Shadow Wars : Armageddon
It's not going to surprise anyone who knows me that I enjoy old GW and that Shadow Wars is the right format of Necromunda-Adjacent flavour to appeal to me. One book with all the rules and warband rosters you need to play anything 40K is pretty great value for those who have some old models about but don't feel like diving back into the large scale wargame.
It's also not going to surprise anyone that I picked the Inquisition and Ger picked Space Marines. So my Inquisitor gathered some expendables and Ger gathered the Battle Brothers and we went to (shadow) war!
Let's see - I started with an Inquisitor with Plasma Pistol and Power Sword, a Crusader with Power Sword and Force Shield, an Acolyte-Sniper with Sniper Rifle and Telescopic Sights, Camo Gear, an Acolyte with a chainsword, an Acolyte with a lasgun and an Initiate with a Bolter. In the first game I gave Frag Grenades to most of the crew, but then I was worried about being able to crack Space Marine armour, so I took them all back and gave lasgun-acolyte some... er, Krak grenades. This was probably a tactical error in a way, Chainsword-acolyte has the most motivation to get close, so I swapped them to him in the second game. My advice though, if your roster comes with an option for Krak grenades, take those bad boys.
I think you can see my full roster after the two games here, which is a handy warband builder. I added a Shotgun Acolyte after the first game and a Shotgun Initiate after the second.
For fun, we both had 1 Promethium at the start to hire a special operative with. I took a Death Cult Assassin with the Executioner Greatblade. Ger bolstered his Space Marine Scout Sergeant, 3 Scouts & 1 Recruit with a terrifying Terminator with a Power Sword. One of those Scouts was lugging about a Heavy Bolter, which gave him a cool full auto advantage.
Ger's ongoing terrain building gave us a great table to skulk about on. Game One was our proof of concept, so we just did "Kill Team Fight" - our guys run into each other and start shooting. Between my Assassin, my Inquisitor and those aforementioned Krak Grenades, the Space Marines suffered at my hands much worse than I did. Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut when Ger finally got me to take a bottle (morale) test I rolled boxcars - double 6. So he won the game, but it felt a bit unsatisfying. We were just starting to smash each other to pieces and my guys ran away? 25% casualties being break point feels a bit early for action, but I suppose the teams have a reason to be cautious in the milieu of Shadow Wars, where supposedly supplies are hard to come by or whatever.
We set up for game two, where we got "Hit and Run" on the chart. Ger got the defender, so his guys are in camp when my guys decide to nobble them. My secret objective was "Shock Tactics", so I had to get someone off the far side of the table. I spent my consolation prize of one Promethium on re-hiring the Assassin, her speed meant she'd be straight off the far side given a couple of turns of running. Two of the scouts I mauled had to miss a game, so Ger hired in a fresh scout to replace them. He didn't spend any Promethium on a special op for some reason, which made my life easier.
Mad Chainsword Acolyte MacGee had the Krak Grenades, so he lobbed one through a window and blew up Ger's Sergeant straight away. My sniper picked his sniper straight off the ledge he was on. His sniper had downed my Crusader with some great rolls on his part and some bad rolls on my part, but he also failed his ammo check roll, so Ger didn't really care that I shot the Space Marine who was up really, really high armed only with a knife.
Ger's last two Scouts maneuvered about the central mass to get a bead on me. Cautiously, because he could see the Assassin pelting past him and he didn't know where she was going or why. She had cut one of his Scouts to teeny tiny pieces in Game One before the Terminator punched her in the face, but the Terminator only won because of a huge difference in our dice rolls. He had learned to be cautious of the crazy Assassin lady. His Heavy Bolter Scout swung around the corner and opened up on my Inquisitor, taming him out of action. And........ I failed a bottle roll again. We decided to play on and see where the game went as though I had passed, because ending on turn 3 seemed pointless. We kept taking bottle rolls, but we just kept a running total rather than apply the effects. In the end, I only failed that one and I think Ger failed two or three.
I had initially sent some acolytes around the side with the Scout Sniper to make Ger have to guess what I was up to, but when the Scout Sniper got downed early it meant I had three guys just wandering about to no effect. I think I could have downed all of the Marines if I could have applied all their force too. The forces in Shadow War are too small for feints and things. If I did it over I'd just have them all pinch in one side and have the Assassin still do the running.
I ran off the side of the board in like, turn 5 or 6, winning the game (technically I bottled out first, but we were finding that a bit boring, as I said). I think we'd be inclined to increase the bottle limit to 50% casualties or similar if we get a chance to play again. In funny result banter, all Ger's injury rolls got him guys missing games and head wounds and so forth, and my Inquisitor got the "What doesn't kill you..." result, so I got a free skill from getting shot. I like the Inquisitor list, there's plenty of variety in guys and gear to assemble a fun team. I should probably shove my Inquisitor into Power Armour in the future. I was surprised there was no option for a Personal Force Field, which is a 40K staple for Inquisitors and Rogue Traders from the eras of games I'm most familiar with. Space Marine Scouts are tough hardasses, but even though my guys are way more fragile, you can equip them with enough punch to knock the Marines down if you can get close.
Close Combat is satisfying and brutal and shooting is very 40K standard. The injury stuff feels a bit loose, it's easy to knock people over but not super easy to get them off the table permanently. I think successive hits should increase the chance of being KO'ed or something, especially on guys who are already down? You could tweak rules forever, but Shadow War:Armageddon is a great, quick, fairly robust ruleset. And it has all the current 40K staple factions in the book (so no Gangers, Squats, Ratlings, Beastmen or Arbites, but you know how that goes) so you can get started with whatever you've got.
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You can find Gerard somewhere West of here, on the Internet. I'll do my best to update with some more gaming stuff soon! I've been in a Fifth Edition D&D game that I've been enjoying, I recently finished running the old WFRP Doomstones Campaign and I am also meant to be running an...... experiment.
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