So I have a question regarding corruption points:

In a recent session, an NPC disguised in rags had hidden himself fairly well along our path. When our group approached, he jumped to his feet and shouted about a darkness within our group (pointing to the pysker). The psyker in the group got an odd sense from the man (he gave no presence in the warp), so the sentiment was similar from him.

However, the man quickly went from talking about darkness to saying we were Inquisitorial agents. He also knew we needed to find a way out (we were being chased), and knew the exact location of the exit. In a brief dialogue, the man said several questionable things which, to my belief, were heretical. First, he made specific statements with regard to the Inquisition being a path leading to darkness. He cited being a former agent of the Inquisition and a witch/psyker hunter and having found himself falling.

My character, being a Cleric and having a background (from Inquisitors Handbook) of Redemptionist, said "We are servents of His Holy Inquisition spreading His Righteous Light." To which the man responded "The brightest light casts the greatest shadows." To me, the entire line of conversation and in particular the line at the end, in addition to the shadiness of knowing things led me to think: heresy/heretic!

So as I passed the man, I drew my shotgun and screamed at him "Burn Heretic!" at which point I fired an inferno shell and he burned. As an additional note, the man was drawing his own weapon -at the same time- as I was drawing mine, and the GM ruled that we both fired at the same time. Firefight ensued, he was slain, with the psyker turning to fire at him as well.

My concern is this: following the session, the GM asked myself and the pysker member of the party to make Willpower tests. The psyker failed, and I succeeded. The GM then revealed that each of us gained a corruption point. When asked why, the GM said it was due to the man we had killed. His justification was that the man was innocent (had 0 corruption points) but was just incredibly insane (70+ insanity or so). Thus, the GM ruled that our killing the man, who was innocent, was a corrupting act. He added that my Cleric was in danger of up to 1d10 corruption, but since I passed my Willpower test I only took 1 point.

Is this a generally accepted mode of thought? Or is corruption something that most people feel is reserved for more severe things (warp influence, forbidden lores, etc)?

Thoughts appreciated!

Your character killed what he firmly believed was a heretic. As best as I can tell he shouldn't have been in any danger of gaining any corruption.

No. Corruption points deal with a more sinister and real form of corruption than the kind your GM is thinking of.

The rules are quite clear: Exposure to Warp Shock, being in the presence of daemons and other creatures of the Warp (and failing relevant Fear tests), taking part in (or even just witnessing) certain occult rituals, reading forbidden texts, etc. It is all linked to the Warp. Psykers have it worst, as many of the Phenomena they manifest, and ALL of the Perils cause them (and sometimes others) to gain CPS.

Just being a soulless, unfeeling, cold-hearted bastard with no empathy does not qualify.

Maybe an insanity point.

Maybe.

If your GM is an Evil bastard.

I'm gunna have to agree with Smeg here corruption is usually seen as your own spiral into darkness while his list covers most things my group also includes things like killing innocents we know are innocent (not spewing direct blasphemy to our face). Believe me quite a few people have met some 12 gauge enlightenment after speaking agaisnt the Emperor to me.

NPC: Well that person you met in the ally must have been mad the way he was speaking.

PC(TechP): Well maybe something he said about the Crow King could have some truth to it.

ALL(including NPCs): *guns out* What?

PC(TechP): errrrrr. *OOC - can I not say that*

Like everyone said, Corruption is for Warp Corruption, not some idea of moral corruption. It comes from contact from the warp or attention from those things within the warp. If everyone got 1 point of corruption for every innocent that they killed, every person in a position of power within the Imperium would have eye-stalks. I think your GM may not quite get what the Imperium and the universe of 40k is. Then again, if your character used to wear a red robe and hadn't tried to burn the witch yet, perhaps both of you might be looking at the 40k universe in a much nicer light then it's usual black-on-black with doom and grimdark illumination.

The Imperium and the Inquisition firmly hold a better safe then sorry attitude to things of a heretical and warp-like nature. Best for a thousand innocents to die then one heretic live and all that. The Inquisition has , in the past, purged entire Guard units after encountering a daemonic incursion -not because they were corrupted, but to insure that they wouldn't be. One particular Inquisitor who likes to ride around on a battle-throne killed just about anyone unlucky enough to be put before him justifying it by saying "a plea of innocence is guilty of wasting my time. Guilty!" The population of entire planets have been wiped out (were talking 10's of billions of people here) to deny the Enemy a strategic asset that the Imperium couldn't logicically defend. The Chambers Militant of Ordo Malleus have a real bad habit of killing anyone at all who even sees them and won't think twice (or grow eye-stalks) over killing the most fanatically pure souls (like sororitas) if it will make their mission a little easer.

In the end, if you're in the Inquisition and no innocents die, you're doing something wrong.

Thoughts for Six Days:

"Innocence proves nothing"
"Nobody is innocent, there are merely varying levels of guilt."
"Victory needs no explanation, defeat allows none."
"Blind faith is a just cause."
"Ruthlessness is the kindness of the wise."
"The justice of your action is measured by the strength of your conviction."

Someone here elegantly put it as simply as this:

"Corruption is Warp Radiation Poisoning".

The only source is exposure to eeeeevil stuff of the Warp.

If a GM wants to "punish" players for being consistently cruel and sociopathic, tell him/her to give Insanity points instead.

Stupid double posting glitch!

Yea, my GM has a similar line of thought.

Back when I was playing my tech-priest I had just gotten Rite of Pure Thought and we were up against a horde of Orks. A comrade or two were engaged in melee and my logic was this: Going Full-auto while doing my best not to shoot the teammates (suffering a -20) meant I had a chance of missing. However, if I were to just fire at the ground, with the sheer number of orks swarming them. Odds were I would only hit my enemies (and it was true, because i didn't take that -20 I actually hit).

Got me a few corruption points for that

Yeah, beginner GMs or GMs new to Dark Heresy might make mistakes like these.

My tech priest was once in a ship, questioning some low life thugs and ratlings that lived from contraband in the lower decks of a massive starship, when he noticed one of the higher ups had a pretty decent chain axe on him. He (or rather, I) approached him and started questioning him, asking about the chain axe and trying to find out how he had gained access to such a weapon being just a no-life thug in an Emperor forsaken deck ran over by gang trade and black market. My reasoning was, if I found out how he acquired it, I could gain access to some valuable tech in the hands of people who probably weren't treating it with the respect the Omnissiah demands. After a couple minutes of polite asking, I (as a player) ran out of ideas for questions on how to make him squeal. Whereas my character was just "pondering the situation" while I thought of more questions to ask the GM, the Commissar that was rolling with us got fed up with wasting time, and put a shotgun shell on his head for being a traitor and harboring valuable technology from the hands of the Emperor's armies.

I got corruption for that. The commissar did too, and he was the GMs NPC guiding us through the decks. I was dumbfounded. Pretty unfair way to get corruption points, I got 2 points out of that, and didn't even get to know the source of the tech. At least I got the chain axe from his body (and at level 2 or 3 that was, pretty decent loot at that level).

Then there was the time our psiker decided to heal someone, and conjured up a massive psychic phenomena. I was mind possesed by a lesser entity for about 6 rounds in a row, accumulating corruption points each round, from failed willpower rolls. Got 23 corruption points, and -10 permanent toughness, a whole bonus point that is, extremely unfair. I know in that context the corruption was rightly accrued, but I thought 23 at once was way, way out of hand and extremely unfair, topped with one less toughness bonus point. But that's another rant and one I will never forget, specially as I was the purest character up until that point, and the only original character that remained from the original party of 6 (all others had died from demonic means or downed in battle).

Oh well, here's hoping they give us a way to get rid of corruption points, as that same tech priest is my favorite character, and survived the whole campaign, and is now ready to become a magos as soon as we start the ascension campaign, still with my first character. I've grown attached to the guy. And it's now like I don't take risks lol

Mormoran said:

Rejoice, for there is an Ascension Transitioning Package that cares just for the likes of you! Gets rid of (most) Corruption.

And later you can use other means to get rid of Corruption and/or Insanity through nasty, expensive chirurgical/praying techniques only open to the best connected in imperial societym, aka Inquisitional Cadre. But at a price ...

70+ Insanity Points isn't incredibly insane BTW, or even insane really, That's just a middling-strong phobia. 100 is insane.

Corruption is not just corruption due to exposure to the warp. It is also spiritual corruption of the sort that allows chaos to sneak its way into your life and twist you, either physically or mentally. I see no problem with giving corruption points out for acts that could be seen as corrupting. In fact I have done that as a GM. However, those acts would have to be particularly extreme and blatant. Killing someone who you believe to be a heretic almost certainly would not qualify, especially in the 40k world. Murdering a (blatantly non-chaotic) prisoner out of spite on the other hand, I would (occurred in a game I GMed. I gave 1 corruption point for it). I didn't give one to the assassin who tried to murder a surrendered prisoner, as due to the events of the fight I could see them doing it out of frustration. Murdering someone just 'cos you feel like it though (and after interrogating them) just felt a bit far.

Just violent acts dont give corruption. Violence by itself is no furthering of chaos. If you take a little girl and butcher it and build a shrine of khorne with it, THIS would be the kind of violence you need to gain corruption. Ops handling of the situation was completely ok in terms of 40k. I would have neither given corruption nor insanity. If anyone should have received insanitypoints in that encounter it would be the moron who argued with a Redemptionist and sounded heretical. Even sounding slightly heretical is a sure path to trouble when speaking with a Redemptionist. One could argue that talking to a Redemptionist is a path to trouble, but that might be my Psyker speaking here

In my campaign my pcs have only gotten corruption points by doing stupid things, such as the assasin pcs who took a deamon sword(which broke later in the campaign) and now trying to summon the deamon as a familar adn of course my psykers psychic phenomias but when the group was fighting a logi daemon he struck it in the body casuing it to explode annd bath him in warp light causing him to get a crap load of CP points

Thaddeus said:

'Nother member of the choir saying CPs shouldn't be used that way.

Corruption Points are a measure of old mother Chaos' grip on your soul. And while her grip can manifest crippling schizophrenia, less obvious psychopathy, and an endless cornucopia of other bad things, you have to be in her grip before she can affect your behaviour. And of course, headcases are not per definition corrupt. The vast majority are simply headcases.

Insanity Points are not actually about how crazy your character is. They're a measure of how mentally stable your character is. By real world definitions, there's no such thing as a sane Redemptionist. They're all somewhere between morally bankrupt & flaming insane, to amoral and flaming insane. But by the standards of the game they're perfectly sane. And for a redemptionist, it is completely in-character to blow away a suspected heretic that he doesn't have time to murder in a more cruel & spectacular fashion.

Given your description of characters, circumstance & your reasoning, I wouldn't have given either character CPs or IPs. Even without knowing anything about the Psyker character, it is hard to imagine that assisting the Redemptionist wouldn't be legitimate in-character behaviour. Most likely, I would have given you a small amount of XP for acting in-character.

And of course, there's no rule that says GMs have to use IPs to punish out-of-character behaviour. It's just something many of us seem to do.

Well from my point of view if your players going around killing innocent people, they qualify to get corruption as their action pleased f.e Khorne. Chaos forces even have ally in the players, cause they do what chaos would, spill blood, kill people etc. So if their actions are similar to the goals of chaos forces and they know it, they should get CP. I had one player who was always doind something before thinking first. Once they were followed by a car, Player has stopped and approached to the car then he drawn a pistol and killed 2 people in this car. Well he was surprised seeing inquisitor badges falling down from the pocket of one guy. After few such actions he started to getting gifts, some cush and other stuff. It was from chaos agents who said that they couldn't do as many bad deeds as he did serving inquisition so it made him think i hope

While I do not agree that the killing of innocents should warrant Corruption Points, I find myself wishing that they should.

Or at least that I could think of a fitting way of getting some Karmic payback against my Evil players and their slaughter of innocents.

Darth Smeg said:

To paraphrase: "Innocents means nothing."

It is always possible the local enforcers or Arbities my find the bodies and start tracking down the murderers (players).

raffalin said:

This is a houserule from your group. In RAW Corruption points do not work this way. Mundane actions dont give you corruption.

As a sidenote it would contradict the GrimDark basic-theme of the Warhammer 40k setting where even the "good" guys constantly have to do very bad things or even worse stuff would happen. If your houserule would be applied the Imperium would fall to Chaos asap.

Your Houserule seems to come from a D&D-standpoint where indeed actions determine if one is "Good" or "Evil". While in Warhammer even noble and altruistic deeds can get you corrupted easily if you used warp-based means to it.

Outside of aspects of indirect (shock, veil rending, witnessing sorcery, reading certain things by accident) or direct methods (daemonic temptations whispered in your ear) you really need to know what you're doing to gain corruption points on your own. Corruption only gains purchase with you outside of the previous circumstances when you are 100% in control of yourself and decide to delve into the dark territories to achieve ends that may or may not be justified by these methods.

Gains in insanity also accompany the same kind of rubric. You can be mentally damaged by having something forced on you (forms of externally triggered mental trama) but the singular best way of garnering insanity is by doing things you know are wrong in the depths of your mind and then rationalizing, compartmentalizing, or simply ignoring (which would be the fertile ground for the seed of the disorder-to-be). Insanity differs also in that certain things would stop accruing insanity after a certain threshold (the easiest way of gaining them would stop becoming a method the GM should assign as per your character's growing numbness to rationality like with fear).

In either case, gaining them on an solo scale via regularly mundane actions would need the GM to measure intent behind the action to fairly determine when I/C points are assign points for DOING BAD THINGS and when they're not for simply roleplaying.

As far as the players in the OP's post I'd go with insanity assignment if they're still fresh as "Innocence Proves Nothing" is still a operating procedure that's rife with forced justification. There's no subject matter involved with Chaos in any respect internal or external so corruption is out (unless said killing him was an on-the-spot sacrifice to Khorne and you're not telling me something).

raffalin said:

That is hilarious! I will have to try that some time…

As far as I was aware the assignment of Corruption and Insanity was pretty much at the whim of the GM, barring those times which explicitly grant it (Warp Shock), with heavy guidance being given on the kind of thing that should qualify. I personally think 1 point for the malicious, knowingly pointless murder of someone of someone who poses no danger should qualify (yes, innocence proves nothing, but you punish the innocent for a purpose, not just 'cause you are feeling spiteful today). However, 1) I don't think the original situation warrants it, as the character didn't knowingly commit murder of an innocent and as they whipped out a weapon they clearly were not harmless and 2) GMs should always be aware that the moral standards of the 40k world are more than slightly… skewed as far as the modern world is concerned. Killing someone does not in itself qualify as an "evil" act, let alone a corrupting one. If you have reason you are going to be understood by most of the 40k world, even if it is illegal.

How does intent factor in to your decisions as a GM?

If the player interrogates a cultist to discern the secrets behind his twisted cult so as to stop their hideous practices, I'd assign nothing and inflict neither IP or CP.

If the player tortures a cultist to discern those secrets, and in the process mutilates him, they face the chance of IP. (sans Jaded)

If the player tortures and mutilates a cultist not only to discern secrets, but also punish them in an attempt to redeem themselves before the Emperor: I'd assign no IP or CP. (Excrutiation?)

If the player tortures and mutilates a cultist as revenge for slaying his fellow and trusted Acolyte, I'd categorize that as a traumatic experience and assign IP.

If the player tortures a cultist because he finds it fun and fulfilling, and the mission is merely a pretense to engaging in such behavior, Insanity Points MIGHT be assigned. (Is there a schism?) But her/his behaviour has a good chance of attracting the wanted/unwanted attention of Chaos. (Slaanesh in this case) Perhaps they wish to strike a bargain, and this could easily mount corruption points.

What would you assign when a group encounters a hidden room where very young children are living. You can see that these children bear the marks of mutation, but are ages 3-6 years old.

-ashe-

I wouldn't have simple contact with a mutant cause CPs. Maybe IPs for inevitably hearing them cry "Whyyyy" as you let loose with the flamer…

As with others, I rule that CPs are generally only when the warp is involved. Now, probably the broadest classification I have for that is that I do give CPs out for performing actions that invoke the rule of sympathy with the chaos gods, while in an area that is, or has been, under their influence.

For example, if in an area that is currently (or at one point has been) tainted by the followers of Khorne, then engaging in massive forms of bloodshed will cause an individual to gain CP (at my table). It wouldn't be much (I might not even notify the player until long after exposure, to avoid too much metagaming), 1 maybe 2. The intent is to provide a "small scale" style of corruption, without it being either nothing or full scale daemon incursion/direct world ending exposure to the empyrean.