The Battle for Tora Armis concludes with a further two adventures. (I reviewed the first part here.) As a reminder, this mini-campaign is made up of four adventures, each featuring different agents of different Tiers, and all providing a different perspective on the same battle to retake the Tori Amos Tora Armis spire. So far ground forces have stormed the spire’s gates, while a strike force has landed at the top of spire and taken out a daemon. Now its time to see what the even-more-elite forces of the Imperium have been up to.
Major spoilers for these adventures follow!
Lord of the Spire
I’m immediately well-disposed towards this adventure because the cover art (used in the header above) is by Sam Manley whose art I can’t say enough good about. (It also helps that it features a Plague Marine, possibly the coolest Traitor Legion.)
Anyway, we’ve reached Tier 3! This time the PCs are the hand-picked agents of an Inquisitor, sent to infiltrate the Hive of Tora Armis and ferret out the source of the corruption that has gripped the rebel leaders. By this point I’ve resigned myself to the fact that we’re going to get another linear sequence of events, but there is a little bit more player freedom – the Agents have at their disposal a contingent of 30 Tempestus Scions (basically elite Imperial Guard soldiers) who they can order around as they wish. This is a really nice touch that distinguishes the Agents at this Tier as being really quite influential. In practice the scenario doesn’t particularly call out any opportunities for the PCs to do clever things with the troops under their command – it just assumes the Scions will follow them around and provide backing fire – but I’m sure inventive players and a reasonable GM could have some fun thinking up clever things to do with these guys.
The mission is pretty simple: breach Governor van Staten’s palace, find evidence of the source of corruption and the plans of the Traitor rebels. There’s a nice touch where military intel should be reported to the command team of the overall taskforce, while evidence of heresy should instead be reported only to the Inquisitor – a nice demonstration of the differing purviews of various bits of Imperium authority.
In practice this involves the PCs (and their troops) fighting their way into the Palace past a horde of relatively low-level enemies (giving plenty of opportunity for Tier 3 PCs to show how powerful they are); exploring the palace and finding first the Governor’s family and then the dreadful plan of the Traitors; and finally fighting their way to the Governor and defeating him. It’s actually a pretty simple scenario. Rather neatly the Palace itself has been possessed by a daemon who will talk to the PCs from time to time; they are welcome to engage it in conversation (and maybe discover some of the Traitors’ plans) at the cost of having to make Corruption tests. Further into the Palace there are lots of grotesque details where the Palace itself is basically one big organism, with random encounters that basically feel like the PCs are making their way through the internal organs of a giant creature. (It’s gross.) Along the way the PCs can discover the Traitors’ nefarious plan which resulted in the appearance of the Poxwalkers in the previous two adventures.
My favoruite bits are various social encounters. On the approach to the palace there’s a prisoner (left to die) who will claim to have all sorts of information about the palace defences in the hope the Agents will free him; all of its nonsense, but it might take the players a while to realise this! There’s a great encounter with the Governor’s family – one of them is die-hard Traitor, one claims to have been held captive against his will, and the third is willing to provide key intel in return for mercy – and the first will try to kill him once she realises what he’s doing. The PCs can also interrogate the Governor’s “servant and companion” (sounds like a euphemism to me) as well as engaging the Governor himself in small talk – although he is surprisingly uninformed, being immobile due to having partially merged with the house and having been kept ignorant of the Loyalist assault on the hive. You then get a Nintendo boss fight against the Governor (he has three stages, with the Daemon taking control of him for the third stage).
Oddly enough, the adventure doesn’t actually conclude with defeating the Governor – instead the PCs have to chase after the Real Threat, who turns out to be some sort of super-power Chaos Marine. They aren’t allowed to catch him – instead they just get to fight his lieutenant and report his destination to their commander in order to set up the fourth adventure. It’s a pretty anticlimactic ending (not least because the final fight is likely to be against one single Traitor Marine, which is unimpressive considering the PC party may very well include a Space Marine of their own) to an otherwise very decent adventure.
Affliction Ascendant
The finale of the Battle for Tora Armis is definitely a high-powered scenario. You’re all playing Primaris Space Marines of the Absolvers Chapter (or Tier 4 characters “with a sufficiently strong relationship with the Absolvers”) – which I have to say immediately makes me wonder if you can build a party of 4-6 Primaris Marines of sufficiently different abilities. (I guess you can – since Wrath & Glory doesn’t actually put many restrictions on what attributes, skills and talents you can buy.)
Helping matters is the fact that this adventure includes a new Archetype: First Company Veteran, who comes with the possibility of Terminator armour!1 (Presumably these guys are regular (non-Primaris) Marines.) It wouldn’t be a W&G Space Marine archetype without some issues – this one doesn’t actually have any mandatory Attributes, only suggested ones (which suggest you could build him with Strength and Toughness 1 if you chose to!). Terminator Armour, of course, is extremely powerful (2 extra AR over Power Armour, at the cost of being Cumbersome and the user being considered Large; you also get a Crux Terminatus (a stone icon) that gives you +1 Resolve and Influence to boot.
Regardless of whether you use Terminators, a very nice touch is the inclusion of “Rites of Battle” for the Space Marines – before the mission, you choose one of three Rites to use, which allow you to spend Glory in unique ways (generally in terms of buffing you and your allies in various ways for a turn). This feels very Space Marine-y and I like it!
Anyway, the adventure! The Space Marines are tasked with tracking down the Big Bad Traitor Marine discovered by the PCs at the end of the previous adventure. But there are other ominous developments: one of the chapter’s astropaths reports disturbances in the warp, and there’s a nice little scene where he has a dreadful vision (which may or may not kill him, depending on the players’ actions). Then it’s time to board a Thunderhawk gunship and descend to the spire on the planet below.
Weirdly this adventure seems to take place in a parallel universe: at the climax of On the Wings of Valkyries we saw a Space Marine drop-pod descending to the spire get temporarily sucked into a warpstorm, before our brave PCs killed the current boss, enabling the drop-pod to continue its descendent. I was completely convinced that it would turn out that the PCs of Affliction Ascendent would be in that drop pod – but instead they’re loaded into a Thunderhawk gunship instead – which also gets caught in a warp storm. Apparently this isn’t the full-blown storm of adventure 2 but rather a “minor disturbance”. I have literally no idea why the adventure was written this way, since I can’t think of a single thing gained by it. Very odd indeed.
In any case the Thunderhawk descends and gets temporarily caught in the warpstorm, leading to a brief combat where daemons materialise inside the ship and attack the PCs. (I suspect they’ll dispatch them in short order, but its a really cool scene nonetheless.) The Thunderhawk then crashes into the spire in the midst of a horde of ten thousand Poxwalkers, enabling the Space Marines to demonstrates that an uncountable horde of zombies is no match for 4-6 of the Emperor’s Finest.
Once the Space Marines have escaped the horde, they find a giant mysterious pit, dug by a bunch of recently-massacred labourers from the spire. Even more mysteriously, there’s a recorded warning being broadcast on repeat… from an Absolver’s sergeant. Excitingly, we get a map of the pit, hooray! Unfortunately it’s a top-down map of a vertical structure (three main levels) so it doesn’t actually depict the levels very well.
Via a few desultory combats, the Space Marines find more mysterious stuff. They can get some information from a surviving labourer, and find the reason for the recorded message: the bodies of a dozen Absolvers, dead for 3,000 years, who succeeded in trapping a powerful Greater Daemon down here, imprisoned within the body of one of their number. But the body of the Marine in question has been burst open, suggesting the daemon is no longer imprisoned…
There’s some nice sequences where the PCs periodically get information from their battle barge in orbit, as their NPC allies unearth information hidden in the barge’s databanks about what happened here millenia ago. Once the evidence of the Greater Daemon is uncovered, the stakes rise dramatically as their commanding officer authorises the use of orbital vortex bombs to destroy the whole site – including the entire Tora Armis Spire. This leads to more clashing between different Imperial authorities – in this case, the Governor and Lord-Militant of the whole Gilead system is told to butt out by the Space Marine Captain when she objects to the plan to vortex-bomb her home planet!
Another very neat touch is that the daemon is actually possessing the surviving labourer the PCs find shortly after entering the pit. Happily the adventure makes provision for them discovering this – a psyker can potentially spot him immediately, and as his human body decays other PCs can spot it too. He just dissolves and escapes as a bunch of maggots if identified, but in the meantime it gives the PCs the chance to interact socially with one of the main villains.
Because indeed there are not one but two big baddies here – the daemon and the Traitor Space Marine Lord – and they are working slightly at cross purposes. The Traitor Marine actually wants to ascend as a Daemon Prince (offering the spire as a sacrifice to Nurgle), while the Daemon seeks to return itself to full power and then destroy the whole planet. The depiction of the Great Unclean One in particular is marvellous – it is not some kind of evil mastermind who has been behind the whole rebellion, but rather has only just been awakened by accident and is trying to work out what the hell is going on, making his interactions with the PCs potentially quite interesting. (Just before the final confrontation he gets a Classic Villain speech where he seeks to persuade the PCs to join him.)
The adventure’s climactic ending is very interesting, although the presentation of it could have been a little clearer. Once the PCs reach the final area, there are two timers running: The Chaos Lord seeks to ascend by reaching a portal to the warp; but two rounds into this timer, the Great Unclean One enters the chamber and starts regenerating to full strength (which slows down the Lord’s progress, for some rather hand-wavey reason.)
At this point the PCs have a Big Choice – they can try to kill the Chaos Lord (or stop him from reaching his ascension); or they can seek to destroy the Daemon before it regains its full strength. Or they can just call down the vortex bomb strike and destroy both threats – as well as themselves and the entire hive city.
This is where the adventure gets a bit woolly. No mechanics are given for calling down the vortex bombs – presumably they just give the order and the bombs are launched. In one place the adventure confidently states that doing so will enable one of their adversaries to escape, but I’m not sure why that is – it sure looks like both will be destroyed (in so far as a Daemon can ever be destroyed completely). And in the Resolution section it describes the vortex bombs as destroying both threats. Oops!
There’s also the issue that it’s not clear why the PCs would want to stop the Chaos Lord reaching his target – he’s not doing anything to threaten them and there’s nothing really to suggest that him reaching his warp portal will have any terrible consequences (although Warhammer 40k fans may presumably be able to guess what he’s doing, and realise that a new Daemon Prince is a Bad Thing in general terms).
Furthermore there’s an unfortunate rules gap: the adventure says the Agents can delay the Chaos Lord by “dragging him or blocking him”. Neither the adventure nor the rulebook provides rules for those things; the rulebook does provide very brief rules for using an Athletics interaction attack to push a target, so you can use that, however there are two issues here: one is that the rulebook gives no guidance on how far a successful attack pushes an opponent; secondly the person writing the Chaos Lord’s profile hasn’t thought this through since he doesn’t have a listed Athletics skill, so he’ll use his default skill rating… which is only 5. This seems improbably low given that he Strength (including power armour) alone is 9! Oops. All fixable by a canny GM, but very sloppy.
In principle the ending choice is an impressive one. The two adversaries are certainly formidable, and the choice of which one to prioritise, and whether to call down the vortex bombs, certainly has a lot of potential. I particularly like that what the PCs do here has very significant and far-reaching consequences for the whole Gilead System – there are different outcomes depending on whether they call down the bombs, or defeat one threat, the other threat or both threats without them. Consequences can involve the destruction of Tora Armis, the unleashing of plagues across Gilead Primus, or a major invasion of the world by Death Guard in seven months time!
I like this adventure a lot. It sets out to be a big, bombastic, high-stakes adventure and it largely succeeds in delivering that. The adventure feels like it captures the nature of being a Space Marine: enormous capabilities both personally and in terms of the resources given to you, and making tough decisions which may well require you to sacrifice your own life for the greater good2. I like the fact that the final combat is designed to be extremely hard to win in the optimal way (though I have to say I can’t judge how difficult it will actually be).
Against this is the fact that once again we have a very linear scenario, and the confusion of the ending, which could do with a proper re-write. Supply the players with clear, understandable consequences for letting the Chaos Lord reach the rift, and some decent options for how to stop him, and I think this could be a real winner.
Overall Conclusion
The Battle for Tora Armis is a really interesting concept. I personally love the idea of showing the same battle from four different perspectives, and as an introduction to Wrath & Glory is it great for enabling players to get a taste of what gameplay at each of the four Tiers feels like. It definitely feels like there will be a really different feel playing Tier 3 characters blowing away enemies and ordering around elite Imperial Guard, compared to playing conscript soldiers slogging through a minefield!
The connections between the adventures are necessarily fairly light – and as noted above, in the final adventure, apparently contradictory to events described in a previous scenario – but I think they generally work pretty well for making the different scenarios feel like part of one bigger whole.
I think the “Deadly Battlefield” section in each adventure (the bit which details how PCs can spend Glory to call for support, and the GM can spend Ruin to make their lives more difficult) is a really nice touch which helps sell the idea that the PCs are part of a wider conflict.
As for the scenarios themselves, they are obviously all very action-packed and pretty linear. I feel like that works fine in Bloody Gates, and I feel like it is handled poorly in On the Wings of Valkyries (which I really don’t like much at all). I never really got a clear sense of why the agents were doing what they were doing in that scenario – which is a problem when the PCs are supposed to have a reasonably broad brief in accomplishing their goals. Surprisingly enough I found Lord of the Spire to be much better – even though its still pretty linear, the way its presented makes it work better for me, because the Agents have a very clear goal. And Affliction Ascendant is a pretty good captstone – really selling the hugely powerful abilities of Tier 4 characters and pitting them against a challenge with impressively far-reaching consequences.
Overall I feel like its not a bad campaign, so long as your players are up for a fairly linear experience. I might be inclined to skip On the Wings of Valkyries though.
Buy Lord of the Spire from DriveThruRPG here, and Affliction Ascendant here. Both these are affiliate links so I receive a small payment for purchases made using them.
Ill Met by Morrslieb 
A well-written review as usual, though the subject matter is deeply distasteful to me.
I understand the adventure again does absolutely nothing to challenge or problemathize treating its space Nazi enforcer protagonists as the heroes?
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It doesnt address it directly, no.
But it is interesting that the final ending involves the possibility of the “heroes” deciding to virus bomb the whole spire in order to stop the daemon. Obviously you can play that as Hard Men Making Hard Decisions, but you could also lean into the horrific aspects instead and use it as a way to interrogate the depiction of Space Marines as heroic.
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An interesting read although not something that appeals to me.
I’m not a great fan of Sci-Fi RPGs having had dissappointing experiences of SWN games in the past. I found that technology seemed to create problems for the GM and there was a lot of the old ‘Star Trek Syndrome’ where it never worked when it was needed or could be useful. My son and I used to laugh at the way in Star Trek the teleporters always broke just when you really needed to bring back the away team in a hurry.
Technology is a problem in Sci-Fi RPGs. Even if the GM understands it and manages to use it effectively to enhance the setting, it tends to trivialise everything and so has to be negated or ignored to create a crisis and I find it contrived.
That’s not to say WFRP doesn’t have issues that pose problems such as long distance communication without mobile phones and the like. But at least those are within the grasp of understanding and logic, whereas I find in Sci-Fi games the technology is either overpowered or non-existent.
Neither condition being particularly beneficial to roleplay.
‘Haggard bolted the hatch to the spaceship and heard the drug crazed mob outside howl in anger and begin thumping on the hull.’
Haggard: Ok! Well I’ll take out my Universal Communicator, phone the police and tell them to get down her pronto because I’m under attack.
GM: It’s not working you must have damaged it somehow.
Haggard: Ok! Well then I’ll use the ships communicator then.
GM: Ah! Thats broken too, perhaps the mob damaged it.
Haggard: Not problem then I’ll abandon the ship and teleport myself to a safe location.
GM: Sorry! Teleporters are out of commission for repairs.
Haggard: Are the ships cannon working? Oh! What about the escape pods?
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Haha! I agree that technology can pose a problem, but I feel that’s a bit less of an issue with 40k because the technology is somewhat more limited (eg teleporters do exist, but most ships don’t have them) and there is baked in a lot of unpredictability (because no-one really understands how the technology actually works, it’s all cargo cult rituals to keep it going).
Personally I do always groan when I see a gargantuan Equipment section in any high tech RPG though!
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On the 40k RPG Subreddit, commentor AVBill provided some detailed notes on a playthrough of Lord of the Spire which are worth a read: https://www.reddit.com/r/40krpg/comments/1djefhs/reviews_lord_of_the_spire_and_affliction_ascendant/
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