So I'm making an Acolyte for my friend's game. Decided to roll up a Guardsman because they seem to be pretty well rounded. I liked the option for the Penal Legionnaire so I decided to make one. His background's neat but that's not the issue.

I rolled up his Divination and got "Corruption within, mutation without". A minor mutation wouldn't be so bad, but the GM rolled a 100 for it.

So yeah. Major Mutation. He's a Necrophage. "Oh lawdy no! He's a freakin' freak now!". +10 Toughness and Regeneration isn't half bad though.

My problem is this; how much meat does this guy have to gorge? Is it just like.. three raw steaks for dinner, or am I going to have to hack up enemies for snacks? Also, seriously considering chopping up downed enemies for snacks. Just saying, mans gotta eat. I kind of like the image of the party slave(explosive collar) "hiding" the bodies for the rest of the party. Makes me think he's a ghoul.

+10 toughness is boss on a guardsman, you can get him up to 80+ toughness easily with that mutation. I got my feral world guardsman up to 82 toughness after purchasing 5 advance, combined with the crusader ascension transition for another +5, and the brute mutation. So it was 42 + 10 + 5 + 25.

The whole raw meat thing though, I'd say that your character just has to replace large portion of his normal food intake with raw meat meat, any thing else just doen't fill your characte up like it used to.

Thinking back to the 'corpse starch' debates, in many environments raw meat might be very difficult, expensive or even impossible to get hold of.

Of course, cannibalism isn't quite the taboo in 40k that it is today.

Most space marines do it.

Many primitive worlders probably practice it.

Corpse starch MAY be 'people' (depending on your view).

From a GM's perspective i'd probably only hit your character with the downside of this on occasion.

Onboard void ships, meat will be an expensive luxury or unobtainable (forcing you to raid the morgue perhaps or acquire fresher meat - nice plotline there...

On certain worlds like hiveworlds its likely to be a luxury, sapping your Thrones as you have to buy a lot of premium priced food.

Etc.

As to how much you have to consume...i'd say you're looking at replacing most of your food intake, but i wouldn't force you to 'eat 3 steaks a day' or anything like that...

Luddite said:

You're really only partly right there.

Space Marines and primitive Imperials worlds get away with it because it's done ritually, not just for a meal, and even then they need to keep out of sight of the Ecchlesiarchy, and other more puritan elements, or risk being purged.

While Corpse Starch... honestly, I've always thought it has people in it too, but it's not like they just grind them up and turn them in to bars. It's all processed and probably has other stuff added in. In fact It's probably a mish-mash of everything organic that goes in to a Recyclotorium (human waste, humans, plants, paper, food waste, vermin and other dead animals collected from the sidewalks..), dried out and processed to remove any other harmful elements (prions, disease, etc.).

I´d go with the previous posters and say that your character replaces most of his food with rare meat to stay fed. Other stuff just gets passed through without him being able to draw sustenance out of it (just like if a normal person would eat a kilo of freshly plugged pure green grass from his frontlawn without dressing).

So in the end in most circumstances that should only mean a premium on paying for your food. How high a premium should highly depend on the lcation where you are. Agriworld = not really much if he´s willing to eat the occasional butcher´s cutout (which is here mostly made into dog snacks). On a Hiveworld it might be noticeable, and on a smaller Voidship on vojage it might get critical if he didnt stock up his own "store" pre-flight.

Im no expert, but i think it would be pretty difficult to just grind people parts up and simply filter or distill out things like prions, from what i remember from class is they are probably not especially distingushable from any other type of protein. I guess sci fi solves everything though.

The GrimDark of 40K often overshadows just how advanced some (IMO a lot) of the Imperium's technology really is.

Sure they have people doing data entry on computers that appear no better than old DOS using 486's.

But then they also have war machines that use cultured brain matter as their CPUs (and the more advanced ones are quasi-sapient)!

I'm quite confident, especially considering how resource hungry the Imperium is, that they have some pretty good recycling technology at their disposal. When you recover the bodies of a bunch of low-hivers, you can either burn them, which will be a net loss of time and energy spent disposing of them, or you can try to get back even a little bit from the effort. And a "little bit" done on a large scale can add up to quite a lot.

Lionus said:

Just split all proteins to amino acids.

Blood Pact said:

If I recall it right, when soemone dies on Tallarn, they take their dead to their underground bunkers and proceed to remove all water from the dead to have dirnking water to the rest of the population; not to mention the old debate about corpse-scratch being really made of corpse, so recycling dead bodies for your own ends might be odd form our view, but for a 40k us, it's just business as usual.

Braddoc said:

Off topic, but thats a blatant ripoff of dune.

I doubt the Imperium is sufficiently concerned about the health of its soldiers to worry about prions

jpomz said:

I recently started re-reading Dune (originally read it in the 1980s). It's kind of startling how much of the 40Kverse is taken directly from Dune ...

Everything in 40K is a ripoff of some classic Sci Fi.

Navigator guilds and their stranglehold on space-travel? God-Emperor? Dune!
Lots of other things too. Take a look at the Sanctioning side effects from DH: Pain through Nerve Induction: The skin on the back of your right hand is horribly scarred. You are uncomfortable around bald, robed women.

The Mechanicus and the control-technology-by-religion? Rogue Traders expanding the Imperiums interest through the stars? Asmovs Foundation series.

The Adeptus Arbites and the Hive cities? Judge Dredd!

The list goes on and on. And it makes Warhammer GREAT. IMHO

Darth Smeg said:

More dune : lasguns, plasteel, and navigators gradually mutating....

Still though, you're right. It makes it awesome.

bogi_khaosa said:

bogi_khaosa said:

Papa Nurgle is pleased by your answer.

Disease prevention and control should be a quite high priority for the Imperial Navy considering the squalor and crowdedness aboard an imperial spaceship. The ships have huge crews and they NEED those huge crews to function so keeping them alive and functional through properly feeding* them would be essential, IMO. *Proper, as in infection-free and nutritional, not of caloric intake or taste. In fact, I would bet that your standard diet onboard (for non-officers) would resemble that of a mouse study on caloric restriction.

To preserve supplies I would wager that most imperial ships recycle all of their organic waste, waste-water going through sterilization to algal tanks or fungus-based feedstock production system. After all, every gram of slop produced on board is a gram of food not purchased on the way, and a gram saved for cargo / guns / armour. IIRC, Rogue Trader corebook had a space station with hydroponics decks.

As for OP: Meat is easy to come by, if you're not too squeamish. Rats are extremely omnivorous, easily available and breed fast. Keep a few in a cage for a meat farm, if necessary.

Rat Meat-Farm. Oh my lord you beautiful man that is fantastic xD

My sister has several rats for pets, she would cringe at it. I love it though.

I could see toting around a small cage of rats, just feeding them through the bars every once and a while(a horrible idea by the way, it creates a habit of them biting fingers). Lets be honest though, there's some sick awesomeness in this idea.

With my guy being a Penal Legionnaire I plan on having someone else in the party with the button to my Explosive Collar(weird name what with them imploding). I'm more or less going to RP him off as the party slave, not so secretly hating them for it but at the same time making himself as useful as humanly possible. "Yes ma'am right away. -mumblegrumble- Don't worry yerself about these here cultists ma'am, I'll get rid of the bodies for ya'll. Just rest for a moment and let ol' Kaustikos take care of this mess for ya."

Why.. of course I cook the party's meals. Trollolloll Hannibal fun xD

Darth Smeg said:

You might expect that a universe as complex and detailed as WH40K would have taken several years to develop (even with all the overt swiping), but the vast majority of the setting was laid in the very first edition; the main change between 40K then and now (other than the absence of Chaos from the WH40K:RT rulebook...) is the visual depiction. The 1st Ed. book hinted at the pseudo-Catholic "Gothic-ness" of the setting, but the illustrators' only frame of reference at the time were the Judge Dredd comics that were then popular. Hence, the 'Rogue Trader' rulebook is illustrated with mohawked gangers and comical mutants (even the Astartes are effected, with their sacred power armour covered with goofy graphitti- 'KIL KIL KIL!'). It wasn't until the Dune movie came out that the game designers were able to say to the illustrators "See? That's what we are talking about!" The main hold-over from the Judge Dredd-look era is the onmipresent oversized shoulder armour (and, oddly enough, the upcoming Judge Dredd movie drops the iconic shoulder plates- because what a Judge Dredd movie needs, apparently, is to be more realistic ....).

Adeptus-B said:

Minor corection, the Dune movie was released in 1984, the original Rogue Trader book was published in 1987.

ItsUncertainWho said:

D'ho! I could have sworn it was 1986. Hmm...maybe it was it's release on videotape in Brittan that snapped 40K out of it's goofy Judge Dread look...

Adeptus-B said:

Uhh..... the Dune movie was a total flop.... no one watched it, I don't even think David Lynch did

jpomz said:

But as with many movies that flop, now it is considered a classic and definitive work in the genre. Few films can match what lynch did with the visual aesthetic of the film.

And apparently there's a remake in the works

And in the original RT, the marines were more like the Terran Marines in Star Craft (which is probably because Blizzard totally stole everything from GW ). Criminals and convicts were drafted into service, juiced up with some gene-mods and surgery and voila!

No Knightly Orders in Space, just drugged up combat monsters in huge armour out to Kil Kil Kil!

Darth Smeg said:

Yes but those were the 80's, a time best forgotten. We are much wiser now.

I think it's pretty funny that bliz ripped off everything warhammer, then starcraft comes out and GW changes the aesthetic of he nyds' to look like zerg...

Darth Smeg said:

Yeah, they have been trying on and off for years. No one wants to spend the money required or leave the original text intact enough for it to be recognizable as Dune .

It's part of the current issue with Hollywood right now. They aren't willing to take chances on anything that people don't already know so new ideas aren't produced. They just rehash old material to try to ride nostalgia in the fans of the previous work and vague recognition in the masses who don't care.

John Carter is an example of a movie that has been kicking around Hollywood for years and years and is finally being made. While I have great hope for it, due to those involved, I don't think it will resemble Princess of Mars much at all.

ItsUncertainWho said:

You mean you're not looking foward with baited breath to the upcoming Battleship movie?!

ItsUncertainWho said:

Saw the commercial during the Superbowl- they don't even mention Mars, do they? I'm guessing that they have "improved" the classic story by making it about an Iraq War veteran "Stargated" to a planet outside the solar system, rather than a Civil War veteran who transmigrates to Mars...

It just occured to me- wasn't this thread originally about mutation ...? Is there an existing "netslang" term for this? If not, I suggest "Thread-drift".