So I am starting a Black Crusade campaign with some friends, and I pretty much got the content for the first few sessions down, content-wise as in they assault a forge worlds and go through as a stage by stage full-scaled invasion, following a "General" whom is a nearly ascended Khorne champion, and they are in this crusade to make names of themselves.

I plan to give them all hidden tasks to either help, hinder or alternate the flow of what the rest of the group intends to do, all pending on which chaos marks they all have chosen. However, once they have started making names of themselves and finished off the forge world (3-6 sessions depends on how fast they are at rushing or going through thoroughly), I don't quite know what to follow it up with.

Anyone have some good suggestions?

This is our first attempt at black crusade, we have only recently started playing pen and paper

Power game within "general's" warband - his warriors (including PCs) are too ambitious and entities they serve force them to backstab each other when it becomes clear that forge world is lost for Imperium.

The conquered forge world seems to be much more ancient than it looked - from abnormalties in local machine cult it becomes clear - machinery is linked into single network planetwide and hosts... what? Demon, xenotech, surviving Iron Man AI?

With forge world desecrated and resistance broken, vengeful Imperium sends in a massive army group backed up with exterminatus fleet. Now PCs, too infamous for their own good, must escape revenge and find a way to use the situation - after all, they do have rival chaos champions that might just not adapt fast enough.

"General"'s accention is almost complete - he has to offer the blood god just a little more sacrifice, and the PCs blood would be sufficient. However, his bloodthirsty master will not mind if PCs turn their former leader into sacrifice - after all might makes right and the only thing that matters is bloodshed itself.

Loyalist marines from accursed dark angels chapter had their secret production line on the planet surface - the machinery is destroyed, but some cogitator arrays were evacuated. Soon it becomes clear that factory produced the dreadful Nephilim jet, whose STC is of unspeakable value. The hunt for the lost data is on.

There you have it - 40-60 hours of gameplay.

The Imperials would not let their forge world go easily; they have sent aid, unfortunately it arrived too late to be of any use.

And unfortunately for the General, they desire vengeance! This bucks an all-out ship-to-ship combat wherein the General's own desire for blood, mixed with the temptations of the Blood-God have clouded his judgment to the point where he cannot see the lost cause - and ultimate doom for him - fighting the Imperial fleet will bring.

In a siege of his capital ship an elite group of Imperials slay him on his command deck, cutting his ascension abruptly short. The PCs are away on mission, either in a smaller tub of their own or in an assault force upon an Imperial ship when word breaks out the General is slain! Now the scattered forces of Chaos must flee and attempt to regroup at another time.

This would allow your group the freedom of being without a master, the driving force to continue the campaign (reassemble the scattered forces under their banner as well as strike back against the Imperium), and the means to enact such things (a crewed Chaos ship or a stolen Imperial vessel at their disposal).

I find myself facing a similar dilemma. I've run a couple of unrelated adventures for my players' heretics. I had hoped that some sort of long term goal for the party would emerge organically but it hasn't happened. Obviously all of the heretics would like to overthrow the Imperium but equally obviously our campaign is going to have to be on a more limited scale than the Horus Heresy (at least to start with...). By their very nature, the heretics are not part of a hierarchy, so there's no-one to order them to undertake particular missions. Similarly, there's very little that they place any value on, which makes it difficult to present them with a threat that they'd care much about.

So I think the approach I'm going to take is to nudge the heretics toward building up networks of cults and heretics in Calixis Sector. Once they begin to get somewhere, I'll bring the Inquisition crashing down on them, ruining their works and murdering their allies. Hopefully I can remind them why they started hating the Imperium in the first place and make the hate a bit more focused for the players.

So, Zarokin, did you manage to get a campaign going?