The Daemon(?) Village

This encounter asks a question. The question is “can you make a one-page dungeon for 40k?” The answer is “sure, why not?” Just make sure you’ve got plenty of meatshields to send in ahead of you so that you’ll laugh instead of cry at the steep casualties on both sides.

Summary: A small fishing village just down river from Brandt’s Landing has been taken over by what the refugees claim are daemons. It’s actually just a bunch of smugglers in masks. Jinkies!

Confrontation: The smugglers are hostile cast-offs from the main smuggling operation that runs from Imberkavitas through the Enclave and Brandt’s Landing. They’re violent and their Disposition towards anyone not already in the group is a mere 25, and they’ll react with hostility to basically any behavior they don’t like. This is a combat encounter, is what I’m getting at here.

A) The shantytown was walled up to keep out wildlife. The scrapwood walls seem like flimsy plywood, but they’re packed layer upon layer over four feet thick. They can catch bullets indefinitely, lasers won’t penetrate, and even bolter rounds will take multiple shots before they’ve blown enough away to bring a section of the wall down. A chimera could make it through but would find itself stuck for some time in the middle of the wall, front half through, back half stuck outside, grinding over the not-quite-flattened debris. The gate is manned by two heavies and, atop a pair of sentry towers flanking it either side, four thugs toting autoguns. The rest of the wall is unmanned, but the sentries in the towers are sweeping the entire area. The people manning the gate are smugglers, but also pretending to be daemons with bodies painted red and masks that are convincing only at a distance. The trees surrounding the gate have been cleared away out to about fifteen meters for lumber for the town and fishing boats. The trees provide AP8 cover while the sentry tower’s battlements provide AP4 cover, and only to people outside the wall.

B) The shanties here have grown so close together that many of them have fused, sharing walls and with the preferred means of getting between one and another to cross the rooftops rather than use the narrow or non-existent paths between shanties. The original inhabitants have been cleared out, and now this chaotic mess is home to four thugs, six obscura addicts, and a skulker. The thugs are relatively in the open and in a single group, but the skulker is some ways away, hidden, and if there’s been any kind of alarm, actively seeking prey. The addicts will stay out of the fight until attacked. The shanties are jam-packed with AP4 cover such that you don’t even really have to make any effort to find it. It’s just there.

C) This is a large opening to the side of the shanties, loosely populated with occasional shacks, and ringed on all sides by stalls for weavers and toolmakers who serve as what industry the shantytown has. Or had, before the, ah, “daemons” moved in. Now there’s a single heavy here. Additionally the area is completely exposed. There is almost no cover except at the edges, and enemies from the tower at E as well as the sentry tower from A will be able to exchange fire with anyone in it at a distance of about fifty meters.

D) The fisher docks are located here on the banks of the river, along with several fisher boats. The river is too deep to be forded by any non-amphibious vehicle. Three thugs, one armed with an autogun, guard the river, along with a single skulker lurking in the shadows. The river is also overlooked by the tower at E at a distance of about fifty meters, and the guards atop the tower can exchange fire with any attackers down below.

E) This tower makes up the northeast corner of the shantytown, rising up out of the river, part of its bottom-floor flooded by an ultimately abandoned effort to waterproof its base. Atop the tower are two thugs with autoguns hiding behind the cover of AP 4 battlements. Within the tower, walkways crossing the flooded base leading to ladders that lead up to a second level of walkways leading to a ladder that finally leads up to the roof of the tower, is a single thug with a shotgun guarding the bottom floor and a skulker hiding on the middle level. The thugs up top do not have cover if flanked by going through the tower.

F) This is a small protected outpost on the opposite shore of the river where a few extra boats are kept in a cove surrounded by treacherous rocks. Fishing boats have been lashed together in an impromptu bridge from here to the other shore at D, and a bridge from the tower at E leads across the river to a much smaller sentry tower at the edge of the outpost’s wall. It’s guarded by just two thugs, who honestly are not so much guarding it as hiding out and hoping no one notices them and asks them to do anything.

Random Encounters

Roll on the below table anytime the acolytes return to a previously cleared area, spend too much time dicking around in one spot while the outpost is on alert, or it’s been at least two rounds of noisy combat in the same area. The number in parentheses at the beginning indicates how many of these encounters are left. Decrease by one each time the encounter is killed or otherwise defeated, or if you use the encounter to restock a static location.

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