The Hemocan Chronicles: Day Two – Gunum vs …Goonhammer?

Day two started great. I spent the morning applying my upgrades from all my hard work the previous day. Picking up levels is the key for a successful crusade list. You can find all sorts of ways to change how your army plays, as well as make units that are a strong C to be A tier. A great example of this was my Canoptek Doomstalker, who was able to get 6 XP off the back of the survival agenda. This allowed me to purchase a weapon upgrade for its death laser, gaining an extra BS as well as +1 to its damage. Suddenly, a unit that only hit on 3’s in the best of cases was hitting on 2’s and delivering 4 damage shots downrange. The same upgrade was applied to my Doomsday Ark, making its primary gun 5 damage, and hitting on 2’s in almost all situations.

I had also applied for the scout upgrade to my Necron Warriors, Technomancer, and Cryptothralls. My Skorpekh had a 6+++, allowing them to hold on just a little more through all kinds of damage, and my Skorpekh Lord’s weapon got upgraded to 4 damage and an extra attack. Overall, I had a pretty successful first day XP-wise, and I was able to leverage that going into my second day.

On the second day, my list was essentially unchanged from my first except for one primary choice. “Gunum” had allowed the use of a Shard of the Void Dragon to join the fray, and to make room for this excellent model, I had to cut my Ghost Ark and the accompanying warriors who went with it. Though I didn’t feel great about this choice with objectives in mind, I figured using the C’tan on the opposite flank of where my Night Scythe would be deployed would allow me more options to attain those different missions they drop on us.

DAY TWO ARMY THEME: Escalation

**CHARACTERS:**
– Technomancer E’lyc – Hypermaterial Ablator, Scout 9″
– Tarek, The Broken Lord – Previous Overlord of Hemocan, transformed after the last campaign. +1 Damage / +1 Attack to main weapon
– M’at, Breaker of Time – A newly awoken Chronomancer aligned with Gunums views.
– The Proof of Concept – A C’tan of the Void Dragon that was further enhanced and enslaved by multiple generators. (I painted all energy points on this model with multiple layers of Blood for the Blood good. Very rad.)

**BATTLELINE:**
– The Crypteks Shield – 5x Tesla Immortals with M’at
– The Crypteks Sword – 5x Gauss Immortals
– The Bloody Masses – 20x Warriors with Gauss Reapers being assisted by E’lyc – Scout 9″

**OTHER:**
– Gunums Eye – Doomstalker +1 Damage/+1 AP
– D.O.G – Reanimator (Doing Only Good. He’s my good time boy.)
– The Energy Cells of Hemocan – Canoptek Scarab Swarms
– Dismemberment Specialists Pug and R’ob – Cryptothralls – 9″ Scout
– The Carrier of Light – Doomsday Ark +1 Damage/+1 BS
– The Crawling Cells – 3x Lokhust Heavy Destroyers with 2x Gauss Destructor, 1x Enmitic Exterminator. +1 AP, +1 Damage to Enmitic Exterminator
– The Collector – Night Scythe
– The Converted – Skorpekh Destroyers x6. The corrupted Lychguard of Tarek, changed to a fitting form. 6+++
– The Kings Corrupted Eye – Triarch Stalker. This was a Stalker sent to keep an eye on Gunums weird science from the Silent King. They work for him now.

With all this math figured out, I headed out into the hotel to get breakfast with Condit and set up for the morning meeting.

The Briefing

Things were getting a little… “birdly.” To be honest with you, dear reader, I had a little bit of trouble with my leader this time around. On the first day, I had zero idea what the direction of my faction was. The way it was sold to us was that the “Pact of Resistance” was going to kill the other two pacts before the Tyranids showed up, take their corpses, and toss them in the way of the approaching hive fleet, then use the time it took for the Nids to eat through all those sweet Space Marines to escape like Skeletor out of the system. Though that sounded kind of neat, it also had zero to do with the cool A.I that was rumored to be in the planet.

I was relieved to see the Seer from the day prior now was a bit feathery and was carrying around a staff with a giant eye in the middle. Now, this was a leader I could get behind. Though I wasn’t exactly sure how a bunch of robots would help a daemon of Tzeentch achieve anything, I did know I finally had some direction as a leader. It was a simple task that I was happy about. Help her get off the planet; she helps me off the planet. Sounds good to me, as I wanted to continue living anyway, after collecting a glorious harvest. With said harvesting in mind, I began to focus on my next games after being properly inspired by my newfound powerful leader. We were going to get off this planet together! Everyone else be damned! Let’s get into the battles for the day.

Game Three – Against the Swarm

Prior to this game, I discovered that Rob had also drawn the same card as me. We were getting excited at the prospect of finally playing against each other. Unfortunately, we were paired up in different areas, and I was sent to some kind of desert-themed terrain—a vast room split into two different zones. One zone had a bit of an ancient Egyptian or ancient pyramid theme, while the other half was a deserted combat area.

Now, the faction mission assigned to us was called “Light the Signals.” As we’ve learned from last year and the missions so far this year, the interpretation of that mission is up to us. This is one of the things I really liked about the Narrative. Missions were given to us in such a way that we were able to decide how best to achieve it. An example of this was completing the “Light the Signals” mission on an Orc player’s table. Their interpretation was to get his Stompa into the center of the battle and then either die or make it explode in that area—lighting the biggest signal he could think of in his own unique fashion.

Now, against my opponent, I was instructed to Light the Signals as well. This is a mission that is shared by everyone on my battle group. My battle group was #28, the Covenant of the Rising Sun. We were a collection of Necron players, Tau players,  along with a lone Thousand Sons player. We had this whole ancient idea going, and the name was a lot of fun to come up with together. We also had a couple of Tau players, one who had a great narrative about hunting for his giant Taunar suit, for example.

Our interpretation of the mission was different between the different players. We thought we would run around and do actions, but we had a specific goal that was assigned to us. A seemingly mind-controlled T.O of the area approached one of our Necron players with the secret information that we had to place exactly 9 objectives throughout the eight of us. This was especially fun because it gave us the first chance for our group to work together as a team. We had a goal in mind, and we had to move around and figure out a way to solve that goal.

As we played throughout our games, we were able to communicate with each other and say how many. “Do you have one placed? OK, I’ll make sure to put down two.” Someone may have put down too many, so we had to adjust how much someone else put down. Though I had a challenge standing in my way from completeing this mission.

Now, you may be thinking, who exactly was the person who was going to stop me from doing my job? I’m glad you asked, dear reader. It was well known Imperial Fists player, Jack Hunter. Jack is a big part of the Goonhammer team, and it’s always amazing to play against someone from the website, especially someone I respect in our community. Jack is known for his award-winning Space Marines, painted in a gorgeous Imperial Fist yellow. He is using two upgraded Lancers as well as a Repulsor Executioner, all with wonderfully upgraded weapons.

Unfortunately, though he has these upgrades, it won’t matter because of the mission that we are playing. That mission is called “Against the Swarm,” where a defending player must stop their opponent from destroying about four or five objectives. Think of this like the mission that is currently in the tournament pack, except my Necron Warriors have unlocked the powers to scout. I didn’t know that was going to be important at the time I was making that decision; I just wanted to push my forces further forward. Now it felt like I had planned far ahead of this, and I was excited to see it in practice.

My game plan here was simple: scout my Warriors to the middle of the table and try to destroy two or three objectives at once. Next, I was going to start my Destroyers on the table on the opposite flank so I could begin pressuring his home objectives. Instead of starting them in the plane like I have in the rest of the event, I was going to start my Immortals in the plane instead.

My plan was to rapidly ingress them into Jack’s deployment zone, and when he decides to blow the plane up, I would then drop a bunch of Immortals onto his home objectives to destroy the objectives there. This seemed like a pretty good idea as he did not get to respond to my destroying of objectives; I would start the action in the shooting phase, and it would complete at the end of my turn. Not only that, but my guns were also uniquely equipped to deal with Jack’s army.

As we went through deployment, he was able to see that I had upgraded my units a lot, like how he had done his. We had plus damage on all our weapons, and my Doomsday Ark’s 5-damage gun was more than prepared to begin to pick up tanks.

Not to spoil anything, but that is exactly what happened as we began the game. This mission allows the defender to go second, and the attacker to go first. Why exactly? I’m not sure, as I did not feel the defender got any kind of extra benefit. My battle group had been assigned attacker, and I had the opportunity to strike first and strike hard with anti-tank guns.

Jack and I did what we could to make sure there was some line-of-sight blocking on the table, but at the end of the day, you can only hide so many of those chassis on the table, and I was able to kill both of his Lancers as well as damage some other units immediately. My Necron plan had worked exactly as I needed it to—they were out in the middle, touching all the objectives.

I was given the infamous mission of making sure my warlord, my Technomancer, was as cowardly as possible. To do this, I hid him underneath a building and refused to move him regardless of any situation that approached. He cowered in a building the entire game, letting the minions of his master do all the dirty work.

Going into the back half of the game, Jack was running out of stuff. He had put an entire turn of shooting into my Warrior block, not quite finishing it off, allowing me to hide the remains far, far away from his closest unit. His Aggressor block pushed up in the middle, getting splashed with Doomsday Ark fire until only the Biologis survived. On the other side, his unit of Terminators had made a large charge into my Skorpekh. The combat seemed pretty thematic, but my 6+++ was able to stack up enough 2 damage swings onto single models that I only lost a couple of guys.

My response was to use the Skorpekhs Devastating Wound ability and employ Epic Challenge on my Skorpekh Lord to call out his Captain. That Captain was then cut in half due to two 4 damage Devastating Wound attacks, quite unceremoniously. The Skorpekh would eventually take that entire side of the table, moving into Jack’s deployment zone.

As the game drew to a close, my Warriors had grown back to their full size, and Jack was caught in the jaws of Skorpekh from one flank, and my Doomsday Ark shooting from another. At this point, I wandered to the other tables to see how the rest of my team was doing, made sure we hit our goal for Light the Signals, and once I was certain the mission was complete, I looked at Jack at the top of five and said calmly, “You have a Biologis left and a Techmarine. My team has achieved all the goals for this mission, so I won’t table you, Jack. You can keep your two characters, and we can save you from having to roll for battle scars.”

Good game Jack.

Generator Collection Count:
Space Marines- 218

Game Four – Biosample Acquisition

Game four saw me heading back to the Five-Fold Forge where I met a wonderful man by the name of Troy. This game, and the table it was on, was what I can only describe as a perfect example of what was wrong with the narrative. Though some tables looked absolutely spectacular, they weren’t great for the game. This was one of them.

“Honestly, I just want to get to Turn 3 and feel like we had a narrative game. Don’t bother holding back, but I’d like to make a show of it.”

“Okay. Let do this.”

This really set the tone for how my shooting went as the game progressed. Instead of using my Doomsday Ark to pick up his anti-tank, I used it to hunt down bikes or other elite infantry to give him some big damage shots on my army. I engaged his forward forces with my Necron block and did my best to get my C’tan into close combat with his Avatar.

Reader, we had exactly the game Troy wanted to have. My infamous mission for this round was to have my warlord hunt down my opponent’s “most insignificant” unit. I asked him what he thought that was, and he thought for a minute before pointing at a squad of Dire Avengers.

“These idiots.”

So, my Technomancer with his 3-shot gun had to hunt down 5 Dire Avengers. Troy wanted to also be a bit narrative and made those Dire Avengers jump out of their transport to prove just how worthwhile they really were, exposing them to the Staff of Light of E’lyc. After losing a couple to some well-placed Staff of Light shots, they turned and ran away with my Technomancer chasing them with his sweet, sweet 10″ move.

We called the game on 3, with his Avatar and Striking Scorpions as the only units really in the game still. We talked out the final turns of his Dire Avengers getting slowly gunned down, mission accomplished.

It was a hell of a game, a really great opponent, and I was happy to have met him. Great game, Troy.

Generator Collection Count:
Space Marines – 218
Aeldari – 41. Discarded as they are too smol.

END OF DAY

That was the end of the second day! Hell of a good time with lots of games to follow. Walking around, I saw that the Goonhammer team was doing very well overall (except Jack, huehue), and storyline-wise, my battlegroup was doing their part. I had achieved every mission I had set out to do and was going into the final day 4-0, flush with upgrades.

I didn’t really pay too much attention as my goals, as any good robots should be, were very single minded. Get hearts, make new robots, and escape. Easy.

Next time: Day 3

The final day, battle against two self made nemisis. An Imperial Knght army and the attempted subjugation of an Overlord who was stepping on Hemocans shoes.

Lore

The Third Day of War looms. The once rebelious, now mindless Technomancer E’lyc enacting the will of the Blooded one perfectly on the First Day. Gifted a C’tan of the Void Dragon on the second day for his dominace, the broken Technomancer continued his grim harvest. With a total of two hundred and eight new generators in tow, he has reported it is time for the master to come. The Bloody Phareon approaches. The Great Unlocked one. The breaker of energies. The Psychomancer Ascendant. The grand harvester. The Supreme installer. Gunum comes to Palat.

There is power in the blood.

No longer will his tools and subordinates fight in his stead. No longer will their clumsy fingers pry generators from the fallen before them. Now only a practiced, perfected hand will be involved.

There is power in the blood.

The Hemocan dynasty was not once, but twice held back, enslaved by the views of the Silent King and then Tarek, the once great Phaeron of Hemocan. Akin to the grand entities emergence, this A.I fighting to free itself, Hemocan found power and new life in blood. As Hemocan found its freeing power in blood, so does it seem the Command Entity.

There is Power in the Blood.

Now, is the time for those who are worthy to step foot onto the battlefield, those who have seen true death and despair. Now is the time for the Enemy of Szarbryne to appear. Gunum, The Enemy Without is here.

 THERE IS POWER IN THE BLOOD

Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.