So the Black Crusade campaign Im running has turned a little bit risky and the stuff has hit the fan a little earlier than planned and I'm looking to bring about a bit of a hammering on them for the way they handled their last mission. First off, background:
Team composition:
1 x Fallen Space Wolf Librarian (Deathwatch character transferred to BC now using Sorcerer archetype)
1 x Night Lord Chaos Marine
1 x Alpha Legion Chaos Marine
1 x Nurgle aligned psyker, the bug filled one from ToD (who oddly enough for a mutation rolled Illusion of Normality)
1 x Pirate Price of the Ragged Helix (Who unfortunately was out this mission)
1 x Heretek
The overall goal, they have been assigned a sub sector and been asked to undermine its leadership and break its sub sector governor utterly. Not kill him, just send him mad and make him suffer. Then their boss will finish the job and take said sector for his own nefarious ends. Now in order to achieve this the players are so far doing little odd jobs for people, working their way up the pecking order and making allies who could help them.
They had managed to make the friend of a rather friendly and well off purveyor of fine liquor, amasec and spirits and he petitioned the party for a favour requesting they help him recover some of his finest alcohol which had been seized by the Adeptus Arbites and in exchange he would owe them one and would make an excellent contact which will open up links to a powerful rogue trader they can now use to complete their overall objectives. The idea was to try and do it quietly, break into the compound, seize the barrels and withdraw them as well as a few other illegal items seized by the arbites to cover their tracks and make a tidy profit.
If all had gone well then there would have been no trace except a bunch of stuff missing however for various reasons the players got careless. They had done their homework on it, scoped out good places to enter, when the patrols were, worked out where things were likely to have been and acquired a lot of detail. I in turn warned them of armed patrols, automatic weapons, security auspexes and cameras as well as perimeter fencing and several towers.
Their initial bits went well, they arranged for their transport to be parked near the weak point on the walls conveniently near to the warehouse that when they finally get an opportunity then they can easily get the loot out. The Alpha Legion took up a vantage point and picked off tower guards with well aimed stalker bolt ammunition and luckily each corpse was recovered. All was going well as the Night Lord gave the psyker a vault over the walls and into the compound before the Space Wolf gave it a try and decided to give it a running jump. The wolf fluffed the roll...badly with a 96. As a GM I reward good rolls like 01 to 05 with glorious and stylish success and 96 to 00 with critical failures (with 00 being just horrific embarrassment) and in this instance he fluffed the attempted jump/climb so was forced to make a strength roll, which he passed. Due to the momentum he therefore ploughed straight through the weak concrete wall making about as much noise as a howitzer shooting into a glass storage warehouse (ok obscure analogy but you get the idea). If he'd have failed he would have hit it with a heavy thud and concussed a bit but otherwise fine and no consequence other than a braining. As a result the guards got suspicious of the noise of half of the perimeter wall coming down. The heretek had the corpses of the dead patrol guards with him, failed to answer the microbead of an officer questioning what had happened with a sufficiently believable reply and then it all went down hill from there...
Guards got alerted, shots got fired, the heretek managed to salvage some dignity by sending a feedback screech through the enemy vox network to disable them for a few moments but the entire thing just got violent with a large amount of dead guard, some player injuries, loads of nicked items and now a severely damaged warehouse due to the liberal use of demolitions.
At this point then I want to hit with some consequences...this is a **** Arbites depot which they raided at a weak point. They succeeded their assignment and removed much of the evidence linking it to their employer but have now put risk on themselves. At no point though did they consider cameras, masks or proper obscuring gear for the humans. The marines are unrecognisable in their armour but it still raises a point to investigators afterwards that traitor marines were here. So far I'm thinking that I bring the Inquisition into it, not sure though whether it would be Ordo Hereticus or Malleus who would respond to evidence of traitor legions and a few cults (I'm leaning to Hereticus but could be the latter).
Any other thoughts though?
Edited by Calgor Grim