Hello everyone so alas it has fallen to me to run epic deathwatch game set in far off ice planet. To give you give you little idea the game i have 6 or 7 players (depending if the one decides to show up that night or not) They are each playing rank 6 marines excpet for my girl freind who is playing a Battle sister/Heiophant 14 rank( Acesnion) and the Apothecary who is rank 7. I wanted to use the old epic Call of Cthulhu Adventure; At the Mountains of Madness as basic meat and potatoes. Now i have pretty much every Deathwatch book and Dark Hersey and Rouge Trader book at my disposal. Still I woudl really love some input as to the enemys I wanna throw at them. I was thinking of warp tainted Tryanids(crashed hive ship) and a whole lot of daemons. But I am total up for suggestions. here is a few ideas i've come uo with so far that im running with

At one piont when they intionally get dropped off on the ice world they are insereted by Drop pod becuase when they arrive there is a fierce storm making normal landing craft unavabile. The storm that rages cause weather with -200 degrees. If not for there power armor they would freeze to death in no time. Currently the planet is in it's farest rotation from the sun plunging it into a constant 3 months of darkness and utter bitter cold

One of the players remebers that at one time the Space wolves used these planets as bunker or a isolated watch post. So there is chance for them to find and use the bunker at as place to resupply and use a tempory HQ for there stay on the planet.

Thats what i've got so far. Any input would be greatly appericated and i wil let everyone updated on how the adventure goes as it plays out.

Thanks Everyone

NinjaLemur said:

Mate forget the Tyrannids, roll out the Mi Go, Shoggoths and Dark Young of Shug Nuggurath. While the playerss are scratching theirs heads trying to metagame their response you can have a ball fraking with their minds, MMWAH Ha HA haaaaaa!!!!!

"What!? Blowing everything else away works, but this thing just reforms and keeps eating us!!"

Seriously, go Lovecraft on their asses, make them engage in a little trial and error, and definintely use the COC trope that the PCs are NOT the baddest things on the mountain. You could have their allies infiltrated with proto-shoggoths, oh I'm just getting carried away now.

Don't forget the INSANITY!!!

Zakalwe said:

QFT!!

Playing Beyond the Mountains of Madness as a Deathwatch Game is potentially inspired. Only problem I can see is how you can get them to trek across the ice rather than just drop pod or thunderhawk in.

Visitor Q said:

Drop-pod blown off-course by 200mph winds. Job done.

PS: I am totally stealing this idea.

Siranui said:

I agree with Zakalwe in that the Tyranids can be forgotten and new Xenos be inserted to take on the squad. Shoggoths should give the Emperor's Finest a good run against the Galaxy's foulest.

Siranui said:

Better yet, dropsite misjudged due to the malleable nature of time and space on the planet.

Visitor Q said:

Have them land in the right spot. But, just before they leave the drop pod, something picks it up and throws it away.

as for tyranids living outside i'd say impossible, but if they managed to get inside an abandon station or fortress of some kind and secretly been living inside feeding on what was living there before then this could be done.Say the group gat a distress signal from that location and this could be a starting mission for the kill team but later finding out that other things lurk deep inside( like the info on the watch fortressof erioch).

I agree with using Lovecraft-inspired beasites instead of established xenos. To tie it into the established 40K verse, you could say that these Elder Horrors were originally imprisoned on the ice planet my the C'tan millions of years ago, and the wards they set up to keep the monsters trapped are beginning to fail...

Speaking of At The Mountains Of Madness , a movie adaptation will be coming out in 2013, made by the director of the Hellboy movies...

yes but how do i convert the lovecraft monster over to Deathwatch I was just planning on using the chaos stats for most of the creatures from Mark of the Xenos . Anymore suggestions creatures or monster to throw at the team?

NinjaLemur said:

I haven't picked up MoX yet, so I don't know what all's in it, but, off the top of my head, some critters that have a good 'Lovecraftian' feel from other books include the Spawn of Chaos from Desciples of the Dark Gods (works good for minor protoplasmic abominations- give it the Hydra and Regeneration traits), and the Living Ammunition from the Eye of the Warp entry in Creatures Anathema has potential- it has a special attack that disolves armour, which will scare the crap out of a typical Space Marine player!

The possibility of a crashed tyranid hive ship could be a surprise for the KT, with ice and snow it's not impossible from even a leviathon too be buried in a few weeks. Say a hive tyrant is still alive although in staisis because the ship was killed before it could awaken him. From the books i have read a dead hive ship is only slightly less of a threat than a living one. Also it need not be dead but simply hibernating and regenerating itself which is hampered by the cold. That could explain why the hive tyrant is dormant too, the ship needs it's focus to regenerate and/or call for help.

With these things in mind you should start the kill team facing notably older, weaker and feral looking tyranids (most easily notable by tyranic war vetrans). As the game progresses the tyrant wakes up due to the threat posed by the DW team to the reparing hive ship. With the hive tyrant awake it starts to hatch new tyranid's to counter the approaching KT. The KT should have a hard trudge threw the region, with vehicles being unreliable in the cold weather (Slipping on ice/engines cutting out and freezing up/dreadnaughts being slowed by iceing up joints), The group should be routinly attacked by at first sporadic and later more organised tyranids. Once they discover the ship (Following the tyranids/tracks back to a cave which ends up being/ leading to the crashed tyranid hive ship) any tyranic war vetrans would probably seek to destroy the vessol and others might want to search for anything useful to be used against the tyranids.

Now the possible original objectives for the mission would probably be to recover data/tech from the long abandoned space wolf out post.

Scouting out a disturbance (from the semi-dormant hive ship) in the warp around the planet.

Being sent to find a space wolf relic on the planet (from either the base or the hive ship as the nids might take the item if it emmenated power).

Being sent to find a mechanicus party who detected the disturbane of the hive ship and decided to investigate.

So with these objectives in mind you can expand on the mountain (perhapes have mountain range rather than just one mountain). You can also increase the size of the tyranid ship and instead have the mountain actually being the vast frozen leviathon hive ship with several hundred feet of ice obscuring the shape of the beast.

You could have the outpost in the middle of the mission (meaning there was a hard slog to get there threw mountains) Perhapes there was magnatic storms which meant a thunderhawk was not a possibility until the storm lets up, and drop pods would likely be thrown off course. You could throw some native creatures in to keep the KT on there toes (perhapes some imported fenris beasties grown large and extra aggressive due to the diet of feral tyranid). Once the KT gets to the out post they could find something to help them beside much needed supplies (Perhapes an empty and forgotten dreadnaught) At any rate it is likely that the base would be frozen over and require some time to bring to operation unless it was built into the ice, in which case the door might provide a challenge. The energy generator would ideally keep the temerature at a bareable level and the stores wouldn't be frozen. You could also have a large force of nids attack the base (perhapes have ravenors burrow up into the base?)

I'll think about it a little more and come up with some more ideas.

SShocky said:

these are all great idea. Thanks i'm gonna use some of them

What if the Imperial bunker was built atop an ancient xenos structure? Deep below the sub-levels of the bunker, within the mountain itself is an ancient vault/city/tomb created by the Old Ones/Eldar. Artwork in some of the rooms depicts a mythological war against a race of skeletal warriors. Old Ones/Eldar figures are shown opening a chest or ark to unleash a living weapon (shoggoth) that dissolves & devours the skeletal warriors. The next stage of the story shows a victory feast by the Eldar that is invaded by the living weapon. The Eldar warriors force the creature back into its casket (possibly with Fire Dragons burning the creature).

The xenos structure has been broken into by an imperial survey team (who are now naturally all dead) after having broken the seals holding the creature in stasis. I'm not sure exactly how you'd convert a creature like a shoggoth into the 40k rpg but I'd suggest having projectile/impact weapons like bolters etc do minimum damage only while flame/energy weapons do normal damage.

You could even borrow ideas from "The Shadow Out of Time" and have a survivor from the survey team possessed by an Old One projecting their consciousness forward in time. The Old One is trying to repair the seals on tomb. At first glance they appear shell shocked and a psychic reading of the survivor will reveal the possession. The kill-team have to decide whether to work with the xenos creature to either destroy or re-imprison the living weapon.