Man O' War? Bah! If it sinks, you can just swim home. Real men brave the poisonous air of space!
My personal favourite happened during a 1000pt Planetary Attack game. It was meant to kick off an Epic
40K ground campaign by landing troops on the planet. The attackers were Ultramarines and the defenders were Orks. Now Space Marines in
BFG were built true to the fluff in that they're pretty slick at planetary assaults, so we didn't expect it to be a fair fight. Basically I thought the Orks (me) might whittle down the attackers a bit before they were comprehensively obliterated.
Now what you have to understand about this battle is that in the previous game, a massive throwdown against Chaos (
which you can read about here), the Marine Battlebarge was blasted by an Activated Blackstone Fortress's warp cannons. Not enough to cripple it, and to be honest it was a bit of a tactical waste when the Fortress could have been zapping Imperial cruisers instead... but we decided that the daemon controlling the thing must have had some nefarious scheme in mind. (I'm thinking of the plaguebearer that got aboard the Imperial ship in
Execution Hour.)
Anyway, back to the Planetary Assault mission. Not long into the game, the Orks decided to board the Battlebarge
en route to the planet. It had Terminators on it, so this was slightly suicidal. (Orks usually do well in boarding actions, but not versus Marines...)
A Kill Krooza and a Terrorship both managed to touch base and start smackin' beekie headz. The absolute best result I could possibly hope for was that the Orks might do a couple of damage points and then move on. There was no possible way I could actually stop the huge ship from reaching the planet.
Or so I thought.
Then we rolled the dice. The result was a tie. Something we'd never, ever seen happen before in a boarding action.
And if you get a tie result, we learned from the rulebook, the ships grapple together and keep fighting. Without moving. Until one side or the other is destroyed.
Marine player: Uh oh.
(I should mention here that the
BFG boarding rules are a blemish on an otherwise excellent ruleset and constantly throw up rules problems. Likely because they were a quick bodge-job from Epic
40K. But never mind.)
We watched in increasing disbelief and helpless laughter as the boarding action turned into a rugby scrum worthy of Warhammer Fantasy. For the next few turns the crew of the Battlebarge ran around in increasing panic as the Ork Meganobz sloooowly chipped away at their numbers. The Terminators teleported into action again and again, desperately trying to wear down the kroozers before the barge ran out of damage points. Meanwhile a pair of Strike Cruisers circled the melee helplessly and lobbed bombardment cannon shots into the mix. As if things weren't mad enough, a stray orbital mine that I'd bought as a planetary defence to use up a few extra points drifted serenely into the scrum and blew up.
The Kill Krooza was reduced to a smouldering wreck, but the Terrorship held on until the Battlebarge hit zero damage. To cheers of " 'Ere it goes!" the boyz hopped back in their motor and released the grapples. The huge blue hulk drifted for several more turns toward the planet until it was caught in the gravity well and slowly swung about...
Gee whiz, nice curse you laid on it there, Mr Blackstone Fortress.
After my opponent had picked his jaw up off the floor, I asked him if he wanted to concede and disengage. Normally he's a bit of a 'game first, fluff second' sorta guy, but not this time. With an expression of grim determination he said, "No. Marines would never give up."
Both Strike Cruisers came about and raced back to the planet with the surviving Ork kroozers hot on their tails. They dove into low orbit and *just* managed to disgorge a few drop pods before the kroozers caught up and blew them apart. (Forward-facing Ork 'eavy gunz up the tailpipe make even Marines cry.) Said kroozers then buzzed the planetary governor's palace before roaring back into the sky. Pull up pull up pull up zoggin' eck dat was close!
In the end the Marines managed to land 1600 pts of Epic
40K troops (thanks White Dwarf 'Death From The Skies' article
)... but were now stranded on the planet. Meanwhile, the fiery meteor of the Battlebarge began its descent. Can you say 'nuclear winter'?
Job's a good 'un.