Escape from Gerson's Rest

One of my oldest gaming mates, Linz, appeared in the vicinity of chez Whiskey yesterday and came round to say hiya after work. Once he'd been fed with a curry and some strong coffee and we'd caught up with gossip and he'd been treated to a couple of hours of the wife's favourite TV shows (Vampire Diaries and Grey's Anatomy) we decided to have a school night game of Rogue Trader.

As he had no figures with him we decided that we'd roll up a Rogue Trader and retinue using the Random Inquisitor rules I put together a couple of posts ago. He rolled like a jammy bastard and got five go's on the retinue table. In the end this gave him 1 Rogue Trader, 2 Human heroes, 4 marines, 4 Stormtroopers (which we played as armsmen) and 4 guard (who we played as landing party red shirts).

This got me a little worried as I was going to use my Sensei again and I was down to 5 models as poor old Gerson had died at the hands of the evil renegade Vlag Hlaf-Iron.

Still, I got to debut my new gaming mat and after a bit of scrabbling around I put together the battlefield.

We talked about the scenario and wanted it to fit in with the previous game so that we could hopefully develop a campaign based around the warbands. We decided that the Sensei had been laying low after their defeat and had come back to an old squat prospecting site on a small moon to lay Gerson to rest and to recuperate. The Rogue trader, who we shall christen (is there an imperial version of a christian name?) Alosissyus Tannbuaser, happened to be in the area and was on the lookout for a easy score. Assuming he might find at the very least some pirates or some Archeotech from the site but also aware that there was someone in the area that the inquisition wanted to get their hands on. A nice little reward and some favours from the inquisition would go down a treat. So his mission was to capture one of the Sensei and mine was to get my guys of the table edge that he deployed from.

First moves were fairly straight forward.
The salty old  Bosun encouraged the redshirts forwards. While the Rogue trader and the ships discipline officer watched as the armsmen moved forward.

The marines moved up on the right flank as the Sensei moved down to the opposite side.

The two groups linked up on the opposite side of the alien fauna (we didn't have time to include all the fun alien plantlife but maybe next time) and moved forward in a sweeping line.

The Sensei split up, the Emderly, Yardymiel and Griff sneaked round the old refinery tower while Van Zant and Barns headed off to see if the could sneak round the other way. Emderly took a shot at the troops in front of him but failed to hit anything and then tried to burst some noggins with his psychic power but the trooper passed his psychic save.

Encouraged by the crappy firepower coming at them, the Salty Bosun encouraged his lads forward and poured fire and scorn back at the psyker and his companions, mulching the greenery and winging Emderly and Griff who both lost a wound.

Meanwhile, the two Sensei began to realise that their stealthy plan wasn't going to work as the rest of the Rogue Trader's forces moved round to seal of their escape route.

After another round of complete inaccuracy, Griff and Emderly decided to fall back.

Moving back around the refinery pipes although Emderly did mange to pop a redshirts head off.

Yardymiel on the other hand used his teleport power and, after failing to hit any of the enemy troops, dissapeared from in front of them, only to reappear on the other side of the board.

The Salty Bosun and his men decided to head off round the other side of the tower.

Van zant and Barns decided that sneaking wasn't doing them any good so jumped out from behind the bushes and vapourised one of the emperors finest.

However he still had plenty of mates waiting to avenge his death.

Emderly and Griff were still moving off round the tower.....

While Van Zant decided that fortune favours the brave and decided to charge the remaining marine (out of shot Barns was on the other side of the fuel tank dealing death to another of the marines)

After despatching the astartes Van Zant was charged by the discipline officer and one of the armsmen.While the last marine moved round to deal with Barns.

Van Zant destroyed the armsmen but failed to kill the Discipline officer who held him in combat.

Allowing the rest of the Rogue traders crew to come up to support.

Yardymiel had worked his way round to support his comrades escape and he and Barns bracketed the final marine in shruiken crossfire. He refused to fall however and the returning fire took a wound off Barns.

Emderly and Griff had worked their way round the back of the refinery and managed to counter-ambush two of the redshirts that had been sent to flush them out. The combined firepower took one down and the other went down to a mind bolt.

In the same round, Van Zant bested the Discipline officer and one of the armsmen and Barns finished off the last marine. Although Yardymiel failed to burst another armsmens brains, the Rogue trader managed to lose 5 of his party in one round, it looked like the scales were tipping. If only the Rogue Trader could best Van Zant who was down to his final wound!

Alosissyus, the Salty Bosun and the remaining crew piled into combat with Van Zant. Their plan being to take him down and use him as a hostage to escape the wrath of the rest of his warband........

who were rapidly surrounding the ongoing melee. A last desperate round of combat saw Van Zant put down one of the troopers but Alosissyus was again let down by his terrible swordsmanship and failed to take Van zant's final wound.

The rest of the warband charged in taking out one of the armsmen and the Salty Bosun.

And the final round of combat left the Rogue Trader and his last faithful armsmen at the mercy of the Sensei.

We had a great little game, lots of laughs at the expense of the ineffective Sensei at the start of the game (most of the figures were down to a single wound by the 4th turn) and then later at the expense of the The Rogue Trader's inability to hit anything with his massive sword (we came to the conclusion that he inherited his title). We obviously have a follow up game that will probably be a hostage rescue but for most of the game we were sure that it'd be the Sensei needing rescued and not the other way around.

We rolled for survival at the end of the game and both the Salty Bosun and the Discipline Officer (who I'll let Linz name) survived and will take part in the rescue mission.

We also worked out the victory points for my Sensei, he got a total of 16 giving him a starchild gift (endurance - another wound, quite apt!) and a roll on the followers table. Guess which model that's going to be!