Adepticon 2012: The Battle for Piscina IV, Part 2

Today we are continuing our coverage of the Dark Angels' attempt to drive off the Beast of Armageddon at Piscina IV. Like the first pair of battles, the rest of the battles of the campaign took place at the same time as one another.

For my next battle, I was tasked with an actual scenario from the Storm of Vengeance campaign pack, Cut and Run. In this particular battle the Dark Angels scouting forces, consisting of Naaman's Scout Squad and Ravenwing Squad Aquila, encountering advanced Ork forces on their way to Koth Ridge. The goal for the mission is fairly simple- get your forces across the 24" mark and then back off your board edge while remaining at at least half strength. I could also mark one unit as a support unit that did not have to complete the scouting task.

Since I only had two units at 400 points (20 pts per sniper scout! With no camo cloaks!) I decided to designate Squad Aquila as my recon force while Squad Naaman provided fire support. The Orks had sentries, but the mighty Astartes simply ignored the pesky Gretchen and turboboosted onto the field.

So, Ravenwing turboboosted forward down one side of the field, easily crossing the middle line. The orks move to engage, shooting to no effect. Turn, two, Squad Aquila turboboosts back to my deployment zone and leaves the field on turn three while Squad Naaman pins or destroys all Ork units.

My opponent and I stared at the board for a bit, then decided to set up again. To make it a bit more fair we decided that, since originally turboboost was not a rule my bikes could not do so during the game. We set up same as before, bikes drove forwards turns one and two, turn two I broke the Orks' back with shooting, and Squad Aquila got away scot free once again.

If you are planning on running this scenario, try making only the Scouts able to perform the scouting mission. I think it could be a very tense, fun engagement if it's Squad Aquila that needs to play blocker/fire support while the scouts hurriedly try to scramble back and forth across the center line.

Since that battle got finished so quickly we decided to play another scenario out of the campaign book, Shadow Warriors. In this one Naaman and his scouts need to cross Ork territory at night and try to sneakily get off the opposite board edge without alerting the sentries. If the sentries are alerted Naaman needs to kill every single last damn Greenskin out there.

The unfortunate part about this mission was that neither I nor the campaign master knew the rules for sentries, so we just made something up, which made them discover me on turn 1. Suddenly I had 60+ orks charging down on my Scouts with Night Fighting preventing my snipers from targeting the enemy at range. Fortunately I was able to divide and conquer, taking out one mob at a time with my close combat scouts and used Night Fight to hide myself from the Ork shooting. The scenario ended when Naaman threw a stasis grenade at the remaining Lootas, allowing my scouts to advance unmolested and put the foul greenskins to the sword.

Meanwhile my allies were fighting a desperate battle on Koth Ridge. My loaned out Imperial Guard forces hadn't thought to bring any armor or heavy weapons, so the Orks advanced with only Devastator fire from the Dark Angels giving them any grief. Things turned even worse when one of their assault squads came in from reserve into terrain, lost 4 members to sharp sticks and promptly fled the field.

The Ork Dreadnought proved to be the real star, rampaging like a god of war through the Imperial lines. In the end what should have been a glorious victory turned into a rout for the forces of the Emperor, giving Gazhgkull easy access to Kadillus.

Seeking vengeance for the loss at Koth Ridge and thanks to the good work that my Scouts had accomplished we moved on to game 6 of the campaign, Revelations. In this mission our goal was to destroy the power plant at the Ork landing site and sabotage their Tellyporta, using only Scouts and Terminators. Widely outnumbered by the Orks the Scouts infiltrated as close as they could, allowing the Terminators to deep strike close to the enemy lines.

Unfortunately we had chosen to attack the objective that was being defended by Gazhgkull himself. The Orks charged and were unstoppable, slaughtering all of the Imperial defenders in three brutal turns. In the end only the Apothecary was standing, surrounded in a growing sea of green...

All in all, I had a blast with this campaign. It didn't matter so much who won or lost (and in fact we managed to get the opposite result in almost every mission!), just that we were having fun reenacting some great battles from 40k's past. Some of the missions probably could have used some extra play testing before running them on 5th edition rules, but again, it was all about the feel and getting the cinematic scenes to come to life.

Thanks for reading. Next, we'll get to some of the hobby projects that I'm working on.