We just finished Maggots in the Meat, and I was wondering if anyone else has run it, and thought the Slaugth were a bit too tough for a group of 1st or 2nd rank characters like the game recommends. I ended up fudging quite a bit, and still had to have the cavalry come in to save the day(which I only did because I didn't want 2 TPKs in 2 adventures).

The flavor text in the Disciples of the Dark Gods says that the Slaugth are almost "unkillable." I figure this may be the reason they are so tough.

Snaford said:

I think that "a bit too much" is a gross understatement, Slaught are absolute killers. I do believe they're just fine the way they are designed but to encounter three to four of these things along with minions for rank 2(!) PC's is just murder.

I don't have the adventure with me right now but I dumped their unnatural stats if I remember correctly and fudged a couple of rolls, toxic weapons are lethal!

Am I the only person who thinks the Slaugth make no sense? As written, all they do is eat dead bodies, of which there are large numbers lying around the Imperium. As I wrote on another forum:

The Slaugth probably, like every other race in 40K, have some evil grimdark agenda lurking in the background, but as actually written in Dark Heresy thus far they seem mostly to unobtrusively hang around in old windmills on backward planets, bothering no one, eating bodies of people who have already died. Ho-hum. Doesn't quite meet my standards of cosmic threat. The Imperium itself recycles the bodies of the dead into food on hiveworlds. Big deal.

SPOILER - Maggots in the Meat, Illumination, Purge the Unclean

The Slaugth are horibly tough indeed, but actually this is one of the only interesting part of the whole adventure in my opinion. Compared to a Slaugth the Skae-Thing in Illumination is a blind grot, so the PC's must learn that a direct approach not always leads to success and that the 40K Galaxy is a dangerous place where vile xeno creatures kill you with a glimpse.

In the beginning of the encounter my players mostly had luck in the sense that they all dodged the deadly ripper rays even though the groups rather tough and macho Guardsman got his a** handed in only two rounds of close combat against a single Infiltrator. The Slaught fled upstairs in high speed and the part of the party in the mill fled to the outside (the Arbitrator dragging the Guardsman who just lost a fate point). When the whole party later came back to the mill with the support of half a dozen of the local Plumes the real massacre began. On the way upstairs each shot of ripper ray killed a Plume (the Lieutenant indeed lost his helmet plume before losing his head altogether...) and again a withdrawal was made. In the end the PCs set fire to the mill and fled the city...

As I said, the badassness of the Slaugth is the interesting part of an otherwise bland adventure. It again gave me the impression that most DH adventures have different persons responsible for writing the adventure, then for writing the stats of the NPC and of course drawing the NPC portraits. In Baron Hopes from PtU it is stated Thorgell opens fire with his gun, but the NPC Thorgell does not have any gun let alone is able to use one. In Illumination the Skae-Thing is described in the adventure as if it is almost unkillable without targeting its eyes, but its stats (and primitive attacks) are far from impressive for a whole group. I am sure the writer of Maggots in the Meat originally also did not had such tough ceatures in mind. Best sentence in the adventure is the first one on page 18: 'If there are any Slaugth alive after a few vicious rounds of fighting, they flee out of one of the rooms windows....' I just thought 'Who? The PCs?'

I have to agree that the power level/sheer toughness of the Slaugth is such that one would be more than enough challenge for rank 1 PC's.

The adventure as written provided a tough final fight for my campaigns party of 5 rank 6 Acolytes.

(They managed to kill most of the slaugth with none of them dying or burning fate, but they were rank 6 rolling through a mission supposedly meant for starting characters after all)

Of course they also brought down the sky mill in the end and one of the slaugth escaped (although the acolytes don't know that and think they got them all)

Glad we weren't the only group that had trouble with them. After the fight started going poorly, and our Guardsman had to burn a fate point, I took pity on them and had the cavalry show up to save the day. We had a total party kill at the end of Illumination, and I didn't want to have another on our first time out with a new group. But if nothing else I can bring them back as villains later, and the group will know to be wary of them.

Luthor Harkon said:

They're far too busy being ejected from the windows. I was amazed no one thought to edit all this before the adventure was published, resulting in perhaps the most ridiculously unfair confrontation in RPG history.Coming Soon: The Burning One appears in the introductory bar fight.

Honestly, we managed to buy off the mercs at the spaceport. They got chewed up the most, and we litterally brought the house down on the vile xenos. In the aftermath, when all was said and done, we found the bodies of several of their pets in the burnt out ruins of the windmill. Nothing else to indicate the Slaugth had ever been on planet.

-=Brother Praetus=-

The whole adventure isn´t a good one to me

[spoiler!]

The "tipp off" to the =I= are some missing dead during a siege ín a medivial town. EXCUSE ME?!? While a siege is going on, I think the last thing that comes to one´s mind is "****! There are some corpses missing". There is canonshoot, musketfire, starvation and serios assault going on...between the periods of repair and dispair.
Hell, the ruler of cities normally hire/order some-one to remove the dead to prevent the rise of plagues!

The footprints of the "pets" is a tipp off, but then the mission should be "there is some strange creature on the loss, find and kill it!"

Talking "Slaught": the "Final" is the best tipp off to the fact that this adventure was a quickly designed give-away as another reason to buy an otherwise costly GM-screen. It is far to overpowered for starting pc. An badly constructed. What is the reason for the slaught to use Smeet & Smoot? With this fine cloaks they are wearing, they should be able to go out at night themselves and pick all the dead they need. And since we have city under siege, there should be plenty of them! Hack, the whole "misterious attack"-Theme would make more sense if the slaugth would simply strole around at night, break down the door of some house near the wall, kill & feast or kill & take the bodies. If threatend to be encounter, they will just flee by squeezing through some cracks in the floor. Who is going to follow them?!?

I love the idea of them (Carrion-eating aliens who terrorize backwater planets? What's not to like?) but I haven't read the adventure. If I do use them, I'll make my own scenario.

Ran it twice the first time with some 2nd rank 3 Sisters of Battle & Psyker, after a close call against the Slaught on the ground floor the Party pulled back and set the Mill Ablaze with an Extermnator Catrage, a full Clip of Inferno Shells from a Pump Shottie and half a dozen Fire Bombs.

2nd time was with a 2nd Rank Guard Squad + Psyker, lost two Player Characters, alomost lost two more and the rest of the PC's got banged up badily, also ran through almost all the NPC's

wel since the name of these Xenos is modified from the word Slaughter, what do you expect.

Great potential as true 40K villains (and would be rad in the table top game) but they seem to lack some ambition.

They are the equivalent of evil that Darth Vader would be if he used Code 66 to steal candy from babies.

Peacekeeper_b said:

BTW arent they working on taking control of the calaxys sector without anyone noticing? so they will have an sector wide "farm" of humans.

Thats a bit ambitious.And there behind the syndicate.

Posts about the Slaugth come up all the time and usually say the same thing. The introduction to them in Maggots in the Meat was just that, an intro. After reading it, how could anyone GM think that their party could beat all of them? The Acolytes are not suppose to destroy them, only uncover the mystery; and once uncovered, the Slaugth's high Intelligence means they simply move on if they can't kill the party outright.

My game ran as such.... party finds them, gets a beating by just one and runs away for reinforcements. They return with the villagers and guards with torches and pitchforks like they were storming Frankenstein's castle. The Slaugth burn the tower down and flee into the swamp. The Acolytes solve the mystery and return with important intel. for the real Inquisitor. The End.

I feel anyone who let their players try to go toe-to-toe with them really played them wrong. The last thing the Slaugth would want is a dead body to identify them. In my game, the players only got descriptors for interaction in combat and never got to see what was under the robes... the perfect boogey-man.

-Cynr

When I ran this game it all turned out in a rather amusing and spectacularly fatal way.

The Slaught had retreated up the stairs of the tower, and the PCs followed cautiously. As they make it to the top, they see the Slaught climbing out the window and down the outside.

So the Psyker gives them Spasms.

This was before the DotDG came out, so no Psycik Blank rules. Just the increased power manifestation threshold adding 10 to the target roll, if I recall correctly. But decent stats and a few rerolls by fate-points, and he managed to manifest it on each of the three fleeing Slaught.

Spasm calls for agility tests to avoid falling... and fall they did. About 200 metres straight down.

*Splat*

Everybody thought it was hillarious. All that shooting, grenades, no effect. Several PCs almost got killed. And in the end, pushing them of the ladder (so to speak) was the way to do it.

Peacekeeper_b said:

I thought they where a variation of the fae Sluagh from celtic mythology, certainly some similarities in more than just name.

I'm yet to use one against rank 6 players, I think properly deployed and played to their stats of being highly intelligent, they'd probably kick the crap out of them fairly well.

Brother Praetus said:

I haven't been in any games where we've run published adventures. Frankly, I'm having a great time in the ones our GM is running though!!

Good stuff, with lots of paranoia abounding in the game.

Based on the commentary here, I hope my group never runs into the Slaugth. We're rank 3 and there are 7 of us, but I still wouldn't want to chance it.

~Mike

My players only beat them after they shot the floor out from underneath the Slaugth on the top floor with a Grenade Launcher and the three up there fell to their deaths (scarily they couldn't actually die from that but we use a more lethal critical hit system). That said the Techpriests still lost a Fate Point from their guns and the Guardsman almost died when they encountered the first one on the ground floor (that guy has the worst luck ever, seriously he has been down to 0 fate points twice now and would have died if it wasnt for the fact that I was just trying to do a cinematic like moment). It has become something of a running joke that whatever they are fighting at least it isn't a Slaugth, except that one time where it was .

I dont like that scenario and in fact the only reason I ran it was that I didn't have anything else ready, it ended up being a search test and 2 tracking tests to enter the death lair that almost killed them all. The only slightly interesting things that happened were at the start where I annoyed them by playing Tipplet the guide in Apu from the Simpsons voice and they tried to kill the Captain of the ship for some precieved slight.

I have also played in it before but we screwed it up so badly that our GM at the time had to invent another way of compleating it which actually made the scenario a whole lot more interesting, that only happened because our GM misread how Smeed and Smoot reacted to us and we blew them away in 1 round before they could surrender (they shot first and to be fair I was asleep at the time and so couldn't stop them).

Kaihlik

LeBlanc13 said:

Speak for yourself, I'm still only a lowly Rank 2 Scribe. Came into the game late, and I have to turn in my background, description and picture yet. I don't even know if I still qualify for the bonus XP for that stuff.

-=Brother Preatus=-