Bloodbath at Orruk's Drift test scenario #3 Linden Way redux

During the lockdown I turned Bloodbath at Orc's Drift into an Age of Sigmar campaign aptly named Bloodbath at Orruk's Drift. On Saturday the ninth I will be hosting the full campaign with a small group of friends, before that time I wanted to retest the third skirmish in the campaign: Linden Way. Here's the battlefield for the scenario's redux. A synopsis of the original tryout is here. 

The re-imagined Linden Way table. I forgot to bring a lake and a few copses of trees. We solved it by improvising.

The first tryout was a lot of fun. Skaven attacked the human village that was defended by Dark Elves. In the scenario rules all the civilians were stuck together on a large blast template. When the Dark Elves (typically) failed to keep their eyes on the people they were supposedly there to save, a small group of Skaven Night Runners jumped out of the bushes and killed the lot, easily winning the scenario. As I just finished painting (some) extra markers for the civilians I decided to retry this scenari with AoS 3.0 rules and three smaller groups of civilians instead of just one large one. Instead of starting in the center of the village square/green they started at their front doors. Yeah, small applause for the attention to detail there ;).

Yelling her fearsome war cry: "I pity the fool who gets on my lawn!", the mad hermit Barrachus (top of picture) made another fine mess of our battle plans this game.

A pivotal character for this scenario is the mad hermit Barrachus. She lives in a ruin just outside the village and gets upset about the noise of armies disturbing her rest. As a response the hermit (represented by a Die Hard Swamp Hag) teleports across the table every hero phase (twice per turn for the non-AoS inclined). She swaps places with the nearest unit on arrival and then fires a magic missile arcane bolt at the second nearest unit. This one game element on its own is enough to cause an untold amount of havoc during the battle. Its quite fun.

Smelling a garrison in the balconied building, my zombie dragon charged. How it was able to smell anything over the overpowering stench of it's rotting meat is a mystery only the undead can answer...

This time around I decided to bring undead Soulblight Gravelords instead of Skaven. When I originally created the scenario I decided on a Order/Death versus Chaos/Destruction split. Progressive insight made me decide to just split the campaign between players as we start playing instead of holding on to factions to much. The fact that I really wanted to put Radukar on the tabletop and my freshly painted dragons, helped inform this decision. 

The Nightmare Legion surrounded the town's watch tower and started stabbing spears into the arrow slits. Inside Mengil Manhide's Man Flayers bravely defended themselves yelling they were not interested in hearing about the great lord and saviour Nagash.

Aside from the changed army I also changed the terrain slightly. I used less buildings to make Linden Way, going back from five to three. This saves tabletop space and motivates the defender to garrison more buildings (there's less room to set up). It also looks a lot more like the map in the original campaign pack. I played at our local gaming venue and forgot to bring my improvised lake (host to a Screaming Bell during the previous test run). Instead we borrowed a forest base to serve as a tentacled forest...(Now, what are you going to do about that? Improvise /way to obscure a reference there I suspect, but I can't help myself). 

A few deadly strikes from the Zombie Dragon's claws and the Tower House collapsed with a deafening roar.

After the first test scenario I made it much easier to destroy buildings in battle. My fresh rules state that you need a weapon that wounds on 2+ or 3+. You attack the building like any model. The building has a 3+ save and 6 wounds. Hitting a stone building with all the attacks of a zombie dragon made short work of it. I suspect a rotting hulk utilizing its monstrous strength would be rather effective against a building. Destroying a watch tower with spear and sword wielding skeletons is not viable (wound score too low) unless you somehow manage to boost them with magic for instance (which I didn't) or use the special rules to set the building alight (I forgot about them this game). 

A flock of Vargheists brilliantly blocked the Dark Elf Cold One cavalry. Unfortunately the mad hermit teleported this unit away, giving the knights a clear charge at the Terrorgheist.

I quickly painted an endless spell in the afternoon to be able to slap it on the table that evening. I'm still not completely sold on the points cost for these spells, but the burning skull does manage to look like a heavy metal album cover come to live (no Necron necessary). Well worth it for that alone. I'll add a few better pictures of it in another blog post. 

It was not entirely clear whether the peasants where running and screaming due to the presence of Dark Elves or the approach of Vampires. It was very clear that living in the Mortal Realms is not the most wonderful experience one can have.

Within the Age of Sigmar rules Dark Elves (currently) form part of the Free Cities. Ever since that book was released they are viable as an army (for narrative gamers, don't ask me about tournaments). The new Soulblight Gravelords (formerly Legions of Nagash and before that Vampire Counts and before that Undead) are quite a lot of fun too. Some flavor has been added to the different factions of vampire you can choose to play as. On the downside I'm starting to get World of Darkness deja vue vibes from the new books (and here's the nobility group (Ventrue vs Silver Fangs), and these are more like beasts (Gangrel vs Get of Fenris), etc.). No matter, having just finished painting Radukar I had to set him up on the tabletop. Couldn't help myself. He did quite nicely too, especially considering he's a freshly painted model and therefore cursed (just ask the two dragons).

You wouldn't expect that going by this picrure, but the peasant was actually saved by Cold One Knights charging the Terrorgheist. I rate this picture 10/10 for awesome, want to see again during a game.

Splitting up the peasants into three groups of three wounds each turned out to work perfectly. It gave the defender a chance to 'split up' (always a good idea in horror scenarios). More importantly, having the defenseless civilians charged by a unit does not result in an instant kill for the entire group (and therefore a lost battle). My dice rolling on the one attack I got in on a group of peasants was another story entirely. I managed to score one wound after a charge with a flock of Fell Bats, that's just shameful. Have to shave the bats and get a stern lady with a bell to call out 'shame' as I parade them through the streets. 

There was a brief flicker of hope that the bats would kill these juicy looking peasants. They only managed to kill one. I guess next time we'll gather together, gloomy and despondent, around a single meager woodcutter again...

The biggest problem we ran into with this battle was time. The venue closed as we got to the end of turn two (of a planned five to seven). If socializing too much during a game is a sin, then I'm the biggest heretic in Warhammer ;). We counted victory points and ended up with a staggering 34 to 14 with the advantage going to the Dark Elves. Calculating the score, the Dark Elves managed to wound more of my units for a slight benefit. Having eight of the nine civilians still alive and well on the table at the end of the game was the most decisive reason for the difference in points. 

At the end of the battle Radukar the Wolf managed to cut his way through four Cold One Knights and he picked a fight with Malekith. More importantly he was still standing despite being freshly painted. Now there's an accomplishment worth bragging about.

On the whole this scenario is ready for primetime. All I need is a few markers to indicate where the roads are (or maybe make some roads using 'how to paint wargames terrain' as inspiration). There's also a small group of civilians at the ready on my brother's 3D-printer that I will paint. Lastly I need to make a decision between building a palisade (easy) or improvised barriers (not quite so easy) for the final (untested) scenario. Luckily there's almost two weeks between this post and primetime....uh oh....