At my last Dark Heresy session, I was faced with one of the most discomforting scenes I’ve ever had to roleplay.
Myself and two other Acolytes were charged with infiltrating a death cult in a one shot campaign while our regular GM was on holiday. The climax of this involved three members of the Inquisition presiding over a live human sacrifice – specifically the sacrifice of a pregnant woman.
This act was unsettling enough, but because I had come into procession of the ceremonial staff, it fell to me to perform the sacrifice. Being a (hopefully) sane and relatively normal individual, I was pretty disgusted by the whole idea and would happily have turned round and chucked a void grenade at the cultists. However, my character was a jaded, gung-ho and frankly unhinged assassin who had already demonstrated that he was willing to do anything to complete his missions.
So – moral quandary – do you do something that goes against everything decent, do you play out what the character would do or do you do something else?
In the event, I decided to roll a d10 and let fate make the decision for me. I rolled a 10, which I took as a fudged roll as per Dark Heresy’s rules, so I performed the sacrifice.
On the upside, I kind of feel justified in my decision given that one of my colleagues then immediately sacrificed me in order to make a pact with a demon (a pretty easy choice given that it was either my about-to-be retired character or his wife’s character). So, I did get my penance, which would probably have been delivered by the Inquisitors of the Ordo Hereticus or my Inquisitorial master and his well equipped Cathedral of Pain at some point anyway.
Still, it wasn’t a comfortable moment while I made my decision and waited for it to play out.
The repercussions should be interesting however – one character now has two Dark Pacts and is required to sacrifice a companion annually, while the other attempted to execute him for heresy and treason, failed and was last seen unconscious at the bottom of a drain.
I’m curious. You say that you were uncomfortable with the decision, but it’s one your character would have made. So my question is, why were you playing a character whose morals made you uncomfortable?
@swordgleam
I quite often play characters who have a moral stance that doesn’t tie up with my own – I like playing Paladins for example, despite the fact that I’m an atheist and don’t like the kind of unquestioning zeal that is generally the hallmark of paladins. Roleplaying yourself is no fun at all.
This is all amplified in the Warhammer 40k universe, where you are pretty much playing an over-zealous bad guy no matter what you do.
For the most part, my characters morals didn’t bother though. He didn’t do anything that wouldn’t have happened in a Hollywood action film prior to that.
I would have tossed the grenade and taken punishment for failing my mission as penance. I might have even played it out as a last spark of humanity driving some kind of madness within my character to do the deed.
@dar
In the event, that’s what one of the other party members did, nearly inducing a total party kill. She’d been acting as the voice of reason to the other two of us anyway.
Wish I’d thought of the last spark of humanity idea. The glorious sacrifice in the name of the Emperor could have played out nicely (the problem being that using a void grenade in close quarters is basically suicide and we’d had most of our weapons taken off us).
Nice war story. I’m thinking of running a WH40k RPG later this fall. Hopefully I can get a lot of those kind of situations in the game.
Thanks for validating everything I wrote in my latest post by the way!
Andreas Davour´s last blog ..Moral and ethics in roleplaying – alignment causes brain damage
Glad I could help. I’m not a massive fan of alignment either, although that’s more because I don’t think it can really be defined well without railroading players.