This is a rough outline for a future campaign, so if anyone from my group in Budapest wanders here, be a good sport, and please stop reading.

+++Thought for the day: A mind without purpose will wander in dark places.+++

Now that it's settled, did anyone read Nightfall by Peter Fehervari, in the Heroes of the Space Marines anthology? After the Alpha Legion failed to impress them, I decided to put the fear of the Traitor Legions into my Kill-Team, and this seems to be a solid background for it:

The planet Sarastus is a dying hive-world, abandoned by the Imperium, and turned into a recruitment world by the Night Lords. The pitiful few survivors, a mere few hundred thousand in a hive built for millions, led by a fatalistic cult, meet their gods in every thirteen years, when the majority of the applicants are slaughtered, and the worthy is taken away to boost the numbers of the Eighth Legion.

Now the abandonment ties in nicely with the Jericho Reach setting, the Imperium ceased to control the region for a few millennia, after all.

On the top of the hive spire there's the Needle, a weird, sentient thorny metal construct, somehow resonating with the arrival of the Legion, signalling the time for the True Night.

After learning the name of the Thousand Sons Sorcerer Dahzak and his apprentice in The Emperor Protects part II, I plan to send the KT after him. Part I and III still awaits, but I want to flex my creative muscles from time to time. I haven't decided yet whether the Needle is actually one of Dahzak's constructs, or totally unrelated, but that's beside the point now.

The plan to send them there is quite simple (after returning to Erioch, they will enquire about Dahzak, and learn that the last time he was heard about was on Sarastus, next to the Hadex Anomaly). The almost-abandoned, creepy hive, the mad cultists and the constant rainfall are given, too, so the atmosphere is set. The enemies are Night Lords, Raptors and if the Needle is not Dahzak's work, a Chaos Sorcerer.

Now the question is, what about the Needle? It obviously has to be the primary objective, so it has a significant role. What do you think, how could it ruin a Marine's day? The pointers in the short story are these: it's metal, it's sentient and possibly malevolent, it communicates with a chosen few psychicaly (sending the non-psychic humans into trance or frenzy), and it acts as a beacon. By the look of it, it doesn't appear to be of Necron origins, so I'm thinking along the lines of infused daemonic essence, but what would it do crunch-wise? Have you ever used something similar?

You could have it be some kind of Warp Rift creator like in the Space Marine Game or it could be some piece of Necron/ Dark Age of Technology tech, like a Men of Iron forge and thats just the outside of it

Sounds cool to me.

Given that the Night Lords supposedly were part to conquer the Jericho Reach during the Great Crusade you can always run it like something that the Night Lords built and left here all those years ago. Maybe it carries some kind of psychic imprint from them, or even the Primarch hiimself, which still calls to the legion and has driven the population into the state that they are now?

the night lords primarch is like space marine batman lol

What I have found intriguing so far is the Irradial Cogitator in Mark of the Xenos - I will probably base the Needle on those statistics. What do you think, is it even remotely possible that our beloved Space Batman trapped a Daemon inside such a device (during the Great Crusade, no less) to keep the population in line, or must it be of later making? I'm afraid the Imperium is not really a fan of artefacts made by the Traitor Primarchs, and the sector was controlled by the faithful for a long time. And one more question, for keepers of the lore - what happens, when such a Daemon Engine is destroyed? Is the being banished to the Warp, or set free?

I'd say the age doesn't matter... the older it is, the better hidden it was, until it was discovered and placed on top of the hive by some heretics/traitors who found information about it somehow, somewhere.

I think what happens if it is destroyed depends on how it is destroyed. Maybe the beforementioned source where the device is found may also provide a source on how to destroy it "correctly".

I'd say the age doesn't matter... the older it is, the better hidden it was, until it was discovered and placed on top of the hive by some heretics/traitors who found information about it somehow, somewhere.

Fair enough. The hive might have had a legend, ancient or recent, about a legendary being enacting bloody vengeance from the shadows, keeping the population in line and giving birth to a death cult. After the Imperium lost its grip on the Jericho Reach, the Night Lords may have returned to reap the world of its fruits.

I think what happens if it is destroyed depends on how it is destroyed. Maybe the beforementioned source where the device is found may also provide a source on how to destroy it "correctly".

I plan to give my KT a false trail chasing Dahzak, so there'll be no instructions. It might tie into my plans to corrupt the "tainted" character a bit more (he thinks having a few Corruption Points is no biggie - he'll realize he's wrong. Just As Planned.). I also plan to unleash a Chaos SM Sorcerer on them, who seemingly allied himself to the Night Lords, but has his own agenda with the machine - maybe unleash a Tzeentchian Daemon from its millennia-old prison?