Will this adventure work if I allow my group to create 4-6 custom characters using the rules in the core book?

I am doing just that right now and it works just fine.

spoilers ahead...

i'd tone down the genestealers that attack the marines in the governor's palace. i changed them to "hybrids" with only strx1 and no rending for 6 of them and they still almost completely tore through the group. i'm not sure how an average starting party (since its an intro adventure) is supposed to survive an ambush by 8 full blooded genestealers. they roll 2d10+12 for damage with pen 5 or 10 depending on the DoS; an lucky damage roll brings a completely healthy marine to the crit table in one hit. if the party had a few turns to whittle them down as they close, it would be different but they're described as attacking from the ceiling so the party if they're lucky simply won't be suprised before they are in close combat.

The prebuilt characters are not too special. About the only thing that stands out is the powerfist for the assault marine, which would be out of place. Otherwise, using the full rules to have things like squad mode/solo mode abilities, and the potential to requisition their own gear, or even the base 1k starting xp make standard starting characters equal if not greater than the prebuilt versions. Stat rolls may be off, but that's always the case.

Personally I changed the scenario up a little bit (ship not destroyed in orbit), and had two lictors in the palace fight (no genestealers). And I increased the broodlords health by 50%, but that was more because I was worried that the vindicare assassin I allowed in the party would one shot it with a turbo penetrator.

I ran FS with 3 rank 3 characters and they came out relatively unscathed (barring the 1 librarian who got sucked Genestealered in the sewers, but, that being said, 1 good hit dropped him to -1 from 23 wounds!)... the FOLLOWUP adventure however kept them running and praying that our 4th party member (our apothecary) would actually be able to start arriving at game!

Just be aware that depending on how good your players are, they will breeze through encounters that are meant for a bunch of new players with fixed equipment and no squad mode abilities.

Players are able to min max characters, or just simply fill roles that they enjoy and are good at.

One of my current killteams has 4 players that have well made characters, including the best possible ultramarine squad leader build. His squad mode abilities also skew the balance so that I've been steadily adding more genestealers, support weapons, leaders, snipers, hybrids, etc... to provide them with a decent challenge.

Heh, I once had a magnitude 50 horde in full on hard cover from entrenchments (32 AP) get shot at by the this team's devastator. The one turn of shooting from squad mode broke that horde.

They're also cleaving through genestealers due to the SM ability to spend a fate point to make it so an attack cannot be dodged/parried. Since the genestealers in final sanction have only 20 wounds, they go down quickly.

I'm not complaining though, it's just a challenge to find the right difficulty to make things fun and interesting. Also be aware that it's not just what you throw at them, but how you throw it at them.

I have a question related to this topic:

For those of you that have run Final Saction with player created characters, what would you suggest for Requsition scores for this mission?

Maybe I'm blind, but I couldn't find it in the PDF. I can work it out, but a few second opinions wouldn't hurt.

Cheers!

Worked just fine, however, I found that player created characters mulched through most of the encounters pretty easily. Of course that was before the errata, so PC Devastator wouldn't be able to one-shot most Hordes in the adventure now, but still - that's something to consider. As for the last question, I ran it before the errata came out, so when I worked out the Requisition score it only came up to 20 points or so. However, I think it would be reasonable to up the Requisition score to 30 (or even higher if your group is pretty small); there are certainly some tough encounters in the adventure (like the 8 Genestealers in governor's palace ).

The important point about the palace encounter is that the genestealers are mainly there for killing a few nobles and ideally the planetary governour. Thus, several of them may be busy doing just that instead of killing the Marines - at least as long as their brethren aren't being shot down...

I have been running FS with a group of 5 male Space Marine player-characters built using the full rules (1 Iron Hands Techmarine, 1 Space Wolf Assault Marine, 1 Ultramarine Tactical Marine, 1 Storm Wardens Devastator Marine and 1 Ultramarine Apothecary) along with one female player who runs a 9th level Psyker-Inquisitor (generated with Dark Heresy/Ascension).

We are just about to reach the climax of the scenario, after six sessions of play. They have pretty much accomplished all of the objectives and thus far none of the characters are wounded. The Apothecary has used his talents to great advantage and frankly they have gotten pretty lucky a couple of times.

The greatest challenge they have faced so far were the genestealers at the Governor's palace, but due to luck and good tactical play they came through that pretty much intact (nothing the Apothecary couldn't fix).

With a group of six players I have bumped up the size and number of hordes slightly and pulled no punches with the genestealers. The group is now aware that they will likely face the Brood Lord and his lair at our next session and realize that this will be a lot tougher than anything they have had to endure so far.

BTW a potent Psyker (Psy Rating 6 with a WP of 61) can be pretty destructive to any enemy that doesn't get the drop on her. She is obviously not as durable as the Deathwatch Marines but they take their duty as her bodyguards very seriously.

Vertrucio said:

Good lord, how did you manage to get 12 hits doing a min of 28 (8 pen from kraken reduces AP32 to 24, then factor in toughness reduction of 3 for 27, then +1 to do a single point of damage) damage in a single turn from a single weapon? It's not the hits that surprise me, it's the consistently high damage. Perhaps my players aren't as minmax-crazy as I suspected.

Vertrucio said:

True enough, but again, my goodness, did none of the genestealers hit? My biggest problem when running FS was when the GS did manage to score a hit, they would do in the neighborhood of 20 damage, which was cutting my marines to ribbons.

Vertrucio said:

VERY much agree with this, as has been discussed in many threads, you've got to use the enemies cleverly or the marines will crush your precious bad guys. Plus, in my expereince, the encounters will drag and get boring if they're not dynamic