Hi everyone, on monday I want my group to face an eversor assasin from the ascension dark hersey supplament. Minus the three melta bombs, It's going to use those to sabotage some of their ship.

My explorers consist of a rank one rogue trader nearly rank two plasma pistol power dagger and mono sword, a rank 1 nearly rank 2 kroot mercenary, a rank 2 astropath with terrify dominate and reprogram as his powers and a rank 1 nealry rank two missionary with a flamer and chainsword.

Do you think the group can handle it? Or should I give them a bit of help and if so how much?

Who did they manage to loss off that badly?

Three letters: TPK.

Ascenscion starts around rank 8, as Dark Heresy figures things. A starting Rogue Trader group is, in theory, equal to about DH rank 5. But, what playtesting I've seen shows that DH characters punch significantly harder than 'equivalent' RT characters, and that Ascenscion is overpowered. I predict the Eversor will go through them like a scythe through wheat.

Cheers,

- V.

Yes the Eversor is very very powerful enemy itt vwill kill the entire party.

Your PCs are the 'kids' in a slasher movie. All they can do is run and pray.

That thing is a beast. One of the preeminent killers in the Imperium, quite capable of killing an entire squad of Space Marines and just be getting warmed up.

I would even hesitate to set it on a beginning Ascension party.

Errant said:

They were forced into picking sides between two inquisitors. The one they pissed off had snuck an evorssor onto their ship at the start of the campaign after saving them from it incase they went rogue, which they did.

Well I really want them to fight it so can you guys think of creative ways to cripple it? Maybe it was damaged in cryo or during an earlier tussel with some of the PC's gaurds.

I clearly need to handicap it if my PC's will be "kids in a slasher movie".

Ehhh, this really isn't how an Inquisitor would normally use an Eversor, it's more suited to the Venenum or Callidus houses. I'd take a leaf out of the infamous Slaughter of Clan McKenzie (Eversor slaughtered over 300 people in one night, resorting to a variety of improvised weapons including a butter knife and a soup spoon). Have the eversor begin its mission with a series of terror missions, leaving red corridors of death as it wades through the Explorers' crew, leaving entire barracks compartments completely devoid of life. The players know only one thing; there's a seemingly unstoppable monster aboard their ship. Now they have to hunt it down! Let them try whatever they can come up with to track it down, but don't make it easy. Reinforce that the butchery is unsettling the crew as rumours start to spread.

As things continue to their bloody end, have the Eversor's equipment start failing. Remember that these assassins aren't meant for infiltration wetwork like a Callidus, they're short-burn tactical warheads, designed to cause the maximum damage in the shortest time. So it slowly runs out of ammunition for the pistol, the custom-forged power blade is damaged by something, breaking the blade off nearly at the hilt. the power-field now spits furious spurts of energy around the edges, nowhere near the usual crackling fire that is more common. The powerful regenerative tonics and assault drugs are starting to ravage the eversor's flesh, causing unpredictable results

tl;dr It runs out/short of ammunition, the power-sword is reduced to a power-knife with an Unstable quality or somesuch, possibly it can only use a combat drug every other round or only has one/two uses of each left.

I didn't give the full story to keep my posts short but the Eversor had been encounterd before.

I really like your idea of the blood stained corridors and the eversor slowly wearing down.

Mabey When the PC's encounter it the eversor could be on it's last legs and all they have to do is find creative ways of stayng away from it until it collapses from over using it's combat drugs.

Honestly i'd just save the encounter for when your PC's have more experience under their belts then look for ways to balance it down.

No, I'm going to reduce its BS and WS down from 70 to 50, and all its other stats by ten due to damage. I wish I hadn't used an eversor in retrospect but I did and the Throne Agent on their ship needs a distration to jump ship.

lurkeroutthere said:

At around rank 4 that would probably be a pretty good fight.

What makes the evissor (if it's the one i'm thinking of) isn't it's raw stats but it's special abilities, i think your still headed for TPK but eh.

Ok, an Eversor assassin against a second rank party………..

Eversor assassins are one of the ultimate terror weapons of the Imperium (although this is not always represented well in their rules in W40K).

This Eversor will, by its very nature, kill everything in its path, reserved for the Imperiums most hated enemies where only the application of unlimited ferocity and brute force will be required, both to kill and scare the pants off the enemy forces, sending a very clear message. So what is it your players have done to be targetted by such a beast?

Given the sheer power of the Assassin Temples and the fact that its operatives are known to have been used, even against the High Lords of Terra in the past, the authorization to assassinate a target must come from the very highest echelons of Imperial command. For this reason, Assassins are watched very closely to make sure that they are under the control of the Imperium. A regular Inquisitor isn't likely to have a "Pet" assassin and if he wanted to keep an eye on the PCs and/or sabotage thier ship, he'd probably have a number of agents more than capable to the task (even Death Cult Assassins) but IF and its a big IF he was going to use an Assassinorum agent it would be, as said, a Callidus who's polymorphine would render the whole task very simple. With a deft flick of the wrist she would rig the gellar field and warpdrives to overload in mid warp jump, then quietly kill the captain and senior staff in a very brutal way, assume thier identity, order the crew to prepare to jump, quietly hop off the ship to her waiting transport and watch the ship jump away to oblivion.

Alternativly a Venenum Assassin would simply poison the ships air and water, killing all the crew in minutes, but regardless the idea of a temple assassin going up against anything other than top rank characters who have some some very, very naughty things just doesn't work and will result, as said above, in a TPK. The fact that your having doubts and the discussion is about how much you can strip down the assassin (broken kit, weaker stats, no combat drugs etc) shows that your heart isn't in it, so remove the Eversor, save him for a more suitable time and use something else, like a human "James Bond" style agent, who sneaks in, plants some demo charges on vital equipment, has a martini and a few of the ships prettier girls and ejects/steals a shuttle to meet up with his lift home, leaving a massive mess, hundreds of dead red uniformed security mooks and a bunch of PCs who have almost no idea whos just shafted them.

UberMutant said:

Too flashy, I'd expect something more in the vein (teehee) of a binary poison. Feed the first dose to the whole crew, use the second to selectively target the ringleaders.

ieatdeadpeople2 said:

When you say the party had encountered the Eversor before what do you mean.

And highly trained Death Cultist could provide some of what you are looking for, in the place of Eversor, They could be used to rig charges on important areas, a Moritat Reaper could leave nothing but a Bloody Barrack Room.

Here's another option - go the other way. UPpower the Eversor. They shoot at it, it dodges. Their best house troops and bodyguards engage it in close combat, they die. It is an unstoppable, murderous THING that can't be reasoned with, can't be killed and will never stop until every man, woman, child, rat and ship's cat aboard is nothing more than torn and bloody meat.

Run it like a skill challenge, rather than a combat. Have it work as a running fight as they're attempting to flee this thing to an area of the ship where htey can trap it and flush it into space/flood the chamber with plasma/other horrific death. Let people use non-standard exploration skills: maybe use Navigation to remember the fastest way through the ship avoiding people, people firing at the Eversor for a round may slow it down temporarily, tech-use to overcharge power conduits to explode when the creature is near them.

Emphasise that Temple Assassins are what are called in when an Inquisitor can't get their hands on a Space marine chapter. THey aren't fighting some deatth cultist - they are fighting Death himself.

professor_kylan said:

I take back my "do not use" statement, this is epic and much, much better.

You would still need to explain to me why the High Lords of Terra allowed an assassin to be sent after a bunch of low ranking traders though……..

UberMutant said:

Do you? It could be that the attack plays a part in some great scheme to thwart a Chaos plot. Who can know? The Secret Masters of the Ordo Mallius aren't going to say. Perhaps the assassin mysteriously changes course after he kills some lowly petty officer and continues his killing all the way to his escape vessel. To the PCs this will look completely random. Will they even spot that there was a specific target amongst the hundreds? Unlikely.

Afterwards the PCs could learn of similar happenings over the sector. A mystery…

professor_kylan said:

I totally love this idea, lets turn this into a terminator movie and hope that you can outrun it long enough and hurt it enough to stay alive,

UberMutant said:

Thanks

The question isn't, IMO, whyu the High Lords allowed such a thing, but how did an Inquisitor scam himself an Eversor to do with as he pleases. More importantly, what ELSE is the Inquisitor planning on doing with it? This is the sort of thing, to me, that speaks of a nemesis type character - a potentially rogue Inquisitor that has somehow managed to steal extraordinarily potent Imperial hardware and abscond with it for his own dirty reasons.

I'm starting to think that a storyline where your players - after surviving the assassin - discover that such fell creatures are only released on the highest authority. To track down the source of that authority, they have to infiltrate an Adeptus Arbites precinct-fortress and have their Explorator perform an Techxorcism on the Animus Mechanica in the heart of the forterss to hack into the records of the off-world astropathic messages that have been sent and received, all while the other characters are distracting the local Arbites by launching raids in the nearby Hab-blocks and attepting to avoid actually hurting any of the loyal servants of the Imperium.

Every game needs a heist session. Every game.

(Also, it allows yout to use the word Techxorcism. Just say it out loud. Yeah, feels good, doen't it?)

Really nice idea Professor. The challenge for the GM will be to make it clear that fighting the monster is not an option. But then, that's what armsmen are for.

I ended up running the encounter as a skill challenge.

THe assasin detonated it's plasma charges for a distraction so the throne agent could escape. It the proceeded to make an attempt on the captain herself. Dozens of guards were slaughterd while the players ran as fast as possible away, nothing could stop it until I reminded them that when they first encounterd the eversor it had been stopped wiht a code word which the throne agent had used, they voxed the poeple in ship survelance who ran through the ships security recordings to find what the throne agent had sayd. The missionary ended up in melee and needed to spend a fate point to survive, the captain got poisoned but then the astropath dominated the eversor and managed to delay it long enough for the key word to be found.

The captain spoke it to the eversor and then the crew flushed it out the airlock.

UberMutant said:

There's a very good reason, unfortunately your inquisitorial rank is to low for access. Ignorance is strength acolyte you'd do well to remember that.

So make it a kick-ass slasher movie!

Blow 'em out the airlock or smash 'em in an industrial press…