Grimdark Future: Assassination Mission on Pestus Maximus

Posted by Comrade on October 25, 2022
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An iridescent drizzle of acid rain hissed off the crumbled machinery at the chem station. Nearby, a small knot of poxwalkers was unfazed by the caustic precipitation; the mindless zombies simply stood sentry and awaited orders, even as their flesh slowly melted away under the relentless rain.

The squad of Plague Marines overseeing the zombies showed more agency, surveilling the perimeter of the chem station and keeping an eye out for interlopers. The Maggot Magnates legion was visiting the shrine world of Pestus Maximus for a specific purpose, and they would not dither any longer than necessary on the accursed planet.

Suddenly, the vox crackled with a whispered warning, and the unmistakable roar of engines drifted in from beyond the perimeter.

John and I got together towards the end of summer for another game of Grimdark Future. John was trying out a list built around a specific expensive, high-powered model (an Imperial assassin) and so we set up a game focused on delivering the assassin to wipe out a high-value target — my Death Guard Lord of Contagion, Brasque Krakmarrow, aka the Grave-Wurm of Endymion-Delta and the Gift-Giver of Vortulai Hive. A truly vile chud if there ever was one!

The game began with John’s Taurox transport motoring into the chem station, where it was met with a trio of Myphitic Blight-Haulers and a small mob of poxwalkers. Inside the transport was a well-equipped squad of inquisitorial acolytes led by a very capable inquisitor.

As the Death Guard moved in to engage the Taurox and its scrappy occupants, a smaller group of Imperial agents crept through the rubble near the chem station. The agents included a pair of acolytes escorting a psyker, who was carrying a teleport homing beacon that would be used to deploy “the asset” — the assassin!

The inquisitor led his acolytes into the comparative safety of the chem station, where they would attempt to hack a data terminal while the Death Guard’s attention was focused by the imminent arrival of the assassin.

When the assassin arrived via the teleport homing beacon (anytime after turn 1, per the Grimdark Future rules) John was immediately presented with an agonizing decision: where to deploy his shiny new toy soldier?!?

Gentle reader, I cannot tell you how much time the two of us collectively spent trying to analyze and strategize the best possible placement of his assassin. Empires rose and fell, seas evaporated into dust, and still John was second guessing about where to put his little man.

Ultimately he plopped him down within easy charge range of my 5-man squad of Plague Marines, which had been camped near an objective for most of the game while they harassed the advancing Imperials with accurate heavy weapon fire.

Across the battlefield, the Death Guard army was doing an admirable job plugging the gaps in their defensive line. The three Myphitic Blight-Haulers motored up to the chem station and began pouring on the fire. This led to a head-smack moment for John as he realized his guys are armed with swords, not guns, and so he sent them clambering down from the chem station’s parapets so they could assault the Myphitic Blight-Haulers.

This proved to be a fairly indecisive battle that dragged on until the end of the game.

The psyker with the homing beacon, his life’s purpose complete now that he had called in the assassin strike, was dragged down and dismembered, along with his escort, by a staggering mob of poxwalkers. He will be remembered in the Tome of Heroes!

What’s left? Oh yeah, the assassin! Having dealt with the squad of Plague Marines, the red-robed killer pivoted toward his true target: the Lord of Contagion! This set up an epic clash of for the ages.

Lumbering behemoth versus spritely death machine! We traded blows for a turn before, stunningly, the Lord of Contagion hefted his might plague axe and cleaved the assassin in twain, casting side the ruined body and grinding the warrior’s entrails into the dust with his massive steel-shod boots.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the assassin represented half of the entire points value of John’s army. Without that unit, he didn’t have much left to oppose me, and we agreed that the forces of Chaos had won the day.

And so John’s intensely focused army list had shattered like a glass torpedo on the rusted armor of my Chaos army. The Imperial landing party slunk off to lick its wounds. With any luck, they’ll be able to piece the assassin back together from the gore-slicked pieces that were recovered from the battlefield on Pestus Maximus. Stay tuned for more!

Nightwatch: The Bone Cage

Posted by Comrade on October 18, 2022
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Perched atop a desolate slab of rock stands a cage. Crafted from sun-bleached bones and tied with dusty scraps of sinew and skin, the cage exudes a kind of forlorn solitude. Travelers are wise to give the bone cage a wide berth if they are forced to traverse the wind-scoured desert of the Hattendorf Border Marches. Those who dare to venture close enough may hear faint cries emanating from within the tattered enclosure…

We played our third game of Nightwatch back in late August, but I haven’t gotten around to doing a writeup until just now. The game was centered around a grisly terrain piece that John printed and painted up just for this occasion — the titular bone cage, wherein the beastmen of the border marches had stashed a few sad, whimpering children kidnapped from Heerselt Manor.

How terrible! If only there were some hunters, blooded from recent battles and increasingly capable of tackling the worst that the border marches could throw at them! Where, oh where, could we find such heroes!

Ah yes. They’re here, at this very place, to attempt the very deed I just described.

If the first two sessions were characterized by caution on the part of the hunters, this session could be characterized instead by competence from the hunters. By this point they were experienced, well equipped, accompanied by a few hand-picked allies, and generally ready to accomplish their mission.

Our Nightwatch battlefield was still quite small, around two feet square, which meant that the hunters were able to quickly get into position to pick the locks on the bone cage. This task took multiple turns, and the rest of the warband had to fight off waves of beastmen and gnoll raiders who swarmed out of the nearby canyons.

As I mentioned earlier, this was a seasoned, competent bunch of players. They knew their characters and had a pretty good sense of how to stymie the beastmen raiders. Their overall goal was to keep the beastmen at bay until they could pick the lock on the bone cage – hopefully before the threat level ratcheted up in the later turns of the game.

The beastmen swarmed in, and the bodies started hitting the floor. The characters had nifty weapons and spells at their disposal, and the low-level beastmen who arrived in the early turns were ground up into hamburger by a flurry of lightning bolts, alcemical grenades, sword parries, and longbow shots.

I’m pleased to report that the players’ plan went off without a hitch. They were able to manage the emerging beastmen threat while simultaneously jimmying the lock on the bone cage. They ripped the doors open at precisely the right moment, just before the threat level was scheduled to ratchet up.

I’ll admit I was extremely interested in deploying some of the more menacing beastmen monsters that we had assembled for this game, but those guys will have to wait until the next session. Until then – you win this round, heroes!!

Dwarf Handgunners from Highlands Miniatures

Posted by Comrade on October 12, 2022
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Last month I completed my first unit of 100% printed miniatures! Up until this point I’ve dabbled here and there in painting 3D printed models — several of the guys in my local game group have printers that are humming non-stop to churn out beautiful resin awesomeness — but this was the first time I set about painting an entire 3D-printed unit.

The models came from Highlands Miniatures, courtesy of BartyB’s fiery forge (actually a Phrozen Sonic Mini 4K). The sculpts are simple and unadorned, which I really like — I’m not a big fan of dwarf models that are covered in fiddly bits related to a specific setting or mythos. Guess that’s why I don’t have a lot of use for GW’s three disparate dwarf lines (the Dispossessed, Kharadron Overlords, and Fyreslayers).

These guys are simple, somber, task-oriented dwarf warriors, and I love it. I ended up painting these guys on my lunch break at work, which led to lots of fun conversations with my coworkers as they repeatedly stumbled across my little hobby setup in the breakroom.

These guys were painted in the sky-blue livery of King Nicodemus II, the Anvil of Dawn, which marks them as part of his personal house guard. These models will bulk out the ranged combat capability of the Expedition to Hearthspire, aka my large dwarf army. The army is composed of models from many different sources, which is almost a hobby unto itself — how many oddball miniatures can I paint up and add to my hodgpodge force?!

Be sure to take a look at the dwarves I painted up earlier this year in my Summer Painting Roundup! I’m hoping to get all of these guys onto the table later this year for our winter fantasy apocalypse game!

Abandoned Mine Terrain Tile

Posted by Comrade on October 4, 2022
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I recently completed a terrain piece that I’ve had built in my head for a year or two. It’s a mining outpost, possibly abandoned, definitely run-down but still representing a tasty pile of loot for an adventuring party.

I originally conceived of this as a terrain tile for Frostgrave table that my group put together back in 2021. It was built on a 12×12 inch square vinyl floor tile, reinforced with foamcore and hardened with like a zillion layers of glue and sand and grout.

Atop that study foundation, I added some carved foam chunks to represent strip-mined areas that had been carved out of the landscape. In the flat interior basin I added a bunch of nifty bits from Mantic’s Abandoned Mine Terrain Crate, which was full of great details that every mine should have — stuff like tools and barrels and mine carts and crystal formations.

I glued most of the fiddly bits down to make this tile easier to transport and use, but I kept a few as individual pieces for creative terrain placement.

The rest of our Frostgrave table is built atop 2-inch foam sheets, so this terrain piece will actually appear to be “below grade” when it is placed alongside the built-up tiles. The tops of the carved foam chunks should be just about even with the “ground level” of the other terrain tiles. Nice!

The paint scheme is actually the same dusty badlands color palette that we selected for our Nightwatch board. I think it’ll work alongside the dark gray colors of our Frostgrave table. It should also fit in decently with my existing fantasy terrain collection, too. I think this piece will see some action in a game of Nightwatch later this month – stay tuned for more!

Nightwatch: Into the Borderlands

Posted by Comrade on August 26, 2022
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We played another session on our Nightwatch campaign earlier this month. The first session, back in July, was a great test drive of the ruleset. This session featured the same threat level (fairly low, suitable for beginning characters). We gathered on a John’s back patio on a scorching hot day in western Oregon. (“But it’s a dry heat!”)

The mission involved escorting an academic from the civilized lands into the Hattendorf Border Marches, in an attempt to learn more about the source of the beastmen raids that had plagued mightily this peaceful region.

The hunters needed to cross the board diagonally, from corner to corner, while keeping their bespectacled scientist safe from the ravening hordes.

As before, Vincent, Paul, and Daniel brought their hunters, plus a few hirelings purchased with hard-won silver coins following last month’s session.

John and I shared responsibilty for running the bad guys – the beastmen vermin and chaos raider hordes that would boil forth from several pre-determined points on the battlefield throughout the game. The game featured some new gnoll archers that John had printed and painted just the week before. Very nice!

As the game got underway, it was amusing to see just how cautious the hunters were in their approach. The near disaster of the first session, where the hunters had strolled blithely through the first few turns before stumbling toward the end, had clearly factored into their strategy. They moved at a deliberate pace and tried to stick together as a group.

As before, the vermin and hordes began spawning each turn during the “Darkness” phase, leading to regular and repeated intonations of “DARKNESS DESCENDS; WEEP FOR THE WORLD YOU HAVE LOST” by yours truly. What can I say, I like getting in character a bit?!

The difference was in the players’ behavior. They were tactical and methodic, making full use of their hirelings, magic spells, and various items of wargear acquired in the previous session.

As the game got underway, the corpses of slain beastmen began to pile up everywhere, represented by colored tokens on our battlefield. In Nightwatch, each hunter has a burden – a curse or debt or other drawback that must be managed or overcome over the course of the campaign. Several burdens relate to corpses, such as looting them or retrieving some artifact. So we had to note the location of dead bodies as the slaying began in earnest!

And still the beastmen attacked! Nightwatch has a basic AI system that provides some flexibility for how the spawning baddies behaved. They won’t always just charge directly for the hunters. Sometimes they’ll angle in to focus on a target related to the scenario – like the fragile academic, in this case!

The beastmen and chaos raiders arrived in ever-greater numbers, but the players were prepared to deal with them. The scientist made it safely to the other side of the board by turn 5, right when the bad guy deployment schedule was just about to ramp up into a more dangerous category. Nice work, team!

It was a solid victory for the hunters – but their celebrations will be short-lived. From here, the threat level of subsequent scenarios will increase…more bad guys, in greater numbers, spawning earlier in the game. We’re playing session #3 soon, so check back for the latest on the hunters and their ultimate quarry…