Last night saw the culmination of a roughly 1.5 year Dark Heresy campaign. The players managed to infiltrate a chaos cult, sow discord from within and finally was brought into the fold as the ritual to awaken the cults dark master came to fruition.

The players where playing Ascenscion level Inquisitors with Deathwatch characters on the side that acts as their personal kill team to hit targets that they uncovered during their time undercover.

As the final confrontation would most likely see the Ascenscion characters and the Deathwatch characters fight in the same battle I needed something that could actually go toe-to-toe with that much firepower [6 Ascenscion level characters and 6 Deathwatch terminators]. Luckily I found a convenient Bloodthirster over at the Fantasy Flight forums. Thank you N0-1_H3r3.

Going through the stats for the beast I wasn't sure that the characters would be able to harm it in a straight stand up encounter. So I had to design the encounter so that they would have a secondary way to end the encounter. The main problem being that none of the Inquisition characters packed close to enough firepower to actually do significant damage to it past it's armour and considerable Toughness bonus.

So for the encounter I decided that the artifacts that contained the entity was still actively channeling energy into the host. Destroying all four artifacts would "overload" the host and lay the entity bare and looking for a new host. Similarly actually taking down the 'thirster would suppress the entity for a short period making it possible for them to bind the host. Since the entity regenerating [like some ruinious Doctor Who] was a major feature of the campaign straight out killing it wasn't really an option.

The first few rounds of combat went as expected. [Actually the fact that there was more than one round of combat was already a bonus, since the Deathwatch characters were making a habit of ending engagements in a single round.] The Ascension character were doing either no damage or minimal damage to it, with the exception of the Tech Magus that used a 1/combat ability to do a whopping 41 damage to it after subtractions. The terminators were holding their own doing average damage per chainfist hit.

The 'thirster was holding his own, going so far as to drop the Tech Magus in a single blow. What? It didn't like getting shot! It was pretty cool though, the character took roughly 20 critical damage from the axe taking him down and out. Now usually when a character in WH40k RP "dies" the player can opt to burn [permanently lose] one of their fate points to miraculously save the character from death. The player just took the damage in mild disbelief and declared his Magus dead, describing how the warp blade cleaved him in twain. The other players were calling out and urging him to burn a fate point to stay in the battle. But he just calmly sat there and said "I can't justify anything saving me from a blow from a weapon like that." and packed up that character.

That did make the fight a bit more "real" for the other players. The Bloodthirster went on to also take down two of the terminators before they destroyed the last artifact. At the end of the battle the Bloodthirster was down to roughly 1/4 of it's starting life when the final artifact was destroyed. Since the two terminators toting the assault cannon and cyclone missile launcher was pretty much out of the battle fighting off chaos marines to secure the area for the others; chances are that if they did have a few more rounds they probably would have put the thing down without my building in another out.

On the other hand, not putting in that out would have left several characters at the table useless for the complete encounter. In which case I would have had several unhappy / bored people instead of it playing out as one of the better battles in the campaign.

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Actually wish I thought of blogging the game or my thoughts on some aspects of it sooner. Next up I'll be running the group around Athas for a bit, so at least I'll be able to go on about that for a while.

Thankyou and goodnight.