The mention of Achilles in the second DD made me think that the great battles of legend would make great DW scenarios. For example...

THE BATTLE OF TROYOUS

A small moon that was a former Maiden World has been overrun by the Eldar. They are bunkered down in a ancient and massive city protected by an impenetrable power field of arcane origins and gaurded by a massive eldar army led by a Farseer and his personl champion, an Autarch code-named 'Hektor' by the Imperial forces. The Imperial Army is led by General Agamemnon, an old foe of the Farseer, who is determined to end their decades long conflict here and now or die trying. The players are a DW kill team nicknamed 'The Myrmidons' led by Captain Achilles.

All the high points of the Fall of Troy could be included as small scenarios, including boastful challenges between Exarchs and Marines leading to one on one combats and sneaky attempts to take the city by stealth.

3 DOZEN

A small marine force led by a DW kill team has to hold up the ork armies of 'Berzerxes the Bad' untill Imperial forces can arrive to reinforce this sector and contain the Waaagh!

In this case, the Marines are using the whole planet instead of just a single pass, sabotaging attempts to build gargants, blowing up telly-portas, freeing enslaved PDF personnel to form militia groups, etc. and generally waging a long-term guerilla campaign on an Ork held world to keep them from taking off somewhere else. A sample situation can be found in the 'Battle fof the Farm' scenario in the original WH40k Rogue Trader book.

THE ODYSSEY

A group of Death Watch Marines on a Rogue Trader vessel are caught up in a warp storm that deposits them at random ports throughout space and time. They must defeat whatever dangers are present at each stop in order to eventually escape the storm. Eventually they will find out that the Navigator has been possessed by a Daemon Prince of Tzeentch and has manipulated the storm to use the DW team as 'troubleshooters' to make changes across the universe for him.

Again, individual scenarios can be made out of the various adventures Odysseus had, culminating in a huge showdown with the Daemon Prince. 

Any other ideas...?

 This may be the best thread I have seen in this forum in a long time.  I plan to adapt the Odyssey for Deathwatch.  Great ideas!

That is bloody brilliant!  I actually pull heavily on various mythology myself.  Had thought about the Iliad to a degree, but not the Odyssey; at least, not for a Deathwatch campaign.

-=Brother Praetus=-

Brilliant adaptation! 

Do you have to be so obvious about it though? 

You do realise that most of the greeks died during the fighting right? You can't have your cake and eat it too. The space marines will have to die by the end of the campaign (specifically achilles). In fact Achilles will have to die in a VERY ignominious way, like a grot knife to the eye ball to reflect the Iliad.

I can't take it seriously when marines get to follow all the good bits of everything and none of the downsides. If marines were that indestructible they'd never die and the ones that existed 10,000 years ago would be the ones fighting now and Marneus Calgar would never have existed.

Hellebore

One of the best Ideas ever!

Hellebore said:

A grot knife to the eyeball...love it!

Can't think of any legends at the moment. But really you can get influences from anywhere. I've always wanted to do a 7 Samurai style DW campaign where the Inquisition sends the squad of DW Marines to a feudal world to train the ill equipped populace against a massive invasion of <horrors here>

The Trojan War, The Seven Samurai, these are fantastic ideas to build off of. I'm quite sure there are many many more.

See, there are plenty of ways to run a Deathwatch game. If you think it can't be done, you just aren't using your imagination.

I like the Seven Samurai concept - in fact you could take it further and use all the old Westerns as well!

I'd use the Alamo, but instead of a well-trained Mexican army, a force of Orks with some Kommandos.

Seven Samurai and the Alamo? Awesome! That's the spirit I'm after! Now let's flesh those out into a servicable adventure/campaign seed

Hellebore said:

You don't have to follow the stories religiously. The names and the situations are similar simply to get the players in the right frame of mind. It doesn't matter if Achilles the Greek died, or Odyesseus slew the suitors instead of a horde of Horrors of Tzeentch, just take a few of the choice events and build an adventure around them. You can even change the names so that only the basic premise remains if you find it too literal, the point is to take a legendary story and use it for inspiration for a Death Watch game.

Me personally, I love modifying movies and books to make new stories. It saves half the plot work (something I'm short on time for these days), allows you to use very familiar imagery that the players can easily visualize and, by changing up key plot points, you can still keep the players on their toes. I did this for 'Apocalypse Now' for Dark Heresy, for example, which is the perfect setup for  an Inquisitorial group on the trail of an IG Commander turned heretic if you just change a few of the key players and locations and then add a Chaos angle for Kurtz's madness.

And after all, GW/Black Library does it for almost every blinking book they write (especially the Ciaphas Kane novels), so by following their example, I'm actually being true to the spirit of the background

Mainly because I'm tired of space marines never losing, even when they are modelled on something where they are SUPPOSED to lose.

They get the best of everything and none of the negatives. Apparently they can wine and dine it up with the best of them. Because people don't like the idea that there are COSTS involved in being a space marine. That you can't be everything at the same time. That while a marine is a great warrior, he won't live for ever and there ARE some things he CAN'T do.

If I wanted a setting like that I wouldn't be playing Warhammer "just a man among untold billions that won't be missed" 40,000.

I'm just very unhappy with GW's obssession with space marines and the impact it has on the setting as a whole. Marines were created because humanity couldn't deal with the alien horrors one on one. They needed to create something equal to the task. But we get indestructible action heroes in a world where a single stray missile can annihilate them.

I think the problem is that people fail to realise that even a space marine is expendable and that a battle cannon doesn't care if it kills a normal human 10x over and a marine only 3x over, because they are both still dead.

That said I am looking forward to playing a deathwatch kill team.

Hellebore

Hellebore said:

I don't really think GW is particularly obsessed with Space Marines.  The fans are however, and GW being a business simply supplies the overwhelming demand for Space Marine products.

The thing is GW doesn't portray Space Marines as indestructible juggernauts.  Look at the Crimson Fists, the Scythes of the Emperor, or the Lamenters, to name just a few.  They generally portray the Astartes as uber warriors fighting uber beasties, and fairly often they get the worst of it.

 The problem I see with the Trojan War scenario is twofold, a) it's a bit of a simplistic way of using the 'marine = Greek Hero' of Ross's similie, which is admittedly a not terrible way of looking at marines, and b) it is very much just a warry campaign, a string of pc combats tied together with the occasional argument between protagonists, there's not much in the way of problems to solve with anything other than your pc's bolters and chainswords.

I think there are better ways to play space marines.

For example - a campaign on a single ex-Imperial planet riven by barbarism and factional conflict for millenia, where the pc's are sent to scout the world, and if possible set about returning the world to compliance. During the course of the campaign the pc's must decide which of the world's 4 nations is closest to Imperial orthodoxy (if any) and to favour. This would require talking to npcs, weighing their cultures, trying to learn if any Chaosy type stuff is going on behind the scenes, perhaps getting into the deeper mystery of why the world fell into anarchy 2000 years ago, as well as helping the people the pc's decide are 'the good guys' against their enemies.