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Suffer Not the Witch (Warhammer 40k Psyker Quest)

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Imrix said:
In all honesty with the exception of daemonhosts, I'd say the Imperium commits horrors analogous to every one of these.
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Oh please, do tell when the imperium created such a thing as:
1) A Demonculaba which is a woman shackled naked within iron cages and force-fed nutrients which caused her body to widen and bloat to grotesque proportions. Then chaos space marines aspirant are unbirthed inside her to be transformed into astartes. Those aspirants are reborn skinless.
2) Caused an entire civilization to either physiologically need to torture sapients beings(Dark Eldar) or regiments their entire live around a job to the point it cause mental illnesses(Craftworld Eldar being lost to the path).

I will admit that Chaos do not have the monopoly of fates worse than death, but whether you are transformed into a servitor or an archo-flagellant, it stops when you die and according to different sources either your soul dissolve after death or go to the golden throne. When you are inflicted a fate worse than death by Chaos, it does not stop at the end of your life: You are then the plaything of demons.
 
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Derkan said:
1) A Demonculaba which is a woman shackled naked within iron cages and force-fed nutrients which caused her body to widen and bloat to grotesque proportions. Then chaos space marines aspirant are unbirthed inside her to be transformed into astartes. Those aspirants are reborn skinless.
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In other words, an industrialised forced breeding program that often produces malformed or mutated people. Honestly this is the one case where specifics escape me, and I don't actually want to go looking because uh, ick, but I can 100% see the Imperium doing something like that. It does, after all, have plenty of hell planets where 'supplementing' the birthrate would be necessary. Heck, it sounds like it'd fit right in on a Forge World.
Derkan said:
2) Caused an entire civilization to either physiologically need to torture sapients beings(Dark Eldar) or regiments their entire live around a job to the point it cause mental illnesses(Craftworld Eldar being lost to the path).
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Ah ah, you didn't say that, you said, "forcing an entire civilization too either torture other sophonts, live in a rigid cast system or have your soul devoured," and the Imperium is a) plenty torture-happy to not have to be forced to that, and b) has its share of rigid caste systems too. Plenty of regimenting people's lives around their jobs to destructive degrees too, for that matter - was it the Eisenhorn or Ravenor novels that had them infiltrating that Administratum building with shit-tons of people described with like, slabs of vat-grown muscles and degraded intellects to fit them to their ordained job as menial labour?
Derkan said:
I will admit that Chaos do not have the monopoly of fates worse than death, but whether you are transformed into a servitor or an archo-flagellant, it stops when you die and according to different sources either your soul dissolve after death or go to the golden throne. When you are inflicted a fate worse than death by Chaos, it does not stop at the end of your life: You are then the plaything of demons.
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And, what, you think going to the Golden Throne is better than being the plaything of daemons? The Golden Throne would've been my evidence of the Imperium having plenty of truck with soul-devouring lol.
 
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[X] [Nadia] Terminate the Prisoner
[X] [Bore] Terminate the Prisoner
[X] [Aeldari] Free the Prisoner
[X] [Ciro] Free the Prisoner
 
Imrix said:
A) Ciro was apparently captured because he volunteered to hold off the Inquisition to buy his accomplices time to escape. Ergo, he was loyal enough to somebody or something to willingly lay down his life for them.
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It's not something you'd generally see from a Night Lord or one of the Emperor's Children, but it's not entirely beyond the pale for the Word Bearers, Black Legion, Death Guard, or even the aforementioned Alpha Legion to sacrifice themselves covering everyone else's retreat. And there are other options, the Thousand Sons may not inspire loyalty but they can mind crush someone into a fair facsimile thereof...really we don't have enough information to make any informed guesses beyond "Almost certainly not a Night Lord or a Berserker, Noise Marine, and the Report would have probably mentioned if he was a Plague Marine", beyond that the sky's the limit, could be a Soul Drinker, one of the Fallen Angels, member of a far from home Space Wolf Great Company...

In all honesty with the exception of daemonhosts, I'd say the Imperium commits horrors analogous to every one of these.
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Meanwhile radical Inquisitors don't bother with "analogous to", they just make their own daemonhosts as information sources or semi controlled terror weapons.
 
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[x] [Nadia] Free the Prisoner.

We need her for navigation/experience piloting the ship. Possible contacts and info once we're in the clear? I don't know how exactly summoning warp entities corrupt the summoner or at least for the Vince, how deep in shit is the Lady Black. As a psycher-duelist we could stick close to her for easy termination should she show signs of daemonic influence and corruption.

[x] [Bore] Terminate the Prisoner

Apply warp flesh taint directly on yourself? The fast lane to chaos my dude!

[x] [Aeldari] Free the Prisoner

Eh, we can't trust him to guard our backs. But we can trust him to save himself- and considering the ship's state right now, the Xenos will need us at least to make heads or tails for ship control or help piloting.

[x] [Ciro] Free the Prisoner

The wildcard. On one hand strongboi to deter the Xenos shenanigans on the other, STRONGBOI too OP halp! With the Xenos out, they can bicker amongst themselves, worse case scenario- the Eldar can give us a few seconds to do something.
 
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[x] [Nadia] Free the Prisoner.
[x] [Bore] Free the Prisoner
[x] [Aeldari] Free the Prisoner
[x] [Ciro] Free the Prisoner

The mister Burns option. They're all absurdly dangerous and so hopefully will be preoccupied with the other prisoners, leaving us to do our stuff with impunity.
 
Imrix said:
B) For all that people call the Eldar treacherous, I would argue that they're meaningfully more trustworthy than the Imperium. Like, they'll happily throw catspaws at the Imperium and manipulate fate to sacrifice human lives for their own sake, but that's... not... treachery? The Imperium and the Eldar are actively at war with one another, there's no assumption that Eldar shouldn't exploit humans for their own gain, if they can engineer the opportunity. But when Eldar actually enter into an agreed upon alliance with humans, then historically speaking they do tend to hold up their end of the bargain. The Eldar are inscrutable, aloof, arrogant, and can generally be expected to live up to their word and not an inch further, but they do live up to their word. Like, Nadia supposedly murdered their own family, the Eldar is not the treacherous one here lol
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You should really amend this statement: Dark Eldar do not behave the way you describe and frankly neither do most craftworlds.
Edit: Regardless, we're dealing with a Corsair, the personality and trustworthiness is impossible beyond "rebellious" and "selfish". Instead we should ask why we want him with us? What unique skills does he have that we might need?
Imrix said:
In all honesty with the exception of daemonhosts, I'd say the Imperium commits horrors analogous to every one of these. I mean, 'fates worse than death'? You want to say Chaos does that and the Imperium doesn't? Hey, remember what Tahr was going to do to us? Pull the other one, it's got bells on.
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Could you maybe be a bit less condescending here? And honestly servitors don't hold a candle to getting your body deformed into a chaos spawn, getting skinned alive so that some sorcerer can write a new book about how to skin people alive, or getting your soul sacrificed to make a daemon world. It just doesn't.
 
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Dream Logic said:
Blood Ravens have successfully hidden their genefather since founding. Could be any number of renegade, mutated or traitor gene seed.

If they don't have the facilities and it isn't high priority it would make sense to leave it blank and move on.
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Considering that the people who MADE there gene seed should know this is one of the more moronic things from canon. The BR can't hide something when they didn't exist yet. If the inquisition didn't keep themselves in the loop as space marine chapters were being made I'll eat a fucking daemon prince.

No if they capture a SM they should AT LEAST know the Primarch the gene seed is based off of.
 
[x] [Nadia] Free the Prisoner.
[x] [Bore] Free the Prisoner
[x] [Aeldari] Free the Prisoner
[x] [Ciro] Free the Prisoner
 
flotter said:
You should really amend this statement: Dark Eldar do not behave the way you describe and frankly neither do most craftworlds.
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Dark Eldar will go back on a deal (well, distort it beyond recognition, but same thing), sure, but I was primarily thinking of Craftworld Eldar when making that statement, so, no, I'm gonna firmly disagree here. Most Eldar are trustworthy. They don't have humanity's interests at heart, so they don't make pacts in the first place all that often, but when they do they historically tend to keep them.
flotter said:
Could you maybe be a bit less condescending here? And honestly servitors don't hold a candle to getting your body deformed into a chaos spawn, getting skinned alive so that some sorcerer can write a new book about how to skin people alive, or getting your soul sacrificed to make a daemon world. It just doesn't.
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I'm kind of boggled that counts as condescending to you, to be honest, but regardless I don't agree. Getting deformed into a Chaos Spawn does not seem to me to be functionally different to getting forcibly converted into an arco-flagellant, or the various other forms of brainwashed and mutilated soldiers the Imperium employs. Likewise, while the Imperium might not bind its books in human skin specifically, they absolutely do render people down for raw materials (corpse starch, anyone?) and frequently torture people to death in ways just as bad as skinning them alive, so that's all of a one to me, too. And sacrificing people's souls? Again, the Golden Throne. Hell, the Astra Telepathica regards burning out people's souls as the cost of sending important emails, basically.

This is kind of my point; making a daemon world isn't an atrocity in itself, but sacrificing thousands of souls to do so is, and the Imperium sacrifices countless people on a daily basis, consuming their lives and their souls in a myriad of ways that are just as horrific and just as unnecessary, so it genuinely does seem to be much of a muchness, to me.
 
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[X] [Nadia] Terminate the Prisoner
[X] [Bore] Terminate the Prisoner
[X] [Aeldari] Free the Prisoner
[X] [Ciro] Free the Prisoner

There are no good options, but I think this will be the most entertaining. Hopefully the Arldari and the Astartes focus on each other and let us slip away later.
 
Just to throw my hat into the Imperium Vs Chaos debate; I would say that Chaos is undoubtedly worse. For all that the Imperium is the worst regime in the grim darkness of the far future; it is still a human regime, composed of humans doing things for purely human reasons. For the Imperium, the atrocities they commit are always the means, not the goal. On the other hand, for Chaos atrocity is the goal.

The Imperium is not a monolith; it is 10 000 years of history and precedent and change. The Imperium can be overthrown, destroyed, or reformed. Chaos stayed the same from the moment of its birth. It will stay this way forever because it is literally cancer on reality. There is no changing the fact that the final goal of Chaos as a faction is torture and degradation of everyone and everywhere with no exceptions.
 
Imrix said:
In other words, an industrialised forced breeding program that often produces malformed or mutated people. Honestly this is the one case where specifics escape me, and I don't actually want to go looking because uh, ick, but I can 100% see the Imperium doing something like that. It does, after all, have plenty of hell planets where 'supplementing' the birthrate would be necessary. Heck, it sounds like it'd fit right in on a Forge World.
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Did you know sex servitors are canonically a thing? Sex servitors are canonically a thing! (So yes.)

Anyway, I am definitely voting 'free everyone'. Worst case scenario and we can't trust any of them and they want to kill us, we might be able to hide and let them kill each other off.

[x] [Ciro] Free the Prisoner
[x] [Aeldari] Free the Prisoner
[x] [Nadia] Free the Prisoner.
[x] [Bore] Free the Prisoner
 
[x] [Ciro] Free the Prisoner
[x] [Aeldari] Free the Prisoner
[x] [Nadia] Free the Prisoner.
[x] [Bore] Free the Prisoner
 
So I've put some thought into this.

First of all the space marine and the eldar are both too personally powerful for our protagonist (especially the marine) to control. If we free one it's a good idea to free the other so they can check each other.

The voidfarer Nadia has obvious utility and being a relatively normal human probably the easiest to deal with in general. With some extra eyes on her to make sure she doesn't summon something she's probably one of our best choices to free.

If we're freeing everyone else then it makes sense to free the magos. He's a bit of a wildcard since he modified himself with daemon crap though so we can expect some nasty side-effects from that.

[x] [Ciro] Free the Prisoner
[x] [Aeldari] Free the Prisoner
[x] [Nadia] Free the Prisoner.
[x] [Bore] Free the Prisoner

Basically free everyone because each individual can't be trusted to act properly on their own recognizance. I could also see terminating everyone except for Nadia being a good choice. Unfortunately since this isn't a plan vote it's best to just go with free everyone in case we get an unfortunate combination.
 
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[X] [Nadia] Free the Prisoner.
[X] [Bore] Free the Prisoner
[X] [Aeldari] Abandon the Prisoner
[X] [Ciro] Abandon the Prisoner
 
flotter said:
Could you maybe be a bit less condescending here? And honestly servitors don't hold a candle to getting your body deformed into a chaos spawn, getting skinned alive so that some sorcerer can write a new book about how to skin people alive, or getting your soul sacrificed to make a daemon world. It just doesn't.
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Do remember that originally and now the Imperium was written essentially as satire, an entity that's as bad if not worse than the enemies it fights.

I mean arguably Chaos has the moral high ground on the Imperium (In the same sense that a tiger eating a human has a moral high ground on a human murderer) - They didn't choose to be the way they are, but the Imperium is full of people choosing the path of most horribleness all the time. There are Inquisitors who make daemonhosts, just like Chaos, as we speak there's probably a bajillion humans slowly and agonizingly being mutated into mutants/spawn/flesh-things from sewage discharges from chemical factories without OSHA..
 
[x] [Nadia] Free the Prisoner.
[x] [Bore] Free the Prisoner
[x] [Aeldari] Free the Prisoner
[x] [Ciro] Free the Prisoner


We are the most harmless of all of them, therefore the natural ally/minion to any of them. Free them all and we won't lead...but would any let us lead that we can trust anyway?
 
Looks like everyone goes free.
I'm not sure the people who actually want to free everyone would have a majority by themselves, but everyone wants to free at least some people, so all those "free all" votes easily win.
 
WorldSlayer said:
Basically free everyone because each individual can't be trusted to act properly on their own recognizance. I could also see terminating everyone except for Nadia being a good choice. Unfortunately since this isn't a plan vote it's best to just go with free everyone in case we get an unfortunate combination.
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I can understand arguments for freeing everybody out of principle, or even just because you think it'll be entertaining in the narrative to see how they'd interact with each other. But I'm not sure I can get behind the logic of 'more uncontrollable people will surely cancel each other out and hand us more control back'. That... does not strike me as sound.

Ciro, for example, might take a disliking to us for any imaginable reason and feel like ganking us; why do we imagine that any of the others would care enough to 'check' that and prevent it from happening? If any of these prisoners feel a sense of loyalty towards us, I will be quite surprised. I'm certainly not expecting everyone to automatically defer to us and go along with whatever we want, no problems.

In other words, I wouldn't expect convenient protagonist magic to win out and let us get our way no matter what happens. The more people we free, the more potentially dissenting voices/plans there are, who will need to be negotiated with. And who may not get along with each other. There's every reason to suspect that the more people set free, the less control of the situation we'll have. I'll be cool with that if that's the direction the story ends up going, but let's just bear that in mind.
 
[x] [Nadia] Free the Prisoner.
[x] [Bore] Free the Prisoner
[x] [Aeldari] Free the Prisoner
[x] [Ciro] Free the Prisoner

 
flotter said:
And honestly servitors don't hold a candle to getting your body deformed into a chaos spawn,
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They're both just identity death at best, a lifetime of torturous body-horror at worst, except that becoming Chaos Spawn can at least be accidental rather than a deliberate act of cold-blooded surgery over several hours.
flotter said:
getting skinned alive so that some sorcerer can write a new book about how to skin people alive,
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As opposed to being flayed alive so that some priest can write a new book about how to punish blasphemers by flaying them alive?
flotter said:
or getting your soul sacrificed to make a daemon world.
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Big E needs his num-nums to power Google Maps.

The best you can say about the Imperium, as compared to Chaos, is that the Emperor is less able to directly intervene within his sphere of influence, and that there are, probably, relatively more individual people with good intentions aligned with the Imperium than with Chaos. You won't find them on either extreme of the spectrum, however, and the Imperium is deliberately built to ensure that individual intentions matter as little as possible.

And that's why we should immediately make for T'au-controlled space and-
 
LastChronicler said:
I can understand arguments for freeing everybody out of principle, or even just because you think it'll be entertaining in the narrative to see how they'd interact with each other. But I'm not sure I can get behind the logic of 'more uncontrollable people will surely cancel each other out and hand us more control back'. That... does not strike me as sound.

Ciro, for example, might take a disliking to us for any imaginable reason and feel like ganking us; why do we imagine that any of the others would care enough to 'check' that and prevent it from happening? If any of these prisoners feel a sense of loyalty towards us, I will be quite surprised. I'm certainly not expecting everyone to automatically defer to us and go along with whatever we want, no problems.

In other words, I wouldn't expect convenient protagonist magic to win out and let us get our way no matter what happens. The more people we free, the more potentially dissenting voices/plans there are, who will need to be negotiated with. And who may not get along with each other. There's every reason to suspect that the more people set free, the less control of the situation we'll have. I'll be cool with that if that's the direction the story ends up going, but let's just bear that in mind.
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I expect the reason we'd be safe is PRECISELY that they are more threatening to each other, and we're all focused mostly on getting out. The Space Marine and the Eldar put each other in check, they'd be focused on what each other can do.

The Navigator/Sorceror, the Magos and the Psyker take up the second circle, where they can threaten each other but really do not want to when theres an Eldar and Space Marine already there as bigger threats.
 
veekie said:
I expect the reason we'd be safe is PRECISELY that they are more threatening to each other, and we're all focused mostly on getting out. The Space Marine and the Eldar put each other in check, they'd be focused on what each other can do.

The Navigator/Sorceror, the Magos and the Psyker take up the second circle, where they can threaten each other but really do not want to when theres an Eldar and Space Marine already there as bigger threats.
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Speaking personally, I just can't believe people are voting to kill off our future Found Family entry on TV Tropes.

We will carry out the worst Rogue Trader disguise. There's gotta be a Warrant of Trade locked away somewhere in those vaults.

"Ah, yes, I am Rogue Trader Lorenzo II, and this is my trusted Navigator, my faithful Magos consultant, my fully-sanctioned Xenos wayfarer, and her Deathwatch handler."
 
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