[Adventure] Vigilante: Who Shot Ya (Part 1)

Who Shot Ya

A Dark Heresy 2E: Vigilante Adventure

Part 1

 Intro

       Sestra is a civilized world in the Imperium man like many others in that it has the same problems as many others. Unfortunately, these problems are landing at the feet of unsuspecting Imperial citizens that will have to use their fists, tools, and whatever they can find to survive the underworld coming at them from a misunderstanding. These citizens will become vigilantes out of necessity or profit. Who Shot Ya is a combat-and-investigation-based Dark heresy adventure beginning with the players getting caught in a sudden slum house gunfight to having to blast down gangers, heretics, and worse to protect themselves and those they care about. 

Outline

       The vigilantes, even before they became vigilantes,  are generally normal citizenry, criminals, and outcast types that begin their ordeal at the slub hab owned by one Vic Romm. Mr. Romm is a loan shark and a minor player in the Underworld scene that is connected to greater powers around Sestra. Being caught up in a gunfight caused by a cocksure veteran ganger hunter, they will be blamed for Mr. Romm's death and have to band together against those searching for them to silence them. In this, they will choose new personas and costumes of a sort to keep their personal war personal from their daily lives. They will start from the beginning with little more than nothing and begin up the chain of the pyramid to find the kingpin threatening to make their lives hell. Along the way, they may find things more complicated than they realize and will rise from normal folks in an extreme situation to hardened masked vigilantes.

Index
(Part 1)

1 - In League

• Black Rook
• The Hangout
• Hangout Events
• The Visitors
• Malek the Vandal
• Beat Detectives
• The Convulsers
• Interrogating the House of Pain
• The Aftermath

2 - Become the Mask

• We Are the Swarm
• Two Half Hearts
• A Little Bit of the Ultraviolence
• The Package
• Hugo Bernlocher: CI?
• Reaching Out
• The Drop
• The No-Show
• The Courier
• The Proxy in the Autoshop
• Continued Paths
• The Exterminators (Killer Bees path)
• The Fun Police (Domino Pact path)

Cont. in (Part 2)

1 - Romm's Hab

     The characters have taken a trip to one of the worst places in Sestra Primus. No one wants to be in Jaq's Crook who isn't a crook, outcast, or an unfortunate tied to the place because of the Stralzi manufactorum. The characters know they have to go to hab 311 on the westside of the place. They roll up to a four-story slum, each individually and each with their own goals in mind. Their paths will cross and combine here in a most unfortunate way.

    On the top floor lies Mr. Vic Romm. Mr. Romm is a minor figure in the local community known for his loan services. His prominence lies more in the underworld as a bit player with connections to higher powers. This makes him interesting to one black-garbed and armored individual.

     The figure watches from a hab across the street, a lit lho stick in his hand and a hot-shot lasgun leaning on his knee. He is dressed to the nines in rare carapace armour, stylish black lamellar, and feather-lined coat. He looks somewhere between a plague doctor and a carrion bird proper.
     The acolytes will be met by surly gangers. One way or another either by choice, force, or chance they will be inside. Gunfire will start outside and the gangers will either mistakenly or clearly blame the Imperials and start to attack them. The fight outside will force them to move up the habs to confront Mr. Romm himself with Romm's thugs surrounding the hab attempting to make sense of the surprise attack and retaliate. Up the hab lies around 3-4 thugs on each floor with a majority of them using improvised weapons and the odd one out using a revolver. (GM note: Either use 1E's recidivist stats or 2E's thug stats with a -5 for all of the thug's characteristics. Lets be fair here with their skills and equipment, they will not get much fairness in this campaign).
     They will find Mr. Romm on the fourth floor with a smoking crater in his head. This is when the Black Rook, the shooter who has now finished his gunfight and by this time killed twenty thugs, will stroll up behind the characters and either by chance or by force be in the same room as the dead body. A holo-projector, an expensive device for a location like Jaq's Crook, will activate. The outline of a man in shadow will be seen. He has very few discernible figures with his face cloaked by darkness. The character can tell he has a very gaunt face with extremely sharp bone structure, a skinny frame, short well-kept hair, and hints of a high-class suit. Gaunt Face, as Black Rook calls him, will see the dead Mr. Romm in the room and realize his negotiations and a key part of his overall plan has been set back by the Black Rook and the characters. He will tell them in a strained and exasperated slightly high-pitched voice that he knows all their faces now and they will be found. The holo-projector will shut off. (That holo-projector could possibly get them around 300 thrones if sold to the right place with more or less depending on Commerce tests).

Black Rook

    The Black Rook will look at this and laugh at their predicament while searching through Mr. Romm's jacket. He is looking for a paper with a set of unnamed addresses on them. After that, he searches through Romm's safe in a room over. It has no gelt but some files that are of use to him. It will take some convincing to for the characters to know what's in them. If they do succeed their social checks versus his willpower, he'll let them know that the files list a series of account numbers at Aetherius Protections and Bonds. That's all he'll give.
    Either out of pity, humor, or boredom the Black Rook will invite them to come with him to explain their new perilous position and what they should do. He drives them in his van autocarriage to a nightclub that's near peakside (or a more affluent neighborhood with the meaning of the slang). He will undress to a t-shirt, jeans, and boots. He is a man in his thirties with a well-kept goatee and short brown hair. He's got an athletic build. He sits them down near some couches in the corner of the main floor of the nightclub and with the thumping music he explains that the man will eventually find them as he did him. Unlike the Black Rook who is very cocksure and a prolific killer of would-be assassins, they do not have a chance alone. Nor do they have a chance of running away. His advice, which he's giving because they would be very convenient distractions to the people Gaunt Face is connected to, is to crew up, suit up, gear up, and cause a bigger distraction than the one they did today so they don't themselves and the people they care about disappeared. Work up the chain and maybe they'll find Gaunt Face whom the Black Rook has been searching for.
     If they ask him why he does this stuff, it's because it makes him money, he's good at it, and it's fun. The gear and costume are literally him ripping off some sob story he heard of where apparently in some backend no-name sector some psycho started blowing up clinics wearing a black cloak and bird helmet. This story got passed around by the descendants that left the planet it happened on and part of it was that it was apparently out of revenge for his dead kids or something. He doesn't really care about all that and the guy sounded like some sad depressive loser. He dug the style though and made his own modifications. (This is your confirmation that this adventure happens about a hundred years after the events in the Malice campaign. With the Inquisition's resources, Rosco Tyruss/Oz Swein may still be out there. Who knows?)
      He does not really give a shit about them. To the point that he'll just straight up leave the club after giving the advice. They're convenient and they made his job slightly easier. Now they are alone, and they have to decide what to do. What they do have is the paper with written addresses on it that the Black Rook purposefully left behind.

*The Hangout and the Hideout*
(Important and to be used continuously throughout the campaign)

This section may change from group to group. The reason being that in designing this adventure for the party I GM for, one of the players opted to play a felinid. I understand if some GMs and parties wouldn't prefer that, but the place I made for them to meet up at was based on that character choice.

 The Hangout

The vigilantes can meet up at the Lost Bepir. The Lost Bepir is a cozy small bar and inn found near the eastern edge of Jaq's Crook. It contains around four beds to rent in small private rooms in its second story and a small bar and dining area on its first floor. Behind the bar is a kitchen where proper pub food is made along with a storage area for the various amasecs and liquors served in the place. The interesting thing about the Lost Bepir is that it is staffed mostly by felinids. The place is owned by a pure-blood lower merchant type named Richart Reiter who mainly lets it run itself. It has three employees.
       The bartender, Sylvana Nuhren, a brown-eared felinid in her forties that has dealt with a lifetime of hard knocks and has a somewhat rough but calm disposition. She deeply cares about her fellow employees and tries to be polite with customers but there's this sense of her holding back her feelings or putting up a front unless she feels like she can drop her guard with someone else.
      The waitress, Valya Muhl, a black-eared felinid in her late-twenties with a friendly chipper disposition. She does her best to put a smile on in her work and she is not afraid to tease or sass the customers. Unlike Sylvana who has taken setbacks in stride, however, Valya hides this inner build up of exhaustion behind her smile. She is intelligent and has an interest in architecture, history, and cartography. Not really having resources to attend a good school, she is mostly self-taught from studying at the librariums around Primus. She has wanderlust and wants to leave Primus to follow her dream of publishing self-made maps of the unknown regions of Absolutia, a continent due to how dangerous and complex it has not been totally mapped out even with satellite imagery. She does have to get past the Sestra cartography guild that does not allow work by non-pure humans, however.
      Then there is Jack Reik, a retired pit figher in his fifties who mainly snoozes in the corner on his favorite stool. He works as the bouncer for the place and kicks out those making trouble. He speaks in a rough deep voice and has a zero-tolerance policy against cat puns in the establishment. He serves as protection where the others can't as the enforcers tolerate his use of violence against unruly customers more than the abhumans. The Lost Bepir employees won't give up the information willingly, but he is also essentially Sylvana's unofficial foster father. He met her when he was nineteen and she was a young street urchin that seemed to have lost her parents for a reason she can't remember. Perhaps not one to make the best choices with his fraught income as an up-and-coming professional fighter, he took her in and raised her.
       There is also a fourth felinid that can be seen around the tavern, a dark grey-haired male named Simon Steiger. He is a somewhat naive person in his mid-twenties that often does contract work for Sylvana cleaning around the bar and the inn rooms. He can often be found sleeping on top of the beds he just cleaned at the end of his work once he's done with them. He has a somewhat flippant attitude to things and makes a living running from odd job to odd job around Sestra Primus. He has a deep somewhat nasally voice and has an odd fascination with the macabre. He likes stories about martyrs, horror, and has an appreciation for dark art. When he's not working he writes and has actually gotten a few paid pieces placed in local magazines under a pseudonym that hid his abhuman nature. He is a bonafide hipster and Bohemian-style artist that hangs out in a graveyard when he writes his stuff. Simon also a favorite recaf shop where his other artist friends gather.

Hangout Events
There are certain events that will occur in their hangout either to foreshadow future content, give them more information, or possibly open up assets to use in their war against Gaunt-Face. These should be spread out across sessions.

Recommended at Session 3 or 4
The Visitors

Two interesting faces will make their way to the Lost Bepir. Their names are Erika Weiss, an administratum investigator for keeping of the tithe and secretly the masked vigilante Miss No-Show, and Rayne McTaggart, a detective of sorts and secretly and newly minted inquisitor and psyker. Fleischer is here just to drink but she is suspicious of the way Rayne carries himself. Rayne is here in deep contemplation about how to find his inquest target, one Maemon of the Undivided Host. Both will keep extremely tight-lipped about their reasons. Rayne will ask if the vigilantes have ever heard of a man named Maemon, and will tell them he is a skinny brown-haired man with a silver tongue. He will add he is extremely dangerous and if they see him they should walk away. He will refuse to explain more than that. Fleischer really did just pop into the Lost Bepir for a drink and something to nurse her black eye she got an hour or so before while she was in her disguise. Fleischer is an official investigator but she also is privately investigating something called the "Network", which unbeknownst to the players is the conspiracy that their adversary Gaunt-Face founded and runs. Right now she is investigating houses Endal, Zuriner, Hilde, Krugen, Kursh, Freitaler, and Richtofen. There is a secret courier network between them they have been using to communicate to other members of the Network. She will not offer any of this information freely.

Recommended at Session 4 or 5

Malek the Vandal

      Near the beginning of hanging out at the hangout, the vigilantes and the employees all can roll a Challenging (+0) Awareness check to hear the sound of a paint can going off. If they fail, they will eventually move outside to find that a piece of graffiti art of the employees has been made on the wall of the Lost Bepir. If they succeed, then they will find that a youth of about 16 is using autocarriage spray paint cans and prints to create a piece of stylized cats and a dog based on the employees inside. The cats are all breeds that match the ears and tails of the felinids. The one based on Sylvana is sitting and looking forward diligently, the one based on Valya is in a pounce position, and the one based on Simon is sleeping. There is a large sleeping dog behind them all that looks somewhere between a bulldog and a pitbull. Underneath the cats are the words "Catscratch." Sylvana knows the vandal. His name is Malek Fife and he is the son of a Stralzi Manufactorum overseer, Tylo Fife. She will attempt to catch him and call his father to pick up his son who is skipping class in his last year of the primer educatory. She treats him like a scolding mother. Malek has no ill will towards the abhumans and did the piece as a joke. He has a rather flippant but positive personality and his hope is to bomb (paint) the Firmament Tower, a large building past the walls in Peaksangle that overlooks the city and rises to the mountain's height. He is a prolific vandal whose pieces are found across the city from the Crook to Steppeland to Downback. He has actually done pieces on the Black Rook, in the form of a rook carrying a pistol with the words "Black Rook Lives" underneath them, on magrail trains. He has a dark grey hoodie with paint drips on the arms and back. 

Malek can serve as an asset to the vigilantes. While not really one to roll in big circles, he has been around Sestra Primus a good number of times and may know some information the vigilantes can use in their fight against Gaunt-Face. He's not a violent sort but is known to cavort with the Killer Bees along with other groups around Primus.

One can combine this encounter with the Beat Detectives where these somewhat menacing detectives at the beginning stroll up to the unaware vandal and surround him. Then they put a hand on his shoulder and point out he has drips in three different places. They tussle his hair, tease him, and then continue inside.

Recommended at Session 4 or 5

Beat Detectives

       One day while at their hangout spot, two detectives from the SPED will walk in. Their names are Detective-Inspector Jakob Bartke and Detective Rudolf Kurst. They are partners and have a reputation as mavericks for walking into crime-ridden Jaq's Crook and often investigating cases or carrying out justice where other SPED members wouldn't bother. While not dirty cops they do share a predilection towards the brutal and blunt and are not afraid to draw weapons when confronted. They are here as a favor to one Letty Wahnn. Ludolf Viernau, Her ex has breached his parole recently and has been late the last few months with child support payments. Bartke takes lead on this and will confront Viernau with barely disguised contempt. He will offer Ludolf to talk to his parole officer to allow his tardiness to slide if he starts sending the checks in again and prevent him from being stuck back in a cell in Stargaze, the penal colony on Sestra's moon, Olion. Ludolf will sneer at this. Bartke and Kurst will proceed to work Ludolf over. They state that with Ludolf's job at the Stralzi manufactorum as a sitting machinist, he needs his hands. His legs and ribs are free game, however. Beating the deadbeat to a pulp, Bartke will repeat his conditions.

      The point of this encounter is to give the vigilantes possible new assets in the form of cooperating enforcers that could also possibly give them leads to new targets. Bartke and Kurst are fervent in their crusade against crime and they're not the only enforcers that actually care about what goes on in the Crook. Talking to them as strangers will have them reticent to reveal anything. Talking to them as confidants with knowledge of the vigilantes' personas can possibly lead them to a cooperative relationship with the vigilantes, promising to outright ignore them, or lead to two hostile enforcers on their tails. It all depends on how well the vigilantes can convince the enforcers they're a good thing to keep around.

Recommended at Session 5 or 6

The Convulsers

      Unknown groups have been kidnapping people and then leaving them to die horribly on the streets of Sestra Primus after seemingly giving these unlucky chosen some type of drug. Give this information to your players one way or another. I did it through their co-workers and bosses in their 9-5 jobs they have when they aren't vigilantes. This group turns out to be a group of brutal killers and assassins known as the House of Pain. Unfortunately, they have chosen the vigilantes' favorite hideout and the NPCs inside to test a serum made by a man named Rose-Glass on. Six of them will barge into the hangout with stummers on. Four of these are lighter armed assassins known as agonizers. Two are heavy thundering berzerkers known as butchers. They will attempt to brutalize the friendly NPCs and will attempt to stick one with a new version of Rose-Glass's serum. The vigilantes are to stop them before that happens. Killing these pain freaks that would brutalize and murder the friendly NPCs will come with rewards. They have decent equipment in the form of full modified Imperial Guard style flak armour under the ebon hoods and metal masks carried by the agonizers along with the two butchers carrying full plate armour. They also carry long tooth sabres, a 1d10 Pen 2 Balanced, Razor Sharp one-blade. Along with that the Agonizers carry hecuter pistols, the butchers carry great axes, and they all carry doses of one stimm and one frenzon inside respective inhalers each. They carry stummers and two of them will have keys to two idle autocarriages outside now.
      If the House of Pain are beaten off or killed, Jack will summon enough strength to implore you to protect his (adopted) daughter. He will then pass out. In my game, he was always going to survive. You may want to kill him off for added drama although Sylvana will be devastated. This will either convince to find a way to buy herself out of her contract under Reiter and either move to pre-wall Peaksangle where it would be safer or even out of Sestra Primus for good. If he survives, and if you want this up in the air have it be decided by a player's medicae test to stabilize him or the test of an ambulance they can pay extra for to get them into Jaq's Crook and have the EMTs save him. This event will also push Simon and Valya to make certain decisions realizing life is short. What those are is up to the GM. Simon in my game asked out one of the player characters (he's bi) and Valya began her long-term plan to get money to travel to Absolutia to map out the unknown parts of the continent.
      If one of the House of Pain members is actually captured, they did leave a trunk in one of the autocarriages they parked outside to leave them in along with a helpful excruciator kit to pry information from them. This will be a Difficult (-10) Interrogation test as the interrogated while having no hope of rescue, he views all the vigilantes as vermin. Here is the information you can receive per DoS.

1 DoS - This attack on the Lonely Bepir was planned in the late evening to lower the number of witnesses and to attack a group most people wouldn't care about (abhumans).
2 DoS - This attack had a primary motive in testing a serum out on one of the victims. This serum has been tested out many times before although it was usually the Domino Pact members that did it.
3 DoS - The serum is an experimental mixture of opiates, painkillers, and a secret ingredient that the House of Pain has that the Domino Pact doesn't. The secret ingredient is meant to maximize the effectivity of the other drugs to give a gigantic high not available by other sources that would approach OD levels.
4 DoS - The serum secret ingredient and this test were supposed to be a gift for Rose-Glass, the disgraced chymist and now sadistic experimenter who has been trying to create a perfect form of this serum for months. With the serum, whoever controls it will find themselves able to multiply the amount of narcotics they can sell by dozens of multitudes by using less ingredients. It hasn't worked because the versions Rose-Glass have been testing gets past the brain-blood barrier too easily and attacks the lobes. Rose-Glass and his patrons in the Domino Pact will be meeting the House of Pain's true masters at an ash-farm fifty kilometres outside Primus. The ash-farm is abandoned seasonally and is known as Camp Smoke.
5 DoS - The serum's secret ingredient is a gift by the House of Pain's patrons and true masters: The Drukhari.

This information above means that Simon would have gotten extremely high but also extremely addicted to the drug had he been stuck with the serum.
To move on from this point, go down to the Rose-Glass side mission.

Agonizer (Elite)

Butcher (Elite)

The point of this encounter is to solidify the vigilantes' motivation in this new war of theirs. This is their picnic in the park or burning-dog house moment.

Recommended at Session 6 or 7

The Beat Detectives and the Aftermath of the Convulsers

     Detectives Bartke and Kurst will be the first on the scene at the Lost Bepir about a day after the incident. They will discover (possibly headless) bodies of the House of Pain and arrange a coroner and a pick up for the bodies. They feel a bit guilty at not being able to help Sylvana as regulars to her bar when she needed it. However, they will also be curious at the shell casings left behind by whomever defended the employees of the Lost Bepir and possibly the looted corpses along with two missing autocarriages. There's no problem in their eyes for self-defense or defending others. It's that the damage on the bodies looks like it was done by professionals and a group like that worries them. That along with some other crime scenes including the looted Killer Bees smuggling ring, the shootout in Leiter Flat, and possibly the shootout in Steppeland at the Sanguine Angel. They will be suspicious of the vigilantes and other bar customers. If they ever find out who the vigilantes are, they will confront them but give them a chance to explain themselves and may not arrest them if they are persuasive enough. They, even with the power of enforcers in the Imperium, are constrained by rules and simple logistics in what they can do as detectives. They may appreciate allies that are less aloof than the Black Rook or the obstinate No-Show. This is a chance for the vigilantes to earn new assets. Like assets, they can warn the vigilantes about enforcer movements, tell them the information they learned (or beat out of thugs) on the street, and possibly help them in fights if they can do it in a way that doesn't implicate they're helping technically a group of criminals.
     Or, if the vigilantes cover-up the attack enough and have an alibi that will be supported by the grateful employees they saved, they will come around to give their condolences for Jack's injury and present Sylvana with the gift of a shotgun registered to Jack for when he comes back and a double-action revolver for Sylvana. Bartke will teach her how to use it and educate her on when she can escalate to using it for self-defense.

The Hideout

In my game, I used one of the player characters' apartments.

2 - Become the Mask

     I would take this time to have your players attempt to gear up and costume up their characters. The list is a good start for them to work up from. By this time they should have another week's pay along with whatever they could get by selling loot from the apartment fight. If they want to make a splash and distract Gaunt Face from having hitmen roll up to their jobs and pop them between the eyes, encourage them to make vigilante names and costumes.

We are the Swarm

     The first address on the list leads them to a brewery, St. Dulcette Brewing Company near the northeastern section of Jaq's Crook. It is one of a few around Sestra Primus and makes a decent low-shelf amasec often found around the taverns of Sestra Primus. This place is run by one Silas Lafett and his two nephews, Gelfrid and Sigric. They man office in the front while usually relying on seasonal labor to work in the brewery itself. It's not very large, being more of a store of St. Dulcette's amasec that is sold to local businesses. Being outer Peaksangle residents, the boss and his secretaries are somewhat soft and prefer locals they vet to do the work of carrying around barrels of amasec, feeding the vats proper ingredients, and keeping track of the proper workings. With a bit of convincing (and being out of their vigilante personas) the vigilantes can convince the boss to give them a tour around the factory if they say they're interested in work. It's going to be mostly uninteresting explaining of what their duties will be, but will also show that the building has two outer entrances on the northside of the building including a stairway found outside that leads to the second floor where bags of hops and barley are held. There are three doors on the bottom, one on the eastern side that serves as a backdoor, one to the office itself, and a large gate that leads to the room of vats that allows easy access for autocarriages to transport the stored amasec. There is also a basement where much of the liquor is stored, and in this basement is an odd spot covered by a rug that doesn't fit with the rest of the floor. Looking under it is a storm grate and underneath the storm grate is a ladder to the sewers.
    This brewery makes amasec, but also hides a smuggling ring beneath its basement that leads to sewers. Unfortunately, the place is under the protection of the Killer Bees, a local gang with territory in the area. They are the enforcers of the place that protect it for the various forces that use the place. Dressed in their Steppers jackets and armed with bats, brass knuckles, and laspistols they keep watch. There are eleven total here along with two drones, the lieutenants of the Killer Bees. The drones are armed with autopistols, mono-modified staffs, swords, and fighting gear they use to great effect with their unarmed specialization.     
      In the sewers lies great many a box meant to be transported, mainly with basic black market goods, chems, and medicine but one may hold a shifted shipment meant for the PDF. In this case it is a crate full of officer kits for PDF NCOs that include common quality 5 stub automatics, 5 las pistols, 10 microbeads, 10 uniforms, 10 magnoculars, stablights, and sundries in the kit. There are two magazines per stub automatic. Furthermore there is a crate filled with clothe which hides illegally smuggled military-grade stimm and anaesthesia (equivalent to morphine). It's a rather small shipment that might have been picked before, but there are ten filled syringes of the anesthesia. Five are labeled to have been made by Gallina Chymicals and the other five by Zeidegger Chymicals. There's about five stimm syringes in there as well. Along with that is a crate filled with legal goods hiding a stache of papers containing a cipher for their intended receivers. Go Down to Cipher 1 to continue this path.
     Investigating the Killer Bees and disrupting their activities is a way to cause trouble for Gaunt-Face. This is the vigilantes' introduction to them. They could possibly find where the smuggled crates of drugs were going to hurt their business more. It would come with possible monetary reward of the rackets they bust and weapon upgrades. Working their way bottom to top and starting by interrogating one of the gangers in the sewers or up on the street could lead them up the chain of the Bees and with that closer to their connections to Gaunt-Face. The leader of the gang doesn't know who he is but she knows how to get to the same circles that keep hiring her gang and thus closer to him. She is difficult to get to.

Two Half Hearts

     A Little Bit of the Ultra Violence

     The second address on the list will lead them to a suburb of Sestra Primus found to its west. This is known as the Leiter Flat and contains the homes of essentially the lower strata of the mercantile class and the high strata of the common class like managers, overseers, professional workers, and the like. Connected to Primus by magrail, it is common for the residents to go back and forth on a normal day of work. The streets break up the concrete of the Flat with paved stone roads and asphalt. The roads are built more for walking than for autocarriage travel. Neighboring houses and yards are broken up by the odd business or municipal fixture. Leiter Flat's location is right next to great highways that lead west from Sestra Primus into further parts of Fortisia.

     The address will bring them to the sight of eight figures in black and white suits and clothing approaching a home in the Flat. These are members of the Domino Pact, a gang of "refined" peakside thrill-seekers and sadists, that are here inquiring about picking up a package that Vic Romm is no longer able to. Gaunt-Face through the Network reached out to them to pick it up. The man that is supposed to be holding the package is Hugo Bernlocher. He is somewhat of a screw-up and at the lower end of Gaunt-Face's proxy network. It will turn out that the package has been lost by its caretaker and this makes the Pact members irate. One will beat the man that answered the door and the rest will spread out to find the package. They will fight the acolytes if they try to distract them.

   

Two Half Hearts Cont.: The Package

     The "package" turns out to be a boy that is five years of age. A strangely pale boy with blonde hair, he can be found hiding in a fern. The boy is hungry, fatigued, and scared. He has been kept in that house for three weeks. If the acolytes ask why he will tell them that he has a bionic heart. From what he can tell from what his captors said, they want the heart for some aristocrat up in the peaks that came down with a rare heart disease. The heart was given to him as an infant by a traveling biologis. Apparently, the biologis had found a cache of bionics thought lost in eras past. The boy, whose name is Wiland Harker, had a failing heart that was diseased since the day he was born. The tech-priest, not caring if the boy would die from the procedure and want to test to see if they were genuine and usable, performed surgery on him. Satisfied with the confirmation, the biologis left the planet and the boy had a new heart.

     He was kidnapped from his home in a Sombra colony. He does have distant family in the area around the Downback habs near the Arteria river. An aunt named Elsbeth Rennman.

     If the acolytes start to get greedy and think they can trade the heart for more information, remind them they have no way to contact the dying noble, no guarantee they will not be screwed over immediately after giving the heart, and that if the people went as far as they did to kidnap a kid and hire a bunch of bored murderous rich kids with taste of the ultraviolence to find him they're not going to take kindly to a group of vigilantes that are disrupting parts of their business by their existence.

     The boy will remember during the time that he parts with the vigilantes that he was taken to a place that looked like it had a series of polychromatic crystals on the ceiling when he had consciousness for mere seconds after being knocked out with sedative. Investigating this will lead them to a mountainside resort northwest of Sestra Primus on a neighboring mountain to the one that Primus is built into. The resort is known as the Albatross and it is found on mount Russ.

Two Half Hearts Cont.: The Paths After picking up The Package

    Going after the Domino Pact is another path they can choose. The rich kids have money and equipment to spare and similar to the Killer Bees their leader might know more about Gaunt-Face. That and being Peaksangle dwellers they can find a way to get past the Peakside wall.
      The trafficking was done by an order given to Gaunt-Face for one Wilhelm Richtofen of the merchant magnate Richtofen house trading company which have a stranglehold on certain industries including textiles, clothes manufactorums, and cotton fields on Viridia, the continent full of agri-work. His son Wesley is to inherit the company. With the heart from Willand, he could stay as the company's CEO for decades. If they do not have the heart, then he will die a week from when the acolytes go on this path.

Two Half Hearts Cont.: Hugo Bernlocher: CI?

      Hugo is a bit of a pushover. He is not combat trained and if the vigilantes put down pressure on him he will crack pretty quickly. He will tell them that he is a lower-ranked proxy member of the  Network that usually works in Steppeland. He answers to a man he only knows as Valten that he meets at a recaf shop named Parkside Black. Hugo's involvement in the Network is to be neutralized once they realize he lost the child so his use will be very limited. However, he can tell them that he has received messages before from a man who signals him from the second-story window of an autoshop in Steppeland called Kalten Body Works.

Two Half Hearts Cont.: Reaching Out

     

      They can try to get answers about Gaunt-Face if they use the boy as a decoy to draw out some of Richtofen's people. If the vigilantes have saved the boy from the Domino Pact and Bernlocher, House Richthofen will do about anything to get that hear to save Wilhelm Richthofen. They will also act outside of Gaunt-Face's authority as head of the Network to do this. This will cause a noticeable amount of egg on Gaunt-Face and will distract him more from finding the civilian personas of the vigilantes.
      The vigilantes can straight up call House Richthofen's offices in Steppeland. The first person that answers will most likely have no idea what they are talking about, but the call can be rerouted taken over by someone in the know along with calling the vox-phone the vigilantes used back. They will make a deal to meet them in a tavern called the Sanguine Angel in Steppeland. They will have the cops back off via bribes and will send in their own people to make a deal with the vigilantes. They will promise amounts totaling $50,000 thrones.
      Of course, these Richthofen wetwork agents have no intention of bringing the money or paying whomever stole the boy away from them. At the Sanguine Angel a skinny man armed with a handcannon smoking a lho stick will be waiting for them near the north-east corner of the main room. This is Leland Rolfe and he is an agent of the Richthofens and is waiting to lure the acolytes in an ambush by the waiting killers and mercs hiding in the side rooms. (Use the Bounty Hunter profile for his combat stats).
      While using a personal kill-team of theirs (Use DH1E's killteam stats or 2E's guardsmen stats with 5 less BS and WS) they have used on potentially collectivizing workers and in the service of the Network by Gaunt-Face's orders, they have also have the Paisano brothers as mercenaries. The Paisano brothers, Leo and Marco, are planet Baroquia natives with thick (not-Italian) accents that are on Sestra due to running from the Baroquian planetary law. They hitched a ride on a pilgrim ship to Sestra and are now stuck on it doing the things they did on the planet of a hundred princes. They are now working to recover the package although they have not been told exactly what the package is. Leo is an agile desperado with a keen eye and two custom best quality Tranter .54s while Marco is a much more blunt man wielding a custom modified Cavallo Autogun, a twin-linked autogun with double ammo capacity and overwhelming firepower. This team along with the four killteam members and the two heavies that the players will fight should serve as a tough encounter.
      The Paisanos can be convinced or bribed ($500) to not fight since they didn't realize the package was a kid. They may be bank robbers and known killers but they're not complete assholes. Leo and Marco no nothing other than being hired. Interrogating them won't get much other than they were hired by Rilker Zuriner, a fellow Network member of Wilhelm Richthofen's, to help get the package back. The others basically just know what the Paisano's know and that Wilhelm Richthofen's wife, Thilde Richthofen, was the one to set this all up to save her husband. She is a little untouchable for now being safely past the wall of Peaksangle. She never usually gets into this part of the business but she was desperate.
      If the deal is thwarted, Willhelm Richthofen dies the following night and his son Wesley inherits the company. Gaunt-Face has to spin this to look like he was helping Wesley. It still has him lose face, but there's not really a path to continue here. The vigilantes will have to look elsewhere. They can try finding a way to Rilker Zuriner, whose guild house is actually before the wall in Peaksangle and not past it.

Leo Paisano (Elite)

Marco Paisano (Elite)

The Drop
Miss No-Show

More information about the character: https://darkheresychainsofmalice.blogspot.com/2019/09/vigilante-erika-weiss-secret-vigilante.html

      The third address on the list is a specific bench in a park. The park lies in Steppeland and is a contrasting green compared to the rest of the concrete jungle of Sestra Primus. If the acolytes wait on the bench in the evening, a man will eventually sit down next to them with a briefcase and while looking forward will say, "the sun's glow is rather crimson this evening." The answer he is looking for is, "yet the night feels sanguine." The acolytes are obviously not going to know this so they will have to suspect the man is up to something. His name is Waldred Knefter and he is a courier for Gaunt-Face and the Network. If they follow the man, they will actually not be the first to reach him. A figure wearing a trenchcoat and a thick white stocking over her head will attack the man to steal the briefcase. She will run from the scene after getting the briefcase away. The vigilantes can chase her and attempt to catch her. They can attempt to use one of their social skills to stop her before she gets too far. If not, they will have to chase her. (GM note: I recommend using my chase rules in the Malice Overhaul). She can get away without the vigilantes being hurt in the end besides time. Also if they figure out she is Erika Weiss, inspector for the Administratum and a semi-regular customer of the Lost Bepir, then she can give them the cipher with a little bit of persuasion (as in actual persuasion, blackmail or death threats will get them murdered by the veteran vigilante). If they can catch up to her or if she willingly talks to them, they will learn that the man is one in a network that is a secret courier for multiple people around the city. Following them, she has learned they that go everywhere in the city including past the walls in Peakside. The messages are in a cipher but they are given to a variety of different figures including merchant magnates, underworld players, nobility, and one was possibly going to be sent to the planetary governor's office. She will leave soon after, and if they ask she will give her name as No-Show. She's an agile traverser and also uses a grapnel and line.

The Courier: Waldred Knefter    

     If the acolytes attempt to follow one of these couriers or confront them, they will admit they do not know what messages they're carrying. They are given their jobs through proxies in secretive ways. If anyone other than the intended courier were to know one of these proxies they would be disappeared from the city.
     Knefter actually peeked one time at who was picking up a message at a dead drop. He saw a skinny, dirty-blonde man with blue eyes and an aquiline nose pick up the letter. The man was wearing the crest of merchant house Zuriner. The courier has a man who pays him for his work. He meets this man who he only knows as Valten at a recaf shop near the park called Parkside Black. They do not chat and they get their business done quickly.
    What the vigilantes can do is force the courier to go to the location they will get the next message for them to follow or for them to give them the location they're going to receive the next message. If they force the courier to go, and the proxy is aware of the vigilantes' presence, they will shoot down the courier with a silenced shot. If they are not aware of their presence, then it will be shown that the proxy leaves the message in a place nearby that they will signal to the courier via the flash of light. This is usually done in places with little to no people around. If the vigilantes come to the place at the time the courier was supposed to then the proxy will know the courier told and will attempt to shoot the vigilantes from a hidden place.

The Proxy in the Autoshop

     The Autoshop is called Kalten Body Works and if they wait outside they can catch the proxy, one Leopold Reichert. He is dressed like the rest of the mechanics in the building and quickly goes inside and up the stairs with a toolbox. Inside the toolbox is a stablight, a pict recorder, and the parts to build together a sniper rifle with a silencer. His job is to leave a dead drop right outside of a fountain a block away from the autoshop and then give a signal via the stablight if the chosen courier is to take it or not. If they are able to interrogate the proxy then they will find that what the proxy knows is that they were hired by someone from the merchant house Zuriner. House Zuriner is a textiles trade house. They are paid very well to keep their secrets and work in this courier network. From what the proxy can tell, the network is an accumulated network between different prominent figures around Sestra Primus. All of those messages go through house Zuriner. He knows the head of House Zuriner is one Rilker Zuriner, but if they give the description they give of the gaunt man he will tell them Rilker is a fat man with round cheeks and shaved hair.

     The important takeaway is that Rilker might know who Gaunt-Face is.

Exterminators - Continuing the Killer Bees Path

      Going after the Killer Bees isn't much different from a normal turf war. Essentially the vigilantes will have to start from the outer edges of their territory and work inside to disable them. In this territory they need to break up protection rackets which means scaring off or killing Killer Bees from the places they "protect", find ways to prevent them from gaining or gaining business, busting up more smuggling circles they have, destroying the source of the illegal narcotics they have, killing off their leaders, making them lose face to other gangs, and other actions. They own about twenty blocks stretching out from the apartment complex known as the Hex, a twenty-story hab that circles in on itself and is the home of Queen Bee. They operate outside of these but to be fighting in Hex territory is to invite the wrath of the swarm. They number in the few thousands and while most are street busters with poor equipment there are the higher-ups with more teeth to bear along with those street officers being a lot more lenient with their personal armouries when someone, or a group of "concerned citizens" is busting up their block in their territory.

     The best approach, unless these vigilantes are rather foolhardy, are hit and run attacks where they can destroy something of value to the Bees that they cannot bring back easily. To add to this, they can try to get outside influences. The enforcers do not care about the Hex and honestly them trying to mess with it would essentially cause a street war not only in the Hex but all around Jaq's Crook and beyond. That is not the case for the Brass Skulls, a burgeoning tech gang whose numbers are small but well equipped by a lucky find from their leader who is obsessed with bionics and high-tech weaponry. It is said he might own a plasma pistol, but this is hear-say and extremely improbable and if it was true he would have it hidden so that eyes from the Adeptus Mechanicus do not invoke their sovereign rights over tech and destroy ten city blocks to get it. Along with the Brass Skulls are Killer Bee breakaway groups and other gangers local to Jaq's Crook that would like to see them at the top of the heap.

The Fun Police - Continuing the Domino Pact Path

      The Domino Pact are a bit harder than the Killer Bees to pursue. They do not own territory, by nature of their uniforms they are masked, and they seemingly cause violence and mayhem where they please. It is known many of them come from the outer-wall portion of Peaksangle, however. Following them, investigating them, and infiltrating them is the play here. With their connections past the wall there are influential members amongst their ranks that might have a connection to Gaunt-Face.
     There is a figure around the pact that is causing a stir in underground circles. No one knows his true name but he has the pseudonym of Rose-Glass, seemingly for the pair of spectacles he wears. It's said they prevent him from receiving horrible headaches. This Rose-Glass has been testing a new type of narcotic solution. Essentially, a mixture of diluted stimm and morphine with an added ingredient that enhances the smaller quantities of drug in the solution to achieve greater effects than the pure stuff. Unfortunately, he's left a trail of broken bodies as the ingredients are particular and the perfect mix has not been found yet that allows for the mix into the body without bypassing cerebral barriers leading to overdoses centralized in the brain. Death by this mixture is torturous and slow. Rose-Glass's research is too valuable for street narc dealers and the bosses that oversee those networks to stop him. If his solution gets perfected, then they can make large profits at a fraction of the cost of gathering pure drugs. Rose-Glass gets almost carte-blanche to do what he feels when he is protected along as he abides by the rules his patrons give and he doesn't test the stuff on their enforcers or employees. It is said right now he has close ties with the Pact Master that lies within the walls of Peaksangle.

The Ciphers

Cipher 1 (Killer Bee Smuggling)

     The cipher looks like a bunch of random longitude and latitude coordinates, but the coordinates pinpoint the locations of streets and buildings whose names make up a message. If worked through with a Challenging (+0) Logic test, it will reveal messages to be intended for a man named Veit Sudener. The message confirms the shipment of narcotics to Sudener and the have him invest in something the cipher calls "Angel" based on the cipher decrypting. The messages tell Veit to begin to accumulate blackmail on the aristocrats and bureaucrats that enter his establishment. The message tells him that Gaunt Face needs to have them push a piece of legislation allowing for private ownership of satellites around Sestra's airspace rather than the adept organizations, the local government, the merchant houses, and the noble houses having strict control over the airspace. One of them, a house Endal, has a stubborn patriarch and will push through any scandal concerning him or any other members of his house. It tells Sudener to have his "best" begin a honeypot operation with house Endal's next successor, Lanric Endal. The younger Endal already enjoys spending time at Sudener's riverside resort up the river Arteria that runs past Primus known as the Satin Dream. If he doesn't succumb, then he will make a fine hostage that will be kidnapped by "unrelated" forces and force Endal to sign under threat of death for his son. The unrelated forces will pretend to be Sestrite separatists who want to be free of the Imperium's rule, beginning with a satellite base they can raise influence, train soldiers, and accumulate resources on.

Ciper 2 (Courier)

     The second cipher laid out the same as the first. A Challenging (+0) Logic test is needed to crack it. However, it is part of a series of messages given to House Zuriner. The intended receiver of the message is one Rilker Zuriner. Gaunt-Face wants Zuriner to begin to rally the other merchant houses into investing something called "Angel". He promises that Zuriner and the rest will essentially have their own fiefdoms if Angel is worked through. To this end, however, Gaunt-Face still needs the money and resources to fund Angel's completion Zuriner needs to use his influence and business to help Gaunt-Face help in his smuggling operations done by proxies. The Killer Bees' have a shipment coming out of their massive drug lab and bunker a kilometers away underneath Mount Rathi's Platinum Waterfall. They call this the Honey Comb. He needs house Zuriner to send out trusted employees that can hide away the narcotics into Zuriner's autocarriage trucks that transport his textiles. The Killer Bees' drug trade has been an immense monetary boon to Gaunt-Face who has profited off of cooperation with them not only in Sestra Primus but other Sestrite cities as well.
  Part 2 Link: