After Action Report: Perish in the Pit

 The ruins still gleam in the falselight cast by the engines of the gods, the spacecraft blasting the worldlet's atmosphere with artificial light. It gleams on the ancient temples built above the death-water-from-below, shadows obscuring the ancient, pre-Imperial glyphs and ritualised warnings. Pale-armoured warriors cluster in the dead temple, their plate clicking with the sacred signs that the death-water-from-below always whispers around their gods' wargear. The semi-man hisses a ritual of thanks, his bristling fur colouring with the proximity to the old, old water. The gods war, and death comes. His will be a place of honour once again.

the battlefield. some Death Guard are deployed

Another skirmish last Sunday, a 1000-point game of Horus Heresy against my old friend Camille, last seen in Vicchièneche, one of the chief cities of Saint-Saëns, where their Sisters of Battle were slaughtered by (but defeated!) by the Death Guard. This fight was ten thousand years earlier, with their Adeptus Custodes against my (less mutated) Death Guard.

Death Guard

Siege-Breaker, power axe, combi-flamer, phosphex bombs.
Contemptor with assault cannon, fist, twin-linked bolter
14 Tactical Marines with attached Apothecary
14 Tactical Marines with attached Apothecary
7 Marines with missile launchers

Adeptus Custodes

Helena
Several Squads of Guard
Contemptor with Spear Thingy

We set up the terrain, sort of accidentally creating a ruined temple with several crumbling fortifications and the War creeping in on the grounds. We were joking around that the temple seemed to have once been a nuclear reactor, and the lake and river had formed from the pool - so that's the setting now. Some pre-Dark Age nuclear site that had fallen into ruin and become a place of worship and that civilisation had itself collapsed, and then Compliance and now civil war. 

It's fun making maps and then accidentally creating layers and layers of history to a place.

look at this huge battlefield we don't use (spoiler)

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)

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.

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.