Greetings all! If some of you recall, some time ago I started a threat asking for advice concerning a campaign with a high-school gaming club! Now, I've got a Roll20 group together, and after the conclusion of our current GM's Dark Heresy 2.0 Campaign, I'll be launching an Only War campaign. So, in this thread I'll be putting in the little things I need help with as the campaign draws ever closer. For now, I need help generating a random encounter chart for a long range mission against the Severan Dominate. The context being that a large combined-arms force of the Severan Dominate is attacking the players homeworld, and they are recently conscripted to the regiment to fight back. Now, obviously, I don't know the terrain yet since we haven't done regiment creation, so I can't get into more indepth encounters, but I am currently trying to put together at least the enemy's forces and their HQ. So, I'm trying to make a random encounter chart just for their enemy forces, to be edited later. Now because of the players browsing this section, I won't reveal any plot details, but feel free to PM me if you need more details!

First of all, good luck with your game!

For the random encounters it largely depends on what kind of regiment they will build, if they take anti-tank unit, you can give them a chimera or couple of sentinels to fight, don't go with sth too heavy since even with the anti tank talents from the training they won't do much good against them, unless they'll make a tank regiment as well (I'd advice against that, it might throw a wrench into your plans - tanks tend to do that, and it's hell of a lot harder to balance the encounters when they have tank, if you don't give the enemy some anti tank weapon, than it's pointless, if you do and enemy decides to use it against the infantry characters they will die in one blast.)

If they'll make an infantry regiment I'd suggest putting together couple of groups of standard guardsman with different weapons, for a example a very basic and easiest encounter could be (number of players +/- 1) enemies with just a simple las carabines on a patrol, and starting from that, add number of enemies, give one of them a plasma gun, or add a heavy weapon team with a heavy stubber, this thing pack a punch even for heavier personal armor. In the higher end of those encounters (difficulty wise) you can put a sentinel (open toped so they can try to shoot the operator if they don't have krak granades) with a multi laser or sth like that.

Another idea for an elite unit is some enemy officer, buffing the soldiers or trying to scare PCs, give him Fear (1) trait and make them roll.

Aside from the particular foes that they may face, have a bunch of different enviromental conditions or landscapes in which the encounter may happen :

- speacial weather: rain, fog, night, daylight, snow, electric storm, ...

- special landscape: bridge, canyon, forest, swamp, cave, ...

- other special conditions: huge fire, place under mortar fire, place targeted for orbital bombardment, ...

It would also be interesting to have other non-combat or special situations :

- foes fighting another faction

- trap

- enemy watchers or spies

- wounded enemies abandoned by their squad

- wounded enemies abandoned by their squad and being attacked by some wild animals

There is a list of types of missions in Core Rulebook in Game Master chapter. Units are in Enemies of the Imperium book.