It's a full house. My Thousand Sons Sorcerer, the Raptor, the Daemonic Champion of Khorne, the Chosen of Slaneesh, the Human Psyker possessed by a Lord of Change and a new recruit, a Champion with a missile launcher who is gunning for the favor of Nurgle.
We resume in the corridor we last fought in. Immediately, we have the Champion of Khorne use his Cloak (one of the artifacts we recovered from the planet) to summon us some allies. 6 cultists armed with autoguns and grenade launchers stumble out of the portal that is his cloak, and promptly fail their fear checks in face of the Khornate half-daemon's visage. They flee. Enraged, the Khornate Champion mows them down with a heavy bolter, disgusted with their cowardice, and summons more allies.
This time we get 4 Havok Chaos Space Marines (and the new player.) They're angry about being interrupted in whatever they were doing and start to rant at us before we remind them they have a fear check to take. They, too, are unmanned by his visage. 3 run and one collapses to the ground. Even more furious, but realizing Havok marines are too useful to waste, the Khornate Champion runs through the Havok at his feet and demands the other three man up. The Psyker helps with the eye artifact we found earlier, compelling them into service in case they still weren't convinced.
We notice a door in the corridor marked "Ship Schemata" and figure we need some info to plan our attack. Inside we see a hololith displaying a diagram of the ship, and note several lifts that could take us to the bridge. We also see three serfs manning the display. I immediately Compel one to start telling us everything he knows about the ship. One of his compatriots promptly pulls out a service pistol and blows his brains out before he can answer. The Psyker/Daemon then uses Golem Curse, I think, which is basically Compel by another name on the third serf and orders him to operate the hololith and start giving us directions. I tie the second serf's hands and TRY to hand him off to another player for safe keeping so I can use him in later in a ritual. Unfortunately, when I said "tie him to his armor", everyone interpreted that as me literally hog tying him to the Slaneeshi Chaos Space Marine's spike-festooned armor. So I'm yet again out of ritual components.
Meanwhile, the third serf has given us a passenger manifest. We learn there are about 150 humans aboard the cruiser and 50 Golden Angel Space Marines, in addition to a Librarian. We do some math and figure we've killed about half the Golden Angels aboard so far. I mention that there's a strong possibility the Golden Angels will sacrifice themselves to deny us their ship (which I guess it's now our intent to capture for ourselves) and recommend we head for the engine room to stave off any attempts at sabotage.
As we make our way through the bulkhead a gas starts to descend around us. In the next corridor, which is a 700m long monster full of multi-level gun decks, we see piles of serfs dead everywhere. A voice comes over the intercom, thanking the serfs for their service to Chapter and the Emperor and assures them that this will all be over soon. We begin to worry that my guess might be correct. But between us and the engine decks we see 20 Golden Angel Space Marines, a Librarian we now know is called Brother Librarian Crucio and a female clad in armor, wearing a long coat and floppy hat.
Combat begins with the Khornate Champion, the Raptor and the Slaaneshi Chosen charging out to engage them in melee. (As an aside, the Slaaneshi Chosen, who is a big fan of humping corpses, managed to roll a "Chaos Organ" as a mutation a couple games back. Guess what kind of organ he chose. The best part? The drawing he did. Imagine a Chaos Space Marine in pink armor with a chest burster from Aliens dangling from his crotch, little hands and everything. Got that? Now imagine it looks even more like a dong.) Herein we continue the sad, sad tale of the Khornate Champion, with his badass Bloodletter Sword, terrifying visage and total inability to engage in melee combat before the end of most firefights, due to the large engagement distance and the lethality of ranged combat. None of the Space Marines, Brother Librarian Crucio or the women seem to care the least about the Khornate Champion's daemonic visage, either.
The Daemon/Pskyer unleashes Storm of Chaos again, doing hefty damage to the woman, Crucio and several Space Marines, even killing two outright. The female then pulls out a golden statue of an angel and shouts something about casting out the daemons. The statue rises into the air and a golden beam of light shoots out of it and strikes the Daemon/Pskyer. The player fails their willpower test, and is halfway to being exorcised. The Golden Angels open up as a group, and somehow I'm the only one of the PCs that seems to get hit. I take a good shot to the arm which turns into a crit, and my arm goes dead for two turns. I reluctantly dropped the las cannon I'd taken from one of the dead Havoks last session, as pound for pound it has a better chance of hurting anything we encounter than Doombolt or my Tzeentchian Bolter rounds.
That said, I'm still dangerous. I roll as good as I possibly can on Doombolt and frag the shit out of the female, doing tons of overkill. The statue however continues to hover in the air, beaming the Daemon/Pskyer. The single Havok marine under my control, with a plasma gun, isn't so lucky and it overheats on him, doing about half his wounds. The Nurgle Champion fires a krak missile at Brother Librarian Crucio and plugs him squarely, blowing him off his feet.
In round 2, the melees are still pounding down the corridor. The Raptor hits his jump jets and sails over the fight to land in the back of the Golden Angels, and drops one of them with his meltaguns. At some point, someone had started shooting at the statue and managed to knock it out of the air, and the exorcism seemed to be interrupted. I throw some ineffective Doombolts, a few more shots are traded and the Golden Angels are the only casualties.
Round 3 is where shit got real. Brother Librarian Crucio hit the Raptor with Smite, which did 40 fucking wounds. Apparently in Death Watch, it's 1d10 times your Psy Rating in damage. The Raptor wasn't just dead, he was fucking annihilated. Cue an almost 15 minute discussion of burning Infamy points versus creatively spending Infamy points to heal back damage.....I don't think what they came up with was exactly legal. It involved using the Champion abilities, allowing them to spend Infamy on other's behalf, along with the the Raptor spending his, to heal back the wounds. Except....he should have been dead and really the only thing that should have saved him is burning Infamy. You can't spend Infamy in the middle of taking damage to generate fake wounds. It was getting pretty late and the combat had drug on for quite a while so I didn't make an issue of it. In the end the Raptor survived. The Slaneeshi Chosen got in range with his heavy flamer and promptly barbecued half of the remaining Golden Angels. We made short work of the rest. The Khornate Champion, meanwhile, was still about a round away from melee range, running flat out for three turns. Oi.
The Daemon/Psyker then made the grave mistake of approaching the statue and it immediately came back to life and started trying to banish him again, as if it had never been interrupted. Again, the player failed the Willpower roll and, in a rush of warp energy, the Lord of Change was kicked back into the Warp. Now, according to the rules, the player character is supposed to be completely crippled by this experience. Mentally, physically, they're pretty much ruined. The GM said that the player character came back completely unharmed, but there was quite a bit of objection to that at the table. So I don't know where that stands. Once it was settled though, the Slaaneshi Chosen promptly defiled the statue in a way that I think a full suit of Power Armor precludes.
On searching the bodies we discovered an Inquisitor's Rosette on the woman, explaining her presence there. I looted Crucio's Force Staff and Libram. The Force Staff will obviously need some modifications since it's currently a weapon of the Corpse Emperor's minions. But when I'm finished with it, it will be a potent focus for my psychic powers. The Libram was full of Litanies and Rites and things beneath my talents (*cough*fucksmite*cough*) , so I gave it to the Slaneeshi Chosen to use as toilet paper. We snagged a refractor field off Crucio as well and gave that to our 'restored' psyker. As a Tzeentch-aligned CSM, I don't know whether to be mad or relieved it's not around anymore. Although we'll miss having access to basically any power in the book, that's for sure. I'm pretty sure Storm of Chaos driven by a Psy Rating 9 character is the only thing that really gave us the upper hand in fights against the Golden Angels. I'm pretty sweet, but I don't get to use every spell in the book at the highest possible Psy Rating.
So now the Golden Angel's ship should be free of Imperials and under our control. With a Gladius-class Cruiser on our side, we can now do some serious damage to other ships, move between worlds through the Warp and begin forming an armada. (Which as I understand is our next goal.) Personally, my goal is to bind a daemon to the ship and give it a kickass name, as those are both requirements for a good Chaos fleet. Of course, I have no "free" components for the ritual, since either we or the Golden Angels killed pretty much everyone on the ship. I suppose we could find some at the next place we stop....or just keep summoning mooks using the cloak until I have enough. Either way it will be sketchy, as failing during a ritual incurs the wrath of the Warp...and in terms of ritual complexity, binding a daemon to the entire ship is a huge undertaking. At least that's what my understanding of the fluff tells me, the GM will probably have a different interpretation.
Next time, on the Blackest Crusade, I imagine there's going to be a lot of montage-style character development, planning and humping of moldy corpses. I'll start plotting my ritual and things could go horribly wrong. I imagine we'll get a lot done now that we're (ostensibly) free of 2+ hour long combats.
Author
Topic: Dark Heresy (And other Warhammer 40,000 RPGs) (Read 18766 times)