Hey everybody,
I’m back with more Necromunda today, and it’s time to talk about the second game in my Law & Misrule campaign! The first game was really a bit of a taster, I suppose, and I’ve begun to think of it more as a prelude to the main event. I’m playing my Goliath gang, and James is playing as Enforcers, though for the first game he took his Orlocks out for a spin. The second game is therefore more like the first proper game in the campaign.
We were playing Experimental Testing for this game, a scenario from a recent issue of White Dwarf, where the attacker is trialling some stimms for a rogue doc, and so each time before they activate, they can roll a D6 and either suffer a flesh wound and lose their turn, gain an extra action for the turn, or suffer the flesh wound then get +1 to strength and movement for the turn. Each dose of stimms gives 1XP, though, so in a way it was a good scenario for the early game because it meant we could build up the experience of the gang. As it happens, I ended up being the attacker so was juicing up my boys quite a few times in the hope that I could level up! Flesh wounds lower the toughness of a fighter, but with Goliath starting as T4, I think we could pretty easily take one bad reaction without much thought.
For this game, we also started playing “properly”, with the Intrigues and Rackets that are used in the campaign. The scenario ended when only one gang is left standing, and luckily I was able to keep enough fighters alive that I could claim the victory. However, I almost had an embarrassment of riches as I made out like a bandit on this one, between the intrigues and rackets that I had! I won a whole bunch of XP for everybody, however my champion went into recovery and two of my gangers actually died (more shortly!) but I also gained a total of 370 credits! This is in addition to the 70 that was in my stash because my starting gang was only 930 credits.
During the game of Necromunda, because you only have a small handful of fighters on the table, they can be quite difficult to outright kill. Whenever a successful wound goes through, for a regular one-wound fighter, you roll an injury dice, and apply the result. This has a 1 in 6 chance of killing him, but you’re more likely to either be seriously injured (whereupon you lie the model face down on the board, leaving them vulnerable to a coup de grace which will kill them), or suffer a flesh wound, which reduces the toughness as I mentioned before. When the fighter is T0, then they are removed. Being seriously injured, however, does have its complications, and can sometimes be quite painful as you can’t do anything with the fighter, except watch them bleed out over the rest of the battle. During the end phase of each round, there is a chance they can recover and stand back up, but I’ve known it before where a champion has spent the entire game just slowly dying in front of me, and it’s not great!
Anyway, during the game when a fighter goes Out of Action, you roll on a D66 table to see whether they suffer a lasting injury. This can range anything from just going into recovery, and missing the next battle, to a memorable death, perma-dying for the rest of the campaign. My champion went into recovery, but one of my gangers suffered a critical injury and would have died had I not taken him to the doc – well, as it happened, I decided to leave him succumb to his injury, as I wanted the credits for something else, and so he died as well. Finally, another ganger suffered a memorable death result, so he died in a blaze of glory, and that is that! Unfortunately, during a Law & Misrule campaign, when a fighter suffers a memorable death, the law-abiding player then has the option to claim a bounty on that fighter, so he ended up being worth 60 credits for James’ Enforcers!
I should say at this point, all of my fighters are named after characters in The Godfather. It started because I had painted up the Goliath bikers and had started calling them Mario and Luigi in my head, and it kinda went from there. So my leader is Vito, obviously, and we’ve got a breadth of gangers including Luca, Tonio, Carlo, and my champion (now in recovery) is Bruno. Luca, unfortunately, suffered the memorable death, while Fredo, despite impressing me during the Prison Break scenario by holding his own, even when he had three flesh wounds on him, bled out before I could take him to the doc.
Visiting the doc in Necromunda is also done in the post-battle sequence, and I often think it’s where a bit of the RPG stuff comes in. You have to pay 2D6x10 credits for the medical bill, but even then there’s a one-in-six chance the fighter will die anyway.
During this battle, James lost three of his Palanite Subjugators, to have them replaced in the next game by three Rookies (juves). Seems to be a very powerful rule that they have, allowing for a replacement fighter for free. However, while I have got a whole bunch of credits and reputation now, mainly thanks to the 200 credits I gained from the “Clear the Smuggling Routes” intrigue card, James is really struggling, with three Subjugators (including his Captain) and three Rookies to replace the other losses.
It really is pretty brutal in the Underhive!
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