Today I and my regular gaming group played a hybrid of Space Hulk and DH. We found this so excellently hilarious and fun that I wanted to share our experiences with you. I also hope that I might glean some ideas for improving our houserules. Basic understading of space hulk rules are assumed of the reader.
The premises are these: A long campaign where our heroes are in opposition of an ordo xenos inquisitor that seeds genestealer cults across the sector. This naturally leads to a fair share of fighting stealers. This time the group decided to go inside a former mining colony that had recently been eaten clean and seeded with hibernating stealers by a hivefleet taht is no longer in the system. Their goal is to detonate the huge plasma reactor att the center of the asteroid that houses the mining base. This is of course to avoid further spreading of the stealers. The party is rather competent at combat, everyone is based around the guardsman career with liberal second-career-options and are now at nearly 14 000 xp (we will be shifting to Acension careers as soon as the story allows it). A total of six characters with some impressive wargear, such as plasma weapons, a powerarmor, a sawn off autocannon, a pyromancer and several good powerweapons. As well as four redshirts in the form of competent inquisitorial guardsmen. I believe they are somewhere around the 3 000xp level. A few of the players in the group are very skilled strategy gamers, so combat tends to be very brutal and tactically very optimized. Several of us in the group are also enthusiastic Space Hulk players, and this was a perfect moment to challenge us in new and exiting ways.
We started with the Space Hulk board. One square = one meter. With the full movement ranges of DH a space hulk board feels very small, so we limited all movement to halfmoves or fullmoves only. Charge is still an option for an action, but the range is limited to your full move range. No sprint. The genestealers also lost their unnatural speed, because with it, they were just running in circles around the characters. Even with these changes the board feels considerably "smaller" than while playing space hulk. The movement ranges was easily the second most important thing we did to capture the Space Hulk feeling.
The most important thing was to use the 3min timer that comes with spacehulk. This timer is turned when the GM is done with the stealers. Once the sand runs out, all moves and actions must be declared. Any model that nothing has been declared for is assumed to stand in overwatch, or to save a half-action for shooting stuff, depending on their weapons. After the time has run out the rolling of dice begins. All acolytes act in whatever order they wish, but one character acts at a time. Being stressed and with a timelimit really spiced things up and kept people on their toes and gave a lot of good immersion.
The corridors are narrow. Moving into a square with a friend in it counts as 2 meters of movement and you are not allowed to stand two models in the same square. You can fire past one friendly model in a corridor (this turned out to be really essential when it came to setting up overwatch lanes and doing successive advances). You can generally lean around corners that you stand nearby in order to fire. Imagine a bit more flexibility than a terminator armour.
The stealers come on to the board as blips. They can be converted by the GM at any time I feel like it or when an acolyte draws line of sight to it. One blip can be converted by a character with an auspex who make a successfull awareness check, attempting this is a half action. One of the players that had not seen space hulk before was rather astonished when I revealed the first blip. "What? Three stealers?" Hilarious :-)
Doors require a half action to open or close. They can be destroyed by a suitable weapon (eviscerator, meltacutter tool etc). I'd love a good formal rule for this. Something like: Armor 20, TB 0 and 20 wounds maybe? They can be welded together as a full turn action by someone with proper tools.
We use the revised actions that are available in Deathwatch. For example you can make a halfmove as part of a full auto firing action, but will suffer reduced hitchance. We also have a bunch of minor houserules to make combat more balanced/interesting/reasonable, but none that feels essential for this post.
If you are on overwatch you will fire as soon as a target presents itself. If the target is moving towarsd you, you may test a standard WP (+/-0) in order to hold your fire until the target is on point blank range. This rule was added to give a cool "hooooold!"-moment. If the target appears in your line of sight already inside the point blank range, you will get no rangebonus at all because you are surprised and startled. This last rule was added to encourage players to seek out long firing ranges down corridors in good space hulk style.
And then of course the void suits. These are boarding armours as described in IH. No armor worth having against stealer claws, but they give you breathable atmosphere and keep you warm in the cold cramped dark. To add some extra spice and stress to things the voidsuits will rip and begin leaking air once you take damage from an attack. A leaking suit means you must start each of your turns (before the 3min timer is started) with rolling a WP-check to keep the panic away (compare to when on fire). The first such check is done at WP+60. For every turn that goes by you will reduce this modifier by 10 for _each_ rip you have. Once the modifier reach +/-0 or lower you will start rolling Toughness checks instead, with failure meaning you fall unconscious from lack of oxygen and suffering one wound for every degree of failure. Death should happen in roughly a dozen rounds or so after a leak is sprung, and is rather unavoidable unless the suit is patched.
Patching a rip is easiest done by someone other than the wearer of the damaged suit. It is a full turn action that requires the patchee to be rather still. So sitting down and reloading a weapon is fine, swinging an eviscerator in melee or doing any kind of dodge/parry/macarena is not. The patching succeeds automatically and will mend _one_ of the rips you have suffered. You can patch yourself, but that requires a standard agi-check to succeed. As soon as all rips are mended, the suit is refilled from your oxygen tanks and should you suffer further rips you will start anew on WP+60.
Powerarmors are selfsealing, so does not leak. They also provide one effective point of armor against stealers (joy!)
The acolytes brought some heavy duty anti-infantry mines of claymore type. These do damage like a frag missile, but only in a forward 90°arc. Setting a mine takes one full turn and requires the performing character to be trained in Demolitions. Setting the detonator vire takes another full turn, and is essentially optional. You can always pull the wire manually as a halfaction.
We used stealer models from the old spacehulk set and custom built models for the acolytes together with the new SH boards. It looked very nice. For next time I'll try to bring a piece of black or dark grey cloth to put on the table under the boards.
The first hours of the evening was spent playing out a meeting with a representative for an adeptus sororitas convent ("Certainly, I can make sure your message gets delivered unread to the astropaths by priority channels, and it would be far beneath me to require a compensation from another servant of the throne. However..."), gearing up for the expedition ("Ten exterminators will never be enough, buy twenty!") and some more time discussing and improving these rules ("Oh my god, we are so frakkt!"). So we had less than two effective hours of playing the combat encounter. Once we got a more intuitive feel for the rules a round didn't take more time than during any normal combat heavy DH-encounter. The timer really helps with this and is a good balance for the itty bitty tactics that can be done and calculated upon in the circumstances. I'm considering keeping the timer for future DH use even outside of these corridors.
It should be noted that standard stealers (from the creatures anathema book) are relatively weak in this setting. They tend to charge in and only be allowed one attack. The charged player can then retaliate with four attacks. The upside of this is of course that I can be allowed plenty of stealers. I had two blips on the board at the start and took in one extra blip per round. This was a noticeable amount, but I believe the characters handled it quite easily (no permanent fatepoint burn).
Next time I'll try to start with some more blips on the table, keep reinforcements to one blip per round and limit the blips to halfmoves, i.e. 6 m of movement. This should make tactical placement of the characters and long term thinking more important. I'm also considering letting stealers (and players) strike two attacks with their second half action if they make a halfmove with the first. Intention being to add some more tactical choice and make the fights tighter.
That was most of it I believe. I'll be glad for any comments, especially so for any suggestions for further rules or improvements of these or pointing out of possible pitfalls or rules inconsistencies I might have missed. Cheers!