Shyish and the Path to Glory: Weekend One

A couple weeks ago, our Age of Sigmar group got together to play the first weekend of a Path to Glory campaign. Here's the primary actors, their warbands, and some narrative reports from a bloody weekend of the hobby.

Peter

Peter, of course, is playing his vampire led Death warband, The Haunted Host of the Tower of Souls. He wrote about that a few weeks ago and the background can be found here.

He has the title belt from last year's Horus Heresy birthday extravaganza as a means of rubbing it in. That's how you little brother.

Ian

I'm playing Goldie Horn and the Three Boars. Goldie Horn is the name of Guldakka Da Kunnin's Maw-Krusha. Because she's gold. And has horns. The Three Boars part should be fairly simple, but it's actually not--orcs can't count above two, throwing everything above into an undifferentiated basket called "lots". Part of the reason why Guldakka is considered so kunnin' by the other boyz is because he can count to three.

Why's he in Shyish fighting vampires? At a gladiatorial tournament in that dread realm, Guldakka was a spectator seated nearby Aristion. Guldakka spilled his drink and, despite the vampire lord being far too elegant and dextrous to be at fault, the orc warlord blamed it on Aristion. This is as good an excuse for a scrap as anything else, so Guldakka and his warband are chasing Aristion around Shyish, having an amazing time.

Scott

Scott is an old friend who's been obsessed with Warhammer vampires for the better part of 25 years. Unlike Peter's more troop heavy approach, Scott's gone with a more concentrated approach.

His warlord is The Mortician, a mighty vampire lord on zombie dragon. He ruled over the village of Shoddenberg for centuries, using it as a feeding ground to slake his unholy and quite eternal thirst. The villagers, cowed and set against one another by the machinations of the vile Mortician, simply made due, their fear only betrayed by the generations of backstabbing to make sure it wasn't you who was dragged off to that forlorn tower in the forest surrounding Shoddenberg.

Things recently went wrong. A band of gnomes led by Literic, a Bonegrinder Giant of enormous stature, raided the village and burned it to the ground in the name of "liberation". The Mortician is enraged, but also intrigued: what is it like to sup from the veins of a giant? He wants to find out. He has raised his warband, Mos Teutonicus, to exact his revenge..

Philip

Philip has a thing for giants, and I'm going to be honest, it's weird. I've never seen anyone so into giants. He's got a fairly large collection of Greenskins, but he wanted something else. So Peter, in his everlasting generosity, bought Philip a Bonegrinder Giant from Forge World to celebrate his PhD fellowship to Oxford (congrats Philip!) and promised we'd cook up some rules for a giant-led and giant-majority warband.

We did and the Visignomes are it. Philip's painted his Night Goblin hordes as pale, sickly gnomes. The worship Literic, a Bonegrinder of hideous stature and demeanor, as a god. And their god demands destruction, accidental or otherwise. It seems strange that the mortal villages of Shyish would cower in fear of a band of deranged gnomes, but then the ground rumbles, a shadow falls over the terrified masses, and it starts to make a lot of sense.

A few weeks ago, the Visignomes burned down Shoddenberg, a village like any other. Except, of course, it wasn't: The Mortician, a vampire lord of great power, was offended by this action and demands restitution. Literic finds the offense taken by the vampire hilarious, and he roars his mirth every time The Mortician catches up to him.

Game Time

We set it up so that we had two axes of enmity: me vs Peter, and Scott vs Philip. This worked out well, but in different ways.

Peter and I led off with two games and his emphasis on troops over mega-heroes paid off immediately in the first game. The goal was to hold three of four terrain pieces, which served as altars. I was essentially helpless. Peter insisted that we listen to Sisters of Mercy every time his warband was on the table; he won, with zero combat, in less time than it took to finish "This Corrosion". It was humiliating.

There had to be vengeance, and there was. We went with an ambush scenario next, with Goldie Horn and the Three Boars ambushing The Haunted Host of the Tower of Souls at a camp. This was another lightning quick game--about 15 minutes--but there was lots of combat and the forces of Death came out much worse. The highlight was the Gore-gruntas running down Aristion just before he could complete a (cowardly) escape.

In keeping with the lines of enmity, Philip and Scott faced off in two successive games. Unlike the games between me and Peter, however, their battles were bloody, drawn out affairs. Each one was evenly matched, with the second swinging from a Mos Teutonicus victory to a victory for the Visignomes in the last turn, when Literic took The Mortician down (the vampire lord on zombie dragon is absolutely terrifying on the field) and his gnome worshipers finished erecting a monument in their god's name.

We're all still friends here in Shyish.

Our warbands swelled. Peter added a necromancer and some more troops. Scott added Hexenwraiths. I added Brutes and Ard Boys. And Philip summoned Pantagruel, Literic's misshapen eldest son.

A strange thing happened in the second game between Scott and Philip, something which set the stage for a weekend closing team game. Pantagruel put one of Scott's spirit hosts in his bag. This is a special one-off attack, a 6+ roll which just removes a miniature from the game as it disappears into a giant's bag for later.

Then it happened again the next turn. And the next.

By the end of the game, Pantagruel had a bag full of ghosts. And nobody wanted to see those ghosts more than Guldakka.

Undead tend to congregate, so the devious Literic offered a bargain: if Guldakka's horde would help him ambush the vampires, who were snacking on some of the leftover gnomes as a pretense for meeting, Literic would let Guldakka see the bag of ghosts.

Never one to turn down the opportunity to see a bag full of ghosts, Guldakka heartily agreed. The stage was set for a massive team battle: Destruction versus Death. It would turn out to be wild, messy and decidedly not kunnin'.

Just eyeballing the forces arrayed on the field, Destruction should've creamed Death. But tactical incoherence doomed the orcs, gnomes, and giants. The Three Boars and Goldie Horn swung left to take a tactical objective, only to be pulled right by the cries of Literic, who was beset by both Aristion and The Mortician.

Literic was a powerful warrior, but nothing can stand against the arrayed might of two vampire lords, ancient in their foul wisdom and mighty with the blood of thousands coursing through their veins. But against all odds, Literic held firm. He fell, finally, but not before withstanding four full turns of onslaught by the undead.

Guldakka should have moved to destroy the flimsy unit of skeletons holding the objective. He did not until it was too late. He was indecisive, slow, and this ultimately cost the forces of Destruction the battle.

Literic was enraged, and when he came to, the triumphant, cackling laughter of the vampires drove him to red-tinged madness.

"No! You not see ghost bag now, green shit," he bellowed. "Ghosts are secret! Secret ghosts ours! You stupid!"

Guldakka was incensed. The deal was that he got to see the bag of ghosts if he helped, not if they won. It was like his drink had been spilled on his pants all over again. As he and his warband left, they swore vengeance on the gnomes and their god. New battles would be fought on the plains of Shyish, but malign portents began to stir, promising that the next time blood was spilled between the four warbands, the realm of waking death itself might alter forever.