"Captain Wolfe of His Holiness's Scout Frigate Blazing Lantern, recording scouting mission, Pelegius system. Subject, Pelegius warp anomaly, codename Charnel Spectre."
Captain Wolfe held up the vox recorder and a servo skull took it, hovering nearby to record his observations. He directed his floating command chair forward and looked out the bridge's observation port. Far from the empty blackness one would expect, beyond the window was a vibrant and awe-inspiring vista, massive nebulae dominating the voidscape like roiling jade clouds. In the starboard distance the massive star Pelegius loomed, its angry red glow lending the dimly-lit and buttressed bridge a sinister, hellish appearance. The scout frigate was a lightly-armed variation of the Firestorm frigate class, like a gothic cathedral built upon a lancet-shaped hull. Small for an Imperial naval ship, it was slightly longer than a kilometer and carried a mere 20,000 crew.
Wolfe sifted through the datastream that flowed into his cybernetically augmented mind through twelve neural jacks in the base of his skull. Observers reported no contacts, auspex scans were clean. Nothing out of the ordinary, on this side of reality at least. He turned to Victus, the Lantern's Astropath Primaris. The wizened figure huddled in an overlarge suspensor throne, seemingly held aloft by a thick bundle of cables leading from the ship's main cogitator bank to his head. His chair was draped with strips of parchment; prayers of fortitude and vision from the ship's cleric, prayers of warding from the superstitious and fearful crew. Victus said nothing, but a grimace betrayed his distress.
"What do you feel?" Wolfe asked.
"It..." The astropath tried to speak but couldn't muster the energy. All of his being was focused on letting in just enough of the amomaly's energies to learn what it was without opening his mind fully to it. The warptides swelled and buffeted him, a momentary lapse in concentration could be fatal. In his mind's eye he could see the Charnel Spectre; a null sphere, radiating torment like a ghastly psychic sun. It pressed against the veil, threatening to tear through into realspace.
We have to get out of here, Victus thought. That was all it took. Uncontrolled warp energy blasted into his distracted psyche, flooding it with terrible visions. A rocky desert under a starless black sky. A nightmare city, seething with sorcerous power. Emaciated humans bowing to a spindly, multi-jointed creature in tattered robes. A brazen locust tree, flayed hides and bloody corpses impaled on its gleaming thorns. The visions flashed by faster and faster, blurring together.
A crash resounded through the bridge as Victus's throne collapsed and he rolled out, convulsing and bleeding from the eyes. A rating ran to aid him, but looked up and froze in shock. Wolfe followed his gaze and saw a distortion in the green starfield, like a giant convex lens. It waxed enormous, a gibbous bulge in the fabric of reality. The auspex arrays began to register anomalous contacts. Victus moaned on the ground, and a metallic taste like a battery filled Wolfe's mouth.
With a deafening psychic screech that blew out the ship's auspex array and burst Victus's head like an overripe fruit, reality tore open. A kaleidoscopic maelstrom of impossible colors flowed forth and was sucked back into the Warp as quickly as it came, leaving nothing but the Charnel Spectre and streamers of Empyrean energy like lambent dragons that danced through space and disappeared. Minutes passed in stunned silence.
An ensign was the first to speak up, "It's-- it's a planet!"
Sure enough, a desert world drifted in the void where moments ago there was nothing. Wolfe mentally recorded images of its surface and fed them into the ship's data vaults before beginning his report. The servo skull moved closer.
"The Charnel Spectre has entered realspace. It appears to be a large planet. Terrain is desert with some mountainous regions. Oceans are black, one continent on this hemisphere. There appear to be several... complexes on the surface that may be cities or may be natural formations. It's hard to tell." With the visual recordings uploaded to the ship's cogitator, Wolfe began a search to see if the planet matched any on record. He continued his report, "Running scans, the planet appears on none of my records, it's unknown."
"Wait... There's something." A single potential match, nestled in ancient data vaults from the ship's earliest missions countless years ago. "The planet is on record, no name though. I can't access the data, it's encrypted with Angevin Crusade codes, security level Umbra. Very interesting..." The Angevin Crusade was a glorious undertaking by the venerated Saint Drusus, sweeping away countless xenos empires in the Calixis Sector, two thousand years ago.
Wolfe considered this new development. What was a planet from the Calixis Sector doing in the Jericho Reach? The two regions were connected by a warp gate, but he still found it curious. The presence of possible cities intrigued him even more. Were they ruins, the former inhabitants wiped out in the world's millenia in the warp? If not, what kind of creatures would they find? Certainly nothing good, he couldn't even imagine what kind of foulness would thrive on such a world, lost to the Immaterium for two thousand years.
He decided someone else could go meet and greet with the xenos. "Auspex arrays were damaged in the anomaly's emergence, further scouting is currently impossible. As much data as I can acquire has been loaded onto the data vaults and will be taken to base along with the encrypted file. One casualty: Astropath Primaris Victus Khan, killed by psychic feedback. Mission complete. Captain Wolfe of the Blazing Lantern, signing off."
That's the story of the beginning of this campaign. After Captain Wolfe returned from his mission, the encrypted data file was passed up the command ladder until it found its way into the hands of the Deathwatch, who possessed the ancient clearance codes to access it. The Charnel Spectre had been part of the dominion of the Yu'vath, the worst xenos empire you've never heard of. Once Saint Drusus was finished killing them he razed their worlds to the ground and struck them from history. Only a scant few documents remain to tell their story, and Wolfe was in unwitting possession of one of them.
The Yu'vath are bad. Real bad. Nobody knows much about them, but it is known that they're psykers, worship the Dark Gods, and use their malign powers to enslave their victims. Normally they Deathwatch would just perform exterminatus, the planet's too fucked up to colonize and the Yu'vath are too dangerous a presence to just leave them sitting there next to the only marginally successful branch of the crusade (The "northern" branch is being eaten by Tyranids, the "Middle" branch hit a brick wall made of heretics right out the gate, the "Southern" branch is in a pretty good spot fighting the Tau, and the Pelegius system is right behind the front line). But they can't just destroy the planet because there's a slight complication.
Imperator Proscriptor, the Emperor's will made manifest! This sacred engine of destruction was part of the force exterminating the Yu'vath when the planet got sucked into the warp. It's still there, in two pieces, but nothing a few hundred techpriests can't fix. With the Orpheus and Acheros salients failing and the Canis salient in a stalemate, an Imperator Titan could be the turning point in the crusade. And by could be I mean will be. Look at that fucking thing. The enemies of the mankind might as well just kill themselves, at least then there'll be something for their families to bury. Already reinforcements are being mustered and battle lines are being drawn. Whatever the cost, Imperator Proscriptor must be recovered.
Then we can exterminatus. Your kill-team is one of several chosen as support units in the Charnel Spectre campaign. You'll be going full Scalpel of the Emperor on this one, using surgical strikes and black ops work to support the Imperial Guard invasion force. There are two main fronts in the war.
The Imperator's body is in a major Yu'vath city which must be sieged. The city's surrounded by a thick wall, and that's what that wall looking thing is. Also, looking at it I realized it's a little messed up. The city extends to the walls, there's not a huge wasteland in between the city and the walls, that would be retarded. The brown and red lines near the bottom are the lines of battle and the camps are staging points.
The Titan's Hellstorm Cannon somehow ended up in a mountainous valley. The valley is clearly of some kind of significance, there are unique structures of unknown (But likely important religious or political) purpose, and the whole area is bristling with all kinds of defenses. The cluster of stars is the cannon. Everything else is as it is in the top map.
These maps will be updated as the campaign progresses.
What we know about the enemy: Jack shit. Drusus was very thorough in his scouring the Yu'vath from existence and all the Imperium knows about them comes from fragmentary documents and data files. Imperial forces already setting up at the staging points have reported the Yu'vath are extremely tall and gangly, and shrouded in robes. They also appear to be very few in number, with the bulk of their army composed of human slaves. It's unknown where they got all these people, seeing as they've been in the warp so long. They don't have much of a navy, but stealth ships have been seen in the neighboring systems, always accompanied by the disappearance of entire towns full of people overnight. It's probable the Yu'vath are already getting back into the swing of things. More disturbing is the presence of other elements in their armies. Sporadic reports of daemons and even Chaos Space Marines have cropped up. This isn't a huge surprise, as the Yu'vath are chaos worshipers, but it's still cause for alarm.
This is an unknown enemy, your presence in the campaign is as much about acquiring knowledge as killing Xenos. Knowing is half the battle.
Information about Deathwatch as a game will be in the next post.
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Topic: Deathwatch - The Charnel Spectre (Signups/Interest Check) (Read 9204 times)