Recently ran "Maggots in the Meat" but didn't find it a good enough adventure to be a stand alone. So what I did was use it as a red herring lead in. While investigating the disappearances in Olranken (sp?) they ran into a pair of acolytes from Ordo Xenos (the pcs believe themselves to be Ordo Hereticus and have no idea Ordo Malleus even exists). The two sets of acolytes decided to work together, sucessfully completed Maggots, then PC acolytes tried to get in touch with their contact to get off world and found out that he had dies in a fire cutting them off from communcation with their boss.

So they go back to the Xenos adepts to meet their inquisitor who is on world and get sent out on a couple of missions for him.

This past session, while out on the second run for Sulladan Prynne, the Ordo Xenos inquisitor, they get contact from their own Interrogator via telepath (using projection to contact from elsewhere in solar system) and get told that the investigation in Olranken was just a ruse to get them close to the Ordo Xenos inquisitor and their real mission is to find out what the Ordo Xenos is up to on Acreage.

Comments from end of session:

"Spying on one inquisitor for another inquisitor! We don't have the training for that!"

"We're all gonna die."

"Our inquisitor would kick their inquisitor's ass."

Of course at the moment they do not know where Inquisitor Prynne is other than he has left his primary on planet base of operations. They haven't really taken time to try to logically figure out where he may have gone yet. Also they don't seem particularly suspicious that his subordinate left in charge at the chateau has told them that a caravan had been arranged to get them to the spaceport at the capital and get them off world. For a bunch of lunatics involved in multiple conspiracies these guys are nowhere near paranoid enough.

Next session should be interesting.

Nice plot twist! I like it.

The details of some of the twists and turns are even more amusing. I see burning of Fate Points coming very soon simply because they haven't taken the time to put two and two together on the one hand, and despite all they've been through (8,000-10,000 XP characters) on ther other.

Haven't taken the time to put 2 and 2 together? We didn't HAVE two twos, Doc. We had about one and a half.

The party is currently alive (bar burning fate points) solely because I AM sufficiently paranoid. I told em! I told em, but they wouldn't listen! Varn especially. Stay awake, there are people coming to kill us, I said. Don't use the flamer, we're trapped on the second floor of a wooden building, I said. Sure, I didn't know it was rigged to explode, but the fact remains that if he'd followed my advice he wouldn't have a used servitor clamp for a hand now. Oh, and some of the civilians might have survived, fancy that!

And that's completely ignoring the basic fact that if I hadn't decided we needed to make a break for it, we would have been dealing with a kill-team of several hundred, rather than a dozen, for the three of us. For the spoiled rich kid, I think I'm doing pretty **** well.

Ah, well, things should be easier from here on out. I mean, sure, we're fighting an Inquisitor, but he's only Ordo Xenos. That's, like, the Texas Air National Guard of the Inquisition. We Hereticus boys will show him how it's done. I mean, seriously, what kind of a threat are xenos? They can kill you. That's pretty much it. Maybe get a little freaky if they're spikey eldar, but we know from personal experience how fragile THOSE are. Daemons, now. Those are freakin' terrifying. Still have nightmares about Baraspine. And the... thing... that came out of that sword we broke. That did not go well.

And what's this nonsense about Ordo Maleria or what-have-you? Heretics summon daemons, daemons spread heresy. It'd be downright silly to have two separate agencies to deal with the problem.

Yyyyup. Ordo Hereticus is on the case. Should have this one all wrapped up next session.

Yeah, yeah you finally got paranoid about a week after I wrote this. And the sudden change in behavior between mission A and mission B, plus the "we'll send you guys with no Ordeo Xenos experience to check out the potential Xenos lead." (which turned out to be a planted Ork infestation) I mean after you found the seeding device, really you had not only 2 + 2, but practically the =4 written out. And at the time it was still all "let's ask the guys who sent us off to be killed by orks for communications and combat gear, the worst they can do is bug it." And still planning on riding off out of town with them to "maybe ditch them later"

Awww... it wouldn't have been hundreds if you'd stuck with the caravan.

Just the 60 or so troops/drivers regularly in the caravan and only 2 crew served twin-linked heavy stubbers and a wagon with a tripod mounted Autocannon. No biggie.

Now that you and Martin are snooping in the GM forum again I'm going to have to stop posting spoilers and veiled references to the really secret stuff (You know: treachery, betrayal, tyranny, heresies you guys helped to conquer worlds without realizing it, multi-planet spanning plot hook that may soon be abandoned b/c you guys keep ingnoring it b/c you assume its a minor local thing, evil cults you accidentally started, revenge-obsessed gender-bending pseudo-witches out to kill you all, and can't forget occular conspiracies, etc. etc. etc.). Ah well, guess I need to get back to finding a few folks not in my game to bounce ideas off again. Poor Adam has to be tired of being bombarded w/ everything all the time.

By the by:

Would "Frateris Leo" be a sufficient pseudo-latin/High Gothic translation for Brotherhood of the Lion?

I have that problem too Doc. Half my players GM themselves, so I can hardly fault them for being here.

Brother Domis said:

And Domis, this absolutely cracked me up.

Brother Domis said:

Be sure to remember that the next time an Ork Waaagh! rampage across several sectors.. Or better yet, when the Necrons decides to fully awake from stasis. Or how about when a genestealer cult has fully infiltrated several worlds and a really hungry hive fleet picks up the whiff of ripe worlds for the taking?

-"I mean, seriously, what kind of threat are xenos?"

aethel said:

But some of us do try to keep ourselves from reading your posts in here if they seem to contain spoiler information.

@aethel

If I might be helpfull for "bouncing back ideas", you should have my email
(you gratiously helped me out with my little "Dusk"-problems)

DocIII said:

Doc, you're seriously overestimating the clarity of the hints you give out. And what change in behavior? We met the guy, what, twice total? He gave us different instructions each time.

"We found worm-aliens!"

"Thanks for the report, we'll handle it. Go investigate these disappearances."

"We found a chaos cult!"

"Thanks for the report, we'll have ordo hereticus handle it. Go investigate these rumors of monsters."

"We found greenskins!"

"The boss is away on business, but thanks for the report, we'll handle it. We've arranged transport back to your department."

When all you've got is three random points, how can you tell what's the line and what's the deviation?

Honestly, the only way I figured out what he was doing (and I DID figure it out on my own, without coming here) was by making the metagame assumption that he must be involved in something you'd let us know about, rather than (more reasonably) assuming he was off doing some secret-squirrel Inquisition stuff we had no knowledge of. I mean, our Inquisitor comes and goes all the time. We have no idea where. Going off on secret business is not unusual behavior for an Inquisitor.

Hell, if his tech priests hadn't sabotaged our gear, I wouldn't think he was the villain. If he was the one who planted the spores, why send us to investigate instead of just wasting us?

Your plots are complex and interesting, Doc, but I'm guessing they seem a lot simpler when you already know the answers. From the other side of the table, there are a thousand possible explanations.

Didn't mean to suggest you didn't figure this one out on your own (after much prodding and hinting) was just pointing out that this thread (and its initial comments about not being paranoid enough) was posted well before anyone showed any sign of snagging a clue. The spoilers and hints I referred to earlier are not in this thread, but rather scattered in others sprinkled through my commentary and seeking of ideas on the forums.

As to the clues being too unclear. Well, setting the difficulty levels of clues is a difficult task in any mystery story as what is obvious when one has all the answers may not be so to someone in the dark. In order to combat that I try to present mystery scenarios to individuals outside of the game, giving them only the information the players have or will be given and then asking what they think. While some of my clues may be obscured by the fog of GM vs. player info, some are missed soley due to player inattention. If I were to highlight every clue with the statement "hey this is an important clue, look at it!" it would kind of ruin the process.

There were very direct and clear (and suspicious) differences to the reactions to the reports from the Olranken and Hauptstragen missions, as well as very obvious and large differences between the briefing before being sent to Hauptstragen and to go look into the Orks. That was one a I ran by other folks before hand to see if it was too subtle. (And to be fair one of you did actually tumble to the shift in attitude, but unfortunately that was the player that was late to the session and missed the hit squad shooting him to pieces)

You'd been given the clues of the missing tech priest and been told your real mission was to investigate the Ordo Xenos inquisitor well before you got yourself into such trouble with collecting rigged gear. On top of that you were handed the clue about the stuff involving the servants without even having to dig for it.

Between the change ups in orders; odd reactions to information gathered; strangeness of sending the least experienced with xenos crowd to face something you were told was thought to be a xeno threat without even one "expert" to supervise; a bunch of obvious offworlders being sent to impersonate local knights without having shown any capacity for passing as locals (except for your character who pulled it off, bravo, but with the painfully obvious insuitablity of the others to their roles almost getting you caught); fact that the orks you were sent off to deal with were planted by someone with access to xenos life forms, odd high-tech devices and imperial arms stores; and immediately thereafter you were told by your own interrogator "you're there to find out what the shady Ordo Xenos inquisitor is up to"; plus being directly informed that the tech priests were right up there with the top acolytes in being in the inner circle of the Xenos Inquisitor's organization on planet; I don't know what else I could of done short of painting a flaming arrow in the sky, or having an NPC roll in and go "psst, here's what's going on"