Commorragh: Phase 2

Okay, now we’ve had brief chat about how the gangs (or kabals or whatever) could be constructed; the next step is to think about the reasons why these gangs would be fighting.  Now, as anyone who knows anything about Commorragh can tell you, it’s a very dangerous place.  Fights happen and casual murder abounds.  However, it’s not completely lawless.  Such a society could not exist.  That’s not to say that there’s any kind of central constitution or set of rules or anything.  Actually, thinking about it, it’s not really law.  It’s order. There’s a distinct difference between the two.  Order seems to be kept by faction and by individual.  After the aristocracy fell, organised gangs (kabals) rose from the anarchy and now keep order in the areas that they control.  This provides a ripe canvas for conflict, as all these kabals would be trying to screw each other over for gain, be it territory, resource, favour from another faction, you name it.  However, such machinations must be planned carefully or a full-on war between kabals could erupt, disrupting the order of the area and (more often than not) weakening both sides regardless of who one.  This environment favours the smaller-sized conflicts with distinct objectives to be achieved and strict parameters for failure.  This is very good for the type of game I want to do.

However, that’s just the kabals.  They’re only one faction in Dark Eldar society (although they are broadly speaking the most powerful and generalist).  You also have Wych Cults, Haemonculi Covens, Hellion Gangs, Incubi Temples, Mandrakes, Alien Mercenaries and the vast multitudes of Slaves knocking about.  However, some of these things are just going to be too specialised to be a full playable faction in the game.  Incubi are a good example to illustrate what I mean.  They have a very strict role and a (sort of) code of ethics to them, and I just don’t see them being involved in these kind of gang war on their own.  I can see them being hired as shock troops and bodyguards though, just not a faction in their own right.  Same for the alien mercenaries.  They wouldn’t be organised enough or well supported enough to participate in and of themselves.  Hired, no problem.  Mandrakes as well.  God knows what they're up to.

Now, in games like Necromunda, you had your distinct gangs (Orlocks, Van Saar, Escher, Goliath et al) and you played strictly to that gang’s layout and quirks.  Van Saar ran highly tech-based, so would have relevant skills and equipment for that theme, Goliath were brute-force close range fighters and so on.  There were some mercenary choices, but it was broadly you having your one gang choice and playing to that.  Gorkamorka was simpler.  You had Gorkers and Morkers.  They weren’t so much gangs as schools of thought (cunning or brute force) and only governed what skills you had available to you.  I see this game as being different from both on that front.

Even in that short list of factions I made, there are a number that would work as hirelings rather than full factions and this would lend itself to a far more varied hodgepodge of gang make ups, as I see people wanting to go for a variety of different gang makeup from all the hired forces.  In some ways this is a good thing, but might end up with the opposing forces being too indistinct and losing character.  How could this be combated?  One possibility is a favour system.  The more you hire, say Incubi, the more they would favour you as a regular employer.  You would gain (if not trust) then at least a little extra consideration.  Yet, at the same time, the other mercenary factions wouldn’t care much for you and you would gain any favour with them.  In fact, up against another gang who had hired wych cultists, your rampant slaughter of them (maybe) would cause you to be seen as an enemy or at least an antagonist and they would be far less likely to work for you.

This system, I’ve realised, potentially falls into the trap to people throwing their lot in with one mercenary faction and endlessly taking advantage of cheaper rates and better equipment, making it feel less like a Kabal and more like a Temple on the march, which I said earlier was incongruous to the logic of Temples.  There should be risk involved in the act of hiring on guys like this.  So I’m thinking of something like a penalty if too many of your hirelings die in a conflict.  After all, the Temple isn’t going to think highly of you if you keep getting their members killed, regardless of how often you hire them…

Okay, that’s the discussion for today, but this section is definitely going to need more thought.

In a good way, of course.  There’s a lot of potential here that needs to be explored.  As ever, any comments or ideas are appreciated.

PS Thanks to you anonymous guys (not sure if you were one or two) for linking me to similar projects.  When time allows I’ll definitely have a look through and see if there’s any insight I can glean from them.  Fingers’ crossed!

Commorragh: Phase 1

I suppose the first thing to think about when trying to design a game like this is wondering what form it should take.  I’ve stated my inspiration for this as being gang-level skirmish campaign games like Necromunda and Mordheim.  That seems like a natural starting point, as the gang violence is probably going to be the meat of the game.  Assuming I take further ideas from those games, another question arises.  In Necromunda, each one of your gang members, from juves to leaders, was their own character.  You named them, equipped them and developed them all individually.  Mordheim, by contrast worked by a different method.  You had some individual characters, but you also had groups of Henchman; guys who were less individual than the named characters.  Where the important characters rolled on dedicated injury tables whenever they got taken down in a fight, henchman got a single flat D6 roll to see whether or not they survived the wounds, representing their more expendable nature.

Another key difference between Henchmen and Characters was in experience and advancement.  One of the most fulfilling things about Necromunda was having one of your juves (low-level gang members) grow over time and claw their way up the gang hierarchy and become more and more dangerous as time progressed.  Henchmen had opportunity for advancement, but these were often less plentiful or developed than Characters, who had far greater opportunities for skills and stats.  Equipment is another defining difference, with Henchmen having far less options for tweaked layouts and less flexibility and character as a result, especially seeing as they were hired on in groups rather than individuals.

That may have been sounding like I don’t like the Henchman system, but that’s not really the case.  The Mordheim system may have sacrificed some of the depth of the Necromunda gang system on a strict model-by-model basis, but the game became streamlined as a result.  It also helped you to get more attached to the characters you did have, as you would (by and large) prefer to have a henchman throw himself in the way to blunt an attack than one of your few characters, whereas you wouldn’t really get the choice in Necromunda.  I also think that the more disposable nature of the Henchman system fits in better with the feel of Commorragh as whole.  People would get thrown away wholesale if necessary with little to no remorse from the loss.

I think that, for the combat section of the game, the Henchman System of Mordheim is probably going to be a better fit overall, with a few more individual characters to act as lieutenants or important allies.  This too conveys the extreme segregation of Commorragh society into the haves or have-nots as well as providing more scope for en masse gangs to develop without horrific amounts of paperwork to endure at the end of each engagement.

However, my decision is by now means set in stone.  These Commorragh posts are really me having a conversation with myself and mulling over ideas.  Well, that’s half true.  They’re also serving as progress updates and discussion points for anyone who might be interested in joining in or giving ideas or criticism.  At the very least have a look at some of the games I mentioned earlier (if you don’t know them already).  They really are quite good.

Free (legal) downloadable rulebooks for the systems can be found through the following links:

Mordheim

Necromunda

Gorkamorka 1

Gorkamorka 2

So long!

Trudging Forward into the Future!

One of the problems I have trying to write these blog posts is decided what to write about.  It’s always been a problem of mine: too much choice.  I mean, battle reports are a good and obvious choice, but I’m wary of writing them too often, as there is a definite limit as to how much actual information they can impart to any situation other than the battles themselves and they can come across as either ego-stroking or self-pitying (depending on battle result of course).

Rants were another option, but I’ve found out that I don’t feel particularly comfortable writing them.  Make no mistake, I can rant in person, in voice, but when it comes to formulating them as a written bellyache, then they lose some of their immediacy and (for me at least) that is one of the key parts of any verbal rampage.  Some writers can convey that very well, but I think my writing is probably to clunky and formal to properly express those views, cathartic as they may be.  I still might write one every now and again but they’re unlikely to be a staple of the blog as I don’t think they’re entertaining or informative enough in my style of prose.  Ho hum.

I definitely plan on doing more Recommendations because it’s nice to write something that can be fairly analytical but also unabashedly positive.  There is the distinct possibility of me running out of things to recommend or at the very least repeating myself, and unfortunately a lot of things I really enjoy are things that I’m sure the overwhelming majority of geekdom enjoy (or at the least have heard of).  I mean, if I were to recommend ‘Firefly’ I’ve no doubt that that will be met with a shrug and tacit agreement.  It wouldn’t achieve anything.  I may still do a few ‘No Shit Sherlock’ recommendations every now and then, but will probably not be spending too much time on them as there is nothing I can add that hasn’t already been said or recorded a lot better somewhere else on the net.

However, recently I’ve hit upon a couple of seams of rich blog fodder that will be ideal for me.  I have one 40K side project going and a new one that I plan to start some point soon.  They seem to be the perfect things to while away the too-short lunchtimes at work.  The pre-existing 40K project is the Iron Hands Codex that I started over a year ago and have revised a couple of times since.  Unfortunately it’s been lying fallow for far too long since my new job hit and took away a lot of my idle computer time.

I’ll go through various units that I’ve created and explain the reasoning behind them and pontificate on where they work, where they don’t and try to improve them over time.  With any luck, my tiny team of imaginary readers may have an opinion on them and help me out with ideas and criticism.

The new project I mentioned is basically taking the form of a Specialist Game like GW used to do.  Now, I don’t create things from scratch typically.  It’s part and parcel of the ‘too much choice’ thing I mentioned earlier.  I tend to take existing things and tweak them; giving my ideas form in that way and building on solid foundations.  Basically, this project is under the working title of Commorragh and will be a Necromunda/Mordheim style of game set in and around the Dark Eldar home city of the title.  Necromunda was (and still is) and very good little game, as was (is) Mordheim.  Both games focussed on gang wars and low-level skirmishes rather than the larger battles of their respective parent systems and are pretty much designed to be played campaign style over a long period of time.  I’ve just realised that Gorkamorka comes under that category as well.  I was seriously remiss not mentioning that earlier (it’s one of my top 3 specialist games).

Now, the pitch.  I think that Commorragh would work really well because of the variety available for really weird stuff going along in the city.  In basic Necromunda you had six gangs (and a few others in expansion) but they were all human (or shades thereof), with a couple of very rare alien mercs available.  In the Dark City, you’ve got the distinct variety of the DE populace, but also any number of alien mercs, slaves, engines of pain and daemonspawn.  Realspace raids could be introduced.  Long-term scheming could be introduced if I can find the right mechanics for it.  The haemonculi give you a wide variety of customisation to your gang (or whatever they’ll be called) much like the Mad Doks of Gorkamorka.  The possibilities are great and I hope to explore them and (hopefully) making a playable campaign game at the end of it.

Anyway, that’s the pitch for Commorragh and the end to this meandering post.  If you have any ideas for either of my projects, let me know.  With luck I’ll bore the pants off you with 40K design talk tomorrow.

But you can never tell.

I am very lazy, after all.

Ashes to Ashes Sucks: Part 3

Well, it’s time to wrap up this miniseries now I think.  Now to touch on one of the biggest things wrong with this series:  the main character.  Alex Drake doesn’t work on a variety of levels.  She is unlikeable, emotionally fragile, arrogant and apparently utterly unable to keep anything to herself.

Now, Sam Tyler had a number of these problems too.  You can’t have a flawless character and make him/her particularly interesting (or at the very least it is exceptionally difficult).  Sam was distant, cold and had a bit of superiority complex, but he wasn’t anywhere near as bad as Drake herself.  We are introduced to Drake as she is doing the school run with her daughter and (for some reason) they are discussing the case of one Sam Tyler, a fairly recent suicide and joking about it.  I have already addressed why confirming that he genuinely had committed suicide and that the modern day world was definitely real was a terrible thing so I won’t dwell on it further.  However our introduction to Drake clearly seems (to me at least) to be setting her up to be a thoroughly dislikeable bitch.  Anyway, blah, blah, blah stuff happens and Drake is at a hostage scene being shot in the head, waking up in 1980-something, etc.  If that seems rushed and threadbare; it is.  I haven’t watched the episode since the first time it was aired several years ago.  Anyway enough of my shoddy blogging ethics, on to the top three reasons why Drake is really annoying.

1.  Upon reaching the 80s, she’s fairly convinced that she’s already got everything figured out, because she was Tyler’s psychiatrist, you see, and she counselled him up his revival from the coma and so knows about the world he lived in for the duration.  She must’ve been bang up on the counselling job, I must say, seeing as Sam killed himself only weeks after the coma.  Some rational characters might end up taking that as a bit of a failure on their part, but not Alex, oh no.  One of the things that made me like Tyler was his confusion and bemusement at the world he’s forced to inhabit.  Not to say that Drake isn’t also confused, but she manages to temper this relatable and sympathetic trait by being an insufferable smart-arse about everything.  Because, you know, she has the ramblings of a (probably) insane suicidal ex-coma patient committed to her memory for just such an eventuality.  Ugh.

2.  She meets her parents.  This isn’t bad in and of itself.  Sam did the same thing.  However, when he did it, he was a little overwhelmed by the whole situation but acted with a great deal of self-restraint and caution with the whole interaction.  He still appeared a little mad, but I challenge you to act better when a car-crash has teleported you to an era of pure brown.  However, Drake breaks down in the space of about10 minutes and tries to directly interfere in her parents’ lives informing them of future events and flat out trying to tell her mum about the situation without any pretence or forethought.  This wouldn’t necessarily reflect awfully on Drake herself (although it definitely ends up doing so), as I can imagine it would definitely be a temptation in that situation.  However, she comes across (quite rightly) as an absolute fucking lunatic for the entire scene.  Now, instead of trying to repair the damage or learning from her mistake and leaving them the hell alone, she meets up with her mum seemingly every other bloody episode to have the whole breakdown over and over again.  And her mum actually allows it to happen!  I see no reason why the supposedly smart lawyer character wouldn’t have the crazy, drunken, ranting police officer committed or at least have a restraining order slapped on them after, say, the third time that officer turns up at their house completely uninvited and unannounced.

3.  She starts falling in love with Gene.  Enough said, really.  That premise is fucking ridiculous in itself.  Fuck this show.

Anyway, that’s about it from me for now.  I don’t think I’m well cut out for ranting, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t try it again in the future.

In conclusion: Life on Mars was great.  Just pretend Ashes to Ashes never existed.  It’s better for all of us that way.

So long!

Ashes to Ashes Sucks: Part 2

In my last post I put down a brief (and probably woefully underdeveloped) sum-up of Life on Mars, steering clear of spoilers.  At least I’m pretty sure it was clear of spoilers.  I can make no such promise about this follow-up post.  So, without further ado:

---------------------------------------SPOILER WARNING-------------------------------------------

Anyway, a couple of provisos before I get into this.  I haven’t watched all of Ashes to Ashes.  Most of the first series, but that was enough to annoy me so much I just jacked it in.  I haven’t rewatched it for the purposes of this rant either, so some of my recollections could be skewed, inaccurate or just plain wrong.  If that’s the case, let me know (but I doubt anyone will go overboard trying to defend this dreck).  I haven’t really done much research on the series either; only a little bit of Wikipedia to remind me of character names and such.  So don’t expect behind-the-scenes info or anything.  That said, I’ll refer back to my previous post and just compare the series for the most part and not get into individual episode plots, although I will mention the occasional blisteringly stupid thing that Alex Drake does.  She’s the main character, by the way (played by Keeley Hawes) and will be the focus of much of my ire.

However, that’s not where we’ll start.  Let’s start at the end of Life on Mars.  The end of Life on Mars had Tyler finally having to make the choice to either stay where he was with Hunt et al or go back to the life he knew before.  Unfortunately, in order to return to his old life, he has to destroy the one he’s made for himself in the ‘70s.  The choice is regretfully made and everything falls apart.  Tyler is returned to his old life and everything seems normal, except there is no joy or colour any more, and Sam falls into increasing ennui, perpetually unsatisfied with the world he now inhabits.  Eventually he makes another choice and throws himself off a building in a bid to return to the retro world.  He arrives, manages to undo (most of) the damage he inflicted upon leaving it and they all go down the pub and off to more adventure or whatever.  The overarching question ‘Am I in a coma, travelled back in time or just mad?’ is left unanswered, as all three options are still (relatively) valid.  This, in my opinion, is an excellent way to end the series and the programme as a whole; giving the audience something to think about and a talking point to mull over with other fans of the series.  Then Ashes to Ashes comes along.  And fucks everything up.

Within the first few minutes, all the ambiguity of the ending is destroyed.  Yes, the modern world is the real world.  Yes, Tyler was in a coma the whole time.  Yes, he genuinely committed suicide and died shortly after impact with ground.  Bravo.  Way to ruin one of the best endings to any TV series in the 25 years.  And it only took three minutes!  As with Tyler, Drake suffers a traumatic injurious event to send her maybe back in time into a coma and she meets up with Gene Hunt and the others.  Except Sam Tyler.  Moreover, it’s the 80s now.  And they’ve moved to London.  Here is where I have another problem.  Tyler was hit by a car and put into a coma.  Drake was shot in the head.  To me this just seems like blatant one-upmanship (as well as far less likely to actually, you know, result in a coma).

Anyway, Drake does a whole bunch of stupid, condescending and unself-aware bullshit throughout the various episodes that I’ve seen, but I’ll save my main gripes about her until tomorrow.  Today, I’ll just briefly (too late) compare a few characters.

1: Gene Hunt.  He was veering dangerously close to caricature in Life on Mars, but in this series he has completely thrown himself into being an utter bigot.  His ‘non-PC’ character was very popular and the lines written for him were very funny in the last series, so the writers seemed to have amped those up massively for the new series and ignored the subtleties and depth to his character as a result.  Don’t get me wrong.  Gene Hunt is a funny character and important to the story.  Glenister clearly has a great deal of fun playing him and his knee-jerk intuition was a superb counter to Sam’s analytical coldness.  They played off each other well and both seemed to be made better by their rivalry, each incorporating positive traits from the other and changing.  Only apparently Hunt has not changed at all.  This is a major source of annoyance to me because not only (despite everything in Life on Mars) has Gene not changed to be more thoughtful and less bigoted, he has actually got worse, further denigrating Tyler to irrelevance in the context of the series.  Prick.

2:  Annie Cartwright.  She isn’t here.  Fair enough.  She was very closely linked to Sam in the last series and bringing her back wouldn’t have served much purpose in character development.  Her replacement however, Shaz Lombard, is no replacement at all.  Where Annie was a strong, caring character and served as a sort of counsellor to the alienated Sam, Shaz is pretty useless.  She is just the typical ‘female side character’ used in a programme to look pretty, do nothing of any real consequence and get in trouble so she can be rescued.  That was more or less her entire character from I saw.  A massive step down from her predecessor.

3: Test Card Girl.  She’s not here either.  Instead, we get a clown.  Now, I know that as horror clichés go, a creepy clown is about as played out and tired as a creepy little girl, so I can’t really argue on that front.  What I can bitch out though is the fact that the clown is relentlessly one-note.  All he does is appear in Drake’s eye line every now and again, scare the shit out of her and be silent.  Occasionally he’ll run menacingly towards the camera.  That was round about all he did.  Again, the ambiguity that was very much there in the character of the Test Card Girl is completely stripped out for the clown.  The Girl was scary, but not because she was threatening.  It was because she was so otherworldly and unnatural.  This clown loses out on that because there is no communication between him a Drake.  Sure, the Girl wasn’t often directly helpful, being cryptic as hell most of the time, but what she said was relevant and her character was a useful expositional element when necessary, doubling as an potential indication for Tyler’s madness.  The clown just fails.

Anyway.  That’s it from me at the moment.  Lunch is over (happens faster and faster each time, I swear!) and my bitching about the character of Alex Drake will begin tomorrow. So long!

Ashes To Ashes Sucks: Part 1

Well, it’s been a week’s break fro this blog.  Not planned by any means, though.  Work was hectic for a couple of days, then some prawns kicked me in the arse and had me off work for a couple of days, and Friday I decided to make it a whole week blog-less and just enjoy my lunch.  Anyway, I’m back now and I’m thinking about talking about something non-40K, which is a bit of challenge for me at the moment.  Battle reports are easy for me to write, because there’s a solid format, and most of the work (i.e. the game itself) is already done for me.  Trying to write about something else throws up a number of problems, starting with what to write about in the first place.  To solve this problem, I’ve decided to back up to an (almost) throwaway comment I made in one of early posts.  Ashes To Ashes was a terrible series.  That’s as true now as it ever was, but I suppose I should waste my time and yours trying to justify this ultimately subjective viewpoint beyond the typical ‘I said it, so it must be’ reasoning that I seem to apply to so many things I say.

In order to find out why I dislike the series so much, you have to look at its precursor (and far superior) series, Life On Mars.  For those that don’t know, Life on Mars was a two-series BBC One show that started in 2006.  The basic premise was that a modern-day policeman called Sam Tyler (John Simm) gets hit by a car and wakes up some 33 years in the past.  Most of the time, the episodes were a 1970s police procedural show with occasional anachronisms thrown in by Tyler as he tries to use modern methods and ideologies decades before their time in pursuit of his work.  Very episodic, but definitely above average.  However, what really made the programme interesting (for me at any rate) was the overarching plot of Tyler’s situation.  It boils down to three alternatives.  He’s either in a coma, has genuinely gone back in time or his whole future life was a delusion and he is therefore more than slightly mad.  To the show’s credit, all three options were eminently plausible (in so far as time travel via head injury can ever be plausible) based on the hints that the programme was giving. 

But that’s just the broad outline. Tyler is undeniably the main focus of the programme (I think he is actually in every single scene of the entire two series run), but there are also three very important side characters.  The first (and most popular) is that of Gene Hunt, Tyler’s immediate superior in the Manchester CID.  He was brutish, belligerent and a borderline alcoholic.  He was also smart in a variety of ways and nearly always certain in what he was doing and, as such, was very much the antithesis of Tyler.  This was the source of most of the main conflict in the show.  They played well off each other, with Gene being right on occasion and Sam being right at other times.  Gene was also a very good comic character and Philip Glenister plays him very well.  However, the comic aspects of Gene Hunt can run the risk of overwhelming the tragedy and hypocrisy of his character (aspects that can often be ignored by a stratum of the audience.  I’ll address that at some point.)

The next character is that of WPC Annie Cartwright and serves very much as an anchor and moral compass to Tyler, being a warm and caring character, again very different to Sam who comes across as cold and calculating through most of the series.  This is also a great source of conflict throughout the run, with the added romantic tension between the two of them providing another layer to the programme.  In my opinion, Annie is definitely one of the best female characters I’ve seen TV as she manages to be a very strong and realistic character with falling into cliché.

The final character I’m mentioning (there are more, but I don’t want to type a full dissertation here) isn’t really a character so much as an apparition. The Test Card Girl is an occasional character who pops up out of Sam’s TV when it’s left on for too long (or at dramatically appropriate moments) to offer cryptic advice or muddy the waters of the overarching plot.  She is creepy as hell (in the manner of many supernatural little girls in fiction) and adds to the surreal feel of the show.  It’s very possible to forget the sci-fi style elements to Life on Mars in the middle of an episode, and one of her appearances is always jarring in the way it reminds you about the weird overall metaplot to the show.

Anyway, that’s a brief outline of the series.  I’ve tried to avoid spoilers as I don’t want to ruin it for anyone who may not have seen it yet.  If you haven’t, then please source a copy of the DVD or Netflix it or Lovefilm or whatever you do and watch it.  It’s a cracking programme and well worth your time.

I can’t say the same for its follow-on sister series but will be addressing that tomorrow.  There will be spoilers.

And rage…

MTT Report: Last Instalment!

Okay, okay.  Last Battle Report for a while now.

I promise.

The last game was strange, to be perfectly honest.  Due to an unexpected last minute rescheduling, my team (Overlords 1) were reassigned to play Overlords 2.  Hmm, convenient.  The night before the tournament we had been chatting together about how we would handle being thrown up against each other, bandying tactics and strategies around in a variety of ‘what if’ scenarios.  But, no, these were half-baked plans that now had to be put into half-baked action.  I flung myself forward as the chosen player for team 1 and the team 2 counter-forces were Dark Eldar and Tau.  That was a bit of a shame, because I wanted to go up against the Marine player.  Partly because I was pretty sure my list could take his and also because he’d been drawn up against three other Dark Eldar players earlier in the tournament and I wanted to see him throw a hissy-fit!  I ended up choosing to go against the DE player though, as he’d been really keen to throw down against me given the chance, and both teams kind of wanted to see a DE vs DE clusterfuck.

Mirror matches can often be very dull affairs, and the DE can be accused of have very samey builds for comp standards.  My list (as has already been addressed, probably at unnecessary length) varies a little from the traditional ‘good’ DE list, which has lead it to be stronger against some other lists and more resilient against a variety of threats.  However, when it comes to going up against Venomspam, they are packing more armour than I am and although AV10 can be fairly reliably taken down with small arms in most armies, the DE small arms are always unable to hurt vehicles.  So basically what happens is that we play tit-for-tat vehicle killing until I run out of vehicles and my main vehicle-killing option is reduced to Hellions trying to hit fast-moving skimmers with pointy sticks.  For those less inclined to handle the mathematics of that situation; it results in me getting 1 glancing hit for every 36 attacks I fling at a vehicle, so the odds are poor.

Fortunately, my opponent was running a different kind of DE list as well.  Instead of flooding the field with Venoms and Ravagers, he instead plumped for two Raiders full of Wyches, a 20 man Kabalite squad with Dark Lances, 3 Razorwings and a Raider with a nasty hammer unit comprising a powered up Archon (djinn blade, shadowfield, combat drugs, blast pistol and soul trap) with a Haemonculus (agoniser, shattershard) and a squad of 6 Incubi.

Remember way (way) back during my game 1 report, where I said I was falling victim to First Game Syndrome?  This was Last Game Syndrome.  My brain was all over the place.  So much so that after I lost the chance to go first in the Dawn of War setup, I forgot to bring in any of the stuff I decided was going to come in Turn 1.  Now anyone who has made this mistake will realise that accidentally leaving all your army in reserve can really hurt your game.  It is also a really dumb mistake to make.  I only had my 3 Wrack Raider and Haemonculus on the field for the first turn and the Raider died before any reinforcements turned up, leaving my guys stranded (in my backfield, luckily, but still stranded).  I received two Ravagers on Turn 2 that tried to take on the Razorwings and did a rather poor job of it too.  One Razorwing downed, but both Ravagers got splattered in the return fire.  My opponent was pushing forward on the offensive, with his hammer unit turboing forward toward my stranded survivors.  Two Objectives out of five were held by his forces; one by the Kabalites populating some area terrain and another by a wych squad on top of a building.

Both my Trueborn arrived and prompted proved their ineptitude by being utterly unable to bring down the archon’s Raider with all the 8 Blaster shots at their disposal.  I decided to kill them after the game.  I could let the Archon’s unit pick and chose their combat so I resorted to one of my (many) desperation tactics.  In addition to the useless Trueborn, I also received a squad of Hellions, and my whole remaining strategy for the game rested on them.  They surrounded the speeding Raider and assaulted it.  A bit of an uncertain tactic, but what else could I have done to bring the raider down?  As it happened; it worked like a charm.  2 Glancing hits; 1 stun, which was good enough for me to be honest (no-one would have been able to disembark from the Raider during the next turn), but I also rolled an Immobilisation!  Just in case you don’t know: if a skimmer which is travelling flat-out is immobilised, it gets wrecked.  The crew then have to emergency disembark (provided it was wrecked during the opponent’s turn).  If a model can’t be placed outside of 1” of an enemy model upon debarkation, then it’s dead.  No saves, no nothing.

That Immobilised result was awesome! That was about 500 points down in one assault and it really started turning the game to my favour.

Naturally, those heroic Hellions were the target of some extensive retribution during the next turn, as both the surviving Razorwings unleashed their entire arsenals into the crowds swarm.  Due to some luck on my part, and some inaccuracy on his, four Hellions managed to survive the firestorm.  Due to the pain token they’d grabbed from the dead Hammer unit, they were fearless to boot and didn’t care.  Their only role for the rest of the game was to fling themselves at an objective in cover and sit there for the rest of the game.  I job they did very well, may I add.

The Razorwings paid for their cowardly attack and were brought down in a hail of darklight.  My final squad of Hellions and the Baron finally deigned to show their faces and leapt forward to contest the wych-held objective.  The Wyches promptly (and predictably) charged them, but with numbers, strength and defensive grenades, the Hellions still manage to lose the combat by a considerable margin.  Seriously, they should not have lost.  Luckily enough, they didn’t run, even though they lost the combat by a total of 4.  The subsequent Hit and Run extracted the Hellions from the combat and they then set about flocking towards the Kabalites.  The next shooting phase, those Kabalites were broken and running.  One of my empty Venoms turboed straight to the wych-held objective to rob my opponent of his last objective.

And with that, my opponent conceded.  Can’t blame him.  All he had left were a raider and a squad of wyches and I was still packing a decent amount of firepower and mobility.  Had the game continued, I’m fairly confident I could’ve gone for the table in a turn or so.

And that’s that.  End of MTT report.  For realises, this time!

Excellent tournament.  I had a great deal of fun and didn’t play against a single opponent I didn’t enjoy.  Just as much by luck as by judgement, I managed to come away with Best Dark Eldar Player, despite the fact that my team came a mighty 14th place out 16!