Gaming in the 40K universe: Game 2 – Part 1 (going rogue).

In my last couple of posts I’ve been talking about gaming in my own little home-brewed corner of the 40K universe… first I covered the setting, and then I recounted a co-op game of StarQuest with a friend from Discord.

Next I want to talk about another game I played/ran solo – this time using my 2D dungeon tiles and the ‘random dungeon cards’ I was experimenting with a while back (you can read more about those HERE).

However, before I get to that, I just want to share a picture of the little warband I’ve created for this game, and some extra terrain pieces I’ve made (which I felt were needed to add more of a sci-fi vibe to the dungeon tiles – though I obviously need to do more).

Now, all of these models were printed on my brother’s ‘Bambu A1 mini’ 3D printer – and for a cheap FDM printer (with a 0.2mm nozzle) it does a pretty good job. It really does seem that FDM printers have come a long way in the past couple of years… and if you’d like a follow up article where I discuss all the (free) model parts I’ve used for these (as most are kitbashed in some way), then let me know, and I’ll do just that.

Anyway, for the game itself I used the StarQuest rules again (by one page rules) – but this time I created a single hero (who came out being exactly 100 points), and gave him a small retinue worth the same amount of points from the ‘firefight’ army builder (I judged that these units couldn’t perform any of the specific hero actions in StarQuest – but would count as having a 6+ for any tests that relied on the extra skills a hero has).

Thus we have Jops Van Jools (bonus points if you get the reference) – a young upstart from the Van Jools Rogue Trader dynasty. Being way down the line of succession for the Warrant of Trade, Jops is usually tasked with duties of little import and/or perfunctory roles as is fitting for one of his station.

But enough of that for now… so, the idea for this game was to set up a random ‘dungeon’ of sorts – however, when I’ve done this in the past, I’ve usually generated the dungeon on the fly (i.e. placed a new tile as each room or passage came into line of sight), but this time I thought I’d use my (prototype) random dungeon cards to generate the ‘dungeon’ ahead of time… and maybe treat this as a preliminary (auspex?) scan of the area.

And here’s how it ended up looking (note that I used some common sense to modify the results to fit my small board – so if a card revealed a passage that was 2 tiles long and ended in a t-junction… but I only had space for it to be one tile long with a single right turn – I just did that instead):

 

I’ve also not used any separate tables for this one – and I removed all the blank tokens from the mix. This way, if a card said ‘draw a token’ I was almost guaranteed to get something of interest. Here’s what I went with:

S token = place some terrain to represent an area that can be Searched.

T token = that room/passage tile counts as dangerous Terrain.

M token = add a Monster ‘blip’ in the middle of the tile.

R token = ignore this Result.

Similarly, if I drew a ‘monster room’ card for a particular room – that room got a monster ‘blip’ token, and if I drew a ‘special room’ card – that room also got some terrain to function as a search token. Furthermore, if a card said to roll on the room feature table – I just added a bit of terrain (though I also added some terrain to the quest room, as I think it deserves it).

As for the monsters I’d be using – I used the same army list from the last game (i.e. one that features all the Nurgle themed models I have painted thus far).

 

And since my warband is 200 points in total (i.e. 100 points for my hero, and 100 points in ‘followers’), when playing StarQuest on ‘difficulty 1’ – that meant that the first ‘wave’ of monsters that appeared in the ‘dungeon’ would be worth a total of roughly 100 points (i.e. half the points value of my guys) – and so a random ‘wave’ of opponents was created in the app… which gave me these:

However, I still want there to be some mystery to the game (i.e. I don’t want to know exactly where all the enemies are going to be) – so I actually placed twice as many blip tokens on the board… with the idea being that if I got a result of one, two, or three when it was flipped over – that would correspond to the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, enemy on the list… and if I got a four, five, or six – that would indicate a false reading from the scanner (i.e. no enemies would be placed).

 

As such, the blips (marked one to six) were shuffled – with one being placed (face down) in each of the ‘monster rooms’, one being placed on the tile that yielded an ‘M’ token, and the last two were placed in random dead ends (these dead ends would also function as ‘spawn points’ for additional enemies placed later in the game).

 

Speaking of which, I didn’t want to roll for additional ‘waves’ in the usual way (which involves keeping track of ‘enemy alertness’ – instead I simply rolled a d6 at the end of each turn. If that resulted in a six – I just put another monster blip at the end of a random ‘dead end passage’ (from any blips that had already been removed from play).

And the last thing I’ve introduced is something from Five Leagues/Parsecs… that being that each room has been numbered (in this case one to six) and I’ve rolled a d6 for each blip – with the result being the room that it is moving towards…

 

...as you can see in the image above (i.e. the blip in room two is going to be headed toward room five on its turn).

 

Now I know I’ve probably made all of this sound rather complicated with my bad explanation of things – but it actually worked rather well in practice :)

Anyway, rather than making this blog post any longer, I think I’ll recap the game itself in a separate article in a day or two. So, here’s hoping this has been a vaguely interesting read, and I’ll hopefully catch you again in the next one.