DH1E - Help needed for combat heavy mini-campaign arc ideas.
Hello fellow GMs and players. I'm looking to pick your collective brains for ideas and inspiration for the next stage of my campaign.
To set the scene:
The acolytes have just finished an investigation into Noble shenanigans that could lead to a potential mutant uprising on a planet. They have ended their investigation feeling like they have solved it (they haven't but they've slowed it considerably) and are on their way back to check on their inquisitor who has been badly injured in a previous mission.
The players have expressed an interest in something more combat heavy for their next campaign arc as the last one was very intrigue and investigation heavy. Which is fair enough IMHO. As a lovely GM I'm happy to have them do something a bit more violent where the enemy's are more obvious than they have been up till now. Even if it's just to let them enjoy the weapons they've collected etc for a little bit.
I'm looking for ideas around what scrapes they could get into. The party is reasonably strong so standard cultists no longer really pose a danger and they are capable of taking down minor daemons with teamwork.
Current ideas I'm toying with:
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Intra-Inquisitorial shenanigans - (nicking the basis of this idea from Rusty Quill Gaming's recent New Year special.) The Inquisitor having somewhat recovered from his injuries has been ordered by the Inquisitor Lords to hand over his evidence regarding trafficking of xenos weapons to another Inquisitor as he is Ordo Hereticus and the Inquisitor from the Ordo Xenos would be better placed to continue the investigation. The Inquisitor has his suspicions that the other Inquisitor is part of a radical faction and would use these filthy xenos weapons themselves if they found them. So he wants the acolytes to intercept the exchange and make it look like the work of enemies of the Imperium. Their Inquisitor is happy to sacrifice two of his other acolytes to make this look authentic. The players are to intercept the information as the hand over is occurring and kill everyone present leaving no witnesses. They have to make it look like the act was carried out by non-Imperial forces.
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Stop the carnage - The Inquisitor's right hand man is an expert Theomancer and he has divined that something terrible will happen soon - The Pilgrims of Hayte are planning to detonate a stadium during the festival of the Emperor's Ascension. The Acolytes are on the shrine world as part of their R&R and are the only Inquisitorial forces planetside in position to counter the threat before it can be realised. They are to go below the stadium with all haste and stop the Cultists scheme (the Inquisitor doesn't know it's a bomb), they will need to kill their way through the cultists to find and disarm the bomb. As the cultists were going to use the deaths of so many civillians to fuel a ritual to summon Khornate daemons, every 8 cultists the players kill will summon a Khornate daemon. The idea is that they should hopefully figure this out and use non-lethal methods of taking down the cultists or find a disrupt the ritual that is doing this so they can kill with impunity. Failing that they will have to fight their way through a shed load of cultists and daemons.
Posted Feb 28, 2017, 2:58 PM UTC
These sound awesome. The first would require a lot of planning on the acolytes part, to make it look truly like a non Imperium force did it. Careful coordination is a pain but oh so rewarding.
The second, it's certainly more combat and I like that it would require some discretion in their methods otherwise khorne. I'd suggest that as more cultists die not only do more deamons be spawned but they also be of higher quality. I've gotten higher level acolytes who can easily mow through a lesser deamon. Really punish them for the guns blazing approach.
I like the former because it gives the not so combat heavy characters a chance to shine with coming up with the plan and co-ordinating etc while still letting the combat guys have their moment of carnage.
I like the idea that the daemons get progressively better.
Perhaps something like:
8 - Cultist becomes a chaos spawn.
16 - Cultist becomes a khornate daemonhost
24 - Fleshhound appears
32 - BloodLetter appears.
40 - BloodLetter on Juggernaught appears
48 - Blood Letter and 2 Fleshhounds appear.
56 - BloodLetter on Juggernaught and 2 fleshhounds appear.
64 - Herald of Khorne
72 - Herald of Khorne on Juggernaught
80 - Bloodthirster.
Hopefully by the first bloodletter they will have noticed a pattern. If they let a daemon escape from below the stadium they'll start chewing through the local populace and speeding up the summoning. I was thinking of limiting it to 40 cultists split across the lower levels of the stadium. So in order to hit 80 they either need to die themselves, let a daemon get loose amongst the civvies or bring NPC support who then get killed.
Could give little hooks for the 'Support' characters in with the second, perhaps a potential contact that has some beef, or something they want from the stadium. So that contact and his mates help smooth over an otherwise awkward obsticle, adds a secondary objective for the PC's and if all else fails they're adding another 5ish people to the pile of blood and skulls.
Second is the one I've gone for at the moment. One of the PCs dumped a load of experience into an arms dealer contact a long time ago so I tied that in as the Arms dealer supplied the bad guys with the explosives. So once they get a heads up something bad is going to happen the arms dealer drops by with a "problem" as one of his subordinates sold a shed load of explosives to a mine owner and when they went to find him to do some further business they couldn't find any trace of him. The arms dealer doesn't want to be accused of being a heretic and become a target of the Inquisition so has fessed up to the acolytes and pulled some strings to get some enforcers on side to back them up.
PCs are just about to storm the stadium. Well the storming has begun, they've killed 2 guards on the perimeter and forced an entry. The final frame of the session was gun slinger barging through a side door into the main underground area, pistols in hand, overcoat billowing out behind him with his cybermastiff hot on his heels. Meanwhile the rest of the party is peering through the doorway with expressions of horror on their faces.