Low-level chaotic antagonists for your players to burn at the stake….

Written by Lightbringer

(Or how to make friends and immolate people)

In advance of September’s release of Disciples of the Dark Gods, I thought I’d have a crack at
putting together some villains for your characters to immolate. These two are low level scum,
none too subtle or dangerous, and are suitable for cornering in their feeble lairs and burning at
the stake in one convenient session.

Adraniss the panderer: Malfian servant of Slaanesh

Adraniss was always a problem child. Intelligent, quick witted and creative, he had the
misfortune to be born in the miserable slums of Hettra, a minor hive on Malfi. He never knew
his father, and his mother died young in making the conventional hurried transition from joygirl
to addict, to corpse.

Forced to beg on the streets from an early age, he rapidly discovered that there were those
who, in defiance of Malfian law, would pay good money to enjoy his youthful company. His
psyche was twisted and scarred during this harsh and abusive induction into adulthood, leaving
him a thoroughly dangerous and mercenary individual absorbed only by his own wishes and
desires. Were it not for a chance encounter in his late teens, Adraniss would, like his mother,
have probably become addicted to one lethal underhive slum-drug or another and rapidly
descended into subhumanity and then death.

But he was saved this fate (in order to be damned to one even worse) by Vedectra, a
highborn Malfian Slaaneshi cultist. Travelling through the Hettran slums in search (literally) of
fresh meat, Vedectra chanced upon Adraniss and convinced him to join him for a simple
monetary exchange in a local hostelry. Vedectra was amused to discover that Adraniss was
intrigued, rather than repelled and horrified by his client’s inclinations, tattoos and brandings.
Adraniss was rapidly inducted into Vedectra’s cult, and seared with the marks of the Prince of
Excess.

However, Adraniss barely had time to learn the initial Rituals of Debasement and the secret
signs of the cult when the Inquisition descended upon Vedectra’s followers like wolves upon
sheep. Terrified and forced to flee, Adraniss took flight to Scintilla in hopes of establishing
himself in safety.

Arriving with nothing, Adraniss used his hive-bred wiles to quickly prey upon his fellow
immigrants, his attention falling in particular upon the naïve and vulnerable of both sexes. Now
he has a small stable of drug-addled joyboys and joygirls who he pimps relentlessly in the
Sumpston sector of the Sibellean underhive. He has rapidly built up a vicious reputation as a
cutthroat and panderer, a reputation enhanced by dark rumours as to his bizarre taste for
torture and self mutilation.

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Low-level chaotic antagonists for your players to burn at the stake….

Written by Lightbringer

Appearance

Adraniss has the usual pale skin, lank blonde hair and watery green eyes of a Hettran Malfian.
He is of average height, slim but well muscled and aged in his late 20s. He wears his hair to his
shoulder, and enjoys the affectation of wearing the pale purple dress leather stormcoat of the
25th Hettran PDF regiment over sallow silks and velveteen britches. He is anonymously good
looking, but his face rapidly twists into a memorable snarl of utter contempt when crossed.
Underneath his garments he is heavily scarred in ritual Slaaneshi patterns, and a significant
portion of his torso is tattooed with hideous, if incomplete, images of slaughter and suffering.

Adraniss the panderer

WS BS S T Ag Int Per WP Fel
30 29 37 29 36 30 33 30 41

Movement: 3/6/9/18

Skills: Awareness (Per), Barter (Fel), Blather +10 (Fel), Deceive (Fel) Carouse +20 (T),
Chem Use +10 (Int), Common Lore (Hettran Underworld) +20, Common Lore (Underworld)
(Int), Forbidden Lore (Slaaneshi rituals and practices), Intimidate +10 (S), Speak Language
(Low Gothic)

Talents: Melee Weapon training (Primitive) Pistol Training (Las)

Weapons: Hooked knife: (3m; 1d5+3R, Primitive), Laspistol (30m, S/3/-; 1d10=2E, Pen 0, Clip
30, Rld, Full, Reliable)

Gear: Hettran PDF stormcoat (Body 4), Drug injector (reused a number of times) 5 hits of
some filthy underhive drug. 500 thrones.

Personality and motivation: Adraniss is intelligent, but damaged, lazy and self indulgent.
When under pressure, he is capable of acts of great cunning, but when free to pursue his own
agenda, he tends to relapse into minor acts of self-destructive brutal depravity. He cannot
restrain himself for long, and that is likely to be his undoing. He is a sadist of the worst kind,
enjoying torture both mental and physical. However he is ultimately cowardly, and is terrified of
the Inquisition, having seen their handiwork before. His main response to danger is to flee, but
he will fight viciously if cornered. He lacks the ambition to ever be a great or truly lethal cultist.
He has no long term plans other than to impose his will on the weak for as long as he can. As
such, he is a minor threat, but dangerous enough, in his own way…

Followers: Adraniss is a minor cultist of Slaanesh, and he never completed his training but
his patron, the heretic Vedectra, was, during his short life, a magister magus of great power. He
taught Adraniss one ritual, the Ritual of Debasement. This enables a cultist to make a total
slave of another human being through the prolonged use of drugs and mental torture. Adraniss
has only had the time so far to inflict this horrific ritual on three of his stable, and they now
would willingly die for him to keep him safe or to amuse him. These three (two sickly looking
young women and a short, androgynous young man) travel with Adraniss everywhere. Use the

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Low-level chaotic antagonists for your players to burn at the stake….

Written by Lightbringer

dreg profile, but give them knives and stub pistols. Adraniss also has a wider stable of joyboys
and joygirls, based in his hideout, but they all hate and fear him, and wouldn’t lift a finger to
save him from the pyre.

Hideout: Adraniss resides in the 13th floor of an abandoned hab block in the Sumpston
sector of Hive Sibellus. The entire floor is given over to him, his clients and his stable of
addicts, who are sold to the depraved denizens of the hive on a half-hourly basis. The 13th
floor is about 1500 square feet of jumbled small rooms and hallways, covered in depraved
graffiti and scattered with drug paraphernalia and human waste. Filthy mattresses litter every
corner, many with addicts passed out on them. In the heart of this cesspool, Adraniss lives in a
cluster of rooms littered with cheap cushions and adorned with artwork stolen from the depths
of the Sibellan underhive, each uniquely “enhanced” to suit Adraniss’ obscene tastes.

Using Adraniss

Adraniss is such a nasty piece of work, players will love turning him into little shreds. The trick
is coming up with a good excuse to point them in his direction! Three quick hooks:

• The player’s Inquisitor is contacted by his opposite number in Malfi, who is chasing the only
survivor of a cult he’s just wiped out. The players are set on the track of this survivor, who was
last seen departing on the St Gerasmuss, a transport bound for Sibellus. His physical
appearance is passed to the players, and the Captain, when questioned, reveals that their
passenger left for the Sumpston sector of Hive Sibellus. Now it’s just a case of following the
trail of addicts…

• Or you could try a CSI-style approach. The players are contacted by the Precinct Judge of
the Hive Sibellus Sumpston Sector Adeptus Arbites. He calls them into the morgue-reclamator
chamber and shows them the body of a young, undernourished woman. “Nothing out of the
ordinary, eh?” he asks. “Another Hive-scum drug addict overdose, I first thought. But look…this
is why I called you in.” And he reveals that someone has carved the rune of Slaanesh on the
woman’s back with a knife, an inch deep, while she was still alive. The players will have to
track down the young woman’s identity, find out where she died, and who was responsible. All
roads lead to Adraniss…

• Or Miami Vice…The players are tracking down the local links in a vast drug supply chain.
They soon find that a new dealer is in town, an immigrant from Malfi, who is feared and loathed
by all the locals because of his hideous reputation for torture. Apparently, he may be the next
link in the supply chain, a chain that seems to stretch back to Malfi…

Sanny the ranter: deluded pawn of Tzeentch

From certain perspectives, hive cities are nothing more than a collection of intersecting
streets. If one is minded to view the metropolis through the eyes of a demagogue, there are
millions of corners from which passers by may be harangued and abused. Any many see their
world in this way. Naïve visitors to the hives are overwhelmed in short order upon arrival by the

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Low-level chaotic antagonists for your players to burn at the stake….

Written by Lightbringer

sheer ferocity and volume of the invective directed at them by hawkers, preachers, and bawds
from every angle, in dozens of languages.

But occasionally, an individual is born who sees the connections between the streets in terms
deeper than the purely financial. For those with the witchsight, street corners have mystical,
magickal qualities, linking worlds and dimensions invisible to those whose perspective is
purely mundane. For those prepared to leave mundane morality and sanity behind, there is
power on the streets, power that can be tapped and manipulated.

For over twenty years, Sanny has wandered the streets of Hive Sibellus. To the casual
observer, he is a typical hive dreg: scrawny, bedraggled and filthy. His bloodshot, rolling eyes,
shock of greasy hair and wild, stabbing gesticulations mark him among the mentally ill. In
civilised societies, such unfortunates are treated with kindness and mercy, but in the great
hives they are ignored and cast aside to perish or to abuse others, depending upon their
nature.

Sanny was in his early teens when the visions first came. At first accompanied by blinding
headaches and later by voices whispering on the edge of hearing, they showed him strange
connections between places and times, weird invisible strands of energy that drifted through
the city and muttered instructions in dead languages in how to channel these forces for his
own ends.

Sanny’s moods and rants soon became unbearable for his poor family, and he wandered onto
the streets, never to return. He now lives off the uncertain charity of the hivedwellers, and off
scraps of food the rats and bloodroaches are too slow to snatch from the gutter. He is an
inconvenience to the Sibellians, an embarrassment. But he may also be their doom.

For Sanny is a pawn of Tzeentch. He is a nascent psyker, the most dangerous of humans,
especially dangerous in his case, for the depth of his insanity conceals a malign purpose not
fully understood even by him. Tzeentch has opened a tiny conduit in his mind between the real
world and the warp, a conduit only possible where the vessel is already irrevocably maddened.

Now Tzeentch drives Sanny to wander through the city, making tiny adjustments to the flow of
warp energy around him in order to fuel the growing gateway in his head. To the uninitiated,
Sanny appears to be simply engaging in random acts of peculiar behaviour: suddenly
stooping, picking up and empty ration-can, walking ten paces, and placing it at a precise angle
next to a streetlight: shouting at a startled pilgrim, or rocking in a certain way at a certain time.
But everything he does is designed to increase the flow of warp energy generated by the living
masses around him into his own mind, where it is stored, awaiting a final, horrific release…

Appearance
Sanny is as thin and skeletal as a gantry crane, and is invariably wrapped in a soiled grey
longcoat and clothed in mismatched rags obviously plucked from the sewers. He is pale and
hairy, with a long beard and matted black hair. His eyes are his most striking feature, being
reddened and sore like angry wounds, but yet wild and startling. His age is hard to determine,
but if he were cleaned and groomed, he could be in his late 30s.

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Low-level chaotic antagonists for your players to burn at the stake….

Written by Lightbringer

Sanny the ranter

WS BS S T Ag Int Per WP Fel
18 18 27 29 32 30 25 40 5

Movement: 3/6/9/18

Skills: Awareness (Per), Carouse (T), Chem Use +10 (Int), Common Lore (Underworld) +10,
Forbidden Lore (Tzeentchian Magickal energy channeling) Secret Tongue (Daemonic)
Concealment (Ag) Intimidate +10 (S) (Int), Speak Language (Low Gothic)

Talents: Melee Weapon training (Primitive), Strong Minded, Unshakeable Faith, Psy Rating 2

Weapons: Filthy shiv/knife: (3m; 1d5+3R, Primitive),

Gear: Rags, collection of old newspapers, wheeled trolley piled high with empty bottles and
moth-eaten blankets.

Psychic powers: Sense Presence, White Noise, Inflict Delusion, Forget me, Visions, Channel
Magickal power, Warpgate (see below)

Unique psychic powers:

Sanny is unique: he has been given a special gift by Tzeentch, a gift that will – one way or
another – one day destroy him.

Warpgate.
Threshold: 10
Focus time: 20 full actions
Sustained: yes
Range: personal
Other requirements: The caster needs to accumulate 999 Tzeenchian Magickal energy points
to use this power.
This is a special psychic power focussed upon the caster. Once activated, it causes the
caster’s brain to swell and expand in his skull, bleeding out of his eyes, mouth and ears. The
cranium splits, and the brain, writhing and reforming like melted plastic, curls into a circular
shape about 20 feet wide. A weird light emanates from the centre of the circle, and then reality
splits wide as if it had been stabbed from within, and thousands of Tzeentchian daemons pour
out, slaying everything in sight, and probably dooming an entire planet to a hideous death. The
caster is, needless to say, slain, and his soul damned forever.

Channel Magickal power

Threshold: 5
Focus time: Half action
Sustained: yes
Range: personal
This is a simple Tzeentchian power that allows the caster to accumulate and store magickal

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Low-level chaotic antagonists for your players to burn at the stake….

Written by Lightbringer

energy to power deadlier rituals. Once cast, the user gains an insight into the flow of psychic
energy in an area about a mile square, and also receives a general idea of how this energy can
be redirected. Redirection can take place using simple ritualised behaviour, the form of which
is largely irrelevant, and which is typically personal to the user. Once redirected, the energy is
stored in the user’s mind, which rapidly drives them insane, at the rate of 1 insanity point for
every Tzeentchian Magickal energy point per day. Once irrevocably insane, the user becomes
a pawn of Tzeentch.

Each time this power is cast for the first nine years, the caster gains 1 Tzeentchian Magickal
energy point per month. After this period, the rate begins to increase to 1 point a week. After a
further 9 years, the rate increases to 1 point per day.

The more Tzeentchian Magickal energy points the user stores, the easier he is to detect by
other psychics. Once the user accumulates 250 Tzeentchian Magickal energy points, a psychic
receives +5 to his psyniscience test to detect him, and +5 for every further 100 points after
that. Once he gets to 900 psychic points, a user is like a blazing light to other psychics, and can
even cause spontaneous nosebleeds and headaches in “normal” humans within 100 yards.

Sanny has accumulated 412 Tzeentchian Magickal energy points over the years. He’s almost
half way there…

Personality and motivation:

Sanny actually has no motivation himself: he has become a total cipher, a conduit for
Tzeentch’s malign purposes. Sanny maintains enough sanity to feed, dress and care for
himself (to a primitive level) but little more than that.

He is impossible to intimidate or interrogate, but retains enough self control to resist capture
and fight to defend himself, and will not hesitate to use psychic powers to this end. Players
meeting him in a social setting should be left in no doubt that he’s irrevocably insane, but if
they try to capture him, they should wonder if he’s been faking all along. In fact he hasn’t: he IS
mad, but Tzeentch doesn’t want his pawn to fall into the Inquisition’s hands just yet…

Using Sanny
Sanny is a tricky adversary to use properly: he combines tremendous potential danger with
relatively little present danger. Yes he’s a moderately powerful psychic, but he’s also a
schizophrenic homeless guy with no friends or resources. The trick is letting the players slowly
realise what they’re dealing with, and what the stakes are. Here are a few suggestions:-
• You could use Sanny as a foreshadowing device in other adventures. Whenever the players
wander through Hive Sibellus, have them see him acting strangely and ranting at passers by.
Perhaps have him grasp a player and hiss deluded (but creepily accurate) prophesies at
him/her. What you should avoid doing is letting any psykers in your party anywhere near him
during the early stages of the adventure: save him for when parties have split into groups, and
have him harass the non-psykers in an entertaining fashion until they’re used to him and look
forward to seeing him again. Then suddenly have a psyker spot him for what he is (using
psyniscience) and let realisation slowly dawn on the players that they’ve been allowing a
potentially vast Daemonic incursion to fester right under their noses….

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Low-level chaotic antagonists for your players to burn at the stake….

Written by Lightbringer

• Or you could try a more direct approach: have the Hive Sibellus astropathic choir sense that
something is rotten in the city, and have your inquisitor send the acolytes scurrying into the
underhive to track down the source of the disturbance like psychic bloodhounds…

• Or just present him as a random encounter to players to spice up an existing adventure:

“Hey…that guy’s a psyker, and he reeks of the warp! Get him!”

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