Stargrave review plus Quarantine 37 scenario 1: Get to the lift! (cooperative scenario) write-up

As the Christmas holiday was approaching I worked hard to build some Frostgrave scenery. My wife and I never got around to playing the game, but we did play a game of Stargrave (it seemed logical at the time). Here's a write-up of the scenario in pictures, with more a generalized review of Stargrave in the rest of the text. 

Screams filled the cavernous hall as most of the crew members were down.  With a dolorous 'bing', the lift doors finally opened. How did the mercenaries end up in this mess? Let's back up five minutes and find out... 

Stargrave is Frostgrave's sci-fi cousin. It has the same author (Joseph A. McCullough), same publisher (Osprey) and basically the same (great) ruleset. In Stargrave you assemble a band spacefaring soldiers/mercenaries/pirates/small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri/whatever tickles your fancy. This warband is led by a Captain and a First Mate. As with the other Osprey rulesets (Frostgrave, Gaslands, A Billion Suns) you pick any models, theme and scenery and they provide you with nice streamlined rules to play games and campaigns with. They also provide a generic setting you're absolutely free to use, modify or ignore. For an oldtimer like me this is what the Rogue Trader background felt like when it was first published. It lends itself well to skirmishes in frontier type sci-fi settings. High time to tag 'Marines out' on a wall and get to shooting. 

Stargrave consist of a hardcover rulebook with pretty artwork, both on the cover and inside. Quarantine 37 is a softcover expansion with a very ominous (and pretty) cover image and nice artwork inside.

So far Osprey published the Stargrave core rulebook and one expansion. The core rulebook contains all the rules you need to make a warband and play games. Quarantine 37 is the first published expansion. This contains rules for solo and cooperative play, expanded technology to steal find, a few extra henchmen to hire, extra archetypes and powers to pick, and rules for zombie (and genestealer) plagues. My wife and I are fans of cooperative games (Arkham Horror rules!) and although the scope of the coop rules is modest, they work well enough. The rules for guiding opposing forces over the board are excellent. The ones for cooperating warbands are very basic (and missions scarce). In the rules as written you build and split a single warband. Each player then controls half of it. As the rules encourage you to be creative, we simply took what there was, made our own warbands and expanded the rules. These were our modifications: 

• We each made a full warband (and split it in half for the first missions);
• We doubled the monsters on the board;
• We doubled the reinforcements that entered the board;
• At the end of the game we split the winnings in half, but each took the full experience for our band. 

It worked, and it wasn't that much effort either.

My wife's warband half featured a captain in combat armour, a trooper in heavy armour and grunts. We quickly discovered I need to paint more appropriate miniatures. Thankfully some old Catachans (with a rather iffy paintjob) were available to fill out the band for now.  

My warband half featured my first mate, formerly know as inquisitor Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau, a mechanicus locksmith and some random Catachans including one holding a flamer. After all: you can't face a zombie horde without at least one flamer (ironic death ahead warning).

With apologies to all those not into the game (yet). I got a bit ahead of myself. Lets talk about the way Stargrave is set up. To play you first make a captain. You pick an archetype (are you a veteran, rogue, mystic, etc?) and then pick a few special powers you can use during (or before) missions. This ranges from psychic magic missiles, to commands you can give your team, all the way to the ability to repair an expensive set of combat armour for free between missions. After the captain is finished you make a first mate. This is reminiscent of the apprentice in Frostgrave. The first mate is a slightly less experienced captain. Whereas in Frostgrave your apprentice is basically a (weak) copy of your wizard, in Stargrave you can pick a separate archetype for your first mate. This gives you the chance to have captain and XO complement each other. After generating and equipping these two, you buy a crew and you're off to your display cases to find suitable miniatures to represent the lot. 

We played solo scenario 1, Get to the Lift! It requires two lifts clustered around the corner of a small map. We used a bigger map was bigger to account for doubling the amount of troopers on the table. To  compensate for this we placed the lifts (represented by the Necromunda terain pieces) in the center of an edge. and started in opposing corners. 

A small group of zombies stood between my team and an interesting looking data terminal. Bringing a hacker instead of a locksmith would've been awesome at this point. Unfortunately the locked box was on the other side of the table, opposite the warband that should've brought a locksmith instead of a hacker...

The game works in turns and uses twenty sided dice (mostly). The players roll off for initiative and then the interesting part begins. Each turn is split into a captain's phase, followed by the first mate's phase, then the rest of the crews can move. The final stage of a turn is the creature's phase. At this point (you guessed it) creatures (and other npc's) move. In order of initiative the captain activates first. But this model can also activate three other members of the warband as long as they are within 3 inches at the start of the turn. The same goes on in the first mate's phase. This makes for an interesting mechanic because it motivates you to keep a cluster of henchmen around your commanders. The creatures phase is basically a flowchart that makes npc's either shoot or charge someone or shuffle towards a predefined hotspot on the board. 

The walk to the elevator seemed to go quite smoothly until a smallish horde of zombies popped up in charge distance of Captain Chaplin (Charles) (<= to my shame, we actually forgot to name our characters, so I'm atoning for that here). 

My team was assaulted by a mix of shuffling zombies and shooting zombies. First mate Sherlock bravely send his two most inexperienced (and expendable) troopers forward to deal with the menace. "You should've worn red shirts," he screamed savagely as he pointed to the approaching zombies.

The rules are fun and easy (assuming you don't misread the damage rules, forcing a restart of the game you are playing. But who does that?.....sniff sniff....). You basically roll a D20, add your stat and find out if it works. In the case of shooting or hitting someone over the head it is an opposed roll, highest score wins. Part of the ease of the game is that your henchmen are standardized. After a bit of playing you know their stats (mostly). This is also a bit of a downside to both Frostgrave and Stargrave. While there's a plethora of NPC creatures, the statline for your troops is always the same. It doesn't matter if you decide to bring some Ork models onto the table or go for - say - Imperial Guard Astra Militarum models. It is easier and  better balanced, but it's also a bit bland. I personally wouldn't mind a supplement with different statlines and rules for henchmen (both for Frostgrave and for Stargrave). Please don't forget Orc animosity there ;). I know this is exactly the thing that constantly unbalances GW's products, but hell it's also what makes them fun. It's why I prefer Mordheim over Wyrdheim and the other ...heim that sought to 'balance things out' and in the process sucked the fun out of that game. 

As the horde assaulting my wife's warband got rather menacingly big, I sent my flamer over to help. That turned out to be futile. The captain's rapid fire weapon was true to its name and easily dealt with the encroaching zombies (with a little help from the other members of that warband). 

Meanwhile both my rather inexperienced troopers had managed to get bitten by zombies. In keeping with tradition they never mentioned this to their colleagues.

After you complete a mission you get experience that can be spend on your captain and first mate. Your troops don't change, reducing both the amount of administration and the potential for unbalancing pawns in the game. I think that is a good thing. You also get to spend money on ship upgrades that give you advantages in future missions. This is also a lot of fun. You get to roll for treasure found during your mission and you can either sell your artifacts or hand them to the captain or first mate. All of this is quite a lot of fun and gives a nice sense of progress. Missions in the core book are rolled randomly, the ones in Quarantine 37 are presented in clusters that link together. Three of these missions are presented with the rules for a single player (or coop) experience. 

My first mate actually managed to hack and grab an objective. Mr. Flamer sprinted back to his own team, just in time to flame the zombies assaulting my junior henchmen. In the background the other team had managed to deal with their zombies and was making good time towards the lift. 

The other team's medic was first at the door to the industrial lift. Unfortunately the computer was out, forcing the medic to use his (lack of) computer skills to hack into the controls.

The Quarantine 37 supplement has a coverpage that says it all. Space zombies! It features a background around a government research facility that's derelict on account of the government getting destroyed by a space war. The facility has awesome technological artifacts in vaults that also contain the kind of stuff that should remain locked up forever. The new rule I liked most in this book is the one about members of your crew getting infected by zombie bites. This does nothing in the current mission, but in future missions your opponent can force a will roll to see if that character turns into a zombie. The sentence describing the why of this rule is characteristic of the easy going, tongue in cheek approach to skirmish gaming of Stargrave: "For reasons known only to movie writers, a soldier wounded by zombies never tells anyone about their injury and will go to great lengths to keep such wounds a secret, even lying about its origins if it's too obvious to conceal." 

At this point we both felt like we'd had an easy time of the mission. Rookie zombie movie mistake! Another serious horde showed up. Only the valiant (and we suspect very involuntary) sacrifice by a robot soldier on my wife's team stopped the horde long enough for the others to reach the (still closed) elevator. We cleaned our consciences by shouting 'For Ripley android!' as the screaming droid was mauled to pieces (we forgot he probably preferred the term 'artificial person', our bad).

The horde ignored our droid's brave sacrifice and kept coming. Luckily, by then the lift doors had opened. The soldier in heavy armour was already safely in as a remote control activated the power servos in his armour's legs. Screaming 'stop I can't control my armour' the brave soldier ran towards the zombies, sacrificing himself for his captain (yes we were making the remote control stuff up as we went along, it is that kind of game). 

At this point a lot of misfortune struck simultaneously. Sergeant Flamer stepped in to burn the horde, but was assaulted by a zombie popping in right in the middle of the lift doors. Captain Chaplin tried shooting the zombie, but hit the sgt. Flamer instead. Rolling a critical (it had to happen) this abruptly ended sgt. Flamer's life. The captain did not have to live with the guilt for long, as he was torn down by unburnt zombie horde. 

Explaining the rules goes quite quickly although (as mentioned earlier) I managed to misread the wounding rule. I'll give that one here, so you can get a feel for the game (and I'll hopefully remember it forever and ever). If you shoot you roll a D20 and add your Shoot stat. Your target also rolls D20 and adds its Fight stat and assorted bonuses (+1 if the attacker moved before shooting for instance). Assuming you roll higher you take the complete result of your roll, substract your target's Armour stat and that is the damage you do. For instance, if you roll 14 and have a +3 stat your result is 17. Assume the zombie you shoot at rolls a 10, has a +1 fight stat and you moved before shooting at it, it gets a 12. Congratulations, that's a hit. You now take your 17 (not 17-12=5), substract the zombie's armour value (10) and end op doing 7 damage. Its all quite easy, even with some extra rules added for getting wounded, stunned and that kind of stuff.

Assuming the captain was dead, my first mate tried to slip into the lift, only to be blocked by another 'middle of the door' pop-up zombie. And there we thought pop-up stores where annoying! Luckily the first mate managed to win in melee. I used an - extremely - creative reading of the rules regarding pushback to push my first mate into the elevator. 

We rammed the close button. Luckily it was one of those Hollywood close buttons. The sort that doesn't open when someone sticks a hand between the doors. Outside we heard the howl of the zombies, or was that the sound of all the wounded team mates we were leaving behind? Details, details. The main thing was that four (out of ten) of us got out safely. 

With the game ended we took up score. Between us, our teams killed 15 plague zombies and 4 soldier zombies. We lost a captain and 5 troopers. But what was that? As the lucky survivors were taking a relieved breather outside the lift, the other lift pulled up as well. With another dolorous 'bing' its doors opened and six gore drenched humans stepped out.  The other troopers and the captain had survived the attack after all! What a relief. "Is anyone wounded?", first mate Obiwan asked. "Of course not," Captain Chaplin replied, hefting his rapid fire to stop anyone from asking more foolish questions...

If you haven't played Stargrave but are on the fence, you should buy the core rulebook. It is quite reasonably priced and features lovely artwork. The only thing missing is 'Don't Panic' on the cover, but that might just be a copyright issue. I can think of few reasons not to pick up a copy of Stargrave. One would be a profound hatred of sci-fi. In that case, pick up Frostgrave. Another would be the fact that you'll discover you need to buy and paint more miniatures because they would make the game look so much better. The you realize you want to build more scenery. Ah those aren't reasons to skip this game if you ask me, they are reasons to pick it up. In short: I can't wait to get more games in and I'm off checking when the next expansion will hit the market after posting this review. Now to stop myself from turning all the Rogue Trader equipment into Stargrave rules....ah distraction, I'll go look for more miniatures and terrain ideas.