Five Parsecs. Campaign Game 17. Ambushed!

Link to previous thrilling instalment

Gallius Marbec leads most of his crew through the underhive. Little do they realise they are being expertly stalked...

"Marbec is here. We must stop him. You two, with me."

"I've sent two troopers to flank and pin him."

Marbec and his crew continue, oblivious to the threat.

Marbec on the right, troopers to the top and left.

The flanking troops open fire.

Incoming!

"Roma!" cries Julio, as his lover goes down!

Marbec and Hezel take cover, while Julio and Chugger charge towards the enemy.

Chugger distracts the enemy with wildly inaccurate fire...

... allowing Julio to flank their position.

Well-drilled, the troopers return fire...

... allowing Chugger to get close!

Without missing a beat, the troopers charge the ogryn.
Who are these guys?

They fight hard- Chugger is lucky to take one down.

With a vicious countermove, the trooper takes Chugger out!

"Just where we want them- neutralise them!"

Hezel goes down to fire from behind!

Julio clears the way as Marbec and new guide
Stazie sprint to the nearest door. 

Marbec looks back only to see the mysterious hunter gun down Julio!

The underhive is getting too hot for Gallius Marbec. He's made a lot of enemies- including these well-equipped mysterious professionals. Chugger shrugs off his wounds, but Hezel ends up in sick bay. Roma wakes up there as well- only to find that Julio, her star cross'd lover, is dead.

Julio Rybeck- betrayed his gang for love
and dreamt of fame as a bounty hunter.
Bled out behind the pipes in Subsector 23-theta.

Postscript:

"Ma'am, Marbec got away but we hit his crew hard."

"Emperor damn you. We were just trying to talk and warn him..."

Runebound expansion heroes

I'm trying to reduce my backlog... My previous Runebound figures are here. I've finally finished and photographed these figures:

Jonas the Kind

Zyla

Eliam

Red Scorpion

Nanok of the Blade

Tatianna

Journeys in Middle-Earth: Spreading War

I've finally painted all the figures from the 'Spreading War' expansion for Journeys in Middle-Earth, including the 'Scourges of the Wastes' villains. I used a lot of Contrast, and some of the painting was a bit of a mental slog. There was an issue with the primer being patchily hydrophobic and I had difficulty getting even coats. I placed the larger figures on MDF bases. The heroes have already been seen here.

Heroes

The otherwise nondescript 'Soldiers' received a thin coat of Vallejo sepia.

Soldiers

The Uruk-hai are nice beefy orcs. I didn't differentiate between all the details on their sculpts, its just browns.

Uruk-hai

I don't like the warg-riders all vaulting the same log, but it's not the end of the world. They're wielding slings, but two of them are broken and I'm not going to repair them.

Warg riders

I removed the flames from the top of the oliphaunt's howdah because they were starting to snap as well.

Oliphaunt

The flames on the siege towers, however, are quite durable.

Siege towers

I'm really happy with these beasts, the wings came out just right.

Fell beasts

I used some Vallejo Liquid Mask to cover the Witch King's flight stand before final matt varnishing. It hasn't quite all come off despite attacking it with a stiff brush and Blutac.

Witch King

I don't know anything about these two villains, as I have yet to encounter them in a campaign.

Lord Angon

Eadris

Glad to have them done.

"What is this, a siege tower for hobbits?"

Unfathomable

Father Dagon leads a wave to assault the Atlantica.

I painted the Deep Ones from Unfathomable, a boardgame where you are crew on a 1920s steamship being attacked by Lovecraftian watery monsters. You have to work together to allocate finite resources, resolve dilemmas, and repel boarders- but at least one of the players is secretly helping the monsters and trying to keep their real allegiance hidden!

Fairly simple paintjobs with Contrast and gloss varnish and plain black bases. There are twenty Deep Ones and they're identical, so it wasn't fun painting them and they've been stalled in my painting queue for over a year. Father Dagon and Mother Hydra are pleasantly hefty chunks of plastic.

Deep Ones

Father Dagon spawns more Deep Ones

Mother Hydra smashes the ship

The boardgame is a retheme of the 2008 classic Battlestar Galactica, which is well out of print. In BSG you are humans evading the Cylons, but some players may be secretly Cylons. The two games are very mechanically similar. The retheme acknowledges the heavy debt to BSG and other SF:

• You're on the SS Atlantica
• One of the crew has a dog called Starbuck
• There was a ship's cat called Ripley
• The Engineer is Jeanne Lafarge
• etc.

I was a traitor in our recent game- it was challenging trying to teach and supervise the game, because mistakes and oversights would favour me!

Necromunda Ash Wastes Nomads

It took me longer than expected to paint these chaps from Necromunda earlier this year. There's a lot of details and shades of sandy brown. I was looking for inspiration from Fremen, Tusken Raiders, mujahideen, Arab Revolt, etc. They've got these banners let them do that ambush-from-the-sand trick. They've got apparatus to protect from the elements and conserve water.

Leader

Rocket launcher and spotter

Long Rifles

Raiders

Skull-o-meter™: 0!

Batwoman & Red Hood vs Killer Moth & Firefly!

Firefly

Killer Moth

Killer Moth and Firefly plot to release a deadly gas weapon- Batwoman and Red Hood team up to thwart their fiendish plan!

Batwoman

Red Hood

Batwoman and Red Hood enter the alley
to find the chemical formula.

Red Hood KOs a thug and gets part of the solution.

Batwoman leaps onto a truck and lets fly her batarangs. 

Red Hood sprints down the alley to get the rest of the formula

Firefly swoops and Batwoman defeats him on top of the truck!

With his gasmask on, Red Hood enters the laboratory
and synthesises the antidote.

The heroes race to climb up the fire escape.

Red Hood tries to distribute the antidote into the air vent.

Killer Moth's thugs gun Red Hood down,
but Batwoman releases the antidote and saves Gotham.

I had another fun game of Gotham City Chronicles. Appreciating how tight the scenarios are will help you prevail- there's no room for getting distracted! Our heroes just prevailed in the nick of time!