Crusade Campaign: The Dusk Raiders

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Jye Nicolson
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Re: Crusade Campaign: The Dusk Raiders

Post by Jye Nicolson » Wed Aug 12, 2020 12:18 am

Install TTS and I'll help you grind as many RP as you want (I was pricing out the AdMech this morning, that's a sweet little patrol for another 7 RP)!

The durability of your team is going to be insane. You just need to avoid the missions that require you to hoof it all over the place, and camp objectives like Nurgle intended.

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The Other Dave
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Re: Crusade Campaign: The Dusk Raiders

Post by The Other Dave » Wed Aug 12, 2020 1:11 am

I'm eying TTS, definitely. There's an Underworlds module too...
Feel free to call me Dave!
-----
Miniatures painted in 2023: 252
Miniatures painted in 2024:
Epic scale: 9 vehicles, 56 stands of infantry, a whole buncha terrain
32mm-ish: 3 infantry

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The Other Dave
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Re: Crusade Campaign: The Dusk Raiders

Post by The Other Dave » Wed Jan 20, 2021 1:56 am

*Rise from your grave!*

No change to my fluff, but I'm resetting my crusade to go along with my shiny new codex:

The Dusk Raiders
RP: 2, supply limit: 50, supply limit used: 44
Virulence Points: 0
Plague: Bleeding Ravaging Growths

HQ
Lord of Contagion Gurloch Thrax (1CP): 6 power
Warlord Trait: Eater Plague
Malignant Plaguecaster Pastus the Impure (2CP): 5 power
Relic: Daemon’s Favor
Upgrade: Sevenfold Blessings
Psychic Powers: Smite, Miasma of Pestilence, Plague Wind, Putrescent Vitality

Troops
Plague Marines (5): 6 power
Champion w/ power fist and plasma gun, plague spewer, blight launcher, meltagun, icon of despair
Plague Marines (5): 6 power
Champion w/ plasma pistol and daemonic plague blade, plague spewer, blight launcher, plasma gun, icon of despair
Poxwalkers (20): 5 power
Poxwalkers (10): 2 power

Fast Attack
Bloat Drone G’zoethl: 7 power
Blight-hauler Ulth’shog: 7 power
Last edited by The Other Dave on Fri Jan 22, 2021 12:37 am, edited 5 times in total.
Feel free to call me Dave!
-----
Miniatures painted in 2023: 252
Miniatures painted in 2024:
Epic scale: 9 vehicles, 56 stands of infantry, a whole buncha terrain
32mm-ish: 3 infantry

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jus
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Re: Crusade Campaign: The Dusk Raiders

Post by jus » Wed Jan 20, 2021 6:19 am

Gurloch Thrax! love the names. So thematic! You should help me come up with names for my guys

Jye Nicolson
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Re: Crusade Campaign: The Dusk Raiders

Post by Jye Nicolson » Wed Jan 20, 2021 6:48 am

I'm really looking forward to facing off against these guys, I think they'll be a massive challenge after their new book.

I'm looking forward to you growing and customising your personal plague, but also kind of dreading it :lol:

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The Other Dave
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Re: Crusade Campaign: The Dusk Raiders

Post by The Other Dave » Wed Jan 20, 2021 7:45 am

jus wrote:
Wed Jan 20, 2021 6:19 am
Gurloch Thrax! love the names. So thematic! You should help me come up with names for my guys
I wish I could take credit! :lol: Lots of the names (like Pastus) are just taken from the Space Marine Heroes 3 models, some (like Gurloch) are from the random name generator in Kill Team, and the daemonic names like the engines have are from the random daemon name generator from the Lost and the Damned!
Jye Nicolson wrote:
Wed Jan 20, 2021 6:48 am
I'm looking forward to you growing and customising your personal plague, but also kind of dreading it :lol:
I got a little lucky! Triggered by hits in melee, immediately does D3 mortal wounds and one more every turn, but then is almost always cured if the affected unit took casualties, which it will have because of the mortal wounds thing... Which makes me want to fish for the Terminus condition of having to take an action to make it go away. Unfortunately, that means my best chance to infect people is to whack them with the Lord of Contagion, who despite being much faster than he was in 8th edition is still pretty dang slow. :lol:
Feel free to call me Dave!
-----
Miniatures painted in 2023: 252
Miniatures painted in 2024:
Epic scale: 9 vehicles, 56 stands of infantry, a whole buncha terrain
32mm-ish: 3 infantry

User avatar
The Other Dave
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Location: Nagoya
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Re: Crusade Campaign: The Dusk Raiders

Post by The Other Dave » Fri Jan 22, 2021 4:36 am

(updated the first couple posts with the "go time" version of my crusade - there were a couple weapons loadout fiddles after I took stock of the rules for plague marine weapons loadouts and the models I had available)

[taken from scattered note fragments in Gurloch Thrax's plague laboratorium]

Progress on decanting the new plague proceeding positively... samples from the rot-pits of Granax VII... [prove?]ing effective on captured slaves...

NO! NO! It is too efficient... [fatality?] rate in mortal subjects nearly 80% within seconds of infect[ion]... only transmits from living host... [only] within approx. one handspan... [most?] die before transmission possible... in every case, halted within minutes of initial transmission, with unacceptably low total casualties

[beginning of page obscured with stain of unknown substance] I can [carry] it, and perhaps the plague[caster]... release it given opp., let it mutate under real-world [conditions?], develop a more [stable] strain...

Much work to be done.
Feel free to call me Dave!
-----
Miniatures painted in 2023: 252
Miniatures painted in 2024:
Epic scale: 9 vehicles, 56 stands of infantry, a whole buncha terrain
32mm-ish: 3 infantry

User avatar
The Other Dave
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Re: Crusade Campaign: The Dusk Raiders

Post by The Other Dave » Sun Jan 24, 2021 8:30 am

Updates to the stats posts. Holy smokes these guys are as fun as advertised.

Two games today, a 25-power Supply Drop versus jus' Ultramarines, and a 50 total power team game with the Supply Cache mission, me and tallgeese's Thousand Sons versus jus' Ultramarines and Matt's Guard. Two wins for me, which is unusual :lol: , although the first was phyrric.

I brought the plaguecaster as my warlord in the first game against jus, and while his mortal wounds shenanigans are as awesome as ever, he's just not all that durable, especially when faced with a couple Victrix Guard and a Lieutenant. Add in an apothecary, and the "bring a guy back from the dead" stratagem that I am very jealous my plague surgeons don't get, and I killed like 4 victrix guards and still had one left at the end of the game - in a 2-man squad. :shock: Basically I got lucky with which objectives blipped out and got the win despite getting tabled.

In the team game I swapped out the plaguecaster for the Lord of Contagion, and holy fish that guy is a beast. He single-handedly killed Matt's plague tank, jus' apothecary and lieutenant, and cleaned up a squad of intercessors the bloat drone had whittled down for good measure. Then I got a nice little chaos boon for killing the warlord - first one's free, as they say.

The bloat drone is as good as ever, and the strategem to regain wounds by eating (oh, say) some guardsmen helped a lot. Really, there's lots of good stratagems in there. I got a lot of use out of the +1 to hit for terminators, cancelling out the LoC's -1 to hit with his plaguereaper, and the one to bring back a whole bunch of dead poxwalkers was also very nice.

Overall, though, from the point of view of playing them, much of the new codex goodness was pretty non-flashy and workmanlike - in a good way. Lots of mortal wounds, lots of durability (it took a squad of hellblasters three rounds of shooting to wipe out a plague marine squad) and I noticed about halfway through the first game just how often I was saying "OK, 2+ to wound, rerolling 1's".

The weakness of the crusade plague I note in the fluff post above is a bit less important than I thought - when you infect someone by whacking them with a plaguereaper, they're not often alive at the end of the turn to check and see if they shake off the plague. :lol:
Feel free to call me Dave!
-----
Miniatures painted in 2023: 252
Miniatures painted in 2024:
Epic scale: 9 vehicles, 56 stands of infantry, a whole buncha terrain
32mm-ish: 3 infantry

Jye Nicolson
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Posts: 1852
Joined: Thu Aug 08, 2019 11:04 pm

Re: Crusade Campaign: The Dusk Raiders

Post by Jye Nicolson » Mon Jan 25, 2021 12:09 am

That sounds awesome!

More evidence that the advantage of a 9th ed Codex isn't power per se (though you will get a bunch of that), it's being straight up more fun.

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The Other Dave
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Re: Crusade Campaign: The Dusk Raiders

Post by The Other Dave » Mon Jan 25, 2021 12:55 am

Jye Nicolson wrote:
Mon Jan 25, 2021 12:09 am
That sounds awesome!

More evidence that the advantage of a 9th ed Codex isn't power per se (though you will get a bunch of that), it's being straight up more fun.
Yeah, I was thinking about this on the way home - it's just a lot of fun to have all these ridiculous interlocking systems to think about comboing together in weird ways. In my first game, me and jus both had a lot of that going on, him with his Ultramarines shenanigans and me with my Death Guard shenanigans; 9th edition seems to have a lot of "wait, you can do what?" in it, and hopefully each codex will get its own heaping serving of ridiculousness. It's (probably a little bit too) complicated, and probably not very balanced, and often surprising, but just fun.

(Currently I'm looking through my bits box to see if I can put together a power-armored lord to ride around in my in-the-mail MDF proxy rhino with my assault plague marine squad and a foul blightspawn or something, just debuffing and infecting everything willy-nilly. Although sadly I don't have enough RP to give him a relic weapon and a plague buff to said weapon and the warlord trait that turns off enemy auras within his own aura range. :lol:)
Feel free to call me Dave!
-----
Miniatures painted in 2023: 252
Miniatures painted in 2024:
Epic scale: 9 vehicles, 56 stands of infantry, a whole buncha terrain
32mm-ish: 3 infantry

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