has anyone else seen the " The Emperor gets a text to speech device" series on youtube yet?

Yes it's amazing! (Altough not safe for ultramarine fans)

Emperor: "about effing time! i have so many things to complain about!"*

Emperor: "I have never created anything called "grey knights"

Emperor: (about roboute and the ultramarines) " remove him from life support and disband that f*cking smurf village!"

Emperor: "they have a toilet seat for their insignia!"

* that's my new fave 40k quote!

On a slightly more serious note, I would imagine Gulliman's chamber was rigged to set off every alarm on the planet if anything went wrong,,,like I don't know turning it off.

I'm reminded of a cartoon from long ago. A wizardly-looking god-like figure and his assistant are working in a laboratory that looks something like an astrophysics lab.

The assistant looks up from a model of our solar system, cries out and tells his master, "The Earthlings have discovered nuclear energy!"

The elderly sage asks him, "What have they done? Are they inventing spaceships to explore their solar system? Are they using it as a transitory fuel while looking for ways to harness their star's power?"

The assistant says, "No! They have bombed themselves!"

The elderly sage rips up the papers in his hand and storms out of the room in disgust.

No. To all of this. Just, no.

So.

Boys.

It's begun.

*sighs*

Here we go. I apologize for any typos as I am writing this on an iPhone.

Some recap. The party managed to steal a Resusatrix chamber and they all decided to put it on Inquisitor Toussant's ship, as he is the most trustworthy (when he isn't reverse engineering Xenotech with his ship full of maleteks and engaging in depraved robo-xenophilia. But no one knows that last part.) as a fail safe, Tousaant put a section of his brain tissue into the chamber to grow a backup flesh body for him to download his mind into if need be.

A few adventures ago, our Inquisitor was nearly assassinated by one of his Fellows from the Ordo Redactus. For those who are not aware, the Ordo Redactus is the inquisitorial order that handles censorship and the editing of the history - the Ministry of Truth as it were. Anyhow, this Inquisitor was a devout radical who had lied and murdered his way to his position by posing as a bastion of censorship, only revealing once he had reached the top that he really wanted to establish a free intel policy.

Edwardius Snowstorm, if you will.

Unfortunately for him, our hero, Inquisitor Toussant, is both a right fisted lawful and a ******* robot. So, given that Toussant has influence 79, the rebel decided the best course of action would be to assassinate him before he became an inquisitor.

That's right folks.

I dropped the TT bomb.

Cue an adventure involving a meeting with the Grand Inquisitor of the Sector, and Toussant was off to go and kill his assassin. This resulted in a terrifying, insanity enducing and uncomfortably awkward encounter with a senile Necron Lord who alternates between hating being a robot, loving being a robot, and not knowing what robots are.

The adventure ended with Toussant going back in time using a Necron device called the Chronomexiter to prevent the assassination. He succeeded, but how the Chronomexiter works is that you can only go back as far as you have a body - leading to a hilarious Rank 1 Dark Heresy fight as the two 16-years old Inquisitors to be shot stub revolvers at each other over a river on Toussant's homeworld while the two Lord Inquisitors just kind of stood on top a huge exploding pyramid unable to move.

Good stuff.

After that Tousaant had an adventure or two where he went around with the senile and amicable Lord Tseshk to steal Necron stuff. Tsehk, having been ousted from his throne by other lords for not following the honor codes, was happy to cooperate - until Toussant tried to steal both a Necron equivalent of a murder cogitator, a trapped cryptek, and the Chronomexiter device. Cue a fight with two fate points burnt on Toussant's part, promoting him to unleash a CTan shard to kill Tsehk, steal the devices, and run away. Back on his ship a hacking battle ensued between him and the cryptek, run as a possession attack using Logic instead of Willpwer, which Toussant had to burn his last fate point to win and did so by the skin of his teeth. So, three burnt fate points for a load of tech that will take him time I decipher and a rudimentary time travel device? For Necron tech, I'd say it's fair (and I was careful to make him clear that the time travel could be shut down at any point to avoid confusion, which he agreed with.)

So Toussant's player ad I had a vision of these three burnt fate points being paid back later by Sylvester unlocking the secrets of the Necrontyr over the course of the campaign - and don't worry, heinous accidents involving scarab swarms and Necron AI has and will continue to occur) but in the end, this campaign has had a progressive feel and I wasn't opposed to the idea of maybe a few decades from now having necron tech become a part of the sector.

This is not what happened.

Now.

To Guilliman.

Our players are:

Sylvester Toussant, robot inquisitor and Xenotech magpie. He captains his ship, the Solitaire.

Carax, a word bearer. He captains his old ship brought out of retirement for this mission, the Honey Flavor (which has no chaos markings).

Why are they working together? Because as players they have agreed not to fight, and as characters Viktir wants to save the Imperium by helping humanity ascend to daemon hood, and Sylvester plans to dispose of him until his assets aren't useful.

The players decided to do Grand Theft Guilliman next. The trip took six

months and after many trials and travails they reached the Ultramar System. On the Soliatire heavy tests were

made to hide the onboard Maletekal lab and Necron loot. At docking they arrive separately so as I avoid association with each other should something go wrong. On the Honey Flavor, Carax hides in a section of bulkhead wall and his cultist crew dresses up as House Troops of Carax's old Rogue Trader identity, Vikitr Blayze. The Ultramar security teams who search the ship before letting them through Orbital Customs roll a 96 and 99. They know nothing.

Outside the fortress of Hera, Toussant (cloaked by a Tau stealth field) flies over the millions strong horde of pilgrims into the Grad Chamber of Guilliman, while Carax powers up the teleportarium to ****** Guilliman's throne. Toussant uses his new Necron know-how (and the disembodied cryptek mind jammed into a locked file somewhere in his HUD) to hack into Ultramar's active defenses and deactivate them. The hacking attack goes perfectly. The void shields over the Fortress of Hera are deactivated, allowing Carax to tear free from the orbital docks and bring his ship into alignment for the teleportation.

Just to be controversial, as Carax activates the teleportarium, Sylvester deactivates the cloaking field an roars 'FOR THE EMPEROR!'

Now. Those of you Dark Heresy players may be familiar with the sorcery mechanics of The Radical's Handbook. I am a great proponent of letting non psykers take advantage of this asset, provided they spend the required xp. Earlier, Carax's player asked me if he could use xp to buy the sorcery talent, along with the Holocaust power as a major arcana. Viktir Blayze has always been a firey man - as a Rogue Trader he wielded flaming power swords, flamers, had magma-deco bionics that looked like volcanic stone, and even had a ring of fire jets built into his cape for the fashionz. As Carax, his

mutations are Burning Body and Wreathed in Chaos. He's firey is my point. So I assuming that this is the reason agree.

The Holocaust power has a clause, which is that characters killed by it are 'killed forever'. I have always taken this to mean that it ignores the burning of fate points.

As soon as Sylvester, clinging to Guilliman's stasis-fielded body, materialized on the teleportarium bridge, Carax told Sylvester to turn on the Resusatrix chamber to ready it. While Sylvester does his tech use, Carax grabs Guilliman and...

Triggers Holocaust.

Pushing all the way.

Fire explodes out of Carax and destroys Guilliman. I allow this to occur because I think it's a very clever usage of rules and a great twist, and also because it makes sense - Guilliman is being kept alive by sheer force of will, and if the Holocaust power destroys your very soul, how would Guilliman survive? I never liked Papa Smurf anyway. Carax's player asks me if he can take the damage Sylvester would have taken to sacrifice himself, and I say yes. Carax and Guilliman are obliterated.

Sylvester is lost for words, as is his player. As a result, Sylvester activates the Chronomexiter.

Back to the throne room: instead of grabbing Guilliman, he steals one of his hairs to use in the chamber. When he teleports onto the ship, Carax realizes he has been discovered and they fight. Carax cleaves Sylvester's body apart with his daemonic scythe, but Sylvester manages to upload his consciousness to his backup flesh body in stasis on the Solitaire. Cue a massive reduction in playing power for that character.

Carax, refusing to be outdone, rips the Honey Flavor free of the orbital docks and beelines directly towards the Fortress of Hera. He rolls Piloting against Ballistic Skill of the planetary defense cannons - 03 vs 05 respectively. I arbitrate that because the system was in chaos due to being Necron-hacked by Toussant, the guns tear apart the ship until the vessel has been completely destroyed around Carax, leaving his body flying with all of the ship's momentum like an obscene flaming winged asteroid. The impact an shockwave destroys the fortress of Hera and all it's occupants. The Resusatrix Chamber and Chronomexiter are destroyed with the ship.

Toussant flees before anyone affiliates him with what just happened.

So.

Gentlemen.

Discuss.

Sweet... mother... of... god. I feel that story scratching at my consciousness... sort of like daemonic possession... except more painful.

Carax's player has now rolled up a Fallen Angel and is concocting a new hair brained scheme involving the return of Lion El'Johnson and some crap with Cypher.

Meanwhile, 65-insanity-point Sylvester is interviewing everyone on his crew for signs of betrayal and brutally murdering anyone who says "Um," before erasing his own memories to avoid having to confront such idiocy.

Is this an ongoing attempt to give poor Traejun an aneurysm?

Has your eye ever twitched so hard that you couldn't open it again?

I... I think I need a medicae.

Your players are clearly having fun, which is always the most important thing in any campaign.

It's a little too extremely out there for me, but fortunately by introducing time travel technobabble I can just assume the campaign ends with you wiping yourselves out of existence.

Also Lion El'Johnson isn't dead, although no one really knows that so that'd be a fun adventure.

I can't tell whether the responses are due to the utter idiocy of the situation (what Carax did) or the adventure itself (what I let them do.)

Oh, at this rate Erathia, the players won't need time travel to kill each other - they'll just do it themselves.

At this point Sylvester's player is just Done with the whole Reurrecting Primach shenanigans due to the effort of acquiring another Resusatrix Chamber and heisting another one of the Emperor's Sons. The ItaLion Job is likely not to be.

I'm not sure what the current plan is but Sylvester's player is now hugely paranoid of Carax's player and is hesitant on working with him, and given that all our players have recently become very busy, it's looking

like the Operation might be put on hold for a wee bit. This thread's not dead and the campaign is ongoing, but I need to figure out how to get the players over these road blocks to make it fun for everyone.

I guess regardless of the game being played and the setting in which it was being played everyone did a story like this one, granted most of them had the excuse of being fourteen.

It's fun, so we don't need an excuse.

Which might sound preachy, but whatever.

The current, new plans are as follows:

Bubsy is creating an alter ego to establish connections in the rest of the Ecclesiarcy and hopefully take control using new policy in the aftermath of the Guilliman Attack, whereas Bofael wants to lure a band of Dark Angels containing a Watcher or two into a trap so he can interrogate a Watcher as to the state of Lion El'Johnson.

Poor Sylvester still doesn't know what to do.

It's true, as long as you're not hurting anyone else then have all the fun you want. Your story violates Lore like crazy, and honestly should not have been able to work, but it has so let's go forward from here.

Let's go forward from the point where you are the worst monsters in the history of the Imperium.

You have now joined the hallowed ranks of Fulgrim and Horus in having murdered a primarch. The last surviving Primarch (as far as everyone knows shut up Salamanders, Raven Guard, Iron Hands, White Scars and Space Wolves. You're all drunk. Especially you Space Wolves.). No one is going to listen to you. No one is going to help you. The entire Imperium should be in shock and chaos, and at the very least, every Ultramarine in existence wants you and everyone ever connected to you and your Dynasty dead and erased from history.

You're not sitting down to take control of anything. The Assassinorium is coming for you. Navigators will no longer talk to you. The entire Ultramar system should be shut down and thousands of ships converging on you. This is the worst disaster to befall the Imperium since probably Vandire came along. You accomplished what the entirety of Hive Fleet Behemoth couldn't do. Chaos wants to kill you now for making them look bad.

Also how the Hell did your players learn about the Watchers or the survival of the Lion? That is a secret that quite possibly the entirety of the Dark Angels legion doesn't know.

I think Bofael is a Veteran of the Long War - for those of you who have never played Black Crusade, those characters are Astarted who have been around since the Great Crusade and have often interacted with their primarchs firsthand.

To be honest, I'm not sure if the campaign is going to continue. Sylvester's player is uncomfortable with working with Bofael's player now because he doesn't trust him out-of-game at all, and Bubsy is in-and-out. So those of you who were adamantly against this campaign can take a breath of deep air - crisis averted, for now.

Thanks to everyone who gave constructive comments and criticism, especially those who managed to put aside their own apprehensions for the purposes of being fair (especially you, Erathia). It's been a great help to me, and hopefully I haven't been pegged as the most batshit crazy GM on the forum (although even if I had, at least its better to live in infamy than die unremembered, as Fabius Bile once said).

If anything new happens I'll post it, but for now the campaign has entered a null zone. Cheers, though. It was fun. Maybe its time to roll up some Dark Heresy characters and investigate a nice, canonical Chaos Cult.

Not being able to trust people out of character is one of the reasons why I don't like PCs having secret goals that are in direct opposition to other people. Scheming and backstabbing are fine, as long as out of character everyone is aware of it and they can all have fun. Shame that it feels like people can't be trusted, but this is a not unexpected outcome. Hopefully they can work it out in character.

Roll up some Dark Heresy characters and have them investigate the bizarre occurrences around Maccragre that the Ultramarines are being uncharacteristically standoffish about.

TBH, if the inquisitor was planning to, as you said, "dispose of" the CSM along the way, he shouldn't be complaining the got one-upped. Never mind he teamed up with a CSM in the first place. What did he expect? Sunshine and rainbows?

I assume people would prefer that this heretical thread be allowed to disappear rather than see it updated?

I can't say...

...

*whispers*

"Hydra Dominatus."

For the emperor!

It falls to us, the strong few, to know the heresy so that we may better recrea... I mean fight it!

I'll be posting the story so far in chunks over the next few days.

The story so far…

+++XX LEGIO DATA_VAULT 4894//9++

+++ACCESSING ENNCRYPTION SCRAPCODES+++

+++HYDRA DOMINATUS+++

If you are reading this, you have been approved by the order of +REDACTED+ for participation in the XX Legion’s Operation Daedalus.

We will save humanity from itself.

May the Emperor forgive us.

ALPHA FILE: The Temptress

Billions of years ago, at the formation of the universe, the Star Gods known as the C’Tan were born. Beings of transcendental energy, the Star Gods began their evolution as nothing more than material parasites, suckling at the energy of dying stars. The evolution of the Necron race was inevitably tied to the vampirism of the C’Tan, resulting in the race being blighted by the radiation of their dying star and craving the eternity-granting powers of the Old Ones. The Old Ones’ refusal to grant such immortality resulted in the conflict known as the War in Heaven. The C’Tan lead their children in undying emotionless legions against the Old Ones, until they were shattered.

The shattering is believed to have resulted in the destruction and fragmentation of the psyches of the C’tan. Each one became a ruined, mad entity. As with all races, exception exist, and it is believed that in one specific instance, a C’Tan known to the Necrons as the Temptress was in fact sympathetic to the plight of the Necrons, and to the necessity for sentient life in the universe. Ironic, then, that these C’Tan, for all their mastery over the material realm, were mostly unaware in the necessity for balance in it – except for the Temptress.

We believed the Temptress could be a valuable asset to our operations against the forces of Chaos, in the name of the survival of the human race and life in the universe. As such, hydra cells were dispatched to various factions of the galaxy to recover shards of the Temptress. The conditions of the shards are variable – some are mad, some practically nonexistent, and some amnesiac. It is our hope that recovering the majority of the shards will help to restore the C’Tan to a semblance of its former self.

The relevance of this will be explained later in the report.

BETA FILE: THE GOOD PROTECTORATE

The Good Protectorate. The name appears but a few times in the Inquisitorial records of the heretical secessions and unholy empires, yet its name carries with it a reputation of infamy.

The history of the Good Protectorate lies within the roots of a number of disparate heretics. The true story of the Protectorate begins with the policing action brought to bear against the Forge World of Irtaufe, in the Calixis Sector, under the command of Arch-Heetek Rabley Nidon. An academic and studier of the teachings of the infamous heretek Nomen Ryne, Rabely Nidon believed in a policy of technological equality – according to his madness, instead of technology being the jealously guarded domain of the Adeptus Mechanicus alone, technology should be both understood and distributed so that it would available for the betterment of all humankind. While I admit that the decentralization of the Martian Piesthood’s power base would be of no loss to the Imperium, Nidon was unopposed to technological innovation of accursed xenotech and the dark science of warp-fuelled technology. During its travels, the explorator fleet of Irtaufe at some point recovered a shard of the Temptress. Upon learning this, our hydra cell established a cult upon the planet, venerating the shard as a manifestation of the Omnissiah. This, we believed, would aid in sepearting the planet from the Imperium and driving it towards our causes.

Irtaufe was not a true planet in that it was actually a planetoid-sized artificial construct, an enormous space station the origins of which date back to the Dark Age of Technology. Its most notable feature was the enormous warp-drive and Gellar field implanted within the core of the structure, which allowed Irtaufe to travel through the warp akin to a starship, making it extremely mobile. This ability was of key importance to Nidon’s escape when, following the assassination of Irtaufe’s original Archmagos Metacurgillis, Inquisitor Toreaux and a detachment of the Order of the Veiled Lily flocked to Irtuafe to apprehend the planet’s population. Usage of the warp drives allowed Irtaufe to escape into the void. This escape came at the price of overheating and destroying the cogitator sever-columns that were implanted into the crust of the planet.

The trail of Irtaufe became cold after that, and the hydra cell’s attentions were redirected to other projects, primarily those pertaining to the Belarus Rogue Trader Dynasty. House Belarus had amassed a reputation for being a cadre of xenophiles, which the Ordos took extreme exception to. It was believed he could prove a useful ally, given his ideals of reforms.