I CAST FIST

Bear in mind that every time a psyker invokes their powers, there's a chance that they'll get sucked into the warp or accidentally open a gate into the warp. Say a team of 20, all activating their powers to go fight Not-Magneto. And that's assuming it only takes one salvo to take him down. How many times does Not-Cyclops use his beam? Because every time he does, there's a chance of ducking everything up.

Then multiply that by how many members of the team there are, add in the fact that they're probably unsanctioned, and you've got a pretty high probability that every time they go to kick ass in a group larger than 5, there's a serious risk of bringing in daemons.

A better in-universe way of making 40k xmen would be cybernetic/biological enhancements which have (mostly) gone wrong. For example, Cyclops has his laser-eyes because a magos tried out making a more-powerful version of the laser eye. It worked, but using the eye-ray on any setting higher than normal gives him a serious headache, and full power knocks him out. Beast was a genetic mutation gone wrong, perhaps an attempt to combine human and xenos DNA, and so on.

I'd stay away from the guys who couldn't be explained in this way, or where such an explanation would make no sense in the setting. For example, don't have Wolverine (at least with his healing factor) because if such a person existed with so great of a healing factor, there's no reason why he wouldn't be captured and used to make all Space Marines damn-near immortal.

Some X-Men would have to be represented as psykers, like Storm and Xavier, but you could probably get away with most of them if you stick to the bio/mechanical enhancements.

>>50021093
Oh no no. I apologize. I either didn't make my intentions clear enough or you read into the superheroes comment too much.. in which case, I'll rephrase to try and be better understood.


I realize that using conventional psyker powers bring the possibility of warping the landscape, damaging things, even if they're exceedingly careless or unlucky, blowing a hole in creation and getting pulled through by demons into the warp. Totally get that.

However, I recall at least in 1st ED (not sure if that was removed by 2nd?) there was a rule where so long as you used half of your power, you could avoid the worst fates of using psyke power. So long as you lowballed it to your willpower, you'd suffer a lot from the anathema you're committing in space, but woudn't summon demons or be yanked through.

With that in mind, the idea wasn't to make literal X-men, but imagine sorcerers/psykers with abilities that artificially bolster their stats. Strength, toughness, mage armor. That sort of thing. So some frail looking wizard guy might only be 5'0 tall, but activating a Psyker power, may add half his Willpower to his Strength rating and crush plasteel like it were paper.

So magical brutes, in other words. Kinds of guys that get into melee with orks and punch them so hard their teeth explode out the backs of their heads.

Their Psyker level and willpower BEING their physical enhancers.

>>50021213

The power you're looking for is called Hammerhand, which quadruples the strength bonus and gives Natural Weapon while keeping your hands from holding anything. Average human's attack would be 1d10+12.

As for direct 1/2WP to S... in theory, yes. But it wouldn't be anything truly terrifying unless they had a weapon. Even then, the average psyker has S30 WP40, so you'd be increasing a sword's attack from 1d10+3 to 1d10+5. It would be scarier if you made it a direct WP to S, and the boss would be something to see.

>>50021491
Is there precedence amongst existing psyker powers for passive abilities? Even once you willingly flick on and off, or cause constant effects while they're active.

So say the Big Boss of this heretical cult activates their 'Holy god we must fall back because this is too much, too early' aura. The air screams and sobs while material objects smell of brimstone and either brighten up into hot metal or burst into flame, while the veil thins and demons giggle and glower through the atmosphere, still prevented access but just barely.

You fire your bolter. The Psyker's clothing bursts away from the force of the impacts, but their skin seems unharmed. A frail looking willowy human psyker lopes up to you like an infuriated gorilla through the hail of rounds and uppercuts your Guardsman hard enough to send them airborne.

The effect being their psyker level just raised their toughness by their willpower. They're effectively as tough as plasteel without power armor on, even while hell is whirling like an eddy all around them.

>>50020581
So basically, you want to get together a set of bad boys from outer space to bodyslam the human race, requiring that wrestlers race to our defense?

>>50021800
Yes, but powers which would affect everyone in an aura in that way would be Primaris Psyker-level. Psyker in question would have to sustain the power, and the threshold would be pretty high (I would guess between 15 and 20), but it's theoretically possible.

>>50021891
With a Dark Pilgrim theme. So imagine them as hellish Luchadores in buckled hats and breeches, in league with space pirates- and through them, a similarly heretical monastary with wuxi elements mixed with good ole puritanism, freemasonry, a space equivalent of a railroad and the underground villages of immigrant Chinese.

Such heresy going on in the colonies that glass golems spring to life in their factories and scream obscenities at the heretics that created them before rampaging through the towns, only to be put down by the alchemists and their heathen sorcerous brutality.

>>50021931
What if it was one person just able to raise and lower it like throwing a dimmer switch- for themselves, only.. but they could teach it to similarly heretical psykers? Would that still keep it between 15 and 20?

>>50022793
Yes. I'm basing that off of the afore-mentioned Hammerhand, but adding threshold to account for the fact that you can choose which stat you're changing. If each person has a different power (i.e. One can buff AG, one can buff S, but neither can do both) I'd keep it at 15. But if it's a spell which changes your buff based on what you pick at the start of your turn, I'd say 18-20 because of customizability.

>>50022793
The mooks could have a weaker varient adding 1/2 WP for, say, 10 Threshold (12 if customizable), and a Primaris Aura would be around 27 (or 30). An alternate Primaris where it just buffs the Psyker's stat by 2xWP instead of just WP would be something like 23 (or 25)

>>50022998
I admittedly DO like the progression idea. And it fits into how similar kinds of psyker powers work in different sourcebooks. They don't tend to all be the same power doing different things, buuuut.. well, that's where it's divergent.

So Mook Tier: No customization, straight up Half WP, 10 threshold.

What if.. what if, the different elements of it were spaced out, and purchased as if separate powers? So the weak version of the power might give 1/4th Willpower, 10 Threshold.
Buying separate powers upgrades ones mastery of it, raising the benefit from 1/4th to 1/2, to equal to Willpower, to X2Willpower.
A separate power lowers the threshold from an astronomical amount.

Mechanically it isn't intended to be learnable by emperor-fearing people, so the math and crunch is also part of the fluff for Non-PCs. But still, being able to outline the growth of the mooks and what the old ass heretics had to do to be where they are and explain their powersets, you know?

>>50021093
>there's no reason why he wouldn't be captured and used to make all Space Marines damn-near immortal.
Captured is one thing, but it's not like the admech can just snap their mechanized digits and reproduce any mutation they want. And the geneseed shit goes wrong often enough as it is, so doing it to space marines seems even more unlikely.