A while ago I started working on a Mara campaign. All I could dig up about the planet were the few mentions from the core book and the Inquisitor's Handbook, so i'd started working on different versions of the planet.

Then I got a chance to look at Dead Stars. Well, this planet is even more messed up than i thought. Anyways, it looks like a lot of fun, but I don't have a current group, and as I'm leaving the country for school in a little under a month, I don't really have time for a full Dead Stars run through.

So I'm looking at taking stuff from Dead Stars and adapting a shorter, more action based campaign. Anyone else used Mara as a setting or have thoughts about what to take from something like Dead Stars to make a dakka-heavy campaign with some good mind-twisting bits?

The hardest thing might be to come up with a reason regarding "Why did we go here anyway?" The plant is abandoned and quarantined, after all. The imperium is not intending to take it back.

Idea: The number of ships which leave the warp next to Mara "by accident" increase alarmingly. As sensor scan (including a number of Pskyer in survey gun cutters) revealed a strang Psychic build up that is strong enough to be perceivable from Orbit... and possibly the reason for this.

For some reason, the Inquisiton did not choose to destroy the planet (perhaps to costly? or they fear the Mara Strain to be actually spread by this?) but deploy a large group of acolythes and guardsman.. in the hope that SOME OF THEM reach the exact location, find out what this is and put and end to it.

Start with several platoon and half a dozen cells. Then, as they travel near teh location, decimate them.

The source: Some crasehd and previously unknown alien race which reacts strangely to the Mara Infestation.. actually using their warp-technology from their wrack to lure in more ships, using captives from savivour pods of the ships (which break apart from entering Mara to close to its gravity) both as energy (they drain live energy for their system) as well as providing the mara strain with more breeding stock (by accident or willingly..they might be a hive race which Ship-Queend got seriousyl messed up by a Mara-Infestation..with the xeno-surviors know seeing Mara-Strain as part of their "hive"

An interesting idea. I really did like how Dead Stars gave us a short history of the planet and what sort of things happened there over its history.

My initial thought was pursuing some sort of major heretic (rogue space marine, sorcerer, something like that) who hijacked a ship another notable Inquisitor was on. The reasoning was pretty shaky, but perhaps there's something to the idea of some terrible artifact or rift deep underneath the station.

You could also set your shot run back in time a bit and go for a survival horror story.

1) A certain penal colony has recently been having a drastic rise in trouble. Violent outbreaks, unaccounted for deaths amongst the prisoner population, and strange inconsistent reports from the High Warden of Mara has the Lord Marshal concerned. Something's not right. A team of Arbiters (the PC's with at least one C hastener) who work for Judge Absolvus is transferred there after the Judge is contacted by Goreman's office. Their mission: discretely investigate the Arbiter's stationed there for signs of weakness, negligence, and/or corruption and gather what evidence they can for the Judge. He is inbound to Mara without the High Marshals knowledge, but not due to arrive for a few months yet, enough time for his vanguard to gather the evidence necessary to put the Arbiters their to trial and quietly cull any weakness and corruption from their ranks before any other Adaptus agency could learn of such existing within the Arbiter's ranks. Not long after their arrival, all hell breaks lose...

~or~

2) The characters are just a few of thousands of fresh-faced young, naive, and very nervous conscripts into His Righteous Army, the Imperial Guard They've all been uprooted from their homes and lives to fight courageously (and then bleed and die horribly as Sgt. Cunningham, that bastard, always likes to say with a grin) far from home in something called the Margin Crusade. But then, during routine drill's, catastrophe strikes. The ship begins twisting and buckling and there's a gellar field flicker. Without warning, it drops from the warp but continues it's disintegration. The Guardsmen, all green recruits, desperately try to escape the horror as order breaks down, commissars start killing kids who've panicked, and the PC's along with the rest of their squad-mates have to keep their heads clear and make it to a salvation-pod to escape the doomed ship. And that's where their troubles begin as their pods hatch opens onto a barren inhospitable stretch of ice and tundra with the only safe haven showing up as a mining structure 200 klicks to the north-north east. They, along with the survivors from the other pods will have to survive the bitter conditions of Mara which they are ill-equipped to do and finally make it to shelter, but once there, would they be able to survive the shelter they've found (and then survive their rescuers when they come)?

Graver, I'd like to say that your "prequel" ideas are top notch. I'd just like to add that you shouldn't be worried to throw in a few Inquisitorial operatives into those different games if you wished. After all, it sure is suspicious that most of the survivors of the Mara Landing Massacres were poached by Isstvanian Inquisitors not long after the fact! If you think your cell can handle that, throwing in secrets and opposing loyalties can make for a delicious bowl of intrigue.