[DH1e] The Damocles Contingency (RPG IC)

[Mazer Rackham]

GM: While everyone is pondering how to open this tin, I think Nicios can have his turn, it won't affect anything.

 

ROUND 4 CONTINUES:

 

The door jeers at your confusion - a rebuff by the mighty Mechanicum to those who would laugh at the 'nerds in robes', perhaps.

 

Nicios [ ]

[Lord_Ikka]

Nicios

 

Moving towards the last cluster of attackers he can see, Nicios calls on the Emperor to unleash His Fury on the mutant scum.

 

"Feel His Wrath! Turn away from the Inquisition and His Holy Servants!"

Spoiler

Half Action - Move, slightly closer to Green 6 mutants

Half Action - Manifest Psychic Power (Psychic Shriek), targets are Green 6 mutants

Threshold - 18

Roll - 1 + 4 + 7 + 7 + 5(WPB) + 1(Power Well) = 25

Overbleed (10 greater than threshold) - None

Result - All 6 mutants must take a Willpower test. A failure means that a target takes 5 levels of Fatigue damage (Nicios WPB is 5). No psychic phenomena (no 9s rolled).

 

[Mazer Rackham]

ROUND 4 CONTINUES:

 

Mutants WP:

D100: FAIL

5 x Fatigue exceeds TB, Mutants become Unconscious.

 

Whether it is the force of Nicios' command, the power of his words, or the sheer might of his psychic ability, the mob reel.

 

Sinking to their knees, keeling over totally faint, the twisted faces slacken and become utterly gormless, drooling even more than normal, if such a thing is possible, before faceplanting the hard surfaces of the walls and ground - minds literally blown.

 

The Arbites look around to see Nicios concentrating, flinching from his terrible demands, even though not directed at them. Their amazement only grows for one who can strike down criminals and evildoers with his mind and voice, both carrying the words of the Emperor!

 

One of them mutters under his breath. "His Will is Law, His Word is Law."

 

SECTOR CLEAR.

 

GM OOC: Posting can be done freely, but be aware we remain in Structured Time. One Full Action or Two Half-Actions permissible.

[Necronaut]

Scourge:

 

As he crushed the cowering mutant, a blinding explosion of light and electrical discharge struck him in turn, searing his retinas with the terrifying after-image of a skeletal figure seated upon a great throne, its eyeless sockets staring into and through him, judging him. He was plunged into darkness and he staggered backward from the backlash, swinging Hywelesbane wildly about him a few times before realising he was alone in the side passage and the sounds of battle had died down elsewhere. Regaining some of his composure, he cautiously took a few steps forwards while holding the great daemonhammer out in front of himself like some absurd walking stick until he made contact with a wall. Sheepishly he called out to the others, "My friends, I am blinded, smote by the spirit of Hywelesbane. Canst one of thee lend me thy hand? Reynard? Bardas? Anyone?"

Edited July 14, 2023 by Necronaut

[Trokair]

Bardas

Spoiler

Tech-Use on door controll

Int:39 + 10 (Tech-Use +10) – 30 (Very Hard):  19

D100: 39, Fail, 2 DoF

 

 

The light blast, whatever it had been, had originated from behind him, and now he could here Scourge call out.

 

+Have Faith, pray to the Omnissiah and he will guide you even in darkness.+ he called out over his shoulder.

 

Hopefully one of the others could go and assist if Scourge really needed physical aid, he had to concentrate on the task in front of him. He had spied universal connector ports, but for now he would try the manual method.

Edited July 15, 2023 by Trokair

[Mazer Rackham]

Bardas:

 

 

The console emits the seventh chime of refusal to your efforts. A rather unpleasant and somewhat rude sound.

 

It resets for your next attempt.

[Lysimachus]

Reynard:

 

"Be calm, Scourge. We seem to have driven them off for now. Your vision will clear in a moment or two. Pray, if you think it will help?"

 

Reynard looked back at where Bardas was working. Thus far, the system was rejecting the Adept's efforts. Maybe he could find another way?

 

"May I attempt something, friend Bardas?"

 

 He dropped to one knee beside the terminal, unsheathing one of his gleaming, mono-sharpened knives. With a quick jab and flick, he dug into the corner of a cover panel and levered it outwards, revealing a multitude of coloured wires beneath the screen. Retrieving his multikey from another pocket, Reynard started stripping wires back and attaching connectors, swift fingers deftly attempting to bypass the security lock entirely.

 

Falk paused in directing the Arbitrator teams to peer over Reynard's shoulder. He grunted.

 

"Careful. That looks like an anti-intrusion device. Wise to avoid it."

 

Reynard nodded, doing his best to work around the identified countermeasure. Bardas also hunkered down to look closer, clearly unimpressed with such unauthorised methods, but willing to assist for the good of the mission.

 

"...Innovative." His tone was deliberately noncommittal. "Attach that connector there. Then cut here. That should circumvent the passcode entry and reroute the door controls directly through the multikey."

 

Reynard followed the instructions and put his blade against the wire. He looked questioningly at the other two men, then took a deep breath.

 

"Here goes nothing."

 

Spoiler

Security Test: Ag50 +30(Multikey) +20(Assists from Falk and Bardas) -40(Difficulty) = target of 60, Roll: 31, 2DoS

 

OOC: Tried to include the Assists narratively, hope that ok with AT and Tro?

 

 

 

[Machine God]

Kerr Restal:

 

He listened to the affront felt by the Door. It had a mighty spirit, it was strong and people had shot at it multiple times.

 

 

He cartwheeled over to Bardas at the console.

 

"Scourge thou noblest Knight attend to us, follow the song of my voice" versed Kerr Restal.

 

"Bardas the door is strong and set in its ways. Scourge can help with the percussive rites to ease the cross-threads, knock back into proper alignments."

 

 

Scourge walked slowly and steadily to the door until Kerr Restal ordered him to stop.

 

"Scourge the door is stuck, it needs a hard knock or two. If you will permit I shall guide your arm to where the percussion should be applied" he guided Scourge's arm carrying the hammer to three places and uttered phrases for each one. 

 

"When I say these phrases you will strike the door!"

 

 

 

INT 33 +0 (Tech Use) -30 (Very Hard) +10 (Fate Point [Charmed: 10, Fate Point not used up]) = 13. Result: 05, Pass

 

 

 

 

"Noneek!"

 

CLANG!

 

"Rutook!"

 

CLANG!

 

"Hununga!"

 

CLANG!

 

 

 

[Mazer Rackham]

The Grim Portcullis:

 

The machinations of the swindler, aided by the lawman serve to pervert the defences of the console and activate the bypass to enable access to the functions therein.

 

The grand cogitator's screens light up with the fourth chime of friendship.

 

The door is les than impressed with you beating it. It creaks with a suitably disapproving groan.

 

Squelookle. CLUNK.

 

There follows the sound of more loose hatch covers falling, or being slapped open by eager, angry, hungry pit dwellers.

 

EDIT: GM: Just to be clear - the choice is open the door or beat it down, as once you deform it, it ain't opening other than with a lump hammer.

 

 

Edited July 14, 2023 by Mazer Rackham
Bash and dash

[Mazer Rackham]

GM: Just as a note, I apologise for running us forward as the pacing is off, but hopefully we can make up for that with the BBEG confrontation. We need to get this done, and you're almost there. Further, if anyone didn't get a chance to move/heal/chat from Round 4, go ahead and incorporate your previous actions into your Round 5 posts.

 

ROUND 4 ENDS.

 

ROUND 5 BEGINS.

 

+Initiative Order+

Spoiler

Restal: 16

Scourge: 14

Bardas: 13

Reynard: 12

Nicios: 11

Mutant Horde: 11 (Player has Priority)

Arbites Squads: 8

Falk: 7

 

MAP:

Spoiler

 

Restal [ ]

 

Edited July 14, 2023 by Mazer Rackham

[Machine God]

Kerr Restal:

 

More mutants were reported by the Arbites squad behind him.

 

He turned around from facing the door walked to the left edge of the Arbites squad and shot at the horde of mutants slithering down the corridor towards them.

 

Presented with a large target he only landed one satisfactory hit.

 

 

 

(Full Action) 2xSAB Vs Black 6. Las-Carbine: 1D10 +3 +2 (Mighty Shot) Pen 0

BS 40 +10 (Close Range) -10 (Two-Weapon Fighting + Ambidextrous) = 40. Result: 65, Fail 2DoF


BS 40 +10 (Close Range) -10 (Two-Weapon Fighting + Ambidextrous) = 40. Result: 28, Pass 1DoS

#1. 3 +3 +2 = 8 Damage.

 

 

 

 

 

[Mazer Rackham]

ROUND 5 CONTINUES

 

The Iron Portcullis:

 

The group of scrags has a hole torn open when one of their number is ruthlessly shot down.

 

Scourge [ ]

 

Edited July 15, 2023 by Mazer Rackham

[A.T.]

Falk

 

Falk raised his shield against the flash, the precautions he and Restal had taken reduced the blindness to a monochromatic glare but he doubted others were so fortunate.

 

Keeping the shield high to protect those at the controls he called out to the other units, "sound off, status"

 

His words half lost as Scourge struck at the door, "strike low and with care lest it never open again"

[Mazer Rackham]

Falk:

 

In between the thumps, bumps and gunshots, comes the reply to your query.

 

"Team 1 secure and ready, Magistrate!"

 

"Team 2, holding, sir."

 

"Team 3, minor disruption, sir. Two men partially blinded. The rest, duty effective."

 

"Team 4, one man compromised, washing his eyes now, Magistrate."

[Necronaut]

Placeholder

 

Scourge moves to stand near Arbites squad 2 to act as a physical block to any incoming mutants despite being blind. 

[Mazer Rackham]

The Iron Portcullis:

 

Bardas:

 

The ministrations of your comrades get you in, however, there is a latticework of extra security ciphers here. Each bears the personal monogram of a senior Mechanicum seer. The electronic signature is that of the Human half of the Opus, overlaid upon a pickaxe running left to right. The similarity to the clan symbol of the Rockheads is immediately striking, Further, it becomes apparent the monogram belongs to Executor Holle.

 

Each cipher is a proof mark, locking down the system in detail.

 

Options Menu (Each has an Action Cost):

• Activate Lights (Challenging +0) Tech Use Test: Half
• Engage Causeway Interlock Doors (One door per Test) (Difficult -10) Tech Use Test: Half
• Open the Portcullis (Hard -20) Tech Use Test: Full
• Initiate Defence Matrix (Very Hard -30) Tech Use Test: Full

GM Notes: The Interlock doors are located in the throats of the ancillary tunnels. If you choose this option, roll 1D3.

1. Lower Left Tunnel
2. Lower Right Tunnel
3. Upper Tunnel 

Bardas [ ]

[Trokair]

Bardas

 

For a moment his mind wondered as he watched the effects of the others physical subversion of the control panel play out on the cogitator screen. Had the Rockheads known all along, or had Holle risen from their rank and adapted the clan symbol as his emblem within the conclave? If there was something relevant here he did not see it immediately.

 

While lights might help against the lurking rabble it could also aid them.

 

Closing lesser doors would only trap them more, for no doubt the rabble would know how to circumvent them amongst the many tunnels. No the path had to be forward.

 

Spoiler

Tech-Use – Open Sesame

Int:39 + 10 (Tech-Use +10) – 20 (Hard):  29

D100: 24, Pass, 0 DoS

 

[Mazer Rackham]

++ STRUCTURED TIME ENDS ++

++ NARRATIVE TIME BEGINS ++

 

The Iron Porcullis:

 

Bardas proves himself equal to the task. A series of impossibly heavy ratchets and locking gears grind, clunk and bang into recesses and open positions. The door begins to shudder with the mighty weight of aeons long passed at the foot of this goliath gravestone hive. Rumbling causes the entire edifice to shudder, scads of rust and dirt sloughing off the walls, door and ceiling.

 

The terrible judder is a shallow echo of the soul-swallowing noise and tremors of a full hive-quake, but even so, it has a great effect.

 

The scrags suddenly pause, throwing their hands up in the air, before dropping to the ground. Whispered feral cant comes from each of the mobs, and weapons vanish into robes before the horrid mutants flee on hands and knees, not daring to look up. Panic and fear saturates the air with sweat and foul soil, before they cart away as many as have swooned in fright. Possibly to eat them later.

 

The causeway is cleared in a minute of this, as the doors grind slowly open, an inch of pale crimson light a lance blade spilling on the ground, before slowly widening to a second, painful inch. The rumbling continues for almost half an hour before a gap twelve inches wide allows you to see the sheer girth of each door leaf - a solid eight feet of plasteel laminated adamantium. Great locking bars a foot thick slowly recede into this monstrous bulkhead.

 

A full hour allows 24 inches of passage, before the colossal mechanism stops dead. There is a grinding sound, like boulders smashing together, and the door stops.

 

Beyond, there is a armoured casement, some 30 metres squared. In the centre, there is another lift platform. Smaller, and lighter, it is meant for inspection only, unable to take many people. Around the room are giant vents, resembling an array of organ pipes. This then, is the thermal overflow vent for the Nucleonic Stacks and Gyroscopic Mantle, upon which the whole hive balances and is kept upright. Deep with the stacks is the heart of the kanker.

 

It will be the last stop.

 

The Arbites squad leaders approach Falk.

 

"Sir, might be best if we hold here. If the door is jammed..." the Senior Arbitrator says.

[Trokair]

Bardas

 

As the Porcullis slowly ground open, at a rate uncomfortably slow, Bardas retuned the Asupex. Thermal sensors were unlikely to return anything useful or give distinct readings inside. Instead he considered the options, electro-magnetic would be equally swamped by signal output from the reactors themselves. Sonic echolocation perhaps, it would alert them to movement even at a distance.

 

As the door ground to a hold, he looked at his companions.

 

+So then, any volunteers?”

[A.T.]

Falk

 

Nodding in agreement, "set up trip flares in the adjacent tunnels, we will send the lift back if we can".

 

Rolling a flare through into the next room Falk knelt down placing his shield against the left bulkhead and made best speed that he could through the awkward space, the landscape becoming increasingly... alien. So much that the hive relied on to exist left here unguarded and unknown with only the faith in the works of its founders that it would endure the millennia.

[Mazer Rackham]

The Vestibule of Excision:

 

Falk:

 

"Understood, sir." The senior Arbitrator salutes, and commences carrying out your orders, the men hurrying to set up a perimeter of shields, a rudimentary first aid station, and begin collecting their canteens and ammunition into ready piles.

 

Leaving their industry behind, and shuffling through, you emerge into the otherworldly chamber. Lit in scarlet, the light pours from several small bulbs, but mostly from thermal exchangers towering in shielded, wrapped coils above you - towering into a vertiginous shaft so long, there is no daylight to be seen. The temperature is on the cool side of comfortable, with gently hissing coolant pipes and flutes whispering a continual mist at ankle height, in turn, blown around the mammoth chamber by the draught.

 

This is one of four main, emergency thermal overflows in the hive, built to allow the escape of dangerous build-up in the nucleonic core. The armoured door is roughly the same thickness of the buttressed walls, but there is no mistaking you are in a giant engine exhaust. The walls, thankfully are not scarred, but there are shiny, glassy patches where in the centuries past, the plascrete underwent high-temperature exchange. Likewise, plasteel vent flanges each as broad as a man is tall, exhibit the odd blonde, and blue-black heat singeing.

 

As you pass the threshold, a ring of white bulkheads illuminates, dispelling the arterial gloom. The chamber is indeed empty, but as you surmised, where servitors and enginseers may have once linked into tending alcoves, these are bare, empty.

 

In the middle of the room, as glimpsed before, is an elevator platform. The sound of a motor reaches a peak whine, as the platform splits open, and the inspection lift car - a protective caged affair some 3 x 3 metres in the beam, emerges swiftly, and locks into place. The corrugated, accordion-like trellis opens to admit passengers. You can see through the grille floor of the lift , the strange cyan hue of the massive stacks below. It becomes apparent, that the lift was sent up when the doors were opened. Such is the perfection of the Mechanicum.

 

[Lysimachus]

Reynard:

 

Reynard frowned. Four squads of fully equipped Arbites to hold a massively well-armoured position only two feet wide? He was pretty sure a Hive nana armed with a broom could manage the job! Still, the elevator only had space to take a few of their number downwards. Probably just about enough room for the six Acolytes, and Reynard couldn't see that a single Arbitrator would be more useful than any one of his colleagues?

 

 

 

 

Not that he wouldn't happily give up his own spot on the lift if one of the lawmen said they wanted it…

 

Edited July 16, 2023 by Lysimachus

[Necronaut]

Scourge:

 

Eventually Scourge's sight returned to him, gray contours emerging from the murk to take on the shapes of his comrades, his subvocal litanies of repentance to the God-Emperor having seemingly been acknowledged. He had stood watch, as best he could, alongside the other arbites, waiting and listening intently for a final push by the massed horde of mutants to overwhelm and devour them while the others laboured to unlock the great and immovable portal. But the tide of subhumans never came. With a deafening grunt of grime-encrusted steel and a sudden rush of hot, trapped air, the immense slab rose and the mutants fled in terror as the great red-tinged maw yawned open.

 

Falk was the first into the breach and the rest soon followed with Scourge taking up a rear-guard position. He had to crawl on his belly to fit through the gap, pushing his boltgun and Hywelesbane ahead of him due to the bulk of his armour and power pack, and the image of a knight crawling into the jaws of a terrible serpent was conjured into being by his imagination.

 

Eventually he was through and was greeted by an incomprehensible array of techno-arcana at whose purpose he could only guess at in bewilderment.

 

I am a stranger in a strange land… 

 

He sheathed Hywelesbane once again and gripped his boltgun tightly.

 

The lair of the beast was just beneath their feet. They were like Herakleion at the mouth of the Nemean lion's den, but were they up to the task of slaying an immortal daemon?

 

"The gates of hell swing wide for us, noble friends. It has been an honour. Let us be the instruments of God's Will; let our sacrifice this day echo down into the annals of history, that the sons and daughters of Damocles onward through the ages will know that God's Hand reached out from Holy Terra and smote the beast in its den!" 

[Mazer Rackham]

The Vestibule of Excision:

 

GM OOC: I'll let the other guys have a quick burble about the room, and then move you all on.

 

Nicios ONLY:

Spoiler

Even as Scourge's words echo in the chamber, ringing off the metal and stone, a deep sense of wrongness, of delirium wafts up the access lift shaft. Invisible but unyielding, it seeps out into the room with the cooling mist.

 

The sour taste lingers in your mind, before sucking away from the shores of your psyche only to tumble and twist down the drain of the lift shaft.

 

[Machine God]

Mellon

 

Kerr Restal:

 

The portal had finally opened under the ministrations of Bardas, The Weasel and Falk. A gap of two feet, wide enough to pass through.

 

So he followed through the massive doorway.

 

The way was open.

 

The watchers in the walkways had been dealt with. Now it was another lift-shaft.

 

 

Got to get up and away from this gravity!