This was one the the best threads in the Dark Heresy group, so I thought I’d start it off here.

Two of our guys were tracking down an albino mutant with wings and terrible flaking skin. They were trying to take him alive, so when they caught up with him, the pyromancer hit him with a flash-bang. The mutant was blinded, but tried to escape by flying away. Unfortunately for all involved, he flew straight into a huge industrial fan, leaving our two heroes covered in a flaky white mess.

At the end of a recent adventure, the characters had fought their way to the top of a tall bell tower, where they confronted the villain, who had chained his hostage to the bell and had applied acid to the bolts so that it would fall within so many turns, killing the hostage.

The villain was a former Arbites Detective who felt he had been unfairly passed over for a promotion, and had devised a plot to gain revenge on those who he felt had wronged him. It was very important to him that he be able to gloat and demonstrate his mental superiority over the characters.

So basically, he starts monologuing at the top of the tower, bragging about his ingenius plot. One of the characters fastdraws his bolt pistol and hits him in the chest with a bolt. It doesn’t do much damage to the heavily armored villain, but does blast him off the tower.

After they got to the bottom, the following exchange occurred.

GM: You find the silver statue and a broken sword cane, but there is no body, only a trail of blood!

Player: What the hell? Exactly how tall is this tower?

GM: Don’t you want a recurring villain.

Other Player: Sure, but not one lame enough to get blasted off the top of a tower while he’s monologuing.

GM: And you find his battered corpse at the base of the tower!

1) The rogue trader meets a traitor techpriest that is now a pirate, the priest says he will blow up the ship if the trader doesn't agree to meet him in a pistol duel, the trader agrees and draws his pistol, the techpriest then proceeds to draw his six pistols and meet the rogue trader man against man.

2) When encountering cannibals at Grace a player is ambushed, while at first prepared for a fight he is hit with a thrown stone and quickly understands that their attacks really can't hurt him.

3) This is probobly the best, the party encounters a great swarm of genestealers and one zoanthrope, the astriopath tries a very difficult shot at the zoantrope, hits and makes two divine fury and a high number afterwards killing the monster and saving them from the genestealer threat. With one shot from a very weak pistol a zoantrope is destroyed.

From last nights game.

The party are infiltrating an Adeptus Mechanicus monastery where a hidden Ordinatus weapon is held. Chaos Marines and human cultists have captured the monastery and the PCs are trying to find and destroy the Ordinatus before the chaos marines take it off planet.

Their inquisitor previously sent them to recruit as many Astartes as they could before the assault, they land planet side with a full company.

10 marines and the 5 heroes sneak into the monastery while the rest make a diversionary attack on the main gates.

Running down a corridor following a homing beacon with a servo skull given to them by a dying tech priest they run into a squad of 10 chaos marines. Since five of their marines had split off to draw away pursuers, they are outnumbered and heavily outgunned. Loyalist and chaos marines go at it with chainswords and bolt pistols.

In rapid succession

Our Han Solo-esque Scum puts a bolt pistol round square into a chaos marines heavy flamer fuel tank, igniting it and taking out the badguy.

Our mentally deficient but non-the-less badass Guardsman engages a chaos marine already fighting a loyalist marine, swings his mono-great weapon, gets a high rolling wrath of the Emperor and does over 20 points of damage (after damage reduction from toughness and armour) killing him instantly. Much to the shock of all present. He then repeats the process with another (already heavily injured) chaos marine, killing him too.

Our scum, desperate not to be out performed shots a chaos marine in the eye, wounding him but not killing him. On the following turns he fires his bolt pistols repeatedly into the chaos marines face doing only tiny damage, desperately hoping to take him down before the guardman turns up to finish him off.

What was supposed to be a rescue scene, with another group of NPCs saving the PCs (and thus being introduced into the story) became a bit of a wipe out for the chaos marines, who suffered brutally at the hands of these puny humans.

Another epic moment was our death worlder guardsman explaining a little of his background and telling the rest of the party that his people:

"Have 100 words for sabre tooth tiger, but non for love".

That last one made us laugh so much he got 50xp for best line of the night.

Just had our first gaming session. The PCs were attacked by 2 Bounty Hunters (From DH) who totally failed to do anything. One got a single shock maul hit in on the Navigator before the Rogue Trader cut his head off, and the other was going to climb up a piller and snipe but was surprised by the Seneschal. He managed to hit him with the but of his gun before being inferno pistoled. The fight ended with one dead Hunter, one Critically Wounded Hunter and two dead civilians. No damage was dealt to the PCs.

Ok multiple stories from just ONE game session.

1.Missionary with a flamer opens up in the crowd during the opening ambush scene in the books intro adventure. When confronted by the group after the fight he simply makes the sign of the aquila and says "If they were faithful, they are now in the arms of the God-Emporer, if they were not, then the heretics should have burned anyway."

2. First ship combat fight in part 2 of the adventure, first shot rolls a 01 with the ships Sunsear Lasers. Proceeds to net a damage roll of 36... Yes that's right, 3 10's rolled. Rolls another 10 for catastophic damage. Warp drive explosion takes out both pirate vessels and the poor pilgrim ship.

3. Group gets to the Rightous Path, almost gets killed by Lady Ash, Rogue Trader decides to send a vox transmission back to the ship, "We aren't going to make it! If we can't have her neither can they! Target the ship!" A few stupid NPC rolls later, the treasure ship and the player chars are dead. Rerolling next week to try anothe go with this group.

Last session.
Missionary did 132 points of damage to an unclean one with a heavy flamer. GM gave him a fate point.
Mainly hilarious in my head because I imagine it being told by a high Episcopalian (sp?) cantor (ie every word is sung, with lots of long pauses for breaths)

"And yeah did he open his holy text in search of knowledge, and searching them, did find the story of St Drusus whooooooo,
{recites the entire verse}
Taking the St. Example, the Missionary began to cast stories of the blessed, onto the Daemon hiding within the catacombs beloooooooooooooow
Until, upon the third hour, in a rage, the Daemon did come out of the catacombs, and the Missionary did hit the beast with fire, and the beast did burn. In the six hour the Missionary did finish his sermon, saying
‘and so St. Cantanius is depicted with a closed fist’.”

The group explores a ship full of zombies with only a few normal men allied to the characters still onboard. After some heavy fighting with the zombies the explorers back up into a corridor until the walking dead do not follow them any more. There they come past a side door which they don't dare to open. Having walked no more than 10 m away, they hear the door open. The Missionary aims his flamer at it. A figure walks through the door. The missionary is the only one who fails his perception test and therefore doesn't identify it is a crew member. Assuming the figure would be a zombie, he fires and scores a direct hit, while the two other characters appalledly stare at him. Then, recognizing his mistake, the missionary hurries towards the man, who is close to drawing his last breath, and wants to heal him by using medicae. Failing the test with a roll over 90, he instead squashes the poor crew member's last intact internal organs. This, once again leaves the other two characters shaking their heads in disbelief.

During my first game, our RT discovered a ghost ship on the radar while in the warp due to a roll on the Warp ocurrence chart. He decided to try and exit the warp as close to the ship as possible hoping to pull it out of the warp with him. Well the ships navigator was successful and it turned out to be an empty cruiser so clean inside and out that it looked like it came right off an assembly line.

With a detachment of marines following the RT they searched the ship from bow to stern finding a malfunctioning Gellar field generator, no crew whatsoever, and a cargo hold crammed with xenos artifacts. It wasn't until the RT ferried a large portion of crewmen over to begin tranferring the cargo that the Umbra (shadow mannipulating orb aliens) began picking off marines who wandered off into the back of the cargo hold. Before long the RT was loading as much loot into the guncutters as he could with his own 2 hands and ordering the marines to board and forcibly eject the ratling cremen who had taken shelter inside.

They ended up abandoning the vessel with a handful of loot and leaving behind over 400 crewmen and 200 marines. Before the RT ordered that his ship open fire on the derelict vessel, it vanished into the Warp without a trace.

Part 2 of the intro adventure : They just got ambushed (also had a "special GM treat" in the shape of a mine that drained a quarter of their system's powers as they were not noob RPGers

I gave them the whole "power down your weapons and prepare to be boarded" milarky and, just before our rogue trader gives the order to fire... the first mate (an ork freebooter knowns as "squigthrowa") politely asks if he can try hailing them first... which the trader allows...
The pirates answer the hail (expecting a surrender) and all they get on screen is an ork in a slightly worn pirate hat shouting "ALLRIGHT THEN U STUPID HUMMIES! IF YOU THINK YOU CAN TAKE ON AN ORKY VESSEL LIKE THIS (This is an imperial frigate btw with wolf in sheeps clothing) THEN BY ALL MEANS GIVE IT A GO! WE WULDN'T BE POWERING THE KILLY STICKS IF WE DIDN'T THINK WE COULD TAKE YOU!" and rolls an intimidate check... rolls a 1...

I then do - 20 willpower checks on both ships ... one faulters... the other takes a second , normal willpower check and fails... and then proceeds to chase down the other ship and start attacking it (over the open comms you can hear the other ship ordering ship number 2 to "COME BACK YOU COWARDS!" and then they proceed to literally blow each other up!

So what my the first mate just did was kill two bandit ships without firing a single shot (Funnily enough to his disappointment )

The missionary of the group had a laspistol and started firing at a chaos marine. He hit. He rolled damage. He got a 10. Righteous fury! He rolled again. He hit. He rolled damage. He got a 10. Righteous fury! He hit...

By the end he got ten righteous furies. Sadly he couldn't use all of them by the rules but the GM (me) allowed him to use them all. The chaos marine was a bloody paste at the end. The RT group gota massive shrine afterwards. They are now obsessed with the emperor and the RT is now a massive believer. After that incident I couldn'y believe how much they changed. From radicals dangerously close to heresy, they are now true believers of the cause.

Not a Rogue Trader, but Dark Heresy Story. A party of Acolytes that were entirely too low of a rank fought their way through a number of chaos cultist encounters to finally get to the altar we were trying to destroy. After besting their leader and fighting a Demon, the psyker went to finish up the last cultist, generated a Perils of the Warp effect, and sent the last cultist and the party flying with a "The Surly Bonds of Earth" result. The 27 meter fall finished off the cultist and the rest of the party. Even my tech priest with a Crimson guard Jet pack died since he had passed out from fatigue earlier. The psyker succeed at the expense of 3 fate points.

Funny story?

One time our ship was transporting a bunch of passengers to Damaris, not so much because we wanted to, but because we needed a non-suspicious way to bring an Inquisitor there without tipping off any alarms in his rivals.

Grumpy about all the jerks on-board getting in the way, my character decided to suggest press-ganging anyone caught "exploring". While talking about this with our ork character, two passengers walk in and stupidly ask "What's in this room?", to which the ork responds " An unexpected job!! "

You had to be there I guess

Oh, and once, the Damarans got their hands on two grots, which they were going to dispose of, but decided to sell to our ork character instead. When first introduced, one was in the process of surgically grafting a sausage onto a mouse...and it was the sausage that was moving...

Our heroes are Rogue Trader & crew,
trying to scrape together enough credits for a real spaceship.

For now the crew has a previously Ork-looted and re-rigged thunderhawk shuttle.
so far the heaviest armament it carries is a rear-firing gravity cannon.

They have cleaned out all the ork mess, except the machine spirit is still Orkish.

the gravity cannon, this is a vicious weapon:
for one thing it does rending damage on ship's hulls if it hits,
and even if it misses its target, it leaves a "dimple" in the local gravity field
that messes with trajectories and renders warp jumps quite deadly.

It is a weapon to be fired in outer space only.

also the crew have hired a gretchin rigger (small ork slave) to help out around the shuttle.
he has adequate repair skill, and can understand the orkish controls,
and translate anything weird the orkish machine spirit onboard may say.

some of the crew have been learning orkish

So the heroes have docked in a disreputable back area of Necromunda,
trying to cut a deal with the local scavvies. During the negotiations,
the Enforcers (police) show up from 3 sides. The players know they will be
arrested along with the street scum. They fight their way to the shuttle,
which is ready for takeoff, and facing towards the outdoors.

their rigger is facing the fight; near the wing with an autogun,

providing covering fire from a ring-mount on the thunderhawk.

The captain leaps in the door, and (in Orkish), orders the AI to fire the grav cannon.
The AI reminds the captain in no polite terms that this is folly.
The captain yells at the rigger to come undo the safety interlock.

rigger informs captain there is no safety interlock.
Captain tells the AI to effing fire the effing grav gun, pronto.
AI: as you wish, captain.

meanwhile The rest of the crew leaps on board.
the captain player rolled near maximum damage (on structural, not personal) for the weapon.
the GM rolled a critical failure on the buildings of the underhive to resist compromise due to damage.

One entire squad of cops totally disappeared.
No fires really started because too many water mains were cut by the weapon.
The other 2 squads and all the scavvies ran in fear.

the voidfarer makes the pilot roll to escape the debris...

As the Thunderhawk jets out of the docking bay, leaving a huge cloud behind,
the gretchin rigger is looking back in awe at the scene from the ring-mount,
screaming at the top of his lungs: THAT WAS TOTALLY WICKED !!!

funny bits from DEATH WATCH 40K RPG:

On Vespasia Gamma, our DW heroes are trying to save an Imperial agri-world from the combined ravages of Chaos and Tyranids. Due to the dire circumstances, we must cooperate with a Rogue Trader cadre, and also a crew of Eldar envoys.

(a Rogue Trader is blustering on how he is saving the planet…)
(then silently on the deathwatch comm link) "Men, Let the Rogue Trader think he's in charge, it benefits us all"

==

"Sir, What is the plural of Apocalypse?"

==

"Since the squad upgraded their chain-swords, I also had to upgrade my helmet with new face plate wipers"

==

"No, no. Honor and Deeds are the true currency of the Eldar. Arrogant comments are merely how they make change"

Shortly after a meeting with an Inquisitor the gm is setting up to be a powerful figure, his minions board our newly acquired ship and search for heretical gear left by the previous owner. Finding several chaos attack craft they order the craft impounded and destroyed while the crew who workeds along side them are exsecuted in the hanger.

Hearing of this happening on my new ship,I send a communicay to the Inquisitor demanding compensation for the heretical blood spilt on my ship and the time and rsesorses itl take to cleans the area (being AdMech I don't fear making demands of the inquisitor and spent much of the meeting mocking him)

The DM informs me that I resieve a replty within seconds stating that the inquisitor will not be compensating as it's only blood.

'ONLY blood? Well I'll archive that. Thank you.'

'Oh gods, that's going to come back and bite me...' Replied the GM

A campaign I was running included a feudal.medieval tech level society on a regressed human world so I wrote up some profiles for mounted knights. The only person who took damage was the voidmaster who got slammed dead on in the face with a lance, but since he was wearing best craftsmanship pressure carapace and had armor boosting bionics and because the lance was a primitive weapon he just got a cracked visor, lost one wound and was knocked on his ass depite the fact the attack did about twenty-two damage before mitigation from armo, toughness and the primitive rule.

It's alot funnier when you visualize it, and when you realize that if he wasn't wearing space armor from the future he would have been completely decapitated. After that the party just hit the knights with photon flashes which made their horses panic and flee the area, a few fell off the fleeing steeds and a few stayed on and I think one just got dragged away by his stirrup. I was a bit surprised because I didn't predict the party would respond by flash banging the hell out of the knights, I figured they'd just shoot them or something.

Death-Watch Space Marines
we're on a mission to accompany an Inquisitor, with two goals:
A) to protect him & his henchmen, and

B) bring back at least two prisoners back alive for interrogation.

Later, We are attacked by hordes of hybrids led by a magos (Old Genestealer Cult)

most of the squad goes left, and assaults down a hall as a group: big messy fight.

my devastator marine goes right alone, and covers the other hallway with Metal-Storm
bolter fire (area effect ammo) on the last roll of the damage, the dice went open-ended three times.
the templates scored 122 points of damage each (~12 points can kill a man)
and then the GM asked me to roll another dice (got 5 degrees of success)
roll again he says. (another great success)
My weapon had laid down five AoE templates, and then the GM lays down 6 more.

turns out Some enemy troopers in the cultish horde were carrying satchel charges,
and in the tearing of the Metal Storm, the dead man switches went off prematurely.

All told, 65 people died in one round, 10 on the left, 55 on the right side,
and the right hallway collapsed, cutting off the right side advance completely.

at this point, the Inquisitor bleeps me on my communicator:
reminding me "Remember, Brother, we do need prisoners."

The Missionary suplexed a hulking land squid unconscious. Now it's a pet.

Despite their better judgement the party put him in charge of their captured Wolfpack raider. He promptly rammed it into an eldar ship, destroying it in a fiery explosion. The eldar ship that is, since the raider didn't even get a scratch from the ramming or the explosion.

When it came time to distribute loot salvaged from a ghost ship the party mocked the missionary for claiming a contract for best quality high provinder as his first pick. Within a few sessions everyone else started trying to buy their own high provinder with acquisition checks. Thus far the rolls have been against them and nobody else has picked up even normal quality high provinder. The missionary's squid however now has high provinder of it's own.

DEATH WATCH 40K

The Ogryn , not having a needed Power Weapon Proficiency, still had to cut through an obstacle, and so
picks up (an antagonist holding a power sword) by his feet, and uses that whole set-up to solve the problem.
Neither the sword nor the wielder survived the experience.
===

Our PC group ended up rescuing a bunch of VIPs cut off by the local civil war. Most are competent,
but we are babysitting a young navigator guild girl 13 years of age. (npc) She does not have her full powers yet.

and she's wearing a dress.

Earlier she had been quite hysterical about losing her ship and her parents.
The Rogue Trader had proffered her a variety of pills to calm her down.
She did not appreciate this, assuming they were like rohypnol or ketamine.

Later when we got to a place of relative safety, my DW squad leader gave our group the lecture about
"Everyone pulls their weight, Everyone earns their keep, Everyone fights, no one quits, no one loafs, everyone takes turns
cleaning up camp or sitting watch, etc. etc." About every fifth word I looked pointedly at the girl;
to give her the notion to be more like Princess Leia than Princess Aurora.
Finally we noticed she had no weapon. So when we did some looting of a Wal-Mart equivalent later,
I got her some pants, a cyan colored auto-gun and an autograph model Hannah Montana Mono-Filament sword.
With This she immediately stabbed into the Rogue Trader, who was only saved at the last second by his guards.
===

Previously the player named his Ogryn Hanover.

someone was talking about strangeness with a Miloslav drive, and it reminded me of this:

Don't forget the VAN HEZWYK PRINCIPLE of NAVAL ARCHITECTURE:

Spend no gold upon thy rigging or sails, For they save ye not.

Translation: do not ever waste your PC's money on the upgrading of sails or engines of your transportation in an RPG, because the speed at which you get someplace is irrelevant to the encounters the DM plans, and all the mercurial swiftness in the known world can Not help you evade an encounter the DM insists must happen.

Unless those upgrades help you tactically in the battle, or to escape battle, or to avoid battles, or ensure you can catch prey, or if the adventure has some sort of time limit such that travel time matters, or if the adventure includes obstacles that increased speed and maneuverability can help you overcome.

Anyhoo.

With a battle between two neutral parties forming in the desert all around them and nothing but a crashed small craft (gun cutter minus guns) for cover the explorator hatched a "genius" plan. He decided the best solution was to jury rig the craft's engines and turn the whole thing into an impromptu rocket sled. It worked, sort of. You see he wasn't really able to steer all that much and the thing was bucking all over the place, and a couple of squads of scouts decided to attack the presumably enemies and climbed aboard just before the rocket sled took off. So they had a fight in the wildly shuddering and jumping and bucking jury rigged rocket sled as it ploughed through the desert, scattering people left and right and drawing fire from both sides.

It was fun.

Long story short my party in a shrine world looking for some help in their mission converting a human planet to the light of the His Grace.

For a couple of sessions an npc boy, with a long hair and and a pretty face try to get an attention from party missioner. Later that day he says he should confess to him, and they go to the missioners room.

There after a short dialogue the boy splits his face and show his arsenal of teeth trying to eat PC, after a short fight missioner is victorious and decides to burn the body.

Now from the perspective of party – they go to the room, then the sound of physical contact of some sort and a couple of seconds later a missioner in the torn apart shirt and out of breathe appears and asks “ Oil, I need some oil quick!”. A minute of silence… “Here you go, but I sought you had the chemgeld or something…”

Long story short my party in a shrine world looking for some help in their mission converting a human planet to the light of the His Grace.

For a couple of sessions an npc boy, with a long hair and and a pretty face try to get an attention from party missioner. Later that day he says he should confess to him, and they go to the missioners room.

There after a short dialogue the boy splits his face and show his arsenal of teeth trying to eat PC, after a short fight missioner is victorious and decides to burn the body.

Now from the perspective of party – they go to the room, then the sound of physical contact of some sort and a couple of seconds later a missioner in the torn apart shirt and out of breathe appears and asks “ Oil, I need some oil quick!”. A minute of silence… “Here you go, but I sought you had the chemgeld or something…”

Ah yes, the old "set up the missionary" trick. I love it!

Finally RT party has pacified Svard, and all the system is now approaching colony status.

The RT decides to host a giant festival, like a worlds fair,

to announce that Svard should now be on the trade routes,

be seen as a fuel stop, shrine, and repair yard. and is now a nice place in Koronus

(translation: come here and lets us sell you stuff)

So the town plaza is set aside as a vendor area, and various concerns are sold tent space.

lets say something like this:

Now the Stryxis were invited, and sold a booth, far away from the Eldar booth.

But when the PCs attention was elsewhere, the Stryxis bogarted the entire central plaza,

like the area labeled "carnival area" above. The players decided not to press the issue,

since no trouble was started yet and they didnt want the peaceful festival marred by any ugliness.

So the multi day festival went fine, even though the visiting eldar left after one day and

the visiting space marines told the RT in no uncertain terms that if any trouble did arise

they were going to cleanse the area thoroughly.

Well with much diplomacy and fate point usage the festival went off without any incidents

and the worst thing that happened was the Stryxis sold a kid a suitcase nuke but that crisis

was defused in time.

So as all the vendors are packing up to leave the RT sends his muscle down to the Stryxis area

and the players proceed to read them the riot act. A spectacular intimidate roll and good speech by the player,

followed by a botched negotiation roll for the Stryxis had them totally cowed, and scared that they had offended.

So they were commanded to return again next year and give the RT house 25% discount on all he desires, or else!