Swatting Bugs on Talumbach's World: An ITEN Game Report

After months of painting and gaming various fantasy games, Josh and I cleansed our palates last week with a nice game of In the Emperor's Name, the small-scale sci-fi ruleset designed for (but not limited to) skirmish gaming in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

As we have been gaming lately in our own homebrew sci-fi universe, we decided to set the game on Talumbach's World, a mostly unexplored forested planet. Here's the capsule Josh came up with for the scenario:

Long ago, Talumbach's World was colonized by Talumbach Enterprises as a mining resource. The corporation allowed the Terran Federation to house a small military base in return for tax credits. One year later, both colony and military base were deserted. Records were sealed, and the planet was declared dangerous, uninhabitable, and off-limits by the Terran frontier government. Years passed,  and the forest took back the land.

More recently, a trade ship crash-landed on the planet's surface carrying valuable data cores about the disposition and movement of Subathi Empire forces in the system. Moving quickly, the Subathi dispatched an extraction team to infiltrate the planet and secure the data cores.

Here's the battlefield at the beginning of the game, with the crashed spaceship located near the abandoned military base. 

Josh's Subathi troopers (actually Tau) were joined by some Kroot warriors for this expedition. Here they are at their jumping-off point.

I know you're all wondering what army I put on the table to threaten Josh's advance. Maybe you guessed it from the scenario or the teaser photo up top. The truth is, Talumbach's World, at least this abandoned firebase, is infested with xenomorphs! Here's what's lurking in the ruins, waiting to feast on Subathi flesh...

The big guy in the center is from Kryomek, and the smaller xenos are from Reviresco.

The weird bug critter is from Grenadier, alongside a Reviresco "homphage" figure.

Oh boy! Aliens everywhere!

We came up with some fun movement rules for the xenomorphs. Small groups could forfeit their activation for one turn in order to re-appear the next turn inside any terrain piece on the battlefield. Leaders were required to use this terrain-to-terrain movement, and this special rule really heightened the tension on the battlefield and kept Josh on his toes.

Here's his cautious advance.

I maneuvered my xenos so they were sort of encircling the crash site, ready to pounce as soon as the Subathi troops got close. They were custom-built from the ITEN rulebook to be close combat monsters. 

Finally, Josh's guys were close enough that I sprang the trap, sending my xenos rushing in from all sides to slaughter his forces.

Close combat in ITEN is fairly simple: roll to hit, then the target rolls his/her Grit stat to avoid dying. My guys had no problem whatsoever scoring hits (they are close combat monsters, after all) but Josh's Grit rolls were frustratingly successful. I was planning to kill two or three of his guys for every one of mine, but the dice were in his favor, and my guys bore the brunt of the assault.

At this point in the game, we got a bit loopy. Josh had a wad of Silly Putty at the table (he uses it to mask off areas for airbrushing), so on a whim we decided to put together some gruesome battlefield effects for the dying xenos. Anyone who's ever seen Aliens knows that these guys spray giblets everywhere when they die. Here are the best shots of the carnage on Talumbach's World.

Yep, guts everywhere. I killed some of his guys, but not enough. The orange Silly Putty puddles soon outnumbered the remaining xeno warriors. Ultimately Josh was able to secure the data cores and fight his way back to the evac site. In retrospect we agreed that perhaps I should have had more xenomorphs to really make his life miserable out there. But then again, we might have run out of orange Silly Putty!

What a mess! 

Next week we'll play the first session of our summer fantasy campaign, so stay tuned for more CSW game reports!

-- Patrick, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

Photo dump from last week's game night

While I was busy typing up some thoughts about This Is Not A Test, a new post-apocalyptic game we're playtesting, my inbox was overflowing with cool photos from the other games that took place during our regular game night. Karl and Josh both sent along a bevy of photos from two games of In The Emperor's Name (ITEN), which we're auditioning as a potential ruleset for our upcoming post-apocalyptic campaign.

Regrettably, I don't have much insight about these photos, except that they're fantastic and do a great job showcasing the wonderful conversions by club member Michael and others. The photo up top is a long shot showing all 3 tabletop battlefields as well as a few Chicago Skirmish Wargames regular (from left: Mike, Tim, Patrick and Jon).

The first ITEN game was a concerted effort to try out the vehicle rules. So we put a whole bunch of zany, post-apocalyptic (and Orky) vehicles on the table, along with a few squads of soldiers, and had a grand melee. Here's the battlefield from the perspective of the Ork encampment (scratchbuilt by Michael, along with both of those cool Ork vehicles).

In addition to Michael's Orks, the game featured Karl's Neo-Soviets and Tim's cyborgs. Here are some more photos from the game, in no particular order (though you can sort of tell how the game unfolded, what with all the overturned vehicles).

 

 

 

Across the table, another conflict was developing. This was a straight-up ITEN skirmish, featuring Jon's cyber-samurai warband vs. Mike's Guardsmen. Again, this was a run-through designed to get some practice with ITEN and figure out if we like it enough for long-term campaign play. Here's the one lone photo we ended up with from their table.

The players concluded that ITEN handles vehicles in a simple manner that doesn't seem to overpower them vs. trooper models. The vehicle units themselves were very easy to stat up using the ITEN vehicle creation rules.

-- Patrick, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

In The Emperor's Name: 6 Games In One Night

This week we met up to play In The Emperor's Name, the quick-play ruleset inspired by early edition Warhammer 40,000 skirmishes. We've dabbled in ITEN before, but this time we gave it a dedicated run-through (6 games on 3 different tabletop layouts) to see if we could use it for our upcoming post-apocalyptic campaign.

Since this was a 40k-inspired game, the players brought a nice array of 40k-inspired warbands, including Space Marines, Necrons, Squats, Tau, Imperial Guard and Daemonhunters. Plenty of these warbands were composed of non-Games Workshop figures, though, since we always try to put lots of different miniatures on the table as often as possible.

Here's the table, looking across all 3 tabletop layouts. We played 3 side-by-side games, then shuffled up the players and got in a second round of games, for a total of 6 games played.

The foreground is a ruined battlefield, the middle layout is a bunker complex hidden away in some rugged hills, and the final layout is an industrial warehouse sector.

The games went pretty well. ITEN is a quick and easy game to pick up, and it helped that we were familiar with the capabilities of 40k dudes (as in, a Necron warrior should be harder to kill than a Guardsman).

Here are a few shots from the games. In the pics below, Josh's newly painted Dark Angels faced off against Tom's Necrons in a fight to claim a piece of xenotech from a bombed-out battlefield. 

 

  

Ultimately Josh's Dark Angels prevailed, spiriting away the alien device before the Necrons could seize it for their own nefarious purposes.

Across the board, my Necrons were flushing a platoon of terrified Guardsmen from their bunker complex. Here we learned a perennial lesson about skirmish games -- heavy armor (or metal bodies, in the case of the Necrons) -- is a serious force multiplier. Mike's Guardsmen didn't have enough heavy weapons to effectively fight off my robots, so they inexorably squeezed the Guardsmen as the game unfolded. I only had 5 robots but they proved quite potent, especially when taking advantage of cover!

Oh! But this was a 3-person game. Another Mike, playing his Daemonhunter warband, was advancing across the board as well. He exchanged fire with my Necrons, found the match-up to be a rather bloody affair (for him), and turned his attention to the poor Guardsmen.

 
His warband figures are mostly Dark Elves that have been converted to hold a variety of sci-fi weapons. This young lady is a Dark Elf Beastmaster, heavily converted of course.

Across the table, Tim was running a Tau warband composed of Skinnies from the Starship Troopers game line. He also had some 28mm scale Daleks in his warband, which were quite awesome. Check out his warband below.

We also didn't end up with many pics from the warehouse sector battlefield. Here's one, showing Josh's Dark Angels defending a refinery from a two pronged assault by both of the Mikes. Yes, that's my washing machine in the background -- 'tis the blessing and the curse of playing in the basement.

One of the last games of the night was a scenario from the ITEN rulebook called "Fort Apache," where Karl's Squats attempted to defend a ruined building from my advancing Necron warband. We went a little crazy with the pictures because his Squats (a new warband that's he's been painting up) looked so good lurking in the ruins. This is an almost-finished piece of terrain that I've been working on recently.

He managed to slaughter most of my robots before we called the game for the night. Karl had figured out how to use the "torrent of fire" rules in ITEN to his advantage, which helped make my heavily armored robots not quite so dangerous. I still ended the game with my fair share of Squat carcasses on the battlefield, though.

What followed was a lengthy discussion on ITEN as it pertained to our upcoming post-apocalyptic campaign. We spent a lot of time talking about whether or not we should limit heavy armor (like power armor for Space Marines, or metal bodies for Necrons) since it proved to be such a force on the battlefield. We also discussed the idea of creating a custom equipment list to limit the number of zany plasma guns and refractor fields in our post-apocalyptic campaign. We agreed that ITEN was a serviceable ruleset that we could build a campaign around. Hurray for that! Now let's get the campaign going!

-- Patrick, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member, with extra photos by Josh and Karl