I started writing this stuff as a mini 40k supplement in my spare time just before the birth of my son back in December 2011. I thought "oh, I'll just finish it off during my paternity leave while the baby's sleeping…" Anyone with young kids will know how ridiculously naive that thought was! The original plan was to write a whole bunch of backgrounds, a couple of alternate ranks, an Ascended career and a short armoury section. Suffice to say, I got a few backgrounds in and then spent the next year up to my eyes in nappies/diapers…

Anyway, rather than never put it out there, I thought it may as well see the light of day. Feel free to use it as you wish. If some brave soul wants to finish it off, be my guest!

Intelligence gathering in the Imperium

The Imperium is a vast empire which consists of countless smaller empires. The threats it faces are so diverse and its geographical scale so colossal that centralised intelligence gathering efforts at anything other than the broadest strategic scale are doomed to failure.

At many junctures in the history of the Imperium, attempts have been made to consolidate the control of humanity’s countless intelligence gathering agencies. Typically, a great reformer on Terra would rise to power, and earnestly seek to bring all secret intelligence work under one roof; only to discover that the whole of Terra was incapable of providing a roof large enough to contain the raw data subsequently obtained. Indeed, on the few occasions where such attempts were made, theintelligence services created rapidly became unworkable, as they became mired in minutiae, fatally slow to react to changing situations occurring thousands of light years from Terra.

Given the enormous bureaucratic obstacles to the creation of any centralised intelligence agency within the Imperium, it is unsurprising that espionage is carried out by tens of thousands of balkanised organisations operating at a local level to gather intelligence about specific opponents of humanity operating in fixed galactic regions.

Such an approach has its merits and flaws. On the one hand, the Imperium rapidly responds to extremely serious new threats; where it cannot destroy a foe militarily immediately, the local Imperial authorities tend to excel in the formation of highly specialised intelligence gathering agencies, often consisting or personnel drawn from a number of different Imperial organisations. These “ad hoc” formations, usually created in response to a monumentally powerful hostile opponent (tyranid hive fleet, Ork Waaagh, Black Crusade, etc) or alternatively assembled during the course of a major offensive Imperial campaign (such as a crusade) have a remarkable track record in gathering relevant military intelligence and it distributing it rapidly to those who need it most. The quality of the Imperium’s intelligence gathering efforts, as is so often the case with humanity, reach their peak in wartime.

However, on the other hand, the lack of central coordination of strategic or political intelligence, and the large number of disparate organisations employing spies and other agents renders the Imperium’s intelligence communities vulnerable to squabbles, infighting and the eternal problem of pointless internal intrigue, especially in regions that lack major external threats. Peaceful Imperial sectors of space are invariably rife with wars of assassination conducted by the covert branch of one major Imperial organisation against another.

Given the wide variety of Imperial organisations that employ clandestine intelligence gathering departments, it is also unsurprising that the Imperium as a whole is rather poorly served in the matter of intelligence analysis. Most analysis of intelligence gathered by Imperial agents is conducted by organisations that tend to have a specific institutional bias. For example, intelligence gathered by covert agents of the Ordo Malleus will always be viewed through the paranoid prism of the Daemonhunter, meaning that otherwise valuable information regarding the political intentions of, say, a potentially rebellious planetary governor, may be discarded or misinterpreted as operationally irrelevant due to the narrow focus of the analyst.

Major Imperial espionage institutions

The Imperial Guard military intelligence divisions

The Imperial Guard is not primarily designed to acquire intelligence, but when operating on a large enough scale has an excellent track record in the creation of military intelligence divisions of high quality.

The Munitorum does not itself create or staff specialist intelligence branches from among the Guard regiments it recruits. There are no formal standing espionage sections of the Imperial Guard. However, Guard Officers, once they reach sufficient seniority, usually set up informal intelligence gathering units from within the forces under their direct control in order to fight particular military campaigns. Creative and intelligent Warmasters invariably direct the formation such units themselves as one of their first steps upon obtaining command of any major military operation.

The normal scenario is that a Warmaster, upon being granted control of a particular campaign or crusade, will usually appoint an officer to head up a military intelligence division, tasked with providing strategic information to the Warmaster and his high command. The charter of such an organisation is strictly limited to authority granted by the Warmaster for the prosecution of that single campaign. Within these limits, these agencies operate as they please.

The head of such a division can be drawn from any number of sources: the Departmento Tacticae, a highly specialised general staff subdivision of the Imperial Guard staffed by particularly brilliant strategic thinkers, is often utilised by Warmasters as a recruiting ground for the heads of such ad hoc intelligence agencies. Alternatively, the political officers of the Commisariat can step in to leadintelligence gathering operations, particularly during military campaigns where subversion of Imperial Guardsmen is a legitimate fear. Sometimes, a Warmaster will rely upon a trusted ally from his past military career, such as a junior officer, or on rarer occasions, a civilian friend.

Such intelligence divisions are invariably purely military in scope and operation, albeit often tinged by a degree of informality and unorthodox thinking traditionally absent from the Imperial military. Their servants are often highly devoted and driven; they have a clear enemy, and they work with their comrades to destroy that enemy. They (correctly) regard themselves as an elite within the Imperial Guard, and enjoy their high status. They are less prone to intrigue against their colleagues and superiors than many organisations, and they are very conscious that there is “a war on” and wish to ensure that their energies are focussed solely upon ending it quickly.

These agencies are highly specialist, and dedicated to the theatre in which they operate and the foe they face. A classic historical example would be the intelligence agency set up by Warmaster Hudra during the Drellan Insurgency, a campaign fought over a subsector-sized region of unexplored space adjacent to the Drepana Sector during the 39th Millenium. Known as “Room XXIV,” Hudra’s agency was headed by an eccentric young colonel seconded from the Departmento Tacticae, and staffed by an odd collection of invalided commissars, sanctioned psykers, and officers from a number of regiments with a speciality in infiltration and scouting. Room XXIV, although only containing around a hundred staff, was instrumental in the destruction of the Luthule Xenoform during the 30 year campaign, and the reintegration of over a dozen worlds back into the Imperial fold.

As campaigns increase in size, so does the size and complexity of the espionage organisations which serve them. Where a true Imperial Crusade is formed, it is not uncommon for a number of such organisations to flower, each under the auspice of an individual Lord-General. Occasionally, such agencies can come into conflict, as squabbles develop between subordinate covert agents over how the campaign should be prosecuted.

Imperial Guard Intelligence Background

The Imperial Guard Intelligence Divisions are regarded, in the Imperium’s espionage communities, as at best gifted amateurs, enthusiastically dabbling in short term, behind-the-lines wartime derring-do operations under limited charters restricted to a particular warzone. With relatively little guidance from older, more established intelligence agencies, each division discovers anew ancient forms of intelligence tradecraft, improvising every step of the way, but rarely reaching the pinnacles of sophistication found within, say, the higher echelons of the Ordos Inquisitorial. However, this being said, the Intelligence Divisions are a fertile recruitment ground for the Inquisition, with many Inquisitors finding those “gifted amateurs” who rise to the top of the divisions to be perfect for initiation into the darker arts of their trade.

Home World: Any

Cost: 300XP

Career: Any save Tech Priest

Effects

Apply the following changes to your character

Characteristics: Increase your Perception by 5.

?Skills: Choose ONE of the following, to represent your speciality within the Intelligence Division you served in: Ciphers (Imperial Guard), Demolition, Inquiry, Interrogation, Security, Shadowing, Speak Language (pick one).

?Talents: You were recruited because of your specialist skills to take part in a vast war against a particular foe. Your focus on this foe has given you cause to hate them with a passion. You gain the Hatred talent, and may pick any foe to represent the target of the war you took part in.

Naval Intelligence

In contrast to the intelligence agencies of the Imperial Guard, which are typically informal, small and adaptable, forming and dissolving as required, Naval Intelligence is a monolithic organisation, a formal division of the Imperial Navy staffed and commanded largely by second-rate officers not quite suited to front line command.

The Imperial Navy’s intelligence requirements are highly technical. They need to know the tonnage of enemy vessels, the power outputs of their weapons, their home ports, their means of egress into Imperial Space. Naval Intelligence therefore requires a high degree of centralisation of data, particularly as the Imperial Navy’s spacefaring enemies are far more mobile than those typically facing the Imperial Guard. After all, a warp capable vessel is capable of skipping from Sector to Sector, so the Imperial Navy must be capable of maintaining a database available to a number of Sector commands.

The principle duty of Naval Intelligence is to monitor and update the Fleet Shipping Registries, a task undertaken in conjunction with a large number of mind-bogglingly dull Administratum agencies. The agency also prepares and updates “D’Ayne’s Fighting Ships of the Imperium,” D’Ayne’s Civil Ships of the Imperium” and “D’Ayne’s Xenos vessels” a series of multivolume works that attempt to condense the fleet registries into a portable (at least on a ship kilometres long) format accessible by Imperial spacefarers.

The structure of Naval Intelligence is identical to that of the Navy itself, as Naval Intelligence is an overt specialism within the service; in the same way that an officer may specialise in gunnery or power systems, an officer may choose (or be selected) to specialise in intelligence. Strangely, within the Navy, the Intelligence specialty is not well regarded, being seen as being on a par with bilge maintenance-a necessary but dull part of the Navy’s duties. As such, those who choose to work within the field are often rather sedentary and unimaginative in comparison to the decisive and august individuals who rise to command front line vessels.

To a far greater extent than the informal and freewheeling intelligence agencies of the Imperial Guard, then, Naval Intelligence is a quill and papyrus agency, staffed by pen pushers, deskbound sailors either unable to achieve or incapable of achievingtrue space command. It is possible to aspire to and build a career in Naval Intelligence, and indeed entire generations of dull, respectable and uninspiredscholarly Naval families have built their fortunes on doing just this.

Naval Intelligence does however contain some of the best technical analysts in the Imperium. While Naval Intelligence officers are far less likely to engage in the cloak and dagger covert operations beloved of the Inquisition or the Officio Assasinorum, and are frankly useless at gathering basic human intelligence, they excel within their limited specialty of assessing Naval threats to the Imperium. If you need someone to estimate the likely strength of a pirate squadron based upon the volume of its discarded bilgewater, or to provide details of the fifteen local rogue spaceports capable of servicing an Iconoclast class raider, then Naval Intelligence is where one turns.

A typical Naval Intelligence operation can be found operating in the Sargassid Nebula, a vast shining cloud of expanding verdant gas in the Segmentum Obscuras. The Nebula covers an area equivalent to thousands of square light years, and contains hundreds of stars glimmering dully in its depths. Most of the worlds within the Nebula are uninhabitable, but the region has long been a haven to raiders and pirate fleets, which is particularly troubling, as it borders three heavily populated Imperial Sectors. The Imperial Navy operates a small space station midway within the Nebula, which contains a small astropathic choir and approximately forty Naval intelligence officers. These officers dutifully record the comings and goings of pirate fleets, tracking them using a series of ancient covert automated satellites. The station is cleverly concealed, but its principle duty is to relay data about fleet movements to the Battlefleet commands of adjacent Sectors.

Naval Intelligence Background Package

The Imperial Navy is an aggressive and combative organisation, forever seeking to burn or seize the ships of its enemies. Those young officers seeking glory or exalted rank in the service of His Imperial Majesty’s Navy tend to jostle for the command of a starship likely to come into contact with humanity’s foes. Given this martial culture, intelligence work is not regarded as a glamorous calling among the myriad Naval training institutions. Those Naval officers who specialise in intelligence have often ended up in this role by chance, or through want of initiative. As such, they tend to be earnest scholars rather than aggressive warriors, specialising in intelligence analysis rather than intelligence gathering, feverishly pawing through the ship’s logs of recaptured space hulks, or obsessively speculating as to the likely warp emergence point of an enemy fleet.

Home World: Any except Feral World

Career: Adept only

Cost: 200XP

Effects

Apply the following changes to your character

Characteristics: Decrease your willpower by 5 to represent the blow to your ego and career taken by being transferred to the backwater that is Naval Intelligence.

?Skills: You gain the skills Scholastic Lore (Astromancy) and Common Lore (Spacecraft).

?Talents: You gain the talent Peer (Imperial Navy) but due to the relatively low status of Naval Intelligence within the navy, this operates to give +5 fellowship rather than +10.

?Special: At the GM’s discretion, you also may gain a unique piece of starting gear: the uniform of an ensign in Naval Intelligence. This smart uniform immediately identifies you as a member of the Imperial Navy…albeit one of an extremely junior rank from a minor and poorly regarded division.

The Adeptus Astartes

Many marine chapters regard intelligence gathering through covert espionage as beneath them. Most are content to rely upon either the astropathic pleas of Imperial citizens or the auguries of their Librarians to point them in the direction of the Imperium’s enemies. A respectable majority of the Astartes community see themselves as purely military and spiritual figures, and regard the operation of spy networks as inherently cowardly, the sign of a desire for worldly power and influence. As such, these chapters regard the use of secret agents as potentially being a breach of the spirit of the reforms which dissolved the ancient Legions.

However, for genetically modified killing machines, the Astartes make surprisingly efficient spymasters when they choose to adopt the role. More complete editions of the Codex Astartes contain chapters governing the classic use of intelligence gathering, propaganda, psychological warfare and disinformation. Indeed, in parts, Roboute Gulliman’s masterwork is one of the finest manuals on the tradecraft of espionage available within the Imperium.

More thoughtful chapters regard it as their duty to remain well informed regarding the foes they are likely to face, and the campaigns they are likely to fight in. The more sensible among them recognise that the Astartes themselves make poor spies when information can only be obtained through infiltration of existing human societies; their huge size, distinctive musculature and black carapace render them obviously inhuman. As such, they recognise that their ability to gather intelligence is hugely dependent upon unmodified human agents.

Astartes intelligence agencies are usually small, but intensely skilled, consisting of humans raised as chapter serfs and trained to operate within the wider Imperium or beyond in a variety of covert roles. These individuals have often been subjected to the same indoctrination as the Astartes themselves, and as such are usually fanatically loyal to their parent chapter. Usually they operate within a fixed geographical region near the chapter’s fortress monastery for years on end, infiltrating other Imperial organisations or settling near likely flashpoints.

The Astartes lifespan gives marine officers a longer term outlook than many human spymasters; those chapters which operate intelligence networks make extensive use of long term infiltration agents or “moles,” often to a far greater extent than other organisations. It is not uncommon for the dozen or so worlds closest to an Astartes fortress-monastery to be infiltrated all the way up to the Governor’s palace by fanatical Astartes agents.

Most Astartes intelligence gathering at chapter level is coordinated by a tripartite council consisting of the Chapter Master (who oversees all operations and has overall command) the Captain of the 10th Company (who oversees all stealth and scouting operations) and a Chapter serf who oversees the Chapter’s network of non-Astartes spies.

A typical example of an Astartes network is operated by the Storm Warden Chapter, based in the Calixis Sector. From their homeworld of Sacris, the Storm Wardens control a network of over a thousand agents across the Drusus Marches Subsector, with agents clustered in worlds near to Sacris itself. This is a largely passive network, which silently observes ship traffic approaching Sacris. However, more highly placed agents monitor threats to the Calixis Sector as a whole, as the Storm Wardens know that they are likely the Sector’s last line of defence, and obsessively spy upon military threats to the Sector. They regard these threats as primarily being the Orks of ‘Undred ‘Under Teef in the Koronus Expanse, and the risk that some enemy force within the Jericho Reach will cross the galaxy via the warp gate and rush headlong into the Calixis Sector.

In order to covertly monitor these threats, the Storm Warden have infiltrated long term agents into the Imperial Navy’s officers in Port Wander. These “moles” pay particular attention to the traffic entering and leaving the Warp Gate into the Jericho Reach.

The Storm Wardens also employ a key agent, Khamlesh Krane, who travels the length and breadth of the Koronus Expanse. Whilst ostensibly a Rogue Trader from the ancient Krane dynasty of the Mandragora Sector, he is in fact a Storm Warden Chapter Serf operating under a false warrant, provided with a battered raider vessel captured by the chapter during anti-pirate operations. His ship, the Cobalt, nowsubstantially upgunned by the Chapter’s techmarines, is crewed by fanatically loyal native Sacrisans, many of whom are former Storm Warden neonates who in some way failed part of the Astartes recruitment process. A charismatic and likeable man, Krane pays particular attention to major military threats like the Orks of the Expanse, the Rak’Gol Marauders and indeed some of the larger and more independent Rogue Trader fleets. He often employs other Rogue Traders to gather information for him, and over his forty year career, has created a vast network of spies across the region.

Adeptus Astartes infiltration agent background package

The Astartes play a long game in their intelligence gathering efforts, relying upon the talents of a large pool of dedicated agents schooled in long term infiltration. These agents are invariably indoctrinated into the Marines’ own chapter cult as lay members, and as such are unswervingly loyal to their superhuman masters, willing to endure decades of highly stressful secret lives just so they can send a single warning message to their homeworld. However, they often have the comfort of knowing that their actions will have contributed in some small way to the salvation of an entire world, or even an entire sector, and however dreadful their long secret war, they will be the first to rejoice when the Angels of Death fall from the heavens in fire and thunder.

Home World: Any. Normally if you have a particular chapter in mind, this should be the same as the chapter homeworld: for example, if you want your character to be a long term infiltration agent employed by the Storm Wardens, you might use the feral world package.

Career: Any except Tech Priest or Imperial Psyker.

Cost: 300XP

Effects

Apply the following changes to your character

?Skills: You gain the skills Charm, Deceive and Ciphers (Specific Space Marine Chapter)

?Talents: You gain a single Peer Talent of your choice, to represent the regard with which you are held by the organisation you have infiltrated at the behest of your superhuman masters. If you are ever revealed to be a spy, you will lose this talent.

Insanity Points: You gain 1D5 insanity points to represent the stress of being a long term spy, having to live a double life and hiding your true nature from those around you.

Commissariat Intelligence

The Commissars of the Departmento Munitorum operate a brutally effective intelligence service. By the standards of most Imperial intelligence agencies, their various intelligence divisions appear to lack ambition, restricting themselves purely tothe terms of work set out by their nominal charter: military counter espionage, internal security and all matters pertaining to military discipline. However, history has shown time and time again that they are prepared to step beyond this narrow set of parameters and act as a true political intelligence service when required.

All Commissars are high ranking commissioned officers of the Departmento Munitorum, empowered to provide a politically sound and fanatically loyal connection between the endlessly disparate practices of the various Imperial Guard Regiments, and the rigid command structure of the higher reaches of the strategic command.Commissars typically are recruited from among the veteran ranks of the Storm Trooper regiments, which itself recruits solely from the Schola Progenium. This background creates Imperial agents of near unparalleled reliability. Commissars are not merely fanatically loyal thugs, however; they are expected to exercise careful judgement in the exercise of their duties.

The primary duty of the Commissariat is to ensure the loyalty and efficiency of the Imperial Guard and the Imperial Navy. They will ensure this by any means at their disposal, and will not shy from utilising the most ruthless practices; flogging, execution, torture, even the literal decimation of entire regiments and ship’s crewsare all methods likely to be being currently employed at any given time somewhere in the vast Imperium. They watch carefully for signs of mutiny or disobedience within the ranks, and are expert at identifying and countering external infiltration of the Imperial militaries.

They are an excellent overt intelligence service, having little truck with the secretivemethods of some other agencies. Commissars, like the Arbites, believe in the power of overt displays, of charismatically winning over a crowed, or of cowing them into submission by terrifying displays of ruthlessness. However, their operatives are far from stupid, and, where necessary, are quite capable of acting as classic intelligence officers, recruiting agents from subject regiments or ships to infiltrate closed societies they themselves cannot penetrate. Such agents are typically ostensibly recruited for the purposes of serving within the S Companies, the Commisariat’s close protection and security detail, which consist of veteran guardsmen or naval ratings of proven loyalty. Not all S Company recruits are simple bodyguards or gaolers: many are secretly tasked to infiltrate their own regiments or ships with a view to providing information to Commissariat intelligence. Other S Company agents, particularly those serving in theatres with a history of mutiny or xenos subversion are recruited to act as a true “secret police” force, abducting suspects from the street, interrogating them and where necessary giving them the Emperor’s grace, all at the command of their political officers.

Commissariat Intelligence Background

The feared agents of Commissariat Intelligence, while usually not full Commissars themselves, are nevertheless loyal and deadly servants of the Imperium, typically empowered to carry out internal security missions at the behest of Commissariat high command. Distinguished by a simple silver “S” added to their usual dress uniform, the men and women of this largely reviled body secretly revel in their intimidating reputation, using it to further their objectives: quashing dissent, quelling mutinies and ensuring the loyalty of the average guardsman or naval rating. Although commonly perceived as being the Commissariat’s “bully boys,” standing dumbly behind a Commissar during an interrogation, carrying a beaten prisoner back to his cell, or dragging a suspected mutineer to an airlock, in fact they are as often as not recruited for their guile and wits, with the intention of infiltrating suspected traitorous units.

Home World: Any except Feral World.

Career: Guardsman, Assassin or Arbitrator

Cost: 300XP

Effects

Apply the following changes to your character

?Skills: You gain the skills Interrogation and Intimidate.

Characteristics: Most S Company agents are usually beefier than the average guardsman or rating. Add +5 to your strength.

Special: The average Imperial Guardsman or Imperial Naval rating regards S Company agents as a combination of stool pigeon and thug. They are despised for their easy duties and their habit of abducting their squadmates for pointless and terrifying interrogations. You suffer a -20 penalty to all fellowship tests when interacting with either Imperial Guardsmen or Naval Ratings.

General Espionage Backgrounds

The following backgrounds assume that the players want to run an Inquisitorial campaign, but to some extent, the background packages set out below are intelligence archetypes that can apply to any Imperial intelligence agency. For example, although Naval Intelligence are portrayed above as a collection of deskbound pen pushers, if you want your character, Commander Jaime Bahnde, to be a dashing, womanising planet hopping secret agent from that agency, then you can use one of the background packages below to flesh him out!

Watcher

The Inquisition has an intimidating reputation among the citizens of the Imperium. The organisation deliberately fosters this, creating a mood of paranoia among the masses. After all, if citizens fear informers, covert observers and eavesdroppers, then surely it must be the case that they will be more reluctant to agitate for freedom, for anarchy, for chaos?

In order to foster this incipient paranoia among its subjects, the Imperium’s Inquisitors employ specialist surveillance acolytes, skilled observers who blend seamlessly in with the street rabble, the better to secretly follow suspects and report upon their activities to their masters. A whole secret discipline of observation has been developed by the Inquisition; its adherents named “pavement artists,” “eyes,” “ears” or, more prosaically, “watchers.” Depending upon the inclinations of the individual Inquisitor, its dark arts will be employed in monitoring the actions of those it wishes to watch.

Such watchers often learn their skills in specialist training schools, practicing pulling front tails, vehicular observation in heavy traffic, or simple shadowing in crowds. Alternatively, some watchers are naturals who learned their skills the hard way, on the street, as pickpockets or paid informers, now working on the side of the angels for once. However you came into the service of your Inquisitor, you are now a crucial component of his entourage, responsible for the clandestine observation of those targets who would hide among the masses of humanity.

Career: Scum, Guardsman or Assassin

XP: 300

Effects

Apply all of the following changes to your character:

Skills: You gain the skills Shadowing and Silent Move as starting skills

Talents: You begin play with the Unremarkable Talent

Regionalist

The Inquisition’s wide ranging duties send them to many exotic locales. A million worlds means a hundred million cultures, a hundred million languages, and a billion or more cultural nuances for those who would ferment discord against the God-Emperor to conceal themselves within.

Many (though by no means all) Imperial agents come from deep within “mainstream” Imperial society. Perhaps they were officers in the military, psykers trained within the bosom of Terra, cosseted nobles or authoritarian enforcers. The more gifted among them recognise that their ability to penetrate many localised, introverted parts of Imperial society will always be compromised by their status as rank outsiders. After all, if you don’t speak the language, don’t know the proper forms of address, and can’t respect the local customs, what’s the point of even trying to remain covert?

As such, many Inquisitors-particularly those who operate large networks of information gatherers in specific sectors or subsectors-employ regional experts, those who can blend in with the locals, drink with them, talk and haggle with them in their own tongue. Many of these individuals are romantic figures, their skins tanned by strange suns, fond of weird food, and possessed of peculiar manners picked up on their travels. Perhaps they are locals themselves, recruited for their knowledge of their homeworld. Alternatively they may be academics, who travelled to the region or world to further their studies, and remained out of sheer love of the place. However they find their way into Inquisitorial service, they can go where their masters cannot, and as such will always be of use.

Career: Any except Tech-Priest

XP:200

Effects

First of all choose a particular world where you are a regional specialist. Then apply all of the following changes to your character:

Skills: You gain the Speak Language skill, though you may only have a human language, as opposed to that of any xenos race. You also gain a unique Common Lore skill that solely relates to the culture and recent history of the one particular world where they speak the same language.

Talents: You begin play with the Unremarkable Talent, though this only applies on the world you have chosen to specialise in.

There is some other stuff, but it's very fragmentary…rather than put the draft fragments up there, I'll stop there! Anyway, hope someone gets some use out of this lot…enjoy!

Interesting very interesting

This is very cool and I'll take it in a document to give my players new options for their characters, because it clearly gives a depth in the intelligence agencies of the Imperium that isn't always presented. Thank you very much for all that stuff, that is great and loyal work to the 40k universe!

I have to say, I love the idea of a Commissariat intelligence group. I might change them from S Company to S Division, but all the same. Great work.

Might want to work on those xp costs, though. Naval Intelligence is almost certainly overcosted.

Plushy said:

Thanks! You really think the Naval Intelligence background is overcosted, though? 200xp for 2 skills, a (modified) peer talent and a smart tailored uniform? I worried it was undercosted, if anything!

Lightbringer said:

Those skills aren't going to come up that often in play, and the penalty to Willpower is really going to hurt. The PC is trading 200xp for two skills that he'll use rarely, a handy little Interaction bonus, and a nice uniform, at the cost of being 5% more prone to fleeing in terror from a scary alien, being mind-controlled by a witch, or going mad. It's up to you, but I'd make it 100xp and ditch the WP penalty.