Greetings, brethern,

I am a little stuck for fresh ideas.

What is the situation?
On the 03.06.2011 (this Friday) one of my groups meets again. We are in modified version of "Shades of Twilight" (Purge the Unclean)


!!!!WARNING! The rest of it will include Spoilers for SoT!!!

What is the modification?
I removed the Spacemarine. Instead, they are accompanied by a boarding party of four Naval Armsmen

Why is this important for what I need?
Instead of the scene where the Battlebrothers stays behind (in an act of sacrifice) to hinder a tide of warpbeasts from a further pursuit, I want a chase scene through the hulk. Basically, a series of non-linked binary choices (path A or path B), each including a different requirement (tests, taking damage, corruption etc).


What do I want?
All in all, I want them to go through about 5 to 7 "sequences/scenes" (5-7 A´s or B´s of their choice). They even might be attacked singular warp-beasts (that where quicker then the rest) which they either need to fend off QUICKLY or lose one of the Naval Armsmen (RedShirts!) to.

At the end of the 5 or 7 sequences, me as the GM will count up the "they made it!" against the "they failed". If they "made" more then they "failed", they will reach a bulkhead door and have enough "head start" to seal it before the beast poor through. If they failed...well, all of the remaining Armsmen will stay behind to buy them the time to close this bulkhead. Robbing them off foddeer in the final fight and some possible bonus xp at the end of the adventure

What do I really-really want?
Ideas for 10 to 14 "sequences" of the hunt. What this choice looks like, what the (hidden or obvious) obstalce is, perhaps how they can gauge it and what tests they need to pass to "make" it. It should be non-combat encounters (unless you want to include one of the warp beast dropping in front of them or being hot on their heels)

What is my group like?
Three pc. A Dusk-Born Guardsman, a void-navy Psyker (excellent Biomancer!) and a BoM-based Sororita in full Sister-Servo.

Thanks for your ideas!

Gregorius21778 said:

1. A section of floor where the gravity plating is dangerously erratic. As in "will throw you 90 degrees into a wall" erratic. +0 Awareness (sight) to spot little bits of debris falling sideways. +0 Agility to get out of the area before they fall sideways. -20 agility to not crash into the wall if they do get caught.

2. Screaming lunatic ghost from a different wreck. +10 psyniscience check to realise "something is coming" and head another direction. Fear (2) check if they see the spectre and its wail of the damned.

3. Cracking ceiling. The hulk is coming apart and this corridor is not safe. +10 awareness (hearing) to notice something is up. Then either move around (+0 navigation surface) and risk losing time or charge ahead and hope (-10 agility to avoid getting hit by debris).

Ancient security systems:

As our intrepid heroes are running through different parts of the hulk, they find the remains of an ancient prison ship. Perhaps it could be a xenos ship, but I feel the wreck of a once massively overcrowded Imperial prisoner transport seems to be a better idea. The tortured corpses of prisoners and guards alike are a must. Power will be down and in the edges of their vision down the dark echoing hallways they may perceive movement. They will probably have to make a few strength tests to bash down some old security gates. Your Sister should handle this nicely.

However, after one of these gates the cell will enter a large open cell area. I'm thinking something like a Panopticon style cell block, where the players enter on the bottom floor on one side and have to walk through it to exit through a door on the opposite side of the room. For this first time, the lights are on in this area. Your players should have a chance to make a +10 Common Lore (Tech), +30 Common Lore (Arbites), or a -10 Logic. Maybe a different variation of those tests, but the success should give the same information: that the area would probably have active security systems.

If your players make this test, a +20 perception will locate motion sensors mounted on the central tower. If they do not make the test, the perception test should be at a -20 (they don't know what they're looking for). They will have an AV of 8 and any damage will destroy them. A straight failure on this perception test will only locate some of the motion sensors and the PC will be informed that these are the only ones.

Should they miss all these tests and enter the main area, they will trip lock down! Unauthorized personnel nearing guard station! Suddenly the lights will rise in intensity and an ear-splitting klaxon will start sounding in the air. Alerts will go out calling non-existent guards to detain the PCs and armored shutters will begin to close over the exit. Worse, auto turrets will spring to life! Of course, the turrets do not actually work anymore. Their ammo was consumed long ago. Make sure that important detail is hidden until the last possible moment!

However, the alarm will doubtlessly bring warp beasts to their location! They will have to make some agility tests to escape before the shutters close (perhaps slowing down their pursuers!). If they fail, they will have to manhandle the doors open. This will take a +0 Tech Use, -20 Strength, or a +10 security. If a PC has security and Tech use, the test is +30 (the doors are designed to hold prisoners, not skilled techs.

Radiation Hazard:

Our PCs see a shortcut through some passages lined with cabling and wires. However, a nearby reactor has had its shielding damaged and is irradiating the area. An Auspex sweep, Salvation Auger, or similar device should immediately warn of this danger. Should they discover this quickly, they can double back and go a different way with little loss of time. However, if they press on they must all make toughness tests. These start at +10 and get more difficult by one step every 5m proceeded down the hall. A failure results in a loss of a wound as the PCs starts coughing up blood and feels terrible. The reality is, this passage is too hot to proceed through. The longer it takes your PCs to figure this out, the more wounds and time they waste!

Oh, I seem to have forgotten an obvious option. Of course, those blast shutters could just be destroyed with weaponry. However, they will have an AV of 30, precluding any easy destruction. However, your PCs can make a +30 Demolitions, +0 perception, -20 Logic, or +10 Tactica Imperialis to realize that most armored doors armor their hinges or equivalent much less than the door itself. The hinges of the door only have AV 12, and destruction of them will cause the door to fall forward and leave the way clear. I hope no one was standing under it!

Hallo Gregorius,
I haven’t played «Shades of Twilight» so I don’t know if what follows can be integrated in the module but perhaps the following scene can be somehow helpful.

In its flight, the group comes out of a long passegeway and finds itself on a metal balcony which opens on a huge and dim lightened room (maybe a hangar); on their right side there is a metal walkway (A), on their left side a descending metal stairs (B). No sounds, no movements, no signs of life.

A) The walkway

The walkway crosses the wide room; the room’s floor is twenty or more meters below, the ceiling five meters or so above them.
The acolytes are running through the walkway as they notice (Awarness skill) that the walkway itself is broken further ahead. They have to stop immediately (Agility test): should they fail, their inertia has them running (=not immediatley stopping) for a number of meters equal to their Agility bonus +1 meter per degree of failure.
Should someone fail the test by three or more degrees, he also accidentally runs into the characters in front of him and pushes them towards the empty space: roll an opposed test (pushing character’s Strength bonus against pushed character’s Agility or Strength bonus) to resist the hit or be pushed toward the hole a number of meters equal to 1+1 for every degree of failure.
Once they stop and evaluate the situation, they can choose to go over the hole and reach the walkway’s other half either by leaping or clinging Tarzan-style to some hanging cables/ropes. In order to prevent them to go back, have some warp beast show on the balcony entrance once they are deciding how to go over the hole.
As they reach the walkway’s other side, they see an open door they can pass to enter another passageway and thus keep up fleeing.

B) The metal stairs

The stairs go down into the room/hangar (should they look upwards, the broken hallway is visible over their heads: they can even see it is broken).
Here you can go nuts with every kind of obstacles (maybe the walkway’s missing piece) or discoveries to slow them down. As said, I haven’t played this adventure so I do not know if this is possibile, yet I think it would be very apt if they should stumbe into a wounded (and maybe unconscious) crewman: they’d need to help him and then take him with themselves, while the warp beasts approach. His leg is under a fallen beam and can be set free only by lifting it with a Strength test (with a bonus of your choice for teaming up and lifting the beam together); then (when possible) a Medicae test on him can be performed in order to have him walking on his own legs and not slowing the group.
The only working exit is a closed door that can be opened only with a magnetic card (or cognomen): a difficult or hard Security test could open it, otherwise it’s the right situation to finally put to use the Demolition skill, should they have a spare grenade or two to blow the door with.
The other doors are broken or blocked beyond any on-the-field intervention.

Off topic digression

As a side note, please allow me to make a completely personal consideration about the use of expendables/redshirts/cannon fodder/puppets to patch up the party’s errors or prevent the PCs from taking damage.

I think that, even in an RPG, it’s important to stress the value of life, even of unnamed NPCs (and even more so when they’re your allies!): works of fiction - and more often movies - have us see how a nameless character is just a counter that has to die (and soon will) in order to prevent the main characters from taking damage or just to show how cool the main characters are. As its name states, an expendable is there just to be killed.

Yet in my opinion this attitude helps in creating that mentality we can often witness in today’s society, «I don’t know that one, so who cares if he’s hurt» or «that one is just a number in the mass, thus I can beat him». I, as a player, would feel uncomfortable playing with a group joined by a certain number of «sentenced to death», knowing that they’re the expendables and that it will be them the ones paying for anything stupid I’ll happen to do: in my opinion it supports a mentality of carelessness, that «we still have three of those, it means we can indulge a tad longer in that room, even though we’re on the run» approach. And I would feel even more uncomfortable should said group play/think that way and freely benefit of their «disposability».

So, whenever extra manpower is needed, as a GM I try instead to flesh out one or two NPCs with their own stories and peculiarities and entrust them to the party: I have them interact with the PCs until the players like them and feel them as their own folk; this way I try to encourage the players both to take care of the NPCs and to make the impossibile to prevent their deaths, thus inducing them to think that death is never to be taken lightly (the NPCs as well have families, dreams, hopes...: in the setting they are «real» people who happen to cross the PCs’ - i.e. the heroes’ - path).
Ok, it is Warhammer 40.000, an universe where a man’s life is worth less than the gear he’s equipped with, nonetheless I think such an approach should be at least attempted in order to raise some awareness among the players about such a delicate subject as death.

Sorry for this speech of mine (which turned out much longer than I intended) but I felt I had to write it: you are an experienced GM - surely more than I am - and surely know better than just to give your party a handful of expendables they can toy with.

Hiyas!

My two thrones

(If no one has suggested it before):

A shot could destroy/fuse an airlock panel & the whole room could be vented to the Void. Some cool moments where everyone/thing grabs for dear life whilst an acolyte frantically works to seal the room again (thinking of the ending for Aliens ).

L

Berengario said:

if I (personally) would share this opinion (the way people act/handle things in an RPG influences how people act/handle things in real life) I would stop roleplaying DH at once. And I would stop playing ego shooters. And a lot of other things.

Thanks for being polite in your statement, but all in all we differ completely in our opinion on this matter.

Gregorius21778 said:

Hallo Gregorius,
you’re going a bit too far: what I meant was that RPGs are a way to help people think and, by taking the role of a fictitious person in different situations and settings, induce them to ponder rough subjects.
This is what I meant by saying that they help in creating today’s mentality: I didn’t say (nor think) they «influence» anyone’s real life behaviour ( should it be this way, neither I would be playing ); I just tried to say that they could help in changing (at least in the gamers like us) the common mentality and the simplistic approach that are taken for granted by most mainstream media.

We are roleplayers, this means we are people who like to think and ponder things: this cerebral entertainment of ours gives us the chance to think over a subject like death and let it awake some awareness/consciousness more about the subject. Let us not waste it.

Of course this is just my opinion, one among many, and all equally correct.

Gregorius21778 said:

Thank you for giving me - with this thread - the opportunity to gather the loose thoughts on the subject I had and rationalize them!

Keep on the good work!

Hi all. Sorry been away for so long, RL getting in the way...

Okay firstly my advice is do not try to come up with 14 encounters. Instead go for 9-10 (ish) still give them the choice each step but only some of the choices make a difference. (This is being realistic about it's better to have quality over quantity).

I'd advise that you escalate the pace as you go along. Start slow and work up. At the start have all the chronos working then by the end the SoT effect has kicked in and no one know what time it is or how much time until the place blows.

Vary the encounters; ideas are

• Straight fight encounter.
• Puzzle, locked door that the 3 of them have to work on whilst the armsmen hold off the beasts. Maybe it's locking mechanism is crushed and two have to hold open the lid whilst the 3rd bypasses it
• Atmosphere! (My favourite). when I ran SoT the BEST encounter was the party going through an alien ship. I dropped enough clues that they thought it could be Tyranid or Necron and they were bricking it!
• Melta Gel. The all access hull opener. Give them a lot, then after 3-4 encounters of them using it they realise they are just down to a handful and the warp beasts are getting closer.
• Give them a way of knowing how close the Warp beasts are, sound, monitoring, or an Aliens style motion tracker.
• Near the end of this section begin to build to the climax, start with Space Opera style encounters with players swinging over pits, or fancy a swim (the PC's did take Swim right???) if not they have to waste time making floats!
• Finally have a moral choice, have one of the Armsman stuck under a beam/metal bar/BicMac next to an obvious escape route. The sound of the Warp Beast increases. Leave him or save him? Might even be a fate point in that choice...

Hope this helps...

Balders

My munchkins would probably stay and fight. They seem to think that all encounters are "winnable". Course, I let loose some genestealers on them in the underhive, and now I think they've learned

To the point:

You don't really need to detail "both corridors" of all their choices, after all, they'll never know what was down the paths they didn't take. So you could just have them encounter a fixed set of challenges, regardless of the choices they make.

To contribute a little:

The corridor fuses with another, that is obviously part of another ship. The corridor runs downwards, and is partially flooded with greenish, murky water. The alternate path is through the vents and service ducts accessible through the corridors roof and walls. Of course, the vents still have functioning fans that needs careful timing to pass through, and the service ducts have power troubles of the sparkling, fatal kind.

The flooded tunnel might hide all sorts of creatures, besides, watching your acolytes realise that swimming with armour and weapons is Very Hard (-30) and that they haven't bothered to learn the Swim skill is hilarious

A similar request for ideas was made on the Deathwatch forums a while back- here is a link:

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=214&efcid=3&efidt=430400

That one is focused more on fighting on the outside of the Hulk, but some of the suggestions should work in your scenario. A couple new ideas:

Running The Gauntlet: the corridor the party is using becomes impassable, forcing them to detour through a section of a still-functioning generatorium, with all kinds of moving pistons, pulsing energy fields, and other hazards. The party has to carefully time their actions as they run through, avoiding each potential deathtrap in turn (maybe have the theme from Frogger qued up for this scene...).

The "Teleprtarium": In a section of an alien ship, they find a large round room with a pedistal with strange controls in the center. Fiddeling with these, they experience a flash of light, and find themselves standing on the surface of an unknown world. Naturally, they will assume they have been teleported, but they have actually activated a Star Trek -style "holodeck"...

Possible Tyranid ships? Now there's an idea.

Have a section of hallway seem to be made of an organic material. As the group advances, make the floor stickier and stickier. Suddenly, one Armsman will start screaming something about how the walls are alive and start blasting away. Perhaps he'll be sinking in too. This could be part of a hallucination or real. Either way, some Command tests may be needed to keep everyone moving.

from france

this anormally normal nightmares of a dead crew:

after a tense fight for example the pc enter a section with elevator music (easy listening?) for along moment this out place music is played. the music stop, and some pc should be glad for that but the scenery change andthey are in a dirty locker room ther heard the plic plic of a shower butthere is no water and this chinese toture continue.

the next room, a dinner room, they are all part of a silly kitchen show where they all play (stupid costume included and silly laught too) cook aid. they can see that all spectator are zombie dead crew who seem to apreciate the cook and they can because the prepared meal is the remants of dead friends of the pc's.

then again the boring elevator music is played. in the next room they all see themselves loving their past lovers (soritas included they can have lovers and one in the fluff is said to had one so don't flame me with that).

their fantasy are as vivid as they want they to be but to the horors their lovers are slowly decaying and necrosing and in a wisper they say "join me all you have to do is to give your soul". no matter what their reponse is they see themselves touching a almost liquid decaying corps.

again the easy listening music comes. they see themselves in the roles of either a torturer of chaos or emperor martyr being tortured but it just a freaky play in a charnel housse and to their horror (especialy the sister) they like it for the simple pleasure of betraying their emperor.

at last the music came and end with a laugh and a question. "did you enjoy it like i had?"......

nothing physical will hurts the pc here but their roleplayin reaction will earn them cooruption / insanety point or remove some.

hope it helps cause it s entirely improvised and it s late here.

Here is an idea that could be interesting, if fleshed out to fit with the setting. As with one of the other posters, I am not familiar with this particular supplement. Anyway, with a space hulk being a conglomeration of ships & other cosmic detrius I thought that a section where several of these vessels are smashed together could be interesting. In addition to the rubble & other obvious obsticles, the gravity from the different components could be every which way. Google Image "escher stairs" to see the inspiration for this idea. The party would have to navigate through without losing too much time. A clever idea would be for them to throw small bits of debris ahead of them as they go to test the gravity patterns. The warp creatures, being warp creatures, would not be impeded by this effect.

Hi Chaos,

unfortunately, you are a little late for the party As posted, I´ve run the mission on Friday the 3rd.

Thanks to all of you for sharing the ideas with me.

Gregorius21778 said:

Story of my life!

Hey Gregorius- what did you end up using? Out of curiosity...

Hi Adeptus-B,

to be honest: none Not even those I made up my own. A lack of preparation time (which was my own fault) made me change my approach)

I went like this: I presented the pc with a map representing a part of a machinery deck they were actually moving through (see link). They had some strange echos on the Auspex (pass a Tech-Use test) but since the interferences (I -LOVE- re-emerged hulks... so many excuses.. .) they could not be sure if this was somebody/something, nothing or a small group of somebody/something. Ilmari (the pc navy-psyker) used his Sense Life. I ruled that he was able to discern that there were to human-sized life signs ahead..but not which direction.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/21/ketserar.jpg/

After some lost opposed tests (Eldar are GOOD for Ambushes), two Terrofex-Grenades and a couple of shout-outs later, they finally had the Scouts cornered (as intended by me). They even used supression fire (I am so glad they reminded tactics!) which gave one of them the changes to activiate "the flute".

While I tried to impress the psyker with some description of hearing painful, cry-like sound (which no-one else heared) "...and something from beyound is answering", the first reaction of the pc was to take up a defensive position (AFTER they dealed with the DE) in order to wait for what was coming in.

Not in the moot for more combat (could have dropped 1d5+2 warp beasts at them & then announced more to come) I described that they waited about a minute or two and then asked the Psyker for another Psyniscience(+30). Of course he made it.
I took the player beside (outside of the room) and told him that he sensed about two dozen incoming warp predators "of the type you already encountered" (Warp Beasts). That gave the player a pause...and led to him questioning me how that could be possible.

I quickly made up that "based on your knowledge for Forbibden Lore and what you have experienced" this flute must have been a massive ampifier and the xenos using it most have somehow sacrificed his soul... a dastardly final attempt to achieve harm on you that he was able to fullfil with his live otherwise.

Funny scene: As we came back, the psyker player started to roleplay how his (otherwise self-confident) psyker got nervous and started to "suggest" a change of tactics... before the sentence was finished half, the player of Thywin (the Dusk-born Guardsman) declared that his pc ordered the navy armsmen to "MOVE!" while he was himself making haste to leave the area... while Sister Danielle (pc Battle-Sister) was a little confused that they are leaving and was generally jogging behind the hastly retrieving group, questioning the psyker abouth what was the reason that they did not stand & fight.

Rest of the game: I simply announced to the Psyker that he could feel that the pack of predators was closing in and that their approached quickend the closer they got. In general, I turned this into a plot device of impending dome. Which worked kinda well.