Preparing for War

I shall start out by noting that this is not related to the current Rolemaster game.

I have recently been building a new Tau army for Warhammer 40K and finishing off my Chaos Space Marines. The last time I played 40K was way back in 1999 and I only played one game using the 3rd edition rules. I recently bought the 4th edition of the rules as I have been meaning to get back into the game. As luck would have it, 3 weeks after I made this decision my local Games Workshop closed! Oh well.

Anyway, my original gaming partner from years ago moved back to Dumfries not long after I did and we had been meaning to get together for a game for months, but I had been dragging my heels. I saw the booklet for the Medusa V campaign that is being run this summer, and I decided I better get my act together as its looks like it could be good fun.

I have managed to put together 1200 points worth of Chaos Space Marines. I added some bits from the Chaos Vehicle sprue to a Predator Annihalator I have had for about 7 years and gave it a repaint. Those vehicle sprues are great for making vehicles look 'Chaosy'. I have eventually finished building and painting my Chaos Land Raider, which will look really good on the battlefield. These are all painted using the Black Legion colours. Eventually I want the ability to field either a Black Legion, Death Guard, or a Emperors Children force. I know it will cost a lot, but I will get there sometime.

My first game is arranged for Wednesday evening, and I hope that I don't get defeated too soundly. May Strike Force Acharon please the Chaos Powers and reign supreme over the battleground (and kill plenty of those deluded Blood Angels, especially those worthless Death Company).

Will I ever roll above 38?

Again it’s been a while since I posted anything. Getting to be a bit of a habit…

After being attacked by the bandit we continued on our journey. We came across two people fighting in the road. As we approached them they turned round and attacked us. There were at least two other bandits and a wizard in the woods. The wizard threw a ball of cold which struck Orophin and took him down to ¼ hit points. Most of the battle is a haze, but Corvus charged on horseback towards the two bandits in the woods. I rolled an amazing double-open ended roll and was able to leap of the back of my horse with both my weapons drawn and engage them in combat. That was won of the few decent rolls I made that night. After a couple of rounds of not being able to hit them (due to the fact that I couldn’t roll above 40), I lucked out and made an open-ended roll on one of my attacks (it was a natural 100) and sliced the head off of one of the bandits.

What Corvus (and I) can remember about the rest of the battle is that Nettie, Orophin’s Dragonette, took care of the Wizard that had caused such harm to his owner.

I missed the next week, which was a shame as there was a massive fight with lots of Rock wolves. Bang goes 3500+ experience points for Corvus. I am led to believe it was the most exciting session to date…at least that’s what they tell me.

The next session was basically an uneventful travel to the next town. The only interesting thing that happened was that I botched one of my perception roles and I fell asleep on my watch. That pesky human woke me up complaining. Corvus’ defence was that I had woken him up and that he must have fell back to sleep on his watch. Nobody really believed me though. Would you believe it? The rest of the party of Elves believed the newbie human scum over their long term elf colleague…

Last nights session was a lot more exciting. While making camp in a mountain pass we were attacked by two giant scorpions. I made two fantastic rolls for my hide and stalk and sneaked right around the back of them. I was so good that nobody else noticed and I nearly got blasted by a shock bolt from the human. As I was surprising them from the rear my first attack was at +40 to hit and then every subsequent attack was at +20. I failed to hit the first four times and in the end I only struck one of the giant scorpions three times for a total of 16 damage. Could I roll above 38? Could I hell! While all this was going on the human attempted on at least two separate occasion to cast a spell and botched it, stunning himself. At least I wasn’t the only one with bad rolls.

A few nights later Corvus was on watch and he noticed a migration of an army ant colony so we were able to avoid it.

Just before reaching the next time we come across a wagon with two adult males torn apart and a woman and two children who were also dead, but bore the marks of humanoid bites. At least two humanoids had been feeding off of them. We put the remains into the wagon, which the beastmaster fixed and then took everything along to the next town and handed it over to the authorities.

During all this we have found out that Robert seems to take guides along various points of the route. He then seems to appear later on without anybody, and he seems to be aging. We have our suspicions that he is draining their life force to survive, and then raises them from the dead. It’s these undead that we think were eating the bodies.

p.s. It should be noted that Neill has managed to break his trend of rolling fumbles. Twice in last nights session he rolled a natural 100. Grrrrrrrrrr.