Right, I'm running Dark Heresy with a group who can do social stuff, but mostly prefer to just do things directly and messily. So I thought why not make an adventure based around space westerns, fluff and such be damned. Was wondering if anyone could help me tie some of it together. I'm thinking of having them investigate a bunch of bandit attacks that involve weaponry way more complex then is usual on the planet, and eventually have it tied to some sort of cult or the likes.
Tl;dr OP needs a little help cobbling together an adventure
>>46008438
The villains are Tau
>>46008438
Firefly?
Players are the crew of the serenity, on the run from mainstream imperial authority (for contrived plot reasons) and they fight against an overt khornate cult (reavers) and have monster-of-the-week subplots against stuff like eldar, tau, rogue planetary governors etc on the fringe of imperial space
Even just straight adapting the show/cast
-Mal is your interrogator/inquisitor who doesn't play by imperial rules and has a sense of decency and fairness
-Wash is obviously your pilot
-Kaley is a slightly heretical mechanicus adept
-River is an Alpha-plus unstable psyker who the inquisition isafter for her power
-Jane is a brutal combat adept and Zoe is an all-rounder adept who is better on her feet
-Simon is a hospitaller or Magos Biologis
-Shepard is an imperial priest
Obviously have the players come up with their own characters and shit, but I would make it firefly with a thin enough veneer that the players wont notice right away
>>46008889
>>46009193
Right, this gave me an idea.
Bait and switch plot.
Tau secretly supplying a chaos cult.
After a while of checking the cult and eventually wiping them out, either have Tau connection revealed or if the cult cause enough damage because players took too long have a Tau advance force show up.
Would that work?
>>46009367
Since Tau don't into chaos without Ethereal guidance it could work with an isolated group of them yeah
>>46009548
Hmm. How large should the force be? Large enough for the team to fight with some odd NPCs helping (got a squad of players) or make it a point to summon help?
>>46009548
Prolly a dumb question in hindsight, but I'm relatively new at the whole dm thing, and I'm never sure how much to throw at the group since they've been waltzing though combat encounters thus far (usually having them fight a squad or two)
>>46009598
Have them been enough to go it alone right until the very end. Westerns tend to run on themes of being outside the law, isolation, and self-reliance.
Having the "cavalry come" right at the end is also huge western trope, in this case the cavalry could be a full-fledged inquisitor with Guard/Space Marine support right during the big battle to eradicate the Cult base/Tau baseWestern is one of my favorite film genres man i wish I could play in this now
>>46009680
Sounds like a good plan.
Thanks again for the help, appreciate it immensely. Will post once it has been run and tell how it went.
Also prolly helps the setting that their Inquisitor is pretty much Clint Eastwood.
>>46009745
>Wanting to play in anon's campaign intensifies
I don't have much experience with Dark Heresy unfortunately. Im a 40k lorefag from when i played the actual game, but my RPG knowledge is mostly limited to 3.5, Pathfinder and Shadowrun.
From DMing different systems don't have straight fights. Have them be surprised, use terrain and stuff to put them at a disadvantage, have a diplomacy go bad and suddenly they're surrounded etc.
players have fun when they barely scrape through on the skin of their teeth and intense teamwork, but this is really difficult to do, I'm still not great at it personally
>>46009902
We're a relatively fresh group as well although a few of us know a bit of the lore, we offhand did Call of Cthulhu but after this past Christmas when I came back from vacation I saw the Dark Heresy 2E rulebook in books a million and jumped on it. Been good times so far. One of my players has a hilarious tendency to hit people in the legs with his hammer. Never fails.
>>46008438
Have it be the secret work of the primarch of the II chapter, which was purged from all imperial records. He is trying to surplant the emperor and remove his corpse from the throne. For the good of humanity of course, which requires several billion billions uprisings.
I ran a variation of this for my Inquisitor-group. They had found clues that prisoners where disappearing from a prison planet. Usually not a big problem, but the yearly quotas of penal troopers where being threatened. The planet in question was a "dump the prisoners with low level tech (muskets and stuff) and let them fend for themselves until needed"-colony thing.
The Inquisitor and assistants went undercover as prisoners and finally, through some detective work, traced the disappearances to a Dark Eldar Cabal kidnapping prisoners and taken them into the webways. Ended in a climactic battle and a collapsing webway portal.
