Early Wounds: Being A Reprint of an Past Battle

Some of you may be familiar with my old Warseer thread where I first began to document my Oldhammer adventures (before, in fact the term Oldhammer was even coined) and I have had a number of requests to post the battle report I did on that thread here on my blog.

Well here it is.

If I recall correctly, this was the third game in the campaign and was played in November of last year, so 11 months ago now. It features a rare appearance of some of Dan's Realm of Chaos miniatures - so see if you can spot them!

Okay, I bit of background. Last summer I decided to quit GW after the fiasco with pricing and the general drop in quality of the releases. I decided to sell everything I had collected over the years. However, I missed my GW fix as I have been collecting, painting and modelling since 1988. Other systems just didn't do it for me so I decided to go retro and return to my 'Golden Age' of 1986-1992 (the Bryan Ansell years) as this was the time I first engaged with the hobby and still excited me. Thanks to ebay, I was able to sell of everything that was not of this date and collect a vast number of classic miniatures, books, rules sets, magazines etc. I remember the buzz around the release of Realm of Chaos and decided to pick this and the 3rd edition ruleset to be my period. I planned to collect, paint and game with all 4 of the chaos powers in the hope of creating (and converting) warbands using only period models and paints. 

Persuading my friend Dan into the idea, we planned a long campaign that would see the warbands grow and fight it out until they reached the battlefields of the Realm of Chaos itself. To begin with, we create two small forces. A slaanesh and khorne warband. I took slaanesh and Dan took Khorne. The warbands shown in the previous post represent these warbands (slaanesh warband lost a few thugs - originally had 6 - but gained 4 skaven and Khorne added a fleshhound, 5 more beastmen- which Dan painted- but lost a second chaos hound). We played several warm up games and tried to get our heads around the MASSIVE amount of rules. Dan was brought into the hobby through 40K and was immediately impressed with the level of depth the game provided as small skirmishes were elaborate affairs that took two or three hours to complete! For those unfamiliar with the system, after each battle each slain character is tested to see if they are truly dead or otherwise injured. Injured models then have their stats modified to represent wounds (there are fantastic tables to do this is both Slaves... and Lost...) as well as rolling on tables to discover what additional followers or rewards the characters will receive. Khorne did much better out ofthis than Slaanesh, with Ulfheir gaining a chaos weapon that lets of a terrible shriek that causes fear for 12 inches in all directions. He also gain a daemonic fleshound. Slaanesh was not pleased with Slakesin during this time and granted only a single attribute, temporal instability, which meant that my champion would slip in and out of reality during the game- nice!

With several games under our belts, we planned are first proper game. A scenario called the 'Boon of Tzeentch'. The premise to the game was that Ulfheir and his warband had just defeated Ulfhednar's followers entirely, leaving only 5 survivors and that the Khornate warband was busy celebrating its victory by summoning bloodletters into the material realm. Ulfhednar had then struck a pact with Slakesin to attack Ulfhier as they celebrated victory, partly for revenge but also to locate a missing magical item left on the battlefield. The location of this item (or boon) was to be represented by 3 markers (one being the item the other two blanks) randomly on the battlefield. A a separate rule, Dan had to decide if he wanted to continue with his ritual to summon daemons or whether or not to concentrate on defending. The two photographs show the two armies at the beginning of the game.

The game began with the Tzeentch forces advancing up the right hand side of the table. Ulfhednar let his beastmen lead the way towards the Khornate lines. 

On the other flank, my Slaaneshi forces advanced slowly though Throgg, my troll, repeatedly failed his stupidity test and did nothing! The skaven moved quickly on the left in an attempt to out flank Ulfheir's beastmen and disrupt the ritual. They managed to get the beastmen to flee and chased them across the board before colliding with another group of beastmen. This caused major concerns for Dan as his entire right flank collapsed and left his ritual exposed.

The chaos thugs withstood the charge from Gluttonspore the minotaur and the two units fought hard for control of the ritual site. Despite breaking on more than one occasion, they held on (supported by Slakesin's magic) long enough for the Beastmen to join up with them and subdue Gluttonspore. On my right, the Tzeentch forces engaged with Ulfheir's personal attendants ( fleshound and chaos hound) in a stalemate (despite Ulfhednar being WS10 due to the weapon master attribute!) which saw the chaos champions repeatedly missing each other.

At this point, Dan decided to use his chaos weapon and unleashed the Shrieking blade. Unbeknown to us, this had a dramatic effect on the game. As we were using a smaller board, most over my warband and his were within range of the noise and promptly failed their fear tests. These saw most of our models running from the board in terror! Luckily, my Skaven held on long enough to push his beastmen from the field entirely but not before he could summon a bloodletter.

Unfortunately, the bloodletter arrived to late and was bound to move only 6 inches from the ritual site. My skaven retreated to safety as Ulfhednar finally killed the Fleshound and clashed with Ulfheir. 

The game ended with our two champions fighting alone. Eventually, Ulfhednar struck down his rival and collected his boon. This turned out to be an attribute (once we rolled to find out) and the Champion of Tzeentch was rewarded with Warp Frenzy which means that in the future when he fails a frenzy test he will transform into a hideous beast that will attack everyone nearby. 

With the game over. We calculated victory points. Khorne lost a beastmen and the fleshound was banished back to the warp. Ulfheir was also seriously wounded, losing an arm to Ulfhednar's axe. Despite this, the warband attracted a further 7 beastmen and 6 chaos spawn for the next conflict.
Slaanesh lost a chaos thug and a few of the other characters suffered minor wounds. When rolling off, Slaanesh was kind enough to grant my warband much the same rewards- 7 beastmen and 7 spawn. 
As an afterthought, Dan was rather miffed that his vicious, blood loving khornate warband ran. He decided to discard Ulfheir after his limb loss and use Gluttonspoor as champion. He felt that the minotaur would have grown angry at the poor leadership and challenged the leader to combat. With only one arm, poor old Ulfheir didn't stand a chance.

At this point in the game we were trying to use the RoC rules properly. That was all swept under the carpet as we chose models for their rules rather than their randomness. Something I am keen to rectify in the next campaign - Slave to Darkness!

Orlygg