having been pushed beyond the brink of human resolve by something so unspeakably awful that it must be stopped at any cost. The person who can encounter some sort of horror and walk away from it unscathed is the person who can still believe that it is possible to remain human and hold on to social and moral rules and guidelines in the face of Chaos.

What is more important to reaching witch hunter levels of zealotry is to have that breaking encounter in the first place, to "have your eyes opened" so to speak. This leads to both the insanity and the zealotry of witch huntery. The key is not choosing an insanity that fits being a Witch Hunter. The key is the event that both lead to the insanity (whatever it is) and lead to the zealous abandonment of normal human values and morals.

TheAngryDM said:

A very lovecraftian (and good) explanation of how Witch Hunters are "created".
Sadly it does not work as well if you aquire the insanity during play while just happening to be stressed and fatigued due to roll effects. It is not impossible to aquire an insanity while in a fight with ordinary humans (though the WH to be might argue that they were deamons after all). But generally speaking insanities are far more likely to occur as a result of traumatic, horrific encounters. Still I love when players want to play a Zealot and purchase the insanity before starting to play it so that they can weave it into their back story in a good way.

k7e9 said:

I agree there. For it to work out as well with an acquired insanity takes a little more finagling and the stars have to align a bit. But, the most insidious, most dangerous form of Chaos is the Chaos that takes the hearts of men and women and turns them to depravity. They look just like everyone else (at first, anyway), but they devour the Empire from within. And anyone... anyone could be an agent of Chaos...

I think even an insanity acquired while fighting normal humans could work if the player and the GM really try.

TheAngryDM said:

Absolutely one "easy" solution could be to let the insane characters dream about the encounter that drove him insane untill he/she is convinced that chaos was involved, as an example.

Everything is possible to work out if you dedicate some time to do it.