Ghost Mushrooms
Rotting Utopia
Bear Necessities
Armored Lizard
Rootless Tree
Broken Angel
The Tree Of Dying
A Deathwatch adventure
Killteam Argonaut recently disappeared on a mission to assassinate Rugluk Brainboila, a powerful ork weirdboy, on an impossibly lush jungle world called Hamith. PC killteam is ordered to retrieve Argonaut and complete the mission.
One member of Argonaut is of the same chapter as a PC. This PC (Secretbearer) should be one whose chapter has a secret to hide. The Chapter issues secret orders to Secretbearer that the Argonaut Astartes (Target) must not survive lest this secret be revealed. If Secretbearer is a Blood Angel, Target may have succumbed to the Black Rage; a Space Wolf might suffer the Wulfen curse, etc (
broken angel).
Hamith is entirely waterbound, and the 'ground' comprises vast drifts of overgrown floating vegetation. This vegetation is often fragile and PCs must travel light and only
bear necessities because heavy PCs (jump packs, heavy weapons, terminator armour, carrying fallen comrades) risk falling through.
Rugluk's ship disintegrated upon re-entry and fell in fragments. Large pieces punched through the vegetation and sank immediately. Only small craft, rokkit-pack troops, etc landed safely. PCs in orbit can track that planetfall centred around a vast thousands-metres-tall tree drifting on the rich waters (
rootless tree). Argonaut is incommunicado.
Orks swarm over Hamith. Observant PCs notice they are moving erratically and approximately towards the giant tree. PCs fighting orks will quickly have many more to fight unless they are quiet. If PCs are hard-pressed, something huge and fast will erupt from beneath the vegetation and eat some orks. Perceptive PCs see it's a giant lizardy thing, VERY perceptive PCs see it wears Eldar-crafted armor.
PCs must go to the tree. They can discover this by
- follwing the orks
- a PC librarian can sense psychic activity around the tree
- discovering Argonaut's last stand, piles of spent bolt casings and dead orks around a charred hole in the vegetation mat. Large tracks lizard tracks, not ork) lead towards the tree.
PCs approaching the tree see Eldar wraithbone intertwines with living wood, now rotting with ork-fungus. It is impossible to burn all the fungus with the munitions PCs can carry, the tree is thoroughly infested. PCs must climb, fighting squigs and orks, to the Eldar outpost around which the tree was grown.
Climbing, Secretbearer PC hears a voice in his head. Hamith is a Maiden World, a long-ago-terraformed sanctuary and haven for the eldar race (
rotting utopia). One warlock, Llifyr, riding a native giant water dragon (which the PCs saw earlier), guards Hamith. She mentally contacts Secretbearer and offers cooperation against Rugluk. She tells him his battle-brother (Target) accepted her offer, and might still survive.
High in the tree, in a wraithbone ampitheatre centred on a webway gate, Target fought Rugluk to a standstill and both lie near death. Rugluk's spores spawn eerie translucent fungus everywhere (
ghost mushrooms), and through them his psychic ork genes taint eldar psychic circuitry and ghost warrior constructs. Fungus-encrusted wraithguard obey Rugluk's will. If left alone, Rugluk will recover.
Target is occasionally lucid and suspects Secretbearer is here to kill him, but insists he can still serve. GM should engineer a situation where Target saves Secretbearer's life, to impose a debt of honour & make deciding harder. If Secretbearer kills Target prematurely, Target will not be able to warn that Llifyr is untrustworthy, suggest the tree-toppling gambit to cleanse the ork infestation, or direct PCs to Argonaut's hidden transport.
Llifyr asks the PCs to delay the orks and Rugluk's ghost-mushroom constructs while she activates a psychic defense system she claims will wipe out the orks. She's lying, it'll wipe every mind within 50 miles. Llifyr intends to escape through the webway gate and let the mindbomb exterminate orks and Deathwatch alike. Unless warned by Target, Librarian PCs sense this with 3 turns before activation, non-psychic PCs only 1. Once they do, Llifyr will dispatch her giant
armored lizard to defend her while she completes activation. If she is seriously wounded, activation aborts. She flees into the webway and closes it behind her.
PCs could simply kill Rugluk and escape, but his spores in the Eldar psychic node would spawn more Rugluks in future, armed with Eldar weaponry. To prevent this, the tree and all in it must be destroyed. Destabilisation is the best way to do this. The fungus-weakened tree has no roots, and will overturn catastrophically with sufficient lateral force, dumping orks, fungus, and wraithguard into the deep. PCs will only have light equipment (
bearing necessities...), so ingenuity (and maybe Argonaut's transport) will be required.