What Do I Know?

After I ran my DCC funnel in the early afternoon slot at the store, a few of us went out to lunch, and reconvened for one of the two events scheduled for the evening.  The two evening games were Shadowrun and Deathwatch, and even though, in the spirit of a “demo day” I should have tried Shadowrun.  I’ve been gaming longer than the game has existed, and never tried it once.  I’ve seen a million ads for it and had tons of friends play it.  But I missed Deathwatch.

Our players for the evening consisted of two of us that had played in the old Deathwatch campaign, two gamers that had neither played Deathwatch, nor were they active Warhammer players, but were in general acquainted with the setting, and two avid Warhammer 40K players that hadn’t played the RPGs before.

Our pregens were as follows:

Space Wolf Wolf Priest/Tactical Marine armed with a Crozius Arcanum and a Storm Bolter

Marines Warrant Tactical Marine/1st Company Veteran/Honor Guard armed with a relic power fist and a Storm Bolter

Blood Angels Librarian/Epistolary/Death Watch Champion with a storm shield and a force sword

Iron Hands Tech Marine/Forge Master armed with a storm shield and an artificer Omnissian axe

Knights of the Raven Tactical Marine/1st Company Veteran/Dead Station Vigil armed with dual Storm Bolters

Dark Angel Assault Marine/Ravenwing Veteran/Deathwing/1st Company Veteran armed with dual lightning claws

All of these guys were Rank 7 and had Terminator Armor.  Huge kudos to my friend +Ryan Porter for putting them together, on his vacation in Florida, for this very event.

Since I was playing a Space Wolf, and another player  (one of the 40K players that hadn’t played Deathwatch before, but was familiar with the setting) was playing a Dark Angel, I immediately started to push his buttons and we started to bet on who was going to score more kills that day.

We teleported aboard a Space Hulk to investigate it’s mysterious ways, and ran smack into a huge mass of Orks holding the room against something from the outside.  We had massive horde in the room, so we could get used to magnitude for larger bodies of foes, and the Knight of the Raven and his dual Storm Bolters did most of the work, and a massive amount of rolling.

The bet wasn’t looking promising for either the Space Wolf or the Dark Angel.

After that, we had a challenge that required us to come up with a logical solution, based on our skills, to get a certain number of degrees of success, the challenge being the massive barricade the Orks made and dismantling it so we could further explore.  I like stuff like this, even if skill challenges have gotten a bad rap over the years, especially if you can get people into explaining what they are actually doing.

We head out, and eventually we make our way through a few more challenges, hit a room that is on fire, which is another challenge like the door challenge above, but one that causes us damage each turn we take in the room without the challenge being resolved.  Eventually we figure our way out of the burning room by blowing down some walkways and having our Iron Hands marine shift some things around for us to walk on through to the other side.

Eventually, we run into a huge area on the ship filled with something that most of us on the mission had no idea about.  At this point in time, when Deathwatch takes place, there is limited knowledge of Necrons, so only our Knight of the Raven had any information on them.  I kept mispronouncing their name every time we ran across something that had to do with them.

The room was huge, and several of the Necrons could get back up when they were killed, so that our Marines Warrent and the Knight of the Raven were busy re-killing the Necrons that went down so they didn’t get to act, while the rest of us tried to engage the remaining Necrons.  The area was so huge that it took a while for my Wolf Priest or the Dark Angel to get into melee range.

(I was avoiding the Storm Bolter just because we had so many of them going at once, that I didn’t want to slow the game down any more with all of the rolling, and my multiple attacks with the Crozius were a bit simpler to resolve)

The Dark Angel and the Space Wolf were really lagging behind the other guys in kills.  Sad really.  Both of us decided that we really needed to exclude the rest of the marines from keeping track, since it was suppose to be our contest.

The Necrons were obviously looking for something, and we thought it would be a good idea to find it before they did, so we pressed on, and eventually found another room of Orks.  Sort of.

I thought it was a big four armed Ork I was fighting, and I decided to challenge it to a one on one fight, but it turned out that the Ork responded to me in High Gothic, and all of his minions were working together in a disconcertingly non-Orkish manner.

After a long fight with a few “Holy Crap” moments, we killed off the four armed Ork leader and found out that he was actually being controlled by an ancient Shard, which is what the Necrons were interested in tracking down.

We had a lot of fun.  Dual storm bolters are a bit much, especially with a bunch of Rank 7 talents to make them even more impressive.  Still, for a Rank 7 adventure, most of the people not familiar with the system didn’t seem to get too lost as we were playing.

Thankfully Ryan got to reuse these pregens for another one shot, so his hard work and diligence wasn’t just for our one foray into the Space Hulk.