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Hello all,



I really hope none of my players read this...



I've got our next session coming up this weekend and I am furiously writing away to get the main parts done before everyone shows up this Saturday. We still have to finish everything we didn't get done last time, but after that the group is finally going to be safe and away from the horrific nightmare that was the Forge World they just escaped.

During this downtime they'll be aboard a small cargo-vessel owned by their Inquisitor, pursuing someone who escaped their grasp. Of course, there's not much they can do to help the pursuit - it's really something that the Navigator and the ship do ie. it's a non-interactive activity. I don't really want to pick up the game right where the action starts (their ship gets boarded, etc.) as they've just completed a marathon run-and-gun across a Forge World so I wanted to come up with a few 'non-combat activities' for them to participate in.

Here's what I've come up with, and I want to know if this sounds like it'd work:

1. The Arbite and the Guardsman in the group have already established a kind of 'card-shark' working relationship when it comes to fleecing unsuspecting Imperial servants of their hard-earned Thrones. We even once literally played Texas Hold 'em for about 6 hours to show this. We haven't got the time to play 'Necromunda Hold 'Em' for that long so my idea for them was to have an abstracted series of card games done in the ship's mess-hall with members of the ship's security detachment. Each of the other players along with myself would take the role of one of the Security Detachment, plus the two PC's would obviously play their own characters, and we'd have an abstracted version of the game using the basic 'Gambling' Skill rules from the main DH rulebook. It would be a chance for the two lowest paid characters in the group to earn a little bit of extra coin, and reward the Guardsman player for actually taking Gambling and Gambling +10 as a pair of advances.

2. The Priest is studying a Heretical text recovered on a previous mission and using it to unlock the secrets of an Archeotech Weapon he recovered at the same time, but he needs secrecy to do it - not just in game terms, but from the players, as they don't know the full story behind this weapon. His is a series of Lore checks of varying types, plus Opposed Will tests, with the risk of Corruption Points if failed badly. He will then have to somehow explain what he is doing to Brother Antarius, a Tech-Marine they joined forces with on the Forge World, as the Marine will come looking for The Priest to pray beside him over his wounded Battle-Brother who they rescued from the Forge World. That's the hardest one, as I and the player playing the Priest have to do this without giving away what we're doing to the others!

3. The Psyker in the group, in his background, once had to basically mind-rape a Navigator to find the location of a Inquisitorial strong hold, and since then has been rather resilient to the machinations of the Warp. The Captain of the ship they're on knows about this (as he's employed by their Inquisitor as well) and has asked the Psyker to do what he can to help their Navigator. This is a series of tests of increasing difficulty that have no tangible in-game benefit (they don't boost stats, or make his weapons better, or give him money or anything) but they do reveal a few upcoming plot-points in a cryptic nature that, if the player is paying attention, could be quite handy or give them an advantage later down the line. It's a way of the players discovering points in the plot using their skills rather than being spoon-fed.

4. And finally, the hardest of the bunch of come up with, was the non-combat activity for the Tech-Priest in the group. I wanted to avoid it just being a "Help the ship's Enginseer with mundane Tech-Use Tests" as the Tech-Priest usually needs around an 80-90 on standard tests to pass them, making them trivial, and making them -30, -40 and so on just means I'm artificially increasing the difficulty to nerf the advances he's paid for. Anyway, so I looked at what else was going on and saw that, as we're on board a star ship, firing high powered weapons within the confines of the ship is a bad idea. As such, the main Throne Agent (an NPC) who helped the party get off the Forge World has ordered that the Tech-Priest's pet Servitor (named Pug!) have his Ultimo-Pattern Meltagun removed and replaced with something more suitable until journey's end - a nice new Servo-Arm! Pug's backstory is that he's a bit... buggy... and hasn't always performed as instructed. The sudden change from 'Gun' Servitor to 'Utility' Servitor doesn't go as well as planned, so the Tech-Priest now has to put Pug through his paces to ensure everything is working. This represents a series of Tests, using everything from Weapon Skill to Agility, looking to see if Pug has been successfully upgraded. They range from the simple (Basic Manipulator Test) that is successful grants Pug the Mechadendrite Use (Utility) Talent, allowing him to correctly use the Servo-Arm, all the way to more complex and difficult system checks (Combat Reflex Test) that if passed will grant +5WS to Pug (he currently has WS25), and if passed well will even grant him Swift Attack.

Generally speaking I want these activities to take about 1/2 an hour to an hour to go through, no more than that, just to give the players a break before the next part of the main story crashes into them.

Do you think these will work?

That actually sounds like fun, H'! I think it'll be a good exercise in roleplaying for your group; it should help balance out the combat with a relaxed session of true roleplaying.

This is the part that worries me:

Generally speaking I want these activities to take about 1/2 an hour to an hour to go through, no more than that, just to give the players a break before the next part of the main story crashes into them.

I wouldn't force a timetable. I find that it's very hard to predict how it'll take something to play out naturally. If you have your heart set on a 1/2 hour you risk making it feel rushed. This is especially bad if it winds up taking longer because they're actually enjoying it and want get deeper into exploring areas outside the "main story" a little more.

If you want to try having some side events as a change of pace, I'd say you should be willing to potentially spend an entire session on it or not bother at all. Maybe they'll get bored with it and toss it aside after 15 minutes, you can't know for sure.

Well, to elaborate, 'sessions' within our group are a rather loose frame of time. Our last 'session' started at midday and didn't finish 'til 2am.

So when I say 'take 1/2 an hour to an hour', it's not meant to be half a session, or exactly 1/3rd of a session or whatever, just that I don't want it taking up too much time, but long enough to break up the action set pieces of the story. I'm certainly not going to rush them, nor force them to drag it out - in fact, in every activity I've said flat out that the player can either continue with the task, or opt out and just explore the ship himself if he wants, and in some cases they can finish the tasks quicker than the 1/2 hour of 'narrative time' all these tasks will take.

I've made sure to define roughly how long each of these tasks takes, including how long it takes to move between the three decks of the ship (all done using 3 different editions of Space Hulk tiles + D&D tiles, across a 6X7.5 foot table!!). Yeah, we do everything with miniatures.

Hell, last time I did a 'non-combat' thing it was a heavily expanded version of the Guard Encampment from the Shattered Hope scenario. What I thought was a quick little stint talking to a few Guardsman and helping out a medic turned out to be much more, as the players got so involved in it we spent 3 hours just doing interaction with the Guardmen.

Those all sound great. Do it!

Sounds like you have a pretty good plan as it is, the only change I could suggest is that, with the pending boarding action in mind, the PC's could better their situation when it comes to the action by good role or roll playing.

This could be done in two ways;

1) Roleplaying options or choices which will put he PC's in better locations when the gak hits the fan. So the Guardsman may notice that someone is cheating. Does he kick off/confront with the Security commander (thus gaining the option of having a pistol/knife in hand when the boarders arrive at the cost of being 1 Sec Commander down or prehaps choose that discression is the better part of valour and not kick off (roleplayed because politically it would be a bad idea to smack the Sec Commander) and thus leave the room and gaining the fact that he is now closer to his wargear/an arms locker?

2) Change location depending on test results, moving closer/further away from safe/advantagous or dangerous locations as a bonus or penalty depending on degrees of success.


A failure by the Tech could result in Pug being closer to the boarders entry point, success could see him closer to a safe room or weapons locker?

Of course all of these suggestions sort of imply that you will have a plan of the ship available?

All of this assumes that the characters aren't traveling around the ship during downtime full armed and armoured.

They're actually all unarmed and unarmoured except for a single side-arm or HTH weapon + their knife (as everyone has a knife) and have little in the way of equipment (the Tech-Priest has his Mechadendrites, the Psyker doesn't suddenly not have his powers, etc.).

All the events take place in a single room, so not much chance to move around. Of course, the events are optional, so whilst there are benefits to sticking around and completing them (be they money, experience, or plot development), they don't have to, and are free to wander around the ship as much as they like. If they happen to be on the Cargo-Deck when the gak hits the fan, then so be it - they'll be unarmed and facing LOADS of bad guys.

Sounds great. I wish people like you were running stuff like this in my area.

I always like the A chid takes you wallet and runs approach always fun the guys tryign to get their stuff back though it did end with a player trying to curbstomp a kid to death and failed 5 attempts in strength before he passed OWW. But also try a memmory lose trip were they got ot find were they are and what happend before. Finnaly a good ol bar or market place will do too. but i love your ideas.

H.B.M.C. wrote:I've made sure to define roughly how long each of these tasks takes, including how long it takes to move between the three decks of the ship (all done using 3 different editions of Space Hulk tiles + D&D tiles, across a 6X7.5 foot table!!). Yeah, we do everything with miniatures.

are minis integral to playing the game like with d&d 3/3.5/4? or do you use they just because it looks cool? from the perusing of the deathwatch threads where various rules are posted, it doesn't seem like a minis-needed type of game.

warboss wrote:

H.B.M.C. wrote:I've made sure to define roughly how long each of these tasks takes, including how long it takes to move between the three decks of the ship (all done using 3 different editions of Space Hulk tiles + D&D tiles, across a 6X7.5 foot table!!). Yeah, we do everything with miniatures.

are minis integral to playing the game like with d&d 3/3.5/4? or do you use they just because it looks cool? from the perusing of the deathwatch threads where various rules are posted, it doesn't seem like a minis-needed type of game.

You can get away without using them. Pretty much everything in the game is defined in real world terms instead of game abstracts. They're nice to have, especially in a combat-centric game with a group that really loves having a "Tactical" feel. However they are not a necessity, especially if you the game is being played with more of a focus on investigation.

No, miniatures are not needed for any of the 40K RPG's (RT would be the game that has the least requirement for them IMO).

However we're all 40K players, with 10's of thousands of points worth of armies, and we like playing with miniatures, so I tend to do virtually everything other than describing travel time between locations with miniatures.

Plus it's allowed me to expand outwards with my miniature collecting, getting things from different companies such as Scibor Miniatures, the excellent internal terrain (control panels, chairs, fuel containers, crates, etc.) from Antenociti's Workshop or those fine folks over at Micro-Art Studios (and their killer Iron Brotherhood line of models).

Well it worked. Went quite well. The Psyker failed most of his tests, so only got some of the plot elements (oh well!), and the Tech-Priest didn't get all of the tests right with his Servitor's new Servo-Arm. The Arbite and the Guardsman made a little money on the card game, and the Priest managed to complete his research without gaining any Corruption Points.

Then combat became an absolute blur as I was running up to 4 different simultaneous combats across two full decks of a ship against different types of opponents involving multiple NPC's as well as bad guys. Wow... that gave me a headache (no really, it did!).

But they made it through, did quite well in stopping the raiders from blowing up their ship (watching them panic as I put the Space Hulk timer down and said 'Now disarm all the bombs') was amusing) and we're finally (finally!!!) finished with Act III.

Act IV starts in two weeks!