24/5/2011: The Horus Heresy

Now you get to see me wax lyrical about the Horus Heresy.

I played the game once again against Dave. I was playing the Imperium and he was playing the Traitors; this may seem odd as Chaos is my army when I'm playing 40K, but Dave is a villain through and through and will rarely pick the good guys by choice. As it was the first time we'd given the game a run-through knowing all the rules to it (or at least that was the plan,) I figured we'd stick to the Brother vs Brother scenario for this. Turns out this was one of my better moves, because I still had to refer to the rulebook almost as often as if I'd picked up the game for the first time, only this time looking for the finer points of the rules I hadn't got a clue about and were by their very nature hard to find. Unfortunately for me, it was all downhill from there...

It didn't start out too well for Dave either as he failed 7 out of his 12 corruption draws. He drew enough to force a co-existence battle between the forces on Spaceport Damocles, but all else got wiped out quite quickly. His bombing fared better, taking out one of the Titans in the area surrounding the Spaceport Primus and breaching the factory occupied by the Fabricator General. He then used his starting orders to shore up Angron's defences around Primus, which was to sew the seeds for the pace of the game. There was no way he was going to lose that ferocious Primarch...

Apart from the coexistence battles, we were playing it cagey for the first couple of initiatives. I moved a few units including Jaghatai Khan and the Fabricator General into position to attack Angron on the next refresh phase, and brought a couple of tank legions on from the far West side of the board. Dave piled on the reinforcements for Mortarion, who was occupying Eternity Wall Spaceport with his Nurgle-infested units, and patiently waited for the refresh phase where the activation markers would disappear.

As soon as they did, Dave took the offensive. Using Vicillitudes of Chaos, I'd managed to divide a significant amount of Angron's forces, but Dave was undaunted by this and went straight for Jaghatai Khan. The fury of the Khornate forces plus the subsequent bombardment resulted in Khan being left out on his own, though Angron had 4 wound counters by the time they had finished. Dave then had a lucky draw of Order Cards and found two Drop Pod orders. He proceeded to slam down 5 units of Chaos Space Marines and a Thunderhawk right on top of the meagre forces that defended Lion's Gate Spaceport. As soon as the change of initiative phase kicked in, they found themselves in battle; the stacking rule wasn't going to save them since any coexistence fights take precedence, and obviously they never stood a chance. Worse, that very cleverly-timed move had landed Dave's initiative marker right on top of the Spaceport Victory square, and as by then he controlled all 4 spaceports, this effectively gave the game to him.

So, what would I do differently next time? Well, if luck were not a factor, I might consider moving some more units in defence of Lion's Gate Spaceport. Thinking about it, I've got a Titan and the Blood Angels in easy reach, plus Sanguinius, so moving an effective defence force there is not a problem and would certainly have caused Dave some problems achieving a Spaceport Victory. In of itself this is a good strategy anyway. Angron and Mortarion have control of 2 Spaceports at the beginning of the game, the other two depend on the results of the corruption draw and in this case Damocles would have to be abandoned but there's not much that could happen to Lion's Gate that you couldn't do anything about.

However, I made one very careless move in this instance which I believe cost me the whole game. I used Vilissitudes of Chaos to separate a Titan and a Chaos Warband from the main force at Primus - and then used an Assault order to attack the Titan with the Fabricator General and the White Scars in the fortification on the other side of the Spaceport. Instead of doing that, I should have gone straight for Angron; there's little chance his forces would have survived that kind of assault and would have given me the Spaceport, so even if Dave had taken Lion's Gate in that fashion, it wouldn't have cost me the game straight away. I guess in a way I'm still playing 40K - that is to say, reacting to the situation without considering the big picture. I really ought to know better because that doesn't do me much good in 40K either.

What do I think of the game itself? Very good, actually. I come from knowing the finer points of the story anyway having been in to the Games Workshop hobby for nearly half of my life, and I don't know if anybody else would care about the game if they weren't already in to 40K. That being said, it's a refreshing change, because apart from the similar theme absolutely nothing connects the two games. There's the completely different scale of it for a start. If you had, say, a Tank Legion, a unit of Space Marines and two Imperial Armies, and attacked a force, a game of 40K would represent at the most a tenth of what is going on with ONE of them. Moving and Attacking is out of the window; rare are the times when you can do both. The card combat system can feel like a game in itself, and the events - instances which would only happen in 40K as a house rule or expansion - lend an uncontrollable nature to the game that makes it feel all the more like you're fighting a desperate battle against the elements as much as your enemy. It's taken a while to get my head around it though. If you've never played a war game before, I wouldn't necessarily make this your first one.

So, Dave's re-written history and taken Holy Terra for Horus. Funnily enough, in some of the background material you can buy, a prediction was made as to what might happen if Horus would have won. It would pretty much mean the end of Humanity... but as Humanity has now spent the last 10,000 years fighting a war it cannot hope to win, and is kept alive purely because of it's tenacious refusal to lie down and die, burning itself out in the Horus Heresy might not have been such a bad way to go.

19/5/2011: Pathfinder: Souls for Smuggler's Shiv

We covered a lot of ground this week...

Having made a new camp on the east side of the island, the Japanese guy who I've now found out is called Ishiru turns out to own a cache of treasure maps, one of which concerns Smuggler's Shiv. Ishiru thinks that the party is near it, and that as the treasure is going to take more than one person to obtain, could we help him dig it up for a reward? Never ones to back down we soldiered up to the top of a hill and waited for a little while, until the following morning where the light between two stones shines on the area that we have to dig. And dig we did, until we found a wooden floor and the skeleton of a dwarf with a dagger in his back. Traugon the Half Orc Mage hacked through it with his greataxe, and there was little underneath but a pool of water. In this water were three water-ghouls, forgotten their names, whereupon there were several members of the party dingle-dangling from the rope swashbucking with these ghouls. Raziel leapt down the ropes and shot at them with his hand crossbow; the weapon isn't strong enough to do them any significant amount of damage but at least it was something. Having finally killed the things (it took two goes during which Garond (Dave's character) got himself paralyzed and infected with Ghoul Disease, that would have turned him in to a ghoul were it not for the restoration potion that we had,) we found an exit underneath, and thereafter the treasure. Ishiru took 1/4 of it and the party had the rest, though it was of little benefit to me as the other members of the party had the magic weapons, and this being a desert island there were precious few places to spend the money.

Journeying on into the centre of the island we came across an abandoned campsite, featuring a partially-completed shack. It was a disturbing sight once we got inside, there was a large pentagram on the wall with what looked like human teeth hammered around it. However, nobody had used the place for years and it didn't appear dangerous, so we spent the some time resting there.

The next place we found was, if anything, even more disturbing. In a small clearing was a partially-collapsed hut made out of skulls, and the skulls weren't in superb nick either. Many of them were scratched or damaged, the damage being done by stone weapons and human teeth... Inside we found a journal in tatters that appeared to come from the captiain of the ship called the Throom's Fang. There weren't many pages left but the ones that were seemed to infer the following - somehow the captain had fallen out of ideal with a female called Nylithati. The captain went away and Nylithati looked after the crew, who subsequently and probably because of her influence became cannibals. The diary makes reference to ceremonies involving a calron, half-eaten bodies that were still alive, and the evidence suggests Nylithati as their leader. I'm envisaging an antagonist that we're going to have to deal with at some point...

Further down the line the path winded down a gulch, where we happened upon a snare trap. As far as we could see the trap was supposed to fling it's victim up towards some spikes at the top of a ledge. I disabled the trap, and set it off, when we were set upon by what looked very much like a cannibal. Using the right combination of spells and missiles we tore after it, and when it became scared and ran away, Raziel shot it in the back of the head with the crossbow and it died. Always nice to make a kill, but somehow I don't know if we'd fare so well against a whole army of the things.

The path branched South and North so we decided to head North. Happening across a narrow beach we saw an immense crab, though the appropriate amount of perception suggested to us that this was no true creature. Instead, we flushed out it's owner, who turned out to be a Tengu. The Tengu told us that the crab was for protection, and that he used to be on a ship called the Crow's Tooth and the Captain was his another Tengu. He also suggested that he'd seen our Captain and his co-called lover heading south towards the cannibals... though he could just be three parts bonkers.

And that was where we left it. Well, if my purpose for being away from the shackles is to lie low for a little while I seem to have picked the right place; it doesn't look like anybody who lands here makes it out again alive. I would not, however, like to think I was stuck here permanently, and would like to find a way off the island if possible. Nonetheless, I have a feeling things will get far more complicated than that once we find our erstwhile Captain and the cannibals...

12/5/2011: Pathfinder: Souls for Smuggler's Shiv

Well we were all eager to pick up where we left off last week, with Dave's character starting a food fight that ended in a challenge to a duel to the death between one of the NPCs and Dave's character. After an unsuccessful attempt to reconcile with the Japanese-looking guy that issued the challenge, we had to come up with a way that we might prevent the fight from going ahead; nobody wanted to see the guy die and we're pretty sure Dave's character never had a chance. It was then that we discovered the 'assist' rule, where the other PCs could assist a character with their skills in order to add an extra 2 to their modifier. So all we had to do was find the character with the highest charisma and skill in Diplomacy. That character turned out to be me.

I had a +6 modifier for my own skill in diplomacy, and all the character's attempts to assist me gave me an extra +8 (unsurprisingly, Traugon, the Half Orc, failed his roll for this.) Nonetheless I had to roll very high in order to make any significant impact on the guy. Thus began the first time in living memory I managed to roll a 20 on the D20. With a score of 34 not even I could have failed to make an impression... and thankfully, I was right, as the Japanese guy apologised for being hasty, and because I rolled so high he actually became friends with us as well. I won't apologise for feeling very pleased with myself.

We explored the West side of the part of the island we were on at that point, and happened across a nest of Dimorphodons. I rolled surprisingly high for initiative as well and got the first turn, scoring an impressive hit on one of the creatures. Not quite enough to kill it though, at which point I started begging for one of my companions to finish it off. This amused Vic (Traugon,) but he happily obliged. I'm starting to get an idea of Raziel as a 'Commisar Cain' type character; he's got it where it counts but he panics and avoids a straight fight where possible. We managed to kill the Dimorphodons, stealing both an egg and a young chick and bringing them back to our crazy assassin friend who agreed to teach us some of her technique, to the point where we all have a higher initiative modifier now.

This didn't really help us as we didn't get in to another fight for the rest of the time we were playing. We did, however, make a point of exploring the Eastern part of the island. We found several wrecks with a couple of things them, including the documents that proved Jask's innocence, and although we had a curious incident on one of the beaches with what appeared to be the ghost of a captain of the ship crying out for his lost love. We happened to have pilfered a locket of the woman from one of the ships and we showed it to the ghost; he 'touched' it and vanished. There was also some evidence of a hastily built camp that suggested that Captain of the Genevieve - the ship we were on in the first place - and his lover - were there at some point but had moved on. In addition to this we found viperberries growing in the jungle somewhere; we manange to take some (again thanks to the dexterity of Yours Truly) and make friends with our drunken half-elven friend. Both of those guys promised to help us with something that's going to take a while to do because in this case one item has to go around all 6 of us, we'll see what happens. And that, I think, was where we left it.

Roleplay tonight, we'll see what comes next! One thing about this - we seem to have no particular aim. Obviously there's something strange going on on the island; we keep having dreams about our escape from the Genevieve.  But there's nothing concrete going on out of the ordinary that doesn't have anything to do with our estranged captain. I follow the rest of the survivors out of a feeling for self preservation, but were I in Raziel's shoes right now, I'd be happy just to get off the island...

5/4/11: Pathfinder: Souls for Smuggler's Shiv.

Interesting week...

As it was heading towards the middle of the day we decided to take some shelter in the jungle to sit out the hottest part of the day, whereupon we were attacked by some killer monkeys. All attempts to communicate with them to find out why this should be the case were met with barely intelligable howling, and I took a hit, but the dwarf monk Bronn used a couple of shurikens to take two of them out, including the leader which caused the remaining monkeys to flee. Problem solved, though I was glad that Raziel wasn't wearing heavy armour; the strain would have certainly caused him some problems.

After this, we had a quick chat with some of our fellow survivors and decided, since we only had a limited amount of time to do it, to head on over to the wreck of the ship. The dexterity that comes with being a rogue did me proud as I climbed across the rocks heading towards the ship, and eventually the entire party made it though not without some tumbles. Once we were there, we could hear noise coming from the underside of the ship. I used Stealth to try to investigate, and found that there were a couple of those crab monsters trying to get in through a door. Stealthy though I made myself, I couldn't prevent them from smelling me, and all of a sudden the party and I were set upon by the creatures. I used my acrobatics to leap down the stairs doing a half-twist to come up behind one of them and stab him in the back, with one of the party already there it was caught unawares and Raziel made his first kill of the game.

We checked the ship after that to find several useful items in the Captain's cabin, including keys that would hopefully get our friend Jask out of the clink, and a bottle of brandy that our half-elven friend had asked for. We also found the captain's log, which suggested that he was enamoured of the female passenger Ilyana, and that his desire for her eventually lead to him casting aspersions on the rest of the crew and passengers. It was apparently at Ilyana's request that the ship get wrecked off the coast of Smuggler's Shiv. Further inspection of the ship revealed the first mate, dead. He was the one that the captain had a problem with the most, and it appears to have been he who ensured the party's safety by dragging us onto the beach. From his wounds, he was most likely subsequently killed by the crab/scorpions/whatever. The other door - the one the creatures were trying to get in to - hid the cook, also dead, though I can't quite remember how. We found quite a bit of lumber and enough materials to build a camp, so with this we headed back to the beach...

After hearing some bits and pieces for our colleagues again - including viperberries for the half-elf who feels it will eradicate her drink problem - a few of us set off to explore parts of the island. After being attacked by dimorphodons (sic) and having a very close shave with one or two of them, we managed to get to the other side of the 'shiv' to find that the coast beyond is green jungle, the terrain being the same all the way through. On the islands to the South West, we noticed that the trees have a grey hue to them, though how we're going to get over there I don't know. We came back to the camp, where misfortune befell the party once again...

In trying to engage a serene but impassive looking asian guy in coversation, one of the party - persumably by throwing food at him - angered him to the point where he challenged him to a duel to the death. When Traugon, our half-orc mage with a toad on his head, tried to rescue the situation by casting Charm Person on him, he became the second on the man's list of people to kill. And that is where we left it, Thursday should prove a nasty surprise for some people...

I can see why the others wanted to build a camp on the beach where they knew it was safe, or at least as safe as it gets, but for how long it took us to get from one side of the island to the other I can't help but feel it would have been better to do this later on, when we could have journeyed to a central position on the island. We're going to have to do a lot more exploring if we're going to get anywhere with this, and every night we spend away from shelter is another night something horrible may happen. We'll have to try to find another way around it but it's going to be a tough one, I think...

3/5/11: The Horus Heresy

I actually got really excited about this, it's a bit anti-climax, but...

I bought The Horus Heresy game a few weeks ago and got to try it out with Dave for the first time last night. It looks like a brilliant game, it really does, but unfortunately we didn't get very far. After a not-so-quick scramble to put all the parts to it together, here's what the board looked like:

We were playing the Brother vs Brother scenario, which we'd got wrong anyway because there's supposed to be more Imperial Titans at the bottom of the map. We gave it a go, and we did our best, we really did, but since neither of us had a clue what we were doing and I had to keep referring back to the book, we were never going to get very far. That being said, it was a pleasure to give Angron and his merry men a kicking with the White Scars...

I've had a look at the rules again and played a practice game against myself so I've got some semblence of an idea of what to do next time. I think I've got it figured, though how I'm going to convert my knowlege of the rules mechanics into something that might help me win the game, I don't know. I managed to realise that you do need to be playing the right size of game with regard to combat, for example if it says the combat is going to last for 6 turns, (or iterations as they're called in the game,) you'd better make sure it does, or you'll get wiped out.

So, after a fairly non-descript first go, it'll be interesting to see how it all turns out next time...