Gaming in the 40K universe: Setting things up for game 3.

After playing my last solo game, I had a few ideas about how I could improve things a little… nothing major, just some ‘quality of life’ improvements and some slight tweaks here and there.

The first of these was to make a few more ‘blips’ that could be used for ‘false signals’ on the sides that get revealed when the token comes into sight.

I also decided to (use the StarQuest app to) generate twice as many enemies as I needed this time…

1. Three Plague Zombies (poxwalkers)

2. Three Plague Zombies

3. Three Plague Zombies

4. Three Plague Zombies

5. Three Plague Cultists with Rifles

6. One Plague Warrior (plaguebearer)

...so that’s six enemy models/units, and the same amount of ‘error’ blips.

I then mixed up all the numbered blips and separated them into two piles – and each of these piles also had three ‘false-signal/error’ tokens mixed in as well.

That way I could use one pile (that contained 3 random enemies and 3 false signals) to populate the board at the beginning at the game, and a second pile (that also contained 3 random enemies and 3 false signals) to use as reinforcements during the game itself.

(Note that ‘reinforcements’ are my homebrew way of introducing extra enemies instead of the ‘wave’ system in regular StarQuest. Basically, at the end of each turn I roll a d6… and if I roll a six, I then place a blip from the reinforce pile at a randomly determined dead end).

Anyway, for the table set-up I used my random dungeon tiles and cards again (to generate the layout) – but like before, because I only have a small table to play on, I did have to jigger things around a bit to get it to fit (I’ll also be using my ¾ size ruler again to measure distances).

So, pictured above is how things were laid out… which I then tried to tie to some of the mission objectives in the StarQuest book.

As such, I placed a computer terminal in each of the ‘special’ rooms – and used these for the markers for the ‘Investigation’ Primary objective. So, my hero had to get to each of these and make a Dex Test to get them back online (thus restoring power to the doors to the Quest Room).

Then, as the secondary objective, I chose ‘Safeguard’ – which meant I had to get to the quest room and make another three successful Dex checks to make sure the generator came online.

Some of the other interpretations where:

A blip was placed in each monster room and the quest room. The remaining 3 blips where each placed at one of the dead end ‘monster spawner’ points (you can’t see it in the picture – but the last one is at the end of the passage in the bottom right).

As before, I numbered all of the rooms (1 to 6), and rolled a die for each blip (except the one in the quest room). The number on the die then represents where that particular blip is moving to. When a blip reaches its destination, it remains there for one round, and I then roll a die for it again (note that all blips simply make a 6” move on their turn until they are revealed).

The ‘T’ token represents dangerous terrain filling that tile (in this case noxious fumes from the toxic spill).

The ‘R’ tokens means that I need to roll a random event if/when I enter those tiles (and try to interpret the result in a fitting way… re-rolling if necessary).

When I got a ‘room feature’ on a card… I simply put some crates on the tile, and these would be treated like a search token (I only got one this time – as seen in the corner of room 6).

And I think that was about it. As you can tell, I’m not always using the cards and tokens in the same way – but instead just trying to make them fit whatever mission (or indeed whatever game system) I’m playing at the time.

So, last time the ‘special rooms’ where areas that could be searched… but for this mission I’m using them as part of the main objective (and I’m instead using ‘room feature’ results as things that can be searched). It’s really just a matter of using them to inspire ideas, rather than giving them set values.

Anyway, because my Rogue Trader and his (heavily armed) servitor where the only survivors of the last mission… he needed to add some new members to his retinue…

…and here we have (from left to right) a sergeant of the household troops, the servitor that survived the last mission, the main man himself (Rogue Trader Jops Van Jools) and a small squad containing a flame thrower (as I reckon that will come in handy for killing swarms of enemies).

So, as you can see – like before, I’m not using multiple heroes for my game (like you are supposed to), but instead creating a small retinue worth the same amount of points as my character. So that’s a total of 220 points (110 for my hero and 110 from various ‘firefight’ lists… and it’s that 220 points that I used to create the custom ‘wave’ of enemies listed above).

And I think that’s about it for this little pre-game ramble… in my next post I’ll do a quick recap of the game itself (and we’ll see who managed to survive this one :o ).