After months of talking about it and throwing ideas back and forth, forum member Stephan and I have finally embarked on a DeepWars campaign!
This particular campaign involves my Fortune Hunters attempting to establish a foothold on Blood Reef, and exploring/exploiting the Reef for their own greedy and nefarious purposes. Stephan's Nereids, ever watchful of their beloved homeland, are rallying to throw the invaders out.
We have a loose structure for this campaign, and we aren't including every single goodie that is available in the Campaigns section of the rulebook; we opted to pick and choose what works for us. Our intent is to play a scenario that fits into the overarching campaign theme, then discuss afterwards what the effects are and how that translates into what the next scenario should be. We're starting with smaller games, between 500-550 points, but plan to move that up to larger games in later scenarios.
Our first scenario was a "Conquer" game, in which the Fortune Hunters were attempting to establish a base of operations in the Coralline Labyrinth area of Blood Reef. The Scenic Artifact Objective was a non-functioning Deflector Field Generator, which the Fortune Hunters planned to incorporate into their base if they could hold on to it.
We set a limit of 10 turns for this scenario.
The Nereids, quick devils that they are, rushed up on the temple and by turn 4 Stephan had nearly all of them in base contact with it. The scenario awards 2 VP per personality model and 1 VP per regular troop model for models close to the objective; almost all of his Nereids were personalities, so he quickly started racking up VP.
We did have a little shark-on-shark violence; I can't remember the type of shark this was that we rolled for, but it was Aggressive and stalked the lowest point valued model on the table, which just happened to be Amatheia's hammerhead (60 points). Amatheia and her pet hammerhead were able to fend it off and kill it, unfortunately for me.
I quickly realized I needed to get my two personality models, the Big Game Hunter and Marie du Chatelet, up to the objective as soon as possible to start getting my own VP. They both made it, but then Marie was confronted by Kalypso and it didn't go so well...
The Big Game Hunter was able to score a Gruesome Kill on Kalypso a couple turns later, but the damage had already been done.
In the other corner, my Heavy Support Diver and one of my Tactical Dive Soldiers ganged up on one of the Reef Guardians, eventually scoring another Gruesome Kill, but not before the Nereids rang up several more VP.
At the end of the game (we went the full 10 turns), the Nereids had scored 49 VP to the Fortune Hunters' 31. Stephan had at least three turns with at least three personality models on the objective, and there was no way I could catch up to them. Unfortunately, my Breaching Mech was out of the fight for the entire game--the Fortune Hunters were playing with the "Trailblazers" special ops rule, and he was trundling off to tag an objective. Dumb move on my part--I should have sent one of the tactical divers in his place. But, live and learn.
On the plus side (for me, anyway), the two models I was able to kill in the Nereid warband were both Gruesome Kills, and as Stephan and I understand the rules, they cannot roll on the survival table and therefore cannot continue in the campaign. He lost Kalypso and a Reef Guardian; he can field other Reef Guardians, but Kalypso is out for the remainder of the campaign. Unfortunately for me, Marie du Chatelet failed her survival roll, so she too is out of the campaign.
Based on the Fortune Hunter's loss in this scenario, the next scenario will be a skirmish with the Nereids as the attackers. They will hit a band of Fortune Hunters who are out scouting another location for their base.
A few other pics from the campaign:
Action hero!
Heeeere, fishy fishy fishy:
Blood in the water:
That's all for now. Watch this space for the next step in the campaign!
Thanks for reading!
