Hello again, Dear Reader and welcome back to my ongoing journal though 2022. In my previous entry I talked about my experiences at the Lone Star Open GT and playing in those games. I pushed myself a little too hard prepping for that event and looking back I should have just said ‘fuck it’ and run Magnus or the Mutalith, even if I am glad to finally have a unit of Warpflamers done.

With LSO down, my next hurdle was the Goonhammer Open. There are two parts to the event: The competitive GT, and the Narrative. In addition to my practice games, I’m going to talk about both events, the logistics behind running an event, and lessons learned from this year’s event. But first let’s talk about the games I played, since I wasn’t a player in this year’s Goonhammer Open.

Getting in Some Practice Games

I’ve got two games here to report on; the first is a game against my friend Andrew, a local in the Astros Militarum Houston crew, and the other was a pre-GHO game against Scott Horras “Heresy” and his Astra Militarum.

Game 1: Death Guard vs. Salamanders

I haven’t had a chance to play Death Guard much since the update, but with a game against Andrew and not a ton of time to prep it felt like a good time to break them out. I went with a relatively standard non-Mortarion force, fielding four units of plague marines.

My Death Guard - click to expand

Nothing too crazy here; the Deathshroud occupy the middle of the table with some limited character support while the Plague Marines in rhinos hit the edges and the Poxwalkers hold the rear and do actions. Going against Salamanders is always going to be a bit rough, since plague weapons are functionally doing nothing for me in that matchup, but they’re still just marines. The Plague marines here are intended to pack a knockout punch on bigger targets and close early, while the PBCs and MBHs can offer ranged support at a variety of ranged bands.

Andrew’s Salamanders list is basically running 3 Redemptors and all the eradicators he can field. He’s running three units of 3, each with a multi-melta. It’s a lot of eradicators and my primary goal here will be to close as much distance as possible and lock them in melee early on. That will be a challenge if Andrew screens them with his Aggressors, but Aggressors aren’t particularly scary for Plague Marines as long as I avoid the overwatch fire.

The Mission: Secure Missing Artefacts

I lose win the roll-off for Attacker/Defender and take the wheel position, using it to pull two objectives closer to each other to create a tight triangle on one half of the table that makes it really easy for my Death Guard – basically I moved the top A objective toward the middle (but still behind the wall) and the top B toward the middle 6″. The goal here is to make it  easier for my Death Guard to move between the center and either objective, and likewise force Andrew to deploy close enough to get charged.

My Secondaries:

• Spread the Sickness
• Grind them Down
• Despoiled Ground

Andrew’s secondaries

• Promethean Creed
• Raise the Banners High
• Bring it Down

I don’t love Grind here but I’m trying it out because I don’t love the other options. Likewise, Bring it Down isn’t particularly good for Andrew – it maxes at 13 and that’s a tough 13 to get – but it’s not terrible.

I’m going first.

That’s good news, and lets me press my rhinos forward, turning them into plague marine pinatas if Andrew manages to pop them open. The MBHs move up to get shots on the Redemptors, and the Deathshrouds advance toward the middle. I’m largely able to stay out of sight and bracket both Redemptors, which helps me on Andrew’s turn when he’s unable to take out any of my units (but I also blank on Grind). He pulls his Aggressors forward and that’s when we’re off to the races – I use a Rhino to lock up three of his units with a charge before charging in with two squads of plague marines.

It all basically goes to plan – I wipe out the Aggressors and lock up a unit of Eradicators and take out both Redemptors on my turn, putting Andrew in an untenable situation as he loses one of his two raised banners. The bulk of the army will then round the corner and press into his deployment zone, sweeping through his remaining units. Andrew pulls an easy 15 for Promethean Creed, but only scores 10 total from Banners and Bring it Down.

Result: 90-64, Win

Game 2: Thousand Sons vs. Astra Militarum

The night before the US Goonhammer Open I got in a practice game against Scott Horras “Heresy” – I had my Lone Star Open army on me in case we needed a ringer, and Scott and I had never played a game in person. We opted to play the first mission of the GHO – Tide of Conviction – and this ended up being a real tough play for Scott, since hold 2/hold 3 missions are not kind to guard. I don’t have photos from this game but it was over pretty quick – I took out a Leman Russ Demolisher on each of Scott’s first two turns and used a teleporting warpflamer unit to kill a key infantry squad holding one of his objectives. This effectively kept him to hold one on turns 2 and 3, putting me up 26-0 on primary coming into round 4. Scott wouldn’t recover from this, despite pulling 10 on Inflexible Command, 13 on Boots, and 12 on Retrieve Nephilim Data. I made the mistake of taking Assassination, but otherwise pulled 15 on Wrath of Magnus and 9 on Psychic Interrogation.

Result: 78-57, Win

Scott went first in this game but ultimately couldn’t do enough damage to make anything of it, using his manticores to kill my Chaos Spawn and that was about it. This would have been a much closer game if we weren’t playing on a hold 2/hold 3 map, where it would have been harder for me to keep Scott off 4/8 VP per turn. I remain undefeated in my matchups with Scott, and now I get to live rent-free in his head.

The Goonhammer Open Narrative Event

Alright let’s get to the meat of this post. I’ve talked before about designing the GHO Narrative event – if you missed those posts, you can find them here:

• GHO Narrative Design, Part 1
• GHO Narrative Design, Part 2
• GHO Narrative Design, Part 3

I finalized most of the Narrative story and mission work about a week before the event and got to work printing out mission sheets for use at the event so I could have them set up on the tables when the players arrived. I didn’t print enough, and in the future I want to do something around digital missions, but it was important to keep them somewhat hidden – I wanted players to have a feel for the type of mission they’d be playing, but not necessarily the details. I split missions into three types:

• Primary Missions, which determine the flow of the narrative overall. These are all Strike Force games and they make up 9/12 games each round, with 3 games of Chaos vs Imperium, 3 Chaos vs Xenos, and 3 Imperium vs Xenos. These are determined based on a campaign tree, mostly.
• Strategic Locations, secondary missions which determine who controls a specific location on the planet, like the orbital defense gun. These tend to be Strike Force games (but some are Incursion), and the team controlling a location gets a bonus. For example, controlling the Spaceport lets your team reserves treat the round number as 1 higher, so you can deep strike turn 1.
• Daring Raids, secondary missions that are all Incursion size and model strategic actions, like hitting your enemies’ supply lines or trying to board their flagship to kill their fleet commander. Winning these would usually give the losing team a debuff.

If you want to see the missions themselves, you can find them here.

The Fortifications Table

We also had a number of Planetstrike missions in the packet, which allow the defender to bring free fortifications with their army. Because most players don’t have these and don’t travel with them, we provided them for players to use. In fact, we had an entire table with Walls of Martyrs, Fortresses of Redemption, Bunkers, Aegis Defence Lines, Void Shield Generators, and Macro cannons available for players to take. These woudl get used in a number of missions and I think really added to the feel of the event.

Event Set-up

Events like this are a shitload of work. You have to move a large amount of terrain, mats, and tables, get it all set up in a single night, then break it all down in a few hours a couple of days later. That means renting a UHaul to move stuff and a storage center to store it. Add in venue costs and you’ve got an event which generally loses us money, but is something we love to run anyways (events like this are one area where we put the Patreon and ad revenue to work). This year Primaris Kevin was our main workhorse, helping ensure the smooth execution from a boots-on-the-ground standpoint. We also had a ton of help from some great volunteers – especially Contemptor Kevin, Pwong, Norman, Rocco, and the Astros Militarum Group in attendance (Dan, Greg, and Andrew).

Despite the cost, we really like the venue – it’s located pretty much in between our MD and VA folks, accessible by DC metro, and the hotel is pretty nice. I think we’re going to try to stay there next year, but we’ll have to explore our options.

One of the big additions this year was the James Kelling Memorial Display Board and Photo Booth (no, James didn’t actually die), a photo booth and display board section set up to allow players to take high-quality, well lit photos of their army. In the future we’ll likely have this set up used more directly for paint judging, having players take photos and submit those for judging rather than going around to specific tables. But for now the events aren’t large enough we’ll need to do that. Mostly it was just cool to have a good lightning setup for people to take photos with, since it’s just not something people have at home.

Running the Narrative

The Narrative event itself went pretty smoothly, save for a couple of hiccups. We ended up managing everything Administratum, and I made heavy use of the new teams feature. This made it pretty easy to track team scores for the Imperium, Xenos, and Chaos teams. We started off the campaign with a series of Planetstrike missions with the Imperium as Defender, to represent the invading forces dropping to the planet’s surface and attempting to gain a foothold. From there, the flow of missions would largely depend on whether the Imperium won or lost two out of three games each round against Chaos and Xenos, respectively. Likewise, the attacker/defender for Chaos and Xenos games would change depending on which team won 2 out of 3 of their primary mission games the prior round.

When all was said and done, the forces of Chaos overran Lenk, decimating Imperial forces and holding off their Xenos rivals. I think things went pretty well, though we did run into some performance issues with Administratum on Saturday night that required us to update our infrastructure on the fly. Fortunately, things are faster than ever now.

Prizes

We handed out prizes – custom purity seals made by Evan “Felime” Siefrig – for a few things:

• As Beautiful as They Are Deadly (Best Painted)
• On the Tree of Woe (Last Place)
• Knows the True Meaning of Suffering (Most Battle Scars)
• Keeper of the Relics (Most Crusade Relics Acquired)
• Most Legendary (Most total XP earned)
• Skulls Added to the Throne (Most total kills)

Evan always does a great job with the purity seals and they’re really cool things to have for your hobby room, so I hope the winners like them as much as I do.

Lessons Learned

Finally, let’s talk about what did and did not work at the event, and what I’d change if I end up running it next year.

What Worked

• The Secondary Missions. These were a blast, and I think everyone enjoyed them. They were a bit wonky mechanically, but fun to work with and I think people were generally excited to dig into them and choose them. It also helped that players had a choice between primary and secondary, so you didn’t have Chaos Knights playing 1000-point games and the players who just wanted “regular 40k, but not so competitive” had that option too, for the most part.
• Administratum. Trying to run a Crusade event without Administratum is a fool’s errand. Having the app simplified the bookkeeping and made tracking wins/losses/team points very easy. Great stuff. The only thing I want for it now is matchmaking with table assignments and shared games between players, but we’re working on that and trying to have shared games done in time for the NOVA Narrative.
• The Teams. Structuring games each round was rough but ultimately the teams aspect really worked out and players felt like they were part of a bigger force. I enjoyed seeing some of the teams really get into it, though this varied by team. Having them be game faction-aligned also helped. If I ever expand things, doing 4 teams might be cool, and would open things up a bit more, or having players who can be more mercenary might also be a fun option.
• Team Rewards. Having rewards and debuffs that hit entire teams was a surprising success, even when the downside (your team doesn’t get any RP) was brutal – players generally enjoyed feeling like they were contributing to a team effort or letting their team down, and hearing a whole team groan when they got a debuff was both cool and also helped the winning team feel like their decision mattered. In the future what I’ll likely do is strip away individual game rewards completely and only do shared resource rewards, and let players figure out whether they want to share them with the team or be selfish with them.
• The XP System. Simplifying things down to a single Marked for Greatness per agenda worked well, reducing the amount of tracking to do.
• Finest Hour. In round 5 every player could have their Warlord declare a finest hour, giving them a buff for the rest of the game but at a price – if their Warlord died, they’d die permanently going into round 6. On the other hand if they survived, they’d immediately level up and get a further bonus. Conceptually, people loved this. In practice, they were too afraid to use it! Need to figure out how to make it work.
• Custom Terrain and Locations. People really love these and the orbital defense laser is just the coolest shit. I need to figure out how to incorporate more of these in the future and source the terrain for it. I’d love to also figure out how to do interlinked games/rounds.

Needs Improvement

• The XP System. I simplified things quite a bit – and that worked out alright – but there was still too much going on and too much XP. Most missions had an extra marked for greatness as their reward, and this was also too much. I also made each marked for greatness 5 XP instead of 3 and while that wasn’t bad, it also was probably still too much. I’m not entirely sure on this one, but my general goal was realized in that players were still able to become legendary by game 6. Also Eldar just break the damn game from an XP standpoint.
• Matchmaking. I didn’t have a strong plan for matchmaking in place, just that I’d put certain missions on certain tables and let teams allocate players to each one. This has to be better next time, to avoid confusion and get rounds started sooner.
• Terrain. We borrowed some terrain from the wonderful Chris Stover – who’s running the NOVA Narrative – and while his stuff is great, we need to build out our own library of terrain in the future. This is an area where I want to start thinking about what kinds of specific places we can build around.
• Missions. Some of the missions were a blast, others were just whatever. In building these, I tried to use a large number of existing Crusade missions with some modifications, but ultimately some of those do a better job capturing the feel of what’s going on and what’s not. I think reducing the number of missions I have to create would help, and focusing less on the flow of games and objectives – which I don’t think the missions communicated well enough – and more on the locations being fought over will help with this. This may also be an area where having a territory map could work out.
• Balancing. While the Imperium team started to catch up at the end, Chaos kind of ran away with things early and ideally next time I’ll have a better plan in place for how to help keep things interesting when one team is clearly in the lead.

The Event Photo Album

If you want to see all the pictures the Narrative group took of the event, you can find them here. There’s some great stuff in there – props to Burger for setting it up, and thanks to everyone who uploaded photos! As always, the real prize of the event are the friends we made along the way, and I had a blast at this year’s GHO despite the fact that running it was exhausting. Great people and great times.

Next Time: The Consequences of Losing (a Bet)

That wraps up my look at the GHO but join me next week when I talk about going to the Asgard August RTT and paying up for that bet I lost to Carmine back in July, wherein I was forced to play an event using his Ultramarines.

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