Ever since BC was announced, I've been ready to roll up a CSM Sorcerer- Thousand Sons or Death Guard. However, a very good friend of mine who runs an excellent Dark Heresy game is rather loath to side with Chaos- she sees Chaos as the 'bad guys' (which they kinda are) and prefers playing as the 'good guys' (such as they are in 40K). She mentioned at one point that she'd consider playing if she could play a Kroot shaper mercenary instead of a CSM or Heretic. I know that, mechanically, you'd have to add about 2,500 experience points to a Rogue Trader character's starting XP in order to get them to starting BC character's starting point, but would it be feasible to have a Kroot mercenary operating alongside the heretics, or would it muck up the feel of the game? For the record, I have been involved in cross-line play before; I've had an Inquisitor PC hanging around with the Deathwatch Kill-Team I GM for more than once.

Personally, I'd see no issue from a role perspective. Presuming the other pc's are cool with Kroot, having Kroot is not an issue. The real problem is that, in the end, BC is a game about people who either worship or are touched by Chaos. The alignment system is fundamental to how the game is played, as is infamy, mutations and corruption. Presuming she doesn't want to play a chaos follower, she presumably doesn't want to take part of those features, which presents a huge mechanical headache.

However, chaos is not evil. Yes, it's side has bad people. Who kill, plunder and do other unpleasant things. Just like the Imperium is a fascistic theocratic dictatorship that had an institutionalized system of planetary genocide as a standard response to apostasy, practices class-based oppression, has an almost wholly corrupt ruling class (seriously, nobles are more or less depraved by default) and has an administrative system that considers the death of entire systems full of people nothing more than a minor clerical error.

Chaos, meanwhile, can include:
People working for democracy (Tzeentch likes all change).
Heroic warriors that dream of chivalry on the battlefield, honorable combat and an age where wars are abandoned in favor of personal duels (Long as someone bleeds, Khorne's good).
Daring political and social mavericks eager to try new systems of governance, experience and the creation of systems to minimize human suffering (Slaanesh likes you long as you're groovin').

Would such people be outliers? Certainly, but I'd say that they'd be no more rare than any Imperial of note who could honestly be called a "good guy". And, unlike said Imperial citizen about to be crushed by a massive bureaucracy that exists to ensure no empathy ever survives within it, they actually have a chance of thriving and expanding their ideas before putting them into practice.

Basically, the chaos gods are not evil, merely alien beings dedicated utterly to their own portfolios. Khorne doesn't give a **** whether you're slaughtering serial killers or babies, long as someone's dying. He'll grant you the same amount of power either way. Well, he might actually grant more power to the guy who goes after the serial killers, because he's also the god of martial honor.

Hell, in 2 Dark Heresy games and 4 rogue trader games, the only time I can honestly say the group has been "good guys" is in Black Crusade. Which features a democratic sorcerer, an infoanarchist heretek and a renegade that touts freedom of religion.

So perhaps talk to your player, and the rest of your group, and see if what they want to play is people breaking free from the grasp of the Imperium and proceeding to truly try to do something good, or just a bunch of mustache twirling bad guys in it for the pillaging, the murder and the fried baby breakfasts.

As long as it's not the latter, I think your player should be able to play just as good a character as if she played a member of the Imperium. And if it is the latter, I don't think being a kroot is going to make it much more bearable for her. The game would still be about pillaging and dipping infants in boiling oil.

Also, just to point it out: Kroot tend to be amoral, mercenary bird monsters that kill anything or anyone for guns, and then eat the dead for personal strength. Personally, I don't see how working FOR a bunch of baby eating sociopaths, in exchange for guns and dead people food, makes you that much better a being than the baby eating sociopaths.

Reverend mort said:

Still, even if they try to do something truly good, I don't think any kind of 100% carebear attitude is gonna float in the vortex. It's still very much dog-eat-dog, and even "nice" pcs will have to dip into the less palatable extremes of the moral spectrum (but not any less or any more than Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader or even Deathwatch) or get trampled by all those that don't have the same moral quandaries as they do. They can be fallen heroes or well-intentioned extremists, but not paladins.

But I mostly agree with what mort said, however. All over the galaxy, humans are still humans, and not all Chaos worshippers are Dawn of War Soulstorm style cultists (www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JrtFazaS7g). In that regard, I really like Dan Abnett's books, which pretty much always represents Chatic societies as weird, but not that different from imperial societies.

K0balt said:

There's a plenty wide margin between "I'm gonna try to build a fair, equal and just society" and "I'm gonna try to build paradise out of rainbows while hurting nobody". Yes, it's dog eat dog world. And the biggest dog makes the rules, even if those rules are "No more slaves" "Stop with the wanton murder". In other words, build a huge ******* warband, claim a few planets, get a bunch of ships and then impose your truly nice will by shooting people who break your rules. In the grand scheme of 40k, that still makes just about the nicest person ever. Doesn't deviate far from the standard BC campaign structure either!

And yes, obviously running around the Vortex being nice isn't gonna be an unchallenged game where the right choice is always the easiest, but I personally find that moral dilemmas that aren't black and white, with white being right, are far more interesting. That said, if you got enough skill, smarts and rampant luck, it's quite possible to survive in something like the Vortex while compromising very little on your morals. It's harder than diamonds, but you could do it, and the challenges would make it all the more satisfying.

Also, aren't Paladins just well-intentioned extremists?

Reverend mort said:

Konrad Curze style! But I don't think he qualified as a "nice person" (nicest maye, but very much debatable). I don't like to deal in morals at all: I think the "morals" of someone living in the 40th millenium are twisted and weird enough to be completely alien to us. Every space battle is a genocide on a gigantic scale (and that doesn't seem to bother people too much), the interdiction of science, research, progress, societal change, something we couldn't even imagine nowadays, Exterminatus would be like the US resorting to nukes every time it invaded a country and had to leave in a hurry. Actual, physical, intervening gods also change the deal. In short: **** "morals", create your own.