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I'm doing a sort of rpg (homebrew) campaign with my friends who will be rping DW and storm troopers in an Inquistors private army. Next month we will be taking on the genestealer cult. The idea is that they go to a planet during a huge war vs orks (something that has gone on for decades (like maybe 100+years ) on the request of an inquisitor. They can't understand why (as it's just standard ork vs guard fighting) until they find out that the majority of the planets forces were infested with genestealer cult fighting the orks for dominance of the planet and that's why the inquisition likely sent them.

I'm wondering, then, if this is possible? And how powerful can the cult get? I'm saying this because I'm very tempted to have a war hound titan under the influence of the cult as a final boss.

A Cult can dominate a whole world if they grow to maturity. Basically the cult will never stop growing, infecting, subverting and taking over all it can.

So yes they can, in theory, infect a world to the point where they could hijack a titan; though I believe titans use a human-machine interface to function and it might be that the machine side could detect and try to remove/eject an impure human - ergo an injected person. However, as with all things you can likely twist the lore to suit your needs - an infection that is super evolved - after many failures - to hide itself from the machine spirits detecting capacity.




Typically cults, when they get big, will attract attention. Both of the Hive Fleets who will rain down death on the whole world and consume all, including the cult (perhaps saving one or two key individuals to be used to seed other worlds).
And also of the Imperium, who will come with inquisitors and the like to purge the infection. Some Xenos might react too, Eldar might work to try and purge the infection so that the world doesn't fall to Tyranids; or a random ork invasion might come along to mess things up.


However a world isolated from the greater part of the Imperium; or where politics has rendered it stuck in a situation where they cannot raise aid (or refuse too); then the infection could spread and spread until it infects the titan crews.

a world that infected will likely be subject toi exterminatus unless it has essential assists on it.

 Overread wrote:
A Cult can dominate a whole world if they grow to maturity. Basically the cult will never stop growing, infecting, subverting and taking over all it can.

So yes they can, in theory, infect a world to the point where they could hijack a titan; though I believe titans use a human-machine interface to function and it might be that the machine side could detect and try to remove/eject an impure human - ergo an injected person. However, as with all things you can likely twist the lore to suit your needs - an infection that is super evolved - after many failures - to hide itself from the machine spirits detecting capacity.




Typically cults, when they get big, will attract attention. Both of the Hive Fleets who will rain down death on the whole world and consume all, including the cult (perhaps saving one or two key individuals to be used to seed other worlds).
And also of the Imperium, who will come with inquisitors and the like to purge the infection. Some Xenos might react too, Eldar might work to try and purge the infection so that the world doesn't fall to Tyranids; or a random ork invasion might come along to mess things up.


However a world isolated from the greater part of the Imperium; or where politics has rendered it stuck in a situation where they cannot raise aid (or refuse too); then the infection could spread and spread until it infects the titan crews.

They could inrfect a entire planets government.

But a Titan has a massively powerful machine spirit. So much so it imprints on its crews and can destroy and absorb the mind of weaker individuals. It takes a very rare person to takencharge, and not be absorbed and destroyed by the potant war spirits. There often ainciant and can be 10,000 years old. They can learn, even run there own guns etc with less effectiveness.

Hard to force a Titan to do anything. There spirits are powerful as there physical weaponry.

The real danger of a cult is it spreading like cancer. Smuggled genestealers aboard cargo ships can seed new cults in other systems even if the original cult is destroyed.

While it can be tempting to view Exterminatus as the go to solution for all problems, it is still only used as a last resort because wiping out a productive world of the Imperium can disrupt supply chains and cause just as much or more damage than the cult itself. That is why Necromunda and Ichar IV for example still exist rather than having had Exterminatus conducted on them for their Genestealer cult infections.

I'm building a campaign to explore this. My cult begins with a game of Spacehulk or Kill Team (haven't decided yet) in which the stealer player attempts to launch 8 escape pods, each carrying a purestrain. The human occupants of the ship are intent on purging and destroying their xeno stowaways before they can escape.

The planet the survivors will land on has a well patrolled and defended city and 8 isolated settlements. One survivor will go to each settlement to sow a cult; anyone they take out in a kill team becomes a brood brother. The one who takes the most brood brothers begins to evolve into the patriarch.

Brood brothers can fight or breed. Purestrains never stop recruiting, even once the games escalate to 40k scale. Brood brothers who chose to breed create Acolytes; like brood brothers, Acolytes can fight or breed. Those who breed create neophytes; like brood brothers and acolytes, they can fight or breed. Those who breed beget the 4th generation, whose firstborn will be the Magus, while the remainder will be near human neophytes. Should 4th generation neophytes breed, their offspring are purestrains.

In the second cycle, brood brothers have a small change to create abberants instead of acolytes, but abberants do not breed. It is also possible to generate additional characters when the 4rth generation is born (primus, sanctus, biophagus, nexos, kellermorph, alphus, locus, etc).

When the third cycle arrives, the odds of brood brothers spawning abberants are equal to their odds of spawning acolytes, but there is also a small chance of spawning metamorphs. When metamorphs breed, their offspring are always abberants. The cult retains the capacity to breed additional characters.

In the fourth cycle, there are equal odds for breeding acolytes abberants and metamorphs, and the cult maintains the capacity to breed additional characters. At this point the gentic replication pattern stabilizes, and subsequent breeding cycles continue to follow the same rules.

To further facilitate the cult's growth, certain campaign territories allow GSC detachments or kill teams to lurk in occupied territories during the preparation phase of a campaign turn. While lurking, purestrains have a chance to infect a basic infantry model from the opposing force; the victim can either join the cult immediately as a brood brother, or remain with their faction as a sleeper agent.

Games can be played as Kill Team or 40k depending upon the sizes of both the attacking and defending forces. The cult strategy is to maximize recruitment through lurking in the preparation phase and engage only in kill team scenarios where purestrains can infect further infect and create brood brothers. Other cult members are better off lurking and breeding than risking large scale confrontations, especially in the first breeding cycle.

The campaign is set to begin before the end of October. I'll be documenting the heck out of the campaign once it's up and running, but I haven't figured that part out yet.




In the fourth cycle,

Actually, full grown cults can sometimes wage wars against others, loyal, world in a conventional way if their full world is under cult control

Perhaps, the Titan is the one who called in the Imperium, and the team is trying to figure out:
why the call for rescue was made (the cult is near planetary scale)
how to rescue the titan (because it will not allow itself to be piloted by the cult, but they CAN cut it up and take it's weapons and mount them on other things).

-STS

I love the idea of full worlds under cult control. I also like the idea of multiple Cults working together. The Cult in our campaign is likely to try to spread its influence to the two other planets in the system rather than focusing on dominating a single planet.

BrianDavion wrote:
a world that infected will likely be subject toi exterminatus unless it has essential assists on it.

I have no clue why, but I read this as "Unless it has essential oils to assist it". Gave me a good chuckle.

slade the sniper wrote:
Perhaps, the Titan is the one who called in the Imperium, and the team is trying to figure out:
why the call for rescue was made (the cult is near planetary scale)
how to rescue the titan (because it will not allow itself to be piloted by the cult, but they CAN cut it up and take it's weapons and mount them on other things).

-STS

In that case a Titan might overload its own reactors though and blow it's self into a large mushroom cloud. A detonating titan can go off like a nuclear weapon.

Unless it was disabled, and powered down, it probably could inteveen somehow. Could be a interesting one though, a Titan calling for aid, though that would likely be a exposition lead by the admech who are surprisingly better geared to resist them as there cold logic, and bio scanners etc stand better odds of resiting inflriltratuon forces.

Plus, many of there lesser orders are almost robotic and under control, like servitors have no real independent thought and skitari are somewhat inhibited and changed.