I recently started a group off with "Maggots in the Meat" as the beginning adventure of a larger campaign, with a few changes of course because I don't think I've ever run an RPG adventure module straight from the book. After having a Void-Born acolyte litterally bump into one of the local scum while crawling toward the docks (she nearly fell when the floating platforms shifted with the waves, so the player decided that she'd get around better on her hands and knees), a fight was narrowly averted by a successful intimidation by our Mind-Cleansed Guardsman. As they headed to the docks in hopes of finding transport to the city, the scum lobbed a fuel canister at the Guardsman's head (which he just managed to duck out of the way from) and ended up with a showdown between 4 PC's and 6 thugs on a thin, rickety, and crowded dock.

There were no guns allowed in the fight, since the Port Authority is quite strict about that, so the Guardsman decided to show off some more bad-assery by pulling out his knife and throwing it at the nearest thug. One roll with 3 degrees of failure later, the knife finds its mark...

...sailing right past its intended target...

...and hitting a civilian squarely in the chest, causing them to fall off of the dock.

As the battle continued, other less-than-wonderful things happened as well, including the Void Born missing an axe swing and nearly falling off of the docks (again), the Cleric deciding to throw her sword (which actually hit, but went over the side with the scum that it impaled), and the Scum in the party decking one of the thugs with brass knuckles and then spending the rest of the fight trying to knock the guy the rest of the way off of the dock. The Port Authority tried to reach the docks but were having difficulty getting through the crowd that was watching, and our Cleric threatened one of the boat owners with her hammer to get a ride for the party before they got arrested.

You can tell that things are going to be interesting when the party is down 2 weapons after the first combat of the game. *laughs*

After an all epic session of clearing a building full of heretics, blowing up a truck and a commissar with a lot of grenades, We came to the end fight with was clearly a demon of some kind.
The fight was going to take place in a third floor; the main group was coming from the front and the assassin from the back (roof).
So it turns out to be a Demonnete, from here everything goes south, the tech priest which has the highest willpower fails TWICE the fear shock and goes into madness.
The rest also fails except the commissar (unshakeable faith).
So the commissar uses his bolt pistol in semi-automatic round after round scoring hit after hit, and shredding the demon to pieces, the guar after he shakes the fear goes toe to toe with it to hold it there, the psyker is reluctant to use powers because of the weaken veil effect (big metagame here!!!). At this point the fight is in a good course so the assassin steps in uses his mauler in semi automatic scoring 2 hits and tearing the leg of the demon apart, and tearing a nearby heretic leg too, which causes a massive explosion (crit chart) which ripped apart the poor tech priest, who in place explodes (he was charring ammunition also, bolter, grenades), so everyone takes more damage and the near weapon cache of the heretics blows. After the flames settles, we have a large chunk of meat which was the tech priest (uses his fate point to be resurrected, which is very good for a tech priest), the psyker is in 7 critical and losing copious amount of blood, the guardsman is at merely 5 critical (thank the emperor for true grit), the commissar a merely 2 critical, and the assassin unscathed with a dumb face.

I wonder what my players would say in this thread?

Would they go with fighting other "acolytes" on Iocanthos? The clash with sky pirates in dirigibles on Coseflame? Duel between pskyer and clock-work Ad Mech Magos? Brother Domis becoming an unbound daemonhost and destroying an Adeptus Arbites precinct fortress? Making deals w/ daemons to save their lives? Battling daemonettes and cultists in the skies of Baraspine? The Hive Eurus navigator massacre? Surviving their plane getting shot down in the toxic wastes of Gemmu? Getting anointed as heroes at the Imperial Cathedral at Vaneris?

Or maybe something else entirely. I just don't know.

Without a doubt our greatest moment was a couple of weeks back.

We're at a anniversary party with ALOT of bigwigs and important people, most of whom are militant. Fleet admirals, Generals, High ranking officials all round. We're attending this party deeply undercover with our Navis Nobilite (NOT A NAVIGATOR) Psyker, playing the part of one of the guests who 24 hours earlier comitted suicide in front of us. He's a biomancer so he doesn't have any trouble mimicing him, but aforementioned guest was a PDF general, who made the list for emperor knows what reason. Point being that our noble psyker, now in guise of an overdressed PDF general and with my scummer and our moritat reaper dressed up as his retinue, is waltzing into a room filled to the bursting point with Impirial heroes and bigshot military types. He quickly senses he is disliked and descides he can use this. He promtly trips down the stairs, swears as we pick him up, straining not the explode with laughter and pointedly insults the Impirial Guard General next to him for his poor reaction speed.

The party goes on and our psyker is gradually being hated more and more by the other guests. He speaks loudly of the incompetence of the Impirial Guards and how they are nothing compared to his "Elites of the Impirium, PDF troops". When a Navy admiral finally snaps and decides to teach him a lesson.

Navy Admiral: *whispers* "Don't you think you've overstayed your welcome. You are amongst people of finer breed than that of your own. If you have a shred of honour you should..."

Our Psyker: "Breed!? *loudly* You have a family too? I have a wife and three sons. Well, four really, but we don't talk about the oldest. Big disappointment he was. Joined the Navy *looks disgusted*.

Navy Admiral: "If you don't..."

Our psyker: *still loudly* "Yeah he's always been a black sheep that one. Joining the Navy PFFFT, *louder* If the Navy and Guards did what they we're supposed to do we wouldn't have to do their work for them!!"

This incurs the spontaneous wrath of half the room and the host drags our psyker into an adjacent room, our psyker apologizes on the way and drops his hat into the punchbowl while stumbling towards the room. They disappear into the room and the host starts asking what the hell our psyker thinks he's doing. At this time my scummer and our reaper enter the room and locks the door. Time to interrogate,

That was brilliant roleplaying on our psykers part and half of us was lying flat on our bellies because he did it so convincingly, however the story does not end here oh no.

My scummer checks the security network, It's offline. For a party boasting half segmentum solar's military heroes that's quite worrying, so we make our escape, now in possesion of the info we needed. Just then the party gets crashed by unknown assailants and yellow smoke starts billowing out of every open window in the building.

We wait for a full day before returning to check the house and find out what happened. Everyone is dead except for a few people who are missing. As we dig through the house my scummer (A heretek) leaves the room and heads for the security main station, in an adjacent building. While I'm gone the rest try to ID the bodies in the main hall.

Out of nowhere a Chaos sorcerer materializes (A sorcerer who we've foiled more than once, and last we saw him he was sucked into the warp). He's accompanied by the low humm of Personal Teleporters and no fewer than 5 obliterators (Chaos Techmarines, - NOT chaos terminators as they are often confused with), enter behind the sorcerer as backup. This time we're deep in it.

But do our party fear death?? oh indeed they do, but every notion of escape is instantly vaporized when our reaper flings herself at the sorcerer, while howling and chanting prayers to the emperor. She rolls the highest initative, Hits the sorcerer 4 times, scores 2 hits in his body and drops his health violently with righteous fury. She then proceeds to, - AND IM NOT KIDDING, score a hit in each arm, score righteous fury again (plainly, for all to see) drops him into critical, and cuts off BOTH his arms. He falls to the ground dead as a doornail.

The rest of the fight went completely in our favor. The marines of chaos are not protected by the emperors divine will and as such "they shall know no fear" is not applied to them, so 2 of them bolt, when the psyker is utterly destroyed by our frenzied assasin. Our metallan gunslinger doubletaps one of them in the head and our psyker and priest rushes a second. Our non-fighty adept pulls out his plasmagun, scores a righteous fury and rips off one obliterators head. the two remaining try to turn tail, but are summarily cut down by our psyker and priest. Fight's over in 3 rounds.

Let it be mentioned that NONE of us have exceeded 5000exp

I can quite conclusively say that a lowbie assassin flinging herself at a Chaos Space Marine sorceror in my game would probably be dead before she hit the ground.

Locque said:

Ditto.

Hey, everyone gets lucky. Had she not gotten the drop on him and one-shot him, he'd probably have killed her in his first action. These things, they happen.

Also, there's nothing meta-gamey about not using psyker powers when the veil is thin. All psykers can feel when the veil goes thin, even non psykers can sometimes feel "things aren't right" in those spots. And psykers know the risks of channeling the warp when the veil is thin. So that's totally valid.

As for my story, I've told this a few times before, but I think it bears repeating. This is first session, and the first thing the players do after they disembark from the shuttle after their breifing:

The party goes to meet their contact to get the ball rolling. Upon entering her hab, the psyker is paranoid and decides to "sense presence" (even though, as it's a Hive Hab, there will be tons of those). Though she can't fail, even on a one, she still rolls a 9 right off the bat, first power use of the campaign. Opting to save her fate point unless the roll goes way crazy (we allow rerolls on the phenomena chart), I roll to see what happens...

Just as they walk in, all the plants in the room and outside wither, die, and turn to ash in moments. The Redemptionist (yes, a redemptionist cleric and a void born psyker with "living nightmare" in the same group, this'll be fun) flips out and puts his gun to the contacts head ("Filthy mutant! What have you done to us?!"). The Adept in the group, being an old and dear friend of the contact, pulls his gun and tries to call off the Cleric (being very devout himself, he doesn't want to harm the cleric). Their assassin just looks at the mess in wonder and distress, as she already doesn't trust the crazy man or the contact. The psyker, devious thing that she is, takes control of the situation and announces "There's a rogue psyker nearby, I can sense it!" (rolls a 02 on deceive). Needless to say, not how I thought things would get going.

The party immediately goes into defensive mode, the priest roughly hands the contact over to the adept, and runs off with the other two to pursue the "rogue". Thinking fast, the psyker then uses "Touch of Madness" to convince some poor random schmuck two levels up that he's just awakened as a psyker and is consequently destined for the Black Ships (with the side effect of also making him twitchy and paranoid). The screaming, moaning and crying draws the party closer. Listening at the door, the priest hears the man bemoaning his fate, which is more than enough evidence for him to condemn the poor guy.

Kicking in the door, as the cleric was expecting no real resistance, touches the now-crazed scapegoat off. He drew a gun and sprayed wildly (missing completely) at the door. The redemptionist took a shot, then after getting perforated by multiple rounds (the psyker's just watching the whole thing while the assassin is catching up) charged the poor guy with a chainsword. He severed the arm at the shoulder and sprayed a fountain of blood all over the priest and the room.

Keeping the act going, the psyker shakes her head, "We should have kept him alive for the ships" all the while having counted on the priest's zeal and paranoia to kill the only evidence of her "slip". They return, damaged and covered in blood, to the contact's hab. There they find a ticked off adept and no contact. The cleric freaks out, while the adept dismissively explained that he had her sent somewhere safe, that he had already gotten everything they needed to know out of her, and that they needed to get the hell out of dodge because the arbites, the local constabulary, and Emperor knows who else were all on their way due to the warp event and the bloodbath upstairs. Thankfully he also made a rather difficult drive check to get them away, and pulled his contacts to cover up their involvement.

The whole exchange with the contact was supposed to be a 2-4 minute conversation, needless to say i did not expect this "side-trip". Friggin hilareous though. >D

That was quite genous of the psyker, genuine credit is due for that.

Ira said:

Oh, no doubt. Given that she's competely immune to all attempts to read her mind, the inquisitor doesn't even have a way to know something is up without more evidence of a pattern emerging (if this starts happening a lot, he'll figure it out fairly fast).

When the PCs in the frozen hulk realized:

A)There were heating pads under the largest orks.

B)The heating pads had turned on.

Given the robustness of orks I decided ork hibernation was just freezing the lot of them.

Ah, the old 'ork in the ice' trick. That's actually an old campfire story on Valhalla. It's even mentioned in Caves of Ice, with the footnote that while orks probably couldn't survive it, fresh ork corpses are certainly found frozen in Valhallan glaciers fairly often. Personally, I like the fact that the footnote was probably couldn't survive- leaves it open for mean GMs to have fun with the exact same trick you just pulled...