PROLOGUE
The Necron invasion of Venom has finally begun. With the majority of the Imperial forces otherwise occupied back on Python IV, Nemekh the Summoner, commander of the Silent King's forces in the Orberus Sector has finally enacted their plans to claim the moon in the name of their sovereign.
The strategy for their invasion was simple. The Night Lord's were to act as a diversion force, picking off sentries and distracting the Imperial forces stationed on Venom. Meanwhile, the Reticent Host and the Khertet Dynasty would attack the main Imperial base in a pincer movement. Whilst the Reticent Host and the Pillage were met with unforeseen resistance the Khertet Dynasty were able to successfully infiltrate the stronghold thanks to Banityn the Hidden's previous reconnaissance.
But the siege had not been a straight forward one. Astartes Castellans met the Necron forces at the gate, a circumstance not unforeseen by the Khertet Phaeron, in fact their opinion of the Humans would have been significantly lowered had they left their headquarters unguarded. However, unlike the previous battles the Khertet Dynasty had waged in the Orberus Sector, Nemekh could not afford to be bested in this battle, they had no other strategy to fall back on, and it is for this reason they requisitioned the aid of their Technomancers to awaken the Dynasty's shard of the Void Dragon.
Absolute annihilation was the only option for victory now. Nemekh had sacrificed too many assets for the Legions of Silence to faulter now.
THE ARMY LISTS
The Khertet Dynasty
Detachment: Hypercrypt Legion
- Warlord
- Wargear: Staff of Light, Resurrection Orb
- Battle Trait: Endless Legions (Necron Codex)
- Crusade Relic: Crimson Medallion of Bastior (Crusade: Tyrannic War), Sigil of Sol (Crusade: Tyrannic War)
- Wargear: Overlord's Blade, Tachyon Arrow
- Battle Traits: Martial Apotheosis (Necron Codex), Endless Legions (Necron Codex)
- Crusade Relic: Treasure of the Technomandrites - Overlord's Blade, Sustained Hits 1 (Crusade: Pariah Nexus)
- Wargear: Overlord's Blade, Resurrection Orbs
- Wargear: Staff of Light
- Enhancement: Metalodermal Tesla Weave
- Weapon Modifiers: Staff of Light - +1 BS, +1 Attack
- Battle Scar: Battle-Weary
- Wargear: Plasmic Lance
- Weapon Modifiers: Plasmic Lance - +1 BS, +1 Attack
- Battle Trait: Lead from the Front (Crusade: Pariah Nexus)
- Battle Scar: Fatigued (Crusade Core Rules)
- Wargear: Aeonstave
- Enhancement: Dimensional Sanctum
- Wargear: 1 x Gauss Destructor
- Battle Trait: Hypergrav Field Manipulation (Necron Codex)
- Battle Scar: Mindless Reaper
- Wargear: 1 x Gauss Destructor
- Wargear: 1 x Gauss Destructor
- Wargear: 5 x Hyperphase Swords & Dispersion Shields
- Wargear: 10 x Gauss Flayers
- Wargear: 10 x Tesla Carbines
- Battle Traits: Undying Revenants (Necron Codex), Will to Serve (Necron Codex)
- Wargear: 6 x Vicious Claws, 6 x Particle Casters
- Wargear: 3 x Feeder Mandibles
- Wargear: 3 x Feeder Mandibles
- Wargear: Doomsday Blaster, Twin Gauss Flayers
- Weapon Modifiers: Doomsday Blaster - +1 Damage, +1 Ballistic Skill
- Battle Trait: Self-Replicator Nodes (Necron Codex)
- Wargear: Twin Tesla Destructor
PREGAME SET UP
BATTLE ROUND 1
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| Aranokh the Insane takes his position amongst the ruins |
The Necrons knew that they would have to set up a trap and carefully assess their enemy in order to achieve victory. The damnable Techmarine had deployed some machine trickery that prevented their weapons targeting the Astartes machines of war, forcing the Necron anti-tank weapons to redirect at the Redemptor Dreadnought on the opposite side of the battlefield but due to intervening terrain they cause minimal damage. The Doomstalker is commanded to hold it's position for now and doesn't attempt to fire on the enemy due to lack of line of sight.
The Astartes war machines are protected by the nearby Techmarine
Banityn translocates his Immortal unit as far forward as he could to get the range on the backfield Hellblaster Squad, taking out a couple as they do so. The wounded Hellblasters fire back, taking down an Immortal with them. Eratoth then deploys his Chronometron to shift his unit back onto the nearby objective.
The Immortals emerge to fire on the Hellblasters
The Space Marines recognised the Night Scythe as a major threat and focus the combined firepower of the Gladiator, Firestrike Turret and the Ballistus Dreadnought to bring it down, but the Quantum Shielding enveloping the Necron flier holds strong and suffers only minimal damage. Not allowing the threat to escape their wrath, the Jump Pack squad fire off their pistols and get a few lucky shots through before ascending into the sky and battering the Night Scythe at close range. The flier spins out of control, and it's emergency invasion protocols materialises the Nemsor, Rakantyr and the Warriors back on solid ground, though seven Warriors are lost in the processes, their bodies stuck in digitised form during the transfer.
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| The Assault Intercessors take their wrath to the skies |
BATTLE ROUND 2
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| (Tried something new with this picture. It looks good but takes entirely too long to edit) |
The Wraiths spring their trap and phase through the ruins to assault the jump pack squad that had taken refuge in the nearby ruins to claim the objective lurking there, and cut the Astartes squad to pieces with their vicious claws and claim the objective for themselves as Baltha'Zyr hovered above on his Canoptek Cloak, relishing the carnage wrought by the constructs.
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| The Wraiths ambush the Jump Pack Assault Intercessors |
The Warriors rematerialise with cosmic precision by the Techmarine and his retinue of machines, and split their fire between the Techmarine himself and the Firestrike Turret, cutting the Firestrike to half it's wounds and killing the Techmarine outright thanks to Rakantyr's Living Fire. With the Techmarine's scrambler fields down, the Lokhust Heavy Destroyers focus their fire on the Gladiator and the Ballistus. The Gladiator explodes, weakening the Dreadnought sufficiently whilst Phaen puts the Firestrike Turret out of commission permanently.
Phaen and his Warriors phase in
The Astartes Inceptors and Eradicators enter the battlefield by the Immortals and, with the aid of the nearby Assault Intercessors, take out the remaining Immortals before the Assault Intercessors charge in and take out the Chronomancer. The unit then consolidates into Banityn the Hidden who quickly dispatched all but one of the unit with his mighty war scythe. The Redemptor Dreadnought and Hellblasters fire everything into the encroaching C'tan but despite their best efforts the God shard remained intact, if just barely.
The Void Dragon weathers the Astartes attacks
Terminators teleport into the Imperial back lines, utterly unable to enter the Necron's territory as the Scarabs and Lokhust Heavy Destroyers created an unsafe drop zone. The unit then fires everything into the Warriors and obliterates the entire squad with the Librarian dealing the finishing blow against Nemesor Phaen.
The Terminators teleport in and destroy the nearby Necron Warriors
BATTLE ROUND 3
The Wraiths advance on the enemy as the Doomstalker fires it's Doomsday Blaster at the Terminators, taking 3 of them out. Preparing for an assault from the Wraiths, the Terminators consolidate as far away from them as possible to minimise their chance of getting into combat, but are blind sided when they realise that they were not their intended target, but rather the Infiltrators guarding the home objective. The Wraiths only manage to take a couple of Marines out however and the Infiltrators end up falling back to allow the Terminators to charge in, but are targeted again by the Doomstalker's sentinel protocols and another three Terminators are taken out. The ensuing combat sees two Wraiths being destroyed in a storm of power fists.
Banityn meanwhile takes out the intercessors on his objective with the help of an approaching scarab swarm which had been activated, their duty to safeguard the Necron's territory complete.
The C'tan Shard reknits it's wounds, accelerating it's recovery by ripping apart and absorbing the ceramite plating from the Ballistus Dreadnought before destroying it with it's mighty spear. It then lets out a vicious Voltaic Storm at the nearby Hellblaster unit before engaging them in combat, finishing off all but one marine as well as the Lieutenant and Apothecary. The Astartes put up a valiant effort in retaliation however and take several chunks out of the God shard.
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| The Void Dragon launches an attack on the Hellblasters |
With little else to do, the Space Marines bunker down, hoping to hold off the enemy attack until reinforcements arrived.
LAST TWO BATTLE ROUNDS
DJ: So at this point, we actually ran out of time at the club and had 10 minutes left to finish. Definitely not long enough to finish the last two Battle Rounds so we decided to quickly talk through how the rest of the battle would play out and quickly rolled for any pivotal moments.
We came to the conclusion that the Void Dragon would ignore the Apothecary, Lieutenant and Hellblaster (as they were no longer in engagement range) in favour of taking out the Infiltrators who actually held my opponent's home objective, and that the bulk of it's model would be too large to allow the Lieutenant, Apothecary and Hellblaster to retake the objective in time to prevent me from scoring the points for removing them from said objective.
The Wraiths would remain in combat and tank the Terminators attacks (we rolled this off) to prevent them from reclaiming the objective too, meanwhile Banityn would kill the remaining Inceptors he was in combat with, scoring points for removing the enemy from the objective they now controlled.
With all that, the Space Marines would only be left with a Redemptor Dreadnought to move freely, but again it was too far to any objective to reach them in time to prevent me from scoring. With all that said and done, me and my opponent shook hands...
KHERTET DYNASTY VICTORY!
35 VP - 45 VP
POSTGAME ANALYSIS
I finally won a Crusade game! Hurrah! Great game though, and I utilised all the lessons I learned from my previous games to achieve victory, but my word my opponent did not make it easy for me. Usually this would be where I would look back on what I could've done better, and there were a couple of minor mistakes I made such as being too eager to use my Immortals and instead getting them all mowed down within a couple of turns, but today I am instead going to go over what worked for me and how I can use these strategies in future games.
To start, I played with considerably more restraint than I usually do. Typically I want my units to rush forward or get into firing lanes as early as possible to maximise damage output, but end up getting destroyed in the process. I tried being restraint against Hive Fleet Vespae in my last game and was the main reason I got to destroy 3 of their monsters. I purposely ignored my Scarabs this game until my opponent had dropped all their reserves on the board and spaced out my Heavy Destroyers to prevent any unwanted units in my back lines. My Doomstalker also remained out of line of sight of anything until the Terminators dropped down to prevent it from being blown to pieces until a prime target appeared.
I also utilised ruins a lot more, hiding my Wraiths behind terrain to prevent any unwanted shots before charging through them thanks to the shared Infantry keyword that the Technomancer has. I also learned that Wraiths are really good at misleading opponents, my opponent sacrifices his Assault Cannon Terminators to make it harder for the Wraiths to charge them, only to realise that they were instead gunning for the Infiltrators guarding their home objective.
And of course the Void Dragon was an absolute beast, though it's Voltaic Storm wasn't as reliable as it should've been.
All in all, I learned a lot in previous games and applied that knowledge to this game, and it worked. Very chuffed and my opponent was a real pleasure to play against. I must've gathered the attention of the whole club however when I let out the loudest laugh I've ever done during a game after my opponent essentially bird striked my Night Scythe to death and achieving what his multitude of anti vehicle weapons couldn't, definitely makes it into the list of most memorable wargame moments for me!
EPILOGUE
Canoptek Scarabs picked clean the bodies of Imperial militia and the Omnissiah worshipping Mechanicus that lay limply amongst the wreckage that was once the forges of Venom. The Astartes had fought well, even valiantly, but their defeat at the hands of Nemekh the Summoner's grand strategy was inevitable for the intricacies of the Phaeron's plan had been formulated in their hyperlogically mind with such pinpoint precision that the risk of failure was negligible. Still, they knew that certain defeat would not stop the Space Marines from foolishly engaging them in future battles, they were after all a particularly stubborn breed.
The single Shard of the Void Dragon that Nemekh had requisitioned for this very battle loomed menacingly above the primary forges of the Imperial bases. Voltaic energy radiated from the C'tan's very core, striking every Mechanicum tainted structure and stripping them molecule by molecule; absorbing the machines into it's being as the efforts of the combined Imperium and Mechanicum literally crumbled to dust; such was the Phaeron's plan.
Banityn materialised by Nemekh's side and knelt in reverence to his master.
"Your will be done, Phaeron." Banityn said. "The Human base of operations lay in ruins."
"I am not blind Banityn." Nemekh responded, somewhat irritated by the Overlord's penchant for stating the obvious. "But you have done well, your Guild of Shadows have more than adequately fulfilled your role in my plans. For this you have been recognised."
"I am humbled by your words. The Guild of Shadows, as ever, are yours to command. What would you have us do now that our mission is complete?"
Nemekh paused a moment and considered their next course of action, relishing the destruction the C'tan Shard wrought as they did so.
"There are some particularly irksome Astartes that continue their crusade against the Protocian Dynasty on Python III. They must not discover the true intent behind our actions there, it is imperative that they are stopped before they learn of it or, if they have already discovered it, annihilated before they can warn their allies."
"Consider it done, my Phaeron." Banityn replied, eager to take out the Angels of Vengeance threat that Nemekh's main forces couldn't and prove once and for all the power that the Guild of Shadows truly wielded.
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