I have a player that wants to play a fallen Apothecary, similar to Variel the Flayer in Dembski-Bowden's Night Lords trilogy. I want him to start with a Narthecium on his arm, so I am looking for some advice on how to develop rules for one.

I was thinking, A Narthecium can:

-add +10 to Medicae tests
-have 6 shots of a drug, stimm, or whatever the player chooses to install, administered as a half action
-maybe something to do with stopping blood loss?
-can be used as weapon (reduced chain sword profile)
-can use the Reductor feature and extract geneseed (must pass Medicae test)

You can lift the one out of Deathwatch directly.

+20 Medicae. Raises the Threshold at which the patient is considered Light Damaged to 3 times his Toughness Bonus and doubles the amount of damage healed by first aid. 10 doses of any 1 drug.

Ah, didn't think to check previous 40K RPG systems.

I am starting my whole 40k RPG experience with Black Crusade.

Thanks.

I think a lot of the bonuses are only when dealing with Space Marines, since it's designed with their heavily modified systems in mind. Don't give even a heavily mutated human a marine-sized dose of anything... unless you didn't like them to begin with.

You could stat it in various ways, depending on what type or the age of it. Having it count as an arm-mounted chainblade+med kit+stimm injector that gives a further bonus to medicae tests to extract geneseed could work. However you interpret it, don't let it's bonus stack with a med kit, that'll make it WAY too powerful.

While it's not explicitly described, I'd assume that a main benefit of the Narthecium would be laparoscopic abilities, meaning the armour will have special "keyhole" ports the Narthecium can provide surgery through with small tendrils. Having to remove the whole suit while on a battlefield would kind of suck...

Cifer said:

This is something dabbled in with the Apothecary-focussed sections of Gav Thorpe's Purging of Kadillus - during the battle of Koth Ridge, Apothecary Nestor is depicted tending to numerous injuries and casualties amongst both the Dark Angels forces and the human PDF aiding them. A lot of Nestor's work is diagnosis and administration of drugs and short-term treatment (administering a resin filler to the chest cavity of a Devastator who suffered a major rib-plate fracture, and dosing him with an adrenal supplement to compensate for his damaged secondary heart - the first is through a breach in the breastplate, the other through the carotid artery), with another memorable moment being resetting a battle-brother's dislocated shoulder by overriding the armour functions so they force the joint back into position. Numerous Astartes injuries can be suffered to their implants as well, so ensuring that implanted organs are functioning properly (or rather, not malfunctioning dangerously) is a major part of their duties. An Apothecary's battlefield medicine is very much an extreme form of first aid relying on the absurd resilience of their patients and the rigidity of their armour to keep them up and fighting.

It's also made clear that Apothecaries are ill-suited to treating mortals. They have the knowledge, but the drugs and tools they employ aren't designed for use on normal humans - for example, the standard sedative that Apothecaries employ would likely put a normal human in a coma, while their combat stimulants would drive a human body into fatal overdrive.