I have been running a group and looked at Maggots in the Meat and decided there was a way to salvage the adventure with some changes.

It is a large group, 9 players. 1 cleric, 1 scum, 2 arbites, 1 guardsman, 1 techpriest, 2 psykers, and 1 assassin. The cleric was the leader mainly because no one else has chosen to step into the role. The only thing about that is he tends to be a little overzealous.

They found information out about the civil war and the siege of the city once they landed. They immediately huddled together to see what they could do to get into the city to commence their investigation. They decided to see if they could hire themselves on as a mercenary group to one of the two sides.

I figured that would be a valid tactic and made some snap decisions, my expectation was they would be hired on to be guards somewhere in the town and be able to carry on their investigations during time off.

First they went to the baroness who had the city under siege, they had heard the rumor about possible infiltration gangs murdering the citizens. They left there and went on to the Prince's. That is where things turned interesting.

They introuduced themselves as a group that was essentially mercenaries that specialized in stealth infiltrations. Their interviewer asked a few other questions, one being if they had aquatic training and also if they had demolitions training. Their characters are all about 2500 exp characters, only 2 have swimming, and no one has demolitions experience. Despite them not hurting for money their leader held out for the best possible pay and figured that answering yes to the above questions, got more money than the Baroness was offering, and signed on for a 3 month tour. They were expecting the Prince to offer more money since his city was under siege.

Essentially at this point I figured that the group has hired on as the equivalent of Navy Seals. I had them show up and announced the plan for their first mission. The module mentioned the naval blockade, so thier job was going to be to take a ship relatively close to the blockade (a 3 hour swim for someone trained), they would do this at night, attach the supplied demolitions and try to blow up the ships doing the blockade and providing the Prince's city some relief. I ended the night with this to give them a week to stew over it.

The next week came along and while one or two of them saw this as a suicide mission they decided to press forward with it. The noble forked over 400 thrones of his own cash to find someone to set the demo packs with a remote and off they sailed. A couple of them wanted to just admit that they weren't trained for the mission but was pretty much overruled by the rest of the party.

They were dropped off in the water at dusk and proceeded to spend the next 5 hours swimming, one of the psykers taking care of their fatigue till the last hour when they split up into 4 groups.

At this point they get to the bay, see 4 large ships that they were tasked with blowing to smithereens. They avoided the smaller patrol ships and managed to get to the 4 larger ships, this is where things started to go wrong.

They split into 4 groups. The two with swimming skills headed to the farther ships, the other 6 split into two groups (1 their tech priest has been out a couple of weeks due to a workschedule change). Two stayed back while the other 2 went forward. They all noticed the lookouts, avoided detection and got up to the ships.

Here 3 of the 4 groups noticed the nets draped about the bottoms of the ships to deter swimmers. The 4th, a lone guardsman ran into the net and started ringing bells. He promptly dropped to the bottom of the bay and avoided the two people who had dropped into the water to look to see what had disturbed the nets.

The others used Security to cut through the ropes and begin to afix the explosives. One of the psykers closest to the guardsman's boat started to swim to him, put up Sense Life and found three life forms in the water, one on the bottom, 2 circling around near the ship. He then went up to the surface and used his com bead to check on the guardsman ( who had not brought his combead with him). This was of course the time I rolled an 01 for the lookouts listen check.

At this time one of the other psykers saw the lights come on on that ship, heard the ringing of the bells as that ship came to life and he decided to use his combead and once again I rolled an 02 for that ships lookouts.

Essentially at this time I have the following situation:

Ship 1 - the guardsman has not set the demo charges, psyker 1 is about 40 meters away in the water. The guardsman is 30-40 meters below the surface hiding w/o a combead and no photovisors.

Ship 2 - 1 person is 25 meters away in the water, 1 is attaching a demo pack.

Ship 3 - 2 people attaching demo packs, 1 psyker 25 meters away in the water.

Ship 4 - 1 lone scum who has attached 1 demo pack and was getting ready to attach another.

Each has a speargun and 5 spears, some brought along additional equipment but they do know las weapons do not work underwater.

2 speargun men off each ship have each dropped into the water w/rebreathers to see who is attacking.

Should be interesting.

OK sorry this has taken awhile to respond to but personal issues have kept the game running but me from having time to reply.

So the group started the next session and here is what happened.

Ship 1 - Failure to blow up the ship - the person assigned to this ship never got a chance to set his demo packs, stayed hidden below, swam off when he saw that they were spotted, luckily remembered to drop the radio detonated demo packs he was holding.

Ship 2 - partial sucess. This person started to attach the demo packs, was spotted and engaged by the two divers. He managed to hold off the two divers long enough allow the demo packs to be detonated with him w/in 5 meters of the explosion costing him a fate point.

Ship 3 - Sucess - they attached the demo packs. One of them had hidden up against the hull while the other one had managed to attract the attention of the two divers in the water and drag them down to the bottom and fought them. He was grappled while down in the water by the two of them and had his rebreather grappled off of him. He drowned in the process. The other person finished attaching the demo packs, tried to help, and when he heard that the signal that he had 30 seconds to get clear swam away to save himself barely getting away, taking damage and nearly enough fatigue to knock him unconcious.

Ship 4 - Sucess - the scum attached the demo packs. When the two divers approched her she pointed to the demo packs and then pointed to the detonator in her hands. They peeled off and sawm off, she swam clear, gave the warning to get clear, and used the detonator at the time she had given for them to get clear.

They then swam to the shore to enter the besieged city. Once on shore one of the psykers used seal wounds to heal the cleric who had washed up on shore unconsious and wounded to 0 (he was the one who had drowned). This resulted in a Perils of the Warp (PoTW) that summoned a demon. They drove off the demon, 3 of them being knocked unconsious by the demons psychic scream. Time ran out and we recessed for the week.

The next week came, some players weren't there. One of them was the cleric whom had started the entire adventure off on a sidetrack by saying that they were qualified for aquatic, stealth, demolitions work. They come up to the city walls, announce themselves, are escorted to the barracks where their hiring officer vouches for them. 3 characters are still unconcious since they are the ones missing. During this time the officer starts to talk about their next missions, they were very pleased with the results. At this point they realize the best way to get out of this is to say their demolitions specialist died in the fight, and they really exaggerated their abilities when it came to aquatic missions pointing to the unconsious cleric as the ringleader, the scum pointing this out and ratting him out. They drag the cleric off along with two others to the stocks for a couple of days of humiliation.

They begin their investigation, finding killing sights and failing their search and tracking rolls. They do find other leads and clues and start to circle in on the warehouse. During this time they visit their comrades in the stocks and the scum pays some street urchins to throw refuse at the cleric and the rest. That night ends with progress being made and some intersting ideas forming. They think that it might be zombies or possibly a chaos cult out in the swamp following the swamp god Horloc rumors. They are sent out to break through the siege lines but another perils of the warp to use the chameleon ability causes a localized earthquake right near the enemy lines and they flee back to the city. This ends another session.

Next week - I decide to work in a little combat, they are patrolling the city at night hoping to encounter a killing. They do that and encounter a couple of xenos. They drive one off and due to a huge crit with a las weapon they are left with an unidentifiable charred corpse. They track the other one to the warehouse with the body snatchers. They enter the warehouse, encounter the xenos, manage to capture one of the bodysnatchers. However they didn't do it very quietly or stealthfully so eventually the Plumes showed up. This is where things went downhill. They waited for the local guards instead of high tailling it out. They remembered that they were not supposed to reveal they were Inquisition so 2 of them hid on the roof ( the assassin and scum), the guardsman and one arbite went around the warehouse district trying to find an empty warehouse to interrogate their prisoner, and the last group waited for the Plumes. Enter the Plumes and they were drug off since the first thing they do is trot out the xenos bodies. They are taken back to the stockades to be interrogated as to how they got involved.

The guardsman and arbite can't break down a door or use security easily to open a door on their first two tries, decide that it would be best to go out into the swamp to hold their investigation. They are spotted trying to cross the walls and are escorted back to the stockades where they are put into cells to be questioned. The scum and assassin had hidden during this and never came out. They are interrogated, so is the bodysnatcher, and the Plumes assault the xenos windmill, taking very heavy losses.

The cleric had missed a few sessions, comes back and is not happy to find out he was in the stockades. So when he is taken in for questioning he begs to not be hurt and will willingly admit to everything. He says the scum is the evil mastermind of the xenos cult and had them all under her spell.

So what started out as a simple interrogation then turned into full blown torture sessions with the acolytes given the seats of honor. The assassin and scum manage to escape and get off planet. They get back to Scintilla and report, the Inquisition goes and gets their wayward Acolytes so the Inquisition can then make sure of their purity. The cleric admits to saying it for revenge, the rest get another round of torture for their enjoyment, and they eventually after 6 months of imprisonment/torture are released with the exception of the cleric who is forced to make a new character. In the course of this they have lost all their equipment and money they had with them.

To which I must say ouch. I used this adventure as my first try GMing, and the worst thing that happened to my group. Is that we had a couple of Scum use a situation to get rich quick. Mainly as a guy who wasn't used to the 40k universe, soon as his character (a guardsman) landed on planet. Ejected his lasgun's magazine and tossed it in the water, really as a joke. 'Causing my group's cleric to want to kill him, but instead flogged him.

This being the situation in which two of my scum characters decided to sell tickets for the masses to watch.

Serimus Bodikan said:

Awesome!

-=Brother Praetus=-