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I'm super interested in Emperor's children (this is a previous post of mine here http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/682662.page), and I recently bought the betrayal at calth boxset, but I have a few questions.

Firstly, these guys would be different from standard 40k EC/noise marines in that rather than being hedonistic perverts (though there is nothing wrong with that), these guys are obsessed still with achieving perfection on an army wide level,
thanks to a continuing obsession with the emperor. This obsession is now to usurp and surpass him, and reveal him for the imperfect being he is by doing so.
So rather than being fleshy, their warp taint has made them more perfect. e.g. possessed might look like celestine, the SoB saint. But they would still be undeniably damned, so radiant perfect beings on the surface, but scratch beneath that and they writhe with chaos and evil.
I'd depict this with black eyes/mouths, maybe use OSL if I get good enough at painting.

My question is how do I justify this. Armies don't mutate or warp in a standard fashion. Did they make a bargain? With slaanesh or the whole pantheon? How and why?
I can't seem to work out the details, and need some fresh ideas to get the thought machine going again.

secondly, i want a way that I can translate that vibe to the 40k CSM codex.
Fluff wise it could be an emperors children warband that split of from the majority of the legion as they retreated from terra, that explains why they still have discipline and a chain of command of some variety.
But I would want to be able to utilise the full force of the 40k CSM codex.

e.g. could I run palatine blades as 40k berserkers and say that the rage and counterattack rules represent their martial pride/ability? So different cult marines represent different aspects of perfection?
Is this acceptable, would you allow this in a game

another example, im not sure how "perfect" a de-spiked forgefiend or whatever would look, so I am unsure of whether to do that or leave them spikey and paint them as another force that is supporting the emperors children?
e.g A word bearers force working in conjunction that is functionally the same army in the same detachment, just painted differently. But I also like my purist EC. Which do you think would work better?

Any advice or recommendations with achieving perfect/damned look would be well received as well. Thanks all

For fluff justification, Slaaneshi worshippers are not always bdsm fetishists. Look at Sigvald the Magnificent from the old Warriors of Chaos range; he's the Fantasy champion of Slaanesh but from the looks of him, you'd think he's an Empire General. Slaanesh is about doing what you like, and if that happens to be making yourself appear perfect, then that's what you'll get. If anything those "mutations" would further make you appear perfect (so you could almost say their perfection is their mutation).

As for their rules, due to the nature of the game, most people have no problem if you use rules for completely different units to represent what you had in mind on the following conditions: 1.) You do not alter the rules themselves (so the Khorne Berserkers wouldn't benefit from any actual Slaaneshi marks or effects, like the FnP granted by an Icon of Excess, or count as Slaaneshi units for rules like the Eldar's Ancient Doom) and 2.) your models look good. If you plop down a marine with a bolter painted pink, then tell me he's using Khorne Berserker rules, I'm gonna take issue with you while my boot takes issue with your "rear armor".

Finally, as for stuff like "de-spiking" stuff, this is where conversion comes in. As long as the resulting model is a good approximation of the model you were going for, it should be fine. In the Forge Fiend example, you could instead take a Dread Knight and swap out the pilot for one of your marines and give it gatling cannons on each arm. For bonus points you could even give him a set of lashes in each hand and have him pull double duty as a Maulerfiend when you don't need the Forge Fiend rules (remember to only use one ruleset at a time).

This is just an example of course, you can always convert up something completely different as long as it looks cool and we have a good idea of what it should be at a glance.

Thanks for the reply. Good to know that it should be alright. The Dread knight idea is an interesting one, I may have to chase that concept a little. Yeah the idea is to have a high quality finish (hard to talk about perfect if the paint job is bad), and of course everything will follow exact rules.