Dark Heresy Adventure: White Room

White Room
Kadoken

Index

1.     Shapes                                     2

2.     Burning Passions                    6

3.     Sanitarium                              7

4.     Leashed                                   10       

5.     The Shape’s Memories           11

Outline

            White Rook is a module of Dark Heresy 2E that is investigation and horror-based. Benjamin Breeg is a local enforcer officer. By chance, a shape from the immaterium has chosen him as refuge from what it only describes as “the noise”. It only knows a bare amount of what it is, why it came to be, and what the noise is. Just that it is drawing near to claim the shape and it could spell doom for the planet. The acolytes will be taken across the city chasing leads. They will be led to Saint Drusus’s Rest, the remaining embers of a sanitarium. The sanitarium holds a terrible power that will twist the minds of the acolytes and drive them to madness and hard as it attempts to claim his prize. How the acolytes stop the power is up to them.

Part 1: Shapes

            The acolytes begin in a city.  If they have themselves a base of operations, then enforcer lieutenant Benjamin Breeg can meet with them to discuss something private that he does not want their superiors to know. If they do not, then they will check on Breeg at his precinct due to strange behavior from him compounded with odd phenomena occuring around him. Breeg is an associate of the acolytes. He has been exposed to the evils the Inquisition face by foul luck. He was determined to be an asset and keeps the acolytes’ overseer, one Harkonn Straussheim, abreast of information passing through enforcer circles.

            Whichever way, Breeg will reluctantly tell them that he needs them to meet someone. He will take a deep breath, look as though he is seizing for a moment, and then drop down to his knees. He then looks up to them, and with a voice that sounds like someone is layering their own with Breegs, asks them to help him. This is the shape, and essentially, he is a warp ghost that has been wandering the immaterium and fleeing something. He only refers to himself as “shape”. He does not know what he is. He does not know how he came to be. All he knows is that for material months he has been wandering and observing when he is not seized by terror at the presence of what he calls “the noise”. He describes the noise as a vaguely humanoid screaming shape. He never peered at it for long, for it did no want to invite its glare. The shape has tried hiding from it. He would hop into the bodies of people to try to hide from it and control their bodies for a time. This is how he found Breeg, and through Breeg witnessed the things the acolytes did. He thinkss that the acolytes can help him.

            The shape does not know much, as said before. He will tell them a set of words that seems to have meaning to him. “White walls”, “burning eyes”, “flash”, “regret”, “ashes”, and “cold stone”. He cannot tell them exactly what those words mean, for he does not know himself. He can tell them he knows the general direction that the noise comes from but cannot pinpoint exactly where it is.

            The acolytes can attempt to figure out what these words mean and where to go from there. They can use a challenging (+0) inquiry test to ask around about what the words mean. With success, they will mainly get strange looks but once in a while burning eyes will strike a nerve with someone who is reminded of the Illuminated. The Illuminated were redemptionists, Imperial creed zealots that take on a personal mission to purge their homes of heretics and mutants. They were easily identified by tattooed flames covering around the eyes. Most citizens will not know if they are still active or not. Two degrees of success can tell the acolytes where the group used to be based in and possibly where they could find surviving members which was in spire Killian in a bloc named Laikham. Three degrees of success would tell them that there have been mutterings of an ex-redemptionist with marks around their eyes that look like removed tattoos hanging around a tavern called Hearth. 

            Alternatively, a psyker with psyniscience can try to find the source of the noise with a challenging (+0) psyniscience skill. One and two degrees of success will not tell the psyker much more than the shape can. Three degrees of success can get the location down to the city district. Four degrees of success or more will show them exactly where the shape originates, and the acolytes can skip to part three.

            Logic can also be used to attempt to make the words make sense in a challenging (+0) test. With success, “white walls” can be assumed to be some sort of hospital or institution. “Burning eyes” taken literally could be a psyker using their powers, or it could mean it looks like someone with burning eyes. Flash is harder to pin down. It could mean a literal flash. “Regret” is unclear if it is the shape’s regret it is referring to. “Ashes” is not hard to pin down. “Cold stone” is similar in that it is probably literal.

            Once they track onto a lead, they could search the history of the city to where the words may refer to and skip to part 3.

Part 2: Burning Passions

            Hearth is a respectable “smelt-house”, a dive and bar for manufactorum workers once their shifts are done. They serve mainly bottom shelf alcohol and simple food. The name comes from the great hearth in the middle that rises into a smokestack. The building is made of a mixture of stone and rockcrete. The inside contains a bar at the north end, tables spread out around the middle circling the hearth, and booths on the sides. There is a man sitting quietly and drinking by himself. He is Leddi Darrow, a manufactorum worker and ex-redemptionist. He is a tall bald skinny man with residue markings around his eyes that look like the outline of flames. He looks tired and downtrodden. If one were to ask someone in the bar about Leddi, they would be told that he comes in every few nights and mainly keeps to himself. He does not cause trouble, but some people are wary of him because of what he is rumored to have been.

            If confronted, he will be afraid of anyone asking about his past. He will run unless calmed by charm or convinced to stay otherwise. He will run through the back door which leads through a narrow alley and then a marketplace (which may be heavily crowded depending on the time of day). Passing through a busy marketplace normally counts as passing through difficult terrain. One can bypass the speed decrease by using acrobatics or navigating their way to a course that would lead to Leddi while avoiding crowds and obstacles. Leddi will attempt to run for the magrail station nearby that still has trains running.

            Leddi, once confronted one way or another, will beg the acolytes not to kill them. He feels he does not deserve the absolution he believes death brings. He will tell them what they need to find Saint Drusus’s Rest, the now defunct sanitarium. He was part of the Illuminated that worked as Frateris Milita under archbishop Longinus, the spiritual leader of the planet. Their group was let loose on those considered undesirables. Their group was disbanded after an incident involving the firebombing of a sanitarium. The leader of the Illuminated was convinced that the patients inside were afflicted by Chaos and were in various states of corruption and possession. They went to Saint Drusus’s Rest to burn it out. A bishop by the name of Ibrim Atellus tried to stop them. Leddi’s fervor was so high that he was the first one to through a firebomb through the window of the sanitarium in spite of the bishop. He immediately regretted it when the other Illuminated started throwing as well. He can still hear the screams of the dying as the white walls turned to ash. He knows he was wrong.

            Leddi will try to bargain with the acolytes. He wants to be properly punished. He cannot stand himself, but he will not take his own life. He will ask if they can have him sent to a penal colony or conscripted into a penal legion. He is so tired. Once the acolytes have promised this, he will tell them exactly where the sanitarium is. What they do next is up to them.

Part 3: Sanitarium

            Saint Drusus’s is a shell of its former self. It is a large three story building remniscent of a hospital. Inside its walls are the remains of clinical white floors and halls that lead to different facilities and rooms for its residents. Its foundations are left standing but what remains is a blackened ashen husk of sanitarium. The local district has not taken measures to clear the space or clean it up. No one in the district wants to go near it. The few that have entered have never been seen again.

            Saint Drusus hides in its heart a cavern underneath that served as a place of worship for its patients. Now it is a corrupted malefic space that is occupied by an unbound daemonhost. The daemonhost was an attempt by a chaos cult to create a new weapon. They used the smoke screen of the burnt down sanitarium and a former patient along with the aged confluence of suffering and insanity as a spot for a ritual. When the ritual was near its end and the patient, one Quinten Grimault of the planetary PDF was sacrificed, it was found that one more sacrifice was needed for the binding to take place. One cultist was betrayed. In their anger they sabotaged the rituals by changing the eldritch symbols to spit out the soul of the sacrifice and force the ritual to be half complete. The daemonhost was formed, but it was unbound. It slaughtered the other cultists and found thati ts form was stuck in this space. Its corporeal form could only sustain itself around the chamber. This gave the thing anger that would be legendary even in the warp for its intensity. It sent out projections of itself to capture the lost soul that would complete the ritual. The rage and pain it felts manifested them as screeching shapes shot out into the unknown space beyond the chamber.

            It found another strength. It could use the sanitarium and exert its influence over the place and anyone in it. It drove people who wanted to search the ruins insane to the point of neurogenic shock, heart attacks, and catatonicity. Mechanically, it isolates those who enter the sanitarium and drive them insane with visions and hallucinations. It seeks to cause them to be disabled or die from shock or trauma. When the acolytes enter, it will want to isolate Breeg who is carrying the shape. (Think the Shining, It, Nightmare on Elmstreet, Silent Hill, and other media in what it will try to do to take down the party). It needs the shape to be complete and unleash its rage upon the planet and the mortals which have chained it to the material world.

            Once the acolytes enter the threshold of a former entrance to the sanitarium, the influence starts immediately with individual visions that all look and feel very real. The visions begin with the acolytes seeing a very clean, lit, and working sanitarium before them in contrast to the burnt down ashes. No one is around. If they were to walk outside again the sanitarium would look burnt down and the view through the doorway would look similarly charred. The sanitarium space is now under control of the daemonhost beneath it. It reaches into the minds of all the acolytes to drive them crazy with bizarre and terrifying visions and situations. If one or more of the acolytes has the machine trait or something preventing their minds from being influenced, it will change the shape of the very place they stand to give a similar effect. The place and the immaterium are almost one and the same. This is helped by the Catalyst ritual performed before this campaign series already narrowing the divide between the material and immaterial on Desoleum. An untouchable will be unaffected by the sanitarium. The acolytes have to use willpower to fight through the visions and disperse them, so they may enter the undercroft church. They can also use fellowship, willpower and fellowship or willpower-based skills to help each other break free from the vision by giving bonuses on their willpower tests. Mechanically, this means first rolling an opposed roll between the daemonhost's willpower and the character's. This first test cannot be helped in a mundane way, although a power like mental fortitude can give a bonus to resist fear. Failing the first test puts the character under the daemonhost's influence and isolates them. Their bodies, if they are influenced by mind only, will stand still. If the daemonhost is forced to reconfigure the sanitarium around a character, they will be physically isolated into a room of the sanitarium. A second test decides if the character breaks out of the visions or space. This second test is unopposed and can be given help by other characters performing Fellowship or Willpower based skills to help them out of the Daemonhost's grasp on their mind. This takes the form of a +10 for every DoS the helping character gives. However, for every DoS the Daemonhost had over the character in the first test, make the test more difficult with a -10 penalty per opposed DoS from the first test. Failing this second test gains the character 1d5 insanity, forces them to roll on the shock chart, and has them face a terrible vision. Repeat the second test until the character snaps out of the vision. They do not have to snap out of fear effects to leave the vision. The daemonhost may try again to influence them (although limit this to two to three times just to be fair). The horrifying things the acolytes see and feel are up to the GM. 

Here are some examples:
-An acolyte is inside a gym with a swimming pool. The pool is empty. The gym is dark except for skylights high on the ceiling. Suddenly, hordes of regular people walk through the doors of the gym. Their numbers are so great they block the doorways. As they walk forward they suddenly fall and bleed profusely on the floor. Some of them lose their heads and spew geysers of blood from their necks. Others lose limbs. The blood pools rapidly. It literally fills the pool. Bodies begin to fill the room as more waves walk in to drop dead. The corpses gather into mountains. They surround the character. They begin to overtake them. The corpses and blood form a nauseous, cloying, and suffocating mess. The bodies rise to the ceiling, but the skylights are unbreakable as the acolyte is crushed against the ceiling from the combined pressure of the bodies, blood, and ceiling.
-An acolyte is moving through the sanitarium. They suddenly find themselves alone. They are next to a nurse's station. If they walk in any direction they find themselves back at the nurses station when they blink. No matter what they do they cannot escape returning to the same spot of the nurses station. Then, they hear great plodding sopping noises. Walls of flesh first appear far away and slowly move closer. The character can run but then they return. The walls move closer and they move disgustingly akin to slugs or snakes maneuvering the mass forward toward's the character. The flesh is made up of cuboid walls of human body parts including functional eyes and mouths placed haphazardly around its "body". The walls make horrid deep toned wails as they roll forward. They begin to crush and suffocate the character
-An acolyte is placed in an old room. It is dusty and the air is stale. There are three walls with old cracked wooden paneling. On the fourth wall are three doors. On each there are messages. "Very Scary", "Scary", and "Not Very Scary". The walls are indestructable. The doors open. The room is filled and the player suffocates. (Yes this is literally stolen from It. Also, never describe what is behind the doors when they open. Let your players imagine what is behind each door).

Part 4: Leashed

            The undercroft church contains the stink of rotting corpses and the touch of the warp. At its middle is an altar that the original ritual was done upon. All around it are malevolent symbols of Chaos that are still active for the failed ritual. The ritual is essentially in stasis with an early possession. The daemonhost is corporeal in this chamber, and the acolytes can attempt to fight it. It will be very difficult as the daemon bound is a powerful sorceror daemon of Tzeentch’s ilk. If they know anything about the warp, daemons, or anything related they can see that finishing a specific set of runes will make the ritual fail completely and free the shape, now known to be Quentin Grimault, from his lingering. The runes are ringed around an altar. This all started with a purposefully failed ritual to bind a daemonhost. They were short a sacrifice to send with Quentin Grimault, the vessel and ex-patient of Saint Drusus’s Rest. They betrayed one of their own. He sought revenge. While the betrayed cultist was trying to make the entire ritual fail, he only got partway through. Just enough to create the stasis. The daemonhost is stuck here now. They cannot leave the room corporeally. They can just barely leave the physical exterior of the room but their being becomes incorporeal and dissipates when moving past the sanitarium. They can use this to their advantage in killing the acolytes to secure the shape by phasing into incorporeality by hovering into the floor and walls and then re-emerging. They daemon wants the shape in order to complete the ritual. That will free him to wreak havoc on the city. He is livid due to planning an attack on a khornate daemon known as the "Brass Duke" and expanding his control in the realm of Chaos. He has been kept from doing so for motnhs. If the acolytes destroy him or complete the ritual, he will leave a fragment of himself. The fragment will be unsure whether he should thank them or plan their demise. He will compromise and give them three terrible truths. These truths can be about the series of adventures the GM runs, about the characters' backgrounds, anything that would cause them insanity or corruption, or anything the GM can imagine. The control the daemon has over the hospital ends after the daemonhost dies or is forced into the warp. 
      The acolytes will be free to leave the ashen remains when the thing dies and the fragment leaves. The sanitarium can rest and its connection to the warp is severed. It is cleansed. The spirit of Quentin will appear and thank the acolytes for freeing him.

Za'qa'iq of the Lord of Change, Unleashed Daemonhost

Rewards

+1000 Completion XP

The Shape’s Memories

            The shape will have instances of remembering its past if given certain triggers. These events are overwhelming for the shape, and if the acolytes wish they may partake in the involuntary telepathic link the shape creates or they may resist it.

Burning Eyes: A flash of flame either from a flame weapon, an explosion, or some other trigger will remind the shape of the fire he was in. His old corporeal shape stood at a window facing a group of redemptionists readying firebombs to throw into the place he lived in. A ringleader of the group riles up the rest by preaching about the corruption of the inhabitants and its cleansing by purifying light. In the middle of this, a car screeches to a stop as a man in a bishop’s clothes runs out and tells them to stop. The ringleader snears at this “pretender” as he calls him. He calls one of his men named “Leddi” to throw the first bomb as newly inducted initiate into the Illuminted. Leddi throws. He immediately has regret on his face as a gas leak explodes the building the Shape occupied. The shape screams in a hoarse man’s voice. It is clearly in distress as its breathing becomes heavier. The last portion of the memory has the shape turning back and running.

The Beast: When the shape returns to Saint Drusus’s Rest, he remembers who partly what he was. He was a patient being treated for severe PTSD. He was part of an Involute Cadre expedition into the xenos structures that litter the surface of Desoleum. What he saw in ancient and old caverns changed him. In the visions, he was a model patient. He remembers his therapist. He remembers nights of triggered PTSD and having to be strapped to his bed. He remembers once grabbing a syringe of a sedative from a nurse and trying to stab her with it. He remembers getting better. He remembers being discharged early due to the fire consuming the hospital. He remembers men in masks. He remembers being stuck with something. He remembers the cavern. He remembers the altar. He remembers the man having his throat cut. He remembers the man crawling and using his blood for writing something. He remembers being ejected from his body. He remembers him, but not him, rising and slaughtering the masked men. He remembers running.