Thursday, 13 March 2025

After Action Report: Revenge!

 Reylissa brushed away the still-blistering scrap of pseudofabric. It was warm, wanting to glue itself to the back of her glove, but she shook it away, scowling as it disintegrated into ash. Danika hadn't really needed to torch the thing - it was no face-hugger - but the thick-armed heavy liked burning things. The juve squinted across the ruined stonework they were crossing at their ward. This von Cage, dressed in robes and carrying a very fine staff. There was something Danika should burn. The old man stank of blood, even to Reylissa's inexperienced nose for these things. But he also stank of money, so here she was, escorting the old fool through the rotting domes of Rustwater Gulch...

deployment - a long-abandoned dome

This Sunday just gone, I had my second game of 2025 against long-time usual opponent Mangs, half of over half the battle reports here. I should make some more friends.

Mangs is always a good opponent, generously letting me take lots of photos and notes on our games. This was Necromunda, an opportunity for me to finally bring out the ex-Slave Ogryns which I painted -- in 2022, sweet lord. These are a really fun gang to use, being incredibly daft (as we'll see) but also very hard to stop (as we'll see). Plus, Necromunda is always a great game, especially if you play it like Mangs and I do - starting gangs only, no fucking Tactics cards, relatively WYSIWYG. I'm sure we'd both like to do a campaign one day, but this style avoids a lot of the Modernhammer problems with the game (scale creep, Tactics cards, etc).

Mangs brought Valeria Sly and the Nightshade Crew, who we've met before over in Ghast Grove:

Nightshade Crew

The mission? Escort Guilder agent von Cage. Should be easy money, unless there are ex-slaves in the area who are looking for revenge...

Kanathion von Cage (from Mangs's collection)

DEPLOYMENT

Helreach United Miners, Fabricators, Haulers

Overboss R-4 'Scarred Gills' heard that von Cage, an agent of the people who had enslaved him and his brothers, was vulnerable to ambush. He led his team up the left flank of the battlefield, right into the guns of the Eshin mercenaries. The lads could take it. They're tough.

Nightshade Crew

More Nightshade Crew

abandoned industry scattered in the eons-old ruins

The ruins of some ancient township forced Sly to split her gang into two rough teams, intending to pincer out the Ogryns in an aggressive counter. Sheer numbers of hot-shot ought to put paid to the abhumans...

TURN ONE


R-4 throws an incendiary charge downfield. He misses Danika, but that hardly matters with a 5" template; she's clipped and her fine blue synthsuit catches fire instantly. All those chemicals from her flamer!

Of course, it's R-4's only charge, as he fails the ammo check.


Some long-range fire from the Eshin light up the ruins, but little damage. Underboss J-Ω 'the Joiner' is hit by a couple of lucky shots, pinning the big guy in place as he ducks his head.

OTHER TURNS

Yeah, I didn't keep track of which turn is which, so some of this might have to be figured out through context. Activation-based systems do make that a little tricky to remember, as well as not giving me enough downtime for photos!

storm-welders are truly terrible weapons

W417 'Freedman' opens up at long range with his storm-welder, which immediately and catastrophically explodes and takes him out. Totally hilarious. Exactly what I expected. 10/10

burn baby

Danika, her gear lit up, runs around and gets both pinned, prone, and takes a flesh wound from the fire. She's in a real bad spot...

long shot

Sly tries a long shot with her bolter at J-Ω, but misses. In his next turn (no photo), J-Ω charges and easily takes out the prone and injured Danika.


G-0G and MA-G-0G move up toward the bulk of the Crew. What's left of their minds means they aren't great at taking cover, but merely standing behind the bulk of the rotting machinery means they're a little harder to shoot.


Crouching behind a rotting wall crusted in rust-fungus, Phoebe takes a long shot at R-4 with her shotgun. The solid state shell thunks into the abhuman's chest, smashing through his industrial gear and hurting like the dickens - but not enough to even really count as a flesh wound...

hello

G-0G lumbers up to Dash and Carli, who back away from the cyborg, laser and autogun fire lighting up the dim ruins.


Meanwhile, MA-G-0G activates his stimulants and sprints over to Cutty. Her makeshift barricade of a former promethium refining system tube does not save her from the abhuman abomination's incredible reach. His massive spanner cracks across the top of her head, knocking her clean out.


Carli, on the other hand, opens up with her autogun on full-auto. She gets three shots, two of which punch through poor G-0G's overalls, causing serious injury to the former slave.

posted this in discord but it wasn't in the google drive!

A careful bolter shot from Sly slams into J-Ω, causing him to duck his head again, but the explosive round failed to detonate properly!


Reylissa fires into MA-G-0G to avenge her sister, but despite the point-blank range, her nerves and inexperience tell and the bullets go wild.

got you now!!

Smarting from Phoebe's shell, R-4 activates his stimms. False strength coursing through his mutant veins, he charges from the ruins into von Cage...


Sparks flying, there is a flare as the displacer field interacts with the arc-welders...


..flinging von Cage's shattered, burned corpse clear across the field. It slams into a broken bulkhead, a red smear adding a brief touch of colour to the desolate underhive. (I got four hits, S9, D3 - and he saved two.)


Technically the game ends once the escort target either dies or is exfiltrated, but we decided to finish the turn, as it seemed silly for the game to end in the middle of a firefight. No photos, but MA-G-0G charges Carli and takes her out smoothly (rolled Out of Action immediately!). Dash charges into the injured G-0G and kicks him in the computer, coup-de-gracing him. Reylissa then moved up behind MA-G-0G and railed him with bullets, hurting him but not much...

Valerie and R-4, realising there is no point to the fight, call off hostilities and mutually break. They've hurt each other pretty badly, and von Cage has been electro-crushed to death. No point in continuing!

AFTERMATH


A great game, and good to see Mangs again - it's been a few months, what with Arthur (the little one, not the union boss) and all. We've made plans to have a game of Kill Team, but adulthood being what it is, that looks like May. Yikes.

The Ogryns did great and looked great. Lots of fun. My god, the Goonhamer guys were not kidding about the storm-welder. Which is great. More options in games like this should be characterful and terrible.

J-Ω checks his email

Saturday, 8 March 2025

Project: Kúrekar

 The nature of the country was, as they thought, so good that cattle would not require house feeding in winter, for there came no frost in winter, and little did the grass wither there. Day and night were more equal than in Greenland or Iceland.
  - from Grænlendinga saga

heathen cowboys

About a year ago, a friend of mine went off the deep end about cowboys. He had some criticisms of Dracula America's timeline and setting (which I'm still not clear about - I'm looking forward to doing some Congregationists once I can convince someone in this town to play it with me), so he pitched a different kind of weird west occult horror game.

I, mostly joking, suggested a Viking cult gang, like some sort of half-century early Heathenry movement, or as if the German Romantics got started early, or if the Norse settlement in Newfoundland had survivors who then wound up in... America? for some reason. It wasn't a very serious suggestion, but I did have a box of cowboys (I really do want to do Dracula's America!) and a ton of Viking bits, so - why the hell not. Let's bash up some silly cowboys, a berserkers with a six-shooter, that kind of thing.

A year later, my friend is no closer to rules or a coherent campaign but, despite my generally slow pace and a thousand other things to do, I spent this week painting up the warband. At the bottom of this post are some notes on converting them to Dracula's America, too.

It got the unpainted miniatures outta my head, I get to show up my friend, and it's a palate cleanse from a ton of grimy future space marines. Pure victory.

Monday, 3 March 2025

After Action Report: Asphalt and Blood

 A bleak and meaningless skirmish on the edges of a galaxy-spanning civil war...

an abandoned bunker amid the ruins of a worthless city

Early 006.M30. Nomirhast Minor. Nomirhüüs-Б. A crumbling suburb leeching off a nowhere township on a minor worldlet, in a meaningless sector of a self-defeating war. The dust of orbital bombardment and the curling after-effects of rad-phages drift over the sludge-grey ruins. Sergeant Caliel Gloss waves a pale gauntlet through the murk, leading his patrol through the silent rockrete guardians. The traitors are here, red-mouthed revenants in their old colours, loyal to the masters who betrayed their oaths. He will find them.

Across the square, past the empty eyes of an abandoned redoubt, Classya-Lablas licks blood from his athame, witchlights burning in his pale brow.

Friday, 28 February 2025

mortem tyrannis: finis

 Thus, all tyrants projects.

Daemon engine. Defiler-class. Cognomen: 3-9-ϴ-27

This is it! The last model for the (post-heresy) Death Guard! Except for that pesky Lord of Poxes, anyway, but I can get him when he's released. This is the last planned model. I've finished another project! Exclamation marks!!!!

Friday, 21 February 2025

mortem tyrannis: lil guys (and an officer)

 I was misinformed the other day when I said I only had four miniatures left for the project...

squirmy wrigglers

Lord of Virulence

I have been going back and forth on including some Nurglings in the project. On the one hand, they aren't really Death Guard. On the other, everybody includes them in lists (not that I've played a game of 40k in 10th) for holding objective markers. They're also cute little guys, and I would be building fun little dioramas for each lot... but I could 'finish' the project quicker if I didn't do them.

In the end, I not only did some (nine!), I bought new bases and some extra models from eBay...

Tuesday, 28 January 2025

mortem tyrannis: engines, daemon

 Good lord, I've been painting this accidental project for over five years.


Second miniature of 2025: a second Plagueburst Crawler, a Death Guard-unique artillery and battle tank. It was challenging making this different from the other (painted in 2020, apparently - I need to focus better on projects), as the kit is quite detailed and unique, but with limited options to customise.

Saturday, 25 January 2025

2024 in Review: Miniature Wargaming

I picked up Midgard: Heroic Battles today, after doing some shopping at CanCon. I now have ideas for about a dozen more projects...

stay focused: this is the current work-in-progress

Every hobbyist struggles with distraction, but the past year has seen the pressure ramp up even more than usual. Two sets of temporary promotions, personal issues - oh, right and my beautiful son, whose eyes glow in the daylight.

bad selfie from last week

Still, let's try to get more thoroughly back into the hobby that I, y'know, love. Let's review 2024.

Sunday, 19 January 2025

mortem tyrannis: многоочитии

Not all daemon princes are ascended from human stock.

ꙮ, associated with + + + XIVE CO77UPT3D + + +


Probably not the Three-Eyed King in Yellow worshipped by cultists shuffling through reeking sumpwater at the rotting base of their hive cities, but an ancient and puissant creature nonetheless. Ordo Malleus archivists have determined that ꙮ brought about the fall of at least one pre-Imperial civilisation on Terra, and there are indications that the multi-eyed horror has been known for millennia, across many pre-Dark Age human peoples - called variously многоочитии, or 百々目鬼, or dŠul-pa-è-a, one of the so-called 𒀭𒐌𒐌𒁉𒀭𒈥𒆪𒉿𒅀𒀸 (trans. 'Dark Heptad'), seven fell lords of ruin that serve the Plague-God-that-Must-Not-Be-Written. The truest way to name this creature is the single character ꙮ.

Its blank eye enervates, overwhelms. Before it, healing stops, regeneration ends. Life drains away.

Saturday, 18 January 2025

After Action Report: Confrontation at Crescent City

 2024 was neither a good year for gaming, nor for updating this blog. Lord Ethan sent his pirates at me in August and I never got around to writing this up...

Crescent City's power facilities

Borgan's Rift remains a backwater, or at the very least a marginal planet in the Magistcracy, but the fires of the FedCom continue to smoulder. Pirate activity burns along such marginal worlds, and the forces of both the liberal Canopians and their more structured allies in the Confederation are stretched.

Following his defeats earlier at Old Port Town and on the mining demi-planet of Kallix-7, "Lord Ethan" has re-armed and re-equipped - shockingly fast for an old pirate king - and made a bold strike at Crescent City. One of the few metropolises on Borgan's Rift worth calling a 'city', Crescent City is home to a new Drop Port. Capturing or at least sacking the city will be quite profitable for the pirate - or his backers...

Wednesday, 15 January 2025

2024 in Review: Literature

Every year, I intend to join in on the year-in-review thing, and every year I forget. I just got back from a holiday, so we might as well...

what I read on my holiday
top: early 2025
bottom: end of 2024

Since 2024, I've been doing a thread of books I read. This lets me track what I'm reading, chew through the mountains of unread things in my house, and also provide Content for the Content Lords. Hilariously, I got permanently suspended late last year for joking with a friend of mine, so I haven't finished 2024's thread. It also means I can't do my end-of-year look-at-what-I-read... so let's do that here.

Friday, 6 December 2024

mortem tyrannis: walkers

  ..qui sanat contritos corde, et alligat contritiones eorum
    - Psalmi 146:3

rule of three

As I intimated in the last post, I went a bit crazy in the end of winter, converting up bio-mechanical horrors for my Death Guard project. I decided I wanted to have a trio of dreadnoughts, but wasn't pleased by the idea of them all looking more-or-less the same. Chaos in general - but Nurgle especially - should lend itself to mutability and change. Plus, I'd been staring at moldmoldmold's work way too much, and had some Ideas...