Hello All!

So, its sort of become a running joke that my heavily injured players are "never going to make it to the Hospital planet"- as their Inquisitor has promised to send them years months ago, but they keep getting side-tracked.

They find themselves now on the Pale Sepulcher, in the midst of a zombie infestation, on their way to the hospital planet. Even though it is their ultimate destination- I would love, in order to mess with them, to get them to stop at Orendal's tomb (A tomb/shrine world) that's right next to Reshia, the Hospital Planet.

But I am completely out of ideas on why they would do that, or what could cause them to stop.

Ultimately, they are fighting "the night cult" right now, and are about to face-off again'st a resurrected alpha-psyker whose very presence is enough to both reanimate the dead and slay weaker-willed individuals. Though they are supposed to destroy this guy, or at least the section of the ship that he's on, I can always have him survive the trip and somehow link him to Orendal's tomb...

I couldn't find a lot of Information on Orendal's Tomb itself... So I will admit, I am completely drawing a blank on this next section.

Any help/Brainstorming ideas would be VERY cool!

Well, the Pale Sepulcher transports the dead bodies of prominent Imperial Citizens, right? So, the most likely reason for it to divert course to Orandel's Tomb is to make a pick-up. It would have to be someone very high-ranking- say, the Sub-Cardinal of the planet's main Templum. When the body is being transferred aboard, the local clerics hear that there are representatives of the Inquisition on board, and they petition the PCs to investigate the Sub-Cardinal's death, which some of them consider highly suspicious...

Man, these new forums are crazy

Yes! In my world at least, it transports the dead (and dying) to their final resting places. Orendal's Tomb is of course a natural stop on its journey- and stopping there isn't as much a problem as getting the players to actually get off their behinds and do something about it

My acolytes are SO INJURED and they want to get to the hospital planet SO BAD they almost missed the entire adventure aboard the Sepulcher in favor of locking themselves up in a small room, licking the pipes for water and eating one of their own for sustenance.

Unfortunately, unless its directly linked to the situation at hand, I very doubt my players are going to do anything about it, more so pull the "Its not in our contract!" line and make a bee-line for the ressuratrix chambers of Reshia.

But I had an idea that the guys would defeat the boss aboard the ship by disconnecting the tomb-vault from the rest of the ship, as the latter orbits Orendal's Tombs.

The vault would plummet to the surface of the planet (maybe with one of the players still inside, having locked himself in statis-chamber after valiantly disconnecting the final chain keeping the vault linked to the ship), and crack open. The psyker would be naturally heavily damaged and would need to regenerate himself, but his unholy presence would still cause the dead to rise, wreaking havoc upon Orendal's Tombs.

Then it would be a race between fragments of the Night Cult on the planet & the acolytes to head down there and recover the Psyker's remains? Or maybe some Pilgrims of Hayte get a hold of him and plug him into a maiden of Pain?

When the players track the surviving player' statis-pod signal and recover him, they find the Psyker's remains conspicuously missing, which leads to the hunt- left unchecked, the situation could doom the entire planet, after all, the Pilgrims of Hayte might not have realized what they've found- and how dangerous it is for them as well. And it gives the Night Cult another chance to ally with the players to recover their mutual prize.

How are your players still so injured? Interstellar travel takes a very long time. Wouldn't they have healed by now?

And lets err on the side of caution and say these are real universe time passages, and that in the warp it is a 1:12 day ratio... a year long trip would still pass as a month to the characters.

The Misericord

"Its round trip—Scintilla/Iocanthus/Sepheris Secundus—a route laid down on the charter carried by its captains, takes well over a year." <--- also the most well traveled route in the sector... and still it takes over a year

Malfi

"This hive world, eight hundred days standard from Scintilla..."

However, time keeping asside, I like the adventure idea.

I especially like the creepy idea of a mosolleum ship for of the dead drifting through space.