Dungeons the Dragoning 40k 7th edition - Going fishing

[Telok]

Since the last two games I was in died due to system failure I'm starting one next week. Using the Dungeons the Dragoning system. If you're unfamiliar with it... you can find it with Google or on tvtropes, I'm not going into that here.

The initial pitch was

The basic premise of the starting adventure is that the characters are
the trouble shooting team of the luxury cruise spelljammer
'Ostentatious Display of Wealth', which is in danger of running out of
sushi. Thus there is going to be a short side trip to a tropical water
planet where the characters will go fishing for an Ichthyform
Leviosaurus Levianthus, generally known as "Ikky". Giant harpoons and
machine gun ammo is provided.

I'm generally using Roger Zelazny's "The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth" as this initial adventure.

I've got the initial interest for several people, no characters yet. The adventure structure is so-far planned thus:
0. Make, confirm, and tweak characters. Set the tone and expectations.
1. A three week pause for ODW to get to the planet. This allows the PCs to try out the wealth & buying system in a limited (safe) setting.
2. Immigration & customs. To taste the social combat system.
3. A week ground side as the boat is prepped. Gives time for a good drinking binge, maybe research, and a stupid gang to try and rob the 'rich' PCs. To give me a feel for the minion squad rules, how much damage the team put out, and how much they can take. Depending on the PCs I may have the gang leader open with a rocket launcher to someone's head.
4. Kill the baitman so that one of the players has to go swimming. Maybe eat that PC too.
5. Eventually they hook the fish and either they land it, or it wrecks a boat larger than a football stadium and they have to swim back.

My questions, and the reason I'm posting this, are two:
1. Does anyone have actual experience with the DtD40k7e system? I've written a small program to run dice calculations (anydice.com has a 5 second time-out limit that exploding dice hit really easily, plus they throttle resources because a million rolls 8k6 does not take a full second) so I have some feel for what the numbers can look like. But I'd like to know if there are any extremes or problems that commonly crop up.
2. I'm not sure if it's best to just super-monster Ikky or to stat him using the living vehicle rules form the second book. He needs to be able to trash TenSquare (the boat) if the players just totally screw up, but I'd like to avoid him having auto-kill attacks. I suppose it may well depend on how the boat stats out. Suggestions?

[Telok]

The crickets are deafening... That said, I'm going to keep this thread up as a resource for anyone else who searches for DtD40K7th on this forum.

The opening session went really well. We have an ork paragon melee guy with and artifact chain axe, an ork werewolf melee guy, a kenku atlantean pilot with a mecha, and an eldarian (eladrin/eldar dontcha know) paragon priest/healer.

They started on the good ship Ostentatious Display of Wealth (3.5 km long luxury cruise ship) with a 2 week burn to enter orbit around a small waterworld planet because they need to stock up on sushi for the next leg of the cruise. I can report that the wealth & buying rules are painless and I don't have to worry about money or anything. I'm sure they haven't realized that they can use hero points and such on the wealth checks, that's ok. Then they shuttled down to the planet. Well the kenku wanted his 20m tall mech so he used the ODW's glitchy teleportarium (Int+TechUse v 20 or suffer perils of the warp) to warp down while everyone else flew. This brought us to the customs and immigration officer who wanted them to spend a couple weeks in decontamination and whatnot. Cue the social combat encounter, which worked fine. None of them has stocked up on social-fu abilities so it lasted (at 20 minutes per 'round') long enough for the rest of the party to get there and start doing aid-anothers. Two-ish hours the start of all this they left with all their gear after paying a modest bribe.

On learning that the boat (name of TenSquare) wouldn't be ready from repairs for a week they immediately went on a pub crawl. Half way through ork paragon decided to buy a dinosaur (the world is in it's Jurassic period), and while he couldn't afford an archaeopteryx he did buy a waist-high raptor. None of them having animal ken or bothering to ask too many questions they do not yet realize that he now owns a very young, not tamed, not housebroken, T-rex. Exploding dice on wealth tests for the win. Anyways after about 6 hours of boozing and impulse buying (actually the pet was the only thing they bought, but it was very impulsive) they had the raptor and mecha helicoptered out to the boat and went for a walk to the local marine biology research station.

It's only about 5km away but they had to walk through the local shanty town first. Which gave me an excuse for the first combat of the game. A Gang Lord (slightly re-skinned level 3 eldarian warrior from the book's antagonists list) and 30 gangers (5x level 2 mooks squads of 6 mook gangers each). The combat works fine and the mook rules are actually really good, they make people feel properly heroic while not making the mooks either too dangerous or too weak.

We opened at about 200m with a frag rocket to the head. Mr. Ork paragon suffered 4 wounds out of his 12 max hit points. Everyone in the blast radius took another 2ish wounds. The orks charged, the eldarian alternated move & shoot with also charging, and the kenku stayed back and shot. At about the half way mark the gang stopped for another round of shooting and then everyone (almost, two chunks of mooks took out after the kenku) was pretty much in melee. The Gang Lord turned out to be a little more dangerous than I expected, he had 23 defence (highish) and a free parry + a free dodge every round and 4 melee skill with an officer's cutlass (electrified sword Con v 15 or be stunned a round, which never actually got failed). By the end the ork paragon had taken several critical hits to arms and body (nothing incapacitating), the ork werewolf was down to his last couple HP, the eldarian loved his shield & mace combo (parry bonuses saved him from a couple hits), and everyone liked the bonuses for ganging up on people. Nobody used stunts and only the eldarian used resources (to case a couple of heals), but they'll get there.

They stopped at the research center, scared the receptionist (they killed the Gang Lord with a 5 point crit to the head with an axe, three of them were covered in blood and they all had wounds), got some info on Ikky and left. Then went back to the resort, checked in to their hotel and met the camera crew. A 3km long luxury ship is expensive and the captain has to make money where he can, so they're on a 'Deadliest Catch' sort of thing as well as going fishing. They also have the impression that Ikkys max out at about 150m in length, which is what I wanted them to think. This whole thing netted them 200 xp.

So next session is going to be a week for healing, the fishing trip, and back to the ship with the catch. If all goes as planned they all ought to be pretty much healed by the time they get to the fishing grounds. I'll see about having another social combat with the camera crew, possibly a three way combat between the camera crew, boat crew, and them. That ought to work a but better since we're now more familiar with the general dice rolling rules. Then it's fish time. I have the boat, the rooks (corner towers with cranes, harpoons, and machine guns), and the shed (mobile tower with another crane and the fishing line thing on it) all statted out a separate vehicles (it worked better that way). Ikky is a level 4, size 20, demonspawn exult fish. The mecha was my only real concern, the player sank all his backgrounds and starting xp into getting and supporting it (he's not bad or weak outside of it, but he built it well and it's a decent chunk of his character) and it's not a pushover. It's size 20 and mounts a void shield (heavily miniaturized) as well as a wave motion gun (heavily miniaturized and the most powerful gun you can mount on a vehicle). But I've run the numbers and it looks like he'll mostly do about 3 wounds at a time, which is every other round as it has a recharge drawback on it. Ikky can hit it for around 1 wound with a tail slap and 1 or 2 wounds with a bite. Since vehicles have to make control tests when they take damage and they take critical damage of they take 2 or more wounds, plus Ikky triggers a Fear 2 test (Willpower v 20) on an all-out bite attack, I'm not worried. If he didn't have the mecha he'd be in one of the towers anyways and they're size 15 "vehicles" with decent attacks of their own.

Hopefully we'll end off with a successful fishing trip and then I can test the spaceship combat with 4 small ships of gnomish marine biologist space pirates. The ships are all statted, I just need to decide on officer stats. I'll let the PCs take the officer positions on the Ostentatious Display of Wealth except for the captain, which is just going to be throwing a 'Picard Speech" action every round to improve crew quality.

[Lord Torath]

Sounds fun! I'm afraid I have absolutely no experience with Dungeons the Dragoning, so I cannot comment on mechanics. Hopefully your ork paragon player will spring for some animal handling skills, so he can do something fun with that T-Rex. How long is it going to take to reach maturity? I've heard 5 years from hatching to full grown, but I'm not sure how trustworthy that number is.

[Lord Raziere]

man your so lucky even getting a DtD40k game, I myself been wanting to play one so I can some crazy concept. though the only character I can think of I want to play is some very edgelord concept of a demon vampire assassin who realized that hell sucks and decided to double cross hell to serve heaven.

[Telok]

Someone was asking in the general forum what it took to play something that wasn't a D&Dish. Unfortunately it is often true that the answer is "run it yourself".

A little googling says that T-rex seem to have some sort of massive growth spurt between ages 14 to 18. Since this is a not-Earth not-T-rex I can go with 3 or 4 years of really rapid growth. I'll need to consider that they'll want to try for some sort of accelerated aging at some point. And probably cybernetic machine gun implants... Oy, I'm gonna have to stat this thing. On the plus side I probably already have a "mini" for it.

Are you guys interested in my throwing my "system & stats doc" spreadsheet onto google and the java code for the stats program on bitbucket?

[Telok]

The fishing trip went well. I was honest with everyone and told them that I has a social combat and minor stuff planned but I'd decided it was boring, so we went right to the fish. Notably none of them wanted to play baitman. So there was a little bit of rolling socials that forced the intern of the camera crew to go bait the hook. Ikkys stealth roll beat the bait and the sonar operator's perceptions rolls, so he ate the baitman. If a PC had been in the TenSquare control room I'd have given them a roll. But they set the hook, tranqued Ikky to -2k0 dice and hauled him up.

Vehicle combat works fine, since I statted TenSquare's corner towers as independent, if immobile, vehicles. Ikky managed some damage to them and to the mecha before being pinned. Even after that he almost broke the pin several times. So I can report that statting a Str 7, Con 6, size 20 fish as a level 4 Daemonhost exalt and having it fight 3 size 15 vehicles with giant mech area and machineguns plus a flying AT-AT (turns out that the kenku's mecha does not have arms, but it dies have VTOL capability) with the biggest vehicle gun in the book actually all works.

Then on leaving the planet they were attacked by gnomish marine biologist space pirates. I now vow to never again use gnomish marine biologist space pirates in a table top game, because it's bloody hard to keep the words straight. Anyways, we screwed up movement in space combat so I was fudging range measurement (it was all run TOTM and worked out pretty well anyways) but it worked. I knew that 4 of the smallest ships weren't a real threat to the Ostentatious Display of Wealth, since I used the biggest possible ship base in the book and boosted it a little anyways. But even with a few tactical mistakes on my part they chewed through half the ODWs shields. One high point was a ship damage crit that went 13+ twice. The spelljammer crit chart is rolled every time that a ship takes hull damage, and all weapons have a crit modifier rating. The chart has 13 entries on it, you roll 1d10 and add the crit modifier. They hit it with a torpedo that had a +8 crit modifier rating. That's "More explosions. +1d10 hull points of damage. -1d10 crew. And roll again with the same modifier." The ship had a -3 to all crit rolls thing, but they rolled 10, 10, 6. Yeah, kablooey.

At the end they were close enough to do boarding actions and they wanted to capture the 'lead' ship (I picked one at random to be the 'leader'). Now I set these things up before hand, so I'm not improvising stats, etc., on the fly. That ship had a self-destruct.

We stopped there. Next week the PCs are going to be the boarding party (boarding parties are usually handled in space combat and just do crew damage) and we'll run them through a gnomish marine biologist space pirate ship. They will have 10 minutes to disarm the self-destruct. I'm on the fence about giant dire space hamsters. Maybe bio-weapon battle toads? I also have to nail down sizes, ODW is 3.6 km long with 21k crew, but the by-the-book biggest ships are maybe 1/5th that at most and have maybe 1250 crew. Seriously, I took (via fast google) the biggest real world cruise ship and simply multiplied by 10 to get ODW, and the USS Iowa has almost 2,800 crew (although it is only 270-ish meters).

I think I may also work up more precise and step-by-step vehicle and space combat round instructions.

[The Glyphstone]

Did you at least try and convince one of them to say 'I'm Baitman' in a deep, gravelly voice?

[Arbane]

Sounds like you're having a lot of fun.

[Telok]

I deeply regret that none of them said "We need a bigger boat".

So I'm about 2/3 done with the spaceship. It will be about 205 meters long, crew of around 1,400. I'm taking the deck plans of the USS Iowa and doing some copy/paste. I would not have thought to put a dentists office in a warship.

I have decided that the captain will be a gnomish half-fish vampire necromancer. With a bunny rabbit for a pet. A perfectly normal, harmless, white rabbit. I'm hoping for panic shooting.

The aft half of the ship (there's a really big mess hall) will have gnome zombie mook squads and a Scorpion light tank. Because I want to. And because I'm confident at this point that they can handle it. The zombies are because the PCs got a really good roll on a boarding action and wiped out around 4/5 of the crew. Which also partially explains the decision to trigger the self destruct.

I an still undecided about the other half of the ship. Some assorted crew who could be easily convinced to not die. No space hamsters, but maybe a pack of trained velociraptors. Not sure what else.

[Telok]

I present the GMBSPS (gnomish marine biologist space pirate ship) Botany Bay


At 235 meters long with a crew of ~1200 it's the smallest class of warp capable ship in my setting. The PC's goal is to board it, disarm the self-destruct in less then 10 minutes, and take possession of the ship.

Opposition: One gnomely crewed light tank in the mess hall, assorted minion groups of zombies (every minute or so I'll roll for 1d5 groups of 5), a halfling swordmaster (I want to try a feat combo), the cyber-yeti, and a gnome vampire necromancer. There are various individual surviving crew who just want off too, but they aren't a threat and there's only about 50 of them scattered around the ship.

I've printed three maps, using a spreadsheet to split it over multiple pages turned out to be easiest. A pair of one and two page landscape prints, the text is too small to read so these will be the pre-boarding scans that will let the PCs plan their attack. I've marked up the single page image with scan notes. Then there's the five page portrait print that I've taped into one long sheet. That has legible text and will be the map we use while fighting through the ship.

Now I need to stat the tank, vamp, swordguy, and yeti.

[Telok]

The tank's stealth roll beat everyone's perception. The swordmaster tanked for three rounds. The cyber-yeti ripped off the werewolf's leg and broke all of the other orc's ribs. Power armor will not save you from the cyber-yeti. Third level vampires can have 5 half actions a round.

Work is a bit nuts. Will do a full write up soonish.

[Telok]

It's been a while but work is finally calming down a bit and I've caught up on the typing. I'll stick stuff in week-by-week spoilers.

Spoiler: First

Show

Ok. So where were we? Ah, the boarding action.

They teleported over into the mess hall, rolled from single digits to 22 on their perception checks and charged some gnome zombies that they saw. Then the stealth tank opened up with a machine gun and a multi-las. I started building the tank with a size limit and a budget, it sort of turned into a scouting and recon tank with some pretty good sensors and an active stealth system. Funny thing is that the active stealth system just lets you roll stealth checks with the vehicle, no bonuses or anything. 4k2 got a 24 stealth check for the tank. Unfortunately 4k2 also completely missed people at short range with fully automatic weapons. So the two lightest armored and lowest max HP of them jumped into the tank (it's open topped) and blew away the crew. On the other side of the stairs the melees buzzed through 25 zombies (Ok, five squads of five minions). Although one clump did get a 40ish attack roll chomp on the werewolf ork.

For scale 5k3 (five minions, threat level 3) has 40+ being it's top 10% of possible rolls. Minions do flat 5*threat level damage with an additional +5 per raise. The character in question has about a 12 defense, so a hit by ~30 is roughly 6 raises. Thus 45 damage minus 7 armor is 38 vs toughness 6 (relatively high) gives 6 wounds. Out of his 14 max. So minions are a reasonable threat. By comparison our (now second level) melee monsters throw about 6k3 to 8k4 attacks for 6k3 or 7k3 damage. So they usually punch in about mid-high 20s on attack and damage. Which also translates into about 3 threat level three minions per attack.

They'd dropped in on the mess hall because it was close to their best guesses at where the self destruct system would be. Which was pretty close. They checked the engines, those were fine. Then the warp energy core. The core had charges wired in under the magic containment runes. They disarmed those with really good rolls.

They moved forward through the port side passages and encountered the ships Master at Arms, a level 3 halfling fight guy in light mesh armor and wielding a rapier. That little bugger started with 30 defense, fought on the defensive (one attack as a full round action round at a penalty, gives bonuses to parry) and parried twice a round. Each time he parried and didn't get hit he got a free riposte. Essentially a way to get 3 attacks a round and a defense boost. He lasted three or four rounds with three people pounding on him and got some good stabs in. It only took 3 hits to down him though.

In the captain's quarters they didn't take the gnome with a grand diaklaive seriously. The he took five half actions, cast a spell that threw someone face first into a wall, and called out Fluffy the cyber-yeti with a Power Fist. Five rounds later the yeti was dead, the vamp gnome was unconscious from fatigue (he was on fire most of the fight), the werewolf was crawling around with only one leg, and the ork paragon was laying still so that all his broken ribs didn't hurt too much. Now cyber-yeti bodyguards are a thing in my universe. We all liked that fight.

They looted the captain, stuffed some explosives into his mouth, and ejected him into space where they blew him up. They now own a small spelljammer with a minor zombies-in-the-plumbing problem that's crewed with some spare raw recruits off of the Ostentatious Display of Wealth.

Spoiler: Second

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I know what the captain of the ODW is, a rogue modron. Since modrons are computery and rogues are by any measure at least somehow insane, it means that there is an insane computer running a self contained habitat the size of a large town with heavily armed and morally dubious troubleshooters. Red uniforms, random missions, a glitchy teleporter... It's hard to tell if this is Star Trek or Paranoia. Or both. I can have both!

I also figured out stats for a tridrone modron, using the in-book stats for monodrone and duodrone and then comparing those to the original AD&D stats. A couple more steps up that ladder and things will get scary. One notable change I made was to move the 'if it wounds then it crits too' effect off the modron gauss guns and over to the melee weapons. Plus I decided that the modrons are made of necrodermis, so they get all the benefits of havinf necrodermis bionics. Which turns out to be not an amazing or powerful change, but it did end up putting a little scare into the players. I also changes it so that modrons have as many half actions as they have 'rank'. Thus a monodrone has one half action each round, a duodrone has two, a tridrone has three, a quadrone is scary, a pentadrone is a fraky hyperactive tank, etc., etc.

This weeks mission was to checkout some weird sensor reading on Eroticon IV. I've started on the setting map and decided that ODW is in a high traffic tourist sphere, although only Eroticon VI is what most people think of as touristy with it's world wide Vegas expy. So the water world with Ikky was Eroticon II and ODW is on the way to Eroticon VI, but the team is being given a dozen young hunting aficionados (ok, six dwarves with rocket launchers and six elves with long las in a team hunting competition set up as two squads of minions) as cover while they check out the 'mysterious readings'.

The planet is sort of Endor but more tropical, a thicker tree canopy so its darker at the bottom, giant bugs, large aggressive marsupials, and the locals are similar to giant leaf bugs (literally, a bug that looks like a leaf). So I've got 'drop bears' which are a dinky level 2 ambush predator that can climb, and 'giant drop bears' that are a fall-from-the-sky-and-crush-small-cars ambush predator.

Well they took their 12 days to get to Eroticon IV, moved into orbit, shuttled down, and took off. Really. They've left a few crew at the spaceport (a small town on giant inner-tubes on the tree-tops that supports landing pads and some hunting excursion businesses) to watch the shuttles and recruit more crew. They rented a trailer to pull behind the scouting tank (yes I let them get it out of the mess hall) and the kenku brought along his mecha. Now I did tell them that the captain said that the hunting trip thing was cover and he didn't require anything of it except not-terrible Yelp reviews. Drugging the hunters and sticking them in virtual reality hunting simulations for a week was explicitly mentioned as an option. They're taking the mook squads with them in the trailer.

Anyways, other than a single giant drop bear (dead before the 'hunters' even got to fire a shot, those Yelp reviews are looking kinda iffy already) and some meter long dragonflies the trip to the 'weird sensor readings' locale was uneventful. They arrived at an area with some sinkholes and less tree cover, some sunlight actually reaches the ground in the area. Left the hunters at the top of a sinkhole with the tank and everyone climbed down except the kenku who flew his mech down.

So it turns out that three fairly funny things happened, or rather had never happened. Mech guy missed the basic amenities package in vehicle construction, so while the thing is environmentally sealed and has both legs and jet engines it lacks a radio, AC, heaters, cup holders, and a music system. He sank all his backgrounds and a chunk of the starting customization xp into this mech so it could have the biggest (raw damage) vehicle gun and a bit of shielding, and there's no radio. In the grim future there is only rolling down a window and shouting really loudly. Nobody has rope... Nobody has flashlights... Mecha, power armor, chain axe, artifact guns, magic, lycanthropy... No $8 flashlights.

They sent the kenku back up to borrow flashlights off the elves. Lied to them too. "You wait here, some stuff to hunt will be along because this is a nesting area. We'll make sure nothing sneaks up on you. We'll be back in a little bit." I said three funny things, right? The rope and flashlights were a single thing. Number three is that among five characters none of them have the skill Common Lore. Arcane lore, academic lore, forbidden lore, they all have at least one of those, most have at least two, and at least one has all three. But zero common lore. They didn't realize that they were telling the truth about the nesting area. We'll get back to this.

At the bottom of the chosen sinkhole, and the reason that they chose it, was a pool of water and a small shuttle. I managed to get the vehicle rules to produce a size 30 (any bigger and you're into minor spaceship territory, by the official rules) VTOL/ramjet plane with more than maxxed speed and afterburners that can barely get into a low orbit, once, then it needs to refuel. It seats 8 and has about 25 cubic meters of cargo space (2x3x4-ish) in a vehicle that is about 75 meters long and 15 meters high. I had to remove the cockpit and replace it with a direct neural interface to have space for cargo _and_ passengers. There was some disappointment that they couldn't steal it, so they sabotaged it.

Right. They wandered around the caverns for an hour, fought some basic skull-themed combat robots (even on a relatively tame robot-with-machine-gun a good kill zone and suppressing fire works fairly well against pretty tough hero types), and swiped a floaty cube thingy. I used some online random dungeon generators I like for caverns and the like, this one gave a series of bridges over water in one corner with some sort of altar thing. So hey, a perfect cube of basalt with some runes below it to levitate it, spin it slowly, creepy green glow, and keep water and dirt off. They were _utterly _facinated_, and they decided to take it home with them. No real monetary value, but it's important to them now. They did not make the target number 35 forbidden lore + intelligence roll to recognize some idiot's attempt to worship modrons.

They found the small fusion reactor and the minecart track leading down. Took the two hour 60 kph trip (estimated around 10 km below surface) and began the 'creepy dungeon'.

The party got off at the end of the track, went through a couple doors, and found a teleportarium. Next door they found a small warp-core. They decided that they wanted to take the whole thing home with them. But the warp core needed a jump-start and the local power was turned off. They tabled that for later. Without exploring some side passages they went deeper. They also failed a target number 30 forbidden lore check to recognize that control panels of 12x(number divisible by 2) unmarked identical buttons are a modron hallmark.

Next was a long cross hall with lots of doors and a couple through passages. The doors on the near.. Heck let's say that they entered the dungeon from the north, that gives us all a nice frame of reference even though the actual cardinal directions have noting to do with this.. So the doors on the north side of the passage all had twelve small rooms with a thin rectangle of necrodermis metal lying on the floor. Call it 100 cm by 175 cm by 15 cm, roughly. A modest fortune in loot. They failed the target number 25 forbidden lore check.

The rooms in the middle chunk were narrowish and had doors at either end (there was another E-W cross hall down there), plus twelve necrodermis metal spheres a bit less than one meter across. They counted the room, there were 12 in total. Then they made the TN 20 forbidden lore check and figured out that all of these were modrons. They couldn't decide if they wanted to loot or run. So they continued south. Oh, and the rooms on the south side of this section all had a single simple console with 12 black buttons in two rows of six. I could see the more impulsive of them wrestle with wanting to wake up some monodrones.

Next area was materials storage, they didn't know that of course. They just knew that there were big tanks of something and a pop-out ceiling turret gauss gun. The gun's Tearing property caused a couple wounds, but it was really pretty naff otherwise. They never even got between it and the vats of cholrine triflouride. Without exploring some side passages they went deeper.

Next was a duplicate of the second area with 12 more duodrones and another 144 monodrones.

Next section was.. Well it was a sort of control and transport area for the modrons. A drop shaft going down, some seismic dampers and control panels, some earthquake damage, another pop-out ceiling turret. They walked right into a room with a seismic damper (used to control and prevent the local earthquakes) noticed a freshly chopped hole in the wall, walked through and got shot by another turret. It was a shorter range this time so the poor thing only got off two shots. Without exploring some side passages they went deeper.

Another section of duo- and monodrones. Just like the first two.

Continuing south into the last area they went through a crooked corridor, checked at a set fo dcouble door and discovered the Dark Mechanus (really just a sort of semi-WH40K tech-priest) fiddling with a three sided pyramid of necrodermis metal hooked up to a large human-made tech-arcana computer console. There was a quick whispered consultation and the ork paragon and kenku went in and talked to him. Well, specifically they claimed that he was desperately needed at the teleportarium. This confused him and there was some short back and forth ending with the mechanus asking "What's the secret password?", to which the kenku answered a full-auto las blast to the face. Literally.

So, note to self and anyone else, Dark Mechanus are not particularly strong combatants. They need minions and robots and assistants to be a significant combat threat. This guy did however manage to do something (a full round tech-use action that provoked opportunity attacks against TN 30 to begin the activation sequence for the tridrone) just before he went down. The computer indicators went haywire and everyone prepared for a boss fight.

We broke there for the week.

Spoiler: Third

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The thing I really like about having a 3-D printer is that I can make minis for things that no game company will do (Pazio's Sratfinder was out for over a year I think before there were ever any minis for it, I bodged a 4-armed guy together from a couple other models I downloaded and printed it in a couple hours), and I can do it pretty quickly in some cases. I made and printed a tridrone model the morning of game. After game I did the duo- and mondrones, although the weapon scale is off and I need to resize and reprint those.

We started the game down a couple people so I decided that the computer seemed to turn off (what was happening was that the tridrone was infecting it's normal metals with necrodermis and turning it into a monodrone, they failed a TN 25 forbidden lore check) so they looted the Dark Mechanus, did not look at his data-slate, and went exploring. They found the magma tap with another unmarked button console, although this one was simple enough that they could probably work it fairly easily once they turned it on and had the displays going. They found the main section control panel with hundreds of buttons. Back through some other sections, found some storage stuff, another turret or two, more seismic dampers, more earthquake damage, the controls for the teleportarium, and the lift shaft down. They chopped a hole in the bottom of the elevator (power was still off) and faced a long drop, and of course they have no rope. Then the power came on.

They rushed to the mangma tap room. It was empty. They turned it off and set up.. I'm not sure I can really call it an ambush. There were three entrances and with four people they set up a sort of watch on each of them with one of them as a 'response team'. Well a monodrone wandered in at one end and got ganked by an ork in power armor with a chain axe. Seriously, surprise rounds get ugly. But they all went over to see what was going on. Two rounds later the tridrone walked in at the other end.

About five rounds later nobody had hit points left, the werewolf was down and only not dead because he was transformed, and they were running away. They had actually downed the tridrone, the dark eldarian doing several called shots to the body because critical damage to the limbs was healing itself. That wasn't going to stop if from either teleporting out or standing back up in three rounds of course, and it had ended up next to the magma tap working on bypassing the controls to turn the power back on. So they ran.

About half way out the power came back on. The tridrone had stood up again. Doors started to open. They threw a satchel of explosives (some of the charges left over from disarming the self destruct on the ship that they captured) and rigged a makeshift detonator for five minutes at the warp core for the teleportarium on the way out. As they got on the minecarts for the trip up they could hear bunches of modrons clicking around in the corridors.

The explosion temporarily cut off access to the surface for the modrons, so the party didn't feel like they were in too much of a hurry. They climbed out to a scene of destruction. Remember that bit about the sinkholes being a nesting place for the drop bears? And the party didn't realize that they were telling the truth there? Yeah. I actually diced it out. Five drop bears, not even the giant ones, attacked the hunters. Two of the dwarves survived because they got in the scout tank and drove around while shooting at the last two bears. Unfortunately losing guys in a minion squad and having to split their dice between driving and shooting has some downsides. The tank ended up with one hit point and flipped over. But the last two hunters survived.

So they flipped the tank back over, scraped together a bit of chain to link the trailer back up, put all the bodies in the trailer, and drove back. Of course I rolled for encounters on the way back, of course they got another giant drop bear about half way through. They killed it of course, but not before it got the last two dwarves and broke the werewolf's kneecaps. Once back aboard ship they radioed Ostentatious Display of Wealth to report in. There were recriminations over the total loss of the hunters (I'm thinking they may have made an enemy somewhere) but two weeks later a couple of actual warships showed up and proceeded to nuke the site from orbit, for 12 days.

They rendezvoused with the ODW and left the crystal sphere of Eroticon, barely failed a warp check, and discovered that they had a passenger because some of their crew has lost a card game. They did not pick a fight with the passenger, a greater daemon. Probably because about every second sentence from the thing included "Praise Vectron!". Anyways, no running demon fight though the ship. They don't know exactly what happened when their Geller field failed for 5 minutes in the warp, I'm thinking 'Little Shop of Horrors' but I haven't decided how precisely to run that.

So they're at Sigil now. The ODW is going to spend a month there resupplying and acquiring new passengers, the party hasn't decided if they're going to stay with the ODW or go solo. We'll see next week. In the meantime I have to work up some adventuring type things to happen in Sigil, and I need to go over their backgrounds to see how their wealth, followers, backing, and holdings are all set out. They may have significant trouble from not reading what their backgrounds actually do. I think they have more holdings than they have anything else to support those holdings with. We'll see.

[The Glyphstone]

This is like a fever dream/acid trip distilled into RPG format. It sounds insanely complicated, but keep reporting!

[Telok]

a fever dream/acid trip distilled into RPG format

I like that. Thanks.

Just a two week update this time.

Random generators for the win. Also, baby punting and pirate movie stars.

So they do have more holdings than they have followers, wealth, or backing to keep up. The ork werewolf has a small spaceport/dock, in a run down and small part of Sigil because real estate prices there are crazy high. The ork paragon has holdings for the small ship they have, and the kenku has holdings 5 for the mech. So they all have bunches of stuff but no money for upkeep or repairs. Now the dark eldarian paragon has wealth 2, for himself. And the gnome vampire has wealth and backing, but again, for himself. Since we're in a ways and all more experienced with the system I allowed for rebuilds with 2/3 total xp gained, the 'healer' eldarian chosen turned into a gnome necromancer vampire, who is a better caster and combatant than the original character build and has more social skills.

Ya know, let's dramatis personae these people.

Spoiler

Show

We have one ork werewolf who is going down the fighter classes path, so he's done Swordsman and is working on Myrmidon. While he was in free study between classes he bought the Minor Magics feat to get access to the first level transmutation spell that obviates armor issues for shapechangers, if you can cast it. Amusingly he's crap at brawling with the war-form claws and bite, he uses a power sword. So there's usually a round of his weapon lying on the ground while he transforms in combat. He owns the small, run down, stardock in a bad part of Sigil and has made an enemy of the halfling mafia who has a bounty out on his head. We'll call him Skabad.

The ork paragon has power armor and an artifact chain axe. He's also going down the fighter classes path, might be at Fight Guy already but I haven't kept too close of an eye on that. He's rather charismatic for an ork but it's all intimidation and command. This is also the guy who nominally owns the spelljammer that they liberated. I think he dreams of leading a horde on a galaxy wide rampage, but for now he's just a melee bruiser. He's called Gork.

The dark eladrin paragon is following the guardsman classes path right now, he'll probably go into one of the gun kata class tracks from the second book at some point but right now he's completed Conscript and is in Guardsman. He has an artifact bolt pistol, hand flamer, and a plasma pistol. He's also modestly technical and stealthy. Vila Lobos.

The kenku Atlantean with the mecha is hunted by the Elven Imperial Navy, for stealing a war-mecha of course. Oddly he dyes himself green and claims to be an ork despite the fact that he has wings and can fly. Excellent tech and piloting skills, a little magic, and pretty good shooting. He's following the magitek gunnman classes track and is through Spellshooter and into Riflemancer. Name of Grackle.

The gnome vampire necromancer is called Velon. This character started in one of the basic classes (Initiate) and then went into the second level class of the priest track (Preacher). This saves him 100 xp every time he wants to learn the first rank of a new school of spells and gave him an early skill specialization that was used on spell touch attacks (actually it's labeled "bad touch", which pretty much means only harmful spell attacks plus other things that haven't come up yet). With the 600 xp on top of the rebuild the character is actually through the Preacher class and in free study before taking another class. The player is keeping the character in free study for a while because the Minor Magics feat is a cheaper and faster way to learn magic than going into a 3rd level class and buying them there. Combat ability is mainly though magic, good social skills, a bit of wealth and the backing of a/the vampire council. Name of Velon.

Yay, I can use names now.

Now they weren't real sure of what they were going to do besides 'get money'. Stuff was talked about, my random lists of stuff were consulted (I'm also mining the "Things I can no longer do in games" threads for ideas as well as using ) and a few things came up. In about thee months there will be Celebration of the Battle Accountants, sponsored this year by the Order of the Sacred Ham Axe and the Orkish Federated Baby Punting Sports League. Involving actuarial duels, a combat auditing tournament, long and high baby punting competitions, and a circum-Sigil combat motorcycle race. Prizes being of course various amounts of wealth and fame. But that's too far in the future, they're looking for a faster payday so they can pay their crew. Since they're in the bad part of town they decided to spread some rumors about how they had some really valuable thing that they weren't guarding very well. The plan was to get someone to attack them (preferably "more pirates") to then kill them harder and take their valuable stuff. They rolled poorly on spreading the rumor that they had something valuable, but very well that they were incompetent at guarding.

Lobos and Velon did the rumor spreading. Gork spent the time trying to recruit more crew. A week later there was a conversation that went something like:
"I recruited 300 more crew this week! We're over half crew now!"
"300? That's more than usual. Did you do any vetting or background checks?"
"No, why?"
"Awww crap"

I rolled a couple dice and came to a decision, three sets of people were interested and they all decided that the best way to get in was to sign on as crew. There's some (mostly) dark eladrian (kinda) smugglers with a low end ship parked at a nearby low end stardock in this low end part of town. There's this (mostly) dragonborn cult of Tiamat gang that needs a ship to do something and can't buy one themselves. Then there's the elven molasses cartel, who are hunting the smugglers, because they've been smuggling cheap molasses, and have mis-identified the PCs as the smugglers. This is actually based on the real life Canadian maple syrup cartel, which is both economically rational and rather hilarious. Plus if I can get them in a warehouse of molasses, next to a warehouse of fireworks, with plasma guns and flamers, I get to drop the Great Boston Molasses Flood on them.

Well the smugglers moved first. The guys went through a bit of work to draw up their run down space dock and figure out sleeping schedules and shifts of crew hiding in shipping containers, so I decided to humor them. Plus Audrey II is helping a bit, but they don't know that yet. Two trucks pulled up and bad guys piled out, then three rounds in more bad guys came up the emergency stairs for the ship. The assault team was two dark eladrian raiders, two regular troopers, and two 5 guy threat 3 rating minion squads from the trucks, with four more regular troops and two more minion squads, split between two set of stairs.

Highlights: Gork smashed in the engine of one of the cars with a single blow of his chain axe, doing more than half the HP of the car, and then fled from a dark eladrian raider pulling out a smoke grenade ("He pulls out a grenade an-" "Stunt! Reaction! backflip over the car to get away!" "-d.. Ok, roll. Plus a die for stunting."). Skabad's ally was called in for this and turned out to be a dwarf 'chosen of Tezeench' explody mage, and if put a half decent fireball under a car it blows up pretty well. The raiders beat Grackle's stealth roll and his sniping position stopped being so good so he dove though a skylight in their warehouse and into his mech. Wave motion guns vaporize threat level 1 (read: wimpy beginner) troops and leave a smoking crater, but he didn't have time to close the hatch so a mook squad started climbing the mech. A spinning jumpjet takeoff scattered them over the area, smooshy dead. Velon got trapped in a room with a squad of mooks. He turned out the lights and slaughtered them all, laughing.

Lessons learned: Dark Eladrian Raiders are glass cannons who need to team up to be a real threat, but when they gang up the Backstab and Sneak Attack feats trigger to make them pretty effective. And while they dodge real well it only takes about 3 or 4 hits landing to put them down.

In the end they had a single prisoner, disposed of the bodies, and searched the remaining car. This netted them the name of the smugglers ship and it's cargo, plus a movie script and signed movie contract form the glove compartment of the car (Death Robots Versus The Ape King!). We called the game there for the week.

--------------------------------------------------

This week the players of Gork and Grackle couldn't make it. The other three decided that since some gunfire and a burning car didn't warrant Harmonium Peace Forcers showing up in riot gear (the mech and bodies were inside the warehouse within 10 minutes so the aircar that went by a couple hundred meters overhead didn't notice anything worth bothering with, and they failed rolls to notice the aircar) that they should practice piracy. So they rigged a shaped charge to their prisoner's butt, grabbed some void-suits, and went for a space walk. I don't think that they quite know what to make of the movie contract thing.

Sigil in this setting is a torus of scrith in the astral plane (the astral replaces the original spelljamming philostogon and is essentially outer space between the crystal spheres and with a better paint job) a couple hundred kilometers across and with a tube diameter of about 80-ish kilometers. Actually there's no set stats for it's size and I guesstimated, descriptively it's ten to fifteen(?) Gotham/Chicago/New York/London conglomerations coating the inside of a giant inner-tube. There's a light tube that goes around in the middle of the torus that radiates antigravity, so the place doesn't have to spin and all the 'walls' are 'down'.

So the defining features of the outside of Sigil are the freaking massive clamps that can hold up multiple kilometer long spelljammers. Then there's random paraphernalia for the outside, sensor spines, cooling vanes, peoples basements, and catwalks. Which means that a space walk out there is more like walking on a metal trellis walkway over an infinite drop. Anyways they managed to get the 15 km over to the next ship, made a great stealth roll (not that anything more then half-arsed image recognition software was watching), had the prisoner show them the airlock at the shuttle bay, hacked the airlock controls, and started in on their life of crime.

The ensuing firefight with merely six level 1 almost-a-threat guys, two dark eladrians, and an ork ganger with his pet rat, almost took out the werewolf and blew up the control room. Velon's player likes Perils of the Warp. I'm gonna have to work up expanded Psychic Phenomina and Perils of the Warp lists to keep the number of repeats down. Anyways the dark eladrians did a bit of damage, one of the mooks managed to actually shoot someone and another even managed to give Skabad a single wound with a knife. Once again the werewolf is down (crit 4 to the body, five broken ribs, and I think another kneecap), but not quite out, from stabby slashy damage. Good thing he heals quick. Perils of the Warp blew out all tech within 15 meters (lights, computers, guns jammed, etc.) and then a second one did a random target (Chosen of Tezheench = Perils of the Warp happen to other people, not to the chosen) warp blast that caught the last mook in the head (crit 4 to the head on the energy table) so everyone got to watch his face burn off in the dark.

We broke there for the night. Vila Lobos, the only one left with a fully intact void-suit and assorted tech gear, went over to the manual shuttle bay doors while everyone else waits in the busted shuttle bay control room. A call was made to the ship for them to get over with a bunch of crew so they could pirate. Oh, and a mook escaped during the firefight. There's another unconscious on the floor behind some molasses barrels, but the escaped guy did manage to get to an intercom and start an alert. I've always known that you don't have to work to kill PCs, just give them enough rope. A bit of gunfire and a burning car in the worst part of town is one thing, actual piracy in New York harbor of an actual cargo ship is quite another. Even if it is a dock in the bad part of town. And I'm pretty sure that they haven't though about that fact that most spelljammer captains don't own their own private docks, especially relatively modest smugglers.

I may not get to do the molasses flood, we may be in "wanted criminals fleeing the law" territory soon. Or maybe "in hock to the mob" depending on how well the in-ship cameras pick up their slaughterfest as they make towards the bridge. Now I gotta stat the ship and some crew.

[Arbane]

Sounds like everyone is having fun!

The gnome vampire necromancer is called Velon.

Not a "Gnome Gnosferatu Gnecromancer"?

[Telok]

Not a "Gnome Gnosferatu Gnecromancer"? :smallbiggrin:

It's our 'that guy'. Unfortunately you're more likely to find more referential humor and roleplay during a WoW raid. I don't think he's ever heard of VtM or it's successors.

Last week on DtD40k7e:
You're in the jail house now

Right. It took them almost ten minutes to de-pressurize the hanger, get a shuttle over and in, re-pressurize the hanger, then get the minions lined up and ready to go. Naturally when they opened the door they were greeted with weapons fire. Then they literally stayed exclusively in corridors (except for one storeroom) while they made their way forward through the ship. So I've got bunches of spaceship / space station rooms laying around to re-use now. Anyways they slaughtered their way through minions and the occasional statted person and a few minor kill-bots, no parley, no prisoners, no survivors.

Once they got to officer country they finally did more than 'look in room, kill everyone, keep moving'. They came to a junction of hallways where the kill-bot control & charging stations, a power control room, and the bridge were all right next to each other. They still didn't enter any rooms (except to wipe / delete to kill-bot control & identification computer). So the NPCs came out to attack them while more minions and kill-bots caught up from behind. Importantly when the captain (tiefling chaos marine molasses smuggler) came out he had a bolter in one hand and a data-slate in the other. He dropped the data-slate when he needed the chainsword of course (I mentioned it twice here). Post fight the PCs turned off the power to all communication systems (this made the data-slate beep), then went to the bridge to "finish taking over" the ship.

This involved turning on the internal comms, telling the crew to evacuate with whatever they could carry because they were going to kill everyone, and then trying to decide how to "get away with the ship". Now, it's been previously established that:
1) All ships have internal security cameras in the hallways
2) The giant docking clamps that keep battleship sized spelljammer ships from being flung away from the outside of Sigil are controlled by the on-Sigil docking stations.

So after about another 15 minutes (this makes it roughly 30 minutes after the initial firefight in the shuttle hanger and maybe 4 or 5 hours after the shootout & burning car at their docking port.) they try to take the elevators up to the dock. The elevators are turned off. They use the intercom to the top. Someone wants to know who they are and what's going on down there. After a couple exchanges with things like "You don't sound like Captain Stabby?", "The docking fees have to be paid first.", and "What about the rest of the cargo? The warehouse is still rented for the rest of the week.", the topside person agrees to turn on the elevator so that they can come up.

Cue arriving at the top with ~15 Harmonium Peace-Forcers and a small remote control mecha with an anti-vehicle PPC on it all ready to kill the party. The smuggler captain had called the cops and the dock owner, that's what was going on with the data-slate.

The party surrendered and Velon rolled the double zeros Peril of the Warp. Essentially they all agreed to surrender but Velon's player decided to overchannel a Vampritic Touch type spell when a Peace-Forcer went to disarm and cuff him. And overchanneling to get more dice automatically triggers a roll on the warp tables. And of course he's not a tested or sanctioned sorcerer, so it's at like +40 on a d% table when he's done tallying everything up. Yup, sucked screaming into the warp never to be seen again.

Which honestly probably prevented a party wipe.

We stopped there. Next session will be a week or so of interrogation & social combat. People will be checking their backgrounds to see if they have any contacts, allies, backing, or anything they can use to hire a good lawyer (basically not much to nope because combat ability was pretty prized for most of them). And Skabad will be sold to someone or sent to the pound since he's been in wolf form for basically the entire incident (early crits during the shuttle hanger fight would have KOed him but for wolf form regen & toughness).

I'm seeing several ways things could go. Skabad could just wreck out of a city pound type place and try for a jailbreak (I need a jail setup). They could actually hire a lawyer or three (wealth, contacts, and social stuff). They could contact the Ostentatious Display of Wealth and try to get help from there (after the bad Yelp reviews from Eroticon IV I'm not sure). They could try to contact the greater daemon that they ferried to Sigil (they probably won't think of this). There's that movie contract (they probably won't think of that either but I'll do hook and hint for that anyways), plus Audrey II on their old ship (which hasn't even hardly had the chance to come up yet).

On the plus side I have options. There's the elvish molasses cartel that could obviously use some expendable, deniable, covert assets that (apparently but not really) know about the smuggling stuff and are willing to fight for molasses. The halfling mafia could be involved with the smugglers and someone could want a dog and some revenge, perhaps someone needs to be busted out of Cuthbert's prison in Mount Celestia too (party succeeds and it's a win, party fails and it's still a win). They could be offered a plea deal to undergo experimental medical procedures to relocate their brains to their torsos and install secondary brains in their heads so that they can infiltrate a mind flayer stronghold as exotic snacks. Maybe Commissar DorfBucks needs a penal battalion and some expendable ships to find out what happened to Ravenholm in Pandemonium, to take it home and weaponize it.

[Telok]

Notes:
Attempted hijacking & piracy [death](have a video, want a confession)
Multiple murder [penal servitude](have video, get admission that they weren't being attacked initially)
Theft [fines](get them to admit taking things)
Smuggling [penal servitude](get them to claim ownership of the molasses)
Unsanctioned sorcery [death](get them to admit spellcasting unless they are sanctioned)
Disturbance of the peace [fines](get them to admit to shootout at Skabad's dock)
Attempted fraud [fines](get them to admit to want to launch without paying docking fees)
Operating heavy machinery under the influence [rehabilitation](just fishing, get them to admit to something)
Possession of controlled substances [rehabilitation](one of the needlers has an illegal drug in it, admit possession)
Possession of controlled weapons [penal servitude](~12 to 15 kilos of high explosives, get someone to admit ownership)
Operation of autonomous war machines without a license [penal servitude](get them to admit messing with the murder-bots)
Unlicensed animal possession, no leash, no space rabies vaccinations [death](Skabad, get someone to admit ownership)

We now join the story in progress with our... heroes... as part of the 3rd Expendable Penal Battalion of the Empire of Humanity under the command of Commissar Urist McBlammo as they explore a Syrneth crystal sphere portal installation in the fourth layer of Carceri. One of the two shuttles worth of "soldiers" has gone silent just minutes after landing.

Unfortunately The players of Grackle and Gork have flaked on us. Well, stuff like an engagement and move to another state for Gork is a valid reason, but Grackle is still flaking. And Velon's player broke his leg pretty badly, guess it's a good thing he got sucked into the warp because he'll be out a little while. But we may get another player back, he was there for the first session but hasn't returned because, life again.

Anyways they were duly stripped of arms, armor, and sundries. Steel zip tied, then exploding carabiner stuck to a bench in the prisoner van. They talked a bit. About 15 minutes later there was some shouting and automatic weapons fire for a bit and everyone ran off, a few of the rogue kill-bots had come up the stairs and started shooting at people. They considered it but refrained form escaping (they had a pretty good chance as long as they actually tried to escape and not grab guns to start fighting). Eventually someone checked in on them, and a little bit later the van started up and began moving.

About an hour to get out of the low town, three hours of freeway time, another hour of driving through the Clerk's Ward. Again I had contingencies for them attempting escape here, but the remaining characters don't have driving skills. I guess big dang heroes take public transit. Anyhow underground parking garage, booking, "Name, residence, occupation.", then into a windowless cell where the lights and surveillance never turn off. A day passes and they get to make some phone calls for lawyers. Wealth, contacts, allies who aren't in jail with you, backing, choose something (or combine several somethings) and roll to see how good a lawyer you get. I'd decided to have the resource be the minimum dice, and the rolled value divided by 5 to be extra dice. So I was expecting numbers like 4k2, 6k3, 9k4, 10k5. Well Skabad stayed in wolf form, but his ally (whom I'd built of course) had contacts 3, rolled average and got a 6k3 lawyer. Vila Lobos used wealth 3, rolled slightly above average and had a 7k3 lawyer. Then it's time for interrogations.

I played the lawyers. I handed them the rap sheet (that chunk at the start of this post) pointed at one of them and said "You're a five keep two interrogator, get him to admit to something.", then we turned it around and did it the other way. Now this would have been a great place for the social combat rules, and I may have used them if we had more people who were more RP oriented. Eh, know your audience (I'm quite sure that 3/4 of them never even considered taking any social feats and Gork was the only one who actually took one). Straight opposed rolls per item on the list with bonus dice for stuff like good arguments and evidence. Plus they threw Gork under the bus at every opportunity, which didn't help mister "can't afford a lawyer because all his backgrounds were sunk into starting with power armor and a chain axe".

Vila Lobos convicted of mass murder and sentenced to penal servitude, at a roll of 83 to 31. That die was insane. Literally a less than 1/100,0000 chance to get a 64 + 19 on 4k2. Sakbad's ally, Tordram (chosen of tezeench, caster) was barely guilty of piracy at 17 to 16, nailed on disturbing the peace, and barely pinned blame for the wolf on Gork. He got penal servitude. Of course poor Gork, now an NPC, got nailed on nearly everything so he was executed during sentencing. Death sentence on video evidence, self incrimination, and stool pigeons. No point in wasting time (mine, on an NPC I'm not gonna use).

Honestly group penal servitude was the result I wanted. I'd kept things loose enough to plausibly fake that or rehabilitation, although if they'd done really well they maybe could have gotten off with fines and possibly permanent loss of wealth or other background bits. If they'd done really badly I'd have had to come up with something they could do to escape, like having the death penalty be dropped onto a deathworld with holo-vid drones following them to broadcast their deaths. But the lawyers called up a week or so later and said that the penal contracts were up for sale, would the PCs like them to try to influence the outcome. They said yes, and try to buy our gear too... Then they asked who was buying.

I gave them a choice:
1. The guild of Cocaine Wizards need people to harvest things for a project.
2. Commisar Urist McBlammo of the human Imperial Army needed troops for an expedition into Carceri.
3. And a group of eldarians was buying subjects for medical experimentation in preparation for some secret mission.

What they didn't know was:
1. Non-lethally hunt down a clan of ninjas, capture a T-rex, raid an assimar heavy weapons cache in deep astral space, and retrieve the seduction of a succubus from the Abyss.
2. Who's the real enemy and who will help you get out alive? The aboleth cult building a power base in a remote system, the ork dark mechanus creating infectious cyber-zombies from misapplied Syrnth tech, the commisar with the button to your bomb-necklace, or the mutagenic slime with the mind of a friendly puppy?
3. Infiltrate a mind flayer world disguised as tasty snacks (brains moved down into their abdomens, 'fake' brains implanted in the head) and carry off a daring commando raid.

You know what they chose.

The sadistic-psychotic hardcore bad*** who dual wields grenade launchers using gun kata to full-auto them, and explosive penal brigade collars with twitchy sensors.

[Justin Sane]

This is probably a little late, but... https://lynks.se/probability/ should help you out mathing the dice system.

[Telok]

It is a bit late. One of the first things I did was to write a little program to brute force the numbers. I validated it against a couple of the lower rolls that anydice.com would do, a sheet if probabilities someone else did for the game, and I did the stats math for two rolls.

Naturally the full validation took about as long as writing the program itself, bug fix included.

Lets see, they got shipped off to Carceri (spelling, fix later) with new neck wear. I made them roll contacts/wealth to have someone buy their important (bought with charscter backgrounds) gear and ship it to them as a care package before they left. Basically they just needed to roll anything and get a not terrible result. If they'd gotten good rolls I was going to throw in candy bars, cigs, and pron vids. Humor value, but they just rolled ok-ish.

Carceri: A Russian nesting doll crystal sphere that gets bigger and more dangerous the further in you go. Inspiration taken fron the Stalker games. Four layers in they end up at a Syrinth portal installation on the surface of the next crystal sphere, there's an Imperial ship rammed into the main stardock, engines cold, no life signs. Two shuttles of conscripts are launched to sections of the installation nearby, the PCs are on the shuttle that land farther away.

After five minutes contact is lost with the first shuttle. The PCs and 24 mooks start off to find out what happened. As soon as they're out of sight the pilot of their shuttle thinks "So long, suckers" and flies back to the main ship. Nobody bothers to check, even after they realize that they don't have radios or flashlights.

They encounter a couple lone cyber-zombies (using slightly nerfed cyber-yeti stats and no power fists) that they dispatch quickly and easily. Arriving at the stardock with the crashed ship (soft crashed, the ship is fine, ancient emergency mechanisims sealed the damage which lightly glued the ship in place) they find that I've decided the Syrinth went to the Star Wars school of architecture. Big open space, a couple rooms on the sides with windows, bottomless pit without railings, random stack of ancient boxes and barrels. Looks empty to begin with.

Part way in a few cyber-zombies enter line of sight, the party keeps going since the CZs just sort of stand there and moan at them. About half way across they panic when one CZ starts slowly following them, shooting and running ensue.

I'm short of time for posting now, suffice to say all the mooks died, the werewolf got an arm punched off and injected with ancient Syrinth cyber-zombie nanites, many perils of the warp (one CZ will pop out of the warp on an inhabited planet somewhere is a couple weeks), and we realized that we aren't somewhere with stores to buy more ammo. Plus, nobody brought food or water.

[Telok]

Ok, lets see. Left off at the dock fight.

Right. It was Skabad, Lobos, the dwarf ally, and about 15 minions in three squads against 8 cyber zombies. I say zombies but the nanites that have hijacked the bodies didn't make them slow or stupid, they're just having a severe lifestyle change shock. All the minions but Smith (who now has a name) died, and a pile of them got blown up to take out a zombie. Skabad got grappled, injected, knocked out, and an arm punched off. Lobos managed to slip out of grapples before being injected and realized that there's no place here to buy more ammo for his bolter pistol. The ally got punched down to 0 hp and a single body crit, his response being to start overcasting blast spells Perils of the Warp be damned.

So they squeaked through (one cyber-zombie got pulled into the warp and will reappear on an inhabited planet in a few weeks) and decided to hole up in a nearby garage while the werewolf regenerated. They scavenged a Syrnth multitool-like device (tech 25 to get it to turn into the right tool for the job, less than 15 jams it, 25 unjams, free raise if you can read Syrnth), didn't try to repair an ancient grav-bike, and took an almost 8 hour rest. Kind unfortunate you don't full heal and cure all poisons, diseases, and fix everything just by taking a long nap, right? Eh, we can handle not being coddled by a game.

Guess who has no food or water. Right, the PCs who were supposed to be on an hour or two long scouting mission. They got worried when the explosions started at hour 7 of the rest. The werewolf regenerated a cyber-arm, a Syrnth rogue nanite infused cyber-arm. Players are so cute when they worry. They came out and... the cyber-zombies they killed were still dead, the minions that were exploded or head mulched were still dead, the 10 mostly intact dead minions were now cyber-zombies. They decided to sneak past this time.

They considered going onto the ship but they identified the explosions as "spaceship being shot by another spaceship", that and some air leakage convinced them to abandon the dock and jam airlock doors shut behind them. I did have the ship bit worked out in case they wanted in. They were fast enough escaping to miss the parade of cyber zombies with wheelbarrows of stuff and a dark mechanus evacuating the ship.

[Telok]

Multi-week update.

TLDR: I need random crap for a warp puppy to zorp people and things into when it engulfs them.

Spoiler: Update

Show

Did I mention Smith? I don't think I did. They had one remaining minion, rather than run him as a hapless mook I set him up with first level 'green troops/beginner bandit' stats and the mook equipment that they were all given. He immediately became a mascot.

They wandered a bit, encountered another random cyber-zombie and ambushed it without indecent, then got to the water tank area. A huge room, 50 meters high, about 80 meters across, maybe 110-ish meters long. There are huge tanks of black slimy water, say 20m diameter and 25m high with open tops, connected by a series of steel pipes roughly 4m in diameter. Some pipes run across the floor, some across the ceiling, some as vertical connections, several enter/leave the room, some have pumps on them. There's a ledge around the edge, ~25m up, with set of metal mesh catwalks across the tops of the tanks. Things in the corners so that crossing the room generally involves using the catwalks, a power station, a control room, a bank of elevators, and an enormous sealed tank (fuel/oil, not that anyone investigated). Naturally they came out at the end with the tank and power station, there was some damage across one wall so the only obvious exits were the elevators and a door by the control booth. Plus there was a very normal looking human with an assault rifle and a big goofy grin on his face, wearing a slightly dirty and ragged Imperial Navy uniform.

Note: A totally normal looking person saying "Come. Master wants to talk to you." in a slightly sing-song voice under these sorts of circumstances triggers paranoia in player characters.

As soon as he turned around Villa Lobos drew two laz pistols and shot him in the back of his head. Cue rolling for initiative.

Note: While mind flayers and aboleths are powerful casters most of the illusions and enchantments have 10 or 30 meter ranges. They don't work well at 80+ meter ranges.

The aboleth was in one of the two far tanks, the mind flayer was in the conrtol room on the far side with some minions, other minions (human Imperial Navy crew with autoguns and no armor, repeatedly dominated & social combat smashed until they're sort of mentally goofy mind-slaves) were scattered around the area. Abby cast invisibility and started swimming closer, Flayey case alter self and blended with some minions to get closer. Skabad wolfed out to go kill a minion squad on one side, Lobos shot minions on the other side and down at floor level, the dwarf ally cast a blasty spell got a warp that opened a rift and Velon returned to the group having burnt a Hero Point to survive certain death. Velon now has a lobster claw left arm, a phobia of seafood, and <roll> 2 insanity... from 2d10. Anyways, fight fight fight. Skabad ended up dominated for one round by the mind flayer and attacked Velon, then turned back and whaled in the it. It jumped into one of the vats to try and escape but he followed it in. It tried "I'm taking you with me" with a grenade underwater but the rolled damage was terrible, Skabad just killed it. The aboleth turns out to have 5 strength, so it ended up ripping open one of the pipes above the catwalk (TN 30 on a shot full of holes section), making an illusionary double to distract, jumping down and going all tentacle hentai on the dwarf and Lobos. After a few rounds they got it down far enough that it decided to flee, so it overcast Luck (level 2 divination spell) for 9 extra dice and jumped off the catwalk into a tank. It needed about 7 meters of distance, jumping from a standstill is Str+Athletics v 15 to get Str meters + 1/5 over, 7k5 went to 10k8 and it got something like 80+ for a jump of around 20 meters. Smith shot a couple few minions and survived jumping onto a vertical pipe and sliding down fast when then illusionary aboleth came his way.

Takeaways: Enchantment is a decent school, if rather short ranged. Illusions works fine as long you make sure not to ******* GM them (so normal as always). Divination is actually a fairly powerful combat magic school with Luck (extra dice to roll), Unluck (remove dice from someone to roll of the rest of the scene), and Forsee (use the spell for a dodge test). Mind flayers are glass cannony but that's fine since they essentially ignore static defense, resilience, armor, etc., until they start grappling, and if they can chain stun someone that isn't too bad of an issue. Aboleth are a slightly more powerful mind flayer type caster (same schools, one more level, better casting stat) and are not glass cannony but not over melee combat terrors either.

The guys looted lost of autorifles, ammo, three candybars, and a few canteens of water that they didn't dare drink after some of the perils of the warp that had gone off. We broke there for the week.

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We picked up next week with the party scuffing through the assorted corridors of the industrial-ish sector. They made some perception checks and got to sneak up on a pair of aboleth victims in a medical section, killed them immediately. Then discovered that there were two medical pods with cyber-zombies inside them. The pods were active, working, and had wires and tubes going into the cyber-zombies. They fooled with the controls enough to figure out how to stop pods and release the zombies OR make the process 'go more'. They did not figure out what the devices were doing. What was happening was the black nano-bot infection that was making then into cyber-zombies was being reversed, but it's a six hour process and they came in half way through. But ya know, medic, tech, whatever skills being used on a complicated process when you don't know the language is hard and they ran out of patience.

They released one. It was still a cyber-zombie, just with a one die penalty, but like all of them it wasn't instantly hostile. Lobos tried to give it orders, did ok on the roll but not quite good enough, and it charged Smith. But at least it went in the direction he told it to go. After killing that one they set the other to the 'go faster' setting, but they got bored after 20 minutes and left. So that poor bugger died horribly since there was nobody to tell the machine to stop when the nano-bots were cleared.

They went through a cloning facility, breaking open various pods to see what was inside. Some were empty, some had twisted humanoid figures in them made out of a black carbon-plastic sort of stuff with lots of black dust, and one had black goo that started spreading and slowly climbing up the walls. This was of course the same nano-tech stuff that was in the cyber-zombies, but I don't think they made that connection even though I actually said "like the black goo-blood of the cyber-zombies". At least they were smart enough to get out and close the door behind them before they had to touch it. Then of course they found the control area with it's memory implanting teaching machines and the cloning pod controls. Of course they turned on the controls and messed with them, it started the cloning machines going but of course they couldn't read the messages that said so. I'm not yet sure what that'll produce since it's partially gummed up with the infecting nano.

One of our long time members who hadn't been able to make it to game soince the first session finally got to come back. He took the offer of new character with 1000 more xp after creation, human paragon named Smythe who's on the assassin class track, so sneaky combat plus quite reasonable social skills, allies holdings and followers, no drawbacks for more xp. Human paragons start with 5 hero points, plus their pressure points on top of their resource points, which enables them to pull off really impressive stunts if they want to blow it all on one roll. A starting human paragon can throw down 4 hero points, 3 pressure points, and a resource point to: reduce the TN by 15, add 1k0 and +3 to the roll, add a raise to the effect if they succeed, and still have a hero point for a reroll if they fail. Throw another 3k0 on for a strong stunt. Make an impossible piloting stunt? That beginning character could easily be looking at 7k3+3 v TN-15, an extra automatic raise, and a reroll. That should hit a normally TN 40 stunt 80% of the time, plus a reroll of course.

This is not a "zero to hero" game.

We decided that he was 1st officer of the crashed ship and had been here a couple weeks. He knew about the dark mechanus making and controlling the cyber-zombies (who had been some of his crew), the aboleth and mind flayers making and controlling mind-slaves (also previously some of his crew), and something that disappeared sentries while nobody was looking but left goodies (alien sculpture, nice hand made rug, crate of oranges, etc.). He also knew a bit of the layout of the area. Anyhow the party met him in the docking bay that the other shuttle had landed in. There was some damage, including to the shuttle controls where someone had had their penal battalion necklace blow up. So we met Smythe, last survivor of the previous ship, the dwarf ally repaired the radio (craft as build/repair, not tech use, otherwise the tech use sill is too good), and they called the ship.

With some back-and-forth the ship said "hold on for reinforcements" and sent another shuttle full of penal battalion minions. On the plus side these guys all had flamers. I did not realize how annoying that would become. They took half the squads (4), put Smith in charge of them, and set off towards the power plant. The other half went off towards the crashed ship. They passed through a heavily overgrown garden/relaxation area with a waterfall and pool, plus some five or six of the aboleth mind-slaves. Amazingly for the first time they didn't just start killing, they asked and the mind-slave pointed them towards the power station. They passed by without a fight. Weird.

They came to a hydroponics section, a football stadium sized place that had clusters of transparent crystal cylinders, pipes all over the ceiling and descending down to the clusters, suspended blue-white globes (the werewolf got a rage/resource point back), some collapsed sections, and a huge pool of standing water with ripples in it covering most of the middle of the area. There was a control panel in the middle of the room, Skabad and his ally moved towards that. The rest of the people were starting to slowly climb the rubbled bits to the next tier up (they entered at one end of the lower, central level and the exits were on the third tier up or there was one across the pool/lake). Velon managed to run back out before the dwarf figured out how to flip the light globes between day and night. Several flips later Skabad had his exalt resource (rage) refilled. Then they noticed the eyes. Lots of eyes, in the water, moving towards them.

They met the warp puppy. I call it a warp puppy because that's what it's mentality is like. They call it a chaos ooze because that's what it looks like, a purple-black tar pile 20 meters across and about 4 meters high in the middle with lots of eyes of all sorts everywhere. They ran. I rolled to see who it was going to follow, which turned out to be Smythe. It's about as fast as the gnome, Velon, so everyone managed to get well into a large room just outside one of the exits except Lobos, Skabad, and Velon before it reached the doorway to that same room. Then the shooting started. Then I realized that the minion rules don't really do area of effect weapons real well. Anyways the discovered some things, like it has a negative static defense but about a 20 resilience, that every time that resilience is overcome there's a Perils of the Warp roll, that every time someone cases a spell in it's presence theres a Perils of the Warp roll, that it doesn't do damage but just engulfs minions and leaves behind a pile of rubber duckies, that it doesn't do damage but causes rolls on the degeneration table. I'm pretty sure they didn't figure out that it doesn't have hit points. However I decided to have it flee after being 'kicked' twenty times. Otherwise they would have hung around trying to shoot or hit it until they were all dead. Smith however survived with two of the squads of minions by the simple expedient of closing a door between him and it.

I might have worked up some sort of modified rule for massed flamers ominions but since I'm using a dice roller app (found one that could do exploding dice and let you save a "bag" or presets) I just mashed buttons each time. It wasn't perhaps as fast as a single role rule but it was fast enough that it didn't impede anything.

This was also the first trial of the new warp tables. I ended up writing a new set of tables because:
A) I'm pretty sure we were misusing the current tables, you shouldn't add the modifier to rolls on the second table which is what we'd been doing.
B) With they way these people play (Velon's player likes random crap, he's the one who would draw every card in a Deck of Many Things) the number of entries on the tables are going to be repeated pretty often and get pretty repetitive.

Unfortunately I ended up with four tables and approximately 150 entries. I had to write a quick program to do the rolls. At some point I need to break down and re-learn Android programming to wrap the die roller and warp tables into something nice and portable. But the tables worked ok. There's a little more repetition at the lower ends than I liked, but they got some good results. Best was Velon and Skabad being empathically linked so that anything that caused Skabad to test fear or check insanity also affected Velon. Alas it only lasted until the end of the session and we broke for the week after that.

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The session this week started with a bit of exploration. They found the power generator complex and it's red, red, red, glow that penetrates leaded and warded six inch thick indestructible crystal. It's a 20 kilo matter-antimatter reaction trapped behind a time dam and surrounded by a bank of absorbing panels. Since this is all ancient, unreproducible, Syrnth magi-tech stuff, well... Of course all the 'glass' in this place has been indestructible Syrnth crystal, but nobody has tried to break any glass so far. Anyways huge room, 40 stories high, big sphere of hexagonal panels taking up most of the place, lots of wires running off the panels, huge pylons of wraithbone with mithril runes going inside the sphere, lots or hard red light coming out the cracks. They could see other viewing areas above them. They went searching for an elevator.

Found an elevator, a cylindrical shaft with a levitating platform, control console nearby, no safety railings or anything, no controls within the elevator either. The elevator activates about 30 seconds after you push a button on the console, no rolls to use this one because frankly freight elevators don't need complex controls. So they went all the way to the top. As the floors whizzed past they got a glimpse of one floor with 30 or 40 cyber-zombies holding boxes and crates. That caused some excited discussion but they ended up deciding that restoring power to the complex was more important than slaughtering bunches of zombies that were just standing around carrying things. At the top they found a better viewing area and located the control room as the bigger windowed one with a big crane sticking out right under it. They counted floors and went back to the elevator.

When they got to the right floor they discovered that they were right above the room full of cyber-zombies. With just a couple centimeters of clearance around the edges of the platform they decided against blowing a bunch of flamer ammo into the room below. Naturally they were not surprised when they checked the last corner before the control room and saw a pair of cyber-zombies by the half opened doors. They decided on an ambush, Lobos would shoot the zombies and the minion squads would flame them. Which ended up taking three tries and Skabad running up into melee. Skabad also discovered that he was having to make Willpower v 10 checks or his arm wanted to hit people who weren't cyber-zombies, but that's an easy check. Those CZs just didn't want to leave their stations, but they did end up bringing four friends. In all it pretty much worked, one flaming cyber-zombie managed to get into melee with a minion squad and kill 4 of them, Skabad took a minor hit or two. During the fight a Peril of the Warp was rolled that indicated paranoia and someone would come hunting the group in the next encounter. The control room doors were also ripped open by the dark mechanus and they realized that there were more cyber-zombies in there with him. But they moved out of sight and waited.

In my grabbing of assorted maps and bits to use I'd screen shotted some websites with partial Star Trek space station deck plans. The one I'd chosen (and modified) for the control room had two escape pods sticking into it and an airlock. I hadn't thought about it at the time but that turned out pretty well because I had the warp puppy show up again, coming down the hallway. So they charged the control room, Velon opened a side room and found a forklift and one of the disconnected hexagonal panels (lost Sryinth tech, converts all electromagnetic & magic radiations into power at 99%+ efficiency, apparently not interesting), the minions were told to slow the warp puppy down with their last shots of flamer ammo. The cyber-zombies managed to inject Skabad again, Lobos got smacked kinda hard by the dark mechanus before he escaped into one of the pods (where we discovered that Syrinth alarms use pulsing green light and ultrasonic sirens, instead of the humanoid normal red flashers with audible sirens, spur of the moment but it's canon now), only one of the three control console get blown up by a flamer blast. Smythe and the dwarf managed to get the power back online, Skabad almost vented himself out an airlock trying to escape warp puppy, the rest of the minion were eaten (producing a plate of chimichangas, a black racing motorcycle, and one of the Syrnth memory implanting teaching machines with unknown settings or lessons), and everyone got into the last escape pod trying to keep away from warp puppy with Smythe pulling a stunt to jump over a bank of computers and past it while it was at the escape pod hatch. They did manage to rescue the teaching machine.

We ended there. Current status: Smythe (human Imperial Navy officer & paragon), Villa Lobos (dark eldarian paragon, ex-penal battalion mass murderer), Skabad (ork werewolf 2/3 cyber-zombie), Velon (gnome vampire unsanctioned sorcerer with a lobster arm), the dwarf (unsanctioned Chosen of Tezeench sorcerer ex-penal battalion space pirate), and Smith (normal human penal battalion sergeant) are launching into space above a reawakened Srynth portal installation on the fourth crystal sphere within Carceri in a highly automated escape pod. Nobody has piloting. There's a wounded aboleth with several mind flayers and about 1/5th the crew of a military cruiser under mind control, a wounded dark mechanus with about 1/5th the crew of a military cruiser turned into cyber-zombies (he's in the other escape pod but has piloting, CZs are in several places around the portal installation), a crazed dwarven Commisar of the human Imperial Navy running around with the rest of the penal battalion, a crashed and slightly shot up navy ship stuck in the installation, and a re-purposed smuggling ship crewed by human naval personnel. The portal is opening and a spaceship eating kaiju bug and it's progeny will be coming out momentarily.

To do before game tomorrow: Stat both ships, the bug, and a weapons bay on the Syrnth installation. I know that the aboleth is going to go to either of the crashed ship or the weapons bay, Urist McBlammo is going to go for one of the ships, the dark mechanus will go to whatever is left, basically wherever the PCs go they're going to come into contact with one of the three sides in this whole mess while dealing with a giant space monster. Somewhat ironically nobody ever shoots before talking except the PCs and Urist, who I think they're most likely to meet. Since there weren't an gnomes or orks in the penal battalion officer corp (read: nobody without exploding collars) before, and certainly nobody with an obviously warm mutated lobster claw arm, Urist is going to start by shooting.

And of course the warp puppy is hanging onto the outside of the escape pod.

[The Glyphstone]

It's a shoggoth. No one recognized it as a (warp) shoggoth?

[Telok]

It's a shoggoth. No one recognized it as a (warp) shoggoth?

Since even the whistling didn't give it away I'd say no.

Yes, it's a warp shoggoth with the mind of a happy puppy. They keep kicking the puppy.

Blasted puppy kicking adventurers.

[Telok]

Kaiju work pretty well using the spaceship rules. I'm fairly confident that a ninja T-rex centipede Cocaine Wizard experiment will work pretty well using the vehicle rules.

First I'd like to state the current house rules that I'm using. This is mostly for myself so that I can keep track of them.
1. During free study between classes you can buy feats, magic schools, and sword schools not on any of your class lists at x2 cost. Default: After study we've decided that the original intention was to gate feats behind classes and class levels. While it does mention buying off list stats and skills during free study there is no mention of feats. Reason: The good stuff costs enough XP, and I've maybe been stingy (about 2000 +/- 200 xp so far, plus one hero point), that I don't worry about what's being bought. Stuff like the triple melee attack or Fan the Hammer feats that increase the number of attacks are limited by the players having to spend resource to gain extra reactions, and that's level limited anyways*.
2. Casting a spell in melee / making a power test in melee does not provoke an attack of opportunity. Default: Normally it provokes. Reason: It started out with my misunderstanding or mis-explaining, I don't remember now. But it's turning out to not be an issue. Spells aren't so powerful that they need a balance like that, there's a feat that removes it, and there's lots of ranged combat anyways. If it ever really turns into an issue I can talk to the group about maybe including a feat to make casting always provoke.
3. With a half decent excuse I'll allow the buying of backgrounds, one at a time, for the same price as magic/sword schools. Default: Once you pick backgrounds they're forever locked in. Except that you can lose them by screwing off. Reason: Spaceships mostly, capture a spaceship and I'll allow characters to sink the xp into holdings to represent that. Then it becomes part of the character that I don't worry about justifying in universe. If you just pirate a ship I consider things like former owners/investors, ID transponders, insurance companies, piracy law, etc. But of you've paid xp we can all just happily hand-wave that. Or play it through to see what complications come up. But it's ultimately you'r bought and paid for spaceship. And that can work for other stuff like followers, wealth, backing. Do something not-idiotic to justify it and pay the xp.

* Multi-attack: Multi-attack options are always a full-round action and each additional attack after the first costs a reaction. Since everyone only gets one base reaction a round anyways that limits them to two attacks (and no dodge, parry, AoO). But you can spend your exalt Resource for more reactions. The limit on Resource is your pool/recovery and the fact that you can't spend more Resource during/after your turn than your Power stat, and the Power stat is limited to your level or less. That's for the unconditional multi-attacks, stuff like the cleave feat or the "all-out attack that damages = repeat the attack once" feat have potential failure to even get the extra attack and are limited to one extra anyways so they don't cost a reaction.

A quick primer on spaceship combat: Ships got stats (surprise). Hull points, maneuverability, shields, add-ons, weapons, speed, static defense, all the usual you'd expect. But the important bit is crew. Crew is less a warm body count than a measure of how many people aboard can do how many different things at once. By default small crew may be 10 people per point and the largest may be 50 per point. Of course default the largest ships pretty much max out at one kilometer and only have 24 crew. So like half the people on a wet navy RL WWII battleship that's 1/3rd the length (don't even ask about cruise ships). And I started the game with a 3.5 km ship. So for me, with the smallest spelljammers being ~300 meters long the 'warm body' count starts at 75-ish and tops out around 1000 per point for the big guys. The important thing about crew, other than how many you have, is the quality. How the crew is split up between ship actions dictates how many dice you roll, but the quality is how many dice you keep. Characters have the option of taking command as officers and substituting their own ranks in a skill for the crew quality. With a skilled officer you can pull some impressive stunts by allocating lots of crew to it.
Three important things to note:
A) Ship static defense is maneuverability (-5 to +5 usually, may get to +10) plus {crew quality x3}. So pretty much 1 to 17 range normally with a max of 25. The pilot can choose to evade instead of steer and replace that with his roll.
B) Shields regenerate every round but weapons have a disruption factor that reduces the regeneration per hit. Once shields are down they stay down for the rest of the fight.
C) Any hit that does hull damage (ramming skips shields and goes straight to hull) causes a roll on the critical chart. Weapons have a crit modifier (can be negative) and 13+ (on 1d10, not 1k1, 1d10) causes internal explosions and another roll on the chart. Crits often kill crew or damage ship systems.

Ok, the PCs left off in an escape pod. They didn't tell it where to go so it went straight while the talked and argued and amputated Velon's arm with a power sword (for some reason there was the assumption that the regenerate spell would grown him a different arm, I dunno). Then something bumped the pod. A quick and surprisingly high Int/Dex roll later they rotated the pod to look down and saw a 500 meter long bug (Gamera 2: Attack of Legion, hilarious with the Texas accent spoof overdub extra feature) with bunches of little flying versions of it. Decisions were quickly made and the decided to follow the other escape pod (dark mechanus/insane tech-priest that they'd recently tried to kill) in the hopes that they could swipe an escape ship. I mean, they haven't seen any other ships but they still assumed that the guy had his own 300 meter long, 600+ crew transport hidden somewhere.

Right. They ended up with the mechanus, quickly allied with him and his ~35 cyber-zombies that he'd stashed at a weapons installation, and started shooting. Essentially they had a ship with bunches of guns and no engines/maneuvering. Cue the 4-way fight between the Lucky Formidable (Urist McBlammo), Marty Celeste (the crashed-ish ship taken over by the aboleth & friends), them, and the bug.

Stats

Spoiler

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Lucky Formidable got upgraded to a 115 build point ship, better shields, random add-ons, fore & aft heavy plasma beam arrays which weren't a really good idea as they're narrow arc and so can't cover the broadsides and the array property is wasted if they can't shoot into the same arc. 60 hull points, 10 crew at quality 3, 120 shield points with regen 10, miscellaneous crap. Static defense 9.

The Marty Celeste was a 110 point ship 55/75 hull points, 60 shields with 25 regen, 8 crew at quality 2, 2 forward heavy plasma beam arrays and 2 aft smoking holes. It started 'docked' and with shields off. Static defense 3.

The Syrnth defense installation had 140 hull points, 50 shields with 25 regeneration that would come back on three rounds after being taken down, 18 crew at quality 1, and 9 weapon turrets (three each of three different types, but not with really different stats). Static defense 1, and no way to raise that.

The bug. 100 hull points, no shields, 4k4 for rolls and could do piloting, attacking, and one other action (engineering or arcana-sensors) each round. 25 minion "fighters", and three different attacks: a lightning blast with ok damage and 10 disruption, a claw attack with low damage & 'melee' range but like ramming it bypasses shields, and some 'laser whips' with low damage & no disruption but bonus damage and crit per raise on the hit roll and -5 maneuverability per raise on the hit roll. This turned out to be slightly more powerful than I expected. It had static defense 20 which it really needed.

Lobos took over gunnery for three positron turrets with 12 crew, Skabad took 3 crew & his ally to run arcana & engineering stuff, Smythe took 3 crew plus Smith & the remaining minion (I was wrong, they still had one penal battalion guy left) to run any other guns he wanted to. I had Skaban and Smythe roll as four crew since they had extra hands and the installation didn't need lots of people to count as crew, that effectively pushed them to 20 crew. Velon shadowed the dark mechanus prepared to attack him if he showed any sign of betraying them. Weirdly nobody has ever tried to betray the characters. In fact nobody here has outright attacked them without being attacked first. I'm not entirely sure that they noticed that.

Lessons learned:
1. Either give kaiju something shield like or give them more hit points, like double hit points. I ended up having it roll the engineering check for emergency repairs every round. That worked OK as an ad-hoc regeneration but kept it from doing any sort of 'divert power to -' checks that could have made things more interesting. If all three 'ships' had concentrated fire the bug would have gone down in two rounds.
2. I need to figure out how the fighters should really work. I was treating them as a group of minions, but I'm thinking that they each ought to have been an individual attacker. Of course that would make 25 of them be a bit too many.
3. Two laser whip attacks in a row will rape a ship if the first one gets a good hit. That +1k0 and +1 crit rating per raise on the hit wasn't too bad, until you realized that the maneuver penalty translated directly into a to-hit bonus for the second shot.

That's what happened to the Marty Celeste. It had backed out and was moving away (reverse engines, +5 TN & half speed for maneuvers) when it fired at the Lucky Formidable and the kaiju. The Formidable had been lightly melee whacked by the kaiju, but I had the bug turn anf go after the Celeste. One round it did the laser whips with an average hit, the Celeste had failed a maneuver roll so it was at defense 3, which turned out to be something like 4 raises. So the damage went from 3k2 to 7k2, and a slightly above average damage roll went for ~30 damage which was half it's full shield strength and it hadn't been at full. The shields went down and the crit roll (because the Celeste took hull damage) at +8 ended up doing a couple crew deaths and damaged something engineering related. But it also put the Celeste at -20 maneuverability, which translated into a -17 static defense. The next laser whip roll was below average, but resulted in 6 raises. 9k2 damage rolled low, but the crit chart... got 13+ four or five times because it was rolling at 1d10+10. It ended up a drifting wreck at 2 hull points and nothing on board being left alive. I think it took more than twice it's remaining crew in crew 'damage'.

A couple rounds later the bug was dead, there were a few 'fighter' bugs left wandering around, and McBlammo did a but of logical thinking. All his actual crew were on the Lucky Formidable with him, most of the penal battalion that had been sent to the station was confirmed dead, none of their exploding collars were sending signals from the weapon emplacement on the portal installation (ok, one was, but it takes more than one guy to run 4 to 8 guns), therefore the only possible people manning the guns in the installation could be enemies. Ergo the PCs ended up blowing the Lucky Formidable to bits. They weren't safe the whole time, at various points everyone had taken a pot-shot at them and the kaiju had gotten in a melee attack, but they still had over 100 hull points and only 2 crew worth of cyber-zombies got sucked out into space from a breach.

There resulted an alliance with the dark mechanus, the recovery and repair of the Marty Celeste, some worrying about the name of the ship, a final realization that simply closing doors would stop the warp puppy, some looting (mostly be the dark mechanus, nobody else seemed interested in anything apart from a broken down Syrnth hover-cycle), and eventually leaving the place behind. They managed to extricate themselves from Carceri but lost about 4 years in the astral/warp sargasso surrounding it. Carceri has a time differential the further in you go so the few or 3 months they spent in there turned into about 2 years, but they also rolled low on an astronavigation check and picked up a warp event of losing more time. Finally they got to a crystal sphere called Seven Suns that's mainly focused on spelljammer build/repair (good since they only had 15-ish hull points) and we left off there. They got XP and a Hero point. Kaiju are worth a hero point in my opinion, even an easy one like this, plus they needed some real reward since they didn't bother to really grab any Syrnth tech.

Oh, and they used the teaching machine. I had to make up rules on the spot. Will v 25 +5/attempt for dealing with having Syrne memories implanted in your head, success was 1k1 insanity points while failure was 1k1 insanity and a mental trauma table roll. A failure would break the machine. Then I had them roll 3d10 & sum, and started counting down the skills list with the first skill being #3. There's only 27 skills on the list so I was going to do spell, gun, and sword school for the last three but nobody rolled that high. Now, NOW they remember to use their hero points. Anyways they all ended up making the Willpower rolls, rolling low insanity, learning the Syrnth language, and getting a free dot in one skill and adding teh Syrnth specialization (specialization is reroll ones when it applies) to that skill. In order: Lobos, animal ken (specialization in Syrne animals? gotta figure that one out, it's weird), one hero point to reroll a failed Will test. Skabad, stealth (specialization being in Syrne architecture), two hero points to lower the TN. Smythe, weaponry, four hero points to reduce the TN to 15. Velon, drive, spent both his hero points to reduce the TN but still failed the Willpower roll (and he's got 5 Will), sadly the trauma was just a little more insanity and him running around gibbering for an hour or two.

They need 20 crew & 12 weeks of repairs. Half the consoles and weapon mounts in their ship are empty. The Syrnth hover-cycle will be worth 4 free raises on wealth tests if they choose to sell it. The multi-tool will be worth 1, the teaching machine will be worth 1 because it's broken unless they lie a lot when it will be worth 4 and an Enemy. I need to come up with something for them to do during the waiting period or just waive it away and see where they want to go next. Of course that means having a bunch of crystal spheres statted up. And some more ships too, for fighting and stuff. Of course Smythe and Velon have contacts in the human imperial navy and the vampire council respectively, so I can always throw something at them from there, especially if they go to those for resources to fix the ship.

[Telok]

Improv time!

There was some ******* around in port, they managed to buy some minimal guns for the rear, contacted the vampire council and filed paperwork to get the ship fixed (plus a new paint job, new IFF transponders, and some reasonably legal ownership papers). They put in a pretty good argument about why the council should bankroll them, they want to quest for a drakness creating artifact or magical devices. Actually they want to steal it form someone because that's easier than doing the hard work to research and build anything themselves. And the good nows is that I (and therefore the vampire council) know a few options. Pandemonium (the setting info blurb about it opens with "We don't go to Pandemonium anymore. Not since the reports came out. Endless screaming tunnels in the blackness. Madness and death are all that await here. Don't go to Pandemonium."), some crystal spheres where mind flayers rule everything, and Gehenna (specifically Vivec city, setting info contains "The Dark
Eldarin decided long ago that safety railings were a lot less entertaining than making the edges of the bridges slippery and razor-sharp.").

Unfortunately after waiting three weeks for the paperwork to go through they learned that it would take another 14 weeks for repairs to be completed. Also, for some reason, they feel poor.

Cue trying to hire themselves out as mercenaries. Cue me having to improvise everything for four hours. Cue me taking the easy way out with a string of fights that took up a lot of time.

I offered them four different things that I thought up off the top of my head. They chose escorting some scientists to get biological samples/specimens. I don't even remember what the others were except that one was a hit offered by the halfling mafia (on Skabad hilariously enough, but they didn't pursue it far enough to get there). They also didn't bother to ask where they were going or why a bunch of researchers had a ex-Navy cruiser and were offering 50,000 credits for some hired guns.

They had a four weeks of transit time and went into high orbit around the gas giant in the Beastlands crystal sphere. Think tyrannids. That's pretty much the Beastlands. The ship avoided the weird moon with the variable gravity well and weird warp signature, because that moon's biosphere keeps spawning bio-titans that go over to have violent deaths at that spot and nobody wanted to risk a bio-titan randomly having a surface-to-orbit weapon growing out of it's back. No, nobody knows what's there. It buried under a small mountain of fossilizing bio-titan armor. Anyhow they hung out in orbit for a few days before being attacked by a 500 meter long space squid. The ship was prepared for this and ran circles around it for half an hour or so shooting it to death. Then another half hour of shooting it so it would stop regenerating. Then a few more shots just to make sure it was really dead and not faking. Then they bundled the party up with an intern in carapace armor and sent them over to collect spores.

I did a quick and dirty no-dead-ends almost-maze of internal organs (10-ish nodes with 2 to 4 connections, quick notes on semi-random encounter timing) and threw re-skinned foes out of the beastiary in the back of the book at them. Lesser daemons as bug bugs, greater daemons without powers or intelligence as two-headed lizards, I was planning on using the dragon stats too. Anyways I offered them essentially all-you-can-carry rocket launchers, frag rockets, needlers, and needler ammo for the trip. I forgot that Skabad had a bag of holding. Skabad now has 144 frag rockets, but he forgot to get a launcher. I love these guys when they do this.

They entered through the rectum of course, their choice. Through the intestines, stomach, through a wound into a 'lung' shaped thing, and then I'd managed to run out the clock. We broke there for the week.

------------------------------------------------------------------

It's not the heat, it's the humidity. Or: Academic rivalry, with rocket launchers, in space.

The previous week wasn't my best work. It kept everyone entertained, there was some amusing stunting and Velon got set on fire, and that's what we're here for. The entertainment I mean, people getting set on fire is just a bonus. But I can do better. So the next room was the 'brain' chunk and the end of the "internal organ dungeon". While the intern used a scanner (because I used the old gang lord stats from the very first combat encounter he was actually surprisingly decent in combat, and his stat-line already had a rocket launcher on it) and a cutlass to hack football/soccer ball sized spores out of the nerve clusters teh rest of them fought off Obliterator stats. Well, Obliterator stats refluffed as size 9 (humans are size 4) tangles of tentacles with a big glowing pink eye in the middle, adding the ability to triple melee attack as a half action (not using reactions/resources) with 12 meter reach and the flexible(no parry) attribute. I placed three 'spawn pods' around the area and rolled every hit on the nerve tissue to see if one would bust out a critter. Well they only fought one at a time and did ok. They were quite respectful of the plasma eye-beam, it having the stats of a man-portable lascannon, and took pains to keep out of the way of that.

Alas the dice favored them and they only woke the second tentacle beast when they were getting the third and last spore that they needed. They blew through 1/3rd of it's hit points very quickly and I realized that I needed to spice things up a bit to keep this interesting. I employed that time honored tool of GMing. I lied.

Actually I just made up a new ability for the critters that they could transfer hit points and revive each other with a full round action. Thus the live critter went over to the dead one and used half it's remaining hit points to heal just enough of the critical damage to get it back to life. Of course the players didn't know that one beast had zero hit points and the other had four. We're talking four hits to re-kill one and maybe six for the other? Not a push over fight, but I was quite sure they weren't in any real danger of anyone dying barring a series of quite good & bad rolls. Still it scared them enough to decide that discretion was the better part of valor and beat a retreat.

They made it back to the ship completely without incident. The ship shot the corpse a little more, just to make sure, and left. A week later and they're in the warp heading back.

Someone knocks at the door of their room. It's an intern for Dr. Murine. Apparently Dr. Whitmore had taken one of the spores out of containment and was going to do unauthorized experiments on it. Why should the PCs care? If they don't get all three spores back they don't get paid. Fine, the PCs care now.

They actually started by talking. Ok, they started with threats and demanding immediate surrender, but that's still talking. The shooting started about 45 seconds later.

Since minion squads come in numbers up to six (you could do more but six turns out to be a pretty good number) I pulled out a big handful of d6 for minions, lab assistants, interns, gofers, etc. After the wrecked lab, exploded acid vat, the fire suppression system going off (Velon got set on fire again), and all that, I counted up 'bodies'. About 90 people had died. A few were minions that were supporting the PCs, they weren't all hostiles. The unconscious Dr. Whitmore was dumped out an airlock and the sport returned to the containment chamber.

The next day someone knocks at the door of their room. It's an intern for Dr. Bunsen. Apparently Dr. Murine had taken one of the spores out of containment and was going to do unauthorized experiments on it.

This time Smythe took along a meltagun, literally the third biggest gun on the equipment list. The only 'bigger' guns are the Syrnth Null Ray, practically an artifact, and the man-portable lascannon. It has penetration 12. Heavy power armor has AR 12. Space marine dangly bits might as well be swinging in the open breezes for all a meltagun cares.

Locked door? Melt-a-hole! Almost put the astronavigation chamber into vacuum/warp. Someone slams the door in your face because they don't want to fight you? Melt-a-hole! Through the door, a mook, and the window at the other end of the room. Hull breach alarms, minions failing strength checks, auto-sealing blast doors, stuffing bodies into holes to buy more time. Dr. Murine is a dexy halfling with 31 defense and enough sword school to be dangerous in melee to both Skabad (via damage) and Vila Lobos (sufficiently high attack rolls)? Melt-a-hole! More hull breach alarms, minions failing strength checks, auto-sealing blast doors, etc.

Finally they rescued the spore from a chamber where it was being zapped with weird energies. Counted up casualties (about 70). And we broke there for the week.

There's talk of then keeping the spores with them. Talk of setting up camp in the containment room. Talk of "Stop putting holes in our ship salvage". The realization that there are only about 600 people on this ship and they've offed around 150 of them. Plus I asked in the Warhammer thread about holing your ship in the warp. Yay, daemon incursions! That gives me an excuse to arm the entire crew with the rocket launchers and some flamers. They may have to stop being all minions.

Luckily I still have about 8 more scientists to go. Names: Chikungunya, Epstein-Barr, Guillain-Barré, Kawasaki, Norwalk, Phthiriasis, etc.

[Telwar]

"Cocaine wizards?"

Right, DtD. Nvm. Carry on, though. :)

[The Glyphstone]

My description of this game as Tripping On Acid: The RPG grows more and more accurate.

[Telok]

https://bitbucket.org/JCamp8/perilso...to/src/master/

Public repo of the java code source, .jar file, and warp effect files. In case anyone wants to use or play with them.

Tentacle Monster with Plasma Eye (level 4 hentai horror)
Stats: str6 dex4 con6 wil4 else1
Skills: all@3: acrobat, ballistic, perception, brawling
hp 15, resilience 8, armour 10(all), defence 14
size 9, speed 10, run 60
senses 4k1, dodge 6k4, parry 7k3 shoot 7k3, melee 6k3
plasma eye: range 300m (+1k0 @ < 150m), 5k4 (reroll 1s) E, pen 10
tentacles: triple attack as a half-action, reach 13m, flexible, 6k3 (reroll1s) I, pen 0
Special: As a full round action it may transfer hit points to another of it's kind via
touching eyes together. This may even bring the other one back from the dead but
requires healing all critical damage to the killing body location.

Doctors & ship officers:
Alkhurma, squat chief engineer, heavy bolter & crisis zone gun kata, will attempt to kill all scientists after 1/3 crew dead
Dr. Bunsen, dark eldarian zoologist, goremaul & stone dragon, will try to hatch a spore
Prthiriasis, Aasimar gunnery officer, chain axe & setting sun, will try to destroy the spores after 1/2 crew dead
Dr. Norwalk, ork scientist-monk, cestus & diamond mind, will try to stealth-steal a spore
Dr. Kawasaki, human arcanist, power fist & transmutation spells, will swipe a spore for magical mutation experimentation
Dr. Guillain-Barre, eldarian physician, daiklave & divination spells, will try to swipe spores for dissection
Dr. Epstein-Barr, gnome physician, flamberge & stone dragon, will aid another scientist
Chikungunya, elf 1st officer, hunting rifle & power sword & iron heart, will mutiny against scientists after 2/3 crew dead

No captain, the ship is run by a committee of the scientists and the 1st officer.

They are currently at 420 crew out of the usual 420. I'm contemplating a pirate attack en route too.

[Telok]

They are currently at 420 crew out of the usual 600. I'm contemplating a pirate attack en route too.

Great Hera's short-n-curlies, did it really take me this long to notice that typo?

Any whee, update.

Whoof. It's been a while since the last update. Three sessions were spent alternately murderizing crew and scientists, fighting daemons, etc.

First the chief engineering officer was possessed of a daemon. He also had a heavy bolter and some gun kata so the bakery and kitchen got pretty well shot up. On death he split into a batch of lobster-snakes, little weenie critters that are really only a threat in numbers of 4+ when attacking a single person. They went down so hard and fast that I ended up giving them a 'regenerate after death' mechanic. If the killing blow wasn't a head shot they would regenerate with 0 HP after 1d6 rounds to a total of 9 rounds. Which means that if I rolled an unlikely numbers of 1s they could regenerate 9 times, the corollary being that if I rolled 5 twice they stayed dead the second time. This actually turned out to work really well and made them a good monster. I'm keeping these things on tap as a sort of 'warp rat' minor infestation critter.

Second was another scientist and crew slaughter. Third was daemons. I used about 12 of the lobster-snakes (should have used more) and two monsters from the book (sabbat prince, reskinned as an inky black silhouette daemon that shot globs of darkness and moved fast).

Fourth was a scientist getting them to come stop another scientist. Actually it was a trap and they weren't even doing anything with the spores, they just identified the PCs as the biggest threat. Notably if an monk type character with transmutation magic is left alone to buff their physical stats into the 6 to 8 range, they get reasonably dangerous. Skabad got half his ribs broken again, as a beefed up werewolf in armor wielding a power sword, by an unarmored human with a power fist. Any ways, after that they discovered that one of the spores was missing. Tracked it down with a tricorder/auspex by the unique organic RNA molecules that it was out-gassing. That led to...

Fifth was a fight in a machine shop where the last two scientists had actually hatched/spawned one of the spores. I used the lesser werewolf, reskinned, as one that clawed it's way out of an incubator. Then they let a reskinned greater werewolf critter out of a big nest/womb that was behind another door. Velon dropped a Perils of the Warp that had everyone within 15-ish meters make a Willpower test or become possessed by a daemon spirit. Only the monster failed (of the people on the side of the bulkhead that the fight was on). Which just meant that it got a bit tougher and gained another pool or resource to spend. At that the last remaining scientist switched over and joined them to try to kill his creation. Because breeding infectious mold-spore based not-Tyrannid monsters with weird science is one thing, but letting a daemon run around is unacceptable. It got a really good damage roll and splattered him.

Sixth was the dawning realization that everyone on the ship who had been trained in Arcana was now dead and they needed to make an Arcana + Wisdom test vs 25 to get out of the warp. Lobos, who has avoided spending any hero points that session blew all of them (4, and his last 3 remaining pressure points) to crank the target number down and beef up his rolls to make an untrained Wisdom check to get them out of the warp. He made it by 2 points.

Then they discovered that they were being pursued by a pair of dark eldarian raiding corvettes as those also dropped out of warp behind them. I'd cut down the lightest ship in the book a bit to make a sort of ultra light raider with a single gun, but I made the mistake of having two of them with slightly too good of a gun on them. One, or two with weaker guns, would probably have been better. The group made the mistake of taking no actions but standard movement and shooting the guns. No shield boosting, no crew triage, no emergency repairs. And of course they only had half the normal crew for their ship. So they came out about 30 VU (void units, a fungible distance of space measurement depending on how cluttered or restricted local space is, normally about 6 million meters or 6000 km) from the crystal sphere and about 50 VU 'over' from the portal installation. Rather than try to make their own portal in the face of the sphere they opted to race for the station and the safety of it's guns.

The made it. Barely. They were literally at the extreme edge of the station's guns when their ship was disabled. Neither of the raiders ships had lost their shields, although one was really close. So the almost damaged raider backed off and the completely undamaged one sent in a raiding party.

Ambushes with rocket launchers and flamers are ugly.

The raiders go stomped. Well, 2/3 of the raiders got stomped. The chunk of the raiders that tried to go through the daemon infested part of the ship ran out followed by about 30 lobster-snakes and a lesser daemon. The lesser daemon got away. Then Lobos had the funny idea to broadcast video of the fight and taunt the raider's ship. He got back a reply: "Those things look tasty. Bring us over a crate or two and we'll let you go." So they loaded up the raider's shuttle with 60 minions, Lobos talked the lesser daemon into rounding up a batch of lobster-snakes and cramming into the airlock, and off they went. Although while they were leaving they did notice a suspicious increase in enthusiasm among the crew to join them. One of the tentacle beasts with the plasma cannon eye was in the engineering section of the ship.

Which brought us up to today. Unfortunately only Velon and Skabad could make it today. Which was fine since they never got out of the landing bay and lost 59 out of 60 minions. Among other things I have a booklet (pdf) of spaceship/space station geomorphs for Traveller. Which comes in pretty useful since there's something like 200+ of them. So I found one with layouts of shuttles and ships boats, picked on that could fit the raiding party, and found it's docking bay. It was an elevator type docking bay, so the shuttle landed on top of the ship and was lowered down into the bay. The shuttle also has a huge rear cargo door with a matching cargo area in the bay. That had 4 dark eldarians with machine guns behind overturned heavy metal tables in it. The door near the shuttle airlock had two of them with machine guns. Then there were eight more standard dark eldarian raiders on the other side of the shuttle bay. Four machine guns doing aimed surprise round suppressing fire at 10 meters into 60 packed minions is ugly, only 25 made it out of the shuttle and that's because I just skipped the pinning tests. The lesser daemon didn't even make it out of the airlock, the two just hosed him down with enough lead that being Mr. Supernatural Horror didn't save him. Oh, and a batch of slaves were setting up pots, grills, and tables for lobster-snake cooking.

Other than the totally natural and expected betrayal and ambush ambushing the raiders were totally going to keep their word. Even invite the PCs to the meal and not poison or drug them. Skabad slaughtered four guys, Velon teleported around and hurt people, minions died in droves, the lobster-snakes scattered all over the docking bay and under the shuttle while dashing out to tear into people.

As soon a Velon got a bit pressed the Perils of the Warp started coming out again. Technology got all shorted out and everyone's guns were jammed. The lights blew out (one guy set fire to an office chair and rolled it towards sounds of fighting). The walls oozed slime. Smells so bad that people vomited blood. And Velon got momentarily possessed of a daemonic countenance that caused rather a lot of panic. It also put him over 40 insanity points. From now on when he is confronted by things daemonic he has a obsessive compulsion to clean everything for 3d10 hours. He can suppress it with willpower rolls for a time, but it's still a nuisance.

Velon also get set on fire again. I love that. The last minion squad that the PCs brought pulled flamers and roasted the back half of the docking bay. They chose it, the players did. I did not have anything to do with that decision. Literally everyone but Velon dodged all six flamer shots. He carries a fire extinguisher these days, in a holster like other people would carry a gun.

Anyway Lobos and Smythe, as NPCs, managed to fix the shuttle engines in about six or seven rounds and took off two rounds later, breaking through the bay doors and killing three of the dark eldarians between the back-blast and hard vacuum. So six raiders and some slaves died, they did manage to get enough lobster-snakes for at least the officers to have a... nice(?) meal (different at least). And only one corridor of the ship got flamed out with shuttle plasma exhaust.

As the PCs flew back towards the portal station they saw that it was blowing 'their' ship into little bits. Which they did admit was reasonable after I reminded them that they'd broadcast that there was a daemon infestation aboard, and they'd come back from the Beastlands, and the ship wasn't responding to calls any more since there was more death and maiming going on in there.

So we leave off with everyone in quarantine being thoroughly decontaminated, administered strong fungicides, and exorcised by at least three different religions.

[The Glyphstone]

The real important question remains. Will they still get paid?