What Do I Know?

I haven’t had much of a chance to play Spirit, my alcoholic heavy weapons guardsmen in Only War.  The last session we played is only the second time I have taken her out for a spin, and the first time was only an abbreviated session after creating her.

I’m not sure how long Spirit will survive.  She’s taken some pretty serious critical wounds, and we currently have no medic, but I’m getting ahead of myself.  Only War is starting to be the sci fi mirror of the DCC game that I run on the opposite Thursdays, but that’s not entirely inaccurate considering we’re guardsmen in the 40K universe.

So what did Spirit learn last session?

• She learned it is possible to requisition a case of reasonably good amasec, and the requisitions officer doesn’t need you to actually explain what you need it for.
• She learned that sometimes search and rescue/search and find out what killed another squad missions are sometimes not a choice duty to pull.  Especially when you bring a rocket launcher, and most of your searching is in an enclosed fortress, which limits your ability to safely fire frag missiles.
• She also learned that when one of your squad mates steals a bottle of amasec from you, and you down a whole bottle to keep anyone else from getting it, your inhibitions about using frag missiles in an enclosed space tend to go away.
• She learned that using the Ogryn as a scout may not be a good idea when you have to continually clarify between “up” and “other up.”  
• She learned that sergeants tend to get all uptight about you giving them helpful suggestions on how to do their job when they are hesitant to make a decision, and she further learned that when you say, “Sarge, I don’t mean to tell you how to do your job, but . . . ” enough times, the rest of the squad starts using that phrase as well.
• From watching the Stormtrooper shoot something with his Hellgun, she learned that not all lasguns are created equal.
• She learned that her companion, Skunk, was really fragile in comparison to killer servitors that randomly roam the halls looking to chop up visitors.
• She learned that if you find a room where there is a spacial anomaly on the wall that looks directly into the Warp, not only should you not look into it, you should not ask the Ruinous Powers what the meaning of life might be.
• She learned that when the medic is the one that does this, and he suddenly grows to be about as tall as the Ogryn and grows a second set of legs out of his butt cheeks, it might be time to put him down.  The Ogryn seems to know this instinctively and didn’t need to learn it, per se.

So, I’m badly injured, and my companion is dead.  Our medic is dead.  We don’t get an extraction until we figure out exactly what happened to the previous squad, and there is definitely Chaos involved in all of this.  Next session we get a ratling sniper and a psyker to aid us in our investigation.  Nothing can go wrong.

Anyway, I’m going to start looking at making up a Ministorum Priest, just as a purely academic exercise.

Also, I wanted to apologize to our GM for last session.  We all had fun, but for some reason, we got off on a goofy, self-destructive footing, and had an exceptionally hard time taking all of the maimed bodies and encroaching insanity seriously, and I wanted to apologize for my part in potentially ruining the mood of the creepy fortress.

We all had fun, but sometimes you should still have the fear of (Chaos)god(s) in you.