Last Stand on Isstvan - Horus Heresy Battle Report

Last week we rolled out my new IX Legion Blood Drinkers army for a game of "30K". Conscript Greg supplied the storyline:

“The Warmaster has raised his true flag at Istvaan and now his Legions turn against the very Imperium they strove to create.  Horus’ war fleets make a grim advance toward Terra while the Imperial authorities struggle to recover from the shock of the Warmaster’s betrayal.  Through the Warmaster’s own sinister designs the Loyalist forces are scattered at the outset of the war and must make what defence they can manage while awaiting further instruction.

In this setting elements of the IXth Legion are making a stand in a city called Rogsburg, hoping to hold back elements of the Sons of Horus and the World Eaters as they race through the local system.  Can a determined local defense of a critical supply depot spike the plans of the Warmaster and his minions?”

We played a straightforward game with 4 objectives, on a half-urban-half-rural board using my new mat from Barrage Miniatures. The Blood Drinkers deployed a Praetor and his Command squad, two large tactical squads, a veteran squad with missile launcher, six-man Terminator squad, and a Rapier. They were joined by two large Solar Auxilia units (19 men each) and an Auxilia Veletaris Storm Squad.

The traitors followers of the alternative Emperor rolled with a couple tactical squads and some specialized weaponeers - squads armed with multi-meltas, heavy bolters, volkite weaponry, and plasma guns. Ouch! They were lead by a Praetor with command squad and various hangers-on like a Centurion, Apothecary, Legion Champion, etc.  Points totalled about 1500 per side.

Here's a view from the Blood Drinkers' side of the table. The objectives were mainly scattered through the middle of the table, with both sides having to move on them.

Game on! Traitor Marines move towards a wood, looking to set up a firebase.

Traitor tactical squad moves up also.

Traitors deploy in the built-up area. You can see a few of the traitor characters standing just outside the building.

Roll Tide!! The followers of Sanguinius got the first turn, and the two tactical squads moved up, fronted by the Terminator squad. First objective taken - seen at centre right just behind the front-line trooper.

The Blood Drinkers were accused of using the Solar Auxilia as ablative human shields in the battle, a charge that the IX Legion strongly denied. Not even sure how anyone would get that impression.

I mean, I ask you...?

Veteran Marines squad deployed behind an Auxilia squad and moved together towards objective #2.

Rapier Laser Destroyer somehow made it up onto the second floor of the building. Some serious suspensor work there.

Auxilia fan out a bit and start taking fire from the traitors at top.

On the other side of the table, the Terminators have been thinned down a tad, and some Auxilia have rushed to the front. Their righteous zeal for the Emperor knows no bounds - it would be downright boorish for the Blood Drinkers to prevent the Auxilia getting between them and the traitors.

Traitor bolter fire takes its toll on the Auxilia but the survivors hang in there. I have to give some props to the Solar Auxilia in this battle, their lasgun fire took a toll on the traitors, especially as the Auxilia was tooled up with some buffs to their shooting.

Blood Drinkers Veterans sweep towards the objective after Auxilia absorb the shooting. There's a reason these guys survived long enough to be "veterans".

Surviving Terminators anchor the line with the Auxilia. The battle's nearing its end and the IX Legion is firmly in control.

Too many chiefs and not enough braves on the traitor side, I'm afraid ;-)

The mighty IX Legion had a weight of numbers and the excellent Solar Auxilia to back them up, and while the game went back and forth, the result was a clear win for the followers of the Emperor. I really like 30K as a gaming experience - the models are great, and the fact that there's a limited number of unit types involved means that the "special rules overload" of 40K isn't as likely to rear its head. Heresy escalation is now in full effect - we need vehicles!!

Flight To The Truth - Horus Heresy 7th Edition Battle Report

The opening stages of the Horus Heresy - Death Guard vs. World Eaters on Istvaan III

Last week Conscript Byron was kind enough to host a small gaming evening.  I wanted to continue with the recent Horus Heresy theme that has been dominating my painting efforts.  Byron has a small force of Legion-era Death Guard figures, and patched together with the various Legion bits and bobs I have painted so far we were able to get a small Horus Heresy game together.

The World Eaters (strung along the left side) need to make it to that Valkyrie model...should be a piece of cake, right?

We played a scenario from Forge World's "Horus Heresy Book One: Betrayal".  The scenario is called "Flight to the Truth".  It is set on Istvaan III, where Horus has launched his open rebellion against the Emperor.  The first stage of his plan is to purge his own Legions of "unreliables" - Marines who would never go along with his plan.  They are sent down to Istvaan III, ostensibly to suppress a rebellion, but they are stabbed in the back by Horus, who attempts to obliterate them from orbit, and then comes down to go after the survivors.

An imposing battle line of Legion Marines from the World Eaters

This scenario feature three "remembrancers", people who would be reliable witnesses of Horus' betrayal.  The Loyalist side is trying to get these three to a shuttle they have located, in the hopes they can travel through warp space and raise the alarm in the Imperium about Horus' dastardly plans.

World Eaters Centurion & command group

We played roughly 1,000 points per side using the 7th Edition Warhammer 40k rules.  Byron played the traitor side, with elements of the Death Guard and the Sons of Horus: Calas Typhon, a squad of "Deathshroud" Terminators, two 10-man tactical squads, a five man support squad with plasma guns and a five man heavy support squad with heavy bolters.

Sons of Horus bolster the Traitor cause?

Is it fun to have five heavy bolters in one squad? Turns out "yes"

I used my World Eaters to represent the loyalist side - a Centurion with a Legion Champion, an apothecary and a command group, two 10-man tactical squads, a 10-man support squad with volkite calivers and a five-man heavy support squad with multi-meltas.

A 10-man tactical squad - what could go wrong?

The table was a 4'x4', divided into quadrants. While the scenario calls for a ruined urban hellscape for terrain, we went with generic green just to keep things simple as we wanted to just try out the scenario.  The entire Loyalist force started the game on the table, while the Traitors only got a couple of units, with the rest coming in reserve.  I placed my Loyalists as close as possible to the Valkyrie model that represented the shuttle - my plan was just to plain bull right through.

Our one chance to open fire and bring down a few of the Deathshroud Terminators who have just warped in, visible at the top of the photo...

My plan didn't even make it to the first turn, as Byron stole the initiative - !#!#@#!!!  And we basically never recovered.  Both of my tactical squads were soon mulched, and once the super ominous Death Guard Terminators arrived, it was kind of over.  Oh, we fought a few turns and made it look all violent, but we didn't kill a single Terminator, and Byron's red-hot die-rolling didn't help!!

Very, very scary troops - Bryon did an amazing job on these figures

While Warhammer 40k remains a deeply flawed game system, I have to say this was pretty fun. Rules like "Fury of the Legion" make the plain tactical marines quite scary, and the configuration of the Space Marine Legion lists makes for some pretty over-the-top violence on the table - like five heavy bolters, just to take one example - ouch! It was five turns of brutal fighting, and it really had a good "feel" to match the period as you read it, if that makes sense.

So I guess our shooting didn't work out...but hey, I'm sure those huge, bulky power scythes worn't do anything in close combat, right?

Where did everyone go? See the blurry figures at the top right? Those are the Sons of Horus heavy bolters evaporating this tactical squad

This scenario specifies no vehicles on either side, so that is great, because between us Byron and I still have just one vehicle painted (Byron has finished one - not me).  I'm hoping to add vehicles to these forces (well, other than Titans or Knights) but for now there is still a lot more infantry waiting in the painting queue.

Death Guard tactical squad appears to help mop up...Byron's only bad rolling involved checking for these guys in reserves, and by the time they showed up their wasn't much for them to do

Big thank you to Byron for hosting - his Death Guard look absolutely fabulous, these photos don't do them justice.  His Deathshroud Terminators in particular look spooky as hell, very well done. Hopefully we can set this one up again sometime for the whole group.

Raid on the Titan Yards - Horus Heresy Rogue Trader Battle Report

To celebrate the completion of our two Reaver Battle Titans, Conscript Greg and I decided to stage a Rogue Trader game with the titans as featured players. No, we didn't troll old White Dwarfs for Reaver stats or anything like that - we fully recognized that these are not models you want to play with in RT; they're much better used as scenery or objectives. So Greg devised a scenario to take place on Isstvaan III, with loyalist Space Marines (ironically, from the Sons of Horus legion) and Solar Auxilia raiding a rebel-held Titan Yard, with the objective of destroying the Titans housed there for repair.

The loyalists were armed with a mobile Void-bomb vehicle - represented on the tabletop by a 1/48 Goliath from WWII. Their goal was to get it as close as possible to the Titans before detonating it, hopefully catching the colossal god-machines with their void-shields down. The traitor World Eater Marines defending the Titan yard had to stop this from happening.

A great opportunity to use some massive terrain pieces - the styro-crete walls, Imperial Bastion, Aegis Defence Line and Skyshield LED pad were all deployed. Plus of course the Titans!

The view from the loyalist table edge.

Traitor squads can be seen deployed at top right behind the Aegis lines.

Traitors deployed their Volkite Caliver support squad in high cover.

"Hark! Followers of the false Emperor doth approach! Let us terminate their miserable existence with extreme prejudice!"

Loyalists advance in typical cowardly fashion, with cannon fodder meatshield well to the forefront. Weaklings!!!

As the Solar Auxilia advanced, the traitors started to swing the gate...

 

Loyalist Marines hiding behind cover. Their cowardice will not save them from the final reckoning with the followers of Warmaster Horus!!

 

Some of the Volkite dudes got picked off. Their faith was lacking...

Loyalist bolter fire finally began to tell on the ranks of the Solar Auxilia as they failed their morale check and fled.

Later, the Solar Auxilia would need to rally. Conscript Indo was trash talking from the Warmaster's side... "they'll never be able to rally. May as well just take them off!" The dice were rolled and...

"Should've listened to Indo!"

With the Solar Auxilia on a permanent vacation, the remaining loyalist Marines pushed forward on their futile suicide mission...

...not realizing that the traitor captain was lying in wait.

He charges in and close combat is joined! The air crackles with power as the two giants trade mighty blows. Faces are punched mercilessly as the follower of the false Emperor and the heroic servant of Mankind's Last Hope, the valiant Warmaster, strive mightily in combat. Nearby, a Techmarine nervously adjusts some dials...

This is the last known pict-transmission received from Titan Maintenance Facility Omega Seven on Isstvaan III. The Adeptus Mechanicus adjuncts to the Collegia Titanicus had of course evacuated the facility, but from their vantage in low orbit they recorded wave radiation consistent with detonation of an Armageddon-Class Void Device.

Dice were rolled to randomize the radius of obliteration and the roll was sufficient to destroy Ferrum Mori and damage the other Titan. Of course the loyalist Marines were reduced to their component atoms in the process as well, but that's how things go in the Horus Heresy. And these are early days yet!

The game was great fun and looked good too. Greg's 30K models are awesome and the Solar Auxilia look fantastic. Thanks for bringing them out to play!

40K Battle Report - First Foray into Heresy

Well, as every reader of the blog well knows, Horus Heresy fever has bit us hard for the last year or so. Byron and Greg have been madly accumulating and painting Forge World resin Space Marines of various antique specifications, and I kid myself that my vintage all-metal Howling Griffons more-or-less qualify as combatants of the 30th millennium of man. They have MKII Rhinos for Pete's sake!

Anyway, I thought it might be fun to wheel out some of these models for a game. Greg came up with the backstory:

"A group of World Eaters, with a few Sons of Horus and Death Guard, are part of a small Crusade stub force that was re-assembling and re-fitting on Toxo IV. They were waiting for new heavy equipment to be delivered - all the other fully assembled units had gone off to Istvaan already - when word of the “developments” on Istvaan arrives.

They move to seize control of the planet.

These “traitors” lack much heavy equipment, so one of their first objectives is a raid on a Planetary Defence Force armoury to steal some tanks. With the support of a lone Sicarian tank, they assault the PDF armoury - their goal will be to activate various tanks and armoured vehicles found there and get them off the table in one piece. A reaction force of Ultramarines also stationed on Toxo IV (the Howling Griffons company) arrives to block their plan."

We set up the opposing forces diagonally in deployment areas 24" apart. I chose a list from the new Forge World "Crusade" army book; two squads of 10 Marines in Rhinos, heavy weapon squad of 5 with lascannons, squad of 5 Terminators, a 7 or 8 man Destroyer squad with jump packs, and a Land Raider Armoured Proteus.

Greg and Byron lined up several giant squads of Space Marines with ridiculously broken weapon combos :-) plus a Legion Sicaran battle tank, a squad of Marines with multimeltas, some guys with Volkite Calivers (nasty), etc...

Byron did a very nice job on the Sicaran tank. Unfortunately its weaponry wasn't quite strong enough to damage the Land Raider, but that turned out not to be a huge problem...

Melta-dudes...

I advanced my line of troops (upper left) trying to refuse a flank and block the melta-goons from getting shots at my Raider. At the same time I dropped the Destroyer squad and Terminators into the backfield to try to hose off the melta guys.

This is about half of what I was facing to my front - pretty strong stuff!

I had some success against the green guys, nearly wiping out the squad, but my own forces were suffering heavily. It was a straight kill-points game so I needed to kill squads, but was falling behind...

Destroyers and Terminators were wiped out. 2 more VPs for Greg and Byron...

Greg's command squad rolled up another of my Marine squads - +1 more VP for the bad/good guys.

But a clash of Titans was imminent as my command squad disembarked from the Raider...

In the middle the two opposing commanders clashed. Artificer armour with 2+ save and the new power weapon rules (AP3) meant the combat was loooong and drawn out. My boss eventually killed Greg's, salvaging a VP for me as a warlord kill. I think they both got so tired that Greg's boss just gave up.

Gilles doing his impression of Greg's traitor warlord

In the end the Griffons got trounced, about 7VPs to 3. Volkite Calivers are nasty but the special SM Legion bolter rule (double shots) and 20-man squads are even nastier. Obviously, escalation in the form of Reaver Titans is in order...

 

Thanks to Conscripts Greg and Byron for bringing out their cool new toys and to Greg for the scenario. The fun factor of 40K is almost entirely dependent on your opponents and the spirit in which the game is played, and we are lucky to all be of similar minds on that!