Now corrections for last adventure. Private First Class Dwayne HOLT is our heavy weapons man, and shares a surname with the sector’s Lord General. The Commissar is STERN. I remembered the guy shared a surname with someone important, I forgot who though. Kind of a huge fuckup for me as a reliable storyteller. He always tries to pass himself off as being within a few times removed of Stern himself though. And I, Sergeant Quinnus, Corporal Cylon Mir, and Private First Class Ivan make up the rest of their crack necron fighting team.

When we picked up the session, Stern and I returned via shuttle, and gleaned what few useful snippets of information we could get from the Inquisitorial Aide, before briefing our men on the mission to come. We set out shortly after. We deployed by Valkyrie to a small force keeping picket around the facility, which we had been informed was an ore refinery of some kind. Our attaché, an unarmed initiate Enginseer, would allow us to navigate the facility better, as well as serving as our vox uplink to command. Those of us with helmets (Mir, Holt and Ivan) were issued Aliens-esque helmet cams which would feed back to command and control via that uplink. We were, thankfully, all issued comm beads. Our task was to gather as much information about the necron presence as possible, and if presented with an opportunity to do so, disrupt their operations.

A brief talk with the sergeant in charge of the picket forces informed us our operating assumptions were indeed correct. It had been a week without contact with the battalions sent inside, but whilst it was plausible they might still be alive, none of them had made it out, or made vox contact in that time.

As we walked through the facility, I took care to watch corners and keep the Techpriest at the center of the formation. Eventually, our light from the outside faded. The refinery didn’t have a lick of power, internal lighting was completely non-functional. We switched to torches. They were a good sort, what you’d expect for Stormtroopers if they somehow lacked their NVGs (Which we did): Illuminating out to about 40m, we scanned the area of the model corridors using a flame template.

Eventually, we heard something. Sobbing. A sweep of our torches in that direction led us to a group of ten guardsmen, from the first incursion, evidently. Identifying ourselves to them, we immediately set about organizing them. Amongst these people was our joining PC, albeit his meltagun, whilst it would have been fantastic against xenos scum, started empty, and we never found any ammo for it during the mission. “Is that the way out?” said one guardsman, pointing to the way we came. “…No.” replied Stern. I elaborated that we had been infiltrating the facility for some time. If they would assist us with our mission, we’d all be home that little bit sooner.

Stern, taking the literalist view of the Imperial Guardsman’s Uplifting Primer, namely that crying is a sign of possible daemonic possession, immediately pulled the sobbing guardsman to his feet, to inspect his eyes for the telltale glow. Instead, he simply saw the guardsman had tear-marks carved through the dirt and sweat covering his face: He had been crying for a long time. “We’ve been here, fighting, for weeks. Some of us go off alone to make it outside, but we can hear them… as they get killed. Haven’t we done enough for the Emperor? Can’t we just leave?”. Well, to be honest, this was probably about as bad as possession, to a Commissar. In the interest of morale improvement, he was given the Emperor’s rest. "If you will not serve in combat you will serve on the firing line".

Roused by such *inspiring* actions, the group began readying itself to move out with us. They were honestly kind of reliant on us given we were the only source of continuous light that they had had in quite a few days. In spite of this, some of us heard a scuttling noise moving away from us. Another guardsman had decided to make a break for it, making for the path we took here. The Commissar’s field execution missed, and the lucky man, given a new lease on life, made it off into the side corridor we came from. About 30 seconds later, we heard terrible fleshrending noises and screaming. This did not overly concern us, but it did at least corroborate the stories the guardsmen had told us: travelling the facility outside a group was suicide.

We moved up the corridor slightly, and the building shook, the ceiling partially collapsing on us. No major damages, save for all the torches bar Ivan’s and Stern’s. An inconvenience, but not an outright threat to mission success. We found something of an anomaly only 20m or so down: A corridor splitting off from ours with… an architecture that was anything but Imperial. It had smooth, squared off walls of anomalous metal. It was simply *there*. The techpriest confirmed my suspicion when I inquired, namely that it was not in the original schematic of the facility layout. He also confirmed the energy signature that we were to investigate lay in that direction, and it was unlikely the facilities own corridors could take us there.

After a bit of work creating our formation, we advanced through the corridor. It was narrow, and zigzagged slightly at exact 45 degree angles, as if we were threading our way between a set of vast metal jaws. We could only pass two men abreast, and as such I was very concerned about what would happen if we were ambushed here. Stern and I led from the front, and Ivan, with the other torch, lit up for the rear guard.

Contrary to my expectations, we made it into the open chamber on the other side unscathed. When I say open, it was still probably only about 20m wide, small by 40k standards. This was in turn a much larger corridor stretching on ahead. We smelt rotting flesh. About 30m ahead there was an intersection with another corridor. Emperor above, Sarge hates corners. We mustered up and reformed before rushing around. We were greeted with a grisly sight: namely the bodies of the men who had come before us. They were so diced as to be indistinguishable, and their equipment seemed simply gone.

Mir had a go at identifying cause of death, but well, how could you choose just one? I decided there was nothing but morale loss to be had from tarrying here. I called for us all to move up. And that was when it all went to shit.

>>18921675
where's your pic from?

rolled 36 = 36

>>18921675

Hell yeah, Alpha Team is back!

Out of each pile of bodies, a dark, quick shape lashed out and pulled a struggling, screaming guardsman each off into these side corridors and back into the bodies. We immediately went on high alert, and yet this did not seem to be the opening salvo of some unified attack. The piles stopped moving, slightly more blood than before seeping out of them, as the struggling of the victims ceased. Ivan tossed a frag into one pile, scattering the debris, but revealing no clues.

I addressed the men. “Our enemy hides in filth! Destroy their unclean and flimsy sanctuaries!”. This was followed by a significant amount of lasfire and grenades from our group hitting the mass of dead flesh. Whilst it didn’t directly dislodge the dreaded foe, they chose to reveal themselves following this. Creatures similar to the necrons we’d encountered before: The bipedal model, but with the claws of the larger, snakelike one, rose forth, draped in human flesh, to assail us.

Sarge probably breathed a sigh of relief at this stage because if there’s one thing he’d learnt, it’s that necron close combat weapons are nothing to be feared, and the biped chassis is not very resilient. This was confirmed, as the flayed ones, charging into melee, missed their attacks. He took a plasma pistol shot at the nearest one to him after moving back towards it. Hit head. Righteous fury. Confirm. Righteous fury.

rolled 5 = 5

>>18921782

Your GM's tear's are delicious.

This shot evaporated enough of the head that it was attached by a bare sliver, shortly before a rather enthusiastic NPC guardsman that the flayed one had moved into CQC with took out his combat knife and righteous furied twice with it, cutting the flayed one into some kind of Japanese fish based dish with the superior manufacture of Imperial steel.

I’m not fucking kidding, any effective means of roleplaying our characters by this point involved believing that necrons are made out of an incredibly fragile alloy, the natural result of the feeble xenos mind. Their only invention of any note with respect to the Imperial standard was gauss flayers from our perspective, a weapon which suffered from chronic inaccuracy despite its brutal effectiveness.

I guess it is worth mentioning that Fear (2) rolls were called for, but the fact that I was providing Iron Discipline meant that where the Guardsmen might have had WP30, their likelyhood of actually passing a fear test was more comparable to someone with WP55. Furthermore, given the Emperor protects, we rolled pretty well: Another new PC, a guardsman built as a scout, freaked out. Dwayne began vomiting. Only one NPC guardsmen freaked, and well, I’ll talk more about that later.

Meanwhile, Ivan, who had already been keeping an eye on one pile of bodies, pegged the other Flayed one with a krak, blowing out most of its torso, but, fragile as necrons are, they don’t give up easily, and Commissar Stern charged into close combat with it to keep it off the rest of the troops.

It occurred to me via tactics that we should move the body of our troops further back down, or up the corridor to prevent being trapped by these flayed ones, but ultimately, they didn’t seem that much of a threat. I decided to get some firsthand experience on whether downed necrons could be finished off, discharging my plasma pistol into the downed flayed one from a short distance away. It immediately phased out. This was looking promising, the Necrons could indeed be brought low with just a few simple steps. (Actually it just severely failed its phase out/resurrection roll).

Stern managed to down his Flayed one as well. A bolt round or two at point blank was enough to finish it after the krak it took shortly before. It was at this point that gauss fire lanced down the corridor from where we entered, inaccurately burning its way across the walls around us. It hit no one, but that shit is fucking dangerous, I knew that firsthand. And now we knew they’d boxed us in. I was torn between trying a tactical retreat to make sure the warriors wouldn’t tear us apart as we advanced, or to advance further into the facility and get away from them entirely. Ultimately my indecision didn’t cost us that much, thankfully.

I really wish you'd type the whole thing out ahead of time, THEN post. I hate waiting,

rolled 66 = 66

>>18922054

Oh hush. OP is returning to us with A-Team Storytiem.

Ivan moved back to bring some torchlight onto the warriors firing at us. The flayed one that Stern had downed responded to his friendly bolt pistol shot by coming back. Fortunately for Stern, the WS70 lightning attack that Flayed ones repeatedly missed him. The next turn, the first hit was parried by his power blade, and we discovered possibly the only good thing about necron claws as a weapon: they aren’t destroyed by power fields. The second hit rolled minimum damage against Stern, resulting in him taking a mere 2 damage from a 2d10+5 weapon. The third attack missed, and it was cut down by Stern once more.

Ivan was having a hell of a time: He sent the first necron warrior coming down the narrow corridor back to its eternal slumber with a righteous furied krak grenade. And then another marched over the body of that one. Ivan took a chunk out of it with a krak, but it stayed moving. Then another came into the torchlight after it. Our mass of mook guardsmen was not in much condition to help. An NPC who had started running for the exit earlier due to fear took the worst hit from a gauss flayer we’ve ever seen, being flayed into a pile of dust in one blast.

I was confronted by another flayed one pulling itself out of the pile of bodies I was watching. It immediately charged the fucking HERO OF THE IMPERIUM who killed the last one with a mere combat knife earlier. My choice to shoot it with a plasma pistol provoked its attention more though, which was good because men like the NPC who would be known as Guardsman Jack are hard to find. It pulled out of melee with him for me. Big mistake. Despite its 20 armor, Jack RFed again to deal it a wound with his mono-knife on the attack of opportunity. And then charged it, finishing the fuck off. Our conclusion is that this man is some kind of samurai master who uses previously unknown features of the combat knife STC to his advantage. Or something. Fuck. I phased out its remains with my plasma pistol.

Now luckily for Ivan, the warriors didn’t just have eyes for him. They also had a few other notable targets in mind, those who had made life hard for their friends. After turns of missing everyone, one of them decided to SHOOT OFF MY FUCKING HAND. This was, by most metrics, probably a good move on their part. I mean there was very little stat effect from that autocrit, and I still had plenty of wounds afterwards, but the fact that I failed the T test and permanently lost my plasma pistol hand was D:

Stern took a hit as well: The autocrit and crit from damage that he took were both -1, and as such he was only slightly inconvienced. Of the further fire that would be directed at him before we pulled out, the GM finally rolled an 06 to hit him, immediately followed by Stern dodging, despite having Agility 24 and no dodge proficiency.

Also, >>18922054 , I did type out the first part ahead, if you look at timestamps. But it seems artificial to post it all at once. And I keep getting impeded by field too long errors which increases the time it takes me between posts.

I pulled back to have Mir attend to my hand at this point. It bears mentioning that Mir had been busy. In this time he’d gotten Dwayne back in action, the heavy bolter heavily aiding Ivan’s efforts in keeping the warriors down, and the many other small medical attendances he’d rendered improved our survivability as a unit.

Ultimately there was… not much the man could do. I now had to deal with being short of my left hand. OOC, we discussed the Yarrick solution. I would have been all for this, but we didn’t manage to prevent phase out of any Necrons that session. I called for us to advance towards the signal, and we did, Gauss fire pinging off the corridors behind us as it receded into the distance. Mir and I threw frags to cover our retreat, which did actually claim a few victims due to damage rolls like 9, 8, 9 (Remember we had houseruled grenade damage).

We reached… our objective? Who knows. An immense, open space. It had a series of monolithic pillars spaced in pairs across the center of it. Between each pair ran a green field of energy. We came just in time to see a large machine that we recognised as a Destroyer OOC move into one such field and disappear. Probably their boss running from us. I asked the Techpriest if this was the origin of the signal. He was lost in a mere reverie, and began wandering forward muttering about the beauty of the technology. Ohhhh shit. And to make things worse, Stern handed Guardsman Jack a spare chainsword, psyched him into a frenzy, and charged into the energy field after the Destroyer.

From my perspective, they might as well have been incinerated on contact.

>>18922065
I love these stories, I just have to be other places soon!
>>18922168
>But it seems artificial to post it all at once.
I don't mind!

I moved our forces up, trying to keep pace with the tech priest. He began reaching a hand, gingerly towards the field. I asked him if he was sure it was safe. The tech priest made no response, disappearing instantly with a flash the second his fingertip contacted the field. I cursed the way only a Sergeant of the Imperial Guard can. I commanded my forces to spread out and defend the position, we’d await their return. Dwayne, for some reason, decided to sneak past me and disappeared into the field. I swore harder. We were unable to find anything of note in the room aside from the (several, mind you) monolith fields.

We held for a minute. No sign of any of them coming back. We held another minute, at which point warriors started advancing into the room under a blanket of gauss fire from the way we came. This gauss fire was some of the most effective yet: A beam burned across Ivans face, blinding him in one eye, and knocking him out. Mir was wounded by another beam. As for Mr. No Melta, well, he’d actually had his leg crippled by gauss fire in the previous battle, so he might as well have been hit.

“…Fine. Stern had the right of it! Fall back into the portal!”. I took special care to refer to it as a portal and not a bugzapper or incinerator. The few able bodied guard remaining dived in. I had nothing protecting me but the poor marksmanship of the Necrons as I pulled the stunned Mir to the portal and tossed him through, followed by the unconscious Ivan, and myself.

Also, there's no need to be silent. Its not like this will use up the fucking post limit of the thread.

When we emerged, Stern and everyone except the Tech priest was there. “Where is the Enginseer?” I inquired. “I sent him back through.”. “And yet there was no sign of him on our end. Clearly it offers no escape.”. At the suggestion of the recovered Mir, while tending to Ivan and the others, we took a defensive position in case they followed us through, but they seemed to have no such intention.

Looking around we were in similar, but different corridors. After we were ready, it was time to move. We began to have an itching feeling these demolition packs we’d been handed might be our only way to serve the god emperor. We set up one against the pylon pair we came through, and ran for it. Eventually, in our travels through yet more maze-like corridors, we came upon a disheartening sight. A window. And what was outside? The void of space.


Also, if the above is the case, me prewriting all of this would not have helped you at all.

>>18922310
Enjoying the hell out of your story time, but don't have anything to comment on aside from that.

>>18922344

Same here.


Also, my face when OH SHIT SPACE

rolled 7 = 7

>>18922336

Did Guardsman Jack survive??

So. Somehow we were now on a Necron ship, and our only rational means of returning the way we came didn’t work *before* we destroyed it. But this is no time to give up hope. Just before deciding to enter the portal, I had reached a conclusion: The only way to survive Saturday morning Heresy was to play to the tropes. Sure, this meant no splitting up, but if we figured out where the hangar was, and destroyed the ship’s generator, we could definitely escape.

This much was clear to me now. After all, my rationale for the portal was that clearly, in a Saturday morning cartoon, no environmental effect like that would instantly kill main characters. It HAD to be a portal. My mind was now fully adapted. I had to hedge on the assumption that we had managed to trivialize the campaign enough that cartoon rules applied.

We found, after some more walking, what might be a generator room. Vast columns wreathed in green energy came from further down than we could see with the ships dim lighting, and discharged into a focal point high above us. Stern was all in favour of blowing them up there and then, but I convinced him we should investigate the ship further before that. At the other end of the 400m long engine room, the exit corridor branched left and right.

I decided we would spend 3 minutes investigating each. And not split up. On the left, after about a minute and a half, we found a sealed door, with some kind of glass panel. We left it the fuck alone and went back. On the right, we had more luck. Whilst it was just more winding corridor after 3 minutes, we continued on. This was the Truth and Reconciliation, and we were those marines, and we were going to escape in a fucking hijacked Shadow Dropship.

We came to an open room. It contained a gauss flayer, of immense size, as large as a small building. It pointed towards one wall. It didn’t take a genius to realise we’d stumbled on some kind of xenos macrocannon equivalent. Whilst at first glance we seemed no closer to our goals, I surmised we now had something very useful: An open, relatively contiguous gallery that we KNEW ran along the outside wall of the ship.

And yes, Guardsman Jack had indeed survived. In fact, despite being the target of several blows from the flayed one, and being a repeated target of gauss fire, he was uninjured.

However, Stern refused to allow this until we returned and destroyed the room we found earlier with demo charges. I was… okay with that. We used 2, for a bang of 3d10+26 and a range of 65m. The entire ship dimmed slightly as the explosion ripped through it. When we returned, the gauss cannon was dark and silent. Continuing on, it was a long walk. We had a bare minimum of combat rations, but it was enough to stop the complaining.

Eventually, we came to another sealed door. Time to see what kind of use Necrons have for doors: I decided to open up its inferior xeno alloy with a shot from my plasma pistol. The door parted before it, and beyond the melted hole, I saw what lay on the other side: The void of space.

Dammit I demand more!

Sorry this update is taking so long, spam filter has me in its jaws. I'm going to make sure I can actually post at ALL first. Fuuuuck.

Fuck, how do I stop the spam filter blocking me? I don't even know what is suspect. I'm going to post TIIIINY amounts at a time.

We freaked the fuck out and damn near jumped away, only to notice no evidence of the room venting into space. Which would have been a problem since Stern and I didn’t have helmets. We still couldn’t see why it was working that way, but frankly, it was time to do or die.

“Commissar, a power blade, if you would.” The power blade worked the rest of the door off, and we were greeted with the sight of… the xenos’ bridge? The control panels overlooked a vast open area bordered by some kind of barely perceptible glass that bordered onto vacuum.

We looked around. None of us were trained in tech use for Imperial tech, let alone xenos. “Man, we really could do with that techpriest right now…”. We sat around a while, musing all the things we WISHED we could do with these controls.

Also, the suspect text string is definitely either this or the upcoming sentence or two.

>>18922825
Open up MS Paint, write the text up in an image, post the image.

Dwayne decided to open a communications channel to Vail. With necron tech. That he can *totally* understand, let alone use.


GM: “You know this is effectively -60 and you are untrained, right?”
Dwayne: *rolls a 01* *gestures to it*
GM: “…”
Inquisitress Amberley Vail’s voice rang over the bridge speakers. Do Necron ships even have communications systems? Who knows. But Dwayne is apparently some kind of savant at this, being that with a few deft button presses on this unfathomably advanced alien technology, he now had control of just such a system.

FINALLY FREE OF SPAM FILTER. It apparently hated the sentence about Dwayne using communications systems, I had to rewrite it from scratch before it accepted.


“Who is this?”
“Thuuuu-this is Commissar Stern-“ “And Sergeant Quin-“ “-and Private First Class Dwayne Holt!”
“How did you… where are you? What happened to the tech priest?”
“He was regrettably lost in action.”
“Then how are you contacting me?”
“Well, you see, we’ve made it on board the xenos ship. We have taken control of their primitive communication systems.”
“Wait but… how… nevermind. You may note I… already had a solution in mind for the Xenos ship.”
It was at this point several of us passed Per tests. Distantly, but approaching rapidly, an Imperial vessel was closing.
“Is there any way we can assist, Maam?”
“If you can lower the void shields, that would assist the boarding effort.”
“Our uh… grasp of the system is tenuous. We don’t think we can do that.”
“Very well then. It’s bound to have some kind of shield generator structures. Destroy them.”
“Would dropping the reactor output be enough?”
“Likely.”

rolled 38 = 38

>>18922872

Unless your player had a 60 odd in int, doesn't that make attempting the skill check an instant fail, even if you rolled a nat 1?

>>18922917
Dark Heresy, 01-05 is auto success, just like 95-100 is auto-fail

>>18922917
Nope. Rules are you can always roll no matter what with a base of 5.

rolled 68 = 68

>>18922939
>>18922940

Could I get a pointer to the page in question? For the auto-succeed?

So we headed out one of the two exits of the bridge we didn’t enter through: The other was a drop, and we’d reached the conclusion that fall damage was a hell of a lot worse than necrons. As we moved along the corridors, we found another sealed door. Plasma aided breaching procedure revealed the hangar we’d been looking for. But time for thoughts of escape later. Stern urged us onwards to our duty. We found ANOTHER generator. Ooooooh yeah. We blasted the hell out of it, and quickly returned to the bridge. “Amberley, are the void shields down?” “Yes, they are now.”. We watched the Imperial vessel approach closer. “We are going to exit the ship using the craft in the hangar. Please don’t shoot us down.” “Yeah, sure.”.

As we would discover, it is those white lies that make her such a goddamn bitch. We made our way to the hangar. Being that they were necron vehicles, not many catered to those who needed life support systems. But we found the perfect one. A Nightscythe. Not only is it a closed transport for 15 passengers, it sort of looks like a shadow dropship if you squint. We piled in. Now Dwayne, being that in addition to his apparent flawless understanding of Necron technology, he is also the only one of us with Pilot, took the helm.

The test to fire up the engines and launch was at significant penalties, but Dwayne failed by only 0 degrees. The Night Scythe closed, and scraped its way along the wall of the hangar, before accelerating out of the hangar. We approached the Imperial vessel, as macrocannon fire started tearing through the air around us. They were trying to shoot us down.

Thankfully, the -50 to hit a target the size of a Nightscythe protected us, and we instead turned towards the planet below, heading for an Imperial controlled Hive. We entered atmosphere easy enough. As we approached the hive, the AA defenses of the hive opened up on us. Dwayne successfully pulled off the evasive manoevres action in an aircraft he still didn’t fully understand how to fly, and their streams of bullets, and barrages of rockets streamed past us. Dwayne tried to land the ‘scythe on the midlevels of the hive, failing again by 0 degrees. The ‘scythe impacted the ground and skidded, tearing up the road, before reaching a stop. When we came to, the Nightscythe was largely undamaged, but surrounded by guardsmen. We opened the exit ramp, and Stern goosestepped out, followed by us.

This earnt us a look of deep disbelief from the sergeant in charge. “Wha….” Stern decided to take the initiative. “We’ve just returned from a very important mission of singlehandedly boarding an enemy vessel. Please point us to your superior.”

The dumbfounded sergeant simply pointed on, and stared awestruck as we brushed ourselves off an walked past him. The debrief with the Inquisitress and the Lord General were really going to be quite something. But above all, we had succeeded in ensuring that grimdarkness did not win this time: We would have our Saturday Morning Heresy.

And with that jesus christ I need to sleep its 4am and I'm going to be woken up at 9am

thank you, beautiful audience members

rolled 70 = 70

>>18923082

GM's response?

Well done, you marvelous people. Your GM must absolutely despise you.

>>18923106
Something akin to softly sobbing followed by "Ok fine".

He elaborated that the ship we encountered was Deathwatch, which was why they fired on us, and we just did their fucking job for them. Furthermore, by capturing an entire intact necron vessel, we just jumped the forefront of Imperial technology hundreds of years forwards. Consider the guard who found a combat knife STC, for comparison.

The plot from here will likely be us serving as the Inquisitress' personal version of Deathwatch, since we proved that we were just plain *better*.

I hope to read of your next misadventure soon enough

This just made my otherwise unremarkable morning most amusing. Thank you, OP.

>>18923175
Same time next week folks!

>>18923154
>pissed off Deathwatch by stumbling through and happening upon everything to victory
MY Sides!

>>18923154
Glorious.

>>18922801
>Fuck, how do I stop the spam filter blocking me? I don't even know what is suspect. I'm going to post TIIIINY amounts at a time.

More like how do you keep the spam filter from banning you.

HOO-RAH!

You, sir, are awesome.

Just finished. Once again, amazing.

So you still have your Saturday Morning Heresy. Will you still write some for us?

>>18922893
>If you can lower the void shields, that would assist the boarding effort

WTF void sheilds? Your GM doesn't know shit about Necrons

>A Nightscythe. Not only is it a closed transport for 15 passengers

WTF? You know it transports through wormholes, not sitting in the thing. Even the pilot chamber doesn't have a canopy.

This entire thread.

>>18934612

Those might be true in 40k... But this is Saturday Morning Heresy.

Sounds like this should be an animated series.

>>18930927
Next week, he said, in >>18923354