Quake & Mourn Campaign: Assassination, with Extreme Prejudice

Last week the club gathered to play the next round in our fantasy campaign. In this game, Josh and I faced off in a quick assassination scenario set in the windswept wastes of the Sunderstone Badlands.

Ditherprank came to rue the day he desecrated that road-side shrine of St. Gormly with his kaotic magicks, because, as by whisper on wind, news of his deed came to the royal Heirophant in Vildeburg and she dispatched her Royal Assassination Squadron to destroy the blasphemer. The priesthood mechanical duly, and with the blessings of all the saints, awakened the cold metal contrivances of murder and set them on their path, with an Adept of the brotherhood militant to guide them.

 

Fulgid Glim and his banditry were tracking the remnants of a defeated orc warband south across the Sunderstone Badlands when they heard the royal klaxon echoing off the stones. The Adept militant called forth Ditherprank by name. 

Glim glared at his puckish magician sharply and hissed. Ditherprank whimpered, as much in fear of the Tainted Thegn as of the Murder Machines arrayed against him. The mute sycophant who carried Ditherprank said nothing, but then he never did.

Needing no spurring from Fulgid Glim, nor any excuse for the glory of battle and trampling dust, the Dire Men rode at the assassins, and were knocked aside and gunned down as the contraptions spun violently forward.

Ditherprank shrieked at his mute to find some cranny-hole in which to hide themselves, but they found no sanctuary in the blasted dirt. In a breath, a magnificent machine was above him, and with its blessed hammer smote the mute full in the trunk, sending him - and Ditherprank beside - in a bloody arc that could only be described as celestial in its height and grace.

The machine stalked to the broken, twitching body of the mute and regarded it for a cold moment...and as the mute gave a final spasm and expired, the machine moved just as coldly away. 

A dozen yards off, in the pit of a pock-marked crater, from the skull that imprisoned the spirit of Ditherprank the wizard, there issued a rattling sigh. His calcic temple had gained a long and painful crack, which would irk him greatly over his centuries of imprisonment, but he had escaped otherwise without harm. It was a shame about his mute, but one could not fret greatly over that withall. Because, thought Ditherprank, when the shit hits the shrine, there are many mutes in the world but there is only one Ditherprank.

-- Mattias, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member