Me and my writing group (which amounts to a full third of my gaming group) are toying with a BC campaign that starts with a group of tribals taken from a chaos dominated feral world (a la pawns of chaos) and mid way through the long and painful process of becoming full CSM.

the template runs thus IIRC its a trimmed down version of the standard CSM template with humans stats

stats base: 25

Skills:

Awareness

Common lore (war)

Dodge

Parry

talents:

Unnatural Strength (1)

Unnatural Toughness (1)

Legion weapon training

gear:

Chainmail coat, legion knife (wielded as a bastard sword), legion bolt pistol (treated as basic)

The idea is that this first camapign arc will follow their journey through their final rites of passage (starting with an artifact retreival from a deathworld) after which they will gain more of their implants and gain another unnatural S&T (up to 2) and maybe some more talents and skills from indoctrination and additional training.

Then one maybe two more missions (with attendant power bumps afterward) before finally being sent to recover some power armour from a hidden arsenal belonging to an enemy warband that has been weakened by infighting after their leader`s apothesis.

Any thoughts on refining this process would be appeciated.

Many Legions are very fond of gladiatorial combats to prove who is most worthy to join em. Could use a variation of the rules in Tome of Blood, Kurse section, to impress the Legionaries. So maybe as a prequel to getting chosen for implantation and whatnot they have to prove that they are worthy.

Should also add full effects of the implants as they are implanted... Try to find some wiki or something which details the general process of implantation among astartes. Some chapters differ in that though, space wolves and blood angels have some odd customs for one.

Really cool idea though. The Blood Trinity worlds in the Jericho Reach often acts as recruiting grounds for the Legions and Renegade chapters.

I`ve already fluffed the campaign for a chaos held world in a selfmade warp rift "south" Trailing? of the calixis sector between the hazeroth and drusian marches subsectors

The players have been chosen from their tribes on this world following a war with invading imperial colonists, a war that was bought to an end by a warband of CSM retreating back to the rift after taking a beating. The warband ended the decades long war in a week by humiliating the Imperials in pitched battle, allowing them to retreat to their base and then obliterating their stronghold from orbit. Then they went about killing the weak tribal leaders for needing help and rounding up potental recruits to restore their numbers.

My players have recently survived receiving their last round of tainted implants mainly because I know the implants go in a certain order and different ages and I`m both leery of my rather twisted players playing children and not convinced CSM would be so cautuious (or clueless) as to stick to the same rules as modern loyalists.

The PCs are the only relatively stable and sane recruits to have survived this long (they will meet some of these less fortunate "brothers") and will have to reach (experience/time/corruption?) milestones for their implants to become fully active.

I`m thinking of a series of tests, compacts and backscratching quests on chaos tainted worlds and maybe even a spacehulk (I`ve called it the Eyeless) around my subsector sized rift in order for their mini-apoothesis to CSM from rather brainy mini-ogryns to be complete.

Then I`ll obepening it up for some violent re-assesment of leadership in the warband and self-determined action from then on (possibly with a NPC deamonic patron for linking in future GM written arcs.)

Also I`m thinking this kind of discusion might belong over in the games masters section.