Lies, Damn Lies

Dark Heresy: Sessions 4-5

The players awoke to the delightful sound of gun fire. The Strophe's house was under attack. Rapidly getting out of their rooms, a rather brutal combat emerged, where Trantor was thrown bodily backwards by one of the assailants. Getting their act together, the players managed to defeat enough mercenaries to drive them from the building. Questioning revealed that the mercenaries were employed by the same organisation, pressure point, as before.

Deciding time was of the essence, the acolytes headed for Ambulon after a days rest. They were rather impressed with the extremely weird turtle like city, especially Mordecai, who practically wanted to have sex with it.

Landing, the party met their contact on the city, and then went to meet the mysterious oracle.

The oracle gave the party some information, giving them an understanding of the force manipulating the joyous choir, a fairly evil bunch of mercenaries by the name of the Serrated Querry. With this in mind, the party went to their quarters to leave some possessions, and then most headed to the joyous choir temple.

Upon approach, the acolytes noticed Theodosia wondering around, giving orders. Getting closer revealed that he had not heard back from the mercenary team yet, which gave them a chance to snoop around. And snoop they did.

Splitting up in the temple, Trantor and Enoch went down a short corridor (through a door marked "no entry"). They were confronted by a Joyous Choir official, who, after some attempts of obfuscation on the players part, demanded identification. So they chopped his head off. This left them.. somewhat covered in blood, so they dragged the corpse into a room and hid in there to clean up.

At this point, Ravion came to the corridor to see it filled with blood and the acolyes missing. Seeing the trail leading to the door, he burst in with gun ready... and Enoch made him spasm, making a laser shot fire into the air.

Pulling the door shut, the acolytes drew their guns and prepared for discovery.... Ravion, however, had an idea, and burst into the corridor, claiming that he was searching for the killers. Sadly the two autogun wielding security men were not exactly holding to that viewpoint, and ordered him to get down on the ground.

At which point, Trantor tackled him, and pointed a gun to his head. Convinced by this performance, the two men wondered over to get posession of the supposed heretic.

At which point Trantor knocked them aside, Enoch jammed their weapons, and fighting began in earnest.

A brutal and dangerous fight happened in the narrow corridor, but at the end the acolytes emerged victorious. Calling to Mordecai, they heard he was only a few minutes away, so they decided to lay an ambush for the guards still in the main church.

Sadly, this didn't go brilliantly for them, as Ravion acted with... less subtletly than he should have, and the guards opened fire, taking down Enoch.

Mordecai arrived soon after, bringing the magistratum with him, and his added assistance dealt with the guards.

With the magistratum there to secure the temple, the acolytes headed down. Finding a locked door, Mordecia attempted to open it with some subtlety, but sadly wasn't able to cut the lock away very easily. Ravion attempted to kick the door in... and failed miserably. Finally, with a rather exasperated expression, Trantor took Enoch's shotgun and blew the door open. A grenade was hurled into the room, and then the party dived through. Sadly their bumbling had attracted attention, and they were met with a hail of fire which sent Ravion collapsing to the ground.

Revealed was a room clearly used for surgery, but with one... modiofication. It was much huger than it should have been, with weird writing scribed on the ceiling. It also contained Theodosia.

The final combat resolved with Theodosia unconcious, Ravion nearly dead, and a set of melta bombs ready to blow the building sky high.

Running away, they were able to secure the heretic, and question him on the Serrated Querry. Information gained was mostly a confirmation of what they had learned so far, and while they had clearly ended this particular scheme, it was implied that the Serrated Querry was still very much active.

Reflections:

It's always fun to hurt your players! I'll move to the final fight in a minute, and talk about the Oracle, which is a character that annoys me. The Oracle has information on the Serrated Querry, and seems to believe they are linked to the Choir. Why hasn't it told anyone? In a WFRP setting, such a character is more believable because of the lack of over imposing central government, but in 40k, such a withholding of important information stinks of heresy- while the Adeptus Mechanicus are not a faction to anger, it strikes me as a little weird.

The final fight was awesome fun. The book provides you with little detail, and just left me to work out what was happening. I wanted the players to have a chance to explore the temple, then come back with reinforcements, so they could fight Theodosia alone, and fully equipped. Things... did not work out exactly as planned. In particular, the kill happy nature of my players was a little.. ridiculous, but never mind, it turned into a rather entertaining motif. While there was nothing about the destruction of the temple, it made sense to me that Theodosia would attempt that if caught, and added some enjoyable urgency to the closing scenes. Full auto fire is proving exceptionally effective.. I have a feeling the players will be using it a lot, especially with the wonder of man-stopper bullets!

There was a moment where I thought the party were going to get killed off, but the extra contingincies I had planned (reinforcements, servitor control), worked in the end. I think we managed the right level of lethality for the final encounter of an arc.

Labels: dark heresy, roleplaying

posted by Mr K @ 10:38 am