Raiders Of The Lost Monolith

On their way to Bluescreen, Jenna Pursuivant's Inquisitorial warband received a code blood signal that demanded immediate investigation. The mining planet of Scargill, ever a small backward place of no import sent a distress signal via Astropath. The message read :

+++Inquisitor missive. +++Seismic activity in the settlement of Kinnock has unearthed structure of alien design. +++Local operatives unable to gain entry +++considerable  fatalities.+++ Request immediate Ordo Xenos assistance.+++ The Emperor Protects+++

A mere week passed and the warband made planetfall. Scargill was a dour place with a populace with a sullen demeanor. Little time was wasted with the planetary Governor, one Thatcher Magz, a female, ruthless and cold - in fact the perfect Imperial servant. Interrogator Pursuivant made straight for Kinnock.  Initial scans showed the structure to be of Necron design but that was immaterial. It had to be destroyed for the good of the Imperium. As the Joker's advanced towards the structure another group were spotted coming towards the Monolith from the opposite direction! Treasure hunters, thieves or  gawpers, it mattered not. If they impeded the agents of The Emperor on their lawful business then blood will be spilled........

The Cause of all the fuss, The Monolith!

Another Day Another Xenos Threat

It seems like I've only just finished my last battle report! This time it's something pretty different, different as in, a scenario designed for Inquisimunda. Blame Stuart. I went round for a game a few weeks ago and he lent me his Necron Codex. It's a fun read and it really gives the Necron army some sort of "we destroying you for your own good!"  type vibe. Or as he says it, The Grumpy Old Men of the 41st Millenium. The premise of the game is a Necron Monolith has erupted slap bang in the middle of an Imperial settlement (Kinnock). Now my Inquisition Cell have to break in, successfully pass three subversion rolls to do enough damage to blow it up. Stuart's Rogue Trader crew is doing something similar, except instead of breaking the Monolith they're stealing stuff from the inside. Sounds pretty easy? There is the matter of the more unwanted humans there are in and about the Monolith, the more it's anti burglary devices come online and Necron troops start materialising around it to stop that sort of thing. That's the basic rules, I will clarify aspects of the game as I go along and will probably publish the entire scenario in a future blog post.

Set Up, Deployment And Other Pertinent Stuff   

Both players set up no more than 8" from their table edge, choosing table edge and who goes first is determined by investigation/subversion rolls. Special deployment is allowed, but no deployment within the 18" area of rubble in the centre of the board where the Monolith is.

Jenna's Jokers

The plan for me was, send in the expendable (ie. cheap to replace/poorly equipped/walking wounded) troops, wreak the Monolith whilst hopefully any materalising Necrons attack Stuart rather than me. That part of the plan was a bit fuzzy as the deployment of Necrons is random. We simply divided the 18" death zone into 4 quarters, rolling a D4 to determine which area the Necron arrived in. 

Left to right, Buxom, Interrogator Pursuivant, Hellion, Chubbs, Greylocks, Spazz.

Disciple Bangs & Clumsey McFearsome

Rogue Trader set up.

The centre model in this trio is the Wyrd, don't know what the others are, probably just crew members.

Heavy Bolter armed model and overly large Ad Mech, I think there is another model skulking behind the barricade too.

Ah yes, a couple more skulkers moving towards the Monolith.

Captain Drachmann, crewperson with a damaged hand and 'Clanky' the Ad Mech. All ready to steal Xenos technology. 

My advance is pretty cautious, only models I don't value can try to get into the Monolith.

Good fields of fire are essential when you have to protect worthless hides with a heavy stubber. It also helps to have a ratling meat shield as well. 

The first Xenos materealises! Scarabs, appear and don't like interlopers. But then, in the grim darkness of the 41st Millenium, who does?

The side view of the monolith shows the temporal door of oblivion or something. It's a bit like the Death Star, not fully operational. Good job because I count three Necron guns on each corner, enough to pretty much wipe out both gangs in a turn or two. Just as long as we don't start shooting each other and making the necrons job any easier, that would be terrible.

Stuat has some cool scenery, this is a tape measure in the shape of a skull that looks like some sort of big scary security camera. Derric and Tefal hope it will bring them luck.

I had fully intended to hang back and blow this scarab swarm apart. Unfortunately Chubbs suffered a head wound last game and decided to become frenzied and ultimately run into the robotic mandibles of doom. He actually won combat inflicting 2 wounds on the swarm (thanks to a fumble), but not enough to fully destroy it.

So the method I used to bring Necron models into the game was (I thought) simple and thematic. At the end of every player turn a d6 was rolled. On the roll of a 6 a second D6 to determine what reinforcements materealise within 3" of the Monolith. Several modifiers apply +1 for every model in the Monolith and +1 for every hull point, the modifiers applied to the reinforcements as well.

By my next turn, poor Chubbs is a bloody red smear on the ground, directly transferring the swarms 40K stats meant that scarabs are pretty tasty against juve stat models, no fumbles this time means the rest of my gang watch chubbs get torn apart! 

One of the Rogue Trader crew goes in and grabs some loot whilst the Navigator gets a light electric shock when she tries to get in (and is pinned). 

Another Necron appears, as luck would have it he is in the quarter nearest my troops. Yay! I used the Necron stats from a codex I borrowed  and they're pretty mean!

The heavy bolter armed crew person fails to hit anything on my side. As an aside, a better camera would probably be nice. Or maybe a lot more lighting. As with a lot of settlements in the Imperium there is a gallows nice and handy, quite near the shops.

Greylocks & Spaz get into the Monolith and manage to inflict a hull point of damage on it. I could have attacked the crew person in it but I thought sticking to the plan would be favourite.

With 3 humans in the Monolith and a hull point of damage, the Necron reinforcements roll was at +4 hence the extra Necron warrior and Flayed One attacking.

Amazingly, Stuart's ganger defeats the Flayed One due to a couple of fumbles. This particular Flayed One was probably more into the being flayed, rather than flaying. A sado masochistic Necron if you will. 

After defeating a Flayed One, this ganger got rewarded by another one materealising within easy charge range. this one may not be quite so submissive.

Meanwhile the Monolith is getting a bit crowded, so a looter leaves through a door and another human gets a shot from the prank electric doorbell trying to get back in. 

Hellion gets zapped on the other side of the Monolith. However a Flayed One is perfectly placed to nom nom her all up!

The tables have turned one Flayed One chops up the human interloper, and the other one get right back up Terminator style.

Some other info about rules of the game vis a vie the Necrons. They do not suffer from pinning, neither do they suffer penalties due to flesh wounds. Also due to their reanimation protocols special rule they behave differently in the recovery phase. 1-3 Flesh Wound (they get back up), 4-5 down (as per normal rules) and 6 is irreparable remove from play.

My valuable asset troops also had to assault the Monolith as to paraphrase a friend of mine "these recruits aren't getting the baby bathed". I was taken some of them down but the stupid things kept getting back up again!

The Flayed Ones start moving towards other members of the Folkvangr crew.

Bangs and Clumsey witness another materealising Necron warrior. Spoiler Alert! It doesn't end well for someone! 

Another Necron joins the round the Monolith party! By this time was getting decidedly tricky to not get murdered by emotionally retarded living metal Dillholes. 

And another one!

Meanwhile, on the cool side of the Monolith, the looting continues unabated. 

Two hull points of damage and a clatter of humans crawling all over the monolith. The Necron High Command (those awake anyway) must be as furious as is possible given the circumstances and them not having much in the way of fury. This game had deteriorated into the equivalent of kicking a wasps nest from the inside!

Desperate measures calls for Tefal to get into combat! No one was as surprised as me when he kicked Metal Mickey's arse . 

Around this time a Necron Warrior blows away Bangs. I'm now in bottle test territory, and I only need to inflict another hull point of damage to destroy the Monolith. Stuart has three loot counters as well so in my mind there is a rolling boulder with the last crew member in there rolling under the gradually descending blast doors. With such a cinematic feel to the end of the game it's getting to the who bottles first stage of the scenario.  

Disciple Bangs receives a large portion of Gauss to her area and drops like a big muscular stone. Clumsey on the other hand rues his lack of ammunition, and Inquisimunda's rules system that doesn't allow him to pick up his fallen comrades weapon and exact bloody vengeance Hard To Kill style.

Not that I'm complaining overmuch, but there are far fewer Necrons round Stuart's side of the table! A big ass light would have made the three Necron Warriors more visible over my side of the table.

Right about now a Flayed One charges into the Monolith and attacks Greylocks. In true Star Wars style he is chopped up efficiently by the Ed Gein wannabe just when (I'm sure) he was about to hit the thing that is the size of a Womp Rat that in turn was going to destroy the Death Star Monolith and save the Galaxy Imperium. Sadly Hellion followed him shortly afterwards and with more cinematics Spaz (not really a very heroic name) probably drags the two of them out of the Monolith as Interrogator Pursuivant signals the retreat (bottles it).

Some taunting from the Folkvangr crew as they make off with the loot and my brave Inquisition Cell bottle it and run off back to the safety of the outskirts of Kinnock.

Don't Mess With The Necrons!

So Stuart wins the scenario and the Necrons come second. My warband brings up the rear. Well all I can say about my scenario is I know how to make it difficult. In Inquisimunda, the rules I used for them are pretty tough. I wanted to make them Terminator-like and I think I succeeded. As far as my tactics went, I thought my plan was pretty sound. Go in, wreck the joint with some unimportant proles whilst all my valuable troops stay safe providing supporting fire. The rather excessive numbers of Necrons knocking about made it a pretty difficult ask, especially as my first two Necron reinforcement rolls got Scarabs and an irritating Necron Warrior to contend with. That's not to say Stuart had it easy either, he got on the wrong end of some Flayed One talons on more than one occasion. All in all I really enjoyed the game but a few more tweaks are needed to the scenario.

The gang management phase was pretty eventful. Injury wise Chubbs died. I wasn't very sad about this as he was a ganger with juve stats and some good skills that he just couldn't back up with combat efficiency. Buxom Hostbane took an arm wound, good job her weapon of choice is a shock maul. Hellion is now partially deaf. Greylocks and Bangs were full recoveries. Got some cool advances, Hellion even though she doesn't hear so well gained another wound. Bangs got +1 Strength (just what you want on a heavy), Spaz got another wound (now he has 3) and Clumsey got a Toughness increase (small yay!). Income saw me net 45 TG so it wasn't a total disaster. Stuart's leader got a real working over by a Flayed One (multiple injuries) and ended up with two chest wounds, and shellshock, he also got impressive scars and a BS increase. A juve received a head wound for his trouble. A WS increase for his heavy and a couple of Ld increases. His Navigator got a BS increase and one of the pieces of loot was an incredibly advanced pysionic evolutor (which is a fancy name I gave to a model upping their Wyrd level). So no actual cash was gained but Stuart's Wyrd is now a level 2 Pyrokinetic Psyker that gained the powers terrify and wall of fire. The Wyrd's cost goes up by 35 TG and has made the warband in general a smidge more lethal. Stuart had enough money to purchase a bionic chest for his leader which puts her almost back to normal.  So with all that happened in the game I think the scenario was perhaps 90% on a par with the gangs involved, so before I release it on the general public the reinforcements rolls needs some work.

Interrogator Pursuivant's warband limped back to the command centre on the outskirts of Kinnock. Chubbs was dead but more worrying was the Xenos still guarding the Necron edifice. The Monolith had been badly damaged but not destroyed. The concern now was whether it was the vanguard of an invasion force or simply a isolated unearthed relic that could give up it's valuable secrets with another determined expedition. The other group were also a worry, what did they take from the Monolith and what were their motives. The Interrogator decided that reinforcements were required to eliminate the threat before Scargill became another Xenos beachhead that would be a drain on the Imperium's resources. With either guile or brutality the Monolith would give up its secrets.......

Thanks for reading.