The corpses of massacred Blood Angels were being ruthlessly defiled by the demons (use your imagination) as the Grey Knights retreated to regroup. After a
valiant effort the Blood Angels were abandoned as part of an Inquisition plot to purge the tainted chapter from the Imperium. However, the Grey Knights still had demons to destroy, and the battle was about to be joined. Two Squads of Terminators, A Librarian, A Psycannon Dreadnought and a Squad of Ten Purifiers were led by Castellan Crowe and his personal Storm Raven transport. In addition, three tech priests were on hand to coordinate the orbital bombardments.
The demons struck deep into the right flank of the Knights. A blood thirsty tide of Khornate monstrosities, impatient for the slaughter, surged from the warp ahead of their brothers. The crowded and perilous placement of their manifestation was no obstacle. Two groups of bloodletters, flesh hounds, a demon prince and a bloodthirster all roared with threats of impending doom. The Demon Prince was enraged even further (if that's possible) by sustaining a wound from the dangerous terrain he materialized in.
Crowe and his troops responded to the hideous cacophony of thirsty voices with stoic hatred. Psycannons and psybolts from the storm raven banished the Bloodthirster immediately while orbital barrages began to thin the ranks of the blood letters. The Psycannon dreadnought faced off with the Demon Prince of Khorne in a valiant attempt to gun it down as it advanced.
As the Khornate Demons howled in frustration the rest of their brethren came screaming through a hole in the sky. Two groups of flamers, pink horrors, fiends, and nurglings followed the fickle Fateweaver into the material realm.
The flamers continued the arrogant approach of their Khornate brothers and manifested perilously close to the Terminators. One unit was consequently banished back the the warp for the time being, but the other cut down the ranks of brave knights with their fowl breath.
The Demon Prince blasts through the Psycannon dreadnought without thinking and rushes on to confront the remaining terminators and the hounds are hot on his heels.
The Fateweaver bundles up in a blanket of nurglings (very unfluffy, I must say, for a blanket) to protect his from the cleansing flame of Crowe and his purifiers. A tech priest is pulled from his observation post by a gibbering horde of bloodletters who are disappointed to find that most of his blood has been replaced by hydraulic fluid.
Many of the terminators fall to the breath of the fiends of chaos, but Justicar Thawn leads the remaining members into a vicious retaliatory assault. Unfortunately the vile Fateweaver has twisted the reality to protect his children and Thawn and his lone brother fall to the flamers.
The purifiers refuse to be denied their confrontation and charge into the midst of the nurglings and fiends as shells fall from orbit on the pink horrors. The Fiends are destroyed, but the nurglings hold and allow their master to escape.
The second unit of flamers returns from the warp only to (finally) be punished for their reckless manifestation strategy and arrive far off course.
Fateweaver continues to intervene and allows the pink horrors to survive assaulting the purifiers long enough to hold them up and subject them to the unit of flamers that had just put down Justicar Thawn. Thawn meanwhile, has regained consciousness and assaulted a unit of advancing bloodletters on his own, in a reckless attempt to prevent them from gaining the summit of the ruined temple, which is now defended by a solitary Crowe. Thawn falls again, but takes a toll, which allows Crowe to successfully destroy the bloodletters with his cleansing flame and furious sword.
Meanwhile, the demon prince and the lone hound have weathered the shooting of the other squad of terminators and assault them with one wound each. Both the hound and the prince are protected from the force weapons of the knights by the blessing of Khorne. Fateweaver joins the assault and adds his powers making the Khornate disciples nigh invulnerable. The Librarian retaliates with Dark Excommunication on Fate Weaver and the Warding Stave bears the blows of the demon prince. So the two units are locked in an endless embrace of mutual hatred until... the shrapnel of a mindstrike missile ricochets into the librarian and Fateweaver finally takes him down!
Meanwhile, Crowe is guarding the temple mount, but bloodletters have snuck into a nearby field of monoliths to gather the remnants of warp relics and the Storm Raven does not have time to intercept them!. This small token is enough to give the demons victory.
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This was a great game and I'd like to thank Solomon for his hospitality and his patience while I looked up all the rules for an army I had never played before. I learned that reckless deep striking can really pay off!! Solomon just placed unit after unit right where he wanted it and if it did scatter it went in a harmless direction. The morale of the story is don't open up a flank against someone whose willing to deepstrike against the board edge!
The game ended on turn five and the storm raven couldn't zip over to contest the far objective, but the only troops I had left were being slowly decimated by the Demon Prince, so the best I could have hoped for was a draw.
The purifiers were awesome and I could have made better use of them in hindsight, but this was a first time so I'm learning.
Fateweaver is a pain, and the 2+ force weapon save on the Demon Prince was just too much with the reroll!
Orbital Bombardment was really fun to use and would have been a lot better on an army without an invulnerable save.
The storm raven was also killer. Solomon didn't really have a lot of anti-tank fire, but all the psybolt shots from the Assault Cannon and Heavy Bolter are pretty serious.
Unfortunately, I was playing Crowe as an
IC which he is apparently not. My bad, it's a new army for me, but that's no excuse not to read the rules...
Good Game Sol!
And as nasty as they all may seem, I probably won`t take that route with my Grey Knights (Dave was borrowing my army for this battle and was kind enough to let me cheat a little bit with my daemons, see below). I May just add Captain Stern, but frankly, I am much more interested with what I can do with Corteaz. That is where all the flavor seems to be
All painted and pushing 60,000 points combined.
.....LVO GT 2014 Team Tournament - Best Generals
