I had a disagreement with a member of my deathwatch group. I'm the GM and I said one of our members is a girl(since she is a girl). The member said thats impossible. I said he was kidnapped on a mission and for god knows why they gave him a sex change. Because of this she never removes any armor around anyone to prevent them from finding out. He says still impossible. Then I asked, If a Space Marine gets a sex change he's still a man? What do you think of this

Slaaneshi abomination. Purge with fire.

Personal opinion? I'm siding with the player.

That being said, I've got $1 that this threat is going to become a battleground any time now.

Can anyone hear the creaking sound of ceramite under the strain of over a ton of raw, steroid inflated meat? Awolf is on his way…

Like this is a serious question. I have two girls in my group that want to be girls. One will rage quit basically if she can't be. but then one side of my players is like NO BECAUSE LORE SAYS OTHERWISE.

This is actually a question that comes up a lot, believe it or not, and I know from personal experience that it can be a massive issue for groups.

There are a number of threads on these here forums that talk about it, and many of them tend to end up as flame wars between "Female marines are okay!" and "Nuh huh! Lore says otherwise!".

It's honestly worth your time to go through the archives, looking for these threads (largely in Gamemasters and the core Deathwatch page, from memory) and read through all of the solutions posted, cause there have been quite a lot. There are a lot of issues with all of them, you'll need to just find the one that works for your group.

The most common suggestion you'll find is playing an Inquisitor or Sister of Battle, using the Dark Heresy Ascension rules. They tend to be pretty overpowered, but if your ladies are the sort who are more interested in roleplay rather than having the biggest numbers, there shouldn't be an issue. You can look at changing the lore to suit, which will cause a lot of arguments amongst the purists. I've suggested before allowing female Deathwatch chapter serfs to enter missions as vehicle pilots - they might not be as personally powerful as an Astartes, but when you put them in a Razorback or a Stormraven, it kinda evens out

If you were more interested in equality, I could *coughcough feedback would be nice as well as outsourcing playtesting* suggest that you check out my Unified 40k rpf rules that I'm working on, which would allow your players to bring in humans at about a similar level to the astartes. But that's just a crazy and really good suggestion from someone as intelligent as they are handsome. Please do not make the obvious connection and follow up insult from that statement, it'll demean us both

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=213&efcid=3&efidt=668600

Ultimately, it is your game and you and your group should play it in the way that is most fun to you, regardless of what a bunch of canonistas on a web forum have to say about it.

That said however, I do think you are losing some of the flavor of the setting if you introduce something like female Space Marines into the game. Even if you stick with just Deathwatch rules, it is a small thing to say that the female characters are still Sisters of Battle. The Adeptas Sororitas are pretty cool and can add a lot of flavor to a game.

If your players are open to playing fast and loose with the lore and you don't mind changing the setting though, you could always introduce previously unknown chapters of Space Marines that are all female. Maybe even have it involve the Lost Primarchs.

Hadesdrew said:

Your best bet will be to tell the player that you're altering the 'official' lore for your game (as the GM, your word can override anything written in the books). I'd personally go with the idea that female space marines have always existed as a largely unmentioned minority (rarely more than 10% of any Chapter) rather than a special snowflake sex change origin to explain the two characters.

Ok so I took the make her an inquisition idea. Gave her plus 10 to all stats, more votes in any decision (like two votes instead of one), worse armor, lowered toughness like 20, gave her +3 psy rating, and 1.5X requisition for each mission. Keeps standard pskyer chart, gets deathwatch and spacemarine charts too. Was going to make her a special chapter chart for inquisition. He proceeded to quit imediately because there was a girl in the group.

Hadesdrew said:

A word of warning, the +3 Psy Rating is pretty hardcore, psykers can wreck things pretty badly in my experience as is. That would put them high on the damage output and low on the damage threshold chart for certain. Good luck!

As for the person quitting, his loss, not yours.

Actually, the /tg/ board on 4chan had a discussion about this a few weeks ago. We came to the conclusion that your best bet for having a female character who is close to on par with the Astartes without resorting to Ascension is to take the Black Templar chapter, fluff it as a Sister of Battle Palatine, and provide Sororita relics and cybernetics to bring her up to par with a Space Marine or replicate the marine's gear/implants. Then you just limit the specialties, as there are no Sororita psykers or techmarines. Apothecary is fine as a Hospitaler.

Gaire said:

See I couldn't do that because she's a pskyer. Currently she's a raven guard psyker.

Gaire said:

As much as I fear the fact that something came from 4chan, this seems like a solid idea. It places the characters on par with the rest of the group and uses some reasonable fluff as to how she got there.

Now the trick to stay within the fluff is to figure out why the Sisters are hanging out with the Ordo Xenos, or vice versa (which isn't too hard to overcome, but should be considered IMO).

On this very forum I've seen examples of "reskinned" deathwatch classes. e.g. An Inquisitorial genetically enhanced biomancer who statwise is a librarian. No mechanical change even required, just respray and play.

Here's the star trek background answer for you.

During warp travel, a small group of Raven Guard are buffetted by a warp storm into a super rare anomaly there Geller field flickers breifly and they are forced out of warp. Amazingly a small number of the crew seemed to have been replaced by a female version of themselves. One of them was a Batttle brother themself and they are suprised as surprised to be surrounded by 'male' marines as the rest of the battle brothers are surpised to have a one of theirs become a sister.

The new found sister is contained untill a surprisingly near Inquisitor comes aboard. The Inquisitor explains that in strictest confidence that he is a member of Ordo Dimensis. A secret ordo that monitors and defends against threats from entire alternative dimensions.These are almost impossible to reach but it seems that many are so closely tied that the events are same, people are the same, often with only one small change, one slight decision or chance event in the past. It seems that the new battle sister is from what the Inquisitor calls universe 63, identical but for the fact that, by mere chance of biology the Emperor of their Universe is an Emperess which has changed the Imperium to being entirely matriachial. Rather than waste the resource and the Inquisitor pulls some strings to allow the new found Battle sister to serve in the equally secretive Deathwatch.

Long story short if a player doesn't want to play a male and want's to play a Space Marine then you might have come up with a crazy answer but the 40k galaxy is a massive place with lots of weird sci-fi going on.

Hadesdrew said:

Do not mix Ascension with anything. Psychic Inquisitors are broken. Psychic Inquisitors are about 500 times better at psychic-ing than Librarians.

That being said I wasn't clear if you just told the female player "you're a girl so your character is too" or if she requested playing a female abomination and you were trying to be obliging. I'm glad it was the latter!

There are any number of reasons a Palatine would be with Ordo Xenos, not the least being because an Ordo Xenos Inquisitor requisitioned her for his retinue.

Also the guy quit because there was a girl PLAYER in the group? I'm sure he's very popular with the ladies. *headdesk*

Kshatriya said:

He bears the mighty Sleazegal, the god of all neck-beards on his face, though.

Hmm… either "This is my world, and there are female Space Marines" without going for weird sex changes, or just go with the whole thing that SPace Marines are guys. Then explain to the female players who cannot play male Space Marines that their gender makes no difference. Though there are no female Space Marines, even if there were they would be exactly the same as male Marines personality wise (or much difference physically either, after the transformations their bodies go through).

I've often pondered if something like this is what happened to the two Lost Legions (or at least their Primarchs)…

Doubt it.

Geneseed is based off of Primarch DNA which is based on the Emperors DNA. The Emperor was a man.

Activating, growing, and controling geneseed inside a person requires male hormones, not enough of the right ones or too much of the wrong ones and supplicant dies.

Space Marines continue to receive chemical and hormonal treatment for the rest of their life to keep their body and organs functioning correctly and to stave off rejection, hormones not agreeing with geneseed would continue to complicate this.

Sexual dimorphism in human beings would mean a "female space marine" would be inferior to a male space marine, the bones wouldn't grow as large and be weaker, muscle mass would be smaller and less efficient, bone and muscle mass would begin to deteriorate with age (menopause) without ever increasing amounts of hormone treatment above and beyond what normal space marines receive, and there would be less room in the main body cavity (ribs) for all the organs. In a universe where a person can be executed for attempting to understand how a light bulb works I doubt anyone would be "touchy-feely" enough to create an inferior female brand of space marines just to make that half of our species happy.

(caveat to stall off rage-responses)
But, if you want to do it in your games I can't stop you. Although I prefer to play the game based upon the established setting myself.

Well… I would imagine that any process for creating female Space Marines would deal with those issues. This of course would mean, as I said, that the physical differences between female and male Space Marines would be minimal (a little bit of internal and external plumbing). Basically: While Space Marines are freaky males, if they could be created, they would be even freakier females, and without a rather intimate and inappropriate inspection below the waist you probably wouldn't be able tell them apart.

It's highly unlikely. Biologically speaking, males typically make superior warriors. Why would the Emperor create anything but the best of the best? Nobody bring that Golden Aquilas trash in here.

Are people really that uncomfortable with gender-swapped characters? Really?

I mean okay I can see guys (particularly American guys) being completely idiotic and absurd about it, but ladies? Really?

Oh, I realize I was unclear. I don't really care either way about gender-swapped marines. It's just the concept of one of the two lost chapters being female marines mildly rustles my jimmies.

Kshatriya said:

It's funny, but I've met a number of female gamers that outright refuse to play female characters, and a number of male players outright refusing to play male characters. All of those people are straight, fairly confidant in their sexuality…. just have a preference.

Although, I also know people who refuse to gender-swap or play in games with gender-swapped charcters. They rarely seem to last long in my gaming community.