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Alignment

Alignment is generally used in roleplaying games to divide the good guys from the bad guys, with the neutral guys in the middle somewhere. Well, alignment in Imperium works in a slightly different way.

In a galaxy where everything seems to be trying to kill everything else, who do we assign the status of ‘good guys’ to?

The Imperium? But the Imperium willingly murders billions of its own citizens with Exterminatus orders, treats its citizens like cattle and commits genocide against aliens who happen to live on a planet that it wants for itself.

The eldar? Selfish, aloof, willing to exterminate millions of alien lives if it saves a single eldar life. They might be highly advanced and cultured, but their desperate fight against extinction highlights the elements of savagery in their makeup.

The tau? Probably the most likely candidates, but again, they will kill anything that doesn’t aspire to join the Greater Good. At the same time as citizens of the Tau Empire have a higher degree of freedom than most regimes in the galaxy, their individuality is suppressed by the drive to sustain the Greater Good.

Good and evil (at least the way our 21^st Century minds see it) are irrelevant in the universe of Warhammer 40,000, where there are only shades of grey. Almost every Imperium PC would be classed, in WFRP, as Neutral, or even Evil, thanks to the selfish, xenophobic, tyrannical attitudes of the organisations and government that they are loyal to.

There are many debates on the nature of the Imperium. It’s easier just to bunch all citizens of the Imperium together as ‘Imperial’, and judge the individual by their actions, not by their alignment. A Ministorum Preacher might lead a mob against a heretical splinter group, resulting in thousands of violent deaths, while at the same time, an Administratum clerk might sign a bill allowing the cult the right to exist as an extension of the Imperial Cult. A Space Marine might throw himself into the path of a bolter shell to save the life of an Imperial citizen, while an Inquisitor might fusion bomb the planet a week later to destroy some great evil that dwells there. An Imperial Guardsman might slaughter alien children, while at the same time, a Xenobiologist strives to preserves the culture for study.

These are drastically different courses of action, but all ultimately serve one entity – the Imperium, which is arguably inherently evil. But even then, the evil Imperium exists to preserve humanity, and how can that, from our human point of view, be branded evil?

Aliens have their own motivations. Tau will serve the Tau Empire, orks serve their own interests of war and power, eldar struggle to prevent the extinction of their species, and so on. Morality and ethics rarely come into it, except on a personal level.

For this reason, character alignment in Imperium is primarily determined nationalistically, rather than morally.

Allegiance

Each character has a primary ‘allegiance’ associated with their initial loyalties, e.g. most humans are ‘Imperial’. The most common allegiances are described below:

Imperial:

Characters of Imperial allegiance are loyal to the Imperium of Man. They are acceptant of the rule of the Emperor, whether they see him as a god, an apotheosis, or merely as a great man, and are (normally, though not necessarily always) acceptant of the more day-to-day rule of the Imperium’s mortal leaders, from the High Lords down to local government level.

Ideologically, the Imperium preaches a ‘humanity first’ doctrine, which is the only way it (and by extension, the human species) can survive in a hostile galaxy. The Imperium and its citizens are generally intolerant of aliens, human mutants, and those human ‘heretics’ who do not follow the Imperial Creed.

Technology is viewed superstitiously as being self-aware (the ‘machine spirits’), and an entire sub-religion exists around worshipping the Emperor as the Machine God. Most citizens of the Imperium with technological expertise are Tech-Priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

With a million worlds come several million social theories. Some cultures are tolerant on the issues of gender, race, sexuality, age and so on, while others are brutally narrow-minded in the extreme.

Abhumans within the Imperium tend to have their own value systems, although most are comparable to those of humans.

Craftworld Eldar:

All eldar culture focuses on one thing: survival. The species that once ruled most of the galaxy is dying, thanks to its own former decadence and complacency. Now, most of the pitifully few survivors live on vast Craftworlds that float through the void of deep space, linked together only by the Webway, a network of tunnels, in which eldar can walk and spacecraft can fly, that cut through the realm of warpspace.

Outsiders are, at best, distrusted by the Craftworld eldar and, at worst, are looked upon as being worthless, mere savages and pretenders to the throne of the galaxy. One day, the Craftworld eldar believe, they will restore their empire to its ancient glory and the lesser races will bow down before them or be wiped out.

Sexuality and gender are non-issues in Craftworld society. Eldar reproduction is naturally a slow process and the concept of sex for pleasure has been more or less eradicated by ten thousand years of puritan restraint against She Who Thirsts (see Chaos – Slaanesh, below). As such, the concept of relationships does not exist, and close, warm friendship is difficult for a Craftworlder to comprehend. For a Craftworld eldar, there are merely companions who have similar interests, or with whom one shares an intangible yet unexplainable bond. As a result, male and female eldar hold equally high ranks and all positions in society are open to both genders. At the same time, religion and tradition have tailored several positions so that they are predominantly inhabited by eldar of one gender, for example, the Howling Banshees – the banshee of legend is female, and her Aspect Warrior imitators are traditionally female also.

Tau:

The Tau Empire is a young, expansionist, collective on the eastern fringe of the galaxy, just outside the limits of Imperial influence. It is mainly populated by the tau species, but several other species are granted citizenship within the Empire, including kroot and renegade humans, left over after the Damocles Crusade, when the Imperium failed to destroy the tau and was forced to abandon several regiments of Imperial Guard.

Having only been a spacefaring species for just over a millennium, Tau are still very open-minded about the galaxy (some would say naïve), and are only just realising how dangerous the wider universe can be.

The Damocles Crusade should have alerted the tau to the hazards of the galaxy, but it ended in a peace treaty, rather than victory or defeat, and saw the beginning of a new era of Imperial co-existence (prompted by the necessity for the Imperium to redirect forces to fight the more dangerous tyranids). Few tau see the Imperium as the threat it will eventually prove to be, and genuinely believe that they can trade with humans indefinitely. Others, particularly those who experienced at first hand the Imperial atrocities of the Damocles Crusade, are more realistic and distrust humans as a rule.

The tau are a psychically-null species, so have no concept of Chaos or the horrifying consequences of Daemonic infiltration of the real universe. As such they will even have dealings with the servants of the Dark Gods.

The only exceptions from the tau policy of live-and-let-live are the orks and, more recently, the tyranids. The tau have learned the hard way that orks live only to fight, and co-existence is virtually impossible. It is, however, reasonably common to see ork mercenaries fighting in tau armies. Over the last few years, the tau have confronted scouting fleets from Hive Fleet Kraken. All attempts at negotiation failed and the Tau Empire is being forced to come to terms with the fact that the tyranids are an inherently hostile species.

On the issue of gender politics, male and female tau are theoretically on an equal footing. Prejudice of any kind is a distraction from the furtherance of the Greater Good. This does not mean that prejudice does not exist, just that the tau have suppressed it to an unconscious level and will not acknowledge it even when it is pointed out to them. Other species within the Empire have varying attitudes towards sex and gender, and varying degrees of willingness to show their attitudes.

Ork:

The orks have no centralised rule, and even their regional government is unstable, being dominated by alpha-specimens known as Nobz and Warbosses.

Might is right in ork society, and the only goal is to have as big a fight as possible, somewhere in the near future. As such, ork ‘kulture’ revolves around a constant arms race, where individual Warbosses gather their Boyz to form Waaaghs (invasion forces) that will ravage nearby star systems. If there are no aliens available to fight, orks will willingly and non-prejudicially fight fellow orks.

There are no sexual politics in ork society, since, despite the use of the term ‘Boyz’ to define the most common species of Orkoid, and their own use of ‘he’ as a pronoun when speaking Imperial Gothic. In reality, orks are sexless. Reproduction is via an unconscious shedding of spores, in a bizarre, unique and almost certainly artificially engineered process of species perpetuation.

Prejudice doesn’t exist as a concept amongst orks, even against those that are on the other side of a war – the ork word for ‘friend’ literally translates as ‘favoured enemy’. While this does not preclude the existence of orkish grudges, it does mean that rival clans will normally gather together to fight some common enemy with no more than a competitive rivalry. As part of their macho kulture, orkoids of any kind will look down on those who are weaker than they are, be they Grot slaves or squishy humans. This isn’t racial prejudice by any means, since some ‘favoured enemies’ from other species come to be highly respected by orks. A prime example of such a ‘favoured enemy’ is Imperial Commissar Yarrick, who defeated Ghazghkull Thraka’s first invasion of the Armageddon hive world. Thraka once captured the commissar on Golgotha Prime, but where a human would probably have executed such a dangerous opponent, Thraka offered Yarrick the opportunity to join his retinue. What happened next is uncertain. Although it is without question that Yarrick refused the offer, it is rumoured that Thraka actually allowed the commissar’s subsequent escape back to Imperial space, although Yarrick himself vehemently denies this.

Chaos:

Chaos, the one constant. Whereas no alignment can be described as evil, Chaos goes beyond evil, into the Chaotic. Whereas an evil person wants personal power for personal power’s sake, Chaos is non-prejudicially representative of sentient emotion in its rawest, most savage form. Chaos destroys and rebuilds, through war, pestilence, scheming, the pursuit of pleasure. Even though most of Chaos’s human servants are initially on a quest for personal power, ultimately they end up serving the causes of the Dark Gods.

The four main powers each have their own allegiance, and there is a fifth for those who do not subscribe to any particular power, but worship Chaos as an undivided whole:

Khorne values martial prowess above all else. Blood and skulls are the only tribute fit to be placed at the foot of his throne. His servants are all warriors, and his rituals are all bloody in the extreme, often indistinguishable from warfare.

Despite his preference for insane bloodshed, Khorne does have a sense of warrior’s honour, after a fashion. Civilians and enemies who surrender will always be butchered, but enemies overpowered after putting up a strong fight will occasionally be taken alive, rather than killed out of hand, out of respect for their determination and prowess. Normally, they will be made into slaves, but sometimes the promise of unending violence is used to lure them into Khorne’s service.

Khorne detests his brother/sister Slaanesh, seeing the decadence and foppery of the Prince of Pleasure as an insult to his honour. Additionally, Khorne will not tolerate the use of magic, which means relationships with Tzeentch cultists are usually hostile.

Special Rule: No character of Khornate allegiance may have psychic powers, or enter a career where psychic powers are compulsory. Characters with psychic powers may not change allegiance to Chaos – Khorne.

Tzeentch is a master of deception and magic, and most of his followers’ activities revolve around complex plots or quests for lost knowledge.

Tzeentch’s prime motivation is to maintain (and often accelerate) the perpetual change that the universe undergoes. Revolutions, natural catastrophes, great inventions, mass extinctions, all are favourite events of Tzeentch, and his followers strive to make these things come to pass.

Magic and mutation are favourite tools of the Lord of Change, since the fixed laws of nature are abhorrent to him, and the champions of Tzeentch are the most mutated, yet most powerfully psychic, followers of Chaos.

Tzeentch distrusts Khorne’s prejudice against magic, and is antithetically opposed to Nurgle’s belief in unchanging stagnation.

At the peak of their power, ten thousand years ago, the eldar were a decadently depraved species, perverse by the standards of most species. Ignoring the warnings from their wisest and most puritanical farseers, they inadvertantly allowed the Chaos God Slaanesh to be born, the resultant warp storm swallowing up the eldar empire and forming the Eye of Terror. Slaanesh still retains many of the characteristics of the planetary eldar, feeding on the pleasures and pains of physical sensation in much the same way as its ‘creators’ did.

Knowing that their patron was created from eldar souls, human followers of Slaanesh tend to be more tolerant of aliens than servants of other Chaos powers or the Imperium. They tolerate the most depraved and corrupt perversions that any mind, human or otherwise, can imagine, and indulge in them at every opportunity, be it sex, drugs, sadism, masochism, murder, music or any of a thousand other practices. Roleplaying Slaaneshi characters (PC or NPC) well requires either a strong stomach or a sick mind.

Slaanesh holds a bitter enmity for Khorne’s crudeness and unrefined brutality.

Nurgle, the Lord of Decay, is the omega to Tzeentch’s alpha. Where Tzeentch seeks to enforce constant change, Nurgle is obsessed with the futility of all life and harbours a desire for unchanging stagnation.

In apparent contradiction with his love of death, Nurgle also loves life, particularly the creation of the germs and microbes of disease. To a follower of Nurgle, there is no contradiction – life is to be enjoyed, since the only way out of it is death. Nurgle is about embracing life as it happens, yet at the same time welcoming the inevitable end.

Many of Nurgle’s most fervent followers, like the god himself, have a macabre sense of humour. Less devout worshippers tend to be the ones who turned to Nurgle in the vain hope of a cure for an illness, and these followers tend to have a depressed outlook on life. It is only when they accept the inevitability of fate that they cheer up and enjoy damnation. If everything is destined to come to an inevitable end, then there is nothing to fear, and nothing can be lost through death.

As mentioned above, Nurgle and Tzeentch are antitheses, so their followers are exceedingly hostile to one another.

There are those who follow Chaos as a whole. They worship both all the gods, and none of them.

Chaos Undivided worshippers follow practises specific to their own cult, so no general guidelines can be given other than that they are invariably insane to some degree. Why else would a person risk so much by worshipping Daemons, for the fleeting chance of a god’s favour?

Some followers of Chaos Undivided look down on power-specific Chaos worshippers, seeing them as misguided and self-limiting.

Zeal

In addition to relative allegiances, a character’s own sense of morality must come into play somewhere, even amongst the darkness of the 41^st Millennium. There is a modifier to the allegiance, which is the degree to which the character follows orthodox teachings, or rails against them.

The four categories of zeal are described below:

Puritan:

Puritans are those who are implacable in their loyalty, who will never doubt the righteousness of their cause, who will never give ground in an ideological debate. They will firmly believe an apparently implausible fiction, or unsupported theory, if it backs up their beliefs.

Ideological puritans do not normally value intellect, except where it supports their own convictions, and they tend to be the most ready to resort to violence against less-zealous individuals or groups.

Examples of puritanical Imperial characters are Redemptionists, Ministorum types, and the Monodominant faction of the Inquisition.

Conservative:

The older or more powerful members of most societies are generally conservative. They believe that the system that has worked for them throughout their life, or that has placed them in a position of power, should be preserved.

Since conservatives generally control society, and because it requires little conscious action or thought to go along with the status quo, conservatism is a common ideology among most populations. Cultures with a strong work ethic and a rigid social order (e.g. strongly Imperial worlds) see conservatism as an ideal, and see liberalism and radicalism as threats.

Morality and society are often one and the same to a conservative. In their eyes, should morals be allowed to slip, society will collapse. They believe that the state should support its people only insomuch as the people support themselves. Those unable or unwilling to put in the effort required to repay the state its debt are contemptible.

Examples of conservative Imperial characters would include the aristocracy, most Inquisitors and almost anyone else in a position of authority.

Most PCs will start their adventuring life either conservative or liberal in their allegiance, although this may be varied at the GM’s discretion.

Liberal:

There are always those who try to work for greater freedom. Intellectuals in particular seem prone to thoughts deviant from the societal norm. Some societies tolerate or even encourage this liberal thought. Others, including those dominated by conservative or puritan factions, see it as a threat to stability.

Liberal characters generally follow their society’s rules and values to an extent, except where they perceive them as restricting freedom, either to themselves or to others. Unlike radicals, they do not believe in opposing authority except where absolutely necessary, i.e. in the promotion of liberty.

Liberals dismiss the idea of a link between morality and social order, and class the restriction of personal freedom as a threat to any society, rather than a way of protecting it. They believe that the state has a responsibility to look after its people, particularly those unable to look after themselves. This can lead in some cases to misguided tolerance of dangerous groups.

Examples of liberal Imperial characters include veteran Inquisitors and Academics.

Most PCs will start their adventuring life either conservative or liberal in their allegiance, although this may be varied at the GM’s discretion.

Radical:

Prolonged exposure to societal subcultures can have an effect on a person’s outlook on life. "Why should things be as they are? Surely, there has to be a better way to run things than this." Usually, this thinking remains just that, as thought, but sometimes, malcontents try to do something about their situation, with the potential for massive upheaval.

Needless to say, most societies fear the radical mindset, since it advocates the upsetting of previously set power structures. Subversives are often suppressed by conservative or puritan governments, where they are most common, while the few radicals that appear amongst liberal cultures are often tolerated as a fringe group preferable to the ideologically opposed puritans.

Like their opponents, the puritans, radicals are often ready to use violence to advance their cause, joining rebel groups and striking actively against their perceived oppressors.

Alternatively, radicals can be just a step away from a puritan, just less rigid in the means used to justify the ends. This makes them no less dangerous to society.

Examples of radical Imperial characters include Xanthite and Horusian Inquisitors, rebels and all other heretics.

Changing Alignment

There are three ways of changing alignment – by choice, by GM’s decree, or as a result of mental illness.

Allegiance rarely changes. The most common change is from Imperial to Chaos. Far rarer is for a character to switch between species, although it has been known for Imperial soldiers to surrender to the tau, in the knowledge that the tau will not normally execute prisoners of war and may even allow them to join the Empire.

It is possible for a character to change allegiance several times over the course of his or her life, but the GM should be wary of allowing this to occur as a matter of course. Changing allegiance means throwing away an entire set of ingrained moral values and acquiring a new set.

Normally, only PCs of radical zeal are allowed to change allegiance, and their zeal will change to liberal or conservative (PC’s choice) until the PC gets to grips with what the new culture demands of him.

Zeal, on the other hand, can change drastically over the course of an adventuring career. For example, a green Imperial Guard trooper with a very conservative view of the galaxy may eventually come into contact with all manner of situations that shake his faith in the Imperial system. After witnessing or being involved in the deliberate killing of civilians, the trooper may feel remorse or empathy, slipping into a liberal mindset. From there, it is only a few more massacres until the trooper decides he has had enough and shoots his commanding officer, becoming a radical. He may still worship the Emperor as a god, and may believe in the right or the necessity of the Imperium, but has an anti-orthodox idea of how Imperial force should be applied.

Normally, a single zeal change can only take one step at a time, e.g. from conservative to puritan, or from radical to liberal. However, this is not always the case. A drastic example could be a Redemptionist who walks in on his Redemptor Priest engaged in unnatural activities with a mutant. The (Imperial – Puritan) Redemptionist may lose his faith entirely, railing against what he now sees as a corrupt and decadent system, becoming an (Imperial – Radical) Rebel.

All alignment changes are at the discretion of the GM, and should a PC wish to change either allegiance or zeal, he must justify this to the GM. Simply becoming an Imperial – Puritan because a player wants an excuse to set fire to people is not enough. The player in this case will have to (justifiably) enter a career that promotes a puritan attitude, e.g. the Ecclesiarchy or Cultist.