Monday, August 17, 2020

Wrapping up Dark Tides:Descent and transition to Graveyard Shift

The session started with wrapping up the previous adventure. Thrakus kept Gerrit held down until arriving at the train station, while the other agents - left on the slower train with a pile of corpses - looked through the Prophet's belongings. Plenty of evidence to tie him to the murders.
A complication while talking to the train station workers meant the Mechanicum was shortly notified of their arrival, but they managed to talk them into allowing Gerrit to live for a bit longer. They lost Ivill Kreet in the underhive, and they still owned a man for servitor parts.

The agents escorted the tied-up Gerrit to the upperhive. They brainstormed ideas on how to hide him from the enforcers, but ended up going up through the main routes anyway.

They sneaked in a message to Rogue Trader Varonius, who assented giving over the prisoner to the authorities. Just in time, as Praetor Borst was already close to arriving. The agents noticed that the Praetor recognized Gerrit - as the scion of one of the ruling families. As such, the secret of the murders was to be kept under a closed lid. 

Gerrit was taken away for questioning; some random fellow was given over to the Mechanicum to become a servitor; and an unlucky minor noble, seen with the first victim on the night of the first murder, was to be declared guilty and publicly executed to appease the nobles. The agents all passed their Corruption tests after condemning all these innocents to death and worse. Borst and Orrilus were happy with the outcome, as was the Rogue Trader, who invited the warband back for a thorough debriefing.

***

We went into downtime next, as Tass wished for an augmetic stomach. I allowed it to be requisitioned without an Influence test, as payment from the grateful Varonius. Warder looked around for a replacement knife, only to loose Wealth on the Influence test. Win-win.

***

Finally, we started our next adventure, available for free from Cubicle 7.  

***

Thrakus awoke dizzily in total darkness, under a pile of corpses. He was wearing a robe, with only his voxbead equipped. By the time he checked his surroundings, and asserted that his unconscious companions were also in the vicinity, the transport craft carrying them landed and disgorged its cargo. The agents were in the courtyard of an Imperial building, with only a hundred or so corpses for companionship. They were all wearing robes, and had no equipment. 

Thrakus dragged them all behind the statue of the Reaper (death seemed to be a theme in the building decorations), then looked at the dataslate sewn into his robes. Apparently the warband had accepted the request of an Inquisitorial Interrogator to investigate the cemetery moon of Daedalon for a xenotech artifact.

In secret.

Which is not their thing.

This soon became apparent. Thrakus retrieved their gear from a fake corpse, only forgetting a couple of items inside - Tass' galvanic rifle and Warder's personal dataslate. As they were gearing up and noticed this, four individuals came singing hymns to load up the corpses into a small servitor-pulled train.

The agents debated on whether to let the items go in favor of secrecy, but the desire to hold on to the gun prevailed. Thrakus walked into the open, surprising the Corpse Tenders who immediately called for security. The guardsmen escorted Thrakus outside, and assigned one of their number to keep an eye on him.

Later, the rest of the party also sneaked out. They reunited in the main square, but only after a couple more small scenes in the nearby cathedral. Thrakus dumbfounded his 'escort', the soldier unable to make heads or tails of the gentle giant with a terrifying visage. Palmulata was stopped for carrying a weapon, and she immediately went full on accusing the soldier of heresy. He backed down immediately.

Realizing that subtlety was not their favorite approach, but still wanting to keep a low profile, the agents decided against directly contacting the ever present Mechanicum or the Sisters of the Order of the Sacred Shield. They instead devised a cover story for being on the moon, and sneaked off to gear up. 

This is where things got interesting.

They hid in between the hab blocks and rolled 2 complications on their Stealth checks. I ruled that no official eyes saw them, but they were noticed by a passing by group of workers. Especially Sister Palmulata, who was being dressed up by Tass and was at the moment wearing a pair of power armored boots. And nothing else. The workers stopped and whistled. Because why wouldn't they.

Warder decided to step in, intent on frightening them away. He cut his hand to use Regeneration. He rolled Perils of the Warp. In a 100m radius, all the walls started bleeding. The agents passed their Fear tests, but the screams of the people living there echoed throughout the city. As the players wailed in terror at what they've done, I grinned and announced the end of the session.

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