Stargrave: Captain Dread and the Adventure of the Abandoned Factory

Happy New Year to all! Having just switched the look and feel of this blog up to something a little more modern, I'm also resolving to make it more of a regular thing. 

Apologies for the sheer infrequency of posts on this blog - I hope to make it more of a habit in 2023 if I can. Below is the summary of our third game of Stargrave, The Abandoned Factory.

In this scenario the crews are trying to loot an abandoned factory on a frontier world. The situation is complicated by the presence of a large war droid in the factory, which has some fairly serious firepower for the crews to attend with.

Captain Dread had added a second Chiseller to his crew called Bryce. Dread seems to have been taking most of his losses among the Genestealer hybrids, largely because I've been using them to advance in a bunch of trouble ahead of the crew, and they have attracted most of the enemy fire. The other Chiseller, Sedgewick, has the pistol belt recovered in the last mission. We have a nice vintage 1980s Rogue Trader vibe going with this campaign, with all the late 1980s and early 1990s figures on the table.

Overhead gantries again featured in this mission (see above), which made the use of my drone quite important. A useful tactic seems to be getting it airborne early on in the proceedings and then using it to get in among the opposition. Captain Dread also invested in another hold rat. They are cheap and fast and can wreak havoc among the Eldar crew. And they are no big loss if they get killed as they are vermin. The mutants like to farm them in the depths of Dread's ship for food.

I pushed forward aggressively in this mission, and took quite a few losses as a consequence. Again we ran out of time and failed to finish the game which was a pain. Kelvin on his blog has suggested a way to credit crews with loot appropriately when time runs out before all counters are off the table.

The war droid was a pain to contend with, as it was taking THREE shots per turn and largely just standing there blasting away. Luckily it did not do much in the way of moving. We also received another visit from the blasted Strontium Dogs. There were rumours of primitive alien tribes in the area, but the shoot out was well over before they turned up with their Stone Age weapons.

Johnny Alpha is down!

Sadly the game ended before Dread's first mate Kolioth Yang grabbed another data counter from the top of a tower by climbing up behind the droid while it was focused on blasting away at the Eldar. I think he would have escaped with it in a couple of turns, but it was not to be...

Captain Dread was wounded but patched up by my medic once the crew escaped off-planet. Medics have their additional uses. Beckett and Carla Zane the aforesaid medic were both badly wounded and will be nursing their injuries in the next game. Yang levelled up and has acquired a new power, Control Robot, which given Kelvin's fondness for robots in his crew could be interesting.

The loot from the factory turned out to be entirely comprised of pistols. We obviously raided a pistol factory.

Rumours on the net indicate the presence of a dormant Necron monolith on a jungle moon in an adjacent system. It will be an opportunity to finish my Necron monolith model and crack out my new jungle mat. Who knows? Maybe some Necrons will feature too? Ancient Necron tech is always to be prized!

I also picked up an excellent book of sci fi skirmish scenarios in December, which I'll be looking to adapt for yet more Stargrave missions in 2023, so stay tuned for that!