History Fanfic / AllGuardsmenParty

** And then the Inquisitor who's their boss, who's only referred to as [[Franchise/{{Pokemon}} Professor Oak.]] [[spoiler:His real name is eventually revealed by the diplomacy adept to be Quercus, which means... Oak.]]

The series can be read [[http://1d4chan.org/wiki/All_Guardsmen_Party here on 1d4chan]], or at the author's [[http://www.theallguardsmenparty.com/ personal archive site]]. There are also some shorts:
[[https://imgur.com/a/evqam6e 1]], [[https://imgur.com/a/gRvnEUq 2]], [[https://imgur.com/a/DRjwcum 3]], [[https://imgur.com/a/LUOxcVk 4]], [[https://imgur.com/a/UFsWzxn 5]], [[https://imgur.com/a/u8v7VfZ 6]]

[[1 https://imgur.com/a/evqam6e]], [[2 https://imgur.com/a/gRvnEUq]], [[3 https://imgur.com/a/DRjwcum]], [[4 https://imgur.com/a/LUOxcVk]], [[5 https://imgur.com/a/UFsWzxn]], [[6 https://imgur.com/a/u8v7VfZ]]

The series can be read [[http://1d4chan.org/wiki/All_Guardsmen_Party here on 1d4chan]], or at the author's [[http://www.theallguardsmenparty.com/ personal archive site]].

** After an entire ''army'' deserted on their watch, the Commissars attached to said army were reassigned to a penal legion training camp. Not to the legion, but to the ''camp'', which means this is where they will spend the rest of their lives with no chance of redeeming themselves.

* SuperPowerMeltdown: [[spoiler:Bane Johns]] suffers one as a result of the squad's relentless attack. Forcing him to use more and more of his psychic energy to fend them off before he finally loses control.

* CatchPhrase: The page quote. Considering the situations the party gets into, starting every chapter or every major action sequence with a NotMakingThisUpDisclaimer is warranted.
** "and then we turned X into [[ChunkySalsaRule Chunky Salsa]]".
** "Truly we were the pinnacle of professionalism." ''Always'' spoken ironically.

* WidgetSeries: Most of the group has this opinion of the not-Anime the Tau make about them. The first storyline was a politically-sanitized version of their real adventures with the Tau, but according to a brief recap by the members who actually enjoy it and watch it regularly, it brought in Dark Eldar witches and GenderBender plots pretty quickly.

* ReasonYouSuckSpeech: The squad gets a ''lot'' of these, though never from Oak himself. Aside from a few of their Interrogator and Inquisitor bosses, the team has also endured dressing down from ship captains, an Eldar Farseer, and the [[spoiler:the ghost of a scout marine in the haunted poker room.]]

** The ''entire series'' makes much more sense after "Escape" interlude, where [[spoiler:Oak explains that he founded the school specifically to handle the worst Interrogators and them into better Inquisitors]].

* LoopholeAbuse: After the fiasco at the research facility in "The [REDACTED] Conspiracy", the Deathwatch Apothecary decides arresting the Guardsmen is no longer his squad's responsibility. The way he see it, their orders were to ''assist'' the Inquisitor in his investigation, ''not'' to do it for him. Now that he's dead, they are under no obligation to do anything but report back to their Watch Station for reassignment and let the Inquisition handle it. This obvious attempt to blow it all off as not his problem and have his superiors deal with it causes the Guardsmen to all feel a deep sense of camaraderie between themselves and him.

* TrainingFromHell: The party's backstory, played through in a marathon session as a series of bloody [[DwindlingParty Only War campaigns]] before they switched to ''TabletopGame/DarkHeresy''. Also applies to what they eventually put their Inquisitorial trainees through.
** The Emperor's Scythes scout marine teaches the Guardsmen how to operate Grav-chutes by giving a quick how to, [[SinkOrSwimMentor then pushing them down an elevator shaft]]. Stating that it was how he himself was taught.

* FateWorseThanDeath: The fate of the Rogue Trader's ship in "The Greater Good". On Doc's suggestion the Guardsmen [[spoiler:sabotage the warp engine and Geller field generators such that the ship becomes trapped in the Warp with no shielding; this causes the ship's inhabitants to be devoured/damned by daemons]].

* HaveYouTriedRebooting: A techpriest suggests the Guards try this with Sciscitat's unhinged techpriest. Using their laspistols. Turning him on again might be difficult, but it's worth a try.

* IdiotBall: Nubby takes firm possession of this during the ''Discount Spaceship'' chapter - it starts with buying the hunk of junk that is the ''Occurrence Border'' (for its relatively very low price just so he can pocket the remaining budget) and escalates from there. [[spoiler: His attempt to openly threaten the owner for a ''further discount'' on the already cheap ship leads the man to have 6 bombs set on the ship's six Geller Field generators out of spite, jeopardizing the whole mission even further just because Nubby wanted to twist the guy's arm for fun]]. His squad is very unimpressed and vow to never let him negotiate for anything important ever again.

** Bane Johns, the suave, hard-partying and improbably-lucky superspy, is a {{Spoonerism}} for "Franchise/JamesBond". He's even strapped into a laser death trap by an Ork named [[Film/{{Goldfinger}} Gol'fingy]], and the dialogue from that scene is used mostly verbatim.
*** Or more likely a reference to "WesternAnimation/{{Archer}}" with his flippant nonchalance.

* SuperPowerMeltdown: [[spoiler:Bane Johns]] suffers one as a result of the squads relentless attack. Forcing him to use more and more of his psychic energy to fend them off before he finally loses control.

* TakingYouWithMe
** [[spoiler:Crisp]] kills a chaos marine by [[spoiler:having Twitch strap all his remaining explosives to his back and detonating them once he's too close for the marine to get away in time.]]

* UnderestimatingBadassery: [[spoiler:The Conspiracy]] doesn't consider the Guardsmen important, so it ignores them entirely. The two members to realize they were a potential threat either died before they could warn their superiors or insisted it was all blind luck.
* TheUnfought: Shoggy indicates their GM had planned for the Guardsmen to fight Bane Johns as the final boss of "The Interplanetary Man of Mystery". The players managed to talk their way out of the fight, much to the GM's annoyance. [[spoiler:So he brought Bane back during "The "Stealth" Mission"]].

** During ''Good Soldiers, Bad Educators'' a Commissar cadet guns down a fleeing trainee only to be shot dead when he tries to kill another. The shooter is unidentified and the Guardsmen are sure it was a Gretchin which stabbed his corpse repeatedly with an Imperium-issue knife.

** ''The Penal Legion'' reveal the students from their training days learned it may be necessary to kill superior officers if they're actively endangering the squad. They did ''not'' learn how to cover up said killing before trying it, hence their reassignment to a penal legion.

* WidgetSeries: Most of the group has this opinion of the not-Anime the Tau make about them. The first storyline was a politically-sanitized version of their real adventures with the Tau, but according to a brief recap by the members who actually enjoy it and watch it regularly it brought in Dark Eldar witches and GenderBender plots pretty quickly.

* AppropriatedAppellation: "Rupert" is British military slang for [[UpperClassTwit a dangerously incompetent upper-class officer]]. The Rupert wholeheartedly adopted this term and insists everyone in the unit call him as such. This takes all the fun out of it for the Guardsmen, but they still call him that, [[InsultOfEndearment even after they warm up to him.]]

* BadBoss: Most of the Interrogators qualify, some more than others. The Rupert is collectively agreed to be the least bad boss the Guardsmen have had[[note]]he's polite, well-connected (literally anybody important is an "old family friend" of his) and pretty competent, but also dangerously naive and sees no issue with charging things head-on[[/note]] [[spoiler: Bane Johns and Angelica Dominicus (aka "The Bitch") are definitely the worst.]]

* BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor: Frequently. Arguably the result of Sarge's promotion - sure, their superiors are no longer ''insane'' and can't just boss them around, but they have much worse assignments now since they've "proven" themselves by having one of their own become a trainee Inquisitor.

* ChunkySalsaRule: The Guardsmen have a standard response when dealing with daemons or similar beings: ff destroying the head and other organs is insufficient to stop an enemy, reducing its entire body to chunky salsa with explosives should at least slow it down.

** When the ComicBook/JudgeDredd-expy Governor Marshall protests using an Arbite ship's brig to transport, to quote Sciscitat, "Unimportant prisoners", Sciscitat flippantly suggests just shoving [[spoiler:the Guardsmen]] in a laundry room instead. Much to the befuddlement of the ship's crew, the Governor Marshall does just that.

** All the Guardsmen are prone to this occasionally, such as when they [[spoiler:fail to notice that the Zoanthrope they are transporting in ''Tyranid Delivery Experts'' is possessed by a daemon for several weeks... or that having an obviously daemonic portal linking ''into its secure cell'' from another point in the ship is a bad thing]].
** Doc is the most prone to this, however, such as when he was so absorbed with his patients in a plague ward (and fawning over his Soroitas hospitallier girlfriend) no notice that [[spoiler:said plague ward was rapidly becoming a hotspot for Nurgalite cultists.]] The fact that [[spoiler:his patients were often infected with [[NoOneShouldSurviveThat several instantly-fatal diseases at the same time]], or the fact that treating those diseases [[HarmfullHealing tended to leave said patients in a worse state than before]], ''[[RuleOfThree or]]'' the fact he knew there was a Nurgle cult operating somewhere on the planet,]] goes completely over his head until Sarge literally smacks some sense into him.

* TheFool: Bane Johns, the squad's fifth Interrogator: despite what seems like a surfeit of confidence and a lack of strategic planning or common sense, every event in his mission seems to go his way without fail. [[spoiler:Turns out he's a psyker with previously undiscovered RealityWarper tendencies who can casually arrange probability to go in his favor - by siphoning away the luck of his teammates or anyone nearby, leading to their (probably) swift death while leaving Bane unharmed. It's also deconstructed, since a lifetime of everything effortlessly going his own way has turned Johns into a psychopathic hedonist with no grasp on reality]].

** The commanding officers in "Heretics and Pilgrims" all managed a shade of this. The Interrogator got himself thrown in the brig after he repeatedly insulted a ship's captain. His subordinates then took control of a lightly armed mob and sent them into a fortified kill zone, getting them slaughtered and triggering daemonic summoning rituals.
** Bane Johns may get the job done stylishly, but during the post-mission discussion with Sarge it's revealed he has gotten ''thirty squads'' of agents killed to the last man. He succeeds in his mission every time, sure, but there's literally no survivors when he's done; the whole point of Oak's initiative is to get '''surviving''' Inquisitorial teams up and running.

** This gets repeated when the squad doesn't understand the complex and varied philosophies of the Inquisition.

* IdiotBall: Nubby takes firm possession of this during the ''Discount Spaceship'' chapter - it starts with buying the hunk of junk that is the ''Occurrence Border'' (for its very low price just so he can pocket the remaining budget) and escalates from there. [[spoiler: His attempt to openly threaten the owner for a ''further discount'' on the already cheap ship leads the man to have 6 bombs set on the ship's six Geller Field generators out of spite, jeopardizing the whole mission even further just because Nubby wanted to twist the guy's arm for fun]]. His squad is very unimpressed and vow to never let him negotiate for anything important ever again.

* JerkAssHasAPoint: In ''Tyranid Delivery Experts'', the ''Occurrence Border'''s Navigator points out that the approaching navy vessels probably believe there is a genestealer cult on their ship... since they de-warped on the far edge of the system, and are radiating Tyranid psychic energy from the captive Zoanthrope. While no one enjoys his insults they can't deny he's right.

* KillItWithFire: Exaggerated, even for a ''40K'' fic. The crew of the ''Occurrence Border'' has on at least one occasion dealt with a warp-corrupted portion of the ship by selectively lowering void shields and melting the offending portion off in a ''sun''. Considering that the entire front end of the ship (where the bow used to be) is obviously melted over, nobody questions Old Bill if this is true.

* LogicalWeakness: [[spoiler: Bane Johns' luck manipulation keeps him safe by draining the luck of anyone nearby, rendering him effectively invulnerable. However, this is automatically caused by Bane's psyker nature on all threats within the power's radius and he's untrained due to never being identified as a psyker. The Guardsmen (once they realize what's happening) stay out of his power's range and simultaneously concentrate all their firepower on him, since no psyker's powers are unlimited and overuse typically causes very bad things to happen to them. Every single shot at Bane might miss or ricochet and every grenade becomes a dud, but hundreds of shots and dozens of grenades (with no source of luck to leech from) eventually causes Bane's powers to fade out and leave him open]].

* MediumAwareness: After the first chapter and a half, the origin of the series as a Dark Heresy campaign is generally ignored. But an occasional line is thrown in. For example, the narrator points out that fighting in vacuum and zero-G felt like the party had lost exactly 10% of their ballistic skills, and capitalizes the word "Obsession" (also a gaming term) while describing Aimy and Twitch.

* PhlebotinumInducedStupidity: During ''The "Stealth" Mission'', the Guardsmen learn that a Chaos artifact held by a high-level crimelord, who would intuitively try and keep it a secret, is being auctioned off in a poker game. Their associated interrogators leap at the opportunity to participate while the lead inquisitor (up in orbit) yells in anguish about how everything and everyone became so stupid. Why the plot suddenly became [[TuxedoAndMartini the setup to a Bond film]] is not a property of the artifact itself, but rather [[spoiler:Bane Johns, the Interplanetary Man of Mystery]].

* GiveChaseWithAngryNatives: The traffic cop in "The "Stealth" Mission" starts following the Guardsmen to issue them even more citations. Having a police escort makes it hard to be inconspicuous, so they eventually run a few laps through the middle of a Hive gang war. Their van only takes a few accidental hits; the cop on the other hand gets deliberately shot down and swarmed by kids with pipes. He is ''very'' pissed the next time he shows up.

* OlderIsBetter: In the last part of ''The "Stealth" Mission'', [[spoiler: in order to over come Bane Johns' probability manipulation powers,]] Tink equips the team with the most reliable lasguns on the planet that they could scrounge up. Because it's ''40k'', the team suspects--almost certainly correctly--they're all older than the human settlement on the planet itself. The only one whose serial number hasn't been worn off with age is Sarge's, all but revealing that, of a type of weapon that likely has trillions of copies in circulation in the galaxy, it was the ''seventh of its kind ever made'' on the ''forge world of Mars''.

* AccidentalTruth: During ''The Xenotech Heresy'' Sarge claims that there is an entire heretek fleet chasing the archaeotech in order to keep the techpriests in line. Just after he finally admits he lied, a heretek fleet drops out of warp.

** The second-hand Warp-ship known as the ''Occurrence Border'' which has been called a "glorified Space Hulk". The first thing that the team noticed about it is that the entire bow and half of the ship's total length was missing and crudely welded over, and it only got worse from there. It does make it perfect as an Inquisition base though, since everyone assumes nobody of any importance would be caught dead in the thing.

* BandOfBrothers: The Guardsmen certainly view themselves as this. The rest of their teams, [[AnyoneCanDie not so much]]. They do eventually expand this to include the more reliable and pleasant teammates they've had, such as [[OnlySaneMan Jim and Hannah]] (deemed "the broest of cogbroes" and taught how to think like proper Guardsmen), [[IneptMage Fumbles]], [[MilitaryBrat Aimy]] (who was already a Guardswoman to begin with, just a noble one from a different regiment), and [[TokenMinority Fio]].

* BullyingADragon: A Techpriest actively harasses and sabotages the Guardsmen, frequently leading them into danger on purpose and nearly ruining the entire mission, out of sheer pettiness and spite. Only as they (a squad of seasoned Guardsmen with a fresh grudge) are beating him (a lone Techpriest) to death does the Techpriest realize that this might have been a bad idea.

** The betrayal and capture of the Guardsmen at the end of ''The "Stealth" Mission'' is actually a plan by [[spoiler:Inquisitor Oak]] to get his people into enemy-controlled territory for a vital mission. Amusingly, the Guardsmen almost ruin this plan by [[ScrewThisImOutOfHere escaping the Arbite ship transporting them to the Inquisition]]. If they hadn't randomly picked [[spoiler:Oak's]] ship to steal and escape in, the plan would have fallen apart completely.

* ChunkySalsaRule: The Guardsmen have a standard response when dealing with daemons or similar beings: If destroying the head and other organs is insufficient to stop an enemy, reducing its entire body to chunky salsa with explosives should at least slow it down.

** In "What's In The Box", Twitch was convinced that the titular box was full of Orks and the non-PC Guard Regiment were all Orks in disguise. [[spoiler:He was right on both counts]].

* DressedToPlunder: The previous captain of the ''Occurrence Border'' met the Guardsmen while wearing every stereotypical bit of Rogue Trader costume he could wear without replacing a limb or eye with an augmetic. The fact that he was roughly spherical and obviously not a Rogue Trader just made this look silly.

* EntertaininglyWrong: Due to a fundamental misunderstanding of how a Space Marine's geneseed works, the T'au think it can be planted in any old human and it'll turn them into a clone of the dead Marine. This is used in one episode of ''Super Deserter Gues'eva Action Heroes'' to bring back their Marine comrade. When Tink suggested "planting Gravis' seeds in a servitor" to fix him, Doc is gobsmacked that he's so off-base about it (and that he took Xenos "heretical cartoons" at face value).

* FateWorseThanDeath: The fate of the Rogue Trader's ship in "The Greater Good". On Doc's suggestion the Guardsmen [[spoiler:sabotage the warp engine and Geller field generators such that the ship becomes trapped in the warp with no shielding]].

* GambitPileup: One of the reasons so many people died in the back story of the "The Interplanetary Man of Mystery" was because there were a half dozen factions running around trying to kill each other or obstructing each other's work.

** Bane Johns may get the job done stylishly, but during the post-mission discussion with Sarge it's revealed he has gotten ''thirty squads'' of agents killed to the last man. He succeeds in his mission every time, sure, but there's literally no survivors when he's done.

* SurroundedByIdiots: [[spoiler:Inquisitor Oak]] admits that his direct subordinates consist mainly of psychopaths, incompetents, and glory seekers whose previous bosses never set them straight, entirely in an effort to reform them into proper Inquisition agents.

** The Occurrence Border has competing infections of squigs and kroots which eventually interbreed into what the crew calls sqroots and kroigs.

** A drunken Commissar riding a hover pallet while waving an empty booze bottle orders the people moving him to "Push me closer, I want to hit them with my bottle!"