Dark Heresy Spirebound: Part 3 FINALE

 The stage was set for the end of, well whatever it was our gang of Interrogators had gotten themselves roped into. They were all seated in a large ballroom where an exclusive, lavish gala was being held in the honour of the Gothic Sector Military Commander Thaddeus Hale by the local Planetary Governor and his sons, the Tarnell family. After some unusually vague instructions, presumably from their boss Inquisitor Caspiel Rex, the group had perused this party undercover and uncovered some very dark and heretical things, all evidence pointing towards the Tarnell sons planning....well something bad for this party, likely involving the Commander himself.

The party was now in full swing, with all the local and visiting nobles seated at a great ring of tables in an opulent marbled ballroom consuming a decadent array of food and drink and waiting for the main assembly to begin. In the centre of it all, Governer Albertus Tarnell and his sons Siris and Dimitrius were seated next to Sector Commander Thaddeus Hale and two of his bodyguards. The speeches were about to start and our party of heroes such as they were waited eagerly for the brothers to make a move, hoping they could save the Commander from whatever scheme they were planning.

An example setting picture of the Governor's Palace

At this point everyone at the Governor's table was now standing, and Siris took out a small silver bell and chimed it. As it chimed the live orchestral music stopped and the conversations in the room settled to a low murmur before quieting entirely. Siris cleared his throat and spoke, but it was not what anyone was expecting.

["Please remain calm. It is with no pleasure that I do this. Sector Commander Thaddeus Hale and Governor Albertus Tarnell, for crimes against the Imperium and the Emperor I have no choice but to sentence you both to death. Emperor have mercy on your souls."]

Several things happened concurrently.  Dimitrius pulled an extremely ornate pistol from its holster and fired it at the Governor, who had a glazed over look and could barely stand thanks to Caesar's drugs. The weapon hissed and a powerful melta beam erupted from it's barrel, utterly vaporizing his father Governor Albertus Tarnell from the waist up. Thaddeus Hale and his armsmen at the table both looked shocked but began to choke and cough as they attempted to act, collapsing on the table. As if on cue a troop of Tarnell house guards marched into the room, and the Naval Armsmen at the door were cut down in a fusillade of lasgun fire.

The assembled nobles, especially those from offworld, looked terrified. The house guard that had entered the room swept their lasguns across the assembly and the few bodyguards that attempted to make any sort of move were shot. This included the bodyguard of Lady Forscythe of Mordia, her attending guard was shot do death after drawing his power sword and it clattered to the floor next to his corpse.

However many of the nobles (all ones Yarrow saw as tainted in his vision, he was quick to point out in the aftermath) instead grinned and stood as well, ripping the tablecloths from their tables to reveal the surfaces had been engraved with the foul runes and iconography of the ruinous powers. Indeed the entire circular assembly of tables was a cleverly concealed and very large ritual circle for dark magic!

[GM'S NOTE

Now this may seem like an incredibly brazen act of treachery, and very shortsighted, but behind the curtain it did all follow a certain pattern for me. Firstly, the Tarnell brother's plot hinged nearly entirely on the artifact that was stolen. It had granted Siris great premonitions after he had inadvertently used it to contact dark warp entities, although the artifact itself was not born of Chaos. The planned ritual required the artifact to be done properly, but without it the Tarnell brothers were operating blind. Even so, they were unwilling to squander the schemes they had spent so long preparing and decided to attempt their plan without it. Their greatest folly, however, was assuming that the Rogue Trader Aleri was the architect of this theft and that their plans would be uncontested except by a few paltry bodyguards. Unfortunately for them both if there was one thing our gang of Interrogators knew how to do, it was ruin a nice party]

Our heroes however were not simply sitting idle. As soon as the shooting started they sprang into action. Caesar fired his laspistol at Siris, although the shots went wide and caused him to face the party in rage. Bram flexed his massive bulking muscles and attempted to flip the table towards the squad of soldiers who were leveling lasguns at them, exerting more effort than he was expecting when it became clear the table was actually bolted to the floor. Even so the legs shattered against his might and lasblasts began to smash into its blessedly thick surface rather than our heroes.

Siris himself, his face twisted in a dark and ugly grin, cast off the amulet he was wearing. It slammed into the marble floor far heavier than it had any right to be, and as it fell Yarrow and Demios became acutely aware of a terrible dark psyonic presence in the room. Siris' arm began to crack, twist and morph, his flesh reshaping into a horrifying appendage lined with small toothed mouths that were dripping and oozing white hot flame. He started walking towards Caesar, screaming about how they had ruined everything.

Caesar, ever the self-preservationist, dived to the side behind another table and fired twice into the back of one of the nobles who had stood and began chanting in spite of all the violence around. She slumped forward with a wheeze thanks to the new hole in her lung just before a swath of warp-flame burst from Siris' arm and consumed the whole table, narrowly missing Caesar.

Caesar Morroe, Hero of the Imperium

Yarrow, feeling equal parts vindicated at his vision and horrified at the tainted warp energy now swilling and swirling around the ballroom, took drastic action. He cast his heavy metal helmet to the ground with a clang, exposing his pallid and horribly burned visage to the glinting light. He drew energy inward before standing at full height over the edge of the table he was sheltering behind. His face locked in a snarl, he let out a battlecry and a massive swath of white-orange purifying flame began to flow from his mouth and sweep across the small troop of soldiers in the room. The first soldier hit fell immediately, his flesh burned to ash, but three more caught on fire and began to either shoot everywhere in a panic or run around trying to put it out. Demios, not to be outdone, once more added his own purple-chaotic flame to the mix killing another soldier, and once again the Warp turned back on him. This time however it simply locked him into his own mind and tormented him with awful visions, and he fell to the ground behind the table whimpering.

In the center of the room, seemingly oblivious to the carnage all around, Dimitrius had hefted Thaddeus Hale onto the massive symbol etched into the centre table and pulled a wicked ritual knife from his ornamented jacket. Tancred and Alcyone looked at each other before both sprinting into the fray. Alcyone's metachandrite autogun peppered one of the nearby soldiers with bullets and dropped him, as Bram clashed with the giant man. Dimitrius, not expecting such a brazen attack, took Bram's first blow to the chest and managed to parry the second. Alcyone was taken aback, normally a single blow like that would drop any normal human. She made an internal memo to tinker with Tancred's synthmuscle implants and see if more power could be added. Dimitrius snarled and once more hefted the ornate and ancient pistol. Bram BARELY managed to turn the weapon aside before it discharged, it's powerful anti-tank melta beam cutting a deep furrow into the marble floor.

At these brazen acts of violent defiance the several of the loyalist nobles still alive in the ballroom became emboldened. Two more bodyguards were shot down exchanging fire with the Tarnell soldiers in the room, a ruddy faced noble clad in furs and finery of Valhalla smashed an amasec bottle and drove the jagged glass edge into the neck of one of the chanting Draxis nobles laughing like a madman all the while, and even Lady Forscythe grabbed a dinner fork and stabbed it into the hand of the Draxis noble next to her, pinning the traitor's hand to the table and causing her to stop chanting and start screaming.

Sinric saw that two soldiers near the lovely Lady Forscythe were leveling their weapons at her and made his move. He scooped the powersword from the floor and dived in front of her, catching a lasblast to the gut and another grazing the side of his face and his arm, but leaving her miraculously unharmed. His body screamed out in pain, but even so he staggered towards the two soldiers, hacking and slashing at them with all the energy he had left even as they continued to fire into him in a panic.

Yarrow directed a second blast of fire at Siris, the flames scorching and blistering his fair features. Before Siris could retaliate a second set of laspistol shots whipped towards him, blasting a small hole in the side of his neck. Even with his newfound otherworldly resilience Siris was beginning to come apart at the seams. He turned to Caesar, screaming. "NO NO NO IT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THIS!" and fired a massive gout of warpflame at the hapless Interrogator. This one found its mark, and Caesar's skin began to blister and burn as his uniform caught fire and he started to panic. The flames would likely consume him in short order.

In the centre of the room the two giants Tancred and Dimitrius were locked in a flurry of unarmed combat as Alcyone, having finished off the other soldier, had dropped low to investigate the health of Thaddeus Hale. Despite his lavish upbringing Dimitrius had trained extensively in unarmed combat and was masterful at bringing his significant strength to bear. Tancred however was fueled by faith and fury, not to mention the positively massive amount of synthetic muscle bolted to his frame below his archaic platemail. Dimitrius struck a telling blow to Bram's helmet and dented the side, only for Bram to fake left, go right and deliver a punishing jab that cracked Dimitrius' ribs. Below the clashing titans, Alcyone had determined using her diagnosticator implant that Hale had simply ingested a powerful sedative and would likely live. This concluded, she quickly dodged over to where her loyal bodyguard was locked in an intense struggle and struck out with the only melee weapon she had, a small but vicious chain scalpel attached to her medical metachandride protruding from the side of her head.

Dimitrius, reeling from Tancred's latest blow, was utterly unprepared for the small scalpel as it dug into the side of his head squarely. There was a whirring of adamantine teeth and a visceral spray of gore and cartilage as the little tool found its mark. She wrenched down on it with mechanical efficiency, nearly entirely removing the front part of corrupted and brutish noble's face. Dimitrius tried to scream but only a ragged gurgling came through. Not one to leave such an opportunity unclaimed, Tancred brought his massive hand up in a vicious backhand slap to what remained of Dimitrius' shattered face, eliciting another spray of blood and knocking him prone on his back before committing the traitor his just sentence.

"In the name of the Holy Inqusition, I pronounce you Excommunicate Traitoris. The sentence is death."

Mercilessly, Bram brought down one large plate steel boot hard onto his head. There was a wicked crunch and spray of brain and bone as the senior Tarnell brother and cultist conspirator paid the ultimate price for his crimes, his head crunching like a rotten melon.


Alcyone took a half second to indulge in a short moment of pride at the work of her prized creation, when all of a sudden she was startled by a gunshot coming from below. Thaddeus Hale had, by great force of will, drawn a sidearm and fired at a solider that neither Bram nor Alcyone had noticed was was sighting on them. The small caliber bullet tore into the soldiers shin and sent him sprawling to the floor screaming. The last of his strength spent, Hale collapsed once more.

Alcyone Saboris and her hulking bodyguard Tancred Bram

[GM'S NOTE

This was entirely unplanned and all thanks to the wonderful Dark Heresy critical tables. Dimitrius was very badly wounded from Bram's powerful blows. Alcyone's character joined the fray with her little chain scalpel mostly just to give Bram the team-up bonus, but her first attack hit and generated Emperor's Fury (basically a critical hit, I was running them old-style where it causes exploding damage dice.) As such the little tool did a lot of damage despite its profile only being like, 1d5+1. Because the Tarnell brothers were important foes I was using the player crit damage tables for them, and this fortuitous blow to the face had the following entry on the table:

In a splatter of skin and teeth, the attack removes most of the target’s face. The strike might not have slain him, but the target’s words are forever slurred as a result of this vicious injury. The target is Stunned for 1 round and suffers Blood Loss. He is permanently Blinded. Permanently reduce his Fellowship characteristic by 1d10

Worth noting this is the worst rending critical effect to the head that does not cause death, so he was literally on the brink when Bram executed him via Boot] 



On the other side of the room Caesar was in a very bad spot as the blaze of warpfire threatened to consume him. Then, something strange happened. The fire, seemingly for no reason, completely receded and went out as if by the hand of the Emperor himself. In that moment Siris knew for certain his dark gods had abandoned him and all his plotting and planning had been entirely for naught, undone by these meddlers. He attempted to scream, giving in to the hopelessness that washed over him. Even so, his fel arm readied another gout of flame as if unbidden.

Caesar seemingly having just witnessed a miracle and seeing the utter despair on the face of his adversary, fought through the pain of his scorched flesh and leveled his laspistol once more. There was a series of cracks as a pair of lasblasts found their mark, the first striking Siris right in the centre of the throat ending his babbling screams and the second impacting him squarely in the left eye, blowing the top of his head apart into smoking chunks.

At Siris' death a few of the Tarnell armsmen fell to the ground convulsing and bleeding from their eyes and mouth. The rest began a full route in complete panic, and gunfire could be heard out in the hallways. Behind the table nearly disintegrated from lasfire, Yarrow attending to his dark, foolish counterpart, having done his part in the battle saving Caesar's life from the fire about to consume him by controlling and dousing it with his own power.

The battle was done, and the ballroom had become a charnel house. The place was covered in ash and bullet holes, the air stunk of cordite, ozone and charred flesh. Bram, bloodlust still pumping in his augmetic veins, began systematically stamping the life out of the Tarnell armsmen who were caught in the throes of convulsion on the floor, and indeed killed the rest of the nobles who had been chanting in the ritual other than the one Forscythe had pinned to the table with a fork. Alcyone, after verifying the Sector Commander was not in imminent peril, carefully collected the extremely rare and valuable Inferno Pistol from next to the massive corpse of Dimitrius Tarnell. It was an exceedingly old and venerable design, far too good for the filthy heretic that had owned it, and she did her best to comfort its no doubt traumatized machine spirit.

Forscythe herself was found sobbing over the lifeless corpse of Sinric Allone, Inquisition Interrogator and Career Wastrel. Caesar was utterly crushed at the loss of his companion and was the first to discover it, his eyes cast downward at the marred and bloody floor in sadness despite the victory they had won. Although the two incessantly needled at each other and Caesar often got the worst of it due to Sinric's sharp wit, Caesar considered him to be like a brother.

Yarrow approached the remaining cultist who was trying to yank the fork out of her hand with little success. She cowered at the implacable expression on his scarred face.

"Please, you have to believe me! Siris was insane, he didn't give us a choice!"

"That's alright." Yarrow responded, his voice incredibly level and calm. "None of us were given a choice today."

He once more conjured his power. The noble coughed a small cloud of smoke, and then began to hack and scream, clawing at her chest cavity. Fire exploded from here eyes and mouth, and she fell to the ground as the internal inferno burned outward and melted her skin.

This grizzly work done, the combatants in the ballroom had all been killed. The surviving loyalists all looked to the party of Interrogators, unsure what to do. As they collected themselves they were astounded and a little saddened by Sinric's final fate. Yarrow always hated his guts, but even he begrudgingly admitted that he had against all odds managed to die a good death committing a selfless act and vowed to keep the woman he had died for safe in the aftermath of this crisis. Caesar was still inconsolable and didn't say much at all.



[GM'S NOTE
This lead to probably one of my favorite exchanges from the whole game when Yarrow tried to give Caesar the powersword Sinric had died wielding, possibly in a misguided attempt to cheer him up.

logs:

Yarrow picks up the power sword from sinric's side and hands it to Caesar. "You always did want a fancy sword."

Caesar Morroe stands up and makes his way over to Sinric's corpse, picking him up with a Fireman's Carry and starting towards the door.

Caesar Morroe:"I've got no use for it, that's a hero's weapon"

/logs
the song i was playing at the time was The Price of Failure by Perturbator and it made for a very emotional moment]


As Bram began to pile up the corpses and heretically engraved tables to form a mighty pyre for the heresy that had gone on, the sounds of conflict grew closer and a small squadron of Naval armsmen stormed in, presumably having fought their way through the routing Tarnell house soldiers to get there. There was a momentary tense standoff but a combination of the party finally flashing their Inquisitorial rosettes, the nobles all vouching they had saved the day and Hale himself managing to give an order for them to stand down convinced the soldiers that the party had indeed saved Hale's life.

Our "Ballroom Blitz" Roll20 sheet after the killing was done and the wanton doodling began

What followed was a far more typical investigation, the Sector Commander's forces assuming rudimentary control of the Draxis Spire and assisting the party in cleaning up any dangling threads, including thoroughly purging any suspected of involvement within the local nobility, scouring all of the Tarnell brothers possessions for additional heretical artifacts and purging all records of what they had done.

After roughly a day of this, they received a rather unusual message from the Commander's personnel manning the front gate of the palace. There was an unusual looking man demanding to see the Inquisition Interrogators stationed there, and he knew all their names. When the party gathered to see the man as the guards brought him up they received quite a surprise.

Approaching them was a bald man with bland features wearing an absolutely ragged uniform of one of the palace servants, stained brown with old blood. His right arm ended in a stump covered in bandages, he was deathly pale and limping along assisted by a woman in a black cloak and another in a neatly pressed naval uniform, a noisy medical servitor trailing behind them and hooked up to the man with IV drips. Unmistakably this was their boss and Inquisitor, Caspiel Rex of the Ordo Hereticus.

In spite of his apparently horrific injuries he seemed in remarkably good spirits, congratulating the party and saying that based on what he was able to glean from the filthy Underhive chop-hospital where he had been recuperating they had performed admirably. The group was shocked, to say the least. This mission was extremely unorthodox from the get-go and seeing that their boss was indeed here the whole time begged many questions. Rex promised to tell them everything as soon as they had a secure private room to do so, and they relocated.

Starting from the beginning, Rex told his Acolytes that he had taken a personal vested interest in the plot of the Tarnell brothers when one of his countless informants and spies let him on to the fact that they had come into possession of a peculiar artifact and had raised a couple red flags of deviant behavior. Obviously this was an issue in and of itself worthy of attention, but the manner in which they had come into possession of the artifact, seemingly out of nowhere and with no warning signs of deviant interest struck Rex as quite odd.

Rex had been working as an Inquisitor in the Gothic Sector for many decades now, and despite the utterly clandestine way he tended to operate he always had a sort of unusual feeling, like there was always something working in opposition to him in the shadows. Something moving between the grinding gears of Imperial society and delivering small parcels of forbidden knowledge in precisely the place where they would cause the most damage, and yet done with such utter detachment and carefully calculated randomness that anyone suggesting a planned effort would be laughed at for lack of proof. Based on this and some other factors he declined to mention he became convinced said actors were indeed real and had influenced the Tarnell family, likely without them even knowing they had been manipulated.

As it turned out he was right, and working undercover as part of the Tarnell house servant staff gave him a valuable clue. However he underestimated Siris' control of the artifact, and using it Siris was able to divine the traitor in the midst of his staff. Dimitrius carried out the sentence with his utter fearsome ruthlessness and strength, beating Rex to a pulp and throwing him down an elevator shaft. (the very same incident Bram was told about by the servant he bribed) However this display of brutality ended up being incredibly short-sighted and likely saved Rex's life. He managed to survive the fall, barely and through sheer force of will, and his Acolytes he had waiting on standby managed to get him to a no-questions-asked hospital in the Draxis Underhive. During his bouts of consciousness as the chop-docs worked fervently to keep him alive he worked through his Acolytes, pulling strings like a spider in the centre of its web and arranging for his group of Interrogators to attend this party in secret and put an end to the heresy there.

Somewhat sheepishly the party admitted to giving the artifact to Aleri, but Rex did not seem particularly bothered by this. Better she have it stored in her collection than the Tarnell brothers have it for their nefarious plans. He also mentioned that the Governor dying when he was likely not guilty of heresy was regrettable, but that saving Sector Commander Hale was a massive boon and rooting out more or less the entire nobility cult here rather than just apprehending the leaders was likewise a good outcome.

He then, predictably, told the party not to get too comfortable because he had another assignment for them. He had his own critical leads he needed to follow up, but they would be sent to the planet he was relatively certain the artifact the Tarnell brothers had been using for their divinations came from, a system on the rimward edge of the Gothic Sector called Vindet. This world was distant, and yet vital for its rich stellar mineral deposits and promethium reserves beneath its equatorial regions jungles. This time he had very little idea what they might find and no certainty of what exactly it was that they were looking for, all he knew for sure was that the artifact Aleri left with came from there and this meant that Rex's shadowy adversaries had to have operated there at some point. He told them he would arrange for their transit and once there they could meet a contact of his, a high ranking adept-scribe in the local Adminstratum branch that had reported some oddities he had found.

Finally, Rex mentioned they would be undergoing some team composition changes. Sinric had died and Rex needed Demios for a special task he declined to elaborate on, which left them short. To fill these vacancies he would be assigning them his two current companions, the straight laced career Navy armsman and operator Gamma Flair and the rougish and mysterious Revalya Teyatimei, still swathed in her cloak.

As they concluded the debriefing and made some quick introductions Rex warned them all to exercise the utmost caution on this assignment. If this adversary had really orchestrated so much while exposing nearly nothing of themselves they likely were masters of spycraft and manipulation, quite like Rex himself. Because of this they should trust no one with certainty, and expect treachery  everywhere. The worst, he theorized, was almost certainly yet to come

End

[GM'S NOTE

This marked the end of Spirebound, the "one-shot" that actually took three sessions to run and the group (me included) ended up enjoying so much that we all collectively agreed to keep the game going. Sinric had died (on purpose at the discretion of his player) and Demios had been reassigned, which allowed their players to make new characters that made up the rest of the main cast for the second act. They will both get proper introductions at the start of the next arc.

I hope you enjoyed the read, assuming you made it through this whole thing! I have a couple other projects on the go (a rules like 40k RPG system and a podcast) that will take up a bit more of my time but I am basically locked in to seeing this tale to its end. If you have any comments or criticisms on the way I write I would love to hear about it.

Believe me when I say that the next arc gets crazier, and is quite a bit longer!]

Special Thanks to Alcyone's player who made our custom charart (and doodled all the dolphins in the ballroom) check them out on tumblr HERE

Dark Heresy Spirebound: Part 2

A tense Mexican Standoff of sorts was taking place in the hidden sewer tunnels beneath the Tarnell Estate. Our brave (well, some of were are anyways) squad of Inquisition Interrogators had found said tunnel in the process of investigating nobles in the Draxis Hive Primus spire for corruption of some kind at the incredibly and unusually vague behest of their Inquisitor via a strange note. Once down here they had killed some truly awful creatures that they deduced had been hacked together with parts of random humans, opened a vault to find said construction materials and a strange featureless cube.

Yarrow Able, curious pyromancer had interacted with said device and was enraptured by a violently powerful vision just as the beautiful and dangerous Rogue Trader the group had encountered upstairs showed up with her entourage, and the two parties were now staring eachother down mistrustfully.



It took only a short tense exchange between Sinric, Caesar and Aleri before both parties concluded that it was exceedingly unlikely that either group was responsible for the horrors down here, given that they had all only arrived the very same day. Sinric convinced Aleri to divulge that she had actually attended this party because by means she refused to divulge she had determined the Tarnell family had possession of a potentially valuable and dangerous artifact, but after probing around revealed no one knew where it was she was convinced that one of the higher ups in the family had likely taken it and hidden it for their own use.

Meanwhile Yarrow was far away, his mind's eye being shown a vivid image of a misty looking ballroom filled with tables. Of the people seated at these tables half had featureless blank faces and the other half had wicked visages of terror, twisted and malformed. The vision changed to show a large golden Imperial Aquila, at first pristine but then showered with blood and gore. As viscera marked its surface it warped and changed to show a large, unblinking eye that stared balefully at him. Yarrow tried to scream but only managed a wheezing gasp, once more back in the vault.

Sinric told Aleri that they were merely investigators looking to uproot a cult, which was technically true. However only moments later Yarrow stumbled out of the vault saying how the artifact inside was trying to help him, that it had given him a potentially helpful vision and that they should take it and give it to the Inquisitor.

The group visibly balked at Yarrow dropping the I word, but Aleri dismissively discredited their concern. She was not a damned fool and an eclectic group such as theirs probing such a high profile party for a cult basically screamed Inquisition to anyone with half a brain.

Then there was the matter of the artifact they had found. Yarrow was certain it was trying to help him find the cult and adamantly wanted to keep it. Aleri insisted this was a bad idea and his fascination was going to get him in trouble. She told the group that if they gave it to her she could contain it with a purpose-built warded container she had brought and it would be safely offworld while the party concluded whatever it was they were going to do. Obviously handing off such a potentially dangerous warp-related artifact to a Rogue Trader is not exactly standard Inquisition protocol, but the party was far from standard and their Inquisitor had already been established as a little bit of a radical.

They debated for a brief time before siding with the Trader. Sinric and Caesar both seemed convinced it was the correct course of action, possibly because they were slightly enamoured with Aleri's striking looks. Yarrow was adamantly against it, wanting to keep the device. Demios seemed to care little either way and Bram was equally surly against all parties, not wanting to hand it over but clearly a little disturbed by Yarrow's fascination. Finally Alcyone broke the deadlock after some deliberation, bartering it to the Trader in exchange for a payment in rare cybernetics to be negotiated properly in the future. Bram was clearly a little uncomfortable with this arrangement but would never speak out against Alcyone, and so the deal was struck. Yarrow was extremely pissed, mostly at Sinric and Caesar.

 An early image of Alcyone, Inquisition Interrogator. Yarrow always suspected she only made that deal because of her barely contained obsession with amassing cybernetics, rather than thinking it was the right thing to do.

Aleri and her entourage covered their eyes and encouraged the party to do the same for safety, although only Sinric and Caesar complied and Caesar peeked through his fingers anyways. Aleri's astropath concentrated his psychic will, and using telepathy opened the featureless cube along a nearly invisible seam in the middle. Inside was a statue, spherical in shape with several spokes of various width and size protruding downward into a base made of some kind of impossibly black stone. The statue itself was made from some sort of glass or crystal so clear it was nearly invisible, its surface seeming to shift and glint ever so slightly. The statue shuddered and rose from its resting place as the psyker worked his magic and it floated over to rest in the warded box the Navis Nobilite was holding, which was covered in runes and purity seals.

The box snapped shut and their business concluded. As a show of good faith Aleri told the party everything she had gathered about the family, although some of it they had already heard. She repeated that Governor Tarnell was considering making his youngest son Siris his heir, but also mentioned that the Sector Commander even attending this event was due to Siris' shrewd political negotiating which was influencing his father's decision. She also mentioned that she caught wind of one of the Spire nobles by the name of Vinatris who had been talking vaguely but at length about a sort of inner circle of the local nobles, like a sort of exclusive club. Both possibly good leads for cult activity but she for obvious reasons had little interest in following them up herself.

[GM'S NOTE

The group would not know this until I divulged the information after the final session of this arc, but while giving Aleri the artifact deprived them of a potentially useful item and piece of evidence it was also a great boon for their cover. The vault being raided and Aleri leaving immediately afterwards pulled all suspicion to her, and made the vile conspirators naively believe that the greatest threat to their nefarious plans had left with their prize.]

With that Aleri gave a wink to Sinric (or maybe it was Caesar, in any case they were both convinced it was for themself) and left up the passage she had come down. Tensions were high in our little group of heroes, Yarrow and Bram making no secret of how they felt about Sinric and Caesar's fascination with the Rogue Trader and how they thought passing off the artifact was a poor move. But regardless they still had a job to do, and scant few leads with which to do it. After some deliberation they decided walking back into the palace covered in grime and mutant blood was a poor choice and elected to attempt a journey back into the civilized portions of the spire through the sewer/runoff tunnels that branched away from the room with the vault.

Being the one ostensibly most trained in navigation Caesar boldly took the lead, desperate to restore some of his companions lost goodwill (in reality they sort of always thought he was a bit of a nonce and nothing had changed), and much to everyone's surprise he actually did a pretty good job. The sewer was cramped, dark and smelly and there were occasionally claw rends in the walls, but the party did not get turned around and after maybe a half hour of navigation found themselves in a back alley of the inhabited areas of the higher-class upper hive civilian areas. The Palace entrance was now within walking distance and they had two hours before security for re-entry was tightened.

After cleaning themselves up as best they could the party capitalized on their new location by perusing some of the local areas to make some purchases with their ill-gotten cash from the vault and skim some rumours from the local high-class drinking establishments. After buying the locals some beverages and chatting around Sinric and Caesar gathered that although the Governor was cracking down on crime hard in the upper hive to prepare for the Sector Commander's gala there had been a string of strange disappearances that the local Enforcers could not explain. They also managed to find a palace servant on leave that was able to confirm the existence of a sort of inner circle in the Draxis Nobility, but insisted they just swilled incredibly expensive alcohol and swapped gossip and fashion tips in the most mind-numbingly dull manner possible.

The image I used to represent the Draxis Upper Spire City. A bit upscale and clean for 40k but I think it got the point across

Their new meagre leads in tow and mostly cleaned of blood and sewer grime in a restroom sink, the party travelled back to the Governor's palace and through the security checkpoint just before heightened security measures were put back into place. The guards thought it odd that they were checking in with no formal record of them having checked out, but some gentle ribbing from Sinric convinced them it was probably just a clerical error and they were allowed in without issue.

Once more they were back within the lavish opulence of the Governor's hospitality. It was getting late but the festivities were ongoing and Sinric decided to chat up the noble Aleri mentioned. Once again blunt application of flattery was extremely effective in obtaining her good graces, but other than a somewhat unusual fascination with Alcyone's profession as a Magis Biologis surgeon she divulged little of usefulness before excusing herself, citing a need to get some beauty sleep.

Meanwhile Alcyone and Yarrow took a moment to discuss what Yarrow saw in his vision. He figured that the artifact was attempting to show him who at the party was under the foul sway of Chaos but had little success at parsing this information. Even so he assured her the artifact had no unnatural sway on his mind.

Caesar and Bram both wandered about, looking for any of the Tarnell family to shadow, finding Dimitrius chatting and drinking in one of the lounges. The massive man had a small group around him, pretending to hang off his every word with mixed success. As they casually watched from a distance and debated their next move a rather terrified looking servant approached and whispered something into the massive man's ear, Dimitrius' face twisting into a visage of pure rage at whatever news he received. He grabbed a nearby chair in one large hand and threw it at the wall so hard it exploded into flinders before storming away.

 Caesar attempted to follow him, but was stonewalled by the guards at the Tarnell family's private wing. Bram instead stayed, walking up to the poor servant attempting to sweep up the shattered chair in shaking hands and helping him pick up the fragments in his massive gauntlets. The servant seemed shocked at the kindness especially from such a fearsome looking man as Tancred and telling him it was not necessary, but Tancred insisted. On his homeworld, he said, they knew that a house was nothing with out his servants and such brutality was unnecessary and foolish. The servant remarked that only two months ago Dimitrius beat one of the new serving staff to a pulp and threw him down an elevator shaft, and he considered himself merely lucky to be alive. He told Bram that all he did was deliver a coded message, but declined to say more for his own safety.

Bram considered this for a moment, before clandestinely offering the man a massive handful of local currency. He could get him and his family out, find safer employment elsewhere in the hive, all he had to do was tell Bram what the message was. The servant was wide eyed at the kindness and bribe, considering for only a moment before taking the cash fervently and stuffing it into a pouch in his apron. His voice dropped to a whisper as he told Bram the message came from Dimitrius' brother Siris. It was coded, and would be entirely gibberish without their own personal cipher to decode it. Even so he told it to Bram in its entirety. He insisted he would tell more if he knew it, all he was sure about was that the brothers had been agonizing over the particulars of tomorrow's Gala for weeks now up to the tiniest decoration and detail. His act of betrayal done, the Servant quickly finished sweeping up the shattered furniture and hurried away, casting furtive glances all around.

It was getting quite late, and the group reconvened in the quarters they had been granted for the stay. Demios had been tossing the place for bugs and traps and found it to be entirely clean, so our heroes pooled their intelligence and planned their next moves. They were fairly certain one or both of the Tarnell brothers were in on whatever misdeeds they had stumbled upon in the sewer as well as the Vinatris lady, but lacked compelling proof and had no idea who else might be implicated. They grudgingly decided that their best course of action was to attend the gala and see what moves were made, protecting the Sector Commander at all costs. If they had gone through such trouble to lure him here they likely had something involving him planned. Alcyone decided to stay awake through the night deciphering the message Bram secured with her considerable skills at codebreaking.

Six hours later the party was mostly waking up. Bram, Caesar and Yarrow reconvened with Alcyone in the common area between their rooms to find she had deciphered part of the message by brute force decryption. "_$%#eal is broken %$&#@ taken. @$%$@$# dead. must reconsider". They assumed this was almost certainly in reference to the vault and its heretical guards they had plundered the previous day which gave them a pretty solid case to implicate the Governor's children, but without any real enforceable authority here they did not have a better course of action than to watch for whatever plans they might enact and move to stop them. As this conversation was going on there was a knock on the door. A servant was outside, and when the door opened he wheeled in a cart with a light breakfast and a decanter of recaf. He informed the party that Sector Commander Thaddeus Hale had been recalled to the front on a matter of some importance, and as such the Gala was being moved up from a dinner to a light luncheon taking place in two hours. As the servant left Sinric finally rose from his bedchamber groggily, skipping the breakfast cart, grabbing a bottle of amasec from the common area fridge and swishing around a mouthful before spitting it on the priceless carpet and taking a proper swig. He retorted the dirty looks from his companions by saying he was getting in character and what the hell were they all so morose about anyways?

Their timeline growing tragically short, the party agreed to attend the gala, watching both the Sector Commander and the Tarnell family and jump into action should they make a move and hopefully prevent tragedy. They posited some basic plans for dealing with what may arise, Sinric suggested the possibility of  Caesar bringing the brothers laced drinks since he was already acquainted and handed Caesar a few vials of Obscura. There were a few raised eyebrows about why Sinric had any of the powerful narcotic in the first place but no one asked.

The party got their finery on and headed out to scope the scene of where the Gala was going to take place. The massive double doors of the ballroom in question were closed and closely guarded by a small team of Tarnell Guards and Naval Armsmen of the Commander's own retinue. None were allowed entry until the preparations were complete but many of the visiting and local nobles were milling about sipping drinks in the adjacent hall. Bram and Alcyone attempted to get close enough to the doors to sneak a metachandrite underneath it and peak inside, but the armsmen were adamant that no one get too close. The group did notice however that a large number of servants were coming and going from a side door in a nearby hallway. Caesar and Sinric concocted a clever plan to get inside, while Alcyone Yarrow and Bram concocted their own little plan to get at least a look inside the ballroom.

Sinric informed one of the servants that his dearest brother Caesar was a bit of a lightweight and drank enough that he spewed all over the floor in their quarters. Caesar turned beet red at this and clenched his teeth as he agreed that was in fact what happened. The two of them took the hapless servant back to their quarters and then pulled a gun on him, forcing him to disrobe and then tying him up. Demios agreed to make sure the fellow didn't run off and Sinric donned his disguise, thankful the servant's garb was a good fit.

Meanwhile back near the ballroom the rest enacted their own scheme. Yarrow lounged near one of the large banners, setting it alight with a small effort of warp energy. Once the flames grew to a decent size he ran up the hallway screaming about a fire. Several of the armsmen went to investigate leaving only a couple at the door. Bram stamped up, drawing himself up to his full height and demanding his ward Alcyone be allowed inside to shelter from the flame. The terrified guard meekly said that there was nothing he could do, and that since the flames looked to already be under control they would need to wait like everyone else. Bram exuded disdain for the snivelling man but it mattered not, Alcyone had gotten close enough to snake a tendril under the door and take a peek inside.

Within the room the Tarnell brothers were directing an army of servants in the arrangement of tables and refreshments. The room itself was very large with the dining tables arranged in a large circle off to one side with the rest of the room's floor open, presumably for dancing. Dimitrius looked positively incensed. Siris was his usual implacable self, but even so Saboris swore she saw an eyebrow twitch in frustration. They were talking hurriedly but were too far from the door for anything to be heard.

As the commotion from the fire died down and the trio discussed their next moves, Caesar and the now-disguised Sinric approached. Sinric went off to try and get inside the side servant entrance Alcyone had spotted, and after a few minutes Bram and Yarrow followed, set on bluffing their way inside as well.

Sinric was let in without issue, ending up in a store-room full of furniture and bustling servants. It was connected to the ballroom, and by the smell of it to the kitchen as well. He was quickly given a broom and told to sweep, and that given the brothers current mood all of their lives likely depended on it. In the ballroom the live band was seated on the other side of the dancefloor tuning up their instruments, and Vinatris had joined the Tarnell brothers. She was wringing her hands and unlike both of them had no measure of composure at all, seeming quite nervous and worried. After a brief exchange (and mentioning something about "They are all destroyed? You are sure?" to which she received no reply) the pompous woman left back to the back room. Sinric kept sweeping and trying to stay close to the brothers. He clandestinely reported all he had seen to the rest of the group via micro-bead communicator.

Bram and Yarrow had got to the lone armsman who seemed quite bored at having to guard the servants entrance. He was adamant that they couldn't pass, but Bram wove some incredibly creative (for him anyways) threats about how the psyker could become a little unhinged when he was hungry, and he just needed to grab him a snack from the kitchen. Given how intimidating the hulking knight and bizarre pyromancer could be the guard let Bram pass as long as he promised to be quick and not tell anyone.

As Bram entered the back room, Sinric made a distraction by tripping a servant carrying a tray of food and slipped back there as well in the chaos of the mess he had made. Sinric let Bram know that the noblewoman they were now certain was implicated in this mess had gone into the kitchen. Bram strode back there confidently to find her.

Meanwhile out front the massive ballroom doors had finally opened and the guests outside as well as the rest of our Interrogators were allowed in. Yarrow had looped around and met up with the rest of them. The arrangement of tables had assigned seating, and the group was shown to their spots. As soon as he approached the table arrangement  Yarrow felt something tug at his mind before he was once more assailed by a portion of the vision shown to him in the sewers. This was the place! The shadowy figures with warped faces all corresponded to seats here at these tables, and of all the ones that were already seated belonged to the Noblry of the Draxis Spire, including the center table where Dimitrius and Siris were sitting! He knew the artifact was trying to help him!

Early art of Caesar Morroe and Yarrow Able

As Bram entered the kitchen area he saw a veritable army of servants and cooks at work preparing a massive feast, watched over by Lady Vinatris. She seemed shocked and angry to see the massive man, but he eased up without missing a beat and told her that his lord sends his regards, and he had some critical information about certain....thieves. Her eyes widened, and then narrowed suspiciously. He told her that it was too sensitive to discuss among so many prying eyes and ears and she tentatively agreed, but was clearly seething with suspicion and anger. The two went out to the hallway where the single armsman was posted. She sent him away dismissively and when he was gone turned to lock the door, saying that if he did not speak quickly she would have him flayed alive.

Not waiting for her to turn around, Bram hammered one of his massive fists into the back of her neck as she finished locking the door. There was a sickening crack and she was instantly killed, her spine and much of her skull utterly pulverized by the blow. She crumpled to the floor, a small bit of blood pooling from her mouth onto the marble. Bram muttered that it was too good a death for such a foul traitor, lifting the keys from her pocket as well as the very same heretical surgical knife from the vault and tossing her corpse behind one of the draping banners. Looking around, he called for Sinric to bring a mop and clean up all this blood.

[GM'S NOTE

I can not adequately describe through text how goddamn hilarious this bit was to all of us. Bram had been pretty firmly established as a man of action rather than words, so we were all really interested to see what sort of scheme our Huge, Bald, punching machine was concocting as he wove a web of intrigue with one of the cult's higher members. And then, at the apex of it all, he just defaulted to what he did best and fucking destroyed her with a single strike from his huge punching hands. God damn it was so funny when his player said "I punch her full force in the back of the head before she can turn back around]

In the ballroom the party was finally starting to get into full swing. Sector Commander Thaddeus Hale finally made his first appearance, the spitting image of the grizzled Imperial Commander. He seemed slightly uncomfortable and altogether fed up with the pomp and foppery of such an event, but even so sat at the table in the centre of the dining area with two of his personal guards, the Governor, and his two sons.

At their table Caesar and Alcyone attempted to put their drugging plan in m otion. Caesar grabbed a few crystal glasses of fine liquor, had Alcyone dose three of them with Obscura and sauntered right over to their table in the middle of the room. This was a huge social Faus Pas, but after introducing himself to Commander Hale it was clear he was delighted to have a proper military man to talk to as opposed to the sycophantic nobles he had been surrounded with (or at least someone pretending to be a proper military man). Unfortunately Caesar's plan went south when only the Governor himself took one of the offered glasses when Caesar proposed a toast to the war effort. Dimitrius still looked furious at everyone and everything and didn't say a word, but Siris seemed calm and implacable once more, declining the beverage politely and after the toast asking Caesar if he would please return to his seat as it was time for the public address and speeches. The Governor had started to sway a little and giggle as the narcotics took hold of his system

Caesar hurried back to his seat, furtively whispering "I FUCKED UP! THEY DIDN'T TAKE THE BAIT I DOSED THE GOVERNOR I FUCKED UUUUUUP!". At this point Tancred Bram had returned to the party's table after instructing a rather pissed off Sinric to clean up his mess. Sinric was not used to doing so much honest work, and after mopping up the small blood puddle pretended to be busy in the ballroom doing not much of anything.

The Gala had started in earnest, and our heroes still had very little idea what was about to transpire or how to stop it. Tune in next time for the thrilling climax of Dark Heresy: Spirebound!

Special Thanks to Alcyone's player who made a bunch of our character art as posted around this story. Check them out on tumblr HERE

Part 3 and the thrilling conclusion can be found here!

Dark Heresy: Spirebound Part 1

Welcome to part 1 of my sad tale. The following story is a retelling of a Dark Heresy campaign that was originally going to be a one-shot but spiraled into a year-long game that is probably the best I have ever run. The narrative will be slightly embellished in places and I will occasionally interject with some notes peering behind the GM's screen, but all the character drama and poor decisions are the direct result of my lovely players.

This will likely not make much sense unless you read the introduction that says a bit about the characters and there current predicament, which you can find here.

Without further ado, here is the first part of Spirebound, beginning right  where the prologue left off. I do hope you enjoy it.

So now our five heroes, clad in their finery and in their new assumed identities, had arrived in the Draxis system in the belly of a massive Imperial freighter and boarded a shuttle to take them to the spire of Draxis Hive Primus in search of....well something bad that they had zero intelligence on other than in implicated some of the highborn nobles at the lavish party they had been invited to.

Hive worlds are massive and ancient, where the inexorable march of time and demand for soldiers and material for the Emperor's wars spanning millennia have transformed the surface into a polluted radioactive wasteland. Over the countless years the cities have been built up into massive arcology spires expanding ever upward, with sections falling into disarray and being compounded far down into the earth's crust even as the tips breach the clouds. Countless tens or even hundreds of billions toil away in obscurity and poverty in the massive churning factories to earn the meager food they eat and air they breathe, never seeing the polluted surface or sky of their world while the upper crust lives in luxury and decadence in the tips of these cities in massive palaces. The party was headed for the most opulent of palaces in the hive world of Draxis, the home of the Planetary Governor Albertus Tarnell.

The shuttle landed on a gilded landing pad and our motley crew of heroes disembarked led by Caesar Morroe, who as Sinric was quick to point out found it incredibly easy to assume the persona of privileged blowhard. After presenting their digital invitations to an attendant and being waved through a checkpoint, the lot of them got their first view of the Tarnell palace interior. The floors were paved in gleaming polished marble, the walls adorned with gilded frames containing countless portraits of the family's ancestors and draping crimson and gold banners. A servant lead the group through a few hallways to a common area where many other nobles and their own attendants were milling about, seated on velvet couches or golden chairs around tables laden with the finest food and drink. Most were clad in the colors of Draxis, but a few sported clothing and insignia marking them as hailing from other Imperial worlds. Backlighting the party was a massive armorcrys window showing a bloated red-orange sun setting beneath the choking sea of smog that the spire was elevated far above.

Sinric wasted no time in helping himself, grabbing a glass of fine amasec and chatting up the fairest maiden he could find in easy reach. Caesar, not to be outdone, attempted to gracefully insert himself into the conversation with mixed success. She giggled at the antics and introduction and revealed herself to be a noble dignitary from Mordia representing her house. The two of them manged to glean some important information about the ruling family, namely that the house Patriarch Albertus Tarnell was beside himself with the opportunity to throw such an extravagant party. The pair did their best to hide their near total ignorance of the lavish party they had been invited to, with limited effectiveness due to Sinric's constant barbed comments towards Ceasar that were causing him to fluster badly. Even so the two of them gleaned that the event was celebrating Gothic Sector Grand Military Commander Thaddeus Hale, who would himself be attending a massive banquet in his honor the following day. Planetary Governor Albertus and his two sons Dimitrius (the eldest, a massive brute with an equally massive temper) and Sirus (The younger, well liked and pensive one) had been working tirelessly to prepare for the event.

While this was going on the rest of the party was enjoying the sights. Alcyone busied herself peering at every small bit of technology in the room, clearly not impressed. Tancred stomped around awkwardly, making a show of being Caesar's bodyguard but constantly glancing at Alcyone, who's safety was paramount in his mind at all times. He drew no shortage of astonished glances due to his massive physiology and archaic armor from the nobles at the party, clearly envious that their own designer bodyguards were not nearly so striking. The psykers were just sort of awkwardly hanging around, Demios making some attempt at small talk but Yarrow bristling visibly at the irritating nobles.

The party's preliminary investigation was interrupted by another announcement from the same group of servants that paraded their own entrance, announcing a new fresh arrival. The honorable Aleri De Vicarius, head of Rogue Trader house Vicarius. In walked a woman with shoulder length white hair, fancy but not ostentatious garb and an ornamented cane. Trailing behind her was a crew nearly as motley as the party itself, an astropath, an elderly member of the Navis Nobilite and a clean cut bodyguard in military dress. Their arrival drew a new wave of gossip and sneering among the nobles as the woman sat at an empty table with a look of utter disinterest on her face.

[GM'S NOTE
As the story proceeds I will probably dump a few of these in and around to let you peer behind the curtain of game mastery. I love to pull little surprises on my players, and Aleri De Vicarius was actually created by Sinric's player as part of a Rogue Trader campaign I ran a long time ago. It was really fun to see how surprised he was at this callback. His player was the only one to know that Aleri was obsessed with the collection of warp-related relics, but kept said info handily out of his IC dealings. In reality he was hesitant to go chat up his own OC but it was deemed a better course of action/more logical in character to do so.]

Caesar and Sinric disengaged with the lovely Catherine Forscythe of Mordia. Sinric insisted on chatting up the striking new arrival while Caesar resolved to cut through the tightly packed group of sycophants surrounding governor Tarnell and hanging off his every word.

Aleri was standoffish and disinterested, if not slightly intrigued by Sinric's apparent sharpness. She insisted she was at this event at the behest of her seneschal and had no interest in being here at all, eager to leave as soon as possible. Sinric had a feeling her presence was too strange to be purely coincidence, but could not seem to glean anything from her impossibly inscrutable demeanor.


Meanwhile Yarrow had started into the free beverages and Alcyone had switched gears to "accidentally" fondling party goers with her optical metachandrite to check them for anything untoward, finding nothing but a few concealed handguns. Caesar managed to cut through the crowd around the governor and make a good first impression by showering him with flattery, but did not get much farther before to pompous noble excused himself to make an announcement. He declared to the room that the Sector Commander had arrived, but was exhausted from the travel and would not be making an appearance until the gala the following day around dinner time. Quarters had been prepared for all guests and festivities would be held all night. He also advised that any looking to leave the spire to the higher class civilian areas of the hive would need to be back by around the local equivalent of 8pm for security reasons.

At this point the party had gleaned a little bit about their surroundings and the key players but had no leads on the shadowy cult they were ostensibly here to find, or what even they were planning to do. The governor himself had done nothing untoward and his two sons had yet to be seen. As such the party did the classic scooby do maneuver and split up to look for clues before their pyromancer could drink himself into a stupor.

Caesar ran into the Tarnell brothers and made an introduction. After a rather brutal snub by the elder one, who was indeed quite massive and brutish in appearance, he chatted a bit with the younger. Siris Tarnell was just as pensive and well-mannered as the rumors claimed. Nothing unusual in sight, other than Dimitrius being a bit of a shithead they seemed to be a relatively normal family of Imperial Nobles.

The rest of the crew dug up some rumors. Namely that Dimitrius had earlier in the day nearly broken a servant's arm for bringing him the wrong drink. The word around was that it was suspected his father was considering naming his younger brother to be the successor to the rulership of Draxis rather than him.

Finally Alcyone and Bram found the first major break in the case. A pair of guards were stationed in front of a large tapestry at the end of a small dead-end hallway. Upon questioning they seemed uncertain as to why they had been stationed there, as far as they knew the tapestry was of no specific significance. Alcyone ogled it with her eyeball stalk and found a small hidden lock and latch on one side. The gang regrouped and after Caesar managed to convince the guards they had deserved a little R&R Alcyone picked the lock and the six of our brave heroes descended into a darkened passage with metal walls beyond, making sure no one saw them enter and closing the door behind them.

The passage was dull metal with very dim overhead lights interspersed. It seemed to be tilting downwards and occasionally had sharp right angle turns. They walked along this single-route tunnel for quite some time, getting what they estimated to be quite a bit of distance from the palace. Eventually, they saw a slightly brighter light ahead in the tunnel, hearing the sounds of dripping water and light shuffling. The party drew their concealed weapons, Caesar with his laspistol, Sinric with his crackling powersword and Bram with his massive fists. The gang crept up carefully, attempting to make as little noise as possible. Surprising everyone including himself Bram managed to carefully creep along with grace and silence completely at odds with his grotesque muscled physique. They reached the base of the tunnel to see quite a sight.

The passage opened up into a large room. There were several passages leading elsewhere, a few of which had foul liquid runoff of some kind flowing into the grate on the floor in the center of the area. There was a large vault door of some kind off to the right. However most striking was a trio of horrific looking creatures that appeared to have at one point been human, each attached to a metal chain anchored to the floor

[GM'S NOTE
As this game was completely text based from start to finish, any time I had to describe a monster or creature I would write a detailed little blurb. Throughout these tales I will likely drop more than a few of them to help set the narrative and this is one such time.

Three horrific creatures are present here, each chained to three metal posts anchored to the ground. They appear mostly humanoid, but their flesh is hardened to some kind of carapace, their arms elongated unnaturally ending in sharp claws, and their features fuse or warp at seemingly random]

It was at this point our hapless heroes luck ran out. Demios, slightly off-kilter from the high-proof libations he had consumed, stumbled as the group approached the doorway and grabbed one of Alcyone's head-anchored metachandrites for support. This caused her to emit an angry burst of curses in binary from the surprise, after which Caesar saw fit to loudly shush the both of them.

This obviously alerted the creatures in the room, which started to give a terrible undulating cry and strain against their chains. They nearly immediately broke and the beasts bounded towards our heroes, leaping at Bram and Caesar who happened to be in the front.

Bram was in his element, taking the scything talons of one on his sturdy chestplate even as he shot out a massive arm and intercepted the blow meant for Caesar. Sinric took a half-step forward and decapitated the gnashing monster in front of Caesar with his power sword as Bram set into the other, punching a hole through its chest before pulverising its head with a downward hammer blow.

All of a sudden there was a terrible screeching of metal from the grate at the center of the room, and a massive, even more horrific creature ripped its way up from the depths.

[There is a sound of sharp talons scraping across steel, echoing around the room. With the terrible crunch of buckling metal a horrifying monstrosity tears its way through the floor grate. It appears to be made from an amalgamation of human bodies, but sports countless talons, graspers and maws. Its shrieking makes your teeth itch and causes a small voice in the back of your head to start gibbering in fear]

Undaunted by this massive new foe, Yarrow the pyromancer raised a hand and channeled the warp through his outstretched arm. With a flicker of unreality the monster burst into white hot flames, its mouths screaming in fury as it continued its assault. There was a half-moment of stunned disbelief at how easily the massive beast shrugged off Yarrow's warp blast despite the inferno that now consumed it, and then the party laid into the lumbering monster. Alcyone's autogun attached to one of her metachandrites rattled with automatic fire and Caesar's laspistol cracked, tearing chunks of flesh from the creature. Not to be outdone, Demios conjured his own darker energies and directed them towards the monster, causing black-purple flame to meld with the yellow-orange and ashing off several flailing limbs. Unfortunately, as often happens, the abyss gazed back and Demios felt himself sucked somewhere far away before slamming back into the hallway feeling most peculiar. His head buzzed and rang with static, and it took him several seconds to realize he had somehow managed to enter the body of Caesar Morroe. Caesar, who was now in Demios' body to match, began to scream and shriek in alarm and fell to the ground. Off to the side, Sinric shoved off the remaining smaller creature and scythed it apart with his blade.

Finally the tortured, burning monster closed the distance between it and the party as Bram assumed a defensive stance to intercept the charge. The two giants slammed together, Bram undeniably taking the worst of it as his armor dented and rent and ribs fractured, yielding but a single step. Roaring in pain and rage, Bram shoved the massive burning creature backward and pulverized the top half of its mass of flesh and tearing out a sizable chunk with a powerful uppercut. Not waiting for it to regain its footing, he grabbed either side of its torso-flesh in his massive gauntleted hands and pulled outward, tearing the creature in twain with a gristly sound of ripping meat and high pitched screaming that turned to gurgling and then silence.

The rest of the party was only slightly horrified at this terrible display of violence, more grateful for the creature's demise. Yarrow once more touched the empyrean to put out the smoldering remains of the monster and Alcyone set about repairing her massive bodyguard. Despite the ferocity with which he had killed the monster he was badly wounded. Caesar and Demios violently returned to their own bodies, the latter falling near comatose in a daze and the former panicking badly.

Caesar did not take the horror very well. He immediately began ranting and raving about having to call in the cavalry they did it they found the heresy fuck this time to leave bring in the guardsmen. It took Sinric and Yarrow all but slapping on the face to convince him that attempting to tell the authorities that were controlled and paid by the very family they were (probably) investigating with out any actual proof implicating said family was a terrible idea and tantamount to suicide.

Meanwhile, Alcyone had sewed Bram mostly back together and roused Demios from his warp trauma-induced nap, relatively certain he would mostly recover. While Bram piled the corrupted corpses according to the customs of his homeland and convinced Yarrow to put them alight once more, Alcyone switched her attention to the massive vault door in the wall. A cursory inspection of its arcane machinery showed that the vault was sealed with powerful servos and a biometric scanner lock, and with the proper rights and prayer she could coax the machine spirit into compliance within a half hour.

It was a very tense time, the party waiting with weapons drawn and jumping at every creak and sound as Alcyone and Bram attended to the massive machine with tool and prayer. After only 20 minutes Alcyone gave a static burst of joy as the machine accepted her biometrics and the massive vault unsealed itself with a hiss of hydraulics and whirring of heavy machinery.

Inside the door was a small vault, not more than five meters a side. Off to the right was a table adorned with maddening iconography that made the head ache at but a glance, strewn with sinister looking cutting implements, suturing tools and other medical implements stained black with ichor. On the left a small unlocked chest, filled with quite a bit of Throne Gelt currency and local hive scrip, a small fortunes worth. But at the back sat the strangest of all, a meter-wide metal cube ominously unadorned.

Yarrow Able, curious as he was, swept the area with his psychic senses. The table and medical implements ached dully with some foul corrupt essence, but the cube at the back was something else entirely. It had the essence of the warp's touch, but unlike the medical tools it did not feel corrupt. Indeed it felt, clean. Pure somehow. Yarrow probed deeper, the first of what would be a long and troubled list of inquisitive acts towards warp artifacts. As his mind approached the strange sensation it grabbed him, like a fish on a hook and yanked him into a violent premonition.

As Yarrow shuddered and convulsed slightly, jaw slack and eyes rolled back under his antiquated helmet, no one noticed. They were all more preoccupied with the sound of footsteps approaching from the very same tunnel they came in through. Aleri De Vicarius and her entourage strode down the corridor, meeting the raised weapons of the party with her own adorned cane, and demanding to know what the hell had happened as she eyed up the pyre of burning mutants.


Part 1 End

Thank's for getting this far, assuming you have. Expect the thrilling conclusion to Spirebound sometime in the next couple weeks!

Imperial Guard: Warfare-lite in the Grim Darkness of the 41st Millenium

A quick forward: The first part of this post is simply an explanation of how and why I created this rules-lite OSR inspired system for running Imperial Guard focused games in the Warhammer 40k setting. If you don't give a shit and just want to get the rules PDF scroll on down to the Imperial Aquila.

I make no secret of the fact that I am a big fan of Warhammer 40k RPGs, especially the d100 based systems created by Fantasy Flight Games (other than the first Dark Heresy of course) until they lost the license in 2014. But they have always left something to be desired in my mind. They are all incredibly in depth, which is good in a way, but as a result tend to be slow to run. Combat involves tracking a dozen different factors such as weapon type, ammo, range, feats, cover, armor, special abilities and fate points. The GM has to handle the same but for many different enemies, who's profiles often simply list the names of feats and require an insane amount of cross referencing to use the way they were meant to be used. This problem is still present outside of combat as well, albeit less so. In spite of these factors I have run many games in these systems and had an incredible amount of fun, but I found myself fatigued by the heavy crunch.

By contrast, I have recently been really in to several games in the OSR scene. OSR for those who do not know stands for Old School Renaissance, and refers in general to a set of old school design principals common in games such as the first editions of Dungeons and Dragons. While no two people can conclusively agree on what specifically OSR entails, there is generally some common ground. The following are what it means to me, more or less.

OSR systems tend to be rules-lite and stats-lite. Crunch is kept to a minimum whenever possible and anything that falls outside of the given rules is up to player creativity and GM ruling
Rulings not rules is another big one. The rules are there to serve the fiction and not the other way around. If something does not make sense the GM makes a call that does make sense and the game moves on. A facet of this is that rolling is rare and reserved for situations where failure moves the game forward in an interesting way. Rolling can be avoided by mitigating your risks through careful planning and deliberate use of all tools available to you in creative ways.
High lethality is a common factor. This one is a bit more controversial but many of these older systems and their contemporaries in the OSR sphere share this theme. In ADnD 2nd edition you died as soon as you hit 0 hit points, and it was possible to only have one hit point at 1st level. One measly point of damage away from permanent death. This contributed heavily to the aforementioned careful planning and creativity, as the only way to survive the adventuring life for many was to be as careful and methodical as possible, and to NEVER fight fair when fighting was inevitable.
Finally, and this one is a bit more modern, but ease of adaptability and modification. In the modern OSR scene systems are often built to be broken and customized as the players and GM see fit. Since many of them tend to be lighter on the rules this is much easier to accomplish on a grander scale.

There are others, obviously. It is known within the community that if you ask 5 OSR players what they define as OSR you will get 7 different definitions. While this project has been heavily inspired by the OSR scene, and in fact the OSR community has been extremely helpful as far as design advice goes, I probably wouldn't label it exactly as OSR. Not in the way most people think of it.

Anyways, within the last couple years I have been reading a couple Warhammer 40k novel series. Mostly ones by Sandy Mitchell and Dan Abnett, the Ciaphus Cain and Gaunts Ghosts series. The Imperial Guard has always been my favourite part about Warhammer 40k, something about regular men and women forced to content with and compete against the likes of Orks, Space Marines, Deamons and other horrible monstrosities using naught but sound tactics and a prayer to the Emperor is massively appealing to me. These books are very good and perfectly showcase what is good and what is terrible about the Imperial Guard as an organization, as well as the staggering variety that can be found in military regiments pulled from disparate worlds in a realm as vast as the Imperium of Man. I tried to emulate this a couple times using Fantasy Flight's Only War system, but to only middling success. Tactics such as cover and suppressing fire were often not necessary in the system due to the sheer durability offered by armor+toughness bonus damage reduction and the deceptively deep pool of survivable crit damage. This is to say nothing of the general bloat of FFG rulesets and how it makes combat drag out.

This system started with a single design principal, namely what if there was a system in which an unarmored man getting shot with Lasgun would usually die. The very first thing I did was decide on average human health range and Lasgun damage to make this the case, and then as the system took more and more shape I worked fervently to make it into a system that captured the essence of what makes the Imperial Guard interesting without slaughtering characters wholesale. How exciting would any of these novels I had been inspired by really be if the entire cast of characters suffered a 95% casualty rate every single book?

The result ended up, well if I'm being honest a little heavier on rules than I was hoping, but still overall very light in comparison to its inspirations. My small number of test combats I have run went pretty smoothly even with some of the crunchier systems like suppression and cover but it all badly needs more testing which is part of my motivation for making this post.

Hopefully what is presented should be suitable for running anything from Band of Brothers to Platoon to Catch 22 in terms of theme and style, but your mileage may vary.

OKAY MY BLOG ENDS HERE YOU CAN GET THE BOOK

Google drive download link here: Download


Be sure to actually download it so you can use the bookmarks, it will be damn near unavigable without them.

Clocks in at about 50 pages but a lot of that is my own advice and ramblings as well as a bunch of example profiles for vehicles, weapons and enemies.

I have done my best to edit things where they make sense and try to have everything organized in a logical way that flows well and lumps relevant entries together. The bookmark system on the sidebar should give you a pretty good ability to find what it is you are looking for easily, I tried to make it as complete as possible.

Potential GMs, get a copy of the Fantasy Flight game Only War if you can. It was a massive inspiration for this project and it does so many things well that I can not and will not repeat ad nauseam. It is referenced several times in the GM section as an amazing resource for running these sorts of games, which it is. It is not however mandatory, the rules as presented should be enough for running games in this setting as long as you are comfortable setting up your own adventures and stuff.

You will notice it is all plain text on white background. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly I have never been one for visual design, and as this is only a very early first test release there is not much point in agonizing over its looks. The second reason is that GW is notorious trigger happy with protecting its IP and I feel like not having any of their official art is a good step towards staying out of their crosshairs. Which brings me to my next point...


THIS IS A NON-MONETIZED FAN PROJECT THAT IS NOT ENDORSED BY GAMES WORKSHOP. ALL WARHAMMER 40k COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY BELONGS NOT TO ME BUT TO THEIR RESPECTIVE OWNERS. PLEASE DONT SUE ME OR C&D ME I AM A GOOD BOY

Seriously if you somehow paid money for this shitty PDF take your money back by force because you got fucking ripped off.

Feel free to use any of my work in your own projects, in the spirit of OSR, but just give me a shout out in the credits or something.


That said I would love to get any and all feedback, even if it is just angry emails where you call me a number of nonsensical racial epithets with a 4GB jpg of goatse attached. I have plans for other stuff I want to add but I would love to hear what works and doesn't work, either on any of the places I have linked this, comments on this post, or via email at wyzack2222@gmail.com. I will likely be running my own playtests as well so if a series of short, likely gruelling campaigns to try out various bits of the system sounds interesting to you drop me a line and I will see about arranging it.

In the future I hope to release additional campaign-based systems, mass combat rules, and a ton of extra weapons, equipment and vehicles, as well as perhaps some more comprehensive game play examples and tables/resources for generating various parts of warfare. if anything is unintuitive or doesn't make sense/needs clarification let me know and I will happily respond as soon as possible.

I hope you somehow manage to enjoy the abomination I have created. Grab your lasgun, shine up you flak armor and prepare to do your Emperor proud, soldier!

Of Wrath and Glory

So if you follow the tabletop RPG scene at all you might have heard some of the controversy lately regarding the "new" Warhammer 40k RPG, Wrath and Glory being developed by Ulisses Spiele. I just wanted to lay out my own experience with the game from the beginning and maybe explain what is going on as far as we know. I decided to dump a ton of context including my experience with the game, so if you just want the current state of the game maybe skip to the end.

40k has had tabletop RPGs to go alongside the wargame for quite some time. While not the first, Dark Heresy 1st Edition released by Black Industries in 2008 was the first of the more modern systems. Like one month later they lost the license to Fantasy Flight Games who put out more splats and more games, as well as a second edition of Dark Heresy in 2014. I loved these games. Each one was a very focused system on a certain type of adventure in the 40k universe with shared percentile dice roll-under mechanics. Dark Heresy was about working for the shadowy Inquisition as investigators, Death Watch was about being HUGE SPACE MARINES and fighting HUGE ALIENS, as well as the politics of inter-chapter co-operation. Black Crusade was about being vile heretics of all stripes and vying for the favor of your god, Rogue Trader was about being a billionaire pirate space merchant price and flying around unexplored areas to make yourself even richer, and Only War was about playing as the dogged men and woman of the Imperial Guard, forced to face down the worst threats in the galaxy with a lasgun and a prayer. The games were by no means perfect but each of the themed systems did a very good job at capturing what made each facet of the 40k universe interesting, and more importantly what made them interesting to play. Then in 2016, after Dark Heresy 2nd edition had only a small handful of splat books compared to the continued support of say Rogue Trader and Only War, Fantasy Flight announced they were ending their partnership with Games Workshop and therefore all future development on the 40k RPG line.

May it rest in peace

I was crushed by this. Dark Heresy 2nd edition, while by no means perfect, made a lot of improvements to the core systems. I was so so badly hoping for a Rogue Trader 2nd edition to be released, since Rogue Trader is such a unique concept but the system itself is badly dated and has so many things wrong with it I could make them a blogpost all on its own. I will not pretend to have all the facts here as to why it happened, there is much speculation that GW was not happy about FFG's Star Wars spaceship game being an indirect competitor for Battlefleet Gothic. I think we all knew this wasn't the end, because despite all their failings as a company GW is not just gonna let this pile of money fester out of their reach, but no one knew what was gonna happen next.

What happened next was Ulisses Spiele getting the 40k license and teasing their new game, Wrath and Glory. At first I was sort of excited. As much as I love the Fantasy Flight line the games themselves are very heavy on rules and after running them for so many years I was just weary of how long combat takes and how many little powers and things you have to account for. Perhaps a lighter system is just what 40k needed. Then it came out that this was a catch all single system that would allow you to play anything and everything. Imperial Guardsmen? Yup. Aliens? You bet! Space Marines? But of course! All side by side and in the same ruleset and book!

This was a massive red flag to me. 40k has some absolutely massive power disparity between the archetypes mentioned there. Space Marines are of positively mythic power, and although the specifics change based on whoever happens to be writing at the time it is generally agreed upon that one Space Marine is basically on a whole other level of power from all but the absolute strongest, most experienced and well equipped human. How could you possibly bridge that gap so that the Imperial Guard player doesn't feel utterly outclassed at all times in combat, and more importantly why would you want to? The same goes for all the other powerful things players can be. They touted a tier based system, where the different archetypes had a minimum tier they could be, but players could increase in tier as they "leveled up" so to speak. So theoretically an Imperial Guardsman and Space Marine in the same party would be on a mostly level playing field, with the Space Marine being closer to baseline and the Guardsman being a high level veteran. This sounds okay on paper, but an Imperial Guardsman and a Space Marine fighting together as equals kind of flies in the face of all established canon and sort of ruins what is interesting about both archetypes, in my humble but utterly worthless opinion.

Not willing to discount the game just yet, my online group got ahold of the playtest materials they released as part of free RPG day. I was very eager to give the system a try since I was desperate for a new 40k game and wanted to see if my fears had any basis in reality. Feel free to scroll down if you don't care to read my long winded hot take on the system.

There are serious spoilers for the playtest adventure inbound, so if you ever have a mind to play it (spoiler alert I seriously recommend you don't) stop reading now and scroll down to the all caps text.

Ulisses preview of the free RPG day materials

Keep in mind I am working largely from memory here so I may get small details wrong, feel free to let me know in the comments.

The playtest had all preset characters and no chargen rules. The options were very rag-tag, a Commissar, an Imperial Guardsmen, an Inquisition Interrogator, a Priest, a Sister of Battle and goddamn Space Marine of the White Scars chapter. I picked the Guardswoman because she seemed badass and the fighting men and women of the Imperial Guard have always been my favorite part of 40k. We ended up with all the characters on the adventure except the space marine, who we sort of collectively agreed was wildly out of place even among this group of misfits.

The adventure was not really very good. Don't get my wrong, we still had fun and Emperor bless our poor GM for trying to plug the holes and make it work, but the whole thing just reeked of being written by someone who had no idea about 40k and was not familiar with the setting at all.

The pitch was that the party was flying around with a Rogue Trader fighting chaos or some other bad stuff in the current canon date, which is roughly 200 years after the fall of Cadia and the galaxy is split asunder by a massive warp rift. Why is a Rogue Trader fighting a war? Why do they have this ragtag group of misfits on their ship, and why are these people working together? Possibly because of the tragic breakdown in chain of command, maybe the RT had a personal stake in the worlds being fought over, it is hardly the most unusual thing. The starting hook though is that this rag-tag party of Imperial servants is on the way to an Imperial Shrine world with a huge and well staffed hospital, to visit an Imperial general or something that had been wounded in the fighting.

This was a little jarring. 40k is not exactly known for its sentimentality, especially not the kind of characters the party was made out of, so the idea that a friggin Space Marine was just popping by to give this general some flowers and a get well soon card seemed a little silly.

The face of a woman on a special mission from the Inquisition to give you a box of chocolates and a hug after your appendix removal

I won't bore you with the details but the gist was that a doctor in the facility who was secretly a nurgle lad was engineering a zombie plague, and the local security force had been covering up/lying about these smaller outbreaks for no real discernible reason since I am pretty sure we conclusively determined they were not in on it, but also there was somehow no information leaks at all despite all the personnel involved in the coverup. Once you discover the plot you have to stop this guy before he busts a fat plague nut in the planet's watersupply that is behind a single hatch in a lightly guarded building. The dude has a ton of health since he has that nurgle juice in his veins and our GM added the space marine player character as a chaos space marine fighting alongside this dude in the final fight, which was a cool touch.

Enough about the story though because mechanically I had some issues with the system. The first was that it is staggeringly hard to die. It is similar to DnD in that when you hit 0 HP you are downed, and have to make death saves each round. The difference is that the roll is made with a d6. a 1 is two failures, a 2 or 3 is one failure. Anything else is a success and a 6 is a critical success, meaning you stand back up. The thing is, you only need a single success to stabilize but three failures to die. And to add to this, getting hit while you are downed just makes you roll again. This means that getting shot at while at 0 HP is just as likely to heal you as it is to hurt you, and brings up some bizarre implications such as the ability to toss a grenade into a group of downed allies and stabilize half of them, maybe even have one heal to 1hp. I am told that the full rules made it so that failing even one death save had some longer term consequences which is a good step, but as far as I know frag grenade first aid is still a risky but viable option.

The second thing I took issue with is the meta point economy. Wrath and Glory (two separate terms not the name of the game) are both types of meta currency players can use in the course of the game and one of them (I believe it is Wrath) is shared among all players, and you can shift extra successes into your Wrath pool if you get extra successes or 6s or something when making an attack. This led to a rather strange scenario in the final fight. As the Imperial Guardsman my lasgun couldn't really scratch the paint on the Space Marine, so as the fight went on we killed the evil doctor by bursting him down and had to contend with the large boy and a swarm of zombies. I was on zombie duty while the Commissar dueled the Marine with her power sword. The fight was close and she badly needed meta points to get an edge in the fight. This put me in a kind of silly position. I could have sprayed into the horde of zombies and killed most of them, but the "optimal play" was to open up full auto with as many shots as I could on a single zombie so that I could maximize my chances of getting some points for the Commissar to use.

I know this seems like a minor gripe and really it is, I have always been the kind of player to do what is cool rather than what is optimal, but this struck me as a point of bad design. In my opinion mechanics should serve the fiction, and should generally not make players do things that seem completely nonsensical in order to win, or in this case not let an entire planet die of the space plague. In spite of all this the battle was pretty climactic and cool, the Commissar saying a snappy one liner before mortally wounding the space marine and causing him to blow himself up with grenades.

My opinion on the rest of the (admittedly incomplete) playtest rules was just okay. Nothing stood out as terribly interesting and I really didn't like the reload system. Seemed like we had fun in spite of the rules rather than because of them, and as far as I was concerned my fears about a universal system making different types of characters very samey were confirmed. I also share the complaint many have expressed in that it just doesn't feel like a good fit for 40k thematically, too light and breezy, not grim or dark enough. Many will argue that is the direction 40k has been heading in general with the recent canon advancements, but that is a topic for another post I think as this one is already hilariously long winded

Please read my fanfiction its right here on this stick

END OF MY HOT TAKE AND ALSO MODULE SPOILERS

So that was that. I know a lot of people probably disagree with my take and I don't blame them, I didn't think the system was great but it also wasn't offensively bad. I just felt (and feel) that it was a bad fit for 40k and that's not really something you can quantify but I can see why people would disagree. I will say for its part combat did run faster than the FF line of games and it is probably easier for a newbie to come to grips with the rules.

Eventually the main rulebook came out. I seem to recall some people being upset with slow distribution making obtaining a physical copy a huge pain in the ass, and I still see people say that the core book has some serious issues with poor organization and editing.

And then....well a whole lot of nothing. Radio silence. Ulisses had made some lofty promises about support in the way of splatbooks expanding options for various player characters and races, but after the core launch WanG's fans were left waiting with not a damn word about where these books were or even any info on their development at all. Nearly a year in fact. Fans were hoping for some news at the recent Warhammer Fest, but while Cubicle 7 was showing off stuff on their Warhammer Fantasy 4th edition RPG Ulisses was nowhere to be seen. This was pretty shitty. I didn't terribly like the system but I know lots of people do and many were feeling kinda cheated.

Friendship ended with Ulisses Spiele now Cubicle 7 is my best friend

Then we got the recent announcement, Ulisses is now assisting in transferring the game to Cubicle 7, who promises to do an overhaul of the core rules as well as deliver on all the supplements Ulisses has promised. I am particularly curious what this means for people who have already shelled out a considerable sum of money for the complete current rules and materials. It has to sting to have paid for a hard copy of the core rules only to have the company go silent for a year and then another company declare they are releasing a revised version. It would be simple enough for Cubicle7 to give free revised PDFs to anyone who bought the main book but another matter entirely to give them hard prints of the new one, and I seriously doubt that would ever happen. As far as I can tell current buyers are stuck with what they have and are likely feeling swindled by this bait and switch, and it is hard to blame them. No one seems to know why the change happened as of yet, but most suspect it has to do with the spotty quality of the core rules and issues with its production and distribution. Perhaps more information will come out down the line.

But where does that leave us now? Hopefully in a pretty good place. During the whole span of complete radio silence on Wrath and Glory products I was sort of hoping against hope that the whole thing might get scrapped and started anew simply because I am not a huge fan of the core mechanics. Selfish I know, but it is what it is. However Cubicle7 at the wheel is an interesting turn of events. I am personally a very big fan of what they have done with Warhammer Fantasy 4th edition, being a huge fan of the 2nd edition of the same game. I have my doubts that the game will turn into something I personally enjoy since they are keeping the core mechanics the same but I think they can do the setting and lore much more justice than Ulisses has so far, simply because their treatment of Warhammer Fantasy's Old World setting has been quite good. My greatest hope is that we get some very robust Rouge Trader and Imperial Guard themed splatbooks that I can steal for use in my own games, but at this point only time will tell.

The future of 40k Tabletop RPGs is a little uncertain, but I think it is in good hands. I hope all the current WanG fans out there get what they want out of it but I also hope, again selfishly, that the revisions turn the game into something I personally would enjoy. I am sure I have missed details and got 1001 things wrong so feel free to let me know your own opinions and any facts I missed or misinterpreted. Thanks for reading this massive wall of text.