Hi,

I plan to play the adventure Frozen Reaches with my group. But I have the feeling that Frozen Reaches is made for lower ranks like two or three. My Group consists of six players when everyone is present and they are rank six to eight and one player has already reached 45000 experience points with selfmade ranks and carreers. Now I’d like to ask, if anybody had some experience with playing Frozen Reaches on a higher rank. I fear the war could turn out too easy for the characters or am I mistaken? Thanks for possible answers.

It's Orks. Add more until you reach the appropriate levels of danger and fun. The groundwar itself relies very little on the players' stats, being more a test of what resources they can gather and how to distribute them. Obviously some of the skill challenges should have an increased difficulty as well. Really, as long as you're prepared to think ahead and tweak the encounters to suit your players, you'll be fine. Same as any published adventure.

Rank 6 to 8 eh? Add in the worldbreka

find/replace 'ork raider' with 'ork kroozer'

Errant is correct, though I would say that if you have a fleet, it might break the adventure a little, and you would need to compensate.

Yeah you are both probably right. The fleet shouldn’t be a problem, because my group never cared for a whole fleet, but they love their cruiser. More orks sounds reasonible as does the upgrading of the ork ships. The defending fleet will also be a bit weaker, because Blitz has already lost his cruiser earlier, so no problem there. I only feared that the characters could push the defending strength through their high skill levels too much, similar to a starship battle, where this also happens regularily.
I will remember that when I’ll prepare to run the adventure, but it should be a while till we will play it.

In space battles add a couple of Ork Kroozers, stick the crew rating at 50 to 60 and allow them to do 2 supplementary actions a turn (lock on target, hit and run, etc)

That'll put the fear into them.

In personal combat, add a few Nobz in mega armour or just up the number of boys, although after the last session i ran with Orks, i recommend giving your orks something with some penetration. Choppas do nasty damage but good armour can gimp them quite well. Orky power claws on the Nobz however are sick sick sick and i love them.

Yeah in the later ranks weapons without penetration are not that great with the high AP-Values some characters can achieve, already noticed with the Rak’Gol. I will bear that in mind and even if a power claws are sick, the players also have there power fits and other stuff like Force Fields. I will see how it will goes with the suggested adaptations because my group is finally ready to play Frozen Reach. Although the characters have changed since I asked the last time. Some have no fate points left, one fall to chaos (the 45000 xp Arch-Militant) and the rest is scared, because of the last encounter with Necrons.

I'm not scared! ^ò.ó^

Well, I suppose I shouldn't spy in this thread because Luther is my GM

Well, I just finnished running act 2 with my PC's. They are only rank 4 (well, about 200xp short of rank 5) but are very well resourced (PF 81, a small fleet including a Chalice class BC, a Firestorm class FF, a Cobra class DD, a Star-Clipper transport and a Loki Q-Ship with the fighter cargo bay conversion. They also brought about 35,000 of their own troops with them).

Act 1 presented few problems for balance, as it really is mostly social interaction.

Act 2 required some tweaking. The party was going to dominate the space war, but that was fine I just kept mentioning that they simply did not have enough ships to cover all the avenues of approach to the planet. For the ground war, that required a bit of work due to the vast millitary might they brought with them. I added 10 Str to each ork attack, and started the Orks with 12 roks on the ground. Might sound like a lot of bonuses for the orks, but it worked out fine with the party holding all 4 walls and the forge at the end of period 3, just... they were really at the point of thinking that they would not survive another wave of attacks.

For individual missions, that is where you will have to tweak it considerably based upon individual party strengths.

Well that sounds rather powerful. My group only as a PF of 77 and one cruiser and one destroyer. The destroyer is currently on the way, maybe arriving in time to participate in a part of the invasion (the navigation test was quite bad) and there cruiser is heavily damaged. We played part 1 yesterday and the captain did fairly well in the social part. Even some others talked with the secondary characters. Only Elizabeth Orleans is still wary, because the captain, not the rest of the crew, is pious, for the Ecclesiarchy and on the side of the Imperium. The captain also botched the last roll to influence her. At the moment I decided she would stay as long as it is profitable for her. I might rule that she abandon Damaris if the explorer try something funny or General Remi Dante seizes to post of the governor. Is this reasonably? Also how do you decided if Sylvia Locke stays or leave Damaris? Good standing is enough? I am uncertain. The captain has influenced her quite a bit, partly because she as the battle fleet home world, but didn’t clearly say that staying is the right choice. Oh an the seneschal left a vox-bug in her office, which was caught after the talk with the captain. Maybe this should make her chance her decision?
So next time is part 2 and I hope it will not be easy for the players. I already have some more optional encounters in mind. Problem is I have no idea how hard it is to defend Damaris with the existing baseline. Oh and I made a mistake. The explorers have a barrack on board their ship. It contains roughly 4000 soldiers and some tanks. I made at an equivalent of 1 Damaris Hghland Levy battalion. But today I noticed one battalion is only a fourth of 4000 man, which is the equivalent of one regiment. I misread it an thought one battalion is 4000 man. Should I correct it and give to explorer four instead of one battalion with the same stats as the Damaris Hightland Levy? Or is this already too much and it will be to easy?

Luther Engelsnot said:

Up to you, really - you can always keep it as one unit but up its effective strength. Handwave it however you like - the Levy have the home ground advantage, for one thing.

To make the numbers more believeable and to make the seige feel more epic, I cut a zero off planetary population and added a zero to the number of troops in the Highland Levy units. I also stretched each 5 day period out to 1 month of time to really hammer home the leangthy seige aspect. All of these changes can be made without any game mechanic alterations necessary. Make these changes and your party will appreciate the 1337'ness of their 4000 men being equal to 10,000 men, plus that would help reflect the integrated tank support of their forces.

Plus monthly cassualty figures in the tens of thousands with projected ork losses in the hundreds of thousands is much more epic.

Well my group reached Part III of the adventure and is on the way to the ork rok building facility, after they sacrificed their half crew as shock troopers to hold the walls and shard’s forge barely. Now I wanted to ask if anybody has some useful tips for the final ship battle. I don’t want to play it out in detail with that many ships, but it is important for the adventure how many they lost, so any recommendations? Thanks for the help.

pair off the allied and enemy ships (or two to one, or whatever) and resolve the combat between the PCs and it's counterpart/s, and assume similar results for the other pairings?