My Players may eventually be journeying to Dusk, a Death world, and while I've read the core book sentence on the place and the parts on Death worlds and Xenos in Creatures Anathema I can't seem to find anything more on it's inhabitants and planetary weather or dangers / pit falls of going there.

I do want to stay in cannon as possible, if possible, for Dusk so I'm wondering if there's a supplement with more info out there that I've missed. I don't usually purchase scenario books and so it might be likely there's something on it in one of those but I'm not sure which.

Also if there are other GM's or Players out there that have advice or stories about what made their games or trips to a Death world memorable, be it the environmental challenges, xeno beasts or something else all together terrifying I'd love to hear them to get a feel for portraying and capturing the essence of a game session and story set on a Death world. Can be as detailed as custom stats for creatures or as simple as a great moment of gameplay shared in a few sentences.

Hello Hello!

There's actually a bit of information on dusk in

A) the Inquisitor's Handbook- there's a Dusk Origin, some drugs that came from Dusk (Night-Dust in the Hive world section).

B) In the last book in the Haarlock Legacy- Dead Stars I think? Its supposed to Happen on Dusk, and I think there's a planet Gazateer about it- and the Dusk Hag makes quite the appearance I hear.

C) In the Core-rulebook, there's two dusk creatures at the very end. Some sort of spider thing, and small poisonous flier.

I am a big fan of dusk myself, and I am planning on taking my players there after this current mission.

For General death world encounters, I asked the same question as you about Kenov III and got a LOT of helpful advice and encounters. Check out the Game-master forums for this thread.

I am going to be running that portion of the game on Friday- so if you can wait that long, I can tell you how it went, what was popular, what wasn't, etc etc.

Though, for Dusk in particular, I would love to hear what people have to say. I do know that Gregorious has run a few games on Dusk, so he's likely the resident expert- if you search around the forums, you'll find a few things he's had to say about the place.

The way I picture it in my heads? Misty, foggy, wet swamp-lands with ominous, dead looking trees that loom out as if to grab you. Shapes moves around the edge of your vision, people go into the fog- nothing comes out. Spindly creatures that you confuse for trees and branches, but are claws ready to pull you into the darkness before you can make a peep. I want to say general darkness- and the darkness is dangerous. The only way to fight is old style gas/oil lamps, torches and fires- because frequent warp events cause constant electrical failures and when darkness falls, people vanish.

I am bound to get more ideas later, and I will let you know how my evening goes on Kenov III on Friday!

Please do! That sounds fantastic! I'll look up those threads and see what the have to offer as well, thanks so much!

Since Dusk is mostly swampy, aquatic predators that combine normal damaging attack with the threat if drowning (the way alligators/crocadiles bite their prey and then drag it into deep water) are a good way to scare the crap out of your players...

Hey!

So, the adventure was a big success- though granted, things got a bit mangled on my part- I am confident they left the planet hating death worlds and plants especially.

I used a lot of atmospheric creeping plants, lots of descriptions, lots of smells but we can generally split the adventure into three parts.

The idea was to avoid killing the players pointlessly but to punish them horrendously if they did anything stupid- and luckily, they sometimes did when they were stuck in between a rock and a hard place.

It started out with the hacking of plants and vines to cross and the sap that smells so bad it it causes people to throw up- here, everything was going relatively well, and it was just to point out the effort in travelling across. A mere 6km journey ends up taking about 10 hours to get across.

After they hack trees for a while, avoid creeping plants, refuse to touch anything and worry about traps here and there- and the large things they can hear groaning in the distance, they eventually reach a grove with large, bulbous fruits. All while several large strange xenos insects hover around them, massing in numbers. These guys did nothing but buzz horrendously, giving them a penalty to perception test. They refused to attack them, fearing a counter-attack hehe.

As they advance in rank and file, some of these strange plants sway suddenly and abruptly, with a chance of striking one of the players- but they avoid it. At this point, this is when the sap on the armor begins to eat to trough it. They have to decide between using the water they had on them, or another source- finding a lake or some such was completely and utterly out of the question (which is good, because I had a lake monster waiting to drag them into the depths )

One of the players decide to hack and the fruit/plant things, hoping to get some juice. He gets a spray of the Yellow mist and a toughness test. But they all passed it, and just to make sure, the tech-priest passed around some detox.

As they attempted to leave the clearing, by still hacking a path (a few of them were fatigued at this point, and had suffered some damage to their armors- but they knew better, and started alternating who was hacking and who waiting behind in order to match the sap's acidity rate (so a few hours before it took effect and started eating trough the armor). That's when the Vox warned them about the thing in the sky coming their way.

Here, they spent a bit of time trying to escape it- it was fun, they enjoyed that part- especially the scale of the creature. Their guardsmen escort looked up, froze in horror (it was a friend who was visiting from abroad that decided to join up during this session so I gave him five guardsmen who were holding up the Vox-caster as an escort and as red shirts ). They all started getting picked up, carried away, barely saving each other. One thing I did here- for the duration of the adventure, I used a d10 and numbered the players to see who would get targeted. I convinced the main cleric player to pick number 10, because it was the Emperor's number. He was, for all intents and purposes, the only player who had several charms and prayed to them extensively. So, when the first giant worm-like tentacle targeted him, I gave him an option: turn that roll of a 10, into a 1. Without telling him who played the 1. After some moral debating, he agreed- and got the option to do that at several occasions during the game

To escape the monster, they had to hack away a bit of path- three rounds they spend with that thing. Then they had an option to cut trough a clearing or to hack some more towards a metallic gleaming thing in the bushes they'd noticed. The first option meant getting closer to the lab they were sent to investigate much easier, after all no hacking involved- the second meant taking a more difficult pass but staying in the range of the tentacles a few more rounds.

The guardsman and the psyker decided to go trough the clearing, the others wanted to hack to the source of the gleaming. Obviously, the guardsman and the Psyker get hit by the giant venus fly-trap, (what they were all trying to avoid all trough the adventure hehe) but they managed to climb out of it before it closes up by rerolling with some fate points. The others manage to escape the tentacles by ducking and hiding, avoiding them.

At this point, they gather up again and regroup at the metal object- a crashed lander. Inside, they find some plot related items and a chance to rest up. But even here the plants were after...

After, they reach the final section: a thick forest that surrounds the lab. When they go in, it comes alive around them- trashing bushes, chaos: they rush across, risking some fatigue for that last hacking sprint and into a an area around the lab without any plants: as if a bunch of elephants had stomped across it. There's the doors to the lab right there- and thats when the forest itself follows them: Last attack Vs 5 Ripped whips. They manage to kill 3 more of the red-shirts, and a few close calls with two players. At this point, the tech-priest manages to open the doors and they all dive inside - only after the untouchable assassin manages to save the caught player by dealing 68 dmg with righteous fury to one of the rippers...

I played it quite loose with the Ripper's rules, gave them some penetration, but kept them primitive- but, I made it clear that when three vines wrapped around a single player, the Ripper didn't need to do damage to kill, they just ripped apart their target.

Surprisingly, all of this took about 3, 3 and a half hours- but it was a big success, the players quite enjoyed it.

Now, the atmosphere in Dusk is quite different- I think its a lot more civilized, with a few settlements and stuff, maybe some fortresses- so that chaotic all hell breaks loose approach won't really work out, but well, we'll see how it goes!

Dusk is a Creepy Haunted Forest In Space.

I'm not sure it's a Death World though.

bogi_khaosa said:

It's classed as a 'Feral World', but by all accounts it's nearly as deadly as a true Death World.

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Glad to hear the session worked out for you, Saldre. I haven't sent my players to a Death World yet; when I do, I'll probably borrow some of your tips.

The Dusk Hag....(Final Part Haarlock Trilogy)

A couple of other suggestions (based on the canon sources already referenced) that are particular hazards on Dusk beyond the wildlife are plagues (caused by the swampy atmosphere allowing the growth of nasties that can be transferred by mosquitoes and other such beasties), and the thin warp veil.

You could open up a vista of disease-based fun (requiring medicae checks and investigation), or warp anomalies that could cause all manner of problems from subtle distortions of reality that the players may not even notice at first (maybe calling for awareness or intelligence checks) to a full-scale Chaos incursion requiring them to team up with the local planetary forces and coordinate an attack.

A person of a nefarious mindset could have a lot of fun with players on Dusk!

How about some SPOILERS ALERTS chaps. Although I GM too, I start the last part of the Haarlock Trilogy this Sunday as a player and I now know we are going to Dusk and that there is something called the Dusk Hag that will make life difficult for us.

Better yet, please discuss published adventure content in the GM section, it's only one click away.

Apologies- I will spoiler out my comments.

Edit- which I can't seem to do...

Sorry about that...

Saldre said:

Thanks for all the other stuff you have posted here Saldre, it's very good and I think I will pinch some of it. And looking on the bright side, I have some clues about what to spend my XP on before Sunday (I'm SOOoooo BAaaad!)

Thanks!

But that was just my session report- if you'd like more ideas, head on over to the Original thread where I requested help. Most of the ideas are theirs, and they have a few more that I didn't quite get to use but that I would have loved to! (The Tick-leafs for one...)

Ps- Good luck on your game on sunday

Saldre said:

Man that sounded like a totally awesome adventure and session! I wonder about the Ripper Whips from creatures anathema. Did you use the GM Tools / Screen supplement to generate your own xenos like the lake monster or just wing it yourself?

I'm seriously considering sitting down and trying to brainstorm some really horrific and bizzaro xenos for Dusk, I wish I had experience in something like African or Amazon rainforest ecology, there's so much in nature already we can just tweak that'll freak out Players and throw them for a loop.

(That was only the first half of the session! [We tend to play rarely, so when we do, we play all-nighters...])

To be completely honest, I was going to wing it with the Lake-monster, but it could have easily been generated with that thing because I do have the game master's kit.

Generator Xenos for Dusk would be a great idea- there's no doubt that my players are heading out there next session for a relatively "free form" game, so a bunch of side-quests and encounters would be cool, especially of the Creepy kind.