nightwatch

All posts tagged nightwatch

Nightwatch: Twilight in the Embermoon Forest

Posted by Comrade on May 23, 2023
Posted in: Posts. Tagged: , , , , , , . 6 Comments

It’s been a while since we checked in on our Nightwatch campaign. I’ve actually had these photos on my phone for a couple months, just haven’t gotten around to doing the writeup.

Anyway, we gathered a few months back to play the fifth (5th) session of our Nightwatch campaign. A proper, by-the-book Nightwatch campaign is a carefully scripted affair, with seven sessions that slowly increase the intensity and danger, culminating with an epic “boss battle” in the final session.

So by that metric, you can see we’re quite advanced by this point in our campaign. Our characters are proficient and deadly, and they’re outfitted with all manner of deadly weapons, artifacts, and gear.

We’ve played a variety of objective-based scenarios up to this point in our campaign. For our fifth session, we decided to try a seemingly simple game mode – survive for seven turns. That’s it! Nothing more complicated than that.

It seemed easy, but the players barely escaped from this game with their hides intact. The danger started early and often, as terrifying beastmen began emerging from the depths of the Embermoon Forest on turn 1.

From there, the danger just increased expontentially. The slower characters, like Jim’s knight Sir Joshua, got bogged down in grinding melee combat just a few inches beyond the heroes’ deployment zone.

This meant that the more mobile characters, like Vincent’s alchemist, had to stay somewhat nearby to protect their slower comrades, and couldn’t race ahead to engage the beastmen reinforcements that were arriving every. single. turn.

This game featured repeated appearances of Terrors – those horrid, panic-inducing monstrosities that represented the near-pinnacle of the Nightwatch bestiary.

Terrors were nearly as powerful as the players’ characters, capable of dealing out fearsome amous of damage, and they arrived with frightening regularity as the game wore on.

It was, as evidenced by these photos, an absolute bloodbath in the Embermoon Forest. The beautiful autumnal foliage was splashed with ichor and gore, the branches blackened by explosive grenades and errant mage bolts. The entire valley was hazy with smoke as the battle wore on. Who would emerge victorious?

Heroes fell in the chaos, then gained their feet, only to fall again. A well-placed magical wall of vapor managed to block a rampaging mob of beastmen reinforcements, gaining precious time for the heroes to organize their defense and gain the upper hand over the savage interlopers.

The beastmen attacked with exceptional savagery, and their onslaught prevented the heroes from moving … anywhere, really. Let’s take a moment and be thankful that this wasn’t a scenario where the heroes had to race around the battlefield and visit different locations. If that had been the case, they would have been doomed!

The heroes spent the final turns in a desperate huddle, hacking at the hordes and using every tactic in their playbook to stay alive until the conclusion of the seventh turn.

These two photos offer a glimpse at the utterly relentless attack that they withstood in the final turns of the game.

And then, as quickly as they had come, the beastmen withdrew into the night, sounding horns and loosing arrows to cover their escape. Who can say what signal caused them to retreat? Perhaps they were called back to their villainous master to serve some darker purpose? Whatever the reason, they fell back in haste, leaving their dead and wounded to moulder in the wilderness of the Embermoon Forest.

And thus concluded our most frenetic, brutal game of Nightwatch yet! We have one more “regular” session ahead of us, followed by an encounter with the savage chieftain of the beastmen … stay tuned for more!

Nightwatch: B-Team Takes a Trip to Town

Posted by Comrade on March 24, 2023
Posted in: Posts. Tagged: , , , , , . 2 Comments

We got together earlier this for another game of Nightwatch, specifically to introduce a couple new players to the game. And while this game wasn’t specifically set in our ongoing Nightwatch campaign, it was fun in retrospect to imagine the events of this game happening concurrently to the primary campaign. This is the “B-Team,” and what they may be lacking in combat prowess they more than make up for with the size of their h e a r t s !

Anyway, this was a fun one-off game where we didn’t worry too much about the outcome … we just focused on rolling dice and having fun!

Somewhat by accident, we set up a rather extensive urban battlefield for this game. It turns out that everyone had thought *they* were responsible for bringing terrain, so we ended up with way more terrain than we needed. Hence this cluttered, yet strangely beautiful setup.

The scenario called for the players to defend the small well in the grassy courtyard in the center of the table. The red portals represent possible spawn points for the waves of bad guys that will emerge at random to menace us.

We had a wide variety of heroes in our game … a bladesman, a wizard, an alchemist, and a ranged combat specialist. Overall, a nicely balanced group, ready for anything that could possibly get thrown at them.

The action started on the first turn, when hordes of vermin poured forth from sewers and drains beneath the village. Nightwatch describes its bestiary in general terms, and leaves it up to the players to decide how to represent them with miniatures. In this game, we decided to draw on our collection of ratmen models, starting with Vince’s rat swarms to represent the vermin, followed by my vintage metal Skaven for the hordes.

The terrain tile above had a nifty subterranean staircase, so naturally we placed a spawn portal down there. And we cackled with glee whenever the vile ratmen would come boiling out of the stairwell!

Vincent’s nifty town bulletin board ended up seeing heavy action as the battle raged around it. I need to make one of these, too!

In the photo below, Mumblemore dances atop the veggie cart while in the background you can see a smattering of gore tokens representing the bad guys who have been taken down over the course of this game.

We’ve found that casualty markers or gore tokens are pretty important for this game, because you need to mark the location of slain corpses so that individual hunters can move into contact with them to undertake various and sundry tasks: robbing their pockets, slicing off an ear, maybe pulling out a gold tooth. It’s all covered under the Burdens section when creating a hunter.

The battle got pretty heated by the end of the game, with ratmen surging up from the subterranean depths and the heroes flinging spells and grenades all around the battlefield. The first couple of sessions of a typical Nightwatch campaign aren’t particularly deadly, which makes them perfect for a learning game like we set up here. You can dig in, explore the rules, slay some bad guys, and then survive to make it back to town and go through the post-game campaign steps.

That’s exactly what we did after this game, actually! Even though we weren’t playing a typical 7-session campaign, we nonetheless went through the post-game campaign steps to determine how much loot we found, which artifacts we ended up with, etc. It was great fun and made us even more excited to return to our ongoing Nightwatch campaign.

Nightwatch: Slaughter at Bloodwater Canyon

Posted by Comrade on November 28, 2022
Posted in: Posts. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 7 Comments

Our Nightwatch campaign ratcheted up another notch at the game last month. This was our fourth session of our anticipated seven-mission Long Hunt, and the threat level was increasing as our heroes ventured further into the Hattendorf Border Marches.

Picking up where last session’s game left off, this game saw the children who had been rescued from a gruesome fate delivered safely to an abandoned minehead located inside Bloodwater Canyon. I’m sure that name is just a colorful local metaphor, right? And I’m certain, absolutely certain, that the mining site was closed down because its local mineral wealth had been extracted successfully. Not abandoned because the crew was dragged into the badlands and eaten alive. Right? Guys?

Anyway, the children were wisely left at the mine site while the heroes set up camp nearby. During the 20 minutes they were gone, however, a band of feral beastmen arrived atop the canyon ridge, war horns a-blaring and skin drums a-banging. It seems the abandoned minehead was not the sanctuary it seemed. To arms, hunters!

This game was an opportunity to use a giant piece of terrain that John had created months ago during the initial worldbuilding phase of our Nightwatch campaign. The canyon wall was placed along one edge of the battlefield to create an imposing physical feature for the beastmen to use as they swarmed into the mine site.

We put two of the four spawn points (from whence the bad guys would arrive each turn) behind the canyon ridge, and by the first turn, the bad guys started scaling the cliffs to menace and mangle the stalwart defenders!!

The heroes initially placed their defenders in the comparative cover of the mining site. They quickly realized that the sheer pace of arriving monsters meant they would be rapidly overwhelmed.

With steel in his hands and determination in his heart, Jim’s bladesman Sir Joshua climbed a ladder to the top of the canyon and stood on the ridge. There he met the marauders in single combat as the sun set and cast a fearsome silhouette against the rocky terrain below.

It was a shaping up to be a real bloodbath up on the gnarled ridgeline. And they just kept coming! Sir Joshua definitely had his hands full.

But this wasn’t the only spot where the beastmen were emerging! Two other spawn points were also located in the grim ruins to either side of the minehead. Per Nightwatch rules, we rolled randomly to select two of the four spawn points per turn to deploy the next batch of bad guys.

So the players had to wisely deploy their defenders to cover the approaches to the mining site. This meant plenty of action for Paul’s elf archer, Vince’s alchemist, Daniel’s wizard, and the various hirelings and henchmen who had been hired over the last few sessions!

By the second half of the game, the really bad guys started arriving — Terrors, in the parlance of Nightwatch. These bruisers are among the strongest monsters that the players will face in a typical Nightwatch campaign.

They emerged howling and snarling in the waning turns of the game, and their sheer brutality challenged the players, whose resources and resolve were in thin supply as the game neared its end stages.

By this point, the ridge was strewn with corpse markers, each one denoting a fallen foe. Nightwatch has several secondary missions that involve looting or harvesting bodies, so we were obliged to track the dead as they piled up. And piled up, and piled up. Poor Sir Joshua was knee deep in the dead by the end of the game!

Despite the absolute onslaught of vermin and terrors pouring into the canyon, the heroes held out — barely. If the tide of darkness had been any stronger, or if the defenders’ resolve had faltered just a bit they would surely have fallen. As it was, they beat the beastmen back, rescued the poor little kids, and spirited them away to maybe a slightly safer venue to rest and recuperate.

Nightwatch provided a great game and kept the tension high. You could see the players’ eyes get wide as the Terrors started arriving in the latter turns! But they kept their composure, worked as a team, and survived this onslaught. Future scenarios will not be so warm and gentle. Enjoy this win, hunters, for it may be your last!

Nightwatch: The Bone Cage

Posted by Comrade on October 18, 2022
Posted in: Posts. Tagged: , , , , , , , . 4 Comments

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!!

Abandoned Mine Terrain Tile

Posted by Comrade on October 4, 2022
Posted in: Posts. Tagged: , , , , , . 8 Comments

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!