My players are running rampant through the vast source material and coming up with some crazycool ideas… and I'd rather make it happen than say no. So once again, how would you do it?

Peer (Mechanicus), war-related backgrounds, cybernetics-related backgrounds, born on a forge world, buy cybernetics at character creation. Done and done. :-)

eBarbarossa said:

What he said.

And a good reason why he is now a RT since Skitari are basically Mechanicus Imperial Guard and pretty low on the pecking order of things.

the augmentetist somehting kit is pretty good too.

thanks for the above. still getting my head round everything, so please forgive obvious questions !

also I saw the augmentacist, shame it's a 2nd rank alternate career instead of a starting one.

UberMutant said:

Well, it's probably easy enough to fudge the RT rules into being an Explorator ship. Which is… pretty much the same thing to a point. The Captain? Well, the officers of the Skitarii are not lobotomised, and hints in some of the various books hint they could potentially be indoctrinated into the Machine God's Cult too. Voila!

Be some pretty hefty fudging unless its a small scout ship (Transport or Raider sized) since Explorator ships are going to be commanded by Master Explorators and other tech priests. Skitari are basically the protection units (along with Preatorians and Combat Servitors). A Skitari officer aboard an Explorator ship is going to be like an Imperial Guard Commander aboard a Naval ship. He's of rank but equally of no importance and has no say in how things are run.

UberMutant said:

Like I said, it's not impossible for a Skitarii to be inducted into the machine cult. So he possibly could be. Especially with an elite advance and if you start at at least rank 2 for the augment AC.

There could always be a skitarii rank equal to fleet captain. After all, Explorators are men of faith and science, not commanders.

The Explorator's mandate is not all that different from a Rogue trader's if you think about it. That being the case, A Skitaari Praetor (Captain) could have been best "Fit for purpose" as a Starship commander. (The AM are not notably sentimental as to where they get their "material"). The "Warrant" would of course be issued by the AM and as such would be a little different from a standard imperial warrant. After all: Captain Murphy is "Product". We can't have our product turning against us can we?

Allow me to lob a spanner into the works… there is another possibility.

Rogue Trader dynasties are hereditary. It is possible that a 'lost heir' got inducted into the Skitarii somehow. Given the sometimes vicious infighting between rival dynasties, and the labyrinth that is the Imperial bureaucracy, it could happen. A hidden heir could get lost, or get deliberately dumped on a forge world (logical if you have enemy: Ecclesiarchy), or the schola could simply assign one of their students to the Mechanicus in ignorance of his/her vaunted bloodline.

The Mechanicus - once alerted to the situation - might well think it a worthwhile trade to swap a Skitarii officer (or even a soldier) for an allied Rogue Trader. There are ways to impose leverage on a former member of the Cult, from blackmail to brainwashing to special implants, and an 'independent' Rogue Trader provides an asset that no Magos-Explorator has: plausible deniability. Yeah, guess who's going to get asked to do all the really crap missions?

Just my 2 thrones worth,

- V.

Your spanner has landed closest to the mark so far.

Thanks again for everyone's thinkmeat. I really appreciate everyone's input, my knowledge of the setting is still very general and all the little details that people are bringing up ise helping immensely.