This was inspired by a question I asked a fellow GM regarding why Murder Servitors didn't grant a bonus to defending against hit and runs or on opposed tests for boarding actions. He said "Basically it's my understanding that they kill everything in sight, no IFF system"

So:

When struck by a critical hit that makes the component unpowered/damaged, the Murder Servitors begin to go berserk onboard the ship, and inflict 1d5 crew damage/morale damage per turn. On a roll of 5 a random component of the GM's choosing becomes damaged/unpowered/on fire/hulled and the ship takes 1 hull integrity damage as the servitors spread out and cause massive destruction. To deal with this, the explorers can either:

A. Destroy the servitors on a successful command test (using modifiers for repelling boarding actions/hit and runs), destroying the component

B. Cause a hard reboot of the machine spirit of the Servitors control matrix on successful Tech-Use (difficulty of +0 or -10), repairing the component

C. Space the affected components for no skill test, doing morale damage and crew damage as per the rules for venting fires on P. 223 (corebook)

I think B is the best option. It gives the explorator another reason to have binary chatter (perhaps reducing the tests dificulty or giving him a chance to prevent the berserking ).

You might also require an upkeep test if they use they fail a hit and run roll really badly or say they need to restock before they can use them again. If they don't have a reclamation component on board they may have to visit a forgeworld or major port.

Though personally I'm not to worried about that combination. My player's have this odd tendency to only hit other ships enough to down void shields, leaving the teleport attack as their most reliable option for defeating their opponents.

I've never found Murder-Servitors to be a problem so long as they are restricted to selecting a result of 1-5. The Teleportarium, OTOH, is rife with potential for abuse.

I had the impression that the murder servitors were devastating but few in numbers, useful for surgical raids, but a in the bucket in mass combat. Don't have my book with me, but I believe they're no use in boarding, attack or defense, only the hit and run raid.

(Edit: Sorry didn't read initial post quite right, but overall my thoughts are the same. They're only useful in a specific surgical role.)

At the very least it seems like repelling a hit-and-run would benefit from them. It's irrelevant either way, I still like the customized rule. But still!

I have to agree that the murder servitors + teleportium is brutal. But of the 2 parts of it I think the teleportium is by far the bigger offender.

Just wait until your players realize they can teleport bombs and all sorts of other goodness not just murder servitors

One of the things we have done is decide that you cannot teleport through shields, and the shields need to be down at the start of the round. This has helped us to cut down on teleporter abuse (somewhat).

Also in regards to the murder servitors we have ruled that if there are friendly troops near them they need a admech handler with binary chatter nearby to prevent them attacking. (might be a good idea to send more than one handler or things could get messy if he dies)

This is why I kept poking Sam to add a bit about additional rules into "Into The Storm", which is why I'm glad he put that optional rule toolbar for Teleportariums into ItS.

Fortinbras said:

The Murder-Servitors are good only for offensive use in H&R. They don't run around your ship like a roving defender because they are too dangerous to your own crew and systems to do so. Using them involves loading them up from cryo, transporting them to the enemy vessel, activating them to do their programmed damage and wait for them to return to their recovery point and deactivate so they can be (hopefully) recovered. Friendlies need to stay away while they are active.

llsoth said:

Yes someone how actually knows about the Horus heresy.

Sry for little rant, but Shields block teleports pronto. The Emperor didnt teleport until Horus shields were down.

Murder servitors are actually rather huge in number. A cruiser has 100k crew in 5 space points or so. 1 space point for the murders. YIKES. Even if you reduce that further you still end up with thousands of them.

But i agree the teleportarium is the real offender in hit and run (i dont see too many other evil things there), too many official planetery adventure parts can be solved with sudden air strikes or application of massive bombardements by macrobatteries, so bombs are just as good.

Voronesh said:

Voronesh said:

I don't you can directly extrapolate a ratio in that manner. For example the storm pod component holds twenty pods and takes up 3 space. Which if looked at in a realistic, non abstract way, says that pods holding 200 men take up the space for 60k or so. Seems a bit much, even for the imperium. Just my opinion, but to assume that the players have a force of + or - 20k murder servitors would open the component up to a lot more use than intended.

You actually only have about a hundred or so Murder Servitors, maybe a couple of hundred, but they then require areas for repair, stasis, rearmament, extra transport tunnels through the ship to take the murder servitors without them accidentally going off and killing thousands of your crew, etc.

That explains the space required, and means that you don't end up having a force capable of destroying a small city.

Ahh but crew quarters need gangways too.

I realize this is highly speculative, but if going with a number straight from my imagination or picking one that correlates somewhat on ithers numbers i prefer the latter. YMMV.

But you are right on the Drop pod module, it is rather large. One reason i cant bring myself to use it, since you need a barracks first to actually profit from it. Space is hard to get unless one sits in a cruiser. Although mostly space marine strike cruisers will have pods, making that rather ok.

In the spirit of YMMV, it is your game and indeed have fun. However if you are estimating the number of murder servitors in the thousands their capabilities would stretch far beyond a +20 to hit and run. Indeed, even the relatively conservative figure of 5k would put them at just short of a quarter of the crew of the smallest raiders, and surely able to do more than garner a +20 on a hit an run. Also, looking at the difficulty of the acquisition, it would quite a steal to get thousands or tens of thousands of murder servitors for a rare acquisition with no modifier for scale. As you say however YMMV, go for it if it's fun for you (and how could a horde of heartless ancient death dealers numbering in the thousands not be?).

Golgenna Grenadier said:

Ah sry i was basing numbers off a cruiser. Kind of a habit for me. Murder servetors had me thinking arco-flagellants for some reason (well it is kinda close) and while good at CC; they were rather easy to cut down, so i always thought youd need many of them for some effect to become apparent. +20 isnt soo bad, at least thats what i thought.

Besides one would scale troops within barracks and such accordingly. Over in general we had a calculation of half a million crew for a lunar cruiser (due to the size increase when you scale according to a frigate), end up with close to 300k troops, and then having a few thousand or even 50.000 mruders doesnt seem so dangerous anymore. Besides If you only have 100 Murders, theyre going to be zero impact in any ground operation beyond the personal level, unless you put em all down, but then there wouldnt be any left.

Ilsoth also had a nice calculation putting a single space point of a Lunar at around 2.7 square kilometers. Thats quite something that one needs to fill with space.

Voronesh said:

Do you have a link or copy of the equation? I would be interested just to have something more concrete for what exactly one "space" is.

Golgenna Grenadier said:

This is what I used

Lets say a cruiser is slightly taller than wide (like the models in illustrations) so 1km tall and lets say an average deck height is 10 meters (very generous but you need to take into account the very large rooms as well as personnel quarters. 5km * .8km = 4 square km per deck with 100 decks giving 400 square kilometers of deck space. This is obviously very rough and is going to be high due to useing a solid block shape but even if you knock that in half to account for non-uniform shape you are still looking at 200km^2 of deck space.

Now to figure out how big 1 space point is you take the 200km^2 / by the 75 space points and get 2.667 km^2 per space point. Obviously very rough but the point is that no matter how you look at it 1 space points on a lunar is a lot of space... huge in fact.

Giving a Lunar-class Cruiser one million people doesn't seem to square well with the estimates offered up in the book for a Lunar-class Cruiser, though.

Fortinbras said:

Yah I personally think that is a little high. It was based on scaling up a sword class frigate to lunar size (lunar has approx 22x the volume). I would just say things are little more spread out and that some components even though bigger don't require a proportionally bigger crew to operate. I don't mind the crew figures in the book (though I think with the bigger ships it should be a little higher) the changes I would make are fiarly minor and not worth worrying about.

The fact that the same macrocannon battery takes up so much more space on a cruiser (one point of space is much bigger on a cruiser than a frigate) than on a raider is.... odd though.