@Gurkhal: Real men go for Full Spread. Start with Atmospheric Incineration, follow up with a few Cyclonic Torpedoes, let it boil for a few hundred years and then you're done

But back to my original question:

Polaria said:

Meaning, What if you wanted to actually save the planet and a good part of its population instead of:

1) Reducing the whole planet to slag of molten rock with Exterminatus

2) Making it into daemon world

3) Making it into daemon world, sorting it out by calling Grey Knights and then have the Grey Knights execute everyone to cover up the fact that they exist.

Stormast said:

Plus they have a Chuk Norris Marty Sue Wannabe as Chapter Master...

Personally, short of leaving the planet boiling for centuries or breaking it into pieces like Alderaan, I wouldn't use an Exterminatus against a planet infested by Tyrannids.

Best delaying action? Orks. They reproduce as fast as the bugs, and they love to fight. And each time an ork dies, spawns enough spores to make an ork army...

Argus Van Het said:

Epic Mission Idea #248: An Ork Waaagh! stumbles over a long-lost Death Star and go hopping around the galaxy blowing planets up. Enter the Deathwatch. They can even infiltrate the place in the smuggler's compartments of a Rogue Trader ship.

lol I can see it now

"you walk onto the embarkation deck of the Sword Class Frigate 'Falcon of Millenia' and are greeted by a man in ostentatious dress. 'Greetings my lords, my name is Olo, Hans Olo, I carry the Emperor's holy trade to all corners of this sector. My Navigator is the best there is, he can make the Orpheus Salient run in under twelve standard weeks,'"

Leaving aside that the orks would get bored about the planet blowing stuff pretty soon (they don't fire weapons, they just love the sound they make while firing... and in space there is no sound! XD), the idea is extremely intriguing. Here we have...

Lord Arth V'Der, Inquisitor of the Hordo Malleus a little too much radical. He likes to wear black, has been severely augmented (all limbs, respirator, MIU, bionic heart...), and is a psyker. And wears a black power armour.

Lord Ob'i'Guan Knbi, Inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos, old and tired, another psyker. While he is much less radical than Lord V'Der, he has mostly "gone native" for the last decades in the remote planet of D'a Tuin.

Mistress Liah Gan'a, scion of a very important pacifist noble family. She is somewhat a of a black sheep, since tomboyish heirs who love to dabble too much with the PDF and the Imperial Guard are not the ideal of her family...

Look Shywakkah, a young Throne Agent and a psyker.

Servitors C-Ep0 and Arturito (pronounced /Ahrr-tuh-rhi-tooh/), the first a protocol servitor at the service of Mistress Liah, the second an engineering servitor made from a ratling.

Chews-dakka, a sanctioned Kroot mercenary from a cold world, at the service of Rogue Trader Hans Olo. He earned his name killing (and eating) orks some time before Hans saved his life. Too much eating of some hairy animal in his birth planet, and too much eating ork has made him taller than most Kroots, with a lot of body hair, and a faint greenish looks. His favourite weapon is a crossbow that fires plasma cartridges using electromagnetism (yeah, a "rainbow crossbow, Gaunt's fans XD).

Pal'Ando Carlhissian, first officer of the Falcon of Millennia, and who is rumored to have win and lost the ship countless times against Hans Olo playing regicide for the last century or so. He's the seneschal of the ship.

Moira Jaded, a Throne Agent of the Officio Assasinorum with Sororitas training (the Emperor gives her gifts... XDD).

Did I left someone important aside? Oh, Admiral Akabar Calmris, a fleet officer and often liasion between inquisitors and throne agents. He lives inside a full sensory inmersion tank onboard his flagship, the Battleship Home One, and is merged to the ship in the same way marines are to Dreadnoughts, directly controlling servitors aboard the ship to interact with visits. His favourite servitor for this task is the mostly still human Lobott (quite a joke, for a lobotomized being to be called like that...).

I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did writing it XD

Obi-wan is already in 40,000 canon being an inquisitor in the 1st ed main rulebook.

Akbar should be an air-caste Tau.

Back to the main topic though of tyranid-battling...

Ah using Orks.. aka Kryptmans Folly. Many have condemned Kryptman's use of orks to stall Hive Fleet Leviathans progress as the battle is in a way simply strengthening the tyranids as they evolve to counter and defeat the orks as well as experiment with all the juicy ork dna.

About biomass... The tyranids totally strip-mine a world, one which would have supported an imperial military effort for thousands of years would supply enough raw material for a huge amount of purposes. Unless the tyranids have the most inefficient material use imaginable (unlikely when they have managed to cross the spaces between galaxies) every world devoured would greatly increase their numbers, strength, potency etc, unless they were funelling away much of each worlds biomass (perhaps through teleport-worms to fleets still in-transit?).

Of course the imperium turns to biomass-denial tactics of exterminatus-ing worlds the tyrnaids have already fought dearly for late in the piece, against kraken iirc so after the time of Dagon. But i think i recal that the Eldar also started burning worlds...

So you manage to shoo off the tyranid ships, you fortify the hive cities, you try to exfoliate the tyrannic jungles that keep growing in the ash wastes and toxic swamps, your sending strike forces in to destroy every brood hive, brood nest, Dominatrix and Tervigon, spore chimney etc, your fighting desperate battles to defend key assets... and then the Eldar come in to burn your world because it's along a path that 200 years from now their craftworld may pass if they fail to assasinate some ork warlord and a conjunction of embarassing diplomatic events involving a tau water caste ambassador sneezing in the middle of a speech during a state dinner with the Demiurg getting a spray of mucous in the Demiurg leaders cyber-beard delaying chances of their joining the greater good comes to pass as predicted by the farseers.

Considering there seems no major presence in the jericho reach i bet the Eldar would happily sacrifice the entire sector!

Battybattybats said:

I'm not certain about this point. If the Hive Fleet has already eaten 100 worlds then eating 1 more world is only going to increase its biomass by 1% assuming it is completely efficient.

Narkasis Broon said:

The total hive fleet size sure, but if you think about it it may take so 1 trillion tons (just an arbitrary number) of biomass to claim and devour a world but think of this world, think of the millions upon millions of years it's nutrients have sustained life, think of the biomass on this world over those millions of millions of years which has not managed to deplete it's resources till mankind started using fossil-fuels. Think of being able to use all those nutrients at once! All of the energy of a world that would last millions of years if used slowly could be millions of times greater if used quickly right? For a 1 tri9llion ton investment you could get a return of googolplex tons.

Now travelling through the void between galaxies must take heaps of energy, so a fleet that ate 100 worlds might have used the fuel of 99 of them to get across from whatever galaxy is east of us, so one world could double it's size. But my point was that the energy of a single world is so vast that unless tyranids are super-inefficient (and their evolutionary practices would fix that pretty fast as soon as they needed it to) then they would gain an incredible amount with every victory.

Think of all the warships, tanks, weapons, ammunition, soldiers, life a single imperial world can produce in a thousand years and think of those resources not annihilated by a hive fleet but picked up and carried with them, available to them, able to be used imediatly rather than only over many years.

An off idea, but one could figure out a way of forcibly introducing the Pariah Gene into the hive fleet. It would destroy their entire army structure and render them beasts as they lost contact with the hive mind. Then the only threat would be the Hive Ships themselves, but those could be easily (comparably) destroyed.

I'm not sure if there's a way in the setting to change a being's genetic code like that though. Even if there were, could it be weaponized?

Sounds like a Dark Heresy Ordo Xenos campaign to me.

@Gurkhal: Real men go for Full Spread. Start with Atmospheric Incineration, follow up with a few Cyclonic Torpedoes, let it boil for a few hundred years and then you're done

That's what I'm talking about, baby! Let the bugs feel the heat!

Nerdynick said:

That sounds like a beastly idea, I would love to see it done. Unfortunately the Inquisition has enough trouble trying to replicate the Pariah gene in willing human subjects. That is why being a Pariah is so rare, so sneaking it into the genetic code of a hive fleet seems unlikely. but 10/10 for style

Nerdynick said:

Gene therapy works by using a recoded virus. So if you attach it to a virus it will spread as far as the virus could spread. That could have a good solid impact on whatever bunch of tyranids you first used it on, with maybe 10% or so managing to survive if the virus was as bad as the theoretical doomsday-virus models on earth. But things like that which do work on tyranids will usually work once only as all the other tyranids everywhere adapt to protect against the weakness you have found. Kryptman iirc did this once on one world using the tyranids own adaptation powers against them using a virus to cause them to uncontrollably mutate, but it only worked the one time.

Also don't underestimate the intelligence of individual Tyranids as much of the older books state they are far from mere automatons and it's the combined thoughts of all tyranids in a gestalt super-consciousness that create the hive mind rather than it being a seperate entity. Tyranids need to be able to think as they won't always be in synapse-range. The loss of synapse is the loss of the over-view, the loss of greater stretegic knowledge but not the loss of decision-making capacity. After all while a Hive Tyrant is the heart of a swarm on a 40k battlefield it too is part of a chain, as in battlefleet gothic drone ships and kraken ships etc which themselves carry hive tyrants and dominatrix in the armies they carry still rely on the central Hive Ships synapse range... so then when a hive ship leaves orbit that itself is reducing a lot of synapse links leaving it to the synapse ranges of the tyrants and dominatrix and other such synapse creatures to form the tactical awareness for the gestalt to work with. It's not quite that the dominatrix or tyrant is the commander thinking for the whole swarm but rather that their capacity as a central hub plus the strength of and volume of minds within it's network determines the strength and capacity of the hive mind in that area like a signal and processing strength. Not that such a force is isolated and limited to just whats local, plenty of material makes clear that what any one lowly termagant experiences the whole of tyranid kind knows, but that information needs to be filtered for relevance, decisions made upon it etc and synapse webs built around the hubs of synapse creatures seem to be the management of that on an imediate local level and the less of these the less coordinated the forces can be.

So sure hormagaunts and raveners are single-minded when not in synaptic control but Termagants can be wiley crafty cunning foes. And genestealers after all are built to operate outside the synapse web using their own high intelligence and supported by a local group-telepathy that doesn't need central hubs at all (but is more powerful with one). Lictors are especially intelligent, not just as a hunter to do what it does, it has the same brain-eating knowledge/memory gaining ability that marines have (from the feeder tendrils) and so can gain large amounts of knowledge...

I had a plot for Inquisitor where a lone lictor had got into an isolated but large esoteric monastery and as it ate brain after brain it began taunting the monks by writing philosophical and theological questions in it's victims blood, more sophisticated with each victim till by the last it formed a great blasphemous treatise in blood on the nature of many things including dangerous philosophical exploration on the nature of the hive mind. The inquisition locked it up and hid it. The genestealer magus/inquisitor (who had infiltrated the inquisition before the purges) with his hybrids and purestrain were fighting for clues to it's location so that he could find a way to break the enslaving will of the hive mind that overtakes genestealer cults when the fleet arrives and to stop or hide the signal that successful stealer infestations broadcast to attract the hive fleet. This is a plot i will totally be revisiting for Deathwatch!

Q: I had a plot for Inquisitor where a lone lictor had got into an isolated but large esoteric monastery and as it ate brain after brain it began taunting the monks by writing philosophical and theological questions in it's victims blood, more sophisticated with each victim till by the last it formed a great blasphemous treatise in blood on the nature of many things including dangerous philosophical exploration on the nature of the hive mind. The inquisition locked it up and hid it. The genestealer magus/inquisitor (who had infiltrated the inquisition before the purges) with his hybrids and purestrain were fighting for clues to it's location so that he could find a way to break the enslaving will of the hive mind that overtakes genestealer cults when the fleet arrives and to stop or hide the signal that successful stealer infestations broadcast to attract the hive fleet. This is a plot i will totally be revisiting for Deathwatch!

If I ever get a Dark Heresy Ordo Xenos campaign rolling, I will shamelessly use this scenarion in it.

It is an exceedingly good scenario, for a lot of reasons. First, if the magus succeeds, then there won't be a great problem (just that genestealers in certain areas won't attract Hive Fleets), in fact, the Inquisition might want that to happen! (Where would the Hive Fleets go without their "explorers" calling them? XD). Second, it is a scenario very centered around investigation, with ample space to scaling up or down the opposition. Third, it can go with all the published WH40k games, and the upcoming Black Crusade. And finally, who said only Tyranid and Imperium forces would be inlvoved? Eldars farseeing how an imperial failure here would be for the better, Tau having that planet where the treatise is under attack, etc...

Maybe once i've had enough practice with the system i should write it up and submit it to FF?

Chaosium published one of my Call Of Cthulchu scenarios once in their first MULA scenario competition. (strange tales of dread and wonder 1, The Hillgrove Horror)

Nerdynick said:

****. This sounds something fitting right into my campaign... As it happens I'm running a "double campaign" (Dark Heresy and Deathwatch) where the original Dark Heresy group is trying to uncover the Necron - Pariah link. The big picture being that the Ordo Hereticus Inquisitor is trying to weaponize the material used in psyk-out warheads far beyond of what it is used for currently (read: Suppressed Psykers for more information on that angle).

At the same time the Deathwatch group is, so far unknowingly, involved on uncovering the secrets of the Necrons on other front. Maybe it is time to test some of the weaponized suppressants in Castobel...

Polaria, remember Deathwatch at least runs some time before the Necron showing up (in The Emperor Protects, it says some decades should still pass), just so you don't land into something you can't explain to the players XD.

Battybattybats: you can always write the non-mechanical stuff (once you have ended the game with your players XD) and put it here, or try to selling it to FFG. The rest is just adding numbers and playing with them ^^

Argus Van Het said:

Not so fast, my friend. I actually did some background work for the campaign when I started it and one of the things I found out was that the date of Necrons showing up is very, very subjective...

For example, the term "Necron" and "Necrontyr" were used by Adeptus Mechanicus explorators in 788.M38, Inquisition task force fought Necron monoliths and warriors aboard a space hulk as early as 980.M39 and an Inquisition document dated 724.M41 tells about "recenet appearances of advanced machine constructs" and speculates if they are linked to old Eldar prophesy about Yngir (C'Tan). The "Official" first contact was Sanctuary 101 on 897.M41, but it seems Inquisition has known bits and pieces about Necrons for two thousand years before that and Adeptus Mechanicus knowledge is dated far, far earlier.

The whole story can be found in following document: Imperial History of Necrons

Polaria said:

And 80 years is well within the viable campaign length for marines which can serve centuries anyway.

Which makes me think about the Badab war and it's impact on the reach and players.

I believe that one of the best ways to stop the tyranid progresssing is the eldar plan in DoW 2. Get the orcs involved. Let the greenskins fight em to a standstill while the kill team goes for the brain. No reason why a radical ordo xenos inquisitor with Istavaanian leanings would not initiate such a plan. At least the greenskins dont turn planets into lifeless lumps of rock too quickly.