The Gathering Darkness

A recurring and much loved topic of discussion amongst the gang is that of  "Edition wars", the endless and near pointless back and forth over which version of Warhammer Fantasy Battle was the best ever.  It was during one such conversation that Rick declared he really liked "the one that had the lizards in it" and that we should play a big game of that edition.  Nevermind that none of us had played 5th edition for decades, and that it was never the quickest system ever to fight a battle to some kind of conclusion, we agreed a date and to bring every model we had within certain parameters. We ended up deciding on a Chaos V Undead bash, with a few allies.

Chris and I would ally our Chaos armies together. Mine was a bit on the small side so I decided to invite my Orcs of the Skullsmasha Legion to the party.  Rick and his sprog Ben would command the Undead. My own undead army was added , and allies came in the form of Skaven!

We decided to play everything more or less Wysiwyg, with only a few "counts as" for some of the more obscure stuff that hadn't existed in 5th edition. Some stuff was simply ported in "as is" from 4th and 6th editions, and this didn't appear to cause any problems!

Little attempt was made to make sure the sides were even, and both forces were simply plonked down. At a guess I'd estimate the forces to be around 10000 points but they were very different forces. Ricks undead were somewhat character heavy, almost as many Vampires in his army as we had any sort of characters!  I counted at least 4 special characters amongst the ranks, including both Von Carstein and Nagash, By contrast we had almost no heroes, and only a few big hitting monsters, but the quality of our infantry was somewhat higher overall.

We let the special characters keep their allocated magic items, and decided to randomly distribute the magic item cards from the 5th edition boxed set. I forget most of who got what, but my Orc Warlord on a Wyvern got the Blade of Ensorcelled Iron for a +1 to hit, the Boarboys got a Warbanner and the Hero leading my Marauders got the Blade of Leaping Bronze for +2 attacks.

Took a few pics, so I'll let them do the talking...

My Orc and Chaos combined armies.

Ricks Undead and Skaven

The Forces of Chaoticness...

The Undead forming up properly .

The battle lines arrayed!

The four biscuit-loving Champions of Order and Chaos put their game faces on...

And the ref blows the whistle, and their off! With just 6 hours of game time to go!

The massed undead lancers look for an opening on the flank whilst a vampire on
Zombie Dragon gets the drop on my Chaos Dragon!  The chaos dragon was badly
wounded, but managed to eat the Vampire, causing the Zombie Dragon to take to the skies.
Our Victory was short lived when the Vampire "escaped!" and returned to hunt down
and finish off the Chaos Dragon later in the game!

The Lancers on the Edge of Time get the better of the Skeleton Horsemen,
 the Giant heads to the Pub

The Slannesh Priest on his panaquin (counting as a chariot today)
gets bogged down by rats, who dismantle his chariot...

The Orc Warlord takes the fight to the plague monks!

The Chaos centre as the zombies approach, the thugs using their bows to
good effect, and nearly killing one...

The battle lines vie for the charge!

My orcs get fed up of waiting for the Chaos knights to get our of the way
and maneuver around them.

The giants pubcrawl is disturbed some annoying little twerps. So he jumps
up and down on them for a bit to teach them a lesson...

The winds of magic just arent blowing strong enough for Nagash,
who is struggling to Raise Dead fast enough to replenish the thinning ranks

Two units of mounted wights caused panic in the chaos lines , with unit after unit
routing, but the undead were too slow to capitalise on this, and the counter attack
defeated both attacks. 

The undead horde is reduced to a mob of unkillable vampires who roll nothing but ones...

The Giant spots more victims!

Well that was a lot of fun, with a convincing victory for the Forces of Chaos!  So what went wrong for Nagash and his minions?  Well, Rick, as the commander in chief of the undead forces was happy to take all the blame and dump it on his son Ben for rolling nothing but ones for the entire game, and doing all the actual dice rolling to boot! We fully expected the Vampire to take a heavy toll on our infantry as we had little capable of taking them in a unit v unit melee, but every time one stepped up to fight they promptly dropped their swords, fell over their own feet and were generally useless. Even Vlad took 4 rounds of combat to deal with someone he should have been able to kill with his little toe!  Apart from killing my Dragon (at the second attempt!) most of them barely landed a blow! Ricks other primary excuse was the pitiful winds of magic rolls. Before the Game I had suggested we make it a 4d6 roll, but Rick was concerned that might allow magic to dominate(!) too much, and eventually we compromised on 3d6+1 cards each turn. He did have a pretty low turn with a mere 5 cards rolled at a critical point of the game, but I thought we had plenty of magic to go around the rest of the time. I felt he was tending to try and power up single spells too much and would have been better with more less powerful spells to draw out the dispel cards. As it was my own Chaos Sorcerer pretty much had Nagash sewn up for the entire game, dispelling almost everything that came his way and planting a few good doses of Soul Drain on key units , which they were unable to recover from before a general melee ensued.

At the end of the game our mass of infantry was engaged with almost none of the skeletons, most of whom were already destroyed but were generally facing a scattering of vampires, wraiths and wights. We had been very luck with the Vampires poor showing thus far, and had only held our own by virtue of skeletons being really squishy! In a hypothetical next turn, with no more skeletons to hit, and with some decent rolls on the vampires and wraiths (being too tough or too ethereal for our infantry to hurt) the out come could have been rather different. 

Anyway that was great and I hope we can do it again soon!