Playing WH40K2. Cops & robbers

You've recently seen my Chaplains and my Field Police. Now you are gonna see them in action!

My opponent, Wachinayn (recently joined the forum). Our rules, mostly 2nd Ed, but not exactly, more kind of a mix of that and RT. 2nd Ed gives us 'quick game experience', particularly about weapon rules (we are familiar with modifiers and stuff), but we tend to play quite in a RPG-esque way (you'll see...), so we use some RT elements. In the end, rules are are unimportant . I also had to test if my scenery was worth of the effort I was putting on it...



A group of rogue Space Marines has stolen a Terminator Armour. They are trying to reach the black market and make it disappear...



But Chapter Master of Sanctity Tow Takka-Chow has dispatched two of his best Chaplains to take some Field Police and go hunt the rebels.

You can see the settings in the pic below. Rogue Marines deploy at the dock, where a ship has just left them (green arrow, right of the picture). They need to get the Termie at Mama Balaklava's (blue arrow, roughly centre of the picture). Two Field Police Squads, each one led by a Chaplain, will arrive by turns just at the top of the Arbites local Station (red arrow, left of the picture), being the Imperial representation on the area. Both Chaplains have quite a dissimilar character; they're going to play the good cop/bad cop ehhh... I mean good Chaplain/ bad Chaplain game. The first one to arrive will try by all means to hunt and kill the rebels. The second Chaplain will however try to catch them alive and to get them on a fair trial back to the Fortress of Hera.



Besides, there are some civilians in the neighbourhood (randomly moving using the scatter die) and several mutants/xenos/abhumans will be getting into the board (reserves rules).

OK, let's go. Rogue Marines move and the Police arrives (as I don't have a Marine flyer, I used the Arbites Airbus. Maybe one day I'll build a Marines flying brick)



Rogue Marines play their Strategy Card. Booby traps!



The fugitives climb up the van and try to convince the owner to carry them (using an initiative roll).



A Minotaur!



The Field Police shoot on the abomination. Such a creature cannot be tolerated on Imperial soil:



Bad Chaplain sees the fugitives. Shoot! Kill! Kill'em all! Kil kil kil!



A marine gets to the crane and pushes the poor civilian to the water (slo-mo action, the kind of thing you could see in the A-Team show)



This most definitely didn't happen in the A-Team!



The Marine commands the Servitor in the crane to pick up his fellow Termie



And take him to the walkaway!



Civilians were a little shocked, a blue demolition ball crashing through the window



The other fugitives finally confiscate the van:



They hit a pedestrian and the other one manages to jump to the water (slo-mo action too)



The Field Police keep on moving:



They take a fugitive down:



The only thing I hate more than traitors is collaborationists! Die, you civilian!



The civilian fights for his life against the Piscean. The barge gets closer and opens fire:



The Mino kicks and punches the Marine who didn't get on the crane nor the van:



Another Mino and another Piscean arrive:



A civilian seems to be an anti-Imperium activist. He gets into a car and tries to hit the Police:



The guy who controlled the crane decided to join his fellow Termie. He ran over the crane arm (Initiative roll was passed) and jumped on the bridge. As a reward to my foolish boldness, my mate even allowed me to move onto the corner and shoot the Field Police. From now on we just called that Marine Daniel Craig.



The police try to stop the car:



Beastmen incoming!



Finally the rogue Marines get some reenforcements:



This is how the flank looked like:



Both Pisceans devoured their victims and they boarded the barge:



The Minos take Bad Chaplain down and the remaining fugitive keeps on running, pursued by the Beastmen:



One of the Minos almost got crushed by the bridge when it rose up to let the barge (with the Pisceans) go through:



The combat goes on. The Termie advances and the Beastmen hit on both sides:



The Termie lets himself fall over the handrail trusting in his powerful armour to preserve his life. His mate Daniel Craig also jumped with him and... he failed his initiative roll for the jump, falling miserably!



General overview:



Fortunately, Daniel Craig gets up, cheks his tie and charges he enemy. He grabs an enemy who was on the upper floor by his ankle and takes him down .



By exposing himself to enemy fire, he pretended to allow his fellow to move forward:



But no way, he fails an armour save and is taken down:



Oooooh, sooo cloooose...

We decided not to roll for the Termie to see if he got back on his feet and just put the game to an end. So the fugitives were taken down and the Chapter avoided the risk of its sacred arcane technology to be desecrated!

Just to end the turn, the Pisceans escaped with their fish cargo on the barge



That was the game . We enjoyed it pretty much. As yu can see, our respect for any rulebook is... limited, but I honestly believe this works fine; playing this game by the book would have been slightly boring, IMHO.

You can check the whole game on the blog, with more pics and better explanations:

http://oldschoolworkshop.blogspot.com.e ... bbers.html

I can use a few more buildings, but for sure I still need a second board and lots of civilians! I'm on it...

Very cool action report. Were you aware that your escape van says "doctor" (Tabeeb) in Arabic on the front? As a new (and in some weird way, also old) 2e player, I am impressed how far you made the 2e rules stretch. It definitely felt like a RT report when I read it. Of course, there are some random, individualized elements in 2e that also make it feel "skirmishy" in comparison to later editions... The random tables for vehicles, the individual facing of infantry and so on. Could you comment a little about what you feel 2e brought to the game that Rogue Trader couldn't have done just as well or better? Also, did it feel natural or somewhat forced to abandon some of the basic game assumptions built into the 2e rules (like squads, cohesion, strategy cards,victory points and so on)?

Thank you! Hehe, I am no Arabic speaker, had to google that to write it on the front
Here is the thread where I post my civilians:
viewtopic.php?f=20&t=3713&hilit=civilians&start=10

About the 2nd Ed questions, short answer is that I tend to use it because I'm more familiar to that than to RT (specially profiles and so), but this particular game is more RT than other thing. All the interaction with the environment (crane, bridges), the way to make mutants/xenos appear, or even the way each Chaplain approached their mission differently... all that is RT. So if we were to 'label' this game, I could say it was mostly RT but using 2nd Ed profiles (warriors, vehicles and weapons) and the slight addition of the Strategy Cards.
I've noticed you have another thread to talk about these things. I'll go and elaborate there.

If you want my two cents... Which I'm going to give you anyway

The game was essentially a very late edition Rogue Trader game (1991-1992) when the battle manual, compilation and vehicle manual had essentially transformed RT into basically a proto-second edition!! At least that's how I read it...essentially it seemed to combine all the best bits from both!!

Legio

More or less what Legio and Suber said.

We use 2nd Ed. as template (we made several modifications to that engine) because of the familiarity we've been developing with that particular system over the years. When you know a system by hand you can force it to make crazy things without broking anything.

On top of that, we favor 2Ed to RT for its simplicity... and the cards! Really, the cards you can use with 2Ed give the battle another texture: objectives, strategy, psychic... More randomness is always a good thing in my book. With that said, we take several rules and profiles from other games of the same family, be they RT, Necromunda, Gorkamorka, Fantasy, etc.

I have to agree, the more I read the rules, the more I love the sub-game that comes out of the cards. It may slow things down if you have everything going in the same game (psyker force cards, wargear, strategy cards, mission cards) but I suspect it wouldn't be too bad for a veteran. Plus it adds so much fog of war—you don't know what's in the opponents hand, literally, so you have to be ready to roll with the surprises (something which I have always found to be the hallmark of any great wargame).

I agree on the sub game thing of 2e. We've just played two games on consecutive weeks and the mix of mission and strategy cards have livened up what would otherwise have been a somewhat dull clash between two 1000 points of Space Marines.

For Tuesday's game we drew the cards a week in advance so that we could tailor forces to the mission (in other words avoid the problem of having a force totally unsuited to the victory conditions). I got The Assassins, mate got Take and Hold. Said mate had a sort of communications uplink mast piece of scenery so he came up with the idea that my side had set that up as a trap, and his side were blundering into an ambush designed to decapitate his leadership.

We've started playing this (I never played it "in period" as by the time 1993 came around I'd decided that Epic made 40K obselete) because we love the randomness of RT but the overhead of sorting a scenario meant we weren't playing it as often as we'd like. We can agree points and let the mission/strategy cards muck everything up without having to do any more work.

For next week we've both drawn The Assassins which should make life somewhat lively!

Coopdevil":205r8kq2 said:

I agree on the sub game thing of 2e. We've just played two games on consecutive weeks and the mix of mission and strategy cards have livened up what would otherwise have been a somewhat dull clash between two 1000 points of Space Marines.

For Tuesday's game we drew the cards a week in advance so that we could tailor forces to the mission (in other words avoid the problem of having a force totally unsuited to the victory conditions). I got The Assassins, mate got Take and Hold. Said mate had a sort of communications uplink mast piece of scenery so he came up with the idea that my side had set that up as a trap, and his side were blundering into an ambush designed to decapitate his leadership.

We've started playing this (I never played it "in period" as by the time 1993 came around I'd decided that Epic made 40K obselete) because we love the randomness of RT but the overhead of sorting a scenario meant we weren't playing it as often as we'd like. We can agree points and let the mission/strategy cards muck everything up without having to do any more work.

For next week we've both drawn The Assassins which should make life somewhat lively!

Click to expand...

I know exactly what you mean. I have only just started using cards in the game (now I'm familiar with the rules) and they entirely change the dynamic. There's nothing like casting a warp gate on your enemy and then marching a squad of terminators through it and into the middle of his firing line consisting of squishy guardsman....Mwuhahahahahaha!!