The group I play with had an amazing in-game moment recently. And I cant help but share it. And not only do I wish to share them, but I wanted to hear some of the heroic, comical, heretical, and astonishing in-game moments from recent and memorable games.

For those of you who saw 'Smokin Aces' your going to love this one.

The group has been hunting a known heretic known as Eli Bim for several months now. Finally tracking him down on the planet of Xelthor. Were a outspoken Radical Inquisitor Dox has already found him, and has interrogated all of his secrets for himself. The interrogation lead to extensive neural damage, and insted of killing him Dox had several medicae put him on life support, so he can lead Dox to the wealth of Xenos technology he has hidden in his personal residence. Our inquisitor, a devout puritian, branded him a Traitor and a heretic and asked us to carry out the execution of Dox and Bim. While most of our force infiltrated (my character included) his base of opperations to kill him. Our assassin Angelo infiltrated alone to target Bim. After killing a medicae and taking his clothing, he abandoned all his weapons except a compact auto-pistol. He successfully found Bim, unconscious on life support. He locked the door to the private infermery, holstered his weapon, and walked over to the life support system keeping Bim alive. Angelo lit a lho, then pulled out wire cutters from his pocket. He snipped all the cords to Bims systems. As he goes into dying convulsions the remaining Medicae and inquisitoral stormtroopers bang and try to force the door open. Angelo has no way out so he unholsters his pistol, removes the clip, removes the medicae robes and sets them on the table, then reclines in a chair waiting for them to open the door... Then the session ended.

I'll probably have to nominate the moment when one of my players' guardsman, on fire, down to his last few wounds and standing next to a fire extinguisher faced down a squad of Eldar.

He looked to the extinguisher, he looked to the Eldar, he looked to his burning carapace armour and grinned.

"FOR THE EMPEROR!" he screamed and opened up on full auto on the approaching raiders.

The scary thing is that he came out of that fight in pretty good shape, not even reduced to criticals. Despite having my carefully crafted encounter blown to pieces I have to admit, it was pretty goddamn awesome.

While I would love to take credit for the most memorable action in our campaign, I'll have to nominate our cleric.

We had just procurred a few armored vehicles from a scrap yard so we could repair them for our own devices when we started getting chased by several vehicles. After making several turns to try and lose them we find ourselves driving straight toward another set of oncoming vehicles whose occupants were trying to take us out. The cleric opens the tarp covered back of the vehicle he's in, climbs onto the roof, activates his power hammer and yells at our assassin to stop the truck.

When the truck is stopped, the cleric jumps, lands on his feet and swing his power hammer head on into a motorcycle that was about to pass him. The motorcycle crumples and the driver is sent flying.

our scum (the most non-fighty character imaginable) killed a daemon by scoring righteous fury to ridiculous degree (53 damage!) with the leg of a chair.

Then we joined a marching band.

This one is a small spoiler from the game we had

*spoiler*

During the attack on the town in the first campaign, the guys with the bomb were running up the middle of the town towards the church. I asked lemark to lend me his lasgun. At an extreme range, headshot, righteous fury, doing 10 critical damage to the bomb holder, removing his head, sending his flaming body running, setting off the bomb, which then did enough damage to ignite all the ammo on the people with the bomb carrier, creating a massive crater in the middle of town.

Everyone at the table, including the GM, were speechless for a few seconds

Tullist said:

That is by far, one of the most enjoyable moments I've ever read. Sucks to the Cyclist though.

Probably when I spent a long time writing up a brutal gang leader with an eviscerator who was juiced up on Slam...he charged the group, spectacularly missing, and got shot in the heart for a phenominal amount of righteous fury damage, and instantly dying, thus ending the encounter, and saving the group from loosing at least one member.

We got betrayed in the middle of dinner buy one of our party members. One of our members had only brought his primitive side arm with him so he was being ignored buy the Vaneheim wielding carapace wearing nutter who was concentrating on more important threats. Now at this point you are thinking, so the primitve pistol blew his head of with an Emperors Fury of epic preportions. No he continued to eat his dinner, what idiot would go up against a Carapace armoured maniac with a flintlock. When the table was overturned he just pushed his chair back and continued eating. When he was running out of targets he got up said something like "May the Emperor Judge you." then legged it to take cover behind the bar.

Kaihlik

It's probably a bit narcististic, but my favourite 'moments' typically involve the grimdark psyker I play/write about called 'Regis' who is a borderline pacifist and psychopathic non-combatant...

...We were in the ruins of an abandoned hive, and as usual Regis was on rear guard, when the group got jumped by an Death Cult Assassin set to wipe us all out.

The Assassin went for Regis first, probably hoping for a quiet kill before picking off the rest, but by the luck of the warp missed him completely! Regis was mildly pleased about this, because he only ever wears a 2-point quilted vest for protection.

Having no weapons in hand, and disregarding the paltry items on my character sheet, I deployed the best 'weapon' Regis could offer...

Regis took the lho-stick out of his mouth, flicked it at the perplexed Assassin in a stylish manner (I rolled for this, and got a crit!) striking her fair between the eyes, and assaulted her with an expleitive that can't be re-printed!

Of course, the second half of my action was to move behind the power-armoured Sororitas, light another lho-stick, and comment "...<smoke>...Assassin!"

My deepest regret was that I never got to finish that lho-stick, and that the GM never let me roll for damage ; )

A month and a half ago my Acolytes were traveling incognito with a mass of pilgrims in the cargo hold of a warp freighter. Three attempts had been made on their lives, and the 3rd attempt left a pilgrim dead and one of the Acolytes, himself an Assassin, looking like the guilty party. Not content to let mod justice run amok in the cargo decks, the captain insisted a trial be held before the assassin was spaced. While everyone was distracted by the trial (most of the people were glaring at the assassin and shouting "Boo! Kill 'em!") the real killer snuck away and planted a bomb on the exterior wall. The Psyker spotted the bomb as it counted down, and before the crowd could panic and turn the cargo deck into a giant meat grinder, the Assassin grabbed one of his concealed throwing knives and, pointing out that he had several Tech Lore skills and would know where to aim, threw the knife across the cargo hold, cutting the blue wire and disarming the bomb. The captain had no choice but to exonerate him.

I am one of the players fortunate enough to participate in Aethel's virtual game.

When my assassin first joined the retinue, they were transitting to another world for their next investigation. I do not recall what sparked the incident, but at some point the cell's resident underhiver scum pulled his hecuter (his pride and joy) and made his intention clear that he was about to use lethal force against one of our own. As new as my character was, and equally unfamiliar with the internecine politics within the group, I nonetheless aimed to resolve the conflict before there was any loss of life. So, I chose a side. Oooh, boy!

I drew my sword, with the intention of using it to knock the pistol from the scum's hand. Apparently, the Emperor had other ideas, seeing the righteousness of my intentions and deeming them worthy for His most beneficent blessing, He thus guiding my sword and sundering the pistol in twain. After being suitably dumbfounded by the sight of his precious weapon lying bifurcated upon the deck, we subsequently pummeled him into submission and successfully completed the work of our Most Holy Ordos.

While this incident initially caused a undercurrent of tension between the scum and myself, after several operations together and saving each others lives, we've developed an excellent professional rapport and I know that I can count upon him when things get dicey (assuming that he is sober).

Z

++[Names deleted to protect the identities of ordos operatives in the field]++

In the last week's session our group was on an outcropping outside the 'House of Ash' (modified from DotDG). In the group was a gunslinger, techpriest, and two guardsmen. The shuttle that was sent to pick us up was sitting near the edge, and standing on top of it was the former psyker of the party (long story short, he got possessed in previous session). Unable to evacuate while he was up there, we attacked.

The Techpriest opened up with a plasma shot that hit the 'daemonhost'...after going through part of the shuttle (and it was a Mechanicus shuttle). Gunslinger starts firing both his laspistols without any effect at the daemonhost. The other guardsman opens up, to no effect. My guardsman fires, using the last couple rounds of blessed ammunition, with some success (not much though). Turns out the daemonhost has some type of protective field around it. Techpriest fires again, hitting it and 'pushing' it back off the shuttle (it was now floating in the air). everyone else keeps shooting at it while I eject my spent magazine and start moving towards it.

Bored with gloating, the 'host starts zapping the techpriest, knocking him down. The gunslinger moves and jumps at the 'host, trying to grapple it, unsuccessfully, and starts to fall through the air down towards some sharp crystal growths. At the same time, my guardsman attaches his melta bomb to the front of his web gear, runs towards the shuttle's nose, up onto the shuttle, hooks his clip line, and leaps towards the daemonhost, yelling "For the Emperor." As I contact his field, I activate the melta bomb (I also happen to have several grenades and plenty of ammo on me). Melta bomb goes off (along with the grenades) as I hit it, vaporising the host (and a good chunk of myself). Using one of my fate points to represent 'divine intervention' to 'save' the gunslinger (giving him a chance to grab my line) and having the shockwave propel him back towards safety. Gunslinger survives as his unconscious body hits the ground (though he'll need some 'rebuilding'), the techpriest is knocked down, and somehow, my guardsman survives (Emperor Protects). Techpriest starts looking to see if I can be 'rebuilt' (what was left of me looked like a lump of burnt meat) while with my last breath I ask the other guardsman for "The Emperor's Mercy." He draws his duelling las out and grants it.

First session with a huge group (6 players and me, and additional player would join later sessions).

Our fearless team starts on a Hive world escorting an informant to the space docks. Of course they're under fire the whole time. Of course they beat back the goons with minimal losses.

While the informant makes it safely to his ship, the bad guy, a xenos merchant, and his crew make a quick get away.

Our team follows him to some backwater planet and the fun begins.

They land near a settlement made from a crashed imperial escort and as they are walking towards town, are stopped by a guard (one of the players) in the trees. Guard doesn't say much except "keep out of the tall grass"

They talk for a bit when a Carnosaur came rushing out of the tall grass at them. It's about 100 meteres away, so they all turn and start firing at it. No one is doing jack as on toughness alone, the beast's damage reduction is 10. Everyone is getting antsy, understandably. The assassin runs. The noble scum runs. The techpriest is the only one doing any damage, but not much. The psyker is... mostly useless. The arbitrator has accepted his fate with a stiff upper lip.

Meanwhile the guardsman in the trees is, in a very relaxed voice, telling everyone "Don't worry. I got this".

He delays his action until the Kill-o-saurus Rex is at point blank range and makes a called shot for its head. Specifically its mouth.

With a belt of grenades. He rolls 01 to hit, almost max damage, blows the beast to chunks, feeds the village for weeks, and gives everyone a level of fatigue for the concussive blast and being covered in gore. Except the assassin and scum. Those who didn't run got a FP.

Even though DH isn't always about combat, a good combat oriented session sure draws in those who are unsure. Or WERE unsure, I should say.

Now that, Outek, is Bad Ass. With capitals.

outek said:

Awesome. Good session.

Our team was hunting xenocultist on some backwater, war ridden world. Final battle took place at the local prince place in his throne room. Only two of us (my Cog Boy and psyker) was able to participate in this battle, because other two was hunting tank with plasma cutter and krak grenades (another story).
To make long story short, it was hard battle and our psyker was taken out (he had to burn fate point) and at the I found myself surrounded by arch heretic and his heavily armed elite guards. I was wounded and outmatched so I did the only thing I could. I throw the last of my hallucinary grenades directly under my feet. All four of the heretics failed their toughness rolls an I was clad in environmentally sealed carapace armour of my own design. After that it took me only 4 bolt pistol rounds to end xeno-heresy on this planet.

The expression on our GMs face was priceless

Few hours later (game time) our assassin did exactly the same thing to some thugs that almost got him on the rooftop of some building. After that we started to call it Hallucinary Gambit.

Nihilius Zee said:

We were drunk, and he saw the Cleric.

It was great to tie him up though! Good times.

outek said:

!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can´t write as many excalamation marks as i want without looking like a total dork. Why can´t i have players like you?

My tech-priest char had a very heroic moment once. It was in our old group when we still had two clerics, a guardsman and me (poor me two clerics!). We were in a community that was under attack by a chaos cult and it was pure pandemonium. We were in the middle of a street where we good see three buildings under attack; one was an Imperial Temple, one was a sort of pub and the other was a Generatorium.
After some quick decisions we decided it was best to stick together because we would become hoorible overwhelmed and a split-second later it was decided that we should save as much civilians as possible, the Emperor-fearing folk that they were. Even the clerics agreed that the Imperial Temple did well in defending itself so the oub it was. I immeditaley said that they could go cram something in their acces-ports and I ran off on my own towards the Generatorium. Who cares that some people will die? You need power darn it!

The others set off towards the pub, cleared it with great difficulty and set off towards the Temple where they were almost slaughtered. I believe the guardsmen almost lost his leg and both clerics were down to two or three wounds.
My solo tech-priest had to deal with almost the exact same encounter but for some reason the Omnissiah was with him and I rolled so many crits it wasn't funny anymore and as a funny side note; I was only armed with a metal staff, las pistol was stolen by some thug (who I found and executed later) and had no armor whatsoever.
When the others, done with their holy mission of saving fleshies came back to look for me I was sitting on top of a pile of corpses sorting out the power packs they had with them and asked "what took you so long?". They were pretty annoyed with me...

In the season finale of the campaign I'm running, the group tracked the Halo Device powered Heinrich Kryptmann to a disused chapel on the outskirts of the city, where he proceeded to rip them apart. They were all taking savage beatings, when the psyker tried to hail the wounded guardsman. One quick perils of the warp roll later, a demon was ripping it's way through the fabric of reality. I let the psyker, at the cost of two fate points, direct the entity into the corpse of Father Mercutio, the group's cleric, who'd perished before the battle. So the assassin, who's incapacitated, sees the mangled priest stand up and charge into the chapel, Kryptmann engages him in combat, believing him to be the cleric on his last legs. No one knows what's just happened, the Psyker screams at everyone to run, the guardsman, psyker and tech-priest flee from the church as things start getting nasty, picking up the semi-conscious assassin as they go, piling into an arbites transport and driving away, tires screeching, as the rampaging servitor army goes berserk and turns on itself, destroying everything.

It really wasn't how I'd planned for things to go with the players, I mean with a player dying and a daemon showing up and all, but ****. It was on the spot, improvised, and brilliantly dramatic.

I mentioned this before in older boards but it remains to this day one of my favorite moments in gaming.

My players are creeping through a building when they are discovered by a routine patrol. Bullets commence flying and the psyker prepares to unleash hell, only to roll a minor warp manifestation on his first ever power attempt. In a brilliant flash of chaos energy his clothing and equipment are all vaporized. The following round he stands back up, steam still rising from his albino hairless skin and he proceeds to lay unholy waste on half a dozen guards. Mere moments later all the thugs lay in barely quivering heaps. Our guardsman cautiously moves up to throw a bullet hole ridden black longcoat over the psyker's shoulders as the last wisps of chaos drift from his fingertips.

Our team went to a backwater planet for chaos investigation. A couple of us started with the local cantina. We unfortunately find that the locals don't like outsiders, so we get a lot of glares. Finally, one of the bigger guys walks up to my character (the sociopathic assassin, Dak Rogers), saying "Off-worlder, we don't take kindly to your kind in here. Why don't you pack up, and get the hell out?" In a silly moment I was having, I decided to quote Wolverine from the 90's Xmen cartoon. "I go where I wanna go."

"Careful who you talk to like that, boy."

Now, at this point, Dak is seriously considering pulling his guns and murdering this cat for talking all this sh*t. But Dak decides it would cause more problems then solve to be this public about it, so he simply steps in close to this guy, stares him down, and says, "Next time we meet, you ain't much gonna like it." The local man chuckles as Dak walks out of the bar.

* * *

Apparently, our group was being tracked and stalked by a mercenary security force of some technology manufacturer for reasons unknown. They seemed to be infiltrating the bar we were scouting, fully armed. So Dak, being the good gunslinger / Sniper assassin that he is, finds an empty 3rd floor balcony over looking the bar entrance. He lays belly flat on the balcony floor and sets his long las. He aims in on an agent just in time to hear 2 auto pistols cock. "You should have left when I gave you the chance, Off-worlder. Through Talent of rapid reaction and fast initiative, Dak actually goes first. He back somersaults, pulling his combat shotgun mid roll, burst fires into the body of the local man and half hamburgers his chest. Unfortunately, this does not kill him, so the man full auto fires his silenced double auto pistols with diamond headed rounds. Through some miracle, Dak dodges all the bullets, quick draws his own pistol and blows the man's brains out, leaving him to fall dead. Dak says, "Told ya you wouldn't like it the next time we meet." Then Dak walks out to the waiting police who stop him, but later find in favor of self defense. The gun fight had brought law enforcement attention, which had scattered the mercenary agents ... for now.

Any way, that was one of my favorite DH moments.

Our cleric went superman again this past weekend. We were fighting Tau, when two of their crisis suits dropped into the fight. One landed on our (thankfully) reinforced truck which I built for the group. The cleric climbs up the ladder on the back to get to it and throes down in melee with it for two rounds before it takes off and hovers about 15 feet off the ground about ten feet from the from front of the truck. The crisis suit then fires off a full burst from its laz guns and brings the cleric to 0.

The cleric runs forward, power hammer in hand, shouting "In the name of the Emperor, I will destroy all those who attempt to destroy me!" He leaps when he gets to the edge of the top of the truck and roll a 01 to hit, and a 10 for damage, to do somewhere in the thirsties worth of damage. His hammer slammed into the crisis suit's head and plowed straight through it, causing it to explode round him.

He takes no damage from the explosion thanks to his armor+toughness and lands in a kneel. He stands, spits out some blood and says, "Show me another heretic..."

My greatest in game moment would have to be what happened at my game last night. I run games in the Dragon's Lair in San Antonio, TX. In this adventure, the Acolytes had been dispacthed into the Scintillian underhive to track down a Narco Gang boss named Klightus Van Damme who had stolen something very valuable from a warehouse owned by the Logicians. While tracking him down, my players ran afoul of the Redemption. The Redemptionist leader beleived that these were the men from a vision he had received from the Emperor. So he let them tag along, purging underhive settlements. The Acolytes were horrified by the Redemptionists' methods so they decided to end this menace before any more settlements succumbed.

To make a long story short, the Acolytes tracked down Klightus to a settlement called Oswald's Warren where he had holed up in an abandoned manufactorum. They cleared out the manufactorum, defeated the Ashen Tear assassins sent to recover the stolen artefact in an epic assassin vs assassin fight and rigged the building to blow. They then lured the Redemptionists inside and dropped a building on them.

Betraying Ecclisarchy members, *tisk tisk*, what would your father say?

We had an entertaining moment the last week of the old GM running before I take the reigns for a few months.

Our team did alot of investigating on a desert world, we had a few rough fights in the cantina over the off-worlders not buying drinks for everyone. Then we discovered that my char (A noble-born ex-guardsmen turned scum) had assassins following him. And in addition to that, a rogue inquisisor was sending agents after us. So after a long day of pounding faces in we went to our luxery estate rooms for a good nights rest. In the middle of the night, twelve mercs stormed the building, six rappelling down the side of the building, six going down the stairs, and six comming up. We were boxed in. So the team met up in the hallway right as they exploded the windows to our room. We rushed for the neerest stairwell and tried to fight through the trap. Two of our team (an assassin and a guardsmen), got dropped into critical wounds, as the "thug" of our group (a highered muscle NPC) carried both of them, I set about cutting them to shreds. When it became apparent that we wouldnt have won, my character said "I am Ibram O'leath, it is I you were sent to capture. If you let my comrads live I will come quietly." And the reply I got was more gunfire. So after hacking through more of them, our psyker yelled "Your f**king with the wrong people, we are the inquisition!" To which they replied with ".... Hey, we're the inquisition." They stopped firing, and the leader came forward and said "By the order of Inquisitor Dox (BTW the radical) we were sent to purge the heretics occupying your floor, did you kill them?" Our psyker started stalling him, while we acted like we were making the dying comfortable. Then in one fluid motion we all turned around, I with a drawed dueling las, the rest with autos and combat shotguns and caught them unawares. With the supprise attack we killed all but the leader, but blew off one of his legs. My character walks over to him and says "Wrong inquisitor pal".

Needless to say we took him hostage and look forward to interrogating him in a few scant months.