Welcome back to Fury of da Beast, the 40K cooperative play supplement where you and your friends battle against invading Ork hordes. Today, two new missions are being added: The Straggler and Sabotage.
Explainer: What Is Fury of da Beast?
If you’ve not been following our previous posts, this is Goonhammer’s second cooperative/solo play supplement for Warhammer 40,000, following on from 2023’s Fury of the Swarm. You and your fellow players fight against an Ork army following preset protocols, with each mission telling a different story and offering a different tactical challenge. It’s the perfect excuse to collect an Ork army, or to get your finest ladz on the table for a scrap. Currently the project is in open beta, meaning any feedback we get will be factored into the finished thing.
It can be played with as many players as you like; 2-3 players is always good, and I now know from experience that four players working together is not only workable but fun. Personally I’m not a solo player, but the rules have been designed to enable that too, since I know some people enjoy playing it that way.
The rules are free, since this is an unofficial supplement. You’ll need the official Core Rules and Codex: Orks (or at least the datacards) to play it, along with, obviously, some Orks to fight against!
Accessing the Rules
You can access the rules here, or by clicking on the choppa below. The rest of this post covers what’s been added, how you can get involved, and what’s coming down the road.
The New Missions
As with Fury of the Swarm, each mission in Fury of da Beast endeavours to give you and your comrades a unique tactical challenge, designed to evoke the different narratives that emerge from Ork invasions.
The Straggler
Evacuation missions exist so that, should you lose a campaign, you can enjoy a cinematic end as your forces make desperate escape attempts. The irony of this is that, from a design perspective, the intention is to write missions that get bracing, but which are ultimately winnable. Consequently, there’s a good chance that if you’re playing a campaign, you might never play an evacuation mission. But they need to be there, and they need to be fun. Happily, the theme of evacuation naturally lends itself to some fun concepts.
In The Straggler, one of the Players’ warlords has become stranded behind enemy lines, and is desperately trying to link up with the rest of your forces before they leave the planet. This mission is returning from Swarm and relies on the Players’ ability to draw the Orks off, and make some tough choices on target prioritisation. In playtests we’ve often found it necessary for some brave squads to sacrifice themselves to evacuate the Warlord, but you can’t be too callous; if you lose over 50% of your forces, you still lose.
Sabotage
In this mission, your forces have gone deep into Ork territory to mess with their supply lines. This is a fairly small-scale mission, with the Players bringing up to 1000 points between them. They’re going to be desperately outnumbers two to one, but the Orks will be very disorganised, drawn to the sound of fighting and arriving piecemeal rather than moving as coherent Warbands.
Your objective is to destroy six supply dumps scattered across the map. There’s a fun mechanic whereby you set charges on these to destroy them, but will (unless in dire circumstances) want to get clear of the objectives before blowing the charges, since when they go, every unit within 6” suffers D6 mortal wounds.
If you time things well, you can use this to lure Orks into the blast zone. If you time things badly, you may have to go for a more suicidal detonation to prevent the Orks disarming the charges!
Rule Changes in this Version
None. You’d think by now there would have been some, but then again, v0.1’s core rules did get quite a lot of testing before going public, and there’s no point changing things purely for the sake of it.
The Roadmap: Now with (Navigably) Choppy Waters
If talking about actual death is difficult for you, I suggest you skip ahead to the next section.
Since my last post there have been some unwelcome developments in my non-nerd life. At my job, things have suddenly become a bit unpredictable, with certain key people leaving. Noted Warhams content firehose goonhammer.com isn’t a remotely sensible place to go into more detail than that, but suffice to say it was a dramatic few days, with some tricky months ahead.
A few days after that, my wife suddenly and unexpectedly lost her mum.
My main role in both of the above situations is to be calm and helpful, particularly for my wife. She is taking a characteristically sensible approach to everything she’s doing, but losing your first parent is hard. Writing Fury of da Beast is a silly project I take seriously, but obviously my wife and my job come first. My mental health is probably in there somewhere too, and I can infer from my fluctuating mental acuity and energy levels that I am somewhat stressed, but not yet to the extent that I think messing with the plan would actually help those stress levels.
Currently I think I can maintain Beast’s fortnightly format. The fact that the finish line is only 6 weeks away helps.
There’s interesting things to be said about how one should approach ostensibly silly things like Warhammer when confronted with difficult life events, but I think it probably deserves its own post, so I’ll move on to the remaining roadmap.
Normal service now resuming…
1st April
Design commentary: how it’s going, and how to write army lists for FotB.
15th April
Fulcrum mission Hold the Line (can also be played during Rokfall and Evacuation) and Fulcrum mission: The Hunt for Red Orktober.
29th April
Nemesis system, PDF of the rules. Version One complete.
How Fury of da Beast Is Going So Far: A Little More Feedback Trickling In
Some of you have been getting in touch with feedback! I’m extremely grateful to those of you who’ve given it a shot. I recognise that investing any time in playing unofficial rules is absolutely a gamble, but it sounds like those of you who’ve tried it are having fun, which pleases me greatly. Thank you.
Thanks also for your feedback. Most of the feedback was just straight positive, which gives me serotonin and reassurance and nothing to say here on that score without sounding onanistic. Happily one of you also made an observation about Big Guns Mustn’t Tire that I’ll respond to here.
The comment was that the objective (the orbital defence battery) is perhaps too fragile. One good volley of shooting from the Orks can blow it sky high! This is intentional; I wanted the whole mission to feel like you’re two mistakes away from disaster. The objective has Toughness 9, 15 wounds, and no save. The feedback was that it would be more fun to have a more resilient objective that the Orks chip away at for longer.
I can see that argument, and it was tankier in Swarm (it had twice as many wounds), but generally the Ork shooting phase is weaker and swingier, making it harder to balance. Obviously if this orbital weapon is some great big edifice, rather than a simple missile silo, it’d make more sense for it to be tougher.
If one did so, of course, the Orks would have to be proportionately more powerful, and this is tricky to balance for when the mission design has to account for not knowing which Ork units you have available. If you don’t have many shooty units, then making the objective more resilient makes the mission far too easy, particularly at a comparatively low points level like this.
The mission is designed to be skirmish-adjacent, with the Players limited to a combined total of 1,000 points. At that small scale, the Orks won’t have all that many guns to shoot it with, so it has to be fragile enough that the mission is challenging. But there could perhaps be an argument for giving the mission two scales to fight at: for up to 1,000 points’ worth of Player forces, you get the fragile little emplacement. For 2,000 points of Player forces, the objective gets more resilient, gaining a 3+ save and 17 wounds (locking it out of being destroyed by 4 wounding hits from the souped-up damage 4 rokkits you encounter in this mode). I wouldn’t want to just sling this new option into the rules without playtesting it first, but I’ll keep it in mind, and would be interested to hear from anyone who gives it a try for science. Regardless, it’s good food for thought. I’ll try to do some testing and make a decision before the release of V1, so thank you to that playtester!
Thoughts on this, and anything else in the supplement, would be very welcome. You can reach me by emailing contact@goonhammer.com, submitting a battle report form, DMing me on Instagram (@CharlieBrassley) or if you’re a Goonhammer patron, by tagging me (Charlie B) in the Fury of da Beast channel in Goonhammer’s Discord server.
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