- Location
- USA
[x] Beam the Beacon survivors out and make for the Vault and hope the teleporter is back online by the time you get there.
WARHAMMER 40,000: ROGUE TRADER: THE CITADEL OF SKULLS (Roleplaying on the Farthest Frontiers)
- Thread starter DragonCobolt
- Start date
- Mature Sci-Fi Fantasy
So if we use the beacon to teleport the survivors out, we may not be able to beam out us and the treasure?
I mean... we're still getting these people out of here now. Just need to work out how to manage the rest.
[x] Beam the Beacon survivors out and make for the Vault and hope the teleporter is back online by the time you get there.
Edit: actually, @DragonCobolt can Phi lock onto the teleport beacon to send the First down to us with an extra beacon? Do we even have another beacon?
Because then we can detail half of the First to protect the civilians until the teleportarium recharges while the rest go with us to find the vault. Then the rest of us go back up in the next cycle.
I mean... we're still getting these people out of here now. Just need to work out how to manage the rest.
[x] Beam the Beacon survivors out and make for the Vault and hope the teleporter is back online by the time you get there.
Edit: actually, @DragonCobolt can Phi lock onto the teleport beacon to send the First down to us with an extra beacon? Do we even have another beacon?
Because then we can detail half of the First to protect the civilians until the teleportarium recharges while the rest go with us to find the vault. Then the rest of us go back up in the next cycle.
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Sir_Travelsalot
Never wakes up tired.
- Location
- At Home
[X] Beam the Beacon survivors out and make for the Vault and hope the teleporter is back online by the time you get there.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You've only got one beacon, sadly!
Anywho, I will need two rolls: Awareness and Navigation: Land!
Sir_Travelsalot
Never wakes up tired.
- Location
- At Home
Well, here goes. Welp, that's another Fate Point spent.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I bet you're all wishing you got that auspex!
- Location
- East of Sun, West of Moon
If wishes were bolt shells nobody would ever have to reload.
... I think that, somehow, all Orks just became very sad, and they have absolutely no idea why.
Sir_Travelsalot
Never wakes up tired.
- Location
- At Home
Soo... Fate Point? Two Fate Points?
- Pronouns
- He/Him
If you guys haven't re-rolled by the time I'm done with my shift, I will just assume failure is fun and start writing!
Sir_Travelsalot
Never wakes up tired.
- Location
- At Home
3 or 4, I think. But I'll refrain from rolling for this.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You actually have 5! It's a new chapter, you've gotten them refreshed!
Fayhem
Definitely not an escaped SCP
- Location
- At large
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Wouldn't that mean we could teleport people down, have them take a second beacon with them, then teleport the civvies up with the first beacon?
Anyhoo, time to FP that Awareness now.
Edit: uh. A better failure, at least? We're rolling against 47 (AFAIK) with our Heightened Senses, so I think that's just a couple degrees of failure?
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
You have one (1) beacon. They're advanced, tricky to find pieces of technology that are paired with teleportariums. To get a second beacon, you'd need to find one that wasn't paired to a teleportarium, or take one that is paired to a teleportarium and then pair it to yours - a complex theoliturgical act that is fraught with cryptospiritual dangers. It might derange your entire omnionic divinity interchange and lead to a complete Demiurgic cascade spiral in the lower nodes of the data crypt!
Fayhem
Definitely not an escaped SCP
- Location
- At large
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Ah. Yep, that makes sense. And thanks for reminding me how much I love your 40k technobabble.😁
CHAPTER FIVE: The Vault of Secrets (1.4)
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You slammed down the teleportarium beacon. "Come on, everyone," you say, gesturing to the men and women you had rescued. Even Captain Sly, who is set beside the beacon by Ryia, who ducks her head down. The Captain is out cold - but he is breathing steadily. Em puts his finger to his helmet.
"Cutting Out party to Revenge - lock onto every vitae signature around the beacon and beam them up and direct them to Dr. Ventris immediately."
"Understood, Captain," Jessie says as you put your gauntlet on Ryia's shoulder. She stood smoothly and you stepped back and away from the collected people. A few of them looked at you in confusion and incomprehension, having no idea what it was that they were about to go through. Honestly? You didn't envy the amount of vomit Phi was going to have to have cleaned up in just a few seconds. Then the CRACK of the teleportarium went off - and with it came the rumbling of the doors as a veritable army of men and women in Vall colors came running into the generatoria. THeir stablights swept through the room and their lasbolts cracked through the air. Em gestured.
"Come on!" he shouts as the Kriegers fell back in good order, running from cover to cover to cover as you sprinted for the exit door. A las-bolt pinged harmlessly off the wall next to your head. Ryia ducked through but Em paused, gesturing you forward. You shake your head.
"I have an idea!" you say.
Em nods - and grenades begin to clatter on the ground, exploding out waves of smoke. The militia know that you have heavy duty weapons and you can hear the rumbling of their heavy weapon teams working to bring up what had to be lascannons and autoguns. You snapped your head to the side and looked at the walls - and not seeing anything like a weak point, you shrugged, then drew Aria and slammed her into the nearest support strut that you could see, sweeping into it with as much strength as you could manage. The chunk that rips free shocks even you. It tears out of the whole wall and then sweeps out and smashes into another pillar, which cracks in half. The room begins to shake and smoke - not the smoke from the grenades, but smoke from the walls cracking and generatoria squealing free - fills the air. THe room becomes a jagged chaos of falling debris and darkness and you turn and sprint.
"Run! Run!" you shout and Em, his eyes widening before his helmet cracks down around his head, turns and starts to sprint. The KRiegers and your sister start spritning as well as a billowing cloud of dust and debris rushes after you.
Apparently, you learn later, the damage is visible from orbit.
Mostly from the secondary detonations as the collapsing room hits one of the void-shield emitters.
"We might be lost," Em says, quietly, swinging his wrist lamp around along the craggy, rocky looking outcropping of stone.
It had started off so well, with the destruction of the Beacon and the Void Shield emitters. You had hurried through the corridor, run into a squad of five militia troops that had been gunned down by your Kriegers before you had even had time to react, and then found on them a crude map. That map had shown your way to the stairs leading down to lower levels. One flight of stairs had taken you to munition stores - and the next had taken you to dark cherubum airies - and the next hadn't been stairs, they had been crude tunnels cut into the living stone - and the next had been nothing but more and more winding canyons.
You were in the thick tunnels under the Citadel, carved to no sane plan, by no sane mind. From time to time, you would come upon workers here...augmented mutants who seemed to barely register your passage. They worked with hissing industrial limbs that carved into the stone. They were digging for industrial metals, it seemed, and you saw no overseers or guards, and when you stopped to try speaking to them, their eyes were as sightless and unintelligent as servitors.
At least the walking gave you some time to...
"It's been long enough, what the fuck happened?" Ryia asks, looking at you.
"I...admit...I would like to know that as well," Em says, guardedly.
You blush. "Well..." you paused.
How...
How do you put it into words?
"I...felt Him," you say, blushing. That sounds so trite. Everyone feels the Emperor in church, when the prayer gets you all whipped up and emotional. But that's a fleeting touch - and it's never words, not unless you're really lucky and begin to speak in Tongues. But...but it was true! You had felt Him. Seeing their looks, you add: "Him."
"The Emperor..." Em whispers.
"Was he more hung than..." Ryia trails off at your frown, blushing. "Sorry, just...I...I don't even know what to say to that, Tine! Are you going to grow wings? Start glowing gold? Are you immortal now?"
You blink, then look back over your shoulders. "Nope, no wings." You smile at her, wryly. "And I don't feel immortal."
"So, are you a saint or what?" Ryia asks.
"I...don't know..." you say, blushing. Your head ducks forward and you feel like you're at a schola test without the answers memorized.
"Ryia," Em says, quietly, putting his hand on your shoulder. "We don't have all the answers. We...maybe never will. But Tine's still Tine. She just has...new scars." He smiles at you, his helmet retracting to show his face. "I believe this is where you begin to brag about your sexy scars."
"To be fair, they are pretty sexy," you say, glad to defuse the situation. Ryia sighs, then nods.
"Okay..." she pauses. "Did He...did you get the feeling...that..."
"Ryia, if...I think if He had an issue with you being a psyker, then He'd never have come to me." You step forward, taking her hands, squeezing them through the armor plating - the faint creak of cereamite on cereamite filling the narrow tunnels. You smile at Ryia. "You're good."
She chuckles. "Yeah."
A droplet of something thick and viscous drops directly onto your hair.
"Ugh!" you groan. "I hate this-"
And that's when the spined, clawed, nightmare horror-monster dropped from the ceiling and directly onto your body, with claws and screaming, hissing fury.
Claws slam into your shoulder pauldron and your helmet whips down and crashes into place as you try and bring Aria up to parry, but the creature keeps clawing and slashing and biting at you, rattling your helmet again and again and again, until you finally slash once and its two halves go flying away from you, smashing down to the ground and skidding. One of the Kriegers, as efficient and calm as ever, puts three lasbolts into the head. Just in case.
"...so, as I was saying," you say, your helmet whipping back off so you can gingerly try and wipe the gunk from your hair. "You're good, Ryia."
"Are you good?" she asks.
"...yeah," you say, looking at the gunk dripping from your fingertip. "Yeah, we're good."
There were twelve daemonetts there, writhing and dancing in an ecstatic pattern, their bodies intertwining, their arms lifting as they danced around something that looked as if it had come straight from a nightmare: Four jagged legs made of wrought iron and brass, supporting a rectangular frame that almost looked like a Rhino tank - but gilded and ornately decorated with debautched images. Two arms jutted from it - both ending in razor sharp claws, while a head jutted from the top, with a pair of heavy duty las-cannons upon it.
"What the fuck is that?" Ryia whispers.
"A daemon engine," you say as it rears up and an unearthly roar booms through the vault and the daemonettes jeered and and pranced around it. It casually picked one up and slammed its talon through the creature's belly, causing the damonette to moan as if in the throws of passion.
"Yes! Yes! Thank you!" she squealed as the Daemon Engine lifted her bleeding body up, then ripped her in half, splattering its entire fuselage with blood, which hissed and smoked and bubbled.
"And I count power armor troops too," Em says, quietly, as you see that several of Vall's Elite guard are here as well - power armored infantry, bearing heavy bolters on suspensors.
"Great," you say. "What do we do?"
---
What do? This is the final, biggest battle of the adventure! the field is wide open - 11 Daemonettes, 1 Deamon Engine, 4 Heavy Bolters, and the Vault of Secrets at the bottom~! Your teleportarium IS active, but beaming down here is going to be very hard without a beacon - but a clever enough scheme can work.
[ ] Write In
"Cutting Out party to Revenge - lock onto every vitae signature around the beacon and beam them up and direct them to Dr. Ventris immediately."
"Understood, Captain," Jessie says as you put your gauntlet on Ryia's shoulder. She stood smoothly and you stepped back and away from the collected people. A few of them looked at you in confusion and incomprehension, having no idea what it was that they were about to go through. Honestly? You didn't envy the amount of vomit Phi was going to have to have cleaned up in just a few seconds. Then the CRACK of the teleportarium went off - and with it came the rumbling of the doors as a veritable army of men and women in Vall colors came running into the generatoria. THeir stablights swept through the room and their lasbolts cracked through the air. Em gestured.
"Come on!" he shouts as the Kriegers fell back in good order, running from cover to cover to cover as you sprinted for the exit door. A las-bolt pinged harmlessly off the wall next to your head. Ryia ducked through but Em paused, gesturing you forward. You shake your head.
"I have an idea!" you say.
Em nods - and grenades begin to clatter on the ground, exploding out waves of smoke. The militia know that you have heavy duty weapons and you can hear the rumbling of their heavy weapon teams working to bring up what had to be lascannons and autoguns. You snapped your head to the side and looked at the walls - and not seeing anything like a weak point, you shrugged, then drew Aria and slammed her into the nearest support strut that you could see, sweeping into it with as much strength as you could manage. The chunk that rips free shocks even you. It tears out of the whole wall and then sweeps out and smashes into another pillar, which cracks in half. The room begins to shake and smoke - not the smoke from the grenades, but smoke from the walls cracking and generatoria squealing free - fills the air. THe room becomes a jagged chaos of falling debris and darkness and you turn and sprint.
"Run! Run!" you shout and Em, his eyes widening before his helmet cracks down around his head, turns and starts to sprint. The KRiegers and your sister start spritning as well as a billowing cloud of dust and debris rushes after you.
Apparently, you learn later, the damage is visible from orbit.
Mostly from the secondary detonations as the collapsing room hits one of the void-shield emitters.
***
An hour later, the alarms are a distant ache and you are beginning to think you might be lost.
"We might be lost," Em says, quietly, swinging his wrist lamp around along the craggy, rocky looking outcropping of stone.
It had started off so well, with the destruction of the Beacon and the Void Shield emitters. You had hurried through the corridor, run into a squad of five militia troops that had been gunned down by your Kriegers before you had even had time to react, and then found on them a crude map. That map had shown your way to the stairs leading down to lower levels. One flight of stairs had taken you to munition stores - and the next had taken you to dark cherubum airies - and the next hadn't been stairs, they had been crude tunnels cut into the living stone - and the next had been nothing but more and more winding canyons.
You were in the thick tunnels under the Citadel, carved to no sane plan, by no sane mind. From time to time, you would come upon workers here...augmented mutants who seemed to barely register your passage. They worked with hissing industrial limbs that carved into the stone. They were digging for industrial metals, it seemed, and you saw no overseers or guards, and when you stopped to try speaking to them, their eyes were as sightless and unintelligent as servitors.
At least the walking gave you some time to...
"It's been long enough, what the fuck happened?" Ryia asks, looking at you.
"I...admit...I would like to know that as well," Em says, guardedly.
You blush. "Well..." you paused.
How...
How do you put it into words?
"I...felt Him," you say, blushing. That sounds so trite. Everyone feels the Emperor in church, when the prayer gets you all whipped up and emotional. But that's a fleeting touch - and it's never words, not unless you're really lucky and begin to speak in Tongues. But...but it was true! You had felt Him. Seeing their looks, you add: "Him."
"The Emperor..." Em whispers.
"Was he more hung than..." Ryia trails off at your frown, blushing. "Sorry, just...I...I don't even know what to say to that, Tine! Are you going to grow wings? Start glowing gold? Are you immortal now?"
You blink, then look back over your shoulders. "Nope, no wings." You smile at her, wryly. "And I don't feel immortal."
"So, are you a saint or what?" Ryia asks.
"I...don't know..." you say, blushing. Your head ducks forward and you feel like you're at a schola test without the answers memorized.
"Ryia," Em says, quietly, putting his hand on your shoulder. "We don't have all the answers. We...maybe never will. But Tine's still Tine. She just has...new scars." He smiles at you, his helmet retracting to show his face. "I believe this is where you begin to brag about your sexy scars."
"To be fair, they are pretty sexy," you say, glad to defuse the situation. Ryia sighs, then nods.
"Okay..." she pauses. "Did He...did you get the feeling...that..."
"Ryia, if...I think if He had an issue with you being a psyker, then He'd never have come to me." You step forward, taking her hands, squeezing them through the armor plating - the faint creak of cereamite on cereamite filling the narrow tunnels. You smile at Ryia. "You're good."
She chuckles. "Yeah."
A droplet of something thick and viscous drops directly onto your hair.
"Ugh!" you groan. "I hate this-"
And that's when the spined, clawed, nightmare horror-monster dropped from the ceiling and directly onto your body, with claws and screaming, hissing fury.
Claws slam into your shoulder pauldron and your helmet whips down and crashes into place as you try and bring Aria up to parry, but the creature keeps clawing and slashing and biting at you, rattling your helmet again and again and again, until you finally slash once and its two halves go flying away from you, smashing down to the ground and skidding. One of the Kriegers, as efficient and calm as ever, puts three lasbolts into the head. Just in case.
"...so, as I was saying," you say, your helmet whipping back off so you can gingerly try and wipe the gunk from your hair. "You're good, Ryia."
"Are you good?" she asks.
"...yeah," you say, looking at the gunk dripping from your fingertip. "Yeah, we're good."
***
A half hour later, you and Em and Ryia and the Kriegers came to a narrow vent that led to a catwalk. This catwalk ringed around a huge, open space that itself, ringed around an elevator column that led straight down towards something that glowed a malevolent purple and red...and you knew, in your heart of hearts, that that elevator went down to the Vault proper. The only problem was the time you had spent lost in the catacombs had given Vall's men the time to secure the place...because they had to know what your target was.
There were twelve daemonetts there, writhing and dancing in an ecstatic pattern, their bodies intertwining, their arms lifting as they danced around something that looked as if it had come straight from a nightmare: Four jagged legs made of wrought iron and brass, supporting a rectangular frame that almost looked like a Rhino tank - but gilded and ornately decorated with debautched images. Two arms jutted from it - both ending in razor sharp claws, while a head jutted from the top, with a pair of heavy duty las-cannons upon it.
"What the fuck is that?" Ryia whispers.
"A daemon engine," you say as it rears up and an unearthly roar booms through the vault and the daemonettes jeered and and pranced around it. It casually picked one up and slammed its talon through the creature's belly, causing the damonette to moan as if in the throws of passion.
"Yes! Yes! Thank you!" she squealed as the Daemon Engine lifted her bleeding body up, then ripped her in half, splattering its entire fuselage with blood, which hissed and smoked and bubbled.
"And I count power armor troops too," Em says, quietly, as you see that several of Vall's Elite guard are here as well - power armored infantry, bearing heavy bolters on suspensors.
"Great," you say. "What do we do?"
---
What do? This is the final, biggest battle of the adventure! the field is wide open - 11 Daemonettes, 1 Deamon Engine, 4 Heavy Bolters, and the Vault of Secrets at the bottom~! Your teleportarium IS active, but beaming down here is going to be very hard without a beacon - but a clever enough scheme can work.
[ ] Write In
20+ militia come running in, the front row snapping off shots as they sprint in (at a -20): No hits
Tine got a righteous fury. So, her total damage is...*rolls* 74 damage, pen 2, against the room.
Tine: 13
Tunnel Horror: 13
Ryia and Em: Less than that
ROUND ONE
Tunnel horror gets a surprise attack with +20 and with lightning attack rolls a 30, 30 and 30. Three THIRTIES. IN A ROW! Tine fails her parry even with the re-roll, so she takes 12, 11, and 12 damage with a pen of 0! She soaks this entirely thanks to her power armor! Then she cuts it ALL THE WAY IN HALF on her turn!
Tine got a righteous fury. So, her total damage is...*rolls* 74 damage, pen 2, against the room.
Tine: 13
Tunnel Horror: 13
Ryia and Em: Less than that
ROUND ONE
Tunnel horror gets a surprise attack with +20 and with lightning attack rolls a 30, 30 and 30. Three THIRTIES. IN A ROW! Tine fails her parry even with the re-roll, so she takes 12, 11, and 12 damage with a pen of 0! She soaks this entirely thanks to her power armor! Then she cuts it ALL THE WAY IN HALF on her turn!
Sir_Travelsalot
Never wakes up tired.
- Location
- At Home
Y'know, in hindsight, getting a decently stocked belt of Krak grenades for this assault would've been quite smart. Those things are practically Emperor-blessed by themselves (exhibit A, my Death World medic killing a Lictor in three turns without suffering any worse injury than ringing ears).
bookwyrm
Doom of Public Libraries
- Location
- Wichita, Kansas
I wonder how we might go about just teleporting in like an entire crate of krak grenades or like one of the ship's macrocannon shells or something just blind-firing with the pins out and ready to boom, as long as they end up somewhere vaguely approximate to the cavernous space of the Vault entrance level the shockwave should travel across and fuck up all the unarmored Daemonettes and fleshy bits of the Daemon Engine. The Vault structures themselves should probably be fine (or at least fine long enough to loot) as the whole thing is designed to be the ultimate supervillain lair and would probably be reinforced to protect itself from the wayward explosions of combat. Vall's a space pirate after all, one of his biggest priorities should be making his stuff bombardment-proof.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
They're Kreigers!
bookwyrm
Doom of Public Libraries
- Location
- Wichita, Kansas
Oh yeah, at least with normal fully uniformed Kriegers you can look away telling yourself its just the fact you never see them without the gas mask and helmet and they're covering their faces, or tell goofy stories of the Death Corps being an overelaborate code name for a secret Gun-Servitor project, now our heroes are forced to look at them dead in the eye and know that Kreigers are Just Like That.
Sir_Travelsalot
Never wakes up tired.
- Location
- At Home
Would it be at all feasible for Ryia to use TK to cause misfeeds, stovepipe jams and other sorts of malfunctions in the Heavy Bolters, while the Kriegers form up and volley fire with their Hellguns? Meanwhile, Tine goes to face the Daemon Engine, since I'm fairly sure she's the only one with a hope of actually doing damage to it.