Well someone is inevitably going to do it so why not start discussing it now? Ignoring differences in power levels for the moment, postulate possible plot hooks where a squad of Guardsmen and Deathwatch Space Marines would work together for the length of a campaign...

Knowledge is power, guard it well : Squad "The Party" is part of a regiment seconded to the Jericho Reach campaign. After a failed attack on a Tyranid world, the regiment is forced to retreat and effectively reduced to just "The Party." The fight to safety is brutal and forces the squad against several new strains of Tyranid but victory favors the Imperium that day.

Upon making it back... well the good news is that the squad is safe from any IG policking. The bad news is that this protection comes from Deathwatch/Ordos Xenos and comes at the cost of Deathwatch wanting them to do it AGAIN. Good news again is that a Deathwatch marine has been attached to the squad as an observer...

You could do all sorts of things.

1. A specialist commando platoon sets down on a world to carry out a strike behind enemy lines. Their enemy - a renegade planetary governor - has been marshalling forces for a full scale assault against a number of key Imperial Agri-Worlds, and the local Guard commanders feel that a specialist platoon of Catachan Commandos will do well on this heavily forested world. Upon arrival the commanders of this platoon (the players) come across a covert Kill-Team of four Marines. They learn that the governor is under alien influence, and that the Kill-Team have been sent in to ascertain the presence of Tyranid vanguard organisms. Teaming with the Kill-Team, the commando platoon help to infiltrate the important supply depots of the governor and establish if the world has become a new target for a Hive Fleet.


2. The leader of a Cadian company is called aside by his superiors only to find himself face to face with a Kill-Marine of the Deathwatch. This Marine has been sent to hunt down and eliminate an Ork Warboss that recently entered this area of space. The Kill-Marine is one man, and cannot fight the Ork WAAAGH himself, and so he has asked for a significant force of Cadians (the player's) to ensure he can beat through the central horde and kill the Ork Warboss.


And so on and so forth. As I said, lots of stuff you could do.

BYE

I'm already running a combo of Dark Heresy and Deathwatch, where the players are stormtroopers sergeants and each has several people under him. I've made up new Orders(solo) abilities and tactics(squad) to use as a small group or part of a larger assault featuring different components (for instance there is a Unit Tactic that improves both armour and infantry if they work together) largely based upon the Orders from the IG tabletop game.

Players make DH characters and I make their flunkies at 1/2 XP, give them all things like basic weapon training las/sp, a standard armour and a standard gun with no real chance of looting things in the field(if you requisition it, you’ve got bring it back, and captured guns are nice, but ammo is a problem). Use DH rules for requisition and renown(adjusted to DH chars again).

It might seem like a lot of paperwork and that rounds might get bogged down in dice rolling but after a single session my players got used to keeping the speed up. It's also very handy if you want to split the players up, so each squad can achieve their own objective, the player who's squad is in charge gives out the char sheets for his flunkies to the other players so they can have some fun too.
Its a lot of fun so far, might have to type this all up into a cohesive document one day...

Rift said:

Rift, I don't mean to be rude or disrespectful to this style of play, but it seems to me that this concept would bog the game down needlessly if you went above two or three players. A squad is at the least four individuals, which means each player has three flunkies....so you are looking at eight to twelve characters each time or more....which means you have at the least if you are giving them enemies to fight of equal size...at least ten to twenty turns per round....adding in the factor of additional rounds it would seem like combat has to take a significant amount of time.

That aside, I commend the amount of work you put into the concept. It had to take you awhile to do all that. I am curious, does this mean you are using modified horde rules for the enemies? If not, then it seems like you would have a significant draw of time in combat compared to time outside of combat even if you have just one fight a session.

Depending on how the game is designed to work, you could assign the players as directly below the DW marines and follow them around/follow their order. Or they could be in a fighting force tasked with other missions that helps the kill team out in theirs.

Personally i hope that the game will differ alot from DW, i dont want to see a guardsman version of DW. So hopefully you will be apointed a strategic area that needs to be captured and held until the Kill-Team can reach it. Or your squads need to take out a hangar of some sort. Perhaps Distract and orcish horde while the team kill the War boss.

I could see a very rewarding campaign done by having interweaving events between two games. Where events in one game effect some of what happens in the other.

Say you play Deathwatch one week, and the PCs kick some major butt, making a big victory and such. Only War next week? Not such a hard go, maybe the PCs go into a building full of enemies the Marines killed - just as a minor example of the sorts of things.

Done right, keeping meticulous notes, alternating sessions, you could do some really neat storytelling like this if you were ambitious, and the players might love it.

I think for a mission behind enemie lines a single SM would be a great liability to a squad of veteran guardsmen.

They know how to sneak and they know that they have to be low profile to survive. The SM just can not sneak unless he's using scout armor and stuff.

Umbranus said:

Or he is a Raven Guard ^^

SwornEagleFeather said:

Civil discourse is always appreciated, if all PnP players had similar likes and dislikes then we'd need only one system wouldn't we?

But the slowdown is very marginal with the use of a battlemap and some markers I made, with simple info like horde magnitude and distance. Each round is about the same amount of time and we have a total of 4 players and 11 flunkies, not counting allies, aircraft, artillery strikes, minefields and armour.

And yes, modified horde rules and enemies(no Tau Commanders with 90wounds) and a lot of standard weapons/armour on the flunkies side. Not a lot of extra damage on the horde's side but still no dodging/parrying so cover and planning becomes very important. My players have been playing for almost 9 years and like this style of play, but I do understand that it's not everyone's cup of tea.

Fair enough, Rift, I was just thinking that might take a fair bit of time to still do a combat even with hordes. 11 flunkies plus 4 players....It seems to me like that would take at least an hour for one combat though? Do you have a rough estimate of how long each combat takes? I've become quite curious about this.

Also, is the no dodging/parrying for everyone or just hordes or just hordes/flunkies? I'm extremely curious about this combination of DH stuff with only War.

Also to go onto topic: Only War with Deathwatch, a squad of Imperial Guardsmen working along side two or three Space Marines sent to invade a planet with a special mission to take down some really important individual in the war. A chaos group with some Chaos Marines would make sense to have Space Marines alongside a Guardsman war front.

@Umbranus

They know how to sneak and they know that they have to be low profile to survive. The SM just can not sneak unless he's using scout armor and stuff.

Which is why a SM behind enemy lines would very likely be using scout armour or stummers. It's generally the IG that has to make do with what equipment they have while SMs get almost whatever they want.

Dulahan said:

This is what I've been wanting to do.

I'd run a central Dark Heresy or Only War Campaign. At certain points the guardsmen or acolytes might discover and report some problem they can't overcome. Next session, the players play a special mission as a Deathwatch kill-team dispatched to act on the intelligence gathered by the primary characters.

Umbranus said:

Actually that can be used as an advantage. While the SM is playing Godzilla and everyone is focusing on him the team can sneak to their objective.

Umbranus said:

That could depend on the chapter, the terrain, and whether the marine is smart enough to understand that running produces noise which is not always desirable. I mean I know SMs are indoctrined to believe that changing paint jobs shames the armor's spirit but what about splattering mud on it and dressing it in vines or branches?

Likewise, whether they know how to sneak particularly well or not depends on what kind of unit the guard squad was from. Heavy Infantry? Probably not.