One of my favourite bits of Only War is the regiment creation, and I roped in the players to give me feedback and make something they thought sounded interesting. Since it was just to be a oneshot sort of game the longevity didn't matter much and we could basically pick whatever options sounded coolest with little thought for balance.
The players thought that a Death World would be a neat homeworld, but we were all sort of weary of the Catachan-style planet and opted for a terrible, inimical acid world where only horrible lifeforms could exist outside of the bio-domes. Stat-wise it would have probably been a better fit to use Hive World but whatever, they wanted a Death World so that's what we used. This had the twofold effect of allowing us to ape part of the Krieger/Armageddon aesthetic of gasmasks and greatcoats, which I really like, and the hilarious side-effect that the entire regiment was illiterate, as Death Worlders tend to be. The players were all sort of settling in to roles and in usual fashion I let the weapon specialist pick their favoured Basic weapon and the heavy weapon guy pick their favoured Heavy weapon (plasmaguns and mortars respectively. In spite of this the Weapons Specialist ended up dual wielding plasma pistols instead since i was being pretty permissive and it sounded cool). However the thing they became most fixated on during regiment creation was the Doomed drawback.
Like these guys but kind of dumb and with horrible luck rather than brainwashed murder machines
For the uninitiated in Only War regiment creation uses a points-based system to purchase special gubbins for your regiment, stuff like better standard issue gear and specialized training doctrines. There are also Drawbacks you can take that give you extra points to spend in exchange for certain penalties. Doomed is possibly the worst drawback you can have for the greatest point gain. Players can no longer burn fate points to survive lethal injuries, take penalties to all regimental logistics checks and the GM is encouraged to make other miscellaneous things go wrong at all times to make sure the penalty has teeth.
My players thought this was goddamn hilarious. They wanted it. They didn't even need the extra points, they were just certain they wanted to play some doomed troopers. We ended up blowing the extra points on gasmasks and a ton of extra grenades, and thus the Argus 123rd Black Dogs were born. Shortly after being mustered from their shithole acid planet and shipped off, the cruiser they were on suffered a catastrophic warp event in which 90% of all crew and soldiers completely and mysteriously vanished in transit, leaving the vessel crippled but mercifully in Imperial Space as it exited the Warp. Strangely enough, not a single member of the Argus 123rd was touched in any way during this event. Ever since they had been affixed with a black mark, a curse some said, and suffered a statistically unlikely string of catastrophes, bad luck and misfortune that caused terrible tolls on the regimental strength and morale as well as furthering their reputation.
I decided I wanted them up a little higher on the totem pole, so the party was going to be a Platoon Command Squad. We ended up with a heavy weapon mortar man, a medic, the aforementioned plasma pistoleer, a sanctioned psyker and a Sargent. A decent spread for an OW party. The Sargent player decided after some consideration that he thought it would be fun to play a completely inept noble sort of commissioned officer, the kind who has no business being on the field or in command of troops and was put there by nepotism rather than merit. It didn't quite fit with the regiment theme so we decided to make him be an outsider from another world, brought in likely as some form of punitive measure by someone he pissed off and shunted to the worst regiment that could be found. However the poor sod was too clueless to realize he was being punished and was quite excited about his new command job, likely because he didn't read any of the dossiers about the soldiers he would be commanding. The story was that the platoon was receiving a new Lieutenant after their last one died to an altogether unfortunate and unlikely plasmagun malfunction which caused it to explode.
Sort of like this except the blue explosion kept expanding and took poor Lt. Flower's organs and innards with it
The battlefield was a nothing world on the far edge of the Gothic Sector, a small pocket of space closed off for a few millennia by warp storms and recently reconnected only to reveal an isolationist human Empire of a few systems, clearly derived from the Imperium of Man at some point in the past few thousand years who's headstrong leader decided he was too good to rejoin the fold. Since unlike something like the Severam Dominate these secessionists were extremely small and not considered a significant threat only a token counter offensive was raised and the Argus 123rd was sent to assault a rather unremarkable temperate world with only a small enemy presence as the spearhead with a couple other regiments involved. Thanks to the shrewd politicking of the 123rd's ill tempered and weary Commander they had not only scored what should have by all right been an absolute milk-run of an invasion, he had actually convinced the Adminstratum to grant his beleaguered regiment custodianship of the planet should they succeed. The ultimate prize for an easy job, maybe their luck was finally changing. Of course the campaign had immediately been plagued by the usual string of horrid luck and misfortune, but even so they were slowly pushing back. The game started with the bulk of the Regiment gearing up for a mass offensive to finally take the last few secessionist holdouts, and 5th platoon was meeting their new CO Lieutenant Emilius Talbarne XXV for the first time, the replacement for the late Lieutenant Butch Flowers following his unfortunate plasmagun incident. The medic declared his official cause of death to be "Acute bodily redistribution".
Emilius Talbarne's player was an absolute riot, and played the role of "clueless noble who has no business commanding soldiers" to an absolute T. He marvelled at the conditions they were living in and was quick to tell anyone who would listen about the various medals he had received for attending parties and dinners as the war-weary Deathworlders stared at him in a mix of horror and disbelief. As they all got comfortable and acquainted 3rd Company Captain Jovian shows up at the barrack to brief them and deliver the dossier for their mission. He is extremely nervous, mostly because the war seems to actually be going sort of well for a change and that can't possibly be good. The Regimental Commander and three companies of Infantry will be assaulting the Planetary Palace and capital city, while 3rd Company 5th Platoon got a pretty cushy objective. Take a small auxiliary base with a power plant and vox relay in it, couple guard towers and a chain-link fence with a dugout around it and roughly 20 enemies, a relatively easy objective for a full strength platoon. The dossier came with a few grainy pictures of said base and a list of mission assignment gear.
The players grabbed a bite in the mess and then went off to get their gear. Emelius thought that eating with the soldiers was a good bit of interesting fun, like going camping or something. The Medic and Psyker engaged in a spirited discussion about weather or not the regiment was actually cursed or not. The psyker swore he could see the blackness of the ruinous powers hovering over all of their heads, but the medic was certain it was just a bit of bad luck. There was no such thing as curses, after all!
Truly the Emperor's finest
After a whole lot of fucking about, bickering and talking shit on their new CO who was too oblivious to notice they finally got the deployment underway. The lot of them were loaded up in trucks and dumped off in the middle of an eerily silent bombed out city and told their mission objective was a 20 minute march to the northwest. This was a little troubling given that the Dossier said their objective was supposed to be in the center of a field. Emelius had his vox operator call command and demand an explanation, but the overwatch operative simply stated the co-ordinates were correct as he had them and their orders stood, proceed to the objective and take it. This was not the end of their misfortune, however.
They picked carefully through the ruined city and finally got to the edge where the buildings thinned out. Across a 200 meter span of craters and rubble, squarely on the co-ordinates the mission objective had provided them, was a damned fortress with a rockrete perimeter wall, pillboxes and and outer trench. There also appeared to be more than twenty soldiers manning the walls. They considered radioing command again but had a feeling the answer would just be "The co-ordinates are correct, proceed to take the objective" (and to be fair they were correct) and didn't bother. Even so, their new untested Lieutenant began to panic. Likely both due to the precarious position they found themselves in and the prospect of an actual proper firefight so imminent.
Not willing to lose face Emelius snapped out of it and formulated a plan. The platoon's three mortar teams (plus the PC with the mortar, Margot Yu) would shell the base while the infantry squads took turns rushing across no-mans land and giving each other covering fire. It was not a terribly good plan, but it was a plan. Mortar salvos began launch across the no-mans land, and as the first shells fell Emelius ordered 6th squad out into the breach. Margot Yu managed to bullseye one of the pillboxes and cave it in, sustained mortar fire punched a small hole in a part of the fortress wall that had previously been patched and the rest of 3rd Platoon rushed out after 6th squad one at a time, both squads taking significant casualties from the withering incoming fire. After Emelius got dinged by a sniper thanks to the medals on his chest the poor sap decided to call a total charge and the rest of them headed out.
This was pretty representative of everything Emilius attempted in the duration of this game
They exchanged fire with the remaining soldiers on the walls. Plasma, lasblasts and bullets flew all around and the group's psyker even managed to dominate the minds of a few enemies on the wall, causing one to throw away his gun like a javelin and one other to swan-dive off the parapet to his death. Against all odds (and no thanks to their leader's brilliant "plan") the remainder of 3rd platoon stacked up on the breached fortress wall. 6th squad was all but annihilated, 4th and 3rd were in rough shape, but they made it. The psyker, not willing to wait around and see what awful scheme their inept commander would cook up next, sprinted out into the breach without warning and caused his squadmates to pile in after him.
The base Interior contained several plan utilitarian looking buildings bearing dark green banners with the crest of the holdout regime. Many soldiers were milling about inside, moving crates for cover and starting to fire as the bald, gaunt visage of the psyker rounded the breach in their perimeter. Off to the left was a large ammunition dump, presumably full of explosives, shells, and ammunition for the various solid projectile weapons used by the secessionists, and trundling up next to it was a Chimera armoured transport, loaded for bear and tracking its multi-laser towards the breach in the wall.
[GM'S NOTE: I will fully admit here, I put that chimera in with no idea how my players were going to engage it. This was a one-off game and I was sort of hoping I could bag a player kill or two to up the tension a bit, and as far as I knew they didn't really have anything that could damage the front armor other than the rather unwieldly mortar. I will sometimes do this for games where I don't mind killing a player or two, drop something in that I have no idea how they will solve and see what they come up with. However this time, well, lets just say that the regiment may have been doomed but my players were fucking lucky as all hell.]
As the party's psyker rounded the corner he did not hesitate, digging deep and drawing heavily on the power of the warp to destroy his foes. The sky darkened, the air crackled, and the most massive barrage of fel lightning any of them had ever seen the psyker conjure arced and blasted across the landscape, causing all gathered there to squint at its vibrant fury. The Chimera was struck squarely, the multiple strikes arcing across its surface, scorching the hell out of it and slagging armor plates off the front. Smoke began to bellow out from the hatches but the gun somehow continued to track. The ground around the psyker quaked and buckled in protest of the massive power draw.
[GM'S NOTE: Defying all probability the psyker pushed, cast smite, and got 9 degrees of success. With a psy-rating of 5 this meant the Chimera took 5 damage rolls with a penetration of 4, generated Emperor's fury twice, and managed to put the machine on the brink of death even through its impressively thick front armor. My jaw hit the fucking floor, I could not believe it]
WITNESS YOUR DOOM!
The rest of the platoon began to file in after the psyker at the sight of his suicidal charge and subsequent brutal assault on the armored vehicle. The pistoleer started to whip hot plasma across the field, the LT tried to rouse the men with an order of sustained fire (And failed. In fact I believe Emelius' player failed nearly every single check he made for the entirety of the game which was extremely on-brand for him) and the now-packed Mortar player whipped one of those fun grenades they received. Bodies on both sides started to drop as the firefight intensified, lasblasts and bullets whizzing every which way. A thin hallucinogenic mist wafted over a number of the enemy soldiers, causing one to fall to the floor scratching at his skin, one to start firing his rifle wildly at the wall, and one armed with a chainsword to fall to bloodlust and bisect the second one in a spray of gore. The Chimera fired a barrage of multilaser blasts at the pistoleer, who managed to dodge into cover. Moments later the Chimera exploded as the internal fires finally reached the promethium reserves. Fire from the exploding tank touched off some of the ammunition in the depot and it began to smoke and pop as bullets started to cook off.
The pysker, riding the high of his battle-lust, dug deeply from the warp once more and attempted to dominate the mind of an enemy sargent who had just filed out of the taller building in the compound. However this time the abyss gazed back. He poured his consciousness into the mind of the man and after a rather bewildering half-second blinked and looked around in surprise. Something had gone terribly wrong, he had somehow swapped bodies with the solider and was forced to duck into cover as his own team-mates began to pour lasfire in his direction. Back with the party, the psyker's body now piloted by an enemy soldier sort of stood dumbfounded and not understanding what had transpired.
The psyker, not willing to squander this opportunity he was presented with, waited for a couple more soldiers to come out of the base before pulling the pin on his only remaining frag grenade. Back with the squad the enemy in the psyker's body seemed to finally come to grips with what had happened and was levelling the psyker's flamethrower integrated on his staff at the rest of the group. Margot tackled him to the ground before it could active just as a WHUMP from across the way signified the enemy's original body getting turned to paste as well as a few of his pals. The psyker was violently slammed back into his own body (4 intelligence points stupider from the trauma) and wondered indignantly why everyone was looking at him like that.
As the firefight raged and they finally seemed to be turning the tide (in spite of yet another failed order from Emilius) they heard something crackle over the vox, the voice of the mortar crews that were shelling the base from across the way. the sargent major angrily declaring that they had a present for those traitorous bastards before the transmission cut to static and two mortar shells bulls-eyed the flaming ammo dump, causing the building to explode violently and scatter everyone in the courtyard. The enemy soldier still wracked with hallucinations of violent bloodlust was only able to turn and regard the building before it utterly incinerated him.
In the aftermath of the massive explosion it was clear the enemy soldiers had taken the worst of it given their proximity to the structure. The players had various levels of hearing loss from the proximity to the blast, the poor squad Medic with the Laud Hailer implant (they really wanted one, mostly as a joke. Who was I to deny them?) was completely deaf and shouting at maximum volume in an attempt to hear themselves speak. The enemy had been routed from the courtyard with the majority of their combat strength shattered and Emilius directed the rest of the squads to fan out and secure the buildings while the medic tended to the wounded, still shouting all the while.
Their mission objective was to secure any intel and take prisoners for interrogation, so when the players got a vox that their men had found what they believed to be a holdout enemy commander barricaded in his office they went to handle it personally. The medic, who could now hear at least a little, shouted through the door that their only hope for survival was to surrender peacefully, but all that returned was a string of curses. They looked to each other and shrugged before the pistoleer put a bolt of plasma through the door and the Mortar expert tossed a hallucinogen grenade through. There was some coughing followed by a series of shotgun blasts, the revving of a chainsword and then some awful sounds of cutting meat.(one of the party members later told me they had successfully guessed the hallucination results based on the sounds i described through the door, which I thought was hilarious.) The party managed to smash down the door in time to see two soldiers in an office next to a wooden desk that had seemingly caught fire from the plasma bolt through the door, incinerating any valuable intel within. On of the soldiers had a panicked, wide eyed gaze as he fired his combat shotgun wildly into the wall. The other, bedecked in an officer's finery, had just finished sawing off his own right leg just above the knee with a chainsword and was rapidly bleeding out. The medic tourniquetted the officer while the other players put a plasma bolt through shotgunner's dome.
And with that final bout of insanity the battle was won and the base was taken. Despite having no real good strategy and their commanding officer failing literally every single skill check he had made (attack rolls and command checks alike) 3rd Company 5th Platoon had taken the fortress that was not even supposed to be there. As their forces took stock of what they had managed to salvage (several prisoners including a commanding officer, none of the ammunition) and buried the dead the command squad once more received a vox from their men scouting the base. A network of tunnels connected the buildings to each other and the outlying pillboxes and they had found something under the center of the base that they did not know how to handle.
The party descended through tunnels littered with the occasional dead enemy soldier and wound up in an impressively large room containing an extremely large and venerable ancient arcane machine. The machine was humming away, and to their entirely untrained opinion it seemed to be generating a great deal of energy for the facility, although it was very obviously not a plasma reactor, promethium burning generator or anything else they had seem before. There were a small handful of men with heavy augments in green robes littering the floor here, and only one was still alive and being restrained by the Argus troopers who had found the room. Apparently the tech personnel had gone near-berserk trying to protect the device. The one that was still alive begged and pleaded to be allow to continue his rites maintaining the machine. These green-robed figures had iconography reminiscent of the Adeptus Mechanicus but long periods of isolation from their order proper in this splinter-empire had warped and changed some of the details.
Emelius did not think much of the thing and ordered the green-robed man to be placed with the other prisoners despite his protests. The rest of the party, on the other hand, were interested indeed. The psyker reached out with his psyniscient senses and detected a strong, steady signature of warp energy emanating from the machine. Not necessarily the taint of the ruinous powers, but certainly something not of this world. He was certain it was some sort of evil, dormant and malevolent, and when Emelius dismissed his concerns he conspired in secret with the rest of his squad. This thing was obviously evil, it had to be destroyed at all costs.
Vaynes projecting so hard he could work in a movie theatre, and Tonto still refusing to believe their curse is real
Elsewhere in the base, rampant celebration had broken out. Vox-casts from the primary front had confirmed that the planet's last holdouts of secessionist regime had been taken in the Commander's large scale blitz-offensive. The planet was theirs! The Argus 123rd "Black Dogs" had finally against all odds managed to escape the gruelling life of warfare that was the Imperial Guard and gained custodianship of their new home. And it didn't even have an acid atmosphere! Emelius beamed, certain he would be highly commended for his mission-critical victory at the fortress.
However in the depths the rest of the squad had become convinced at the psyker's rhetoric, if only just, and agreed to help him destroy the machine. The men left to guard it were not willing to let them access it, but only a cursory convincing from the medic persuaded them to indulge in just a little dereliction of duty and join in the celebrations being held topside. Once they were gone the pskyer coldly regarded the machine once more as the rest of the team strapped it with every grenade they had left (other than the hallucinogen ones). Satisfied with their demolition work, they stood as far back in the adjoining hall as they could while still able to see the machine and the plasma pistoleer took careful aim and fired at the first set of grenades to set off the explosion.
[GM'S NOTE: I think at this point I need to step in and clarify some things. This device was not malevolent, at least not in its current state. I don't know if such a thing is actually possible but the device was an ancient, venerable power-generation device from the Dark Age of Technology, forgotten in this little nothing base thanks to its separation from the Imperium proper and therefore the Adeptus Mechanicus. I had designed it as something that generated and sustained a stable little rift into warpspace and bled energy from this rift into conduits, generating power. It was shielded in such a way that it did not act as a gateway for evil things as long as it was maintained, and an order of descendant techpriests had been maintaining it for the millennia since this place had been isolated. I only put it in that it might act as sort of a final desperate act of defiance in what was supposed to be the final part of this game, as when damaged it would explode with the effect of a Vortex Grenade (!!!!). I was not terribly subtle in my attempts to hint to them that this was a fucking stupid idea, blowing it up. I was relatively overt in fact. But in spite of my warnings they decided to string the fucker up with bombs and blow it to hell because the psyker felt some warp tingles and Emperor help them that was just not okay!]
At the resounding explosion the machine crumpled inward with a horrific screeching sound as the micro-rift sustained inside the machine ripped and widened into a full tear into the empyrean. The screaming Vortex hurtled towards those that had unleashed it, utterly destroying them before their minds had time to register the fact that they had been shredded asunder by the raw energy of the Warp. The Vortex ran amok, tearing up the base and killing nearly all of 5th Platoon before finally fizzling itself out as such Vortexes sometimes do. Despite all the best efforts made to dissuade them the party died to a TPK brought on entirely by their own stupidity.
Hindpsyniscience is 20/20, as they say
This horrific (and thanks to the death of all those involved, utterly unexplainable) event was unfortunately completely overshadowed by what was to come, a mere footnote in greater and more terrible events. Not five days after the liberation of Rhasis Prime all Imperial Astropaths reported the presence of a terrible shadow in the Warp. Not long after a mighty Tyranid splinter fleet descended on Rhasis Prime. However thanks to the presence of many more Imperial Guard regiments than would normally have been stationed on such a backwater world, what would have been a simple harvesting turned into a gruelling protracted campaign, the Argus 123rd especially galvanized to protect that which they had suffered so much to earn. Eventually Rhasis Prime fell, and it is said that the Argus 123rd Commander saw great swathes of the planet's biosphere razed rather than allow it to the enemy in one final act of spite.
This final act of defiance saw the Argus 123rd finally freed from their terrible curse in death, whatever black mark hung above their heads finally lost to oblivion. Their final struggle was not in vain however, as the delays they foisted on the Hive Fleet as it descended on what it assumed would be an easy meal allowed Battlefleet Gothic time to muster a devastating response and all but blunt the fleet's encroachment entirely. Whether the machinations of a cruel, malevolent god or the grand design of the Emperor himself, it seemed that all things worked out in the end.
Thanks for reading! The end bit there might seem a little confusing so I feel like I need to explain a little bit. It was entirely my intention to have the players see these latter events first hand. The way it played out in my mind was that they would take the base, there would be a small time-skip as they realized the weight of the victory they had won, and then there would be some strange happenings culminating in them having to defend the very same base they had just won from an endless stream of Tyranids, holding out as long as they could until they had all been killed and I could roll my Epilogue. I had everything planned out including lists of Tyranid stats and a vague idea of how I was going to organize the waves. The only stats available for Tyranids came from Deathwatch so I toned down their defences a bit while leaving their damage extreme enough to hurt Space Marines.
I only added the stupid warp generator into the base in the hope that when they realized there was no chance to hold their fortress from the onslaught of bugs they would try destroying it and release the fury of the Vortex Grenade into the swarm. I really did not expect the Psyker to fixate so heavily on it and convince the other players that if they didn't destroy it they would all be killed. I never told them it was not dangerous with my GM voice but I dropped several not-so-subtle hints through various In Character avenues to try and dissuade them from this course of action. Obviously it didn't work.
I really, really considered changing my plans, interrupting them or otherwise giving them an out to change the consequences they had dropped firmly upon themselves, but in the end decided to not interfere with their agency and allow them to lie in the graves they had so eagerly dug for themselves. The funniest part of all this was that I considered the fact that they might survive cursory exposure and allowed them to roll a die for scatter before they really knew what exactly it was that had happened, in order to determine where the Vortex went. The Medic's player rolled such that the Vortex beelined directly on top of them and killed them all instantly in a single round and that was that. Emelius was elsewhere on the base at the time but was assumed to have been killed by the rampaging rift before it dissolved. I offered them a retcon in case they wanted to play the Tyranid defence bit, but it was already getting late so we decided to let the chips lie where they fell.
In the end, we all had a good laugh about it. Despite the terrible curse that lingered over their regiment in the end it was free will and insubordination that killed the player characters, and it certainly made the game memorable. In fact the lot of them had so much fun they all agreed to be in the next game which ended up becoming Spirebound. I also sort of tentatively weave the events of all the games I run into a sort of unified personal canon, so when the Sector Commander showed up in Spirebound he was being commended for his resounding victory against the Tyranids that had showed up at the end here. There was even some small discussion about the Argus 123rd which the players used to belong to, which was a nice little touch.
As always thanks for reading. You can check out some of my other posts with the archive links in the sidebar there, mostly incoherent ramblings about Warhammer 40k RPGs and a few other storytimes. I am also part of a Podcast called Building Character where we fuck around and go through the process of making RPG characters step-by-step in various systems, if you are at all interested you can check us out on Soundcloud here.
Proverb of the day: A questioning mind is a vulnerable mind
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