Shoggy Posted December 10, 2014 Share Posted December 10, 2014 Hi folks, some people suggested I come to this board and share this story. If I'm in the wrong place let me know, I am new here. This is not a story about a group of superhumans striding across the field of battle smiting the foes of the Imperium, but rather the story of a band of doughty guardsmen holding the line and serving as best they can. It is a tale of bravery, stoicism, incompetence, and excessive use of detpacks which follows the guardsmen from their origin in the mud and blood to rise as one of the premier Inquisitorial teams on the sub-sector. Time and time again the guardsmen fight and triumph over xenos, heretics, and their own incompetent superiors; officially for the glory of the Emperor, but mostly in a desperate attempt to stay alive. This is at heart a write-up of an Only War and Dark Heresy campaign, but only briefly touches on the mechanics in the first two chapters and it shouldn't be a problem if you do not like or play either game. Be aware that this thing gets rather long in the later chapters and there is a significant tone shift after the prologue. Sorry about that, the story has been continuing for a while now and I lack any sort of editor. The Adventures of the All Guardsmen Party Currently I can't embed the images due to language restrictions, but the entire story is available in nice clean HTML format here: http://www.theallguardsmenparty.com/ Or in imgur albums or the original threads here: Prologue: Natural Selection Based Character Creation Album Link: http://imgur.com/L2ASKOM Original Thread Link: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/33660810/ Part 2: Guardsmen and Pilgrims Album Link: http://imgur.com/a/XwoY7 Original Thread Link: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/34095013/ Part 3: Dude Where's My Psyker Album Link: http://imgur.com/a/Tkqjm Original Thread Link: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/34333783/ Part 4: What's in the Box? Album Link: http://imgur.com/a/0aGN5 Original Thread Link: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/34660239/ Part 5: Nubby's Girlfriend Album Link: http://imgur.com/a/puNBl Original Thread Link: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/34985468/ Part 6: Heretic Purging Album Link: http://imgur.com/a/HxVMi Original Thread Link: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/35461504/ Part 7: Discount Spaceship Album Link: http://imgur.com/a/Eyiep Original Thread Link: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/35923989/ Part 8: Good Soldiers, Bad Educators Album Link: http://imgur.com/a/thn81 Original Thread Link: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/36338781/ Part 9: The Interplanetary Man of Mystery Album Link: http://imgur.com/a/URsER Original Thread Link: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/37339037 Part 10: The Greater Good Album Link: http://imgur.com/gallery/5uUpI Original Thread Link: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/38181397 Part 11: The Xenotech Heresy Album Link: http://imgur.com/gallery/phJ5W/ Original Thread Links: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/39165875 http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/39185203 Part 12: Tyranid Acquisition Experts Album Link: http://imgur.com/gallery/iVHrS/ Original Thread Link: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/40747009 Interlude: Dewarp Album Link: http://imgur.com/gallery/c0kerRl/ Original Thread Link: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/42204030 Part 13: Tyranid Delivery Experts Album Link: http://imgur.com/gallery/fzCzz/ Original Thread Link: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/43288004 Part 13.5: Tyranid Delivery Experts Part 2 Album Link: http://imgur.com/gallery/wGzlU Original Thread Links: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/43990923/ http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/44027113/ Part 14: The [REDACTED] Conspiracy Album Link: http://imgur.com/gallery/25MD7/ Original Thread Links: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/46575971 http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/46600041 http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/46864402 Part 15.1: The "Stealth" Mission http://www.theallguardsmenparty.com/secret.html Original Thread Link: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/50535024/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
librisrouge Posted December 10, 2014 Share Posted December 10, 2014 I've only read the first section and I really want to be that GM. Thanks for posting this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WarriorFish Posted December 10, 2014 Share Posted December 10, 2014 Welcome to the B&C Shoggy, this is certainly the place for Guard heroics! :D Unfortunately I had to remove your epic tale as it contains language that is not suitable for the forum. Before any help can be provided I'm afraid you'll need to make the source content clean of swear words. It needs some serious editing aside from that though as it is quite the tome, I had to stop reading about half way through and skim the rest. I'm not sure how you could do this without losing the content itself so you might need to just get stuck in and sort it out - and all the hours that would take... I wish my DH group could get up to quite as much mayhem, but we don't do too badly. Things normally devolve into slaughter, my character is of course a Guardsmen and is generally confused about what is going on but he does love killing enemies of the Emprah :P Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shoggy Posted December 10, 2014 Author Share Posted December 10, 2014 Welcome to the B&C Shoggy, this is certainly the place for Guard heroics! Unfortunately I had to remove your epic tale as it contains language that is not suitable for the forum. Well I can't do anything about the archives or screencaps, but I've done a quick edit pass to tone down the general purpose invectives in the HTML. Let me know what other changes need to be made to fit into your guidelines. I can't really think of any way to host the content directly on the forum (where it's not diverting traffic away to a third party location) without using the caps though, is there any middle ground you can think of? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
librisrouge Posted December 10, 2014 Share Posted December 10, 2014 Maybe a link to somewhere offsite where they could be read in all of their vulgar glory. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shoggy Posted December 10, 2014 Author Share Posted December 10, 2014 Maybe a link to somewhere offsite where they could be read in all of their vulgar glory. Rearranged them to all link offsite, seems sub-optimal, but at least it's all there... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CoffeeGrunt Posted December 11, 2014 Share Posted December 11, 2014 I think I remember hearing about the prologue before on a site, it sounded like such a great way to do a roleplay. I'll get onto reading through the rest at some point! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shoggy Posted December 12, 2014 Author Share Posted December 12, 2014 I think I remember hearing about the prologue before on a site, it sounded like such a great way to do a roleplay. I'll get onto reading through the rest at some point! Yea our GM is still smug about that marathon zerg-fest. Even if the rest of the stories are quite excellent, from a GM perspective that's his crowning glory. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spafe Posted December 15, 2014 Share Posted December 15, 2014 I've only read the first couple of them, but my god they sound awesome! I'll be so stealing that style of gm'ing for any future campaigns (dark heresy or otherwise) I do, stops players getting too attached to characters and whiny then they die :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shoggy Posted December 16, 2014 Author Share Posted December 16, 2014 I've only read the first couple of them, but my god they sound awesome! I'll be so stealing that style of gm'ing for any future campaigns (dark heresy or otherwise) I do, stops players getting too attached to characters and whiny then they die Glad you liked the stories and I hope you have fun running those future campaigns. Hopefully you keep reading, I'm rather embarrassed about the quality of the early stuff. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IamJacksUserName Posted December 16, 2014 Share Posted December 16, 2014 Having GMed a dark heresy / rogue trader campaign on and off again for 5 years I appreciate your write up of the campaigns. Sounds like you have a good group and I only got up to the beginning of the inquisition campaigns. My players were supposed to be stealth ops for an inquisitor gone rogue (of course they didn't know that at the time). However, my players interpretation of "stealth" left a bit to be desired. They claimed if no one was left alive to identify them, it was as good as not being seen in the first place. I definitely look forward to reading the rest of your stories Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spafe Posted December 16, 2014 Share Posted December 16, 2014 Have jsut finished reading it all, its great write ups and I'm sorry, but some of those ideas are being heavily ripped off when I next have to gm. Did it end there or is there more to come about the latest interregator? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shoggy Posted December 16, 2014 Author Share Posted December 16, 2014 Having GMed a dark heresy / rogue trader campaign on and off again for 5 years I appreciate your write up of the campaigns. Sounds like you have a good group and I only got up to the beginning of the inquisition campaigns. My players were supposed to be stealth ops for an inquisitor gone rogue (of course they didn't know that at the time). However, my players interpretation of "stealth" left a bit to be desired. They claimed if no one was left alive to identify them, it was as good as not being seen in the first place. I definitely look forward to reading the rest of your stories I think our GM has occasionally been frustrated by our take on stealth too. He just sort of glared at us the first few times we insisted on carrying lasguns while in civilian clothing or decided to disguise ourselves as guardsmen. Have jsut finished reading it all, its great write ups and I'm sorry, but some of those ideas are being heavily ripped off when I next have to gm. Did it end there or is there more to come about the latest interregator? Both myself and my GM would be honored if you ripped off our stuff. It's pretty much the best form of flattery you can get as a tabletop player. The stories will be continuing after the holidays, hopefully on the 9th or 10th. I won't be disappearing without notice. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WarriorFish Posted December 16, 2014 Share Posted December 16, 2014 The correct term is "being inspired by" ;) I will have to pester my DH group for some more game time, we've got some carnage to catch up on! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spafe Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 I also have a cuople of quick questions if you dont mind. With regards to the slaughter of characters in the first chapter... did you all just roll stats and come up with a few lines to give them a flavour of background or properly flesh out them with equip, starting creds, etc etc etc? Jsut logistically rolling up that many in depth characters would take our group a seriously long time so was wondering how this was handled. Presumably when you guys leveled up, any characters who died and were replaced, the replacement came in at same exp level as you guys? or did you do indivual leveling up? I'm sure there were other questions but my mind has taking a vacation atm so might ask them later :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shoggy Posted December 17, 2014 Author Share Posted December 17, 2014 Most of the characters in the deathzerg were standard role-templates with a line or two of descriptive text. We very rarely got away from standard issue kit and stats, so there wasn't much agonizing over what skills or gear to buy. It was just a matter of grabbing a sheet, penciling in a name and basic background/motivations, then using the 5-10 minute breather before each battle to expand a little. The longer a character survived the more flavor they got. As for leveling, we didn't advance during combat or the battles at all and surviving characters were saved away and not played again. At the start of the battle all the templates were bumped up by something like 300 points (we ended up at the start of armsman level in DH I think). So there wasn't much dithering about what to buy, you couldn't really afford much and it was rare to get anything outside of standard kit. Also, no comrades and no esoteric characters like psykers or full on tech-priests. There wasn't time to keep track of the fiddly little rules (and he was prepping us for DH where the comrades wouldn't be a thing). It all worked out though, our GM put a lot of effort into streamlining the process. He tends to answer questions about how he runs things on reddit when he posts the stories there. You can ask him things or see some of his past explanations there if you want: http://www.reddit.com/user/Failer10/ Here's an excerpt on setting up a game like that first one: As a sort of warning, please be careful. I've known my players for a long time and I was sure they'd bear with me, but they were getting a little burnt out from all the PC deaths. Just keep in mind that while it's a cool concept it can be hard on the players, make sure they don't pour their hearts into and characters. My main tools for the macro level were: * A flowchart for each battle, sort of like this: http://imgur.com/pHPPMlI where each node is a PC battle and branches are based on Failure, Success, or Crit Sucess. Crit goes up, Sucess stays level and failure goes down. * A map for each battle with startegic positions that change based on the nodes in the flowchart sort of like these: http://imgur.com/a/WfYFE * A battle grid (just a blowup of the section of the large map usually) for each node, a base objective (like defend for x waves or take x point), and a bonus objective (like take point in y turns or take less than y casualties) * A big stack of blank template sheets for every role * A box of guardsmen figures or plastic army men A lot of the prep was wasted since they only hit like half your nodes, but it lets them see the results of their work so it's very cool. On the micro level my basic theories were: * Put squads on their flanks but don't roll for NPC soldiers, use averages or simplified rules. Keep them around so it feels like a major battle and the players can help or get help from their trenchmates. * Consider putting resupply points in the battles so new characters can come in and ammo can be refilled * Adjust the rules a little so cover gives aim+ROF benefits and suppression decreased speed and taking fire reduces speed and accuracy. * Let them call for strikes and stuff, just don't always give it to them * Tank / Arty / Jet missions can be good intermediate chapters that don't need to affect the overall flow, just relieve tension Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spafe Posted December 18, 2014 Share Posted December 18, 2014 Thats all very useful, and thanks for the links! You have possibly jsut made me into the most hated gm in our group for a while, but I reckon I'll be nice and warn them to jsut write up like 5 characters in brief before we begin so the shock isn't such a draining loss. And serious kudos to your gm for the work he must put in! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WarriorFish Posted December 18, 2014 Share Posted December 18, 2014 Don't forget to also report back on your group's shenanigans spafe :D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IamJacksUserName Posted December 21, 2014 Share Posted December 21, 2014 I just finished reading the whole thing. I want more. That or find a good group to start playing again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shoggy Posted January 13, 2015 Author Share Posted January 13, 2015 Is anyone here interested in more of these? There's another chapter now, I'll post here if there's interest otherwise I'll let this thead die. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WarriorFish Posted January 13, 2015 Share Posted January 13, 2015 There is definitely interest, as long as you remember to keep posts within B&C rules ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shoggy Posted January 13, 2015 Author Share Posted January 13, 2015 Part 9: The Interplanetary Man of Mystery Album Link: http://imgur.com/a/URsER Original Thread Link: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/37339037/ Also the HTML version has been updated to include the latest chapter as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Terminus Posted January 14, 2015 Share Posted January 14, 2015 This is a great read so far. Best part so far is you hiding out from the Interrogator trying to hire you. Induction into the Astartes, hah! It'd be great to see the Interrogator's face when he got that answer. I suggest you change the subtitle to "So no there we were". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WarriorFish Posted January 14, 2015 Share Posted January 14, 2015 I suggest nothing is done to rile the commissariat up over B&C rules ;) I was glad to see Sarge get a promotion, feels like he deserves it! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spafe Posted January 14, 2015 Share Posted January 14, 2015 Please keep posting them here! I is a great little break while drinking my coffee at work to read them! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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