Sunday, August 17, 2014

Grimdark

In the grimdark future where there is only war, and also darkness and grimness, the Deathwatch stands as an elite unit of Space Marines tasked to cleanse the galaxy of the xenos threat.  Fantasy Flight has put out a number of role playing games set in the Warhammer 40k universe.  Deathwatch is the one that allows the players to play Space Marines, the most powerful of the forces of the Empire of Man.  Where Space Marines normally fight with their chapter, those sworn to the Deathwatch are drawn from all chapters, which allows a campaign where characters from multiple chapters interact.

In this session we had:

A Flesh Tearer Assault Marine - Not terribly bright, and given to foolish acts of bravery, but capable of tearing through xenos with dual chain swords.

An Ultramarine Techmarine - Augmented with cybernetic attachments.  He also has a rocket launcher.  He's not a particularly good aim, but mostly he ends up firing it at things so big you can hardly miss.  Like carnifexes.

A Blood Raven Librarian - Creepy, with an unhealthy obsession with forbidden lore.  He's also capable of blowing people up with his mind.  Eventually he's probably going to kill us all when his psyker powers summon something awful out of the warp to eat us.

An Iron Hand Techmarine - A cybernetic Space Marine from the chapter that thinks cybernetic enhancement is the awesomest thing ever.  Last session he got set on fire and had all the fat melt out of his body, so now he's got even fewer meat parts than he used to.

And me, the Novamarine Apothecary - I try to keep these idiots healthy and recover their gene-seeds if they die.  Also, I punch aliens in the face.  It works pretty well.

We have been active in the Castobel system defending against a massive Tyranid siege.  In recent sessions we've discovered that the Traitor Legions are active in the system, and that the planetary governor has made some questionable decisions related to the defense of certain hives and that he's been forming a personal army.

The session began with news that communication with one of the planet's hives had been completely lost.  Our team traveled to the planet to be briefed.  While still in the hangar, a Thunderhawk transport came in to land.  Problem: it wasn't slowing down.  It made a crash landing, and two Blood Drinkers piled out in the throes of the Black Rage and began firing attacking both us and the workers and servitors in the hangar.  We took them down fairly quickly, and while I was retrieving their gene-seeds, their chapter Librarian stumbled out.  He was missing an arm and exhausted, but was able to tell us that the hive had fallen to some sort of massive warp event within the hive, and that Traitor Marines were involved somehow.

We took the Thunderhawk and set out to try and retake the hive.  On arrival, we found that the hive's defenses were utterly broken and Tyranids were pouring into it.  The central spire was surrounded by some sort of warp field.  We cleared one of the hangars with ship's weapons and landed.  Fighting our way through a horde of Tyranids, we made our way to the field, which our Librarian was able to force an opening through for long enough for us to enter.

Inside the field, we quickly entered the spire and began making our way up to the source of the warp disturbance.  We fought our way past more Tyranids, as well as Chaos cultists, and found an area of the spire that had been devastated by psychic power where we were set upon dsemons.  After defeating them, our techmarines were able to gain access to the spire's communications and determined that an order had been issued by the planetary governor to bring all detected psykers, who would normally be given to the Black Ships to become astropaths, to this hive.

Best we can tell, the governor had been attempting to create his own platoon of psykers for his personal army.  Unsurprisingly, it went horribly wrong, and now we have at least one rogue psyker running about the place and who knows how many daemons have been summoned out of the warp.  We stopped there for the evening.

Now, we'll need to make our way the rest of the way up the spire in hopes of reactivating the hive's defenses, find and kill the rogue psyker before he can summon too many horrors, and ensure that the governor is taken by the Inquisitors for his crimes.  Should be a blast.

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