Hello all,



I really hope none of my players read this...



I've got our next session coming up this weekend and I am furiously writing away to get the main parts done before everyone shows up this Saturday. We still have to finish everything we didn't get done last time, but after that the group is finally going to be safe and away from the horrific nightmare that was the Forge World they just escaped.

During this downtime they'll be aboard a small cargo-vessel owned by their Inquisitor, pursuing someone who escaped their grasp. Of course, there's not much they can do to help the pursuit - it's really something that the Navigator and the ship do ie. it's a non-interactive activity. I don't really want to pick up the game right where the action starts (their ship gets boarded, etc.) as they've just completed a marathon run-and-gun across a Forge World so I wanted to come up with a few ' non-combat activities ' for them to participate in.

Here's what I've come up with, and I want to know if this sounds like it'd work:

1. The Arbite and the Guardsman in the group have already established a kind of 'card-shark' working relationship when it comes to fleecing unsuspecting Imperial servants of their hard-earned Thrones. We even once literally played Texas Hold 'em for about 6 hours to show this. We haven't got the time to play ' Necromunda Hold 'Em ' for that long so my idea for them was to have an abstracted series of card games done in the ship's mess-hall with members of the ship's security detachment. Each of the other players along with myself would take the role of one of the Security Detachment, plus the two PC's would obviously play their own characters, and we'd have an abstracted version of the game using the basic 'Gambling' Skill rules from the main DH rulebook. It would be a chance for the two lowest paid characters in the group to earn a little bit of extra coin, and reward the Guardsman player for actually taking Gambling and Gambling +10 as a pair of advances.

2. The Priest is studying a Heretical text recovered on a previous mission and using it to unlock the secrets of an Archeotech Weapon he recovered at the same time, but he needs secrecy to do it - not just in game terms, but from the players, as they don't know the full story behind this weapon. His is a series of Lore checks of varying types, plus Opposed Will tests, with the risk of Corruption Points if failed badly. He will then have to somehow explain what he is doing to Brother Antarius, a Tech-Marine they joined forces with on the Forge World, as the Marine will come looking for The Priest to pray beside him over his wounded Battle-Brother who they rescued from the Forge World. That's the hardest one, as I and the player playing the Priest have to do this without giving away what we're doing to the others!

3. The Psyker in the group, in his background, once had to basically mind-**** a Navigator to find the location of a Inquisitorial strong hold, and since then has been rather resilient to the machinations of the Warp. The Captain of the ship they're on knows about this (as he's employed by their Inquisitor as well) and has asked the Psyker to do what he can to help their Navigator. This is a series of tests of increasing difficulty that have no tangible in-game benefit (they don't boost stats, or make his weapons better, or give him money or anything) but they do reveal a few upcoming plot-points in a cryptic nature that, if the player is paying attention, could be quite handy or give them an advantage later down the line. It's a way of the players discovering points in the plot using their skills rather than being spoon-fed.

4. And finally, the hardest of the bunch of come up with, was the non-combat activity for the Tech-Priest in the group. I wanted to avoid it just being a " Help the ship's Enginseer with mundane Tech-Use Tests " as the Tech-Priest usually needs around an 80-90 on standard tests to pass them, making them trivial, and making them -30, -40 and so on just means I'm artificially increasing the difficulty to nerf the advances he's paid for. Anyway, so I looked at what else was going on and saw that, as we're on board a star ship, firing high powered weapons within the confines of the ship is a bad idea. As such, the main Throne Agent (an NPC) who helped the party get off the Forge World has ordered that the Tech-Priest's pet Servitor (named Pug!) have his Ultimo-Pattern Meltagun removed and replaced with something more suitable until journey's end - a nice new Servo-Arm! Pug's backstory is that he's a bit... buggy... and hasn't always performed as instructed. The sudden change from 'Gun' Servitor to 'Utility' Servitor doesn't go as well as planned, so the Tech-Priest now has to put Pug through his paces to ensure everything is working. This represents a series of Tests, using everything from Weapon Skill to Agility, looking to see if Pug has been successfully upgraded. They range from the simple (Basic Manipulator Test) that is successful grants Pug the Mechadendrite Use (Utility) Talent, allowing him to correctly use the Servo-Arm, all the way to more complex and difficult system checks (Combat Reflex Test) that if passed will grant +5WS to Pug (he currently has WS25), and if passed well will even grant him Swift Attack.

Generally speaking I want these activities to take about 1/2 an hour to an hour to go through, no more than that, just to give the players a break before the next part of the main story crashes into them.

Do you think these will work?

BYE

Sounds like you got everything under control

Seems good to me. *Thumbs up*

Go for it I'd say. I think that any larger or external intermezzo might use up too much time of a game session. It looks liek you've got it under control, enough to give the players a sense of time passing and accomplishing something and short enough to use as a spring board.

Ok, well I've asked this in two different places and got pretty much the same positive response from everyone, so thanks guys! Good to see I'm not (completely) insane.

BYE