Over the holiday period I enjoyed playing a several games of Killteam using the expanded rules found here at The Heralds of Ruin. As my gaming group enjoys wargaming and roleplaying and has come off a stint playing Mordheim again these are great.
We also had a few 'fun' games of 40K, pairing up for team games, using Escalation rules - The Revenant got pushed around the table - generally trying to mix it up from the usual 1500 - 1850 point games we have played for the last few years.
This in combination with the Carthis Prime game day I hosted has lead us too the Quintas Maelstrom. We came up with the idea of this campaign after a full day of gaming with fairly competitive lists. We as a group found it no where as much fun as our recent more varied games had been. We bounced some ideas around and I had a rummage through the volumes of gaming material in the games room and found the old GW Eldritch Storm campaign map that came out years ago. Womble then over the following week made up a great set of rules. These include discovered worlds being random according to a table, a chance of inhabitants being allies or hostiles and army attrition and rebuild costs depending on how you do in the actual games.
We established initial force restrictions. 1000 point lists, 1 HQ, 2 Troops, 1 Elite, 1 Fast Attack and 1 Heavy Support. Worlds you conquer can add more FoC slots including being able to exceed the normal FoC slots by 1. Certain worlds can also grant you more points to spend on your force giving a player a strong advantage. Allies will only be accessible if you discover inhabited systems and then conquer/befriend them. Killteams using the Herald's rules also need to be made for espionage missions against each other.
With this established we rolled some random starting positions. Alex with Dark Angels is in the North West, Womble with Tau in the South West, Stu's Necrons East of the Centre, Cody's Ultramarines in the South East and myself with Eldar North of the Centre.
We each set 3 neighbouring systems to our starting worlds as a Hive World which automatically grants an Elite slot, a frontier world for Fast Attack and a Forge World for Heavy Support. Other systems are all random. After initial moves I think we all went for our neighbouring Forge Worlds with only my Eldar encountering a hostile force present. I rolled an Imperial force and Alex opted to play the planetary defenders. He chose Dark Angels as is familiar to him and Womble set the board. Defending inhabitants are not restricted and have access to a normal FoC chart where I had to be quite selective.
Our table was set with a large series of central fortifications including towering bastions and a skyshield bridging them. My objective was to take control of the central bastion with any infantry unit where the defenders had to keep me at bay. Alex set up his Dark Angels defensively but did little to stop the Eldar invaders. D-Scythe toting Wraithguard weakened the Deathwing inside the Bastion, while mass fire from paired Wave Serpents, Warp Spiders and a Wraithknight dramatically thinned the rest of the Unforgiven force taking control of the Forgeworld.
Since then we have made a couple more rapid campaign moves resulting in Cody's Ultramarines encountering a Khorne cult on a Hive World he was bringing to compliance. After seizing the Initiative his newly purchased Devastator Centurions destroyed the traitor forces en mass while supporting tactical squads in Razorbacks finished what remained of the lunatic cultists.
In our last move made Womble's Tau have encountered an hostile Ork force on a frontier world, that is yet to be resolved.
As a side effect of the random encounters it has encouraged us as a group to look at finishing off the many random collections of models we own and forming them into usable 1000 point armies. This will make it a project with quite a lot of variety which will be nice.
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