I challenged someone in my local group to a game when someone else who hadn’t played in a little while asked if he could jump in, too. And I thought, okay, sure… I just need a good multiplayer scenario to make this happen.
So then I go through my big document of scenarios, reading one after the other until I arrive at Daemonic Possession. And, holy shit, does this fit the bill.
The idea is that a daemon has set up shop in a random ganger from a random gang and everyone must kill it. Except… the daemon can jump bodies at the end of every round on a 5+ to the next closest fighter or if the body it’s in is killed non-melee and with a roll a lower than 5+.
Most scenarios eventually boil down into gangs just trying to kill one another but it’s always fun to have a motivation for it
It’s a tough sonofabitch to kill but it makes for a great scenario when you have multiple gangs all out to kill one daemon and, maybe, more or less setting other rivalries aside.
It’s additionally funny because, while the daemon is in your fighter, your gang is protective of it because it’s actually kind of a bad ass fighter. But when it’s in another gang, well, the great enemy must be destroyed.
That’s really the whole scenario. It’s a straight up gang fight. As many gangs who want to jump in can and they’re all trying to wipe each other out, before or after they purge the daemon. The one who successfully kills the daemon wins or it’s the last gang standing.
The truth is, most scenarios eventually boil down into gangs just trying to kill one another but it’s always fun to have a motivation for it. And this one provides some interesting motivation.
When we played it, I was the lucky winner of daemonic possession and my opponents never really teamed up against me but they also never really went after each other. It was kind of fun, for my part, fighting on two fronts at the same time.
One comment I will make about this one though, is that like a lot of scenarios where something happens on a 5+ die roll, it may not happen as often as the writers thought it would. In this case, the jumping bodies every round. It stayed pretty stable until late in the game where it jumped into my opponent, only to jump back to one of my guys when I was lucky and one-shotted him, and then jumped back into my original ganger where it stayed until the game ended.
I think the writers assumed possibly two things: that the possessed fighter would be taken out of action more often than sometimes happens or that it would jump on its own about a third of the time. In this case, both events barely happened. It’s tough to think of a corrective for this though as too much jumping around could actually sap the uniqueness of the mechanic.
So… I would suggest just to play as written.
One fun thing extra that we did though was we played on my Sump Sea mat, where fighters who were knocked into it had to make strength checks to swim to the sides or to gangways. It added a fun little environmental effect that just gave a three-way fight between two groups of Outcasts and a Goliath game a little more texture.
The key art at the top of this article was generated by GPT Image 2 based on a tableau this author photographed of his own miniatures.
