Vadinax Update, Week 14: The End Begins

The Vadinax Campaign is Goonhammer’s Global Crusade Campaign for Warhammer 40,000. Each week we’ll explore the major events taking place in the sector and talk about how players are shaping the ongoing story.

If you missed the most recent update before this, you can find it here.

The Assault on Hope's Clarion Call Begins

With their prize secured on Keplon, the forces of Chaos have turned their assault toward the Imperium's crown jewel in the Vadinax sector, the shrine world of Hope's Clarion Call. Spurred on by orders from the Dark Apostle Shanker Gord, these forces make haste for the planet as imperial defenders struggle to muster their forces.

Credit: Robert "TheChirurgeon" Jones

+++ INCOMING VOX TRANSMISSION: Shanker Gord’s Missive to the Assembled Chaos of Vadinax, Before the Siege of Hope’s Clarion Call +++

It seems…that Keplon…won’t be joining us…for the ressssst…of itssss…life.

But hells and bells, it seems so lively on the other side of it! This is Shanker Gord, Dark Apostle of the Scourged, and Ihhhhhham reaching out to you on the ones and the twos to tell you that hhhistory has points of no return. Such as hhhistory is. To every single one of you who has contributed to this moment, the thrones of secrets, blood, pleasure, and plague will be yours! For all this and more, just a few more installments of war. The relic of Keplon is ours.

You will understand the ffhhhuuullness of your deeds in time. We’ll write ballads bloody across skin and make our enemies scream them in the warp. Especially the elves! But know this: the relic of Keplon is also now Abaddon’s. The Despoiler is well aware of your progress and it brings him something those of us below his understanding of the Four interpret as satisfaction. He will, when this great music reaches its final height, find all things that he has not taken delivered to hhhhim -- and the Void will become us.

So let’s get rowdy with it, boys and girls, killers and churls. I want metrics. I want reportables. I want things that make our rivals become us as they cry and shit and scream in terror. I want you to be able to point at a place on a planetary map and proudly tell me or Abaddon or your god, “I bent their sword against them there, and I made them into ruin.” Or similar. Ihhhhffff you’re effective enough, you can just grunt. We’ll look out upon the plain of your destruction, and intuit the thing.

Get up, get fresh, get out. Get in your ships. Hope’s Clarion Cull. The final bastion of our lesser brothers and sisters, misses and misters, in this system. Get to it; run through it. I want you to take a chainsword and a flamer and make every person on this planet as small as you possibly can. I want you to find new ways to torture, infect, defeat, and destroy everything about them. I want you to find new business to start in the corpses of their families that might please the Void. I want you to compromise the entire idea of sacred buildings. I want you to make the great statues there into things the fabric of reality hates. I want you to get artistic. I want you to get silly. I want you to have fun.

Can you do that? Can you have fun for me? Can you deliver Abaddon a planet so perverse that when those quailing little priests call in their failure ships, it spits the fire back? I think you can. I think you will. I thhhhhink you must.

Pray for swiftness on Hope's Clarion Call. Either a swift defense, or a swift death.

+++STATUS REPORT: TERN’S ENDEAVOR+++

+++050123M03+++

At long last - after defeats in their raids at Grand Kriosa, the fall of Valern Citadel, and their attempts to regroup and stabilize the situation, the Imperial defenders of Tern’s Endeavor find themselves defending the outskirts of the planetary capital against the raiding warbands, surely the vanguard of a greater Chaos offensive. And yet, not all eyes turn toward this dubious jewel of the storm-wracked rock. Investigations and private agendas bear fruit, as the true nature of the world and the reason for this fierce conflict begins to dawn upon the commanders who fight over it.

The scattered reports can no longer be denied, even by those without first-hand encounters with them. Nocatalith pylons buried in the caverns and mines beneath Mellar’s Reach, or deep below the sea surrounding the mysterious Imperial installation of The Underside. An Ark Mechanicus of a heretical sect crashed upon the world, sealed remnants of it embedded in the tangled wreckage of the Graves. Webway gates hidden in secret places in the Laiten Expanse, surely placed there for some reason in the misty recesses of history. How much of this was known, before the combatants descended upon the world? The swiftness of an Inquisitorial response, an emissary of the Despoiler stepping through the warp to assess the Archenemy forces… is the conquest of the world their true goal, or but a necessity along their paths?

Eyesore

The Empty Eye is, by even generous accounts, an unlikely collection of ship segments and stranded voidcraft welded together, a crude simulacrum of a space station amassed from whatever resources salvagers and smugglers could manage to pull together. That is to say that, for an Ork, it clearly has all the familiar comforts and trappings of home. The station shudders, pressurized chambers tumbling away in flaming wreckage, external pipes and cabling dangling like shredded flesh from a torn-off limb. More forward-thinking or rational commanders sought to preserve the station’s integrity, yes, and to some initial effect… but the savagery of the orkish raiders could not be denied. Even now, a loose confederation of local smuggler-lords and military detachments hold the upper floors against the greenskin foe, but ceding the sublevels might prove to be a setback too great to overcome.

(Hastily dropping down to orbit after their failed attempt to claim a share of the ailing station, a Tau strike force discovers Tern’s Endeavor positively teeming with hostile forces, even on the surface. Credit: “Theseus Protocol”)

Tears of the Endeavor

While a full Chaos advance has yet to manifest, the decentralized nature of the Archenemy forces has seen some of their number already making raids against the planetary capital. Unlike the bastion that was Valern Citadel, Tearfall is a sprawling mess of hive-like communities - slow to take by dint of volume and nature, but lacking in all but hastily-improvised defensive positions. Imperial forces scramble to deny these raids, but they face a difficult prospect to respond in force and speed over the vast sprawl of the city’s outskirts.

(“Twice-Born” possessed stalk the fog of war at the outskirts of Tearfall… an approach that would soon be validated, as Captain Faustus of the Ultramarines threw some of their more reckless companions bodily from the top of a manufactorum complex.Credit: “Krayon Prince” Darryl.)

In Search of the Truth

Yet there may still be treasures more important to find. With little care for a smuggler station or industrial sprawl that might be found on any number of worlds in the Imperium, forces find themselves drawn in by their own agendas and discoveries, and tantalizing secrets or horrible truths stand upon the brink of revelation. It is as if, one might think, the whole world shudders in tense anticipation.

(The Sons of Medusa swoop in to bring the fight to battle-automata of the Theseus Protocol, surely not the last conflict between two forces in pursuit of archeotech secrets. Credit: “Theseus Protocol”)

(A scouting detachment of the Duskborn ventures out of a secret smuggler encampment to reconnoiter a webway gate, only to find an Aeldari force already scrambling to meet them. Credit: Quinn “Lhyon” Radich)

Next Week: Locks and Keys

That wraps up our look this week at the results of the Vadinax campaign but check back next week we talk about what’s in store for the final weeks of the campaign and the desperate attempts to protect Hope's Clarion Call. And we'll also check in again on our local groups. And in the meantime if you have any questions or feedback, drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.

Tags: 40k | Warhammer 40k | Narrative Play | Crusade | Vadinax