First some background:

My players recently investigated a spacehulk, fighting their way through some ghilliam, and ork ambushes. I sort of intended them to be deterred and retreat to their waiting thunderhawk, escaping the hulk as it began to crash into the planet's atmosphere, but they continued with their mission, and reached a still active warp core, to cripple and destroy the hulk. At this point, they saw through a huge rent in the hulk, the thunderhawks leaving, and the techpriest boosted their comm bead signals to get in contact with their thunderhawk, which informed them that the hulk was going to enter the atmosphere shortly.

They tried to find a solution, and came up with activating the geller field of the mars class cruiser which housed the power core. The techpriest burned fate to do this, and then activated the warp drive, successfully. They are currently drifting in the warp, trying to coax the machine spirit out of the warp. Meanwhile, one of the players, a psyker, who has a demon living inside his mind, used Time Fade, and slipped out of the ship (in a void suit) and was rescued when the local forces investigated its disappearence. So he is separated from the party. My question now is what should I do, and how? I was thinking of the following:

Option one is to travel in time to during the horus heresy or some other such event, basically just travel to an iconic event or time. I think that would be cool while it lasted but end on a "now what" sort of note. Next I was thinking of something with the Threnos zone, with it being corrupted or taken over by some rogue inquisitor or something, who perhaps presses them into service, or convinces him that he is on their side. Other ideas that I dont like as much are just being transported to a random area and lost for a while, perhaps the lathes, dealing with the gravitational fluxes, or, on a slightly better (I think) note, have a survival themed adventure on a feral or feudal world. Ideas? What do you think of the things I've put forth?

I think your solutions leave the major problem untouched: your party is seperated. Not like "differents part of town" but like "different levels of existence". With slipping the majority of them into the horus heresy area, you can as well tell the psyker player to make another pc...in the horus heresy area. Do you REALLY want to go that way?

My advise: Take the turn that you do not like. Get them lost for a while and then "regroup", all in the off. Add a little corruptions and perhaps insanity for having a ride on a not-really-functionable hulk starting from a really unsafe point for warp transfer (minutes away from a planet). After all, they did something risky and if they get away with this by burning fate they will do it again.

What to do next: On the FFG site, I would advise "Brutal Lament" (after beefing it up a little to match your pc´s power level). "Idle Heresy" can be fun as well, but would need some serious "beefing up" to be a threat (or challenge) for everything but starters. If you have money in your pocket and you didn´t alreay bought "Disciples of the dark Gods", I would adivse it. Good material and a small "free-for-all" action based adventure modul.

If you take a look at http://www.darkreign40k.com/plot-seeds/index.php you will find over a dozen unfinished ideas for emporer-knows-what. Perhaps something helpfull waits inside.

Question: What are your pc like? Which rank and career? What do you and your group enjoyed playing so far? Which "ordo" is the cell affiliated with?
Even the best written mysterie-murder piece about heretic conspiracy is a bad advise for a psyker/assasine/assine/guardsmen group of the Ordo Xenos which has been founded and raised as hit-hard-response-team.

Yes I was going to attach that to the bottom as a sort of "and on top of all this....

But the forum does not allow editing.

Yeah I'm not keen on the idea, but I mentioned a couple random ideas I had at the end of the session, and everyone thought it was cool... It's probably not the best idea. As far as fate.... During the session, 3/5 had critical damage, and one had to burn fate to live, so I hope that they will use their fate wisely.... If not... I won't pull punches... they need to learn to fight more tactically, although they're getting better.

But that's besides the point, I realize now that I should have said that the psyker appears somewhere else in the hulk, or something, due to the warp field. Or something. But what's done is done. I'd like to avoid simply saying "and you all find eachother again. Now here's another mission," in effect... The Psyker is harboring a daemonhost, and I've already given him some daemonic help, in the form of regaining wounds and gaining corruption, so its possible that he might find his way to them, or something, but I don't really know how I'd justify that without doing the same "and now you're all back together" thing, but in reverse.

I like the idea of using the Threnos zone as the start of their adventure, as they try to get out... danger lurks and all that.

The PC's are:

a scum (going down the combat path)

a guardsman

a psyker (down the combat path)

an assassin (who may want to die and replace himself with a combat tech-priest)

a tech priest (going down the knowledge path I believe, wants to be a tech heretic, slowly).

Do you think the Psyker could be persuaded to launch a rescue operation ?

It turns out the space hulk isn't drifting through the warp. It's stationary ! If the pc's somehow pop out of the warp they will be in the same bad situation as before, only now their warp coil needs recharging !!

luckily for them, a stationary gellar-field can be sensed by a special gellar-detector. The local tech-priests know how to build one, but they need a flux capacitor / lightning inverter / vacuum grown crystals / whatever to build it. Perhaps the miners in the asteroid belt have some ?

All the psyker have to do is persuade the tech-priests to build the detector and send a tech-priest who knows how to use it along, travel to the asteroid belt to buy the missing spare parts, get a small spaceship, go to the general area where the spacehulk disappeared, turn on the detector, wait while the tech priest scans the warp and finds the hulk, tune the teleporter to the frequency of the gellar field so he/they can teleport in, teleport in with teleport beacons for everyone and...oh no, the beacons can't penetrate the gellar field !!

Someone has to goto the core of the hulk to turn of the gellar field, and since the machine spirit isn't cooperating, it has to be done with explosives.

Blowing up the field generator will the hulk back in to normal space, but leave a small rift in space where the warp leaks, through allowing demons to fill the hulk. . . and it will enter the planet atmosphere in a few minutes.

Since the teleporter beacon only work near the surface/outer areas of the hulk, whoever goes to turn of the gellar field is on a suicide mission !

The rest of the pc's put on void suits and make their way to a place/room near the outer skin of the hulk. The moment the gellar field shuts down they are teleported to safety.

Piece of cake !

Additional fun could include:

Orks laying seige to / attacking the pc's while they wait.

That old Gellar field may be unstable allowing for all kinds of demon fun.

WARNING: I am a new-comer to Dark Heresy. Just bought the book and have only played 40K for about a year. BUT - I have some RPG experience, so here's my advice and it will be very basic. You'll need to fill in the details.

Seperated Psycher - You have a seperated party, but - due to the circumstances- this is actually an incredible gift. He slipped out while they were in warp-space, right? Warp-Space is weird, right? What if - even though he "got away" - he left an exact copy of himself on the Hulk? Only, this copy is a manifested warp imprint and has some odd quirks. Maybe he adds +10 to his Psychic Phenomena rolls or he just twitches a lot. No need to leave him out of games and you all will have some fun with the mirror image that your PC is playing.

Lost innnnnn Spaaaaaaaccccce........

Pardon the pun. OK, so they're lost. Here is where my 40k/Dark Heresy knowledge will surely reveal my noobness, but I expect you to make the corrections to fit it in and have it make sense - if you so desire. What if the ship, due to stress of being in the warp, begins to malfunction? What if it is taking damage and destined to explode? This could give the players a goal to accomplish in a limited time. Another idea might just be to have a series of adventures involving oddities all over the ship. Hauntings, aliens, warp beasts, and any other strangeness is possible. You could even have them enter some type of weird, twisted warp dream (don't let them know this as their characters just awaken somewhere) where they play a series of missions only to awaken in a hulk that has just exited warp space.

My point is that the possibilities are endless. You and your players have a rare gift: a truly memorable series of games that can define your campaign.

NOTE: I suggest (assuming you use the imprint-image of the psycher) that you make him chose when they "get home" on which version he wants to play. Then - there can be a follow-up game involving the evil-culprit version of your PC.

Hope I helped!

I might have the most boring but perhaps the most obvious answer.

After escaping certain death crashing into the planet, they appear on the other side of the planet as the Geller Field failed. Which wouldn't be all to weird considering that they got it to work in the first place was the real weird part. It's old machinery without sufficient fuel, the right spare parts etc. It's only a question of time when it's going to break down. I mean, imagine you find a 5000 year old car engine that hobos has used as a fishing bait to catch wales (:S) and you only have your bare hands to get it to work..

My suggestion - Perhaps the Psycher escaped, but you mentioned a daemon in his mind... could there now be two of them = one on the ship and one back planeside? Get the player to play both of them knowing that one my be the daemon...

What I'd do is let the psyker create a temp PC or create one yourself. Let him play that character while they are split up. When the PC rejoin give him the option of playing one or the other. Also this is a chance to have a throw away character that your game wouldn't normally have. The mutant or warp touched from the Radical's Handbook comes to mind.

Dalnor Surloc said:

Depending on your player's particular likes and dislikes in the overall 40K universe you might even allow them to (briefly) play something like an Ork Mechboy trapped on the hulk. Yeah, it's a filthy xenos, but it is the only thing on the hulk that "kinda" knows how to get the broken down warp drive/Geller Field/whatever-is-broken and the team's "best" chance to actually live through this. Lots of yummy potential angst and drama as they contemplate their options. You could also go with the cheesy (but possibly fun) Star Trek "bullcrap-of-the-week" method and have some quirky "warp-clone" of the Psyker that can only exist as long as the ship is submerged in the Warp. Make the "warp-clone" a bit higher in raw power (+1-2 Psy rating) but also more unstable (From Beyond, Warp Instability, possibly even Incorporeal traits [or Phase], Psychic Phenomena are now triggered on rolls of 8 AND 9). Skimpy uniform and goatee optional.

Alternately, allow the player to (in private with the GM) generate a copy of the character that is still on the ship... As a Demonhost! The Psyker himself is actually back in "realspace" and no longer posessed (give him the Dark Soul trait for free or as a cheap elite advance) since the demon has taken the rare opportunity of his original host crossing the Warp/reality barrier unshielded to spin itself a new body from raw Warpstuff.... A body without a pesky soul to annoy it with it's feeble resistance and weaknesses!