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Made in us
Outraged Witness







Every one of these molemen had begun life underground.
Yet each would set foot on the surface when the time came.
They would look up at the night sky and see an abyss of menace.
From any of those remote points of light could come a greedy enemy.
Some foe who coveted their fertile home. Some fools who thought them weak.



Today's battle was fought by Ratmen attacking Molemen in Beaver Creek.
Procedural terrain is fun but sometimes a familiar multiplayer level is nice too.
JR's skaven would spend the entire battle in their prototype Land Raiders which spared me the trouble of making/finding a suitable model.
It should be noted that while these 'Raiders resemble the iconic armored vehicle that we all know from later editions,
the original form was much more lightly equipped; single lascannons on each side and a bolter on top.



As the battle began, molemen spotters filed out of the bunker in 2 symmetrical kicklines.
JR then set eyes upon them, the bunker, and the intervening rocks and said something to the effect of
"I shoot the molemen if they're close enough, otherwise shoot the bunker itself, if not the bunker, then the boulders.
Now since the players on the stream are nearly all Warhammer-normies and had been really great about learning to play, I'd been cutting a lot of slack about this sort of thing.

No longer.
It was time to have... THE TALK.



"ahem... so... in 40k, as with many tabletop wargames, you need to estimate the range and then commit to the action.
Whether you're walking, running, charging into melee, shooting, throwing grenades, lobbing artillery, casting a spell, anything.
You make an educated guess, you act, and if your guess was wrong the effort is wasted."


Some of the people in chat were taken aback.
To be fair, for people who are new to these games it must seem like this hardcore elitist thing.
Even the later editions which are considered very streamlined and simplified are still grossly complex and obtuse at first.



🎵 It's time to load the mortars 🎵
🎵 It's time to light the lights 🎵
🎵 It's time to kill the Xenos on the Mole Patrol tonight 🎵
🎵 It's time to spot the co-ords 🎵
🎵 It's time to put up a fight 🎵
🎵 It's time to raise the curtain on the Mole Patrol tonight 🎵




First JR blasted the Fiend of Slaanesh with a pair of lascannons.

Its glowing innards were soon exposed to the cool night air.
For those of you who remember 1st Ed (or Warhammer Fantasy Battle up to 3rd Ed), you'll appreciate the dilemma I faced letting players take daemons.
They were _entirely_ impervious to non-magical attacks.
To damage them at all you needed a spell, enchanted weapon, an attack from a spiritual entity like a ghost or another daemon, or an attack from a creature that had the taint of Chaos.

With players already struggling to deal with heavy armor, this was a potential source of imbalance that would just ruin the game outright.
So I changed the rule give daemons a perfect, but modifiable, 1+ armor save against non-magical attacks.
Magical attacks would still negate this near-invulnerability which meant they'd still be an important asset and a key consideration for players anticipating incorporeal enemies.
But heavy artillery could just blow a daemon apart causing it to become unstable.



It was now Algosith's turn to learn a harsh lesson about 40k.
He'd made the quintessential Warhammer noob mistake; he didn't have any real tankbusting power.
The mole mortars from the Battle Manual could only inflict Strength 3 or 4 hits.
A Land Raider prototype as found in the Rogue Trader rulebook has a Toughness of 8.



Yet his moles determinedly swathed the ground level vehicles with craters which continually left them halted.
Each time new craters were placed (typically at least one each, every turn) the Land Raider would need to roll a 4+ to move again.
They'd then have to begin their acceleration at 5" per turn... until they were halted again.



Thus a battle of sheer will and patience began with JR inexorably rolling out of crater after crater while Algo's mole spotters scurried back around the sides of the bunker.
Into the river, under the stone arch the tanks gradually crept.



Then all at once the Gutter Runner's tanks were free.
One had no craters left and the other two rolled perfect 6s to extricate themselves.
Even seeing this the courage of the plucky moles did not falter.
"We are the Mole Men of Talpinus" they intoned "and we shall never surrender!"



Algosith then switched the targets of the mortars to the twin natural pillars holding up the stone arch.
His hope was to bring down the overhanging sandstone on at least one of the tanks.
I ruled that we would add up the results of the ground and subterranean hits into one giant crater and he needed to exceed to radius of the pillar to cause a complete collapse.
But when the chart results were all calculated and tallied, it wasn't enough.
The northern pillar suffered minor damage while the southern incurred a total of 5".

With this, the last gesture of defiance was snuffed out.
The molemen would die in an all too appropriate and familiar manner - buried and crushed.
Their warbled voices a mix of horror and disbelief, muffled under the plasticrete rubble.


Thanks for reading. Hope to see some of you there next time.

This message was edited 8 times. Last update was at 2022/10/06 06:41:46


   
 
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