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Fallen Novator

Started by Ghengis, March 30, 2011, 09:55:24 PM

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Ghengis

Hey guys, I'm pretty new to Inquisitor, but I thought I'd see what you'd think to the leader of my warband, the warped, vampiric former Novator, Oliver Kenward. Basically I randomly generated him, tweaked his Ws up and his Bs down (after he rolled Vampiric I thought he should be better in combat than he is with a gun). He has some pretty high-end weaponry, but thats somewhat countered by the fact that he can only use them in his off hand since his stronger right arm also got mutated.  Anyway, here's his story...


Fallen Novator Oliver Kenward

Decades ago Oliver Kenward was a trusted and respected member of the Navis Nobilite, ensuring Imperial war fleets and priceless merchant cargos were navigated safely though the warp. Unlike other navigators, Kenward was uninterested in the materialistic concerns his brethren consumed themselves with and devoted his life to his service to the Emperor, sadly this proved to be his downfall.

Countless missions without returning to his house, and prolonged contact with the warp took its toll on Kenward's body and upon his mind. His teeth grew long and pointy, his skin began to harden in patches like scales and his favoured right hand became talon-like and impractical for all but the most violent of tasks. Although these physical changes attracted the attention of members of the Inquisition, most notably the Ordo Hereticus, Kenward was confident his loyal service would save him from their condemnation and for many years it did, but it was the alterations to Kenward's mind that caused him worry. He became increasingly tormented by visions of death and violence, he found himself fantasising about killing and drinking the blood of his victims and the longer it went on the more he felt urges to put his visions into practice. Reports of staff members on vessels navigated by Kenward being found brutally murdered with their throats ripped out soon brought the suspicion of the Inquisition back to the troubled navigator and he found it increasingly difficult to conceal his increasing vampiric tendencies. Although he had the Ordo Hereticus on his tail, Kenward was smart and never let down his guard for long enough to get caught, which greatly frustrated those who suspected him.

As time went by more and more members of the Inquisition became angered by their inability to pin anything solid on Kenward despite their suspicions, so a small 'accident' was arranged for him. Lured into what he thought was an escape pod, during what he had been lead to believe was an emergency, Kenward was sealed in an inescapable sarcophagus and fired into the depths of the warp, his good deeds scratched from imperial records and his existence eventually forgotten by all but a few.

As Kenward floated, forgotten and alone his cravings and visions drove him mad, he allowed hopelessness to overcome him as he prepared himself for his eternity of imprisonment thankful that he would never betray his emperor again. This could, and probably should have been the end of Novator Oliver Kenward's story, but for a voice in the warp, a quiet manipulative voice of unknown origin, perhaps an unknown deity of chaos who, like the Novator, was lost and all but forgotten. The voice filled Kenward's mind with a new sanity, a hatred for the servants of his once-beloved Emperor and the promise of freedom from his floating space prison in return for eternal service to the voice. Kenward remembered the taste of blood, and gladly submitted.

Today, driven by the voice in his head and his insatiable bloodlust, Kenward stalks through the shadows killing and feeding always hunting down members of the Inquisition he now despises, his mind knows only hate, violence and thirst, killing wherever the voice tells him. He arrives without a seconds warning an leaves just as suddenly but there's no question he was there, his attacks are loud, brutal and bloody, not only attacking the target picked by the voice, but wreaking as much havoc as he can for his own enjoyment  in the process.

There's no more for now, not till he gets in a scrap or two any way!

Stats:

Ws- 58
Bs- 54
S- 58
T- 126 (Mutation)
I- 79
Wp- 84
Sg- 89
Nv-  96
Ld- 83
Hand- Right

Mutations: Toughness (added in profile), Fangs (free improvised weapon attack per turn), Scales (+1 Base Injury Value), Talon (Right arm, counts as armed with short sword, cannot hold anything else).

Equipment: Power Sword, Inferno Pistol 2x reload, 2x Photon Flash Grenade, Carapace Armour on chest, abdomen and groin, flack armour on legs and left arm.

Special Abilities: Fast Draw, Vampirism, I have Stared Into The Abyss, The Third Eye (Navigator psychic powers: Lidless Stare, Warp Gaze, Temporal Distortion, Inertia).

Henchmen to follow.

Myriad

Pretty good basic concept, but a couple of questions do arise.

1)  Given he can only use it in his off hand, why's he carrying such high end weaponry.  And, unless it got shot into the warp with him, where did he get it from?  It's fairly rare stuff, most of it.

2) The inquisition isn't big on accountability.  If they resolved to get rid of him, why wasn't he just shot?
I had better point out, that some of the clubs I represent are of a military bent.

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Flinty

#2
Nice backstory; perhaps as Myriad suggests a little tweak is in order, something like it was suspicious crew members egged on by an Inquisitors Agent who came up with the escape pod disposal idea.

Stat wise, I assume his leadership relates to some terrifying hold he has over his followers, which sounds about right if the option is to be his next snack.  You don't mention his age, I'd expect Navigators to be fairly well educated and, especially in his case, fully aware of the perils besetting mankind - but it is pretty high. Perhaps a line or two in the fluff to explain?

This is the first fallen Navigator PC I can remember (not that that means much) posted here, and I can see plenty of scope for some interesting game play there.

Edit: sp
Neanderthal and Proud!

Dolnikan

I like the background, what are you going to do to model him?
I would remove at least the inferno pistol and replace it with something less game-ending. A single shot of one of those things can almost instantaneously kill a character.
Circles of the wise My attempt at writing something, please comment on it if you have any advise.

Kaled

I like the concept and background, but his equipment seems rather over the top and doesn't really suggest navigator - it seems more like what you'd expect an Inquisitor to carry into a warzone.

Also his name is rather mundane - makes him sound more like a middle manager than the fallen son of an ancient noble family...
I like to remember things my own way... Not necessarily the way they happened.

Inquisitor - Blood Bowl - Malifaux - Fairy Meat

MarcoSkoll

Toughness 126, Scales and Carapace Armour?

Personally, I think that's excessive, and rather broken rules wise. That gives him practically automatic recovery (for 8-10 points a turn), and means a character would have to huggggeeee damage to do a second injury level. However, four slaps to the face, and he's dead.

Crazily high toughness does not represent hardy characters well. After a certain point, it's better to add injury levels than it is to add toughness.
Lose a large chunk of that toughness (and by that, I mean: More like half that, particularly if you're keeping the scales), but give him a extra light injury level on all locations instead (so he has two light injury levels).

That should help him against small arms, but also bring his resistance to heavy weapons to a far more believable level. As it is, a few shots with a laspistol can finish him, but taking a multimelta to the chest would be fairly trivial.
S.Sgt Silva Birgen: "Good evening, we're here from the Adeptus Defenestratus."
Captain L. Rollin: "Nonsense. Never heard of it."
Birgen: "Pick a window. I'll demonstrate".

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Ghengis

Thanks for the feedback guys, I'll attempt to deal with some of it...

Firstly @ Dolnikan, I'm currently sculpting him I'll try to get some pics up when he's at a stage fit for public viewing.

So, story line wise, I really like the idea of suspicious crew brought up by Flinty, it's a lot more feasible than my initial idea so I'll give it a change so something along those lines, and as Kaled suggested the name is pretty weak I'll put some extra thought into that too.

As far as the rules go, I agree it needs more tweaking, my initial idea with this character was to create a totally random Novator and make up his story from how he ended up. However as people have pointed out there's a few bits that need altering, although I wasn't totally sure what MarkoSkoll meant by 'adding injury levels'. Considering he's very vampire-like here is a revision of his stats, with your suggestions in mind plus a couple of things I think make him more believable:

Ws- 58
Bs- 54
S- 62 (Increase in strength due to the vampiric mutations)
T- 76 (Decreased to the original value before the toughness mutation, till too tough though?)
I- 79
Wp- 84
Sg- 89
Nv-  96
Ld- 83
Hand- Right

Mutations: Fangs (free improvised weapon attack per turn), Scales (+1 Base Injury Value), Talon (Right arm, counts as armed with short sword, cannot hold anything else).

I'm dropping the power sword in favor of his talon being his main weapon, however it makes sense that this arm is far stronger than the other, would it be sensible to say that this arm strikes at 75% of his total S rather than 50%? So S-47. I'm also dropping the grenades I added them because the rules look cool, I'm sure I can find a henchman who they are more fitting on, the inferno pistol had been replaced with a more fitting weapon, and the armour has been made more characterful.

Equipment: Naval Pistol with Rangefinder 2x Reload (an ancient heirloom of his navigating days, I've added the range finder because being a Novator he probably would have had access to the best weapons in his household), Flack armour on chest, abdomen and groin,  Robe armour on all other locations bar right arm (he may lose this on he head, depends how I end up sculpting him), all armored locations Ablative (2) (It makes sence that he's have armour that is more effective against the first hit, since storyline wise he turns up, makes a violent assult and exits quickly, I have an image in my head of him diving through an explosion with his outer robes on fire to tear some hapless human apart. As far as armour on the head goes, maybe it should only be Ablative, representing him keeping his vampiric visage hidden until the strike).

The special abilities is the hardest bit, there are many in character ones but I am unsure wether using any more than 3 would be practical in a came sense, let alone being a bit cheesy, the ones I am considering:

I have Stared into the Abyss- This one will have to stay, as he is a Navigator.
Vampiric- Stands to reason.
Fearsome- The why speaks for itself, but two exotic abilities smacks of cheese.
Furious Assault- He's got an uncontrollable thirst for blood, tearing people apart is a favored pass time.
Force of Will- "If you bleed, you 'aint scary mate."
Lightning Reflexes- Being a chaos vampire I imagine he's pretty quick at getting to his prey.

Thoughts?

Then there's his Psychic powers, being out of the loop for a while its probable that he's out of practice with the powers of the Navigator, so inertia and lidless stare and warp gaze are out, leaving only temporal distortion, the most useful of the navigator powers for getting up close and personal with the foe. Then I figure a chaos power would be sensible, either Demonic Shield to represent The Voice watching over him, or Hatestorm to represent him 'urging' his minions on to bring him mortals to feed on, or it's their own blood for dinner (or both?)

He seems far less random now, and hopefully more rounded and characterful.

Dolnikan

You usually attack with your full strength even if using a weapon one-handed.

I think that what MarcoSkoll meant with the extra injury levels was something like giving the character another light injury level on each location, meaning that he would have to suffer two light injuries before moving on to heavy damage. A high toughness can be too unbalancing in the game as it is, they are far harder to hurt with heavy weapons than they should be and they will heal a lot of damage making them almost unkillable.

I think that he would certainly qualify as fearsome, I mean, he is a vampiric navigator. Furious assault is fitting for him, I would however drop Force of Will because I think he would still be scared at least a bit by a terrifying creature, those are really bad things, he would probably still pass almost all tests with his enormous nerve. I would also drop the lightning reflexes, I think that his speed is already sufficiently represented by his initiative value.
For a psychic ability I would use hatestorm, he projects his hatred onto his followers and of course threatens them as well.
Circles of the wise My attempt at writing something, please comment on it if you have any advise.

MarcoSkoll

Quote from: Ghengis on March 31, 2011, 08:23:27 PMI wasn't totally sure what MarkoSkoll meant by 'adding injury levels'.
Basically as Dolnikan said. He would have Light, 2nd Light, Heavy, Serious, Acute and Crippled.

Six injury levels rather than the normal five gives a better representation of a character's hardiness than an arbitrarily high toughness - it adds to the number of hits the character can take, rather than just making them shrug off multimeltas to the face.

QuoteFearsome- The why speaks for itself, but two exotic abilities smacks of cheese.
My guidelines for Fearsome:

- Should the other character know, just by looking at the character, that charging him obviously really, really dangerous and a one way ticket to gory, gory death? Space Marines (even if the rulebook doesn't think so), Arcoflagellants and pit fighters count. Someone with unpleasant scarring on their face does not - this is the 41st millennium, horribly scarred people are a dime a dozen.
- Does the character have some scary psychic aura? e.g. Daemonhosts?
- Do both the above apply? (e.g. Manifest daemons) Well, they might have earned Terrifying, but they may well not be PC material any more.


So, really my question is: He's mutated and dangerous, but is it immediately apparent from his appearance that he's a vampiric killing machine? And if it is, why has he not yet been shot?
S.Sgt Silva Birgen: "Good evening, we're here from the Adeptus Defenestratus."
Captain L. Rollin: "Nonsense. Never heard of it."
Birgen: "Pick a window. I'll demonstrate".

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Ghengis

Cheers guys, I thought that what was you meant by adding extra injury levels but I couldnt find anything about it in the book. I guess thats because its a very open ended rulebook.
I'll wait to see how the model turns out before I decide on Fearsome, his one big arm is currently looking pretty scary though! Maybe him counting as fearsome after he has made a successful vampirism attack, I'd imagine its more unnerving to see a friend hurt or killed just as food, than as an enemy (which psychologically puts them on a level playing field).

MarcoSkoll

Quote from: Ghengis on March 31, 2011, 09:43:04 PMMaybe him counting as fearsome after he has made a successful vampirism attack
That could work.

I often tend to give characters fearsome temporarily if they've done something really formidable or scary - it'll only affect those who were watching, but if your mate has just been effortlessly cleft in twain by a single blow, you might be a little more wary about getting into a scrap with the person responsible.

Or, indeed, if people have a past history. Who wouldn't be scared of the bionic monster who damn near killed them last time? (Although, this bonus of course gets lost if the "monster" ceases to remain scary enough over time.)
S.Sgt Silva Birgen: "Good evening, we're here from the Adeptus Defenestratus."
Captain L. Rollin: "Nonsense. Never heard of it."
Birgen: "Pick a window. I'll demonstrate".

GW's =I= articles

Ghengis

So, a name change for the Novator... Lord Ivan Crucis Scorpii formerly of the Belisarius Household, and a revised character history.

Decades ago Ivan Scorpii was a trusted and respected member of the Navis Nobilite, ensuring Imperial war fleets and priceless merchant cargos were navigated safely though the warp. Unlike other navigators, he was uninterested in the materialistic concerns his brethren consumed themselves with and devoted his life to his service to the Emperor, sadly this proved to be his downfall.

A member of House Belisarius, Scorpii was ever worried that he should one day be called upon by the Eldar to repay part of the debt owed to them, for saving his house from destruction many years previously. Although not ungrateful for their actions, Scorpii distrusted all Xenos and was most concerned that the pact between his house and the Eldar could potentially cause him to harm the Imperium. This, and the increasingly decadent and hedonistic attitudes of his fellow navigators that lead Scorpii to break from his house and pursue a more nomadic existence, constantly on the wing at the helm of many an Imperial vessel. During this time Scorpii learned intricately the movements of Imperial forces and cargo throughout the galaxy.

Countless missions without returning to his house, and prolonged contact with the warp took its toll on Scorpii's body and upon his mind. His teeth grew long and pointy, his skin began to harden in patches like scales and his favoured right hand became talon-like and impractical for all but the most violent of tasks. Although these physical changes may have attracted the attention of members of the Inquisition, most notably the Ordo Hereticus, Scoprpii was confident his loyal service would save him from their condemnation and he was right, it was commonplace for Navigators to show some physical mutation in the face of prolonged warp contact. However, Scorpii knew that should anyone become savvy to the effect the warp had in his head he would be in deep trouble. He became increasingly tormented by visions of death and violence, he found himself fantasising about killing and drinking the blood of his victims and the longer it went on the more he felt urges to put his visions into practice. While on a long haul cargo mission, the Novator finally could stand it no longer, and while he was thought to be sleeping he stalked the shadows in the ship, brutally attacking lone members of the ships staff and quenching his thirst for blood. Initially Scorpii made every effort to hide the corpses, but eventually 'missing' crew began to turn up, their mutilated corpses found crammed into air ducts and storage containers making it clear to those on board that they shared their craft with something monstrous. As the panic grew in the ship, fights broke out between crew members leading to imprisonment and sometimes deaths, the climate of fear having a maddening effect on everyone, bar Scorpii.
Perhaps it was this reason that some of those on board started to suspect Scorpii, or maybe they just distrusted him because of his mutations, or even just that they wanted a scapegoat and he was seen as an easy target for blame. Whatever the reason, Scorpii was tricked, getting into what he thought what an escape pod when panic on the ship had reached breaking point, Scorpii was sealed in an inescapable sarcophagus by those who blamed him for the deaths, and fired into the depths of the warp. Though they had nullified the threat, no one on the ship really knew it and the panic tore the ship apart, no one survived and eventually the ship, the crew and the lost, imprisoned Novator were forgotten to memory.

As Scorpii floated, forgotten and alone his cravings and visions drove him mad, he allowed hopelessness to overcome him as he prepared himself for his eternity of imprisonment thankful that he would never betray his emperor again. This could, and probably should have been the end of Novator Ivan Crucis Scorpii's story, but for a voice in the warp, a quiet manipulative voice of unknown origin, perhaps an unknown deity of chaos who, like the Novator, was lost and all but forgotten. The voice filled Scorpii's mind with a new sanity, a hatred for the servants of his once-beloved Emperor and the promise of freedom from his floating space prison in return for eternal service to the voice. The Navigator remembered the taste of blood, and gladly submitted.

Today, driven by the voice in his head and his insatiable bloodlust, Scorpii stalks through the shadows killing and feeding always hunting down members of the Inquisition he now despises, his mind knows only hate, violence and thirst, killing wherever the voice tells him. He arrives without a seconds warning an leaves just as suddenly but there's no question he was there, his attacks are loud, brutal and bloody, not only attacking the target picked by the voice, but wreaking as much havoc as he can for his own enjoyment  in the process.

So, henchmen. I have a few ideas for henchmen, I imagine he'll end up with 5 or 6 to select from before making his attack. Firstly he'll have a couple of mad acolytes who see him as some kind of demigod, they'll basically be nutty lunatics who are far more scared and in awe of the vampire than most other creatures they may end up fighting, dregs of society with no other hope. Secondly he'll have some kind of 'human livestock' for feeding should he not have an enemy to suck dry, these guys will be bloated, mutated, verging on brain dead and tough as old boots, I'm thinking models based on ogre butchers. Finally I think a chaos spawn-like creature who is attracted to the seething warp energies the chaotic navigator is sure to exude.


InquisitorHeidfeld

Only one point to raise...

Aren't the Navigators a stable mutation line already due to their warp exposure?

It seems a little odd that someone who may survive long enough to turn into a huge Jabba the Hutt type character branches off so significantly - especially as he hasn't been exposed to anything more significant than his bretheren...

It might make more sense if his ship had suffered a Gellar field failure or something but it just doesn't work from my perspective.

MarcoSkoll

Quote from: InquisitorHeidfeld on April 07, 2011, 01:28:48 PMAren't the Navigators a stable mutation line already due to their warp exposure?
No, not at all. Each Navigator will be different (even in the same house, although there will be trends in each family) even at birth - and they frequently develop more and more mutant deformities with age.
S.Sgt Silva Birgen: "Good evening, we're here from the Adeptus Defenestratus."
Captain L. Rollin: "Nonsense. Never heard of it."
Birgen: "Pick a window. I'll demonstrate".

GW's =I= articles

DapperAnarchist

I'd say yes and no - there is a stable mutation, the Third Eye. However, they are drastically mutated in other ways.
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