"Whoa thought it was a nightmare/ Lord it was so true/ They told me don't go walking slow/ The devil's on the loose/ Better run through the jungle/ Better run through the jungle..."
Every year I resolve to beat my previous personal best in terms of number of blog posts in a year, but who am I kidding? I'm catching up on past table-top gaming activity with this post, and the next one, which will detail my adventures with Bloody Big Battles and my domino Kriegspiel proposition (aka the Domino Principle). Also on the cards hopefully, my 1980s Soviets in Afghanistan strategic game, courtesy of Small Wars.
We managed to get another game in of our sporadic Stargrave battle, detailed below. It was an opportunity to make use of my new jungle mat and my incomplete Necron monolith. I need to finish this!
For this homebrew mission, the crews were able to recover an additional two loot tokens (instead of the central token) from the dormant monolith per the rules for unlocking a physical loot token. All loot recovered from the monolith could be generated using the alien artefact table. Data loot would always be a Secret and worth 200cr.
The act of even trying to access the loot activates the monolith, which immediately begins spawning Necron warriors. XP awards for unlocking the monolith were +25, and +5 per warrior destroyed. The warriors were rated as robots and were also immune to robot control.
Here are some pictures illustrative of the general course of the mission.
Eldar with grenade launcher covers the Eldar captain as he leads his men forwards into the clearing. Nothing is moving other than the tropical wildlife at this stage in the proceedings.
Apart from the Necrons themselves, we also included wandering critters as per the usual rules. In this case the planet was home to ryakans (see Stargrave p.149), although they were less of a threat than the Necrons.
Captain Dread made it to the monolith first and also managed to awaken the Necrons. We rolled randomly to see which side of the monolith they came out of. Luckily the monolith's primary weapons array was not active.
One of my giant mutant hold rats and a drone play hide and seek with an Eldar robot. They are on the edge of some jungle quicksand!
A ryakan pounces on an Eldar guardsman.
Two of my crew make a break for it with alien goodies from the monolith. My pilot is dodging incessant Eldar fire in the foreground. Another crewmember - Angel - can be seen hiding in a bush on the right, where he spent pretty much the entire game trading fire with the Eldar.
The problem with the Necrons is that they just kept coming - they spawned more every turn. Although we were both mowing them down, it was inevitable that any crew who stuck around for too long, would get taken out. This picture, taken near the end of the skirmish, shows the Necrons fanning out into the jungle. Most crew were either down or running for their respective vessels by this stage.
A very enjoyable game with a home brew scenario. We must get Stargrave back on the table again in the near future! I may even cook up a scenario myself...highly enjoyable and you can use any science fiction miniatures you like!
You can download our custom scenario here.
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