Transcript
THE RUINED CHAPEL
EXT. WOODS – DAY
A muddy, still stream. A staff breaks the surface, plunging down slowly to check the depth.
Jolanda Scaletta stands at the edge of the brackish water crossing her path. Her dipped staff suggests the water isn’t too deep. She lifts her already-muddy skirts, but hesitates, scanning her surroundings, the woods, with a frown.
Vermont Escoffier steps into frame, her studied look causing him to survey the woods himself.
Vermont: “Something ahead? Claude’s out there somewhere.”
Still fixed on the woods, Jolanda replies softly, “Running water offers protection, no? Standing water may do the same, but not for us.”
Vermont glances sideways at her.
CUT TO:
Muddy boots trudging through the undergrowth, two pairs.
Infantryman Baptiste grunts, surly, hefting his musket over his shoulder on its strap and yanking a leather-wrapped canteen from his belt. “That bastard scout’s gone and got his lost again, I know it.”
Before he can sip, the canteen is snatched from his hand, grenadier Brielle hefts it with a grin, swigs from it. “Claude only got us lost once. You, on the other hand, didn’t know the map was upside down.” She grins, then pushes deeper into the trees.
Baptiste snarls, “That’s my -” and cuts himself off as the canteen flies back at him from the trees.
CUT TO:
Felice, moving slowly through the bracken, every sound, every twig crack, every squirrel squirreling through the forest, making her twitch, nervous eyes darting here, there, to the side and back.
CLOSE UP: her hands white knuckling her musket.
A gloved hand lands on her shoulder and a beaked plague mask enters frame; it’s hanging around Gaspar Gagneux’s neck.
Gaspar: We’re all here together, remember?
Felice nods shakily.
A small creak from up head draws her attention, and she hisses, raising the musket, the barrel trembling, and from the woods a harsh whisper calls, “It’s Claude, uh, just, you know, don’t fire up on me.”
CLOSE UP: a gloved hand thumbs the hammer of a holstered pistol carefully back down. Tilt up to reveal Gaspar’s silent relief.
POV: sighting down the barrel of the musket. Gaspar’s gloved hand gently pushes the barrel down out of frame, revealing a blue-coated Claude emerging from the trees.
CUT TO:
The warband huddles together with Claude and Ottilie at the center.
Claude: We’re very close. The old walking path lies just yonder.
Ottilie looks skyward.
HER POV: the sun shining through breaks in swaying branches
Ottilie: Mid-morning. This is good. We need to be on our way back to the regiment by nightfall.
“Is this the rally point then?” asks Claude.
Jolanda points across the stream of stagnant water behind them. “On the other side of the stream if you please.”
Ottilie sizes her up and nods. “So be it. We don’t know exactly what we’re looking for, but we’ll probably know when we find it.”
Baptiste grunts. “So it’s true, then, we be grave-robbing today?”
Brielle snorts. “You’ve been robbing graves since you were nigh-high as a weasel or I’m a three-legged sow.”
Ottillie looks at Baptiste: “The old records say there was a cemetery. You, however, will be robbing any nightmares of the chance to murder us, aye?”
Baptist grunts again.
Ottilie looks at her troops. “Felice, Baptiste with me, eyes open, soul shielded.”
The warband replies in unison: “Mind clear. Powder dry.”
Craning up: the warband disburses into the trees, camera tilting down to the ribbon of still water below.
CUT TO:
Low angle, half-buried cobblestone. A boot steps into frame. TILT UP, reveal Claude creeping forward along an overgrown path.
REVERSE ANGLE: ahead of him, some sort of stone arch choked by creeping vines, rusty black iron hanging in some facsimile of a once-proud gate.
He drops to a knee, swinging up that great musket with the brass tubular sight. Something beyond has captured his attention. The trees have thickened, here shadows threatening to swallow the whole forest.
Claude sights down the barrel and murmurs, “What do we have here? Another party we weren’t invited to? I’d say that sounds about right.”
Confusion crosses his face, followed by a slow horror. He’s lowering the gun, rising backwards, then turning and running.
INTRO
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes it’s Chapter Two in an on-going narrative skirmish game series! And you might think that’s a weird way to phrase that since this is technically our first Chapter Two, but over time, there’s bound to be more!
And we thank our patrons for their monthly support, which goes quite a ways in both a material and spiritual sense!
Ah and if you’re new to the channel, you can see Chapter One of this saga, right here. <snap>
So we’ll get right into it, shall we? Well, let me preface this one with a couple of notes. Even though this scenario ended up being a shorter game than Chapter One, it took me twice as long to shoot it, and I don’t know why. Just thought I’d throw that little bit of trivia in there for no apparent reason. Tabletop Alchemy, the proud home of rambles and long-winded stories!
Second off, look at these stats for the Vampire in The Silver Bayonet! These things have me pretty much terrified for our little warband. And I thought the werewolves were tough! <snap>
They’re Indestructible, which means they’re immune to all damage that doesn’t come from those sources to which they’re allergic – which is silver, blessed and I guess things that are on fire. They’re Ethereal, which means they can see AND MOVE through any terrain without penalties. Which, I assume, means walls and stuff. Ridiculous. They have the Hypnotic attribute, which means any figure trying to make a Move to Attack must first pass a Courage check. They’re Indefatigable, so they can only ever have one Fatigue token, they’re Strong, which means they get a plus 1 to melee damage – oh and look! They have this attribute called Soul Sheer. And THAT means any figure they cause damage to has to make a Terror check with a penalty equal to the amount of damage they inflicted. They’ve got a +3 to melee, 14 Health and a 15 Defense. They are literal monsters and I don’t think any of The Nightmare Hunters are capable of withstanding a battle with these things, not even a little bit.
So yeah, I’m pretty terrified of these things getting on the board. And according to our scenario’s special rules, one Vampire arrives at the end of Turn 1 and another at the end of Turn 5.
To be fair, I think these vampire stats are a pretty slick representation of the general mythic vampire, right? All those attributes and scores really do evoke “vampire”. I just really, really don’t want to face one.
Which is also the accurate response according to myth and legend, right? Good on ya, Mr. McCoullough.
Third and last here, I think in a future video it’s going to be fun to write up a couple of homebrew rules for solo players. Well, at least for me but you know maybe some other solo players might wanna use them too. That’ll be interesting to do together ‘cause I’ve never really written any skirmish-type rules, but in today’s game I’ll point out a couple of things I’d like to do rule-wise in the future.
How about a montage?
Okay, so the table is set, we just need to put down the clue markers and here’s a little legend of the playing pieces we’ll be using. We’ve got the clue markers, which I put together in this little video here <snap>, and we’ll use the black dice as Power Dice, the blue dice as Skill Dice and the red and green dice as Monster Dice.
Four clue markers go on the table today, according to the scenario set up instructions, and each goes in a corner of the central ruins. And now, deployment.
First we put down the starting enemies, of which there are six zombies – called revenants in The Silver Bayonet – and each one of these goes next to the six main gravestones that ring the chapel ruins. I added this little cemetery area because it just felt like a logical terrain addition to the location. Our last zombie is apparently starting on top of a broken sarcophagus, cause like most of us, he’s just a teenager deep down.
And over here is the gate slash entrance path to the whole place and so that’s the direction our warband is coming from, even though the scenario states that we could deploy soldiers on any or all table edges. The narrative kind of helps give me direction so I just kind defer to that when I can.
So Claude has rushed back to Ottilie to warn her about the stirring undead. Ottilie breaks the warband into two squads and keeps the edgy Felice with her along with Baptiste and the doctor, who refuses to leave the officer unattended. Ottilie reminds everyone how the dead don’t care much about being shot – she tells them to engage in hand-to-hand combat with blade and flame to put them down.
This attribute here is the reason they aren’t super-susceptible to black powder weapons, they automatically reduce any shooting damage by 4, which is a pretty hefty penalty, enough to dissuade our intrepid soldiers from wasting ammunition.
Ottilie’s squad deploys along what we’ll call the western border, with Officer Bastarauche gaining a perch on a tall rock and her accompanying soldiers arrayed alongside her on the forest floor.
Claude takes the supernatural investigator and occultist with him around to the north and Brielle the grenadier follows. The scout has his eye on a rocky perch just ahead of him and the others fan out amongst the trees. Vermont in particular is very keen on getting into those ruins, hoping to discover some kind of artifact. But he can see more than one undead lurking through the trees and that’s definitely dampening the treasure-hunting mood.
And as Turn One begins, clouds roll in and the trees thicken somehow and it’s almost as if night is falling – while the Gloaming rises. Line of sight for the game has been minimized to 12 inches. A mist coalesces along the forest floor and the revenants stumble and moan listlessly in the gloom. Felice shivers.
Now here is where I want to write up a rule from scratch and that rule would be Stealth. Now a stealth rule probably has no place in the general game but for solo players, I feel this is almost a missing feature. I mean, I know it’s just a combat skirmish game, but because we get so into narrative here amongst ourselves, when I look at this board and I think of how the story would go, I think Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars would do their best to capitalize on some sort of stealthy movement. You know, instead of just charging in to fight right away.
But, like I said, we’ll get into that in an another video down the road. For now, without a stealth mechanic, Ottilie leans over her rock to tell Baptiste that she’s going to try to take out this closest aberration, but the goal is to reach those ruins. Before he can reply she leaps down and rushes forward, musket coming off her shoulder with its shining silver bayonet slashing through the gloom as she Moves to Attack!
She rolls a 9 and a 7 plus one for her melee and she connects with a brutal stab that hammers the revenant to the ground. She rips her bayonet free and with a single hit point left, the revenant savagely Strikes Back, snapping at her ankle like a rabid dog impervious to pain or reason.
And it rolls … double nines! It’s damn near torn her leg off! With it’s +1 for melee, it ravages Ottilie like a starving bear, clawing on its way up the fearless officer, who is shocked by the sudden savagery as she stumbles back, trying to keep the maniacal thing at bay with the butt of her musket.
Baptiste aims his musket but snarls in frustration at his officer’s reminder of the undead’s disinclination to suffer much from shooting attacks, so he drops aim and charges through the trees to barrel into the shrieking starving revenant himself.
And wow, another nine shows up, he gets a total of 15 with his plus one to melee and he slams into the soulless creature, growling like a bear himself. That nine on the power die puts that revenant back in the mud for sure. He knocks it so hard into the cracked sarcophagus behind, its head snaps clean off.
Gaspar cuts along the back of the rock his Officer was on and catches up to her, rummaging in his satchel, but as he reaches her, he spots shambling movement off in the murk and panics slightly. He draws out his pistol and fires over Ottilie’s shoulder, startling her and Baptiste both.
The second unit hears that shot echo strangely, and in the gloom Claude mutters, “Well. I suppose five minutes of surprise is all we could ask for, huh?” Brielle and Vermont look nonplussed. Jolanda isn’t paying attention, fixated as she seems to be on the darkening vault of tree canopy.
Gaspar rolls a bizarre fourth nine in a row on the power die and a six on the skill die for a 15 total and hits the revenant – much to his own surprise. “En guard?” he whispers to himself.
With its damage reduction attribute, its only reaction to Gaspar’s black powder ball tearing a chunk out of it, is to shuffle twitchily for a more clear look at the doctor and the other humans gathered there like a buffet line. It bears its teeth, eternal hunger burning deep in its dead gaze.
Felice, wanting to show her beloved leader she’s not afraid, grits her teeth and advances through the trees, wiping leaves out of her face, to cover the flank. Blinking in the growing murk, she squints to spot the moaning corpse the doctor fired upon and, with a darting glance at the darkening ambiance, she lights her torch and raises it high. “I see it,” she mutters and decides to sprint to put herself in line with Baptiste, anxious to help.
With the first squad fully activated, we now enter the Monster Phase.
That revenant Gaspar invited to the party barely notices Felice move into its peripheral vision. Its black heart is set on the feast before it and it shambles through the shadows dragging one broken foot. It doesn’t run. It doesn’t hurry. It just stumbles forward toward Baptiste, opening its mouth in an impossibly large gaping maw, heedless of the branches raking at its face, its hollow eyes.
The next revenant can smell Felice, her fear like smoke in the air and it lurches through the woods towards the vivandierie and her flickering flame.
Two revenants shamble towards the second squad, Brielle barking, “We’ve got the loudest scout in the legion, I swear.” She arches an eyebrow at Claude. “But I appreciate you serving them up, I’ve got a silver ducat says I put more in the mud than you today.”
“Uh huh,” Claude drawls into his scope. “I believe I’ll take that bet, grenadier.”
The last revenant, weeping strangely, shambles towards Ottilie and the doctor.
That’s all the enemies, so the second squad activates now.
Claude scrambles up that rock and sweeps the murk with his scoped eye. A guttural moan from beneath him makes him swish the musket down and a revenant looms up in his scope. He jerks his eye out of the glass to sight down the barrel instead and fires nearly point blank down the escarpment.
A 3 + 10 + 1 for his accuracy and his crazy aim proves true. He grunts with satisfaction as a chunk of skull blows out of the side of the revenant’s head, then sighs in dismay as it looks up at him for a beat … and after its damage reduction, it begins to climb.
Brielle snaps at Vermont and Jolanda, “You’re on your own for a beat, lemme help our talkative scout stay alive.” And she’s charging through the trees with her bayonet leading the way.
She slams into the rock-climbing revenant, stabbing wildly with her bayonet and with a seven and two and her plus one for melee, she manages to slip on a gnarled root and just miss the moaning zombie, blade scraping across the cracked granite. “Merde!”
That zombie strikes back with a lurch and falls on her with a sudden ferocity, rolling a 10 and a 9! A huge counterattack that even Brielle is stunned by, the monstrous thing tearing at her, shredding through her coat and raking a huge gaping wound in her side. Brielle screams despite herself, twisting away in the last moment, forcing a laugh and coughing up blood. She spits in a creature’s face with a grimace.
Now, here we’ll use our first die from our Fate Pool, in which of course we only have two dice to start with. We’ll roll the skill die from the pool and we get a seven which will negate four of those 9 damage points; not great but we’ll see how it goes. So Brielle is at five health instead of 1.
Vermont Escoffier keeps eyeing those ruins. He nudges Jolanda. “With me?” Jolanda nods, closes her eyes and holds her staff at the undead atrocity stumbling towards them. She curses it with a prayer to the Almighty, beseeching the Creator for just a bit of sunlight, even if only metaphorical, and blesses the aberrant creature.
Now, here I made a mistake and I overlooked both the Courage check and the point of damage occultists are supposed to take upon attempting to cast a spell. I realize this later on, but hey sometimes we make mistakes, if it happens to be in our favor… well, it’s still a mistake.
So the revenant’s gotta make a Courage check with target number of 18 and it’s got a, oh wow, these things have +5 Courage?! Who wrote this scenario? This is only chapter 2 and it feels like we’re on hard-core mode, good grief! It rolls and 11 + 5 = 16; excellent! Not enough. It suffers -1 penalty to all it’s rolls for the rest of the game.
Vermont charges ahead as soon as Jolanda touches his shoulder. He swings at the blessed zombie with all his might, trying to cave it in in one go with his heavy mace … and the revenant shuffles mindlessly into a mossy hole that causes it to stumble just under the supernatural investigator’s wild attack. He curses and tries to over-correct as the creature Strikes Back at him.
And that die that jumped out of the rolling tray was a 1 and I’m damn well keeping it! Fight me! It’s a one! For a total of 11 which misses! Vermont recoils with a grunt, just out reach. Yes! (Napoleon Dynamite)
And that’s the end of Turn One. Now, some end of turn stuff happens of course, first, a new revenant clambers up out of the ground and the directional die will show us … that it appears topside beside a sarcophagus very close to our second unit. Great.
Second, a vampire is arriving, drawn by the psychic screams of horror and the smell of warm blood. We gotta roll that directional die again to determine which corner of the table it’s going come from. I’m deathly afraid of this thing. Here goes. All right!! Finally something good! I mean it’s the farthest corner from our guys as possible, that’s literally the best we could hope for. Whoa, okay, we’ve got a fighting chance, at least for now.
Turn Number Two.
The doc goes first, pulling a great brass syringe from his satchel and stabbing Ottilie with it. She belts out a cry and jerks away from him. “It’s going to make you feel better.” Upon her snarling glare, he adds, desperate, “I swear!” and she gains two health, back up to a whopping six out of 14.
Baptiste lunges at the monster before him, stabbing with his heavy bayonet. The infantryman is pissed off today and with a 9 + 8 + 1 for melee, he runs the revenant through and ruthlessly twists the blade, then kicks the twice dead thing off his weapon. “Back to the inferno with you.”
Ottilie sprints into the chapel ruins, vaulting over a cracked sarcophagus with a burst of energy from Gaspar’s terrible syringe. She desperately starts searching one musty corner, kicking over a moldering heap of detritus and scattering ancient broken floor tiles. She yells as loud as she can, “Vermont, Jolanda, still breathing?” “Currently, madam!” is the distant answer.
Felice sprints after Ottilie. “I’m right behind you, Madame.” Ottilie replies, “Search this damn place. Find us one thing to make this bloody excursion worth it.”
And we’re on to the Monster Phase.
Unbeknownst to our crew, silent death is drifting towards the graveyard and the ruins, the smell of blood lighting it’s way like a synathetic beacon. Synathetic isn’t a word, but neither are vampires. Except in the Gloaming.
Baptiste has a new friend coming to say hi, much to his chagrin. The revenant that didn’t move last turn now sees lunch on the menu and hobbles toward Vermont and Jolanda. The NEWLY risen revenant agrees that lunch sounds like a great idea and follows suit.
The revenant that tried to hug Vermont earlier comes at him with open arms and renewed vigor. It’s broken jaw carving a hideous smile in the shade, it’s cold embrace all chipped teeth and talons scraped from finger bones and it rolls an 8 + 7 + 1 for melee but minus one from Jolanda’s metaphorical sunlight blessing, but the blessed curse isn’t enough to stop it, and it wraps Vermont up in a vicious hug and takes a bite out of him for good measure – and 8 points of damage.
Now here we’re going to meta-game for a moment and this is one of those homebrew rule things I want to write up. So when I built Vermont’s character and chose his special attributes, I chose Monster Expert as one of them and I didn’t know yet how that functioned in solo play. Monster Expert adds one extra Monster Die to a warband’s Fate Pool. But in solo play, the player doesn’t get any Monster Dice in their Fate Pool. So this is essentially worthless in solo play UNLESS we brew up a bit of homebrew rules. Now I’m not gonna think to hard about it right this moment, we’ll develop this idea later on. For now, I’m just gonna say that Vermont’s Monster Expertness allows him to force a single re-roll of a monster’s power die once per game, kind of just like an additional Fate Pool die, which is probably a bit much and why this needs some actual thought behind it. But for now, he turns that eight into a one which turns that hug of pain into a blind miss, which happens because the revenant stumbles into another mossy pothole which pulls it off kilter with a sad, sad moan. It really wants those hugs and kisses.
Vermont Strikes Back, sidestepping the clumsy attack and brings his mace around with an uppercut swing for a 6 + 10 + 2 for his melee and his mace crunches into the zombie face with an echoing crack. That mace is a heavy weapon which adds one to the damage, leaving the revenant with three hit points. With deep breaths, Vermont readies himself for more unwanted advances.
The slavering insanity that nearly killed Brielle lunges again at the wounded Grenadier, gnashing at her with tooth and bone – and that’s another bounce out that’s a one! And I’m keeping that one too! Deal with it!Struggling to breathe through broken ribs the Grenadier forces a grin as she manages to get her musket up between them, holding the scrabbling monster just out of reach.
With a wheezing snarl, she kicks back at it – very reminiscent of a Baptiste move – and rolls the illustrious 6 + 9 but if only those dice had been reversed! As it stands, she punts it hard in the chest, and as it flies back, she slashes at it with her bayonet for seven damage and they both get their fatigue tokens.
And that brings us to the second squad activation phase.
With an exasperated sigh Claude slings his musket and leaps from his rocky perch, sliding down with pebbles and debris cascading after him – and he lands right between Brielle and her opponent. Somehow his boot knife has materialized in his hand and it thunks down on that skull he already shot once. Yes! 9 + 3 + 1 for melee, the MVP is back, the revenant collapses under the great deluge that is Claude Cellier, the mouthy scout. Without looking back, already shouldering that musket and bringing the scope to his eye, he mutters, “That silver ducat is most likely mine, eh?”
Even in terrible pain, Brielle can’t stomach it, spitting a curse. She looks around for something to smash and spots the two zombies attacking Vermont and limply charges the wounded one. Ooh it’s about time. We got some good rolls a 9 + 8 + 1 for her melee but minus one for fatigue and she cleaves that zombie fully in half, her bayonet falling like a bolt of lightning. The rotting corpse falls away to either side, revealing the snarling grenadier’s blood-streaked visage. “We’re even now, you mouthy bastard!”
Claude, eye to his scope, sighs a third time.
Vermont, emboldened by Brielle’s barbarous victory, rushes at the next revenant, the thing standing between him and the ruins beyond. His swings that heavy mace and wow, another run of nines and eights!
It better stop when the monsters go, though.
So an 8 + 9 + 2 for melee and -1 for fatigue and his mace knocks the hanging jaw clean off that revenant, one point shy of putting it down. Its whole decrepit body shivers with the impact, and yet, it strikes back like an undead cobra. OMG the 9 + 8 reversed! This mission is rigged.
We’re gonna burn a re-roll. Wait, okay, wait just a minute. Okay, looking at the board, we might not use that last Fate Die just yet. So that zombie snaps back with 10 damage, which is enormous. Vermont buckles under the brutal rending fingers that tear at him with the black strength of the Gloaming.
Jolanda hisses at the wound Vermont suffers and steps up, smoothly drawing her silver knife. Whoa, what that roll says is that Jolanda just walks calmly up to the thing and slices her blade across its exposed throat, finishing the job Vermont started. The thing slowly sags to a sitting position and its head rolls down into its own lap, staring up at them all. With a fistful of coat, Brielle keeps Vermont on his feet, both bleeding heavily and wheezing for breath.
Jolanda turns to watch another revenant doddering towards them from the weird midday twilight. She frowns, takes a curious sniff, looking off into the shadowy depths of the woods past the ruins. “Vermont,” she says, “light your torch.” Into the gloom, she calls out, “Mistress! There is something else here!”
And that is the end of turn two. Fatigue tokens are collected, and a new revenant halls itself out of the ground near Baptiste and Ottilie.
Turn Number Three
To kick things off with what might be a terrible decision, Felice crosses the ruined chapel to get to the far clue marker. The special rules for searching in here require her to make a target number eight check to successfully investigate, so let’s do it as Felice searches, desperately, for what, she has no idea. She makes the roll with a 10 and we finally get to draw a card: the king of spades! Which means she trips on a dark sack that clinks and from inside she retrieves a bag of silver shot. Excellent! Now if only Felice had a firearm with which to use that possibly soon to be precious item.
And this is another thing I want to create a small homebrew rule for, the trading or passing off of found objects. But again, we’ll deal with that later. And another side note, in the intro, I forgot that Felice doesn’t carry a firearm, so that scene with her and Vermont and Claude would have been slightly different.
All right, Ottilie nods at her vivandierie and continues searching herself. Over her shoulder, she says, “We need to fall back, Felice. Find Claude and the rest.”
“Ma’am?”
“I’ll be right behind you.”
She rolls for her investigation check, knocking over an ancient pest-ridden cabinet. She barely makes it with a nine and the cabinet disintegrates as she tips it over, muck rats, squealing, and darting over her boots. Something down in a chink in the wall glints – let’s draw a card! Queen of spades! Ottilie digs a silver knife out of the wall, just what the woman with a silver bayonet needs, right? You can never have too many knives – that’s another Bloody Nine reference – except in this game where one is really all you need, mechanically-speaking. But this knife has an intricately carved ebony handle and the blade is bright and razor sharp – it’s a handsome specimen of single edged wit, for sure.
Kicking diseased-looking rodents out of her path, Ottilie crosses to another corner of the ruins. She yells, “It’s time to go. Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars, retreat!”
Upon hearing this Baptiste grins mirthlessly at the revenant trudging towards him. Confident he can outrun the stupid thing, he retreats just far enough to stay out of reach, baiting it to keep it fixed on him and not his crewmate and commanding officer who are poking around in the ruins back there.
And to make sure he’s captured its attention, he shoots at it. Another big role! 9 + 10 + 1 for his accuracy, his shot easily center punches a musketball into the creeping zombie’s chest, knocking it off its feet. It spasms … and then clambers back up with five points because it doesn’t care about being shot.
“Reload your pistol doc and fall back,” Baptiste growls. Gaspar, glancing about nervously, reloads his gun, but then instead of falling back, he heads towards the ruins. “Doc, you bloody fool, where are you going?”
“Where she goes, I go,” is Gaspar’s sober reply.
And that puts us into the Monster Phase.
The vampire glides silently through the ancient graveyard, its feet lost in a shadow it seems to pull with it like a vast black cloak swallowing the world.
Baptiste’s zombie follows after him mindlessly, moaning and limping through the bracken, it just wants to return his thoughtful gift of a bullet.
The last revenant lurches towards Jolanda’s gleaming white headdress, which captures its attention from the other humans, who to be fair are slightly further away from it and it wants lunch now dammit! 7 + 4 + 1 in melee and it claws at our occultist but with her Defense of 13, she just takes a calm step backward from the lumbering atrocity, which is her way of Backing Off instead of Striking Back.
All right, second unit time and it’s pretty simple. They all fall back but they don’t retreat just yet. Brielle calls out, “We await you at the tree line, Madam!” With the pained grunt, she hefts her musket and fires at the single revenant in front of her and with a 3 + 10 + 1, she scores a hit but again the dead walker’s dead flesh just absorbs the shot like a rock tossed in the mud. Brielle spits more blood on the ground in disgust.
From his rock Claude snipes at her, “I take it that was a miss, dear grenadier.”
“I hit the damned thing, damn you!”
“Aye, just not hard enough eh?”
“Shut your mouthy mouth, you mouthy bastard.”
Smiling grimly to himself, Claude reloads his musket.
Jolanda murmurs to herself, once again clasping her holy staff, and this time we remember to make the Courage check, where she rolls double eights, no problem. She blesses that incoming revenant with another prayer beseeching the Above to share its light and winces, touching her forehead where a sharp pain lances briefly through her mind and she loses a hit point for casting a spell. The zombie rolls it’s Courage check and it’ll be close – oh boy, it rolls of 15 + 5 for its Courage and no penalties so it passes the check and suffers not the blessing, curse or otherwise.
Another revenant punches up from the grave dirt for air and lumbers to its feet by this grave marker and we’re now at
Turn Number Four.
Just a reminder that at the end of Turn Five another vampire is going to appear on the board and I’ll be up front with you – I had every intention of trying my best to get the Nightmare Hunters off the board before that happens.
We start with Ottilie, who’s still ransacking the ruins. Felice hears that new revenant claw its way up from the dirt and she is sensing something foreboding now as well, something putting her teeth on edge. She begs her commander, “You ordered us to leave, you must be leaving as well?!”
“One last look,” Ottilie grunts. “Get moving. That’s an order.”
Ottilie rolls for her investigation check, which she passes easily and while kicking over a pile of broken stones and bricks, she catches another small glint, covered in old spiderwebs and we draw another card: the jack of spades! She finds a small icon, a tiny golden figure with the mark of a saint on its base. “This,” she murmurs, turning the small statue over in her gloved hand, “this is something useful.” She looks out from the ruins into the murky forest, pondering. With a self-satisfied nod, she calls, “Retreat on the double, we’re done here!”
And the bonus that icon gives us is we get to add another power die to our Fate Pool, excellent.
Now Ottilie and Felice haul ass out of the ruins. Felice can sprint but Ottilie spent her action searching so she gets the standard 6 inch move. Gaspar sprints after her towards the rally point and Baptiste sprints off the board and that’s it! No monsters can catch any of the crew on their turn and everyone makes it successfully back across the running water, back to where the sun is able to dapple down through the trees again.
Vermont and Brielle hobble across the stream supporting each other. Jolanda walks calmly, pausing for a brief moment on the far side of the stream to let her bare feet feel the damp sand. Ottilie and Felice and Gaspar are the last to cross the stream and together, Les Chasseur de Cauchemars head back to the regiment, somewhat the worse for wear but silently hopeful in their gait. As the rest trudge down the trail, Jolanda stops and turns to look back toward the ruined chapel. She pantomimes the sign of the Cross and bows her head in thanks and murmurs, “We shall return with the cleansing fire.”
And we fade to black.
All right, another battle report in the can!
An interesting thing about being able to do these battle reports as a video is that I’m essentially debriefing myself and studying the battle after the fact. Which means of course seeing things I should have done differently, et cetera. I think my most interesting take-away after going over this game again is how I missed out on the tactical nature of the revenant movement stat for most of the game. Like at the beginning Ottilie literally rushes into hand-to-hand combat because I was fixated on this Damage Reduction attribute the zombies had. But they also only had a movement of 4 versus our warband’s movement of 6 inches. And I didn’t capitalize on that until the very end with Baptiste doing his kiting thing. Really, even though a new revenant was going to spawn every turn, if I had focused fire with multiple troops on single zombies, I probably could have whittled down one or two per turn from a totally safe distance. Well, maybe. The dice of course are really what drive things, so you never know right?
But yeah, this definitely felt like a shorter game compared to the last one, but it was still really fun. I know a lot of you actually liked the last battle report and I really like these too, but I can tell that I have to be pretty careful about over-producing them. They take a pretty large amount of effort on the production side and while I really enjoy the end result, I gotta be careful to pace myself so I don’t burn myself out on doing them, if you get what I’m saying.
I mean, I wanna play a bunch of different games, but I really only want to do this type narrative battle report. Storytelling is really what I enjoy and these things – as if you couldn’t tell – sorta help me scratch that itch as a “failed filmmaker”. But anyway I hope you had as much as fun as I did – there’s really only one campaign thing we have to do post-game, because we didn’t lose any warband members this time, and that’s allocate XP.
Every member gets one XP for going through the grind and then they took out I think six revenants, at least five and for that, the warband as a whole gets one XP point. They get one XP because more than four of the soldiers got off the table of their own volition and they get one XP for successfully investigating three or more clue markers.
So I gave Ottilie one of the extra XP points, one to Brielle and one to Jolanda, who from a story-perspective I’m really starting to lik quite a bit, she’s just developing as a cool character, to me anyway. I like her mysteriousness.
All right guys, well, cheers and, you know … go play a game!
See ya!