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)

We rolled the weirdest (and for my list, worst) deployment, Ambush. A circle in the centre of the board, with the 'attacker' coming in from the edges. Camille beat me in every pre-game roll, damn their eyes, and so got to come in hard and fast.

another short of this nice field

Helena and her Guard

Camille's Custodes are pretty nice to look at, painted in the standard gold, reds, and blue accents. I also like that they are Woke and have a Female Leader. Fuck you, nazis.

I did at least get to deploy in cover.

faces of bystanders blurred because of poor photography, not out of respect for privacy

really, they're all 'dreads' because i dread fighting them

Helena and her pals

THE GAME

I forgot to note the turns in my notes, and I can hear Arthur waking up, so please excuse the rather simplistic rendition of the game. It occurred very quickly anyway, so this post is mostly to allow some photos.

Camille moved their posthumans in around the edges toward me quite rapidly. The nature of the deployment zones, combined with ample cover and their small squad sizes, meant that I did very little with my counterfire.

The dread comes in.

This incredible 11" charge didn't bloody help.

On the way in, the Custodes shooting took out a Tactical and a missile launcher marine; that squad returned fire at the Dreadnought but it passed all its saves. Maybe I should give in and get a lascannon squad, but I really would prefer not...

Our combat knives did nothing. 

fun photography though

The Custodes, even with the disordered charge, annihilated the Tactical squad, who broke and fell to the sweeping advance. I admittedly did forget about my rad grenades in this combat, but I assure you that it would have made no difference.

Helena wades into the sacred pool, geigh-her readings ticking steadily upwards. The blood of Mortarion stains her boots.

The Siege Breaker (I need to name him) throws a phosphex bomb, but it splatters the ruins on the far side of the Guard unit, semi-sentient fire crawling towards the rad lake.

Sergeant Gloss unleashed the fury of the legion against Helena and her squad. They manage to smash two of the Emperor's children (note case!) into the cracked flagstones and polluted waters. The missile launchers pour krak missiles into the squad, to no effect - although the Guard counter-fire kills three Death Guard and causes them to flee down a level of the old Atomic Temple.

It is the Kheres Assault Cannon of the revered Ancient who incapacitates the last Custodes Guardsman and wounds Helena, a storm of fire shredding the concrete shores of the nucleake as he steps in against the Captain.

+ + + DIE + + +

Spinning in the air, her agility belying the weight of her customised armour, Helena slashes into the dreadnaught with her long, gleaming spear. She does five wounds before the mighty veteran can strike, but surely his years of experience will tell, and this honoured Guard captain dies here, at the edge of the war.

Not so much. I don't even hit her.

hop down a level, lads

may we come in and offer a copy of the Watchtower (that joke would work better with Deathwatch)

The Custodes come in to kill my remaining Tactical Squad, the dread killing two with its laser gun while we do a wound to the Custodes Guard squad. I don't have high hopes for the combat itself.

fight fight fight

I'm right to despair. While the marines do wound a Guardsman (I think killing one!), the Custodes' squad leader decapitates my sergeant in a challenge and their brothers kill eight other Marines; we break and are immediately Sweeping Advanced to death.

phosphex bombs!

Helena does, of course, immediately tear the heart out of my Contemptor's near-dead warrior. The game is effectively over, of course, though I do try to see if I would kill anything in the next turn. I fail to even scratch Helena with phosphex bombs and krak missiles. Camille and I agree that there is nothing left to do but pack up and shake hands again.

CONCLUSIONS

I didn't exactly cover myself in glory in this skirmish, but that deployment zone is rough. I think my list selection, while hampered by 1000 points and what I have painted was okay. If I could have kept Camille at arms-length for a turn or three and hammered them with missiles and Legion bolters, I might have been able to do a little better. But essentially immediate charges makes the whole thing over very fast indeed.

I don't want to make a lascannon squad. It's boring. However, the shift in Heresy 2.0 to Dreads having stats means that the Sunder ability from the Siege Master is moot. So at these tiny-points games without tanks, I don't have counters to Dreads other than my own.

Maybe if I build some more of those at least...

Qed-Mjw slid to his stifles next to the now-still water. The gilded gods had cleaned their wounded, and dead, and spent weapons, and left; the pale were recovered by grim-faced figures, haloed outside of light. The ruins of the war still encroached on the Place, but the scurrying servants of the Eagles-Devouring-the-Sun had finally left the crumbling temple grounds. The lights of the god engines had thinned. Finally, he could perform the rituals that the War-in-Heaven kept delaying.

He whispered the heptagonal prayers, washing his ears and lapping his whiskers. His fur shifted into iridescence in this, the place of honour, where his people had warded away the vulnerable for spin after spin after spin of the stars, until their names were all forgotten and only the rituals remained.

Haec epistula est admonitio de periculo.

Hadhih alrisalat tahdhir min alkhatari.

Eto soobshcheniye yavlyayetsya preduprezhdeniyem ob opasnosti.

Doo shił yáhoot'ééł niháji'ígíí t'áá'íiyisí.

This message is a warning about danger.

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.