Into the Machine!

[signoftheserpent 92]

My first adventure (if you can call it that) was a little combat exercise that pitted the two acolytes I have as players against a tech priest who had a warp rift he had constructed via heretical research. During the course of that encounter he disappeared into it, as did the players as their only means of escape from the station (the priest's sponsor, a chaos marine, was en route).

Now I have decided to send them to another station, the priest's former hq, where his followers are trying to summon his spirit from the warp into a specially prepared cogitator and they have lured the acolytes as part of a trap. They are travelling back from another mission and are unaware of what's going to happen. Their involvement is deemed necessary because they have been through the portal. Who can think of a means to involve them in a preparatory ritual that won't kill them but will be successful, leaving them to survive and fight against the priest's spirit as it takes over the mechanisms of the station?

[Gurkhal 110]

I think that the classic scenario is to either have an Inquisitorial undercover agent there that can free them or having some flaw in their prison for the characters so at the right moment they can spring free. Otherwise I would run that they are captured on arrival but that they somehow manage to free themselves and turn the table on the heretics.

[signoftheserpent 92]

I'm thinking they need to be part of the ritual to prepare the cogitator that will host the tech priest's soul, but what is the nature of this ritual? What does it require of the acolytes and how can they survive while allowing the ritual to succeed.

[Gurkhal 110]

This is probably very cliché but one possibility could be that when the ritual is completed there's some kind of backlash of energy, say perhaps a temporary warp rife appears and a few daemons pops out, and in the ensuing chaos the characters can escape the scene while their captors are focused on something else.

[signoftheserpent 92]

Yes that could work, the idea is that he takes over the station and even his own followers aren't safe. Bit of a 'computer takes control' scenario. The only problem is that daemons really are too powerful for low level acolytes.

[Gurkhal 110]

Yes I understand your reluctance to engage with daemons against your Acolytes but the plan is that they will not fight the daemons. The daemons will fight with the bad guys and during that fight the Acolytes take advantage of their captors being engaged and escapes. Thus they will not fight the daemons but use it as an oppertunity to escape while the daemons are taken care of by the bad guys.

[Gregorius21778 249]

signoftheserpent said:

I'm thinking they need to be part of the ritual to prepare the cogitator that will host the tech priest's soul, but what is the nature of this ritual? What does it require of the acolytes and how can they survive while allowing the ritual to succeed.

Hi Sign,

@the nature of the ritual and the part of the PC
Since they went through the same warp rift, the warp-tech-ritual needs them in accordance to the "rules of sympathy": the ritualist wants somebody back
who passed through this warp gate and thereby need for the "ignition" somebody who was through the same warp rift (the PC, ALIFE!). 

A general advice: plan for the occurance that the PC will not get captured but confront their would-be pursuers. Otherwise, you railroad your players which is something that can backlash more horrible then any warp ritual

A possible solution to this: as soon as the PC are present in the ritual chamber (at this point: storming in, guns blazing) the ritualist starts the ritual while his minions are fighting with the PC. It is enough that they are their, the ritualist just needs to finish the ritual before the PC killhim (give him an energy field!) or get killed (by accident, as his minions try to capture them). 
This set up would give you an additional excuse for everything going wrong during the ritual and ...whatever you daemon incursion you have planned!

[signoftheserpent 92]

This is to be a short adventure. I appreciate it might seem linear, and that's true to a degree. But it's not a long term scenario.

To be honest I'm struggling to devise ideas: I don't think it's really working with 2 low ranking acolytes: assassin and psyker. I thought of all the games DH might be more amenable to a smaller group, but it's kind of limited.

So it's really thrusting them into an SF horror situation and letting them get out. The key is that the ritual succeeds and then go from there, they are catalysts in that (after all travel to space stations isn't an everday occurence in 40k).