So the book has many effects that are reliant upon your devotion to a God. What if one were to stay unaligned, as I plan to with my Alpha Legionnaire? For instance, the mutations... many of them have effects that are God-based.

My Legionnaire's goal is to gain enough infamy before hitting the 100 corruption threshold to lead a Black Crusade as an un-ascended Champion. Basically, he's going old-school Alpha Legionnaire via Dan Abnett's Legion , bring down the Imperium to starve Chaos.

I'm going to avoid aligning myself with any one God.

Staying unaligned has three benefits: Firstly, you can roll on the Gifts table twice and take the result you like better (assuming it's a gift rather than a punishment you are receiving). Secondly, you can gain access to Exalted psychic powers, which is obviously not that helpful if you're not a psyker. And thirdly, you likely have an easier time allying with others - most dedicated heretics can suffer working with or under an Unaligned character, but will have greater trouble allying or serving an enemy power.

igotsmeakabob!! said:

The main difference I see is that you can't really specialize that character and so he'll have to be a kind of jack-of-all-trades to be able to avoid alignment in the long run. It could of course be pretty fun to play an Alpha Legionary who is trying to stay away from Chaos but is slowly being corrupted through his own actions.

Gurkhal said:

We're doing the point-buy method for characteristics, so I ended up having a character with 45Ws 35Bs, most other stats at 40ish 'cept for 50 fellowship. Yeah, it doesn't look *too* difficult to stay with the narrow Unaligned path, considering my character will be leader-material (the better to make contacts with) and decent with a blade. It looks like I'll have a healthy dip into most of the Gods this way... hopefully I can keep him effective in combat as well (but I'll be taking the Minions of Chaos talents as well, another Marine in tier 3 should help that).

There is also the advancement cost thing....You'll be able to advance easier in a wider variety, but that was mentioned with jack of all trades comments.

I've been thinking about this, and I make a difference between unaligned and undivided. Members of the Black Legion and Word Bearers as a whole are probably worshippers of Chaos undvided while The Night Haunter's legion is unaligned. I'd say work on a gifts table for Undivided, using the existant gifts table I'd treat them mostly the same however and leave it to an In game RP decision on the player's part which he/she wanted.

You could also bounce off of being aligned with some of the gods, after all if you don't pick up the mark, there isn't a loss for going unaligned again, it would be really hard to do this more than once though.

Gurkhal said:

This isn't true at all. I've run through some character creations [for giggles mostly] to make a character focused on melee that remains unaligned. It did this by balancing Khorne and Slaanesh advancements against each other. It is easy to make a specialized character but stay unaligned.