I mentioned in a different post that I joined up with another campaign that’s running the Cinderak Burning campaign and sticking to the N23 rules for the time being. Which, of course, is great for me as I am well set up for N23 and have an Orlock gang big enough to fight an attrition campaign.
To kick things off, we played Meat for the Grinder, a scenario I will write about shortly but, because I ended up as the underdog, I got to challenge my opponent and select the scenario. Fortunately, I got to play my buddy Rokksville, who people will know from his incredible conversions (including several featured in the sidebar here). And, because I’ve gotten to play so few, I selected an Ash Wastes scenario. Because what’s the point of having made up gangers on Quads and dirtbikes unless you can actually run then on Quads and dirtbikes.
if they pass an Intelligence check, they’ve found their way through the storm
This worked for my buddy, too, since he also worked up a sweet, sweet kitbash for an Escher cutter.
Naturally, per the title of this piece, we ran Out of the Storm. Which was a sick scenario! Honestly, it couldn’t have been more fun, and with a weather mechanic that was easy to remember and implement and also added a lot of color.
The conceit for the piece is that there’s an attacker and a defender. The defender is in a makeshift Fallout village that’s behind a wall with gaps suspiciously large enough to drive vehicles through. But it’s denser on that side of the wall. The other side is open to the Ash Wastes. And behind that, a storm in rolling in. Every round, the storm consumes six inches from the board, forcing the attackers into the village. Models the storm moves over are removed from the board but retain their Ready markers. On their activation, if they pass an Intelligence check, they’ve found their way through the storm and are placed at the storm’s edge and can activate as normal.
The winner of the scenario is based on Victory Points… 1VP for each fighter taking out of action and 2VP for each vehicle wrecked.
What’s great about this scenario is that the storm provides a great pressure mechanism. It would be easy to sit on each side and try to snipe at one another from cover but with the storm coming up behind the attacker, it’s real motivation to move in close. But, also, at six inches per round, the storm isn’t advancing so fast that there can’t be some Ash Wastes shenanigans. One of my favorite moments was that my Orlock Quad’s heavy bolter had jammed on the first shot and, for some reason, my opponents Death Maiden was out in the open. So vroom, when the engine and suddenly I was trying to flatten her into a pancake!
Then, once the storm catches up, things become tighter and tighter because, while the storm doesn’t take fighters out of action, it does risk them not coming back. We each had a couple of fighters who, once the storm covered them, were never quite smart enough to figure out how to get back out. Which led to increasingly desperate moves from both of us.
The fun thing about the way the old edition ran vehicles versus mounts were that mounts were infinitely maneuverable, being able to turn on a dime, easily run drive-by attacks. They can basically fire in all directions because you’re on a bike, you can look behind you as you let off a spray of bullets. Yes, they were vulnerable to the I Get Knocked Down rule but if you ran your mounts the way I like to (read: giving them to disposable juves) then it really doesn’t matter as much. Hence, when I lost my biker, it wasn’t that big of a loss.
when I lost my biker, it wasn’t that big of a loss.
Vehicles, by comparison, feel big and clunky because there are specific turn and movement rules and because they also have specific target arcs into which they can fire. The rules for vehicles in N23 were chunky and didn’t always make sense. But they were also flavorful and you felt the difference between fielding a vehicle and a mount.
This was even more the case when the storm would catch up and suddenly you’re running a big heavy quad around under bridges and over more fragile fighters. And it’s doubly funny when it’s because the quad as passed their intelligence roll to come zooming out of the storm and over an Escher cutter.
I always say, what makes Necromunda great is that every game there’s at least one moment that feels like a scene from a movie and nothing feels more cinematic than your heavy vehicle come racing out of the dust clouds to run over an enemy looming over you.
While I’m overall enjoying my test games of N26, I am also looking forward to the day when GW brings back more narrative scenarios like this one. The card system is a nice way to generate scenarios on the fly and I’ve seen the math, you can generate a lot of scenarios with just the cards in the core box, but there’s something nice and artful about a constructed scenario with thought-out mechanics like Out of the Storm.
Pros
- Easy Mechanics – As with every Ash Wastes scenario, it can get needlessly complicated but if you play this where the storm is the weather effect by itself, then you can simplify a lot of the rest and it becomes an easy mechanic to manage.
- Narrative Engine – In a similar fashion, the mechanic of this scenario offers an easy engine for narrative moments to happen because they have to happen.
- Vehicles – They don’t get to be put on the table as often as they should be and this scenario encourages one or two to be used to support the other fighters.
Cons
- Vehicles – I said it above, vehicles can be clunky and, also, not everyone has built them. And without any vehicles to take advantage of the wide open spaces you get in an Ash Wastes scenario, it may feel a little bit more like a turkey shoot.
- Strictly Two-player – You could probably do 2×2 if people picked teams but you’d need a much larger board and it would significantly slow down the pace of the game. It’s a strong two-player scenario just not a good candidate for multi-player.
