Fanfic / The Guy Who Cried Grendel

In a Dark Heresy campaign, a low-level party (barely level 2) is given the job of investigating Khornate cultists on the planet Ambulon. They screw up trying to find the cult, only stumbling into them in the middle of a daemon Summoning Ritual. A firefight ensues, killing two PCs in the process, and making a massive bloodbath of the chamber. It should be noted that the demon-god Khorne doesn't care where the blood flows from, only that it flows, so he's quite happy with how the ritual turned out anyway. So happy, in fact, that he sends a Charnel Daemon there in response to the summoning. Whoops.

The Adept (scholar) of the party, one Castus Grendel, gets the first action after the daemon appears. He is overweight, physically incapable, and only armed with a knife, so he has no real chance to defeat the daemon. He decides to attack it anyway as a Heroic Sacrifice so that perhaps some of his party members can get away and call down an Exterminatus. He charges it, strikes with his knife- and hits. The players laugh and joke about how cool it would be if he actually killed it- and then he crits his damage roll. And then the critical crits. And he keeps getting criticals. The result?

One-Hit Kill.

And it just keeps getting more awesome from there, as Grendel and party are sent on more adventures and Grendel defeats even more daemons along with several dangerous xenos, wins the love of Benedicta, a Khornate cultist pretending to be a Sister of Battle, and saves multiple planets, eventually being canonized as a Living Saint.

The transcript can be found here.

Tropes

• Acrofatic: Grendel was overweight and physically incapable (his Agility starts at 24 - on a scale of 1-99), yet still pulled of some incredible moves.
• Action Girl: Inez the arbitrator and Benedicta the cultist/fake Sister of Battle.
• Anyone Can Die: Except Grendel, because he's too badass to die.
• Ascended Fanon: The Radical Inquisitor's Handbook has a letter between Inquisitors that specifically mentions Grendel (by name) and Benedicta (by description), making Adept Grendel canonical.
• Ax-Crazy: The Commissar (a later character played by Inez's player) has his moments.
• Badass Bookworm: Grendel is an adept, which is a scholarly class. He still managed to Curb Stomp threats seriously out of his league.
• Badass Normal: Only one party member (Able) has Psychic Powers, but even the non-Grendel ones get several very badass moments.
• Blood Knight: Benedicta, as she serves Khorne, the god of Blood Knights.
• Born Lucky: Grendal's player rolls so well over the course of the campaign that you'd think they were literally blessed the Emporer themselves.
• Critical Failure: As per Dark Heresy rules, they can happen. One of the more notable is when, after Grendel bluffs some pirates into fleeing, the cleric tries to talk the ship's crew into giving them a reward. He rolls a 100 (Dark Heresy skill rolls are rolled on D100, lower rolls better) and proceeds to insult the crap out of them while making the request. The crew promptly informs them that they should probably stay in their miserably poor rooms if they want to finish the trip in one piece.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Grendel keeps dishing them out. He eventually acquires a mesh robe that he decorates with silhouettes of the things he kills - which fills up rapidly.
• Cyborg: Cromwell the tech-priest, whose player narrated the story.
• Daemonic Possession: An Inquisitor the party looks for at one point gets possessed by a Tzeentchian Daemon.
• The Dreaded: Grendel became this towards Chaos.
• Exact Words: Happens a lot with Benedicta, though the party doesn't notice.
• First-Person Peripheral Narrator: The narrator of the story is the player of Cromwell, the tech-priest.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Well, from Chaos's point of view. Grendel was originally a librarian who read a forbidden book and was inducted into the Inquisition rather than be mind-wiped. Then he became a Living Saint.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Grendel intended his attack on the Charnel Daemon to be this, charging into a battle he had no hope of winning in order to buy his teammates a few seconds to escape. And then he actually won.
• I Call It "Vera": The knife Grendel used was eventually christened Grendel's Claw.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: One particularly nasty demon gets a tank-gun through the chest.
• In Love with the Mark: Benedicta's original job was to infiltrate the party to either kill Grendel or protect him from non-Khornate caused deaths. Well, that's what the job was before Grendel saved her life and she fell for him.
• Kill Tally: Grendel gets a set of robes with caricatures of all the things he kills- right side is for Daemons, left side for Xenos.
• Know When to Fold Them: The party runs away from overwhelming situations quite often (the narrator explicitly comparing it to Scooby-Doo).
• Living Legend: Grendel by the end of the game.
• Lovecraft Lite: If an Eldritch Abomination getting killed by a out-of-shape librarian with a knife in the first scene didn't tip you off.
• Loved by All: Grendel on the planets he's saved.
• Nerves of Steel: After taking out the Charnel Demon, Grendel is given the custom Trait "Contempt: Daemons", meaning daemons and related monsters simply cannot scare him.
• Non-Action Guy: Grendel, prior to becoming a legendary daemon slayer.
• Off with His Head!: The fate of that first daemon Grendel killed.
• One-Hit Polykill: At one point, Grendel disembowels two bloodletters with a single strike, and later on he blows a hole through an Ork Warboss, ignites some ammo behind him, and kills an Unbound Daemonhost with the ensuing explosion, while escaping without a scratch.
• Psychic Powers: Able, as a psyker, has them.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The party is a group of Inquisition acolytes consisting of an arbitrator, a self-deprecating psyker, a standoffish tech-priest, a pompous, racist cleric, and an unassuming librarian who somehow manages to curbstomp major daemons with a small knife.
• Rescue Romance: Invoked by the GM, who decides to have Benedicta make a save against developing some genuine affection for Grendel after he risks his life to save her. She fails. Horribly.
• Springtime for Hitler: Grendel intended to make a Heroic Sacrifice to buy time for the surviving party members to escape and call down an orbital bombardment that could kill the daemon. And then he did just that while armed only with his knife.
• This Was His True Form: When the party is sent to retrieve an Inquisitor, they're forced to fight an Unbound Daemonhost. Once they kill it, one of them finds an Inquisitorial rosette among the pile of gore left behind. They pocket the rosette as proof they "found" the Inquisitor.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: After the party reassures a sobbing Able that he is useful, he uses his powers to heal himself up. He gets Psychic Phenomena at the end- Memory Worm. The GM rules that he forgets that he got phenomena, so he essentially managed to use a chain of powers without incident- making him genuinely happy for the first time as an acolyte.
• Tough Act to Follow: The narrator mentions that Grendel's player was afraid of playing Grendel again after killing the Charnel Daemon, fearing that there was no way he was going to top that. Well, let's just say he shouldn't have worried.
• The Vamp: Benedicta was supposed to be this. Against Grendel, she winds up Becoming the Mask instead.
• Weapon of X-Slaying: The knife Grendel uses eventually becomes Grendel's Claw, a weapon with serious bonuses against Daemons, after he uses it to kill so many of them.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Two party members die in the encounter with the Charnel Daemon that sets the story off - an Assassin and a Scum. Their players replace them with the above-mentioned pompous, racist Cleric and an Assassin respectively.