The Ancient Research Base

## **Voyaging back to Ludd**

**Things going on in background:**

**Yeoman has gone missing. There was some strange event just underneath Cornelius’ quarters - violence by unknown forces. Niko undertakes signal analysis to trace Yeoman**

**House Dakkar tried to abduct Yeoman; BINKY has been informed. We apologise!**

**I ask Yeoman to make a Salvation shield**

**Cornelius, Alea, and Niko confront Koll. He says that he won’t fuck with it again on pain of mindscraping**

**Holstein surrounded by family of nulls in white**

**Cornelius has persuaded the Seneschal’s staff that a crusade is a good idea but the Seneschal remains resistant**

**Holstein seems to have something emitting an aura that disposes people well to him**

**The Bureau: five core departments are staffed with small elite unit**

* **Asset acquisition**
* **Sigint group**
* **Interior security**
* **Propaganda**
* **Forecasting**

**Warp journey takes 5 months**

**We all do crafting etc**

**Koll makes excellent star charts of the path; gets us +1 PF**

## **Glorious return to Ludd**

**Start of Q4 100.M42**

**We have to spend 1 profit factor if we don’t want Ludd’s economy to go to shit with a quarter million voidsmen orbiting above and some hungry plasma reactors.**

**We spend an additional 1 profit factor to hold celebrations of our return; shutting down manufactorums for a weekend and disbursing grants to charitable organisations, holding galas for the nobles and giving out food to the poor (with our house branding, naturally).**

**We take 2 PF from colony**

**Six of eight tribal chiefs turn up for our return. Two warring ones are not present - they were killed for fucking with the prophecy**

**They pledge fielty to our military goals, Cornelius delivers a cool speech and uses a totally non offensive salute.**

**We’re gifted six land-hammerhead-shark-panthers that are fuckawesome**

**Stealthy chameleon skin, naaasty teeth, horrific scream**

**The creatures are all female - the males can’t be tamed and must be bred in the wild**

**They’re culturally important to the Khans and only the most respected may ride them, although showing that outsiders have the skills may be a way of getting the Khans to accepts mixed unit tactics**

**Translator seems competent - knows way more than fuckhead governor**

**We all get 500xp**

**Ghotra - Royal Bloodline**

**Our awesome beasts**

**+10 S and T, +10 wounds**

**WS 58**

**BS -**

**S 65**

**T 60**

**Ag 50**

**Int 16**

**Per 50**

**WP 45**

**Fel -**

**Movement 8/16/24/48 Wounds 25**

**Armour None Total TB 6**

**Skills: Awareness (per), tracking (int), concealment (agi) +20, silent move (agi) +20**

**Talents: Swift attack, lightning attack, improved natural weapons, unnatural speed x2**

**Traits: Bestial, brutal charge, natural weapons, Apex, stealthy, swift**

**Weapons: Claws or fangs (1d10+6 R, Pen 0)**

**Cornelius does a whole bunch of purchasing, exhausting the capabilities of his trade network**

**Also sends out directed recruitment. Rolls 10 successes and gets 200 points’ worth of NPC allies**

* **Chief Confessor - skill 65**
* **Master of Whisperers (Head of The Bureau) - skill 70**
* **Master of Ordnance - skill 65**

**Before Kristoff pissed off on his own, he gave us a spherical ball of unknown material and told us “This is for use in emergencies” - needs to be activated and thrown. Some sort of special deadly weapon that is definitely not a grenade. It’s some kind of beacon that emits signals on every waveband. Attracts/calls some powerful thing?**

**Kristoff has been strangely energised in his faith after seeing the Emperor’s romper suit. He’s fired up about the crusade idea**

**Cornelius meets with Harlocke - meeting nearly busted up by controlled Tyranid hit squad**

**Cornelius become an Interrogator under Lord Inquisitor Harlocke**

**Got a lictor body for research purposes - Bureau dissects it, seems like a typical Chronos strain Lictor but with flesh implanted by malreceptors (psychic carnifex things) so they’re very difficult to spot psychically and have advanced cameleoline scales; traces of residue from our ship on its feet.**

**Genestealers were present**

## **The ancient research base**

**We leave Ludd and approach the archaeotech base, taking a week to travel there**

**The moon it’s in is shimmering blue and seems to be of extra-system origin**

**The research station is ancient and previous treasure hunters have attempted to plumb its depths but not returned**

**We scan it with the Allure’s augurs, getting 11 DoS**

**More general scan of the orbital zone gets 4 DoS**

**Koll uses Tracks in the Stars with 2 DoS - up to five weeks of previous warp engine usage**

**Top few layers of the lab are deserted and seem heavily damage. Lots of workshops and factories that are completely decrepit. Definitely pre-imperial. Doesn’t seem to have any heavy warp presence.**

**An area of the station, hidden below the surface areas, seems to have been shielded from damage. One zone appears pretty untouched and may still be vaguely functional. The entrance is small but there’s a large elevator shaft going down.**

**Team 13 is stationed in teleportarium, ready to deploy or to slaughter/disable anything that we teleport up**

**We deploy the servo skulls down the elevator shaft**

**Niko tries to hack the remaining security system and manages to get through a few layers before getting black ice feedback and a blinding sense of alien data structures, perhaps even a completely new paradigm of computation and mathematics.**

**He takes a WP check to avoid getting overwhelmed and manages to keep it together. For now…**

**Another bunch of servo skulls go down, this time not trying to hack. They get down to the lab and it’s beautiful - Sistine chapel style, conspicuously absent of recognisable figures**

**One of the exits to the main chamber is noticeably not of the same architectural style**

**The place is human scale and looks like it was made by humans, but no comparison with any imperial structures. All very functional and utilitarian yet beautiful**

**In one corner a machine is bubbling away. An automoton is repeatedly pressing a button on it.**

**There are a couple of bodies killed by plasma. Impacts of heavy bolter fire. Seems to be damage to the strange exit.**

**Big robotic titan, almost like a slender and alien Iron Giant**

**Cornelius realises that this looks like it might be something derived from the Men of Iron. It’s not contemperaneous with the robot rebellion but may be related…**

**Koll recalls old legends of these things. The true AIs created a race of lesser robots - the Men of Stone.**

**Between us we’re confused that these are \*relatively\* new Men of Stone - probably somewhere circa the Horus Heresy.**

**We continue mapping the place with servo skulls**

**Workshop - has thousands of work stations, look derelict but each was used for intricate personalised tooling. Some personal effects yet remain. At the back, three stations are still lit up. As the servo skulls approach the lights turn on and hidden guns blow them apart, destroying several and the rest retreat.**

**The sub-basement is well defended and all we can see is a forcefield at the back before the skulls retreat**

**Small bubble shaped room - one servo skull enters and signal immediately drops. It’s been shrunk!**

**Hab areas are apparently undefended, but it’s all tenebro maze style and we can’t reach back 20 rooms.**

**We send down ten dudes without ammo. They encounter the automaton and try to shoot it but fail. The automaton identifies one of them as a foreman and gives a readout**

**Main room: Offline**

**Workshop: 98% offline**

**Others: 74% offline**

**We fry the redshirts with shock collars although two seem to have escaped, including the “foreman”**

**We all descend via grav chute (Niko using several)**

**Alea and Cornelius set up firing positions and hide; Koll and Niko investigate**

**We start looking around the main room**

**Automaton is stuck in a logic loop of some sort**

**Niko finds a bag from previous explorers hidden by a stealth field**

**Cornelius finds evidence of the previous explorers’ camp. Were probably there for a couple of weeks based on their spoor.**

**Something terrifying lurks behind the mysterious door**

**Feeling foreboding, we decide to leave it alone**

**We go down to the sub basement**

**Loads of combat servitors!**

**Cornelius and Niko do a fight**

**Warpstone problems**

**83 - Niko gains d6 insanity**

**43 - Thousands of rats bickers with his machine spirit**

**We mash up the servitors**

**Niko does some archaeology. Seems that there’s a giant automaton behind the door. Or maybe lots more.**

**Loot:**

* **Stealth field**
* **Bag of explorers’ gear**

* + **Dataslate with codes to start the mysterious machine and notes about the site**
	+ **Previous explorers were down here for quite a while before being turned into servitors.**
	+ **Have code for the weird door but weren’t able to get in**

**900xp each!**

**We make for the hab complex next. Niko opens the door trivially and we move in.**

**Inside are shifting portal doors that follow some weird pattern and move us around the bizarre hyperdimensional space in the complex. Alea and Cornelius move fast and track the bio readings of the hapless redshirts, while Koll surveys its warp geometries (giving himself a bit of a headache in the process) and Niko tries to figure out the shifting patterns.**

**Alea psychically contacts one of the redshirts and looks through his eyes, seeing that they’re being transformed, and discovering that one of them is a latent psyker. Warp energy is crackling around**

**Alea and Cornelius get close to the room at the back where the redshirts ended up but the pattern shifts. Niko manages to give us a window to move and we sprint for the room. Inside the redshirts are being changed into weird ass servitors, but a daemon sorcerer of Tzeench turns up on a disc, plus a bunch of horrors. We’re a bit shaken but nobody breaks.**

**Niko bamfs in and drops on top of the sorcerer, hurting it, Cornelius fires his storm bolter blessed rounds into the sorcerer and finishes it off. He and Alea then move on the room; he fires a psyk-out grenade into the horrors and banishes several. Alea fires her shuriken cannon, blasting apart most of the remaining ones.**

**The wall next to Niko starts developing crazy warp energies as the systems shut down and geometries shift. Alea demolishes the remaining daemon in close combat**

**The disc starts roaring towards Koll, careening towards him. Cornelius fires a shield breaker shot, damaging its defences, and Koll unleashes a gauss blast that wounds it. Cornelius loads a psycannon bolt, offers a prayer, and fires. It explodes into goo**

**At least 10 lictors running around; Snitch killed 30 of them but they’re evolving very quickly indeed. We’ve got ~2 hours until they arrive to prepare**

**But the expected time comes and goes, and they’ve gone to ground.**

**1,300 XP for all!**

**Fucking lictors coming. Inquisitor Cyclopis sent them, they're super fast mutating. We have a sample but it undergoes apoptosis. We plan to engineer something to target that.**

**We bring down Team 13 and Koll’s new retinue. There's some tension but both teams stay professional (team 13 moreso)**

**Alea goes looking for potential ingress points and identifies some in the sub basement. She starts locking them down with wraithbone**

**Defense turrets in the workshop fire at a lictor that escapes**

**Niko starts developing a custom toxin to kill the nids via induction of uncontrolled mutation**

**Cornelius left leg demolished**

**1,300xp again**

**We fight the corrupt AI component**

**Manage to stick the corruption into the stasis trunk**

**Alpha 1 is now free… It has our number and is “friendly”**

**We shrink the stasis trunk and get out of the mini lab**

**Kroot are happy with the donation of tyranid biomass in exchange for the 18 deaths**

**Looks like the orbital strike on the tyranids was effective, although there are traces left. We exterminate some tyranid pods**

**Skaven fuckery counts as a Tenebro Maze**

**Skaven uprising among Clan Molder, they go “purging heretics”, kill lots of skaven but do purge some genestealers. Niko has confirmed Molder’s weird superstitions by manipulating them with an image of their rat god**

**We all get 700xp**

**[updated construction timelines in colony plans at this point]**