By reading final sanction I run over the Location where the broodlord hides...a Promethium Refinery which is " mostly untouched by the figthing and remains largely intact..." uhm, okay... so this highly intelligent and ancient genstealer hides on a great bomb of promethium awaiting to be blown into the orbit of avalos...sounds like a quick ending without heroic fighting; all the players need is the location and a few melter charges...

how did you handle this?

See the other thread on this subject, titled 'Demo: Extraction or final sanction'

But:

A) The party do not have any melta charges

B) They are supposed to be rescuing the Inquisitor and recovering information that the Inquisitor gathered. Blowing up the person who summoned them to the planet isn't a great plan.

C) They are supposed to be saving the city/planet, and blowing up 20% of the city is -lacking hindsight and knowledge of the upcoming follow-up adventure- going to hamper that in the long-term. It's what the Imperial Guard might do, lacking the cojones to go and kick brood lord backside, but the Marines have been sent specifically to be able to solve this kind of problem and should -initially- try to take the broodlord without causing massive damage to the planet's key facilities that would take years to rebuild. After all: If industrial resources can so easily be squandered, why ever fight a ground war with Marines? Why not just nuke every problem from orbit. Essentially: The facility may well be deemed more valuable than the PC's lives.

D) Promethium facilities are probably designed expressly not to blow sky-high at the first spark. It would be a bit of a design flaw if three square km exploded from one melta charge. The district is a vast area, and a maze of pipework and such, and isn't just going to explode that easily. You'd need to get the explosives to the right place, and you'd need specialist knowledge for that. You'd probably need to get the charges close to the brood lord's hideout. And at the point where they're doing that... well, the brood lord is going to jump then!

E) They're marines. In the Deathwatch. The best of the best (with honours!). They need to man up and get on with it.

OUr GM just let us blow the thing up with it inside... then the not quite dead thing charged out to be gunned down. Now, the fact we were near dead (I had burnt a fate point already) may have influenced that decision, but I don't see why (if like with our group you have selected your own equipment and have a character obsessed with excessive explosives) you shouldn't be allowed to do that. It is a legitimate approach, though it may cost xp or Reknown at the end of the mission.

Exactly what we're saying.

But to me, the Inquisitor thing is quite the problem here. OK, getting rid of the Broodlord is priority number one, but the Inquisitor's life would be priority 1bis...

We had come to the conclusion the Inquisitor was probably dead anyway...

Then the intel she gathered may be useful.

I'm not saying it is absolutely crazy to blow the Prometheum extraction factory, just that it isn't that easy (you have to go there and rig it solidly, as someone else said, the Imperium would be completely mad to have such factories blow up so easily, and therefore you may as well end up being attacked by the 'nids, though in a more fashionable setup maybe), and that the choice isn't that clear.

And these are only my 2 cents, but as a GM, I would put on some (renown) penalties on the players for doing so. It seems logical: they didn't do everything it takes to try and save the Inquisitor (even if she clearly has a near-zero chance of having survived) or the data she was carrying. That's their choice, they can earn some renown for having destroyed the Bloodlord, but will suffer loss of some for having acted that way.

I'm a sucker for sandboxes: you do what you want, and it may as well succeed in a way I didn't preview, but you face the consequences.

And consequences will never be the same!

It is an abandoned Promethium refinery.

Alex

Even if the marines thought to "blow up" the whole factory it, in all liklihood, wouldn't have worked.

Prometheum burns, it doesn't explode. Its like tossing a grenade at a gas pump, I know in the movies it would blow up a whole city block. But in reality all you did was shred apart 1 or 2 gas pumps and earned yourself a really big fine. (Seriously if gas stations were as dangerous as they are depicted in the movies cities would only allow them to be built 5 miles out of city limits. Same for cars, we wouldn't be driving them if every time they ran into a wall they exploded.)

The only place that would even burn at a prometheum factory would be the tanks. The factory was probably turned off and not producing anything, so all those nifty pipes were probably empty. Even if you put a melta bomb next to a prometheum tank the whole in the side of the tank and the heat from the melta charge would instantly be drowned by the prometheum rushing out, no air no burn. It takes a lot of effort to stage the fake explosions you see on TV and the movies.

Check youtube, and even mythbusters (they do like to blow things up). Learn how real bombs, explosives, and incendiaries work. Truth is much cooler than fiction, I guarentee it.

herichimo said:

Well, you're right in that gas stations and gasoline aren't as dangerous as they are in the movies, but gas stations, tanker truks, refineries, cars, airplanes, helicopters, and boats all have the potential to explode and they do.

One of the problems with 'prometheum' in 40k is that it can be anything from camp stove fuel to flamer ammo to rocket fuel. The explosive capabilities of it would depend on a myriad of environmental factors.

40k is often depicted in a cinematic fashion, so I'd say do whatever feels right for the game. Personally I made the place abandoned- I left a couple of smaller barrels of fuel, some greasy puddles, and added a hint of danger to the creepy darkness. The PCs improvised in a couple of places to try and leverage the environment to lure the stealers, but I didn't leave enough that they could truly blow up the Broodlord or themselves.

herichimo said:

The vapour is another matter, though. Empty fuel tanks are far more dangerous than full ones.

Yes gasoline can explode...

If you first aerosol the fuel into the air, Generally acomplished in the movies by detonating a small explosive under a few gallons of gas. Then you ignite the aerosoled fuel, which then burns very explosively.

Thats why planes tend to explode when they crash. A very large portion of that plane is filled with jet fuel. When the plane impacts the ground at 300-500 miles per hour the energy of impact spews the jet fuel into the air. Then the fuel burning in the engines, or another source of heat (say from the kinetic impact of several tons of metal hitting the ground) ignites the gas cloud, and boom. If you walked up to a plane and put a big bonfire underneath it, the only thing that would happen is the plane would catch on fire and burn. It would burn very hot once the jet fuel ignites but burning is the only thing that would happen.

Gas stations don't blow up, ever. Not because of gas anyways. If a gas station ever blew up its likely because some schmuck drove a van full of TNT or other home-made bomb material into it. Even then, the stations gas would probly still be safely stored underground. I've seen what happens when someone with a lit cigarette lights gas coming out of a fuel pump at a gas station... The gas that got pumped out burned up, then the fire goes out. Thats it. There is no way a little accident like that could blow up a gas station.

The only way a modern car could blow up is if you engineered it to blow up. Cars don't go fast enough to aerosol gasoline enough to cause an explosion when they crash. The gas might spill out, ignite, and burn, but they won't blow up.

Even if you took a bathtub. Filled it halfway with gasoline, then threw in a match. You still wouldn't explode the gas. (yeah so you might get a small puff from the fumes over the gas but that wouldn't do much). The gas on top would burn, but the gas under the "water line" wouldn't. Hell you could swim in a pool of gasoline while it burns, as long as you stayed under the water line (well, if you could swim in gasoline that is).

A fume filled tank is dangerous yes. If you heat it up, the air and fumes inside will begin to expand. Eventually the building preasure will breach the tank, then fumes will jet out of the hole. The heat that built the preasure would then ignite the fumes. The little burning jet would then burn the breach wider until enough oxygen got inside the tank to support an explosive burn. Then the exploding fuel in the tank would increase the preasure so quickly the tank itself would explode, unable to hold in the preasure any longer.

Gasoline isn't an explosive. Some forms of fuel require less air or aerosol more easily than gas, but it still needs to be aerosoled. Even propane needs to be aerosoled, to little air, or too much and it won't even ignite. Even if you were to take the time to set up such a method to aerosol a lot of fuel to the point it would create an explosion, the explosion wouldn't be strong enough to detroy a factory. Gasoline (and the like) explosions aren't nearly as powerful as high explosives. You would need gallons upon gallons of gas just to equal the force of 1 stick of TNT. And getting all that gas to explode would likely require 1 or more sticks of TNT itself...

Of course, if you still want to go the whole "movie" thing, well go ahead. If thats what you want. I just feel the need every once in a while to dispel various myths that exist. Just don't start trying to curve your bolter shots around corners. Shudder..... Sorry, thats just the dumbest thing I've seen in years.

herichimo said:

You know, with its low initial velocity and gyrojets, if any weapon can do it a bolter is probably the most likely

Im so not serious its unbelievable

but yeah theres plenty of reasons why blowing up the promethium factory would not be that easy. you want the real flaw in final sanction. worry about what happens then marines pool all of their requisition to call in a lance strike although as a GM its fairly easy to say "there are no cruisers nearby" it feels a bit lame to keep using that excuse forever. at some point I feel its in the book, I've got to let them blow up a city at least once

Thing is though -as we've talked about elsewhere- if the answer was 'nuke the site from orbit', then why call DW in the first place? The answer is surely that going in there on foot is more important than just blowing it up.

herichimo said:

Yes, and that's the key to my point.

You're right about the general properties of gasoline, and while most events like exploded gas stations or cars aren't exactly common place they can and do happen, and they're not all from people driving home made bombs into them.

But I totally get that it's probably more trouble than it's worth to try and blow up an old refinery (especially if said refinery might have something of value that you're going to go in and get), but there is going to be flammable and explosive material left in those pipes, storage tanks, etc.- even modern plants store chemicals far more explosive than gasoline. But then there is the problem again with 'what is promethium' and how is it refined?

herichimo said:

It's hard to not, I know, I have my pet peeves as well. As for the curving bullets, privded you try the old German WWII contraption rather than trying to look like Angelina Jolie I say knock youself out

As for blowing it up from orbit, in the Final Sanction that I read, you're cut off and don't have air or space support. The ship you rode in on gets raped by tyranids, and your drop pod crash lands into the middle of a church. One of your objectives is to get to an astropath to send off a message asking for help after all, and help doesn't show up until Oblivion's Edge. Simple solution that won't work on all adventures, but then you should check Siranui's post above and answer the question 'why call in the DW in the first place?'

When my group get to that bit, I'd quite happlily let them blow it up. That is if they think of it.

I'll just give them a challenging time setting the charges (and aquiring some). Then they'll have to set the correct amount of explosive in the right place. Otherwise they'll risk blowing a large proportion of the city up, or allowing the Broodlord to escape.