From late May to mid September... long break between games! But such is the lot of the married-with-children gamer.

Brief Reminder of the Cast of Characters (all rank 6 as our last session)

Remington Sabras - Rogue Trader and Bearer of the Sabras Warrant

Tyrion Sabras - "The False Man", vat-grown clone of Remington, also a Rogue Trader

Explorator Lucius - Servant of the Machine God and Chief Enginseer

"Cadian" - Arch Militant Head of Security and Chief Gunner

Stark - Void Master Helmsman of the Ordained Destiny and crack pilot

Key NPCs

Quintus Aleene - Ships Navigator

Yerevan the quiet - Ships Astropath

Arakasi - Ships Steward and Seneschal of the Sabras Dynasty

Inquisitor Vownus Kaede

Connavar "The Giant", Claymore-wielding warrior

Honsou & Michiko, Oathsworn Assassins

Anyhow, we finally had a follow up session, with the explorers plus their inquisition 'allies'(??) infiltrating the Narco-Spire on Footfall to root out the source of warp corruption infecting the flow of drugs into the Calixis Sector. Initally, they made easy progress, using the 'hiding in plain sight approach'. The weakest gangs inhabit the lower levels of the spire and each assumed that this heavily armed group were simply on business with one of the more powerful tribes higher up in the hab block. Eventually however, they were challenged by a mob of slaught-crazed gangers, with an Ogryn or two thrown in. They handled them quite easliy, but their cover was blown.

They spared the last tribesman left standing and he immediately tried to strike a bargain with them - He told them that, up to about a year ago, the various larger Narco-tribes had been equals and co-existed relatively harmoniously. However, around that time, an individual know simply as the Alchemist arrived - supposedly from Dusk in the Calixis Sector - and assumed control of the Night Kin (the Dusk expat faction in the Spire). Slowly, the leaders of the other tribes either swore service to the Alchemist or had unfortunate 'accidents', until this mysterious individual was the effective lord of the Narco-tribes.

In return for his tribe (refugees from Naduesh) being spared in any fighting, their prisoner would use his knowledge of the spire and access to bio-key controlled elevators to aid the explorers in getting to the Alchemist without having to fight through thousands more tribesmen. The team were wary of a trap, but thought the offer was too good to pass up. It was a simple task for Lucius to override control of sections of the internal building security monitoring systems to ensure that their passage was unnoticed and they were able to reach the 76th storey of the spire without incident.

From here to the Alchemists suite of chambers on the 80th floor however, would be much trickier. The Inquisitor's pet assassins took out the first few guards in silence, allowing the group to ascend to the 78th floor unimpeded. Then, as they moved across the atrium balcony towards the stairway up to 79, with the assassins leading the way, Honsou's head exploded in a red mist of brain and bone! They had been spotted by a sniper on the next floor up. Lucius and Cadian returned fire and took the gunman out with ease, but now the entire upper spire was alert to the intrusion and closing on their position.

At this point, the explorers played their trump card... A regiment of mercenaries standing buy in assault boats in the launch bays of the Ordained Destiny . Remington gave the word and within moments the group could hear the impacts as the Shark Assault Boats smashed into the sides of the spire and disgorged the entirety of Artemiev's Free Company into the interior. This would keep the vast majority of the Narco-Tribesmen occupied while the team could concentrate on the Alchemist himself.

The party fought their way up the last two stairways and landings through a horde of Night Kin tribesmen. There were a couple of close calls, with the explorers having to wade through lots of suppressive fire and, at one point, Explorator Lucius taking a direct hit from a Krak Grenade... though the sight of him shrugging it off and returning fire significantly disheartened the resistance. The party reached the 80th storey, which housed the largest drug processing factory in the complex and the private chambers of the Alchemist. Cadian snapped off a spectacular burst of fire to take out a heavy stubber nest and the party finally stormed the Alchemist's chambers!

The inner rooms were like some sort of demented mix of art studio and abbatoir, with braziers, alien sculptures and half flayed corpses littered about the chamber. In the middle of it all was a robed figure, with wild hair and beard and crazed eyes. Cryptically, he greeted the intruding group as if he was famililar with them... then started to incant something over the largest of the Braziers. The party immediately opened fire, lashing the figure with plasma fire... which barely seemed to dent it! As the Alchemist completed his incantation, his body warped and ripped, eventually shedding the meat like a molting insect - revealing a Greater Daemon, the same beast whcih had ambushed the explorers in the bowels of Port Wander years before!

A titanic battle ensued, with Lucius badly wounded by the Daemon's summoned minions, and Connavar, Inquisitor Kaede's companion slain in hand-to-hand combat by the beast itself, before the combined firepower (and willpower) of the group destroyed it's corporeal form, once again banishing it back to the Warp... for now.

And that was where we finished up, more to come, hopefully without the same wait as last time ;-)

Well, my last comment on this thread was an unfortunate omen... here I am back again after 8 months

On the plus side, you guys haven't missed much, as I have only run maybe 5 or 6 sessions in that whole time, but 2 in the last month - so things are looking up. Since the last journal entry that I wrote, the heroes of the Sabras Dynasty have answered a distress call from the remote world of Damaris, thus embroiling themselves in the events of the "Frozen Reaches" and hopefully the follow up adventures as well.

A brief summary of the action so far: The journey to Damaris was plagued with ill warp-tides which extended the voyage by weeks. There was also a brief run-in with chaos reaver ships, though these were dispatched easily. On arrival in the Damaris system, the crew familiarised themselves with the local luminaries and the other Rogue Traders who responded to the distress call: Hyronius Figg, Lady Orleans and Aoife Armengarde - who it turns out is the paramour of Inquisitor Kaede. Indeed, one of Kaede's entourage is revealed to be their daughter Igraine, heir to the Armengarde dynasty.

In short order the team are appraised of the immenent Ork threat to Damaris. After some politicking and 'proving' themselves to the other power players on Damaris, they are named as the effective commanders of the defence efforts. Not too long after their arrival, the first wave or Greenskin ships and Roks are detected streaming towards the planet. The space defence is valiant and punishing, legions or Orks are vapourized in the battle, but through their sheer numbers, a handful or Roks plummet to the surface of the world.

Battle is joined on the ground and rages for a week - the party are involved personally in a number of key turning pioints, destroying a number of the impressively armed and armoured Ork Nobs. After six or seven days of fighting, it appears as if the defenders have contained the Xenos invaders and are starting to whittle down their numbers - only to hear the alarm klaxons wail throughout Damaris city. Orbital defences have detected a second wave of Roks, rushing to make planetfall!!

With any luck, I'll have a further update in the next few weeks

Back again and thankfully, not so long betweeen updates this time. Since the last post, we ran through another week of game time, with a couple of orbital engagements as well as some PR work on the planet and a little political manouvering. The space defences were resolute and only allowed a further 3 roks to slip through the net and reach the planet surface intact. During this battle the senior sensoria adept on the bridge of the Ordained Destiny alerted Captain Remington that he had picked up what appeared to be an Imperial vessel inbound from the system's edge, pursued by multiple xenos craft.

The command crew were initially wary of some type of trap or trick, but they eventually managed to establish vox contact with the Naval Frigate, the Adamant , and were satisfied that it was a genuine friendly vessel in peril. When they had destroyed the pursuing ork ships, they had some interaction with the navy captian, Commander Algor DuRanes. They discovered that he had been dispatched by Port Wander Naval Command to find a Captain Locke and her ship, the Aegis and bring them back through the Maw for debriefing and re-assignment.

Locke and her Light Cruiser have been a key part of the space defences around Damaris for the last couple of weeks, working well with the explorers and determined not to abandon this Emperor-worshipping frontier. The party know that losing her at this time would greatly impact their chances of success and are at their most persuasive in convincing Commander DuRanes to allow her a little more time, to see off the Greenskins. They are so persuasive in fact, that DuRanes decides to stay in the vicinity of Damaris himself, to make "essential repairs and refit" to the Adamant .

Finally, when the team return to the command bunker in Damaris city, they encounter another political conundrum... Governor Kapak has taken charge of the civil issues in the beseiged city and against all expectation, proven to be excellent in both logistics and administration. He asks Captain Remington to accompany him on a brief morale raising exercise, making several speeches to the citizenry and defenders.

The Rogue Trader agrees, but shortly afterwards is contacted by a furious General Dante, the commanding officer of the Damaris Highland Levy. The general had agreed to support the explorers as leaders of the Damaris defences if they in turn would support him in a planned Coup to depose Kapak and become Governor himself. With the Captain and the Governor being seen together publicly, Dante had become nervous that they party were going to renege on their agreement. So nervous in fact, that he planned to arrest Kapak as soon as he completed his public appearances. Remington assured the genaral that they were still in support of his plan in the long term, but that any action against the Governor now would be a terrible idea.

Dante has relented for the moment, but this situation is a ticking time bomb that the explorers may need to resolve sooner rather than later...

Hello loyal readers, back again! So we had a further two sessions since last posting a lot was accomplished by the mighty Ordained Destiny and her crew. The explorers were once more embroiled in a bitter ground war against the reinforced Greenskins.The defenders of Damaris acquitted themselves admirably, but over the course of another week's fighting, attrition started to weigh heavily against them. The party came to realise that, despite winning each battle so far, they were eventually going to lose this war as long as the Orks were able to continue landing Roks on the ground. They knew that they needed to destroy facility where the Roks were being outfitted and/or kill the Ork Warboss, dispersing the Waaagghh! that way, but were not sure where to start looking... Enter the Eldar.

The explorers received the Eldar vox message and, despite some misgivings and distrust, traveled to the rendezvous location on the far side of Damaris to parley. The enigmatic Xenos described the prophetic visions which showed the heroes of the Sabras dynasty defeating the Greenskin horde and saving the Expanse from a dire fate and offered to help that prophecy come to pass. They explained that this world had once been an outpost of their civilization, hence the ancient Wraithbone buildings. They pointed out the largest structure among the ruins, still mostly intact and informed the party that it contained an Orrery of the surrounding system. This Orrery would allow them to pinpoint the location of Skadi, which was surely where the Orks were constructing their Rok fleet.

The only complication was that the building was stasis locked, since the time of the original Eldar settlement. This was done to trap a dire threat inside the structure, a creature which had preyed upon the Eldar eons previously and which they had been unable to defeat. A Slaught overseer and a cadre of flesh puppets and warrior constructs were time-locked within and the explorers would have to defeat them to access the Orrery. During the ensuing battle Tyrion and Lucius were both injured, but neither were in particularly great danger and the team annihilated the parasitic Xenos in short order. After some jury rigging of an interface between the sacred technology of the Mechanicus and the heretical Xenos arcaneotech, Lucius was able to download and translate the astrographic data they needed. They finally had a location for mysterious Skadi!

Note: I had thrown this little twist in just to up the action quota of this section of the adventure. I actually expected the fight to be a close run thing, but to be honest, the wargear and combat skill ratings of the PCs are now so potent that I will have to start using Deathwatch level opponents to really challenge them.

Thus the final chapter of the adventure commenced. The Ordained Destiny led a fleet of warships - Starweaver, Boundless Ambition, Bansidhe, Aegis and Adamant - to the coordinates that they had determined as the location of Skadi. They made the voyage swiftly and safely and quickly pinpointed the hive of activity around one of the Gas Giants many moons that was the Rok construction facility. As they edged ever closer, they got a better read on the other enemy ships in the vicinity. This included, bizarrely, a ship of ancient Terran pattern - a Chaos Reaver ship! Of more interest to the explorers though, was what had to be the flagship of the Ork fleet (and I made another little change here)... the colossal Wurldbreaka !!!

The party spent quite a bit of time debating how best to engage the Orks - get in close and use broadsides and bombers, or open up with the Nova Cannon at extreme range and let the Orks close the distance... eventually the Nova Cannon plan won (like it almost always does!). So they gave instructions to the fleet and opened fire - with devastating results. The first shot from the Nova cannon tore apart half the Ork fleet of Roks and escort vessels, including the Chaos ship. Most importantly, it also did severe damage to Da Wurldbreaka . However, the Greenskin juggernaut was now aware of them and surged in their direction. From this point, I concentrated on that particular duel, with a background narrative of the rest of the fleet engaging the remaining Ork ships and the Rok construction facility.

The battle was a tense cat and mouse affair. The Destiny's crew knew that range and manouverability were their strengths. This was reinforced in the one strategic turn where they let Da Wurldbreaka get a little too close and it chewed through almost 30 points of Hull Integrity. Fortunately for them however, (or maybe because they had a good plan and an excellent pilot) that was the only time the Ork ship got close enough to use it's full array of weapons against them. The fight took a few hours, but they constantly manouvered to limit the Ork ship's firing solutions and maximize their own. They also made good use of their Fighter and Bomber squadrons (though lost all of their fighters and half of their Bombers by the end) to stack up more damage and critical strikes. They gradually wore the behemoth down and bled it of crew and functional components. Then finally, as it drifted, burning and unpowered through the void, they blasted their way through it's plasma drive containment fields, destroying it utterly!

It was a great, climactic finish to the adventure, even if it did deviate slightly from the adventure as written. The battle felt momentous and significant and the rewards were substantial. I will probably do a loose-ends wrap up session at some point, outlining the mopping up action of the remaining Orks back on Damaris, what trade opportunities open up for the explorers after that, as well as what resources they might find in and around Skadi and it's moons.

Of course, they never did see the corpse of Morgash Kulgraz, the Ork Warlord (or find the notes explaining what brought the Orks to Damaris in the first place) and at the end of the battle, the void was thick with debris and drifting wreckage, too much to spot a lone small craft or escape pod. So you never know, exploring and exploiting the moons of Skadi could have a few surprises for the Sabras Dynasty yet...

Hello Knight, I've enjoyed reading your posts. Question about the Frozen Reaches- I noticed that the calendar showing the sequence of events in the book doesn't align properly with the descriptions that are given for when the events actually occur. How did you address this?

To be honest, I hadn't even noticed - I read through the various 'encounters' listed in the book and plucked them out for use as and when I needed them... essentially filling 3 weeks worth of space and ground warfare, but the order didn't really matter too much. I did try to string things together as logically as possible, but I found that almost any of the occurrences could be used at any time.

So, as hinted at after the last session - the salvation of the Damaris system wasn't quite as cut and dried as it appeared. I ran a follow-up 'mopping up' session since, which started out with the crew surveying Skadi and it's moons and trying to figure out what PF they could yield from it. Simultaneously, they were trying to secure repair materials and manpower to get their capital ships back to full operational capacity. They had spent a couple of months in orbit around Damaris or docked to the Bulwark, with an expectation of several more months before they would be ready to undertake a major voyage, when they received word that two of their survey lighters operating around Skadi had failed to report in when expected.

The command crew immediately started to prep the ship to investigate. After reviewing the vox records, they determined that one survey craft had been scanning some debris and wreckage orbiting one of the Gas Giant's moons and issued a short range distress call to another nearby lighter before being abruptly cut-off. The second ship sent a message back to the survey coordinator on the Medusa to say it was going to assess the situation. That was the last contact from either vessel.

Captain Sabras, Explorator Lucius and Storm the Cadian prepared their battle-gear and were readying to ease the Ordained Destiny out of it's mooring slips when the long range auspex registered the arrival in-system of a Chalice class Battlecruiser. Almost immediately, the Destiny was hailed by this vessel, which identified itself as the Colossus Reborn , new flagship of the Bastille Dynasty (an old enemy)! The party were immediately prepping for combat, despite the fact that their ship was not truly battle ready. However, the vox message was not what they expected... when they responded to the hail, they were addressed by an individual who introduced himself as Inquisitor Glavius Wroth, requesting an audience with the explorers.

Despite the indication that they would not be immediately fired upon, the interest of another Inquisitor had the crew worried. In particular, Remington had spent some years being 'questioned' by the inquisition already and was eager to avoid a repeat encounter. The explorers knew they would have to deal with this new development quickly, if only to prevent their business interests being adversely affected (trading partners get nervous when they hear the 'I' word). However, since the Colossus was at the outer fringe of the system and would take at least a day to reach Damaris, the party opted to resolve the mystery of their missing survey lighters first.

They made their way to the last know location of their scout craft. orbiting Skadi's 7th moon. They quickly located the drifting, unpowered vessels, along with a debris cloud of small-craft wreckage, leftover from the battle with the Orks. Lucius was able to patch into the onboard security systems of the two ships, but quickly determined that all of the pict grabbers had been disabled. The archived footage showed disjointed feed of something huge blocking out the picts before they went dead. The team elected to explore the scene themselves, rather than risk less capable crew members. They were all equipped with Power Armour, personal deflector shield devices and state of the art weaponry: Storm Bolters, Power Swords or Axes, Inferno Pistols and even a man-portable LasCannon.

Swiftly after boarding the second lighter, they found their quarry... a 3.5M tall, 600kg Ork wielding the largest axe they had ever seen - Warlord of the 'Undred, 'Undred Teef, Morgaash Kulgraz, in the flesh! This was a truly epic battle, which ultimately, the explorers lost. I had determined that Kulgraz had an Orky tech deflector shield equipped, with a shield rating of 45. However, he defied the odds by deflecting closer to 75% of incoming attacks with the shield as well as not losing his chain axe, despite being parried by power weapons on a number of occasions.

Storm the Cadian drew first blood, catching the monster with a LasCannon blast immediately. Unfortunately, this just marked him as the first target of the behemoth, whose triple charging attack was devastating in such confined quarters. The three explorers unleashed everything in their arsenal and grievously wounded the greenskin, but gradually, through volume of attacks, he managed to penetrate their defences and deal terrible cleaving blows to Storm. Remington realized that the tide had turned against them with the Arch-Militant falling, so called for an emergency teleport back to the Destiny . To his horror, the Ork had clung to the body of the fallen Cadian and was now in the Teleportarium on board the Sabras flagship!

The battle continued in the chamber and Kulgraz finally cut through Lucius' guard and delivered a death cut to the mighty cyborg. He then turned his bloodshot eyes on Captain Remington and prepared to charge, but Sabras had been exhorting the surviving tech adepts to prepare one more emergency teleport... dumping the Ork Warlord off the port bow! His next instruction was for all port turret batteries to lock on to the target and fire at will. Even Morgaash Kulgraz could not survive this onslaught. And so, the Ordained Destiny limped back to Damaris, bearing it's slain master-at-arms and chief enginseer in honour.

In the aftermath, all of the players except for Remington's have decided to roll new characters (even Tyrion's, who didn't actually die). Lucius' player already had a Navigator mostly ready to go and both Tyrion's and Storm's players are leaning towards Deathwatch Astartes - which will open plenty of campaign options for me. We may also have a new player joining in, who is thinking about playing a Battle Sister of the Adepta Sororitas, so I'm looking forward to the next arc of the campaign... which will undoubtedly have more interaction with the Inquisition among other things.

Hello all, just wanted to pop in and say that, despite my journal drying up, my campaign did not. As mentioned back in Sept 2014, several of my group switched over to Astartes characters - 3 Deathwatch & 1 Grey Knight - for the next stage, which was an adapted version of Citadel of Skulls. This went very well and was highly entertaining.

I expect to start the next arc in a couple of weeks, which will involve a full party of Rank 6, Hero renown DW Marines taking on a supercharged, steroid-pumped version of Fallen Suns, which I hope to track in a new journal in the DW section forums, for any who are interested in keeping tabs