Session 8
Campaign turn 4, part 2. The Lord Corruptor was sadly absent - but since he's missing next week as well we decided to leave his element and just resolved his action as a 'half success' -5 defender strength on Danaan.
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The lord purgator and retainers arrived at Thersites, passing an opposed operate (voidship) + manouvrability versus awareness + detection to evade patrols in the outer reaches and proceed to Thersites V under silent running.
- During the time spent en route, the Dolon Pleasure Guild 'arranged' to have numerous high-ranking younger scions of the Dolon sector nobility visit the death world's big game hunting resorts, providing a suitable final sacrifice.
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Haarlock doesn't actually have Navigate (Surface), so delegated the job of finding a suitable discrete landing site to the big game hunters (assumed stat of 40 with all skills at +10)
- They failed but by less than a degree, so essentially found three sites, each capable of handling one of the three halo barges needed to put the slaves on the ground (with landers carrying the more important members of the team, but they were several hours forced march apart. He took the largest landing site as a second halo barge was needed for his minstrels...
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It took a brief tech-use test to make contact with the other landers via the Insatiable without a wideband vox transmission which would easily be tracked.
- Haarlock directed (a) the hunters to lead each group to rendezvous at a mountain roughly equidistant between the three landing sites, and (b) the slaves to fashion a litter to carry him through the steaming, humid jungle in style.
- Whilst he has an awesome charm skill, his intimidate skill is somewhat mediocre, and he was faced with a brief slave uprising to quell. This was achieved swiftly with two plasma pistol headshots and a volley of sonic weapons fire from the minstrels.
- "You know..." he observed "...we are making rather a lot of noise."
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It was another few hours of forced marching before Haarlock - with the benefit of heightened senses and assistance from the hunter, realised they were being stalked.
- He took the opportunity to have the medicae immediately start dosing the slaves with drugs, and they got about 1/3 done before a massive bull megasaur burst from the jungle and charged.
- Its initial trample attack broke the horde of slaves, leaving them running as it tore into their corpses. Haarlock - never one not to be in the first rank of a retreat - also ran - knowing he couldn't outrun a charging megasaur for long, but happy just outrunning the slaves.
- The big game hunter tried to sight up on it with a longrifle - with a swift command test and a comment of 'really?' Haarlock encouraged him to also withdraw and wait for the drugs to kick in.
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I should...probably point out here that the Lord Purgator....didn't actually
know
what drugs were being used. He'd just asked for 'drugs' from the chem-hunter and the pharmacologists of the
Insatiable
, who knew he was planning a daemonic ritual, without specifying details. He'd assumed the drugs would be anasthetics. Some of them were, but the rest was blue fire and spook.
- He found out that it wasn't when the now-psychic megaaur force-bolted the hunter, reducing him to a smear on the nearest tree.
- This led to a degree of panic and a few recriminatory accusations.
- This continued for some time, with more slaves slaughtered, a few minstrels telekinetically turned to aerosol vapour, and an almost completely ineffectual sonic weapon volley (The thing has an unnaturally-boosted toughness bonus of 11, 11 armour and 78 wounds - I'm not entirely sure what he thought the minstrels were going to achieve aside from making it angry....)
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And then....yeah. Force bolt kill....perils of the warp....vice-versa.
- We did randomise, including the daemonologists, (but not the slaves who were mostly dead or unconcious) or the minstrels (who are, after all, just minions) and as the only other psynicient in the vicinity, Haarlock inevitably found himself in the body of the megasaur.
- This took a while to process.
- Firstly, 'his' body - now containing the megasaur - was now throwing itself at the minstrels and trying to bite their throats out in a frenzied assault.
- Secondly, he was trying to get the rest of the minstrels to stop shooting at 'him' - the megasaur - and get the daemonologists into position whilst he could prevent the megasaur's body going on a murder-rampage. Attempting this via gesture required a very hard linguistics test, which - somehow - he passed.
Quote of the evening:
"...You're trying to direct a complex daemonic ritual via the medium of interpretive dance whilst trapped in a non-humanoid body?"
"Honestly, I'm kind of impressed how badly wrong this is going."
- This continued for another turn or so, with Haarlock-in-megasaur eating fleeing slaves to try and increase the dosage of anasthetic and actually fail a toughness test on his/it's T75, and megasaur-in-haarlock fighting off the minstrel horde's attempts to grapple it, whilst the other players looked on in disbelief.
- Eventually, the megasaur passed out from drugs and shortly after, Haarlock recovered conciousness in his own body.
- "So...that's the dangerous part over!" "Yes. Just the two daemonic rituals left."
- Surprisingly, the rituals all went to plan, with the only real issue being the psychic phenomena and perils of the warp causing a swarm of venomous predatory ampibians to attack and kill yet more of the minstrals, and a detonation of warp energy wiping out 2/3 of the daemonologists, which - in the Lord Purgator's words - "means I don't have to pay them."
- We rolled for the rituals by the other groups, which impressively both managed to pull off both rituals without a hitch, despite all 4 rolls being 50% checks.
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...Shortly after, a pack of three megasaurs possessed by fiends of slaanesh attacked the hunting lodge of the nobility.
- Using the rules for possession in tome of decay, we figured out the stats for the megasaurs once possessed by fiends of slaanesh. The result was truly monstrous, and the presence of a corruption-driven force field was the icing on the cake.
- The players had great fun murdering the nobility and their bodyguards, most of whom went insane and started attacking one another as soon as the daemon-megasaurs appeared.
- We resolved the corruption roll, and Thersites is now corrupted by Slaanesh (but not contested, so Haarlock and Catarina better get a move-on with the invasion!)
- As an aside, we also resolved the turn's battle on Danaan. With the Lord Deceiver rolling a 09 for the opposed conflict value, the defenders - even with their knightly reinforcements - were wiped out.
- Catarina also rolled for her traitor Jannissaries in Dolon. They lost - obviously - but thanks to detailling Hnefltafl to lead the guerrilla war, the extra +10 conflict score, and the need to roll three degrees of failure, not two, to lose a host, means they survive and will continue to plague Dolon's ability to buy reinforcements.
- We also rolled for turn 4's event - which was a 'no event' result (finally...)
Reinforcements, plunder, etc are all being left to next session.
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