Jim's (really freaking long) OFCC Report

[JMGraham]

Man, but I love the OFCC. The combined format this year was great, as got to hang out with friends from across both systems. Epic, epic fun. I was playing on the 40k side this year, with one of the Bellingham Warhamster squads, the Devlan Studs. I took a Nurgle CSM/Daemon list with:

 

Nurgle Chaos Lord on bike (4+ invulnerable save, lightning claw/power fist and burning brand)

2 squads of 7 Plague Marines in Rhinos (one with 2 meltas, one with 2 plasma)

5 Spawn of Nurgle

3 Nurgle Bikes (2 meltas)

Heldrake with Baleflamer

Aegis with a Quad Gun

Level 3 Great Unclean One with 2 greater gifts

2 units of 10 Plaguebearers

3 Plague Drones (3+ poison and a champion with an etherblade)

Soulgrinder with Phlegm

 

Not much in the way of shooting, but lots of resilient assault units and (more importantly for this weekend), a fair number of fast units. I hadn’t played too many maelstrom missions before this weekend, but I really like the idea of the tactical cards. They can be fickle and random, but they encourage a flexible style of game that’s tons of fun.

 

Round 1

 

My first game was against Don from Team Oddball. Don was running an Ork army with a humongous mob of bikers, two fliers (one dakka and one bomba), and more boy-filled trukks than you could count on both hands (provided you had lost a couple of fingers – I think he had 9 of them). It was pretty much perfect for the maelstrom missions, as he had lots of OS troops that could get where they needed to be pretty quickly. I have to admit, when I first saw this list, I was terrified of all those bikers. I didn’t have much that could stand up to their combined shoot and charge. From what I was told after the game, Don’s captain (Kingpin, I believe) realized this, and had instructed him to (above all else), keep the bikers away from my Great Unclean One, as I didn’t have much else that could deal with them.

 

Don set up first and had first turn. Predictably, I set up my GU1 (who had rolled up Iron Arm) opposite the bikes, and could only watch as a mass of ramshackle trukks full of filthy green apes came thundering across the board. At this point, Don had a choice with his bikes. Option #1 was that he could swing them to my left, away from my GU1 and toward the center of the board. If he did that, he’d be giving up on the objectives on my right flank, but would utterly dominate the center of the table (we both had token forces on the far left flank). That would also leave my GU1 stranded, bellowing impotently in rage. Option #2 would be to ignore his captain’s cowardly advice, and shove the biggest baddest orks on the board down the throat of the biggest baddest enemy on the board. Don did what any self-respecting Ork player would do. The fight between the Orks and the GU1 ground on for pretty much the entire game. I got lucky with keeping Iron Arm up, but the powerklaw orks were able to wound the GU1, so they couldn’t invoke “our weapons are useless!” and run away. Eventually, the GU1 finished off the powerklaws and ran the rest of the Orks down.

 

At one point, I thought I was being clever by blocking the path of a stunned Bomba with my Soul Grinder, who then got an exploding kamikaze bomber on his head for his trouble. Oops!

 

I honestly don’t recall the specifics of the center of the table. For the most part, what the orks charged, they obliterated. What orks I charged were obliterated. I have a vague sense of successive waves of assault and counter-assault, with many, many models dying. Then trucks started to explode, and it all went to hell.

 

Even though Nurgle won out, I reckon the Orks figured that those Nurgle lads were green, and green is the best, so it all worked out in the end. Don was an awesome, awesome guy to play with. I think they there’s something in the DNA of Ork players that makes them the best at Warhamming the way it should be Warhammered.

 

Round 2

 

Round 2 saw us matched against the Guardian Games: Lose at All Costs! Team. I played Stoobert’s IG and Space Wolves

 

Stoobert had a bunch of tanks packed up in a corner of the table, with all sorts of horrible, vicious and cruel blast template and barrage weapons. I advanced toward the IG strongpoint under cover of terrain, and then got a bunch of wolves drop-podding in my backfield. In response I sent some of my quicker units back to deal with them (effectively halting my wholesale advance).

 

Meanwhile, the GU1 materialized right in front of the tanks, buffed himself with Iron Arm, and got shot in the face a whole bunch. The GU1 was reeling, but grew a wound back and blasted into some tanks, picking up the command tank and smashing it to bits. The Guardsman fired again, and the GU1 was down to 2 wounds. A Rune Priest stepped forward to fight, and knew that he would need some extra power to defeat a greater daemon. He drew as deeply as he could from the warp to empower his force weapon, but got too greedy… he attracted the wrong kind of attention and periled. I’m not certain what transpired between the priest and the warp entity, but I can only guess that some sort of bargain was struck. In the end the priest was infused with warp energy, rocking fleshbane and a 3+ invulnerable save, all with attacks causing instant death from the force weapon. In other words, the GU1 was [big bad swear word]ed. However, while the Chaos gods sometimes reward those who swear their obedience, they also sometimes strike down those with too much hubris. The GU1 passed his saves, the combat ground down, and the fallen priest was eventually killed. He had foresworn his oaths for the power he needed to protect his packmates, yet was simply another pawn of the chaos gods. He died without redemption, at the hands of an obscene mound of vile filth and putrescence…

 

At which point the GU1 got shot in the eye by a Guardsman sniper and died. Because if a legion of tanks and a super-human psychic half-god can’t do it, a Guardsman can certainly get the [big bad swear word]ing job done. Because that’s what they do in the Guard. They get it the [big bad swear word] done.

 

Oh, also: on the other side of the table my Chaos Lord ascended to daemonhood, which would have been considered awesome, save for the decidedly more awesome thing happening on the other side of the table. As such, we did the only thing we could. We drank bourbon.

 

Ended with a victory for Nurgle. Really fun game, and Stoobert was an amazing opponent. He bagged the only kill of my GU1 all weekend, and did so in as epic a fashion as I could imagine. I think the game went the way it did not so much largely because Stoobert had an army that wasn’t well suited to Maelstrom missions. His army was great at holding a line and using drop pods to slow the enemy advance, but that sort of army is ill-suited to missions requiring you to be able to have a potential presence everywhere on the board at once.

 

Round 3

 

Round 3 was against Chris “Limey El Johnson”, the captain of A-Club Underdogs. Chris was rocking a Dark Angels army, with some nasty terminators (Knights?) in a Spartan, another unit of termies deep-striking in, some drop pods, a speeder, and a big honking bastion bristling with guns and a voidshield. We started with team toast of bourbon, and got to work.

 

Chris had rolled up Levitation for his psyker, and we discussed whether or not it would apply to the Spartan tank if the unit was inside. I’ve got no idea what the rules say, but an enormous brick of ceramite and steel wooshing across the battlefield is rather freaking cool. The fact that Chris can say “Wingardium Leviosa” in a perfect British accent (how does he do that?) sealed the deal. Unfortunately, Chris chose not to split up his squads to make it happen. One day, I hope to visit the alternative universe where he chose to fly that beast of a tank across the table!

 

It was an epic, fun game! Chris is so relaxed and fun to hang out with, that I forgot that we were both playing a tough-as-nails game of 40k. The fact that he could carry both without breaking a sweat is a testament to his grace and character. A few notable events happened (each of which necessitated some more bourbon to remedy). At turn 2 or 3 a stray nuclear missile from a neighboring table careened onto our table (when my teammate Fix’s games start to go south, he often decides to take the “unlimited” range of the Deathstrike missiles seriously), resulting in a small bit of chaos (one of my charges was blocked and a couple of terminators died). The vortex eventually got tired and wandered off. Chris also had a penchant for picking up whatever dice was handy and rolling it without looking at it – needless to say, it’s hard to make an armour save using a scatter die.

 

Chris had me on the rails throughout the match, and had a points lead throughout. Chris met me halfway (hammer and anvil deployment) and really kept me off the objectives on his side of the table. My left flank and center was halted by the threat of the Spartan and 2 units of nasty, nasty terminators (one unit of which was flying!), and while I eventually got some units deep into his territory on my right flank, it didn’t look like it was going to be enough to do it. Especially considering an Imperial Bastion was sitting on top of one of the objectives.

 

Play-wise, I didn’t put much of a dent in his forces. I kept within a couple of points on him on objectives, but he really held me in the center. Between the flying terminators, the knights, and the Spartan, I was really held back. For an army that relies on being able to go where it wants, when it wants, it was tough for me to deal with it. Hammer-and-Anvil stopped me from being able to play to the flanks in my accustomed manner, and Chris took every advantage of it

 

Last half of the last turn, I was down a couple of points and the objective I needed had a gigantic Imperial Bastion built on top of it. The void shield had previously fallen, and I had a unit of Plague Drones and two melta bikers in position. The melta was pretty much the only shot I had. I took my couple of shots (or did I only have one melta left? I forget – did I mention bourbon?) … and hit, rolled to penetrate … and penetrated, rolled the results … and got a catastrophic explosion. However, the Bastion was full of OS marines, so unless they were all crushed in the debris … and they all died. I snagged the objective and between that, line breaker, and another card that scored points for me if I had 3 objectives (of which the strongpoint objective was necessary for me to take), it swung from down 2 to up 3.

 

Victory to Nurgle, by the very tip of my man-parts at the very last minute. Exhilarating game, against one of the greatest gentlemen in Warhammer. The ability to be graceful, rowdy, polite, sarcastic, fun, and challenging all at the same time is pretty darn special. Chris got my favorite opponent pin, and his crew went on to take Best Sports. Thus, it seems that I’m not the only one who thinks so highly of him!

 

Round 4

 

In round 4 I was matched against my Warhammer twin: George, the captain of Hits on Sixes. Last year George and I enjoyed a bout of hot robot-on-robot action with a Necron mirror match, this year we were both taking chaos lists – mine Nurgle, his Khorne. Turns out he also has a Nurgle WoC army (like me!).  With that said, our armies were pretty different. George had a gorgeous daemon-engine army, with some heldrakes, some maulerfiends, some cultists, a mirror to my lord in spawns unit (though in red instead of green) and … a Lord of Skulls. My gods, but that thing was huge. And pretty. And intimidating. I decided to do my best to ignore it, run away wherever I could, and focus in objectives. 

 

Neither of us had much in the way of shooting, so turns went pretty quickly. We deployed our generals in their spawn units opposite to one another, and were locked into combat pretty quickly. I was the one who got the charge off, so I thought I’d be clever by shooting the h-e-double-hockey-sticks out of the unit before I charged in. I think I ended up killing something like 3 spawn, and was feeling pretty good about the situation when my full-strength unit charged in. However, counter-charge had something to say about that. The big boss fight happened, and George rolled first – he ended up getting 3 wounds through my 4++, and killing my Lord. Since we were both using fists, I still got to attack back – I rolled up and … 3 wounds got through! Yea! I did it! Wait …. What? Juggernaugts give +1 Wound? Wa-wa-waaaaaaaa… The epic boss fight win went to George’s Khorne Lord, who was promptly rewarded with +1 Toughness (fitting that Nurgle’s blessing would pass on to him). The Spawn eventually finished off the Lord, and were ground into paste under the Lord of Skulls in return.

 

On the other side of the battle field, the GU1 and the Soulgrinder wrestled with the Maulerfiends, and my Plague Drones and Heldrake saw the cultists off. This was the mission where you only generate cards for each objective you control. It’s a neat idea, but George’s army didn’t have enough units to be able to create the “whole-board” presence you needed to keep racking up the TO cards. Wherever George focused his forces he did really well, but it was hard for him to lose a unit or two, given his reduced numbers. Ended in a victory for Nurgle.

 

Following the game, George and I rolled some dice to see what would have happened if the LoS and the GU1 had ever seen each other in combat (I did my best to hide the GU1 from the LoS throughout the game). We gave the GU1 it’s full psychic buffs it had that game (which included iron Arm and Warp Speed, and armourbane), and gave the GU1 the charge. We rolled it, and the GU1 did some serious wounds to the LoS. In return, the LoS did 18 unsaved wounds to the GU1. It killed 3(!!!) GU1s worth of wounds in one round of combat. It’s a specialized beast, but it is a monster for what it does. I’m really thankful that I never wounded it, and I LOVE that the rules reflect the fluff. I imagine the LoS bellowing around, with enemy troops cowering. Someone with a lascannon might try to pop off a shot, but the rest of his squad mates would tackle him. “You fool! Don’t shoot it! You’ll just make it angry! If we lie really still, maybe it won’t notice us…”

 

George is always a great opponent – relaxed, good-natured, with great taste in armies. I’m really, really excited to see what his squad is coming up with for next year. Given their past performance in painting and displays, and given the idea that George was tossing around, it should be a show-stopper!

 

Round 5

 

Round 5 was against Karl, the team captain of the Imperial Fist-Bumps running a (surprise!) Imperial Fist army, and wearing the most kick-ass t-shirts of the weekend. Karl had a Thunderfire, lots of drop-pods (albeit with smaller squads for most of them), a couple of the smaller Space Marine flyers and (cue dun-dun-dun music) an Imperial Knight! It’s the first Knight I had faced, and I was terrified of what it could do to my army. I don’t have the shooting to manage it, and the few combat attacks I had that could manage it weren’t going to be able to smash through it quickly enough before getting D-weaponed out. Due to the mission, the Imperial Knight was infiltrating (it was very sneaky!) so the pressure was on even harder. Thankfully, Karl was equally terrified of my (also very sneaky, also infiltrating) Great Unclean One. To start, Karl deployed a Thunderfire Cannon and a Knight – the rest would be dropping in later.

 

What followed was the series of some of the bloodiest back-and-forth scrums I’ve ever played. The smaller units of marines meant Karl had more drop pods available than the typical list. As such, he kept having more resources to pull out over the course of the battle. He’d take an objective, I’d fight like hell to get him off and score it. He’d drop another pod, shoot me off, and score it. Then I’d fight like hell to get him off of it. This repeated a hundred different times across the battlefield.

 

It turns out Karl was as worried about my Great Unclean One as I was his Knight. Since I won the roll-off for infiltrating, I put the GU1 in the center of the table near Karl’s deployment zone, between two objectives. I’ve found that while the GU1 isn’t fast, he can usually create a large “no-go” zone for enemy units. As such, he’s usually best front-and-center, where he can threaten a wider area. To avoid him, Karl put his Knight on my far right flank. The Knight dominated that flank, but gave me the other two-thirds of the table to battle over. My plan of largely ignoring the Knight and focusing on objectives worked well, but still wouldn’t have been enough if not for a couple of key mistakes that Karl made in regards to the tactical objectives (missing a chance to score two objectives with his Knight, misjudging when to discard a tactical objective marker). The points were neck-and-neck until the very end.

 

It was a wonderful, tactically-tense but interpersonally-relaxed game. Karl was tons of fun to play and has a gorgeous army (in the same way Ork-player DNA that makes them the best at Warhammering, Imperial Fist DNA must give folks the  benefit of painting like gods – must be all those coats of yellow you need to put down).

 

Wrap-Up

 

I was really pleasantly surprised about how things went for the weekend. I’m pretty sure I did a personal OFCC best for myself (certainly a 40k OFCC personal best, at least!), by winning 5 games without being a dick (at least, I hope so! I was honored to receive 3 favorite opponent pins). I was really stoked about all of the compliments I received for my army. Team-wise, I was pretty stoked as well: the Warhamster: Devlan Studs ended up in the top 5 for appearance, 2^nd place for sports, and 3^rd overall.

 

From an overall experience stand-point, it was amazing. I loved having both systems going together, as I got to hang out with friends from both sides of the hobby. While I know some people must have had some bad opponents that weekend (for example, I know that at least 5 fantasy players had to play Derk), I was blown away by each of my opponents. Actually, my biggest regret was that I didn’t have more pins to give out. At any other event, any of my opponents would be the highlight of the tournament. I think it’s a testament to the OFCC that it brings together some of the best gamers out there.

 

I had an absolutely wonderful weekend. I had 5 wonderful opponents who I would happily play any day of the week, no questions asked. I got to spend the weekend playing, drinking, hanging out with old friends, and making new friends. I was surrounded by beautiful armies and great people. Thank you for a great time, OFCC!

[Guest]

Nurgle Chaos Lord on bike (4+ invulnerable save, lightning claw/power fist and burning brand)

3 weapons? Given that each requires replacing existing weapons, and the lord only begins with 2, how'd you get the third weapon?

[JMGraham]

A model on a chaos bike gets +1 Toughness, changes the type from infantry to bike, and gets a twin-linked bolter (that doesn't replace any existing weapons). EDIT: I'd direct you to the internet for lots of long-winded conversations on the matter!

[Guest]

A model on a chaos bike gets +1 Toughness, changes the type from infantry to bike, and gets a twin-linked bolter (that doesn't replace any existing weapons). EDIT: I'd direct you to the internet for lots of long-winded conversations on the matter!

Interesting. So you replace the built-in weapon. Hadn't considered that option. Seems fine, especially on a nurgle lord, which would have much better profile on his mount than on a bike...

[Jayne_Cobbb]

Great write up!  And Great playing!

[fluger]

I was blown away by each of my opponents. Actually, my biggest regret was that I didn’t have more pins to give out. At any other event, any of my opponents would be the highlight of the tournament. I think it’s a testament to the OFCC that it brings together some of the best gamers out there.

 

I had the *exact* same thought with my 5 opponents.  Even poor Josh who got me at my tiredest in game 5 was a great opponent.  

 

Great write up, Jim.  We need to cross swords sometime.  I honestly think we haven't played in...ages...  Must've been Empire vs fake Nurgle Empire with terri-bad archer detachments.   

 

Anyway, next time something's brewing in B-ham 40k-wise, we should make a plan to play.  

[JMGraham]

 

Anyway, next time something's brewing in B-ham 40k-wise, we should make a plan to play.  

 

Deal!

[Psilence]

Very spiffy write up, informative and entertaining  .  Thanks for sharing.

 

The guard sniper reinforces my experiences as well.  Somehow they always seem to pull off something sweet, like a 5 man pcs killing a chaplain that had charged them.  

If you need to kill a terminator, shoot him in the face with a lasgun.  Works (almost) every time. 

 

Between this and another post(s) it's looking like mobility is key to maelstrom missions.

[JMGraham]

The guard sniper reinforces my experiences as well.  Somehow they always seem to pull off something sweet, like a 5 man pcs killing a chaplain that had charged them.  

If you need to kill a terminator, shoot him in the face with a lasgun.  Works (almost) every time. 

 

 

Exactly! :) We expect big heroes to do epic things, so we don't pay attention to them when they do. In fact, we're more likely to be disappointed with their performance when it falls short. The lowly line-troop, though? We expect them to die. When they turn out to be a big damn hero, we notice!

 

It's like horses in Fantasy. They seem to be the most vicious killers in the Warhammer Old World.

[Stoobert]

Great game against you round 2, Jim.  Thanks for the whiskey to "freshen up my water".  The Rune Priest vs. NurgleBurgle battle was super fun and I'm glad my uppity chaos-curious Rune Priest got smacked down - f*%ing heretic!  My sniper survived the battle and was promoted, only to die of gangrenous trench foot three weeks later, no doubt caused by copious bacteria spewed into the air by the exploding GU1.

[JMGraham]

My sniper survived the battle and was promoted, only to die of gangrenous trench foot three weeks later, no doubt caused by copious bacteria spewed into the air by the exploding GU1.

 

  Don't blame Nurgle; it was the promotion that killed him. No way he'd be stuck in that muddy trench for weeks on end filling out requisition orders without the promotion (while the rest of his unit was shipped off-planet for R&R). A Guardsman can live forever. In the far grim darkness of the dark grim future, a promotion is a death-sentence.