We're playing through The House of Dust and Ash, and the party is travelling undercover on the airship The Cygnan Martyr as it flies over hundreds of kilometres of acid waters. During the night, the psyker wanders the corridors of the ship alone. Bad idea.

He gets jumped by parties left unnamed for spoilier-reasons, knocked out, dragged into a private cabin, killed and thrown overboard. Burning a fatepoint lets him somehow survive the stabbing, and he comes to his senses in free-fall.

Hurtling at terminal velocity (some 200kmh) in the dark of night towards the more solid darkness of the acid sea below, he manifests Shape Flesh and chooses the Flyer trait, halting his fall.

Looking around he sees nothing but darkness. It starts to rain (of course).
The rain is just as corrosive as the sea below, and it burns his skin. (He is stripped and naked, of course).

Seeing not any clues as to which way to go, he goes up, planning to ascend above the cloud layers to avoid the rain. A thunderstorm brews (of course).

Lightening strikes, and hits the only thing around: Him.

As this is a play by post game, I'll just post the text here (skipping the player input, posting just the condensed story)

"Havelas strains his eyes, but sees nothing that might suggest land or blimp. (Very Hard Search Test: FAILED)

Raising his head to the clouds above, he soars straight up into the thunderstorm above. With no warning, lightening strikes.

Havelas is stunned by shock and pain as 1,2 Jiggawatts enters his head and cruises around his body. (-4 Energy Critical: Burns away all your hair, 2 Levels of Fatigue, Blinded for 2 rounds)

Blinded, Shocked, Burned and in immense pain, Havelas soars straight up as fast as he can. Leaving trails of electrical discharge as he passes through the ion-charged cloud layer, he desperately tries to heal and protect his battered self.

Manifesting Cellular Control (Manifest Power Test: PASSED) and Seal Wounds (Manifest Power Test: PASSED, Phenomena triggered) he mends his broken flesh, but in the uncontrolled release of power he releases an inferno of flames, igniting the poisonous gases in the clouds around and below him.

Still blinded, but feeling the heat, Havelas puts on a desperate burst of speed staying just ahead of the expanding inferno below him.

Rising on a pillar of fire from the black clouds below, covered with the electric pulses of psionic energy, Havelas ascends like a Phoenix. His arms stretched to the sides, his body is pumped and supernaturally large due to the warping powers working to sustain it. His eyes open, blank and white, streaming lightening in all directions as he fights to regain control.

Havelas stops when the temperature drops dangerously low and the air grows thin. After an indeterminable amount of time things calm down and Havelas regains control. As he looks around he sees the sun rise in the east, and the endless layers of clouds and the dark sea thousands of meters below."

So at this point he orientates himself by the direction of the rising sun, and flies south after the ship and towards the Burning Isle. This triggered my discussion in another thread about flying speeds, but I finally worked out that if travelling at highest speeds he can hold 36kmh, but needs to pass Toughness tests (at increasing difficulty levels) every hour to maintain speed, or suffer Fatigue. Cellular Control deals with Fatigue, but the sustaining of Shape Flesh needs a power roll every 10 rounds (50 secs)

Crunching some numbers I worked out that he will trigger on average 30 phenomenas an hour in this manner, or 1 every 2 minutes. Or 1 every 830 meters.

Imagine him summoning a Demon at such an altitude

"I have come to crush... AAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaahhhhh"

*Splash*

Ah, anyway, though very silly it gave us a laugh.

Fantastic. That's desperate resourcefulness at its best.

Anyway, sustaining powers doesn't trigger psychic phenomena (pg. 164), so as long as he manages to maintain his rolls to sustain Cellular Control and Shape Flesh he should be okay; of course, the threshold should increase by eight (since he has two powers active) so it's likely he'll end up having to outright re-active his powers every once in a while. I would love to see the freefall Daemon.

If he woke up in free-fall why didn't he just fly back to the airship? Should have been visible (you can't free fall for that much time so the ship shouldn't have been able to travel that far from his free-falling location). Second if it was a thundestorm, wouldn't the lightning more probably have hit the airship rather than a tiny little psyker among the clouds?

All in all, a fun story though, but it seemed like the Gm was a bit extra mean towards the psyker player if you ask me.

I mean, not only does he get stabbed to death, he get's tossed of the side of the airship as well, and while the psyker actually burns a fate point to survive the stabbing and manages to avoid dying by free fall the GM decides to strike him with lightning as well. Sounds a bit harsh.

It's almost like the GM was thinking: -"I really hate that psyker guy. Oh! He's stupid enough to sneak around the ship during the night? Great I can send some mooks to stab him to death. Aw shucks, he burned a fate point. Oh well, I'll just have the mooks toss him over the side. Goddamnit! He used his powers to sprout wings! Oh well, I'll just say that the ship is nowhere to be seen. That should give him a clue to just die already. Then that bastard decides to fly towards the island? Why can't he just die already? I'll send some lightning strikes on him. that should do it!"

the sustaining of Shape Flesh needs a power roll every 10 rounds (50 secs)

Crunching some numbers I worked out that he will trigger on average 30 phenomenas an hour in this manner, or 1 every 2 minutes. Or 1 every 830 meters.

Barring house rules, you do not in fact cause phenomena with the sustain rolls.

Varnias Tybalt said:

I've got to agree with that. All of this sounds entirely and unnecessarily cruel and pointless. If I were the psykers player, I'd walk from the game.

Oh, I knew he could handle it, or I wouldn't have been so cruel. It's not so much a punishment as setting up for a spectacular re-entry at a most opportune moment later. The player was laughing his ass off, but then we share the same peculiar sense of humour.

The burnt Fate Point pretty much ensures his survival of the whole incident, but that doesn't mean it should be easy or that we can't play out some desperate scenes of epic heroism.

Thanks for the pointers about not causing phenomena on sustain rolls, that will make things a little easier en less farcical

And as for flying back to the ship, well he would if he saw it. But in the pitch dark of midnight you cant see far, especially in the rain. He didn't come to until he almost hit the water (have to cut it fine for proper dramatic effect, after all), and confused as he was he didn't even know which direction to search.

LuciusT said:

I concur as well. Barring criticism of how there would be some crew or the like on the ship that might be witnesses and the fact that this certain character (they played Illumination, didn't they?) knows that he should hold off on any killing until he gets to a place where he has a better chance to off them without being noticed. Namely, the auction. He spends a fate point and instead of getting caught in something off the ship or the like he is still almost certainly condemned to death. A very hard test to find the ship? It's pretty big and he'd still be moving forward at the ship's speed.

And now you want him to get possessed while he makes a clever and desperate bid to save his life after he refused to die when you had him stabbed, refused to fall to his death, refused to die from lightning, and refused to die from a gas explosion.

Whoops, you responded when I was typing my response. You answered most of my points there.

Darth Smeg said:

Oh, okay. As long as the psyker could survive from bruning the fate point. I mean, sure there are some situations where it's hard to come up with a way of surviving even through fate point burning (being obliterated to nothingness by a melta charge, being blown out the airlock on a space ship etc. etc.), being stabbed and tossed off the side of an airship hardly seems like the same kind of situation. (especially if the PC is a psyker)

Although I agree it might be hard to see very far during midnight, don't the airships have blinking lights on their hull? (would be kind of hard to manage flight traffic otherwise)

Just sayin'

Darth Smeg said:

Well, what's important is that everyone enjoys themselves.

numb3rc said:

Quite so. But in this case one party member is already suffering from poison administered by another passenger, and so the confusion offers a possibility to be grasped. Especially since the Psyker was asking all sorts of pesky questions and getting quite suspicious of his would-be killer, it was seen prudent to get rid of him before he exposed said killer.

Darth Smeg said:

Ah, well suspicious questions are another matter entirely. That makes it much more justified.