Welcome back, Dear Reader, to my ongoing blog of competitive and hobby progress for 2024. Yesterday I talked about my travel to the venue and the first day of games at the Grand Narrative. Today I’ll be recapping Saturday and Sunday at the event, talking about the results, and giving some final thoughts on this year’s Grand Narrative.
Day 3: Saturday
I didn’t sleep a ton on Friday night, but mostly that was because of staying up late drinking. I wasn’t in bad shape or anything but I was pretty tired Saturday morning. I grabbed some breakfast with Gunum and then hit the briefing. There were a number of new doodads introduced yesterday – a series of large, expensive props with light-up elements to represent the three artefacts being sought out by each faction. For Chaos, it was the Blade of Night, unlocked by completing the altar of Chaos. For the Orks, it was the Wurrzog machine, some kind of force field generator. And for the Imperium, it was whatever mysterious xenotech was in this Ork box.
When each faction retrieved the six necessary bafmodads – daggers for Chaos, plugs for Xenos, and keys for the Imperium – they’d unlock their special artefact and get some kind of bonus. There didn’t appear to be any way to stop this from happening – if you build the fancy doodad for a campaign like this, you’re gonna end up using it. By day 2, everyone had one of their six bafmodads. The Imperium weren’t doing well, but they were resolved to claw back some wins – and as it turned out, the mission would work very much in their favor.
We were ordered to return to Rorgan.
Round 3: vs. Jordan’s Astra Militarum
You want to know how the Imperium ended up clawing it back? This mission is how. Mission 3 saw Chaos as the Defenders against the Imperium, on a mission in which we had to deploy in a thin band along the table’s diagonal line:
Conceptually, there’s nothing wrong with this. It’s a neat pincer deployment concept, and it’s been used in other missions. Going along the diagonal helps as well – it puts some decent distance between zones, but there are a few major issues here. The first is that, in this mission, the Attackers go first. Knowing you’re going first when you deploy provides a massive advantage, and it makes having places to hide as the Defender super-important. To that end, the mission gives Defenders a way to reserve units as “hiding in the Ruins,” letting them pop up later, wholly within area terrain features. The big issue with that is that this was the table:
If you don’t see any area terrain there well, you’re not alone. I was going second on this map, against Astra Militarum rocking a Knight Lancer, a Rogal Dorn, a Tank Commander, a Leman Russ, Hellhound, and Basilisk, all while being tasked with keeping the opponent out of my Deployment Zone. Will was pretty new to the edition and as a result wasn’t able to just cripple my army on the first turn. If he had, this would be a different game but instead I put everything but the transports and the Vindicator in reserves, then proceeded to take out the Basilisk turn 1 and go from there. This was slow going – my army is not built to kill tanks – and I was lucky to survive out of the first turn when Jordan split his army and his firepower, letting me pop Smoke much more effectively on the Vindicator.
This mission was otherwise absolutely brutal, and that “the Attacker goes first” clause made this round an insane one for us. On top of that, Chaos players in our battlegroup found that on tables where they were ahead, Imperial reinforcements were being dropped in. At the table to my left, Princess Lexi had to contend with a sudden Baneblade showing up on her table, while at the table behind me it was a thousand points of Custodes.
This, frankly, sucks. I get that it’s not super-fun to get steamrolled, or to just breeze through things, but now we’re getting absolutely rolled by a combination of going second in incredibly difficult circumstances, and when we show a chance of clawing our way out of those circumstances, getting buried under a bunch of reinforcements. I end up being one of the few players on my team to get a win this round, and that’s in part because I managed to put away my game just fast enough that I couldn’t be buried in reinforcements. Though in similar fashion, Gunum got absolutely rolled by MasterSlowPoke’s Rainbow Warriors, who made quick work of him going first.
After Round 3 we grab lunch in the food court again. This time around there’s a lot more grousing – no one on our team is really happy with that particular mission, regardless of whether they won or lost. I grab a bowl of baked ziti for lunch, from the same pizza place Gunum hits up. After that I do a little bookkeeping, meet up again with the missus and our son, and prep for the next round. Bryce and Andrew’s kid have been running around but we alternate handing them off between us and the wives at various intervals so everyone gets a break, more or less. Huge props here to Andrew’s wife, who took them for the longest stretches and was an absolute saint.
Round 4: vs. Robert’s Ultramarines
For round 4 we were in Futility. This mission was absolutely wild – there were no deployment zones or objectives (once again putting me on Veterans of the Long War), and instead we deployed by basically alternating deep striking units, with it being possible to place a unit within 9″ (and outside 3″), but with the penalty of taking D6 mortal wounds.
Players score by placing objective markers via an action. My Imperium opponent needed to place objectives within 12″ of the middle (Sector E), while I scored for each quarter with an objective marker, i.e. A-D.
Robert’s army here was absolutely loaded with haymakers, and by round four we were getting to the part of the Crusade campaign where unit deadliness has been amped way up. The custom Battle Traits supplied for this event are bonkers, and Robert’s got a unit of Devastator Centurions who hit on 2s and can leave the table at the end of my turn if they’re wholly within 9″ of the battlefield edge. As they have Deep Strike, this means they can basically be anywhere he needs any turn to wipe me out. Robert wins the first turn roll-off and blows my Land Raider off the table with his Gladiator Lancer.
This game is pretty tight – Robert’s a good player and an RTT regular, just playing an intentionally subpar list – and I’d have lost if not for an earlier focus on planting objectives. I get a head start with two on the first battle round, and manage to punt one of Robert’s off the table in round 2 with my Chaos Lord. We go back and forth trading units a few times but by the start of Round 4 I can tell he won’t be able to catch up. This mission was weighted toward the Imperium – they had no cap on their scoring max per turn – and toward going first, given the wide open nature of the terrain and the inability to screen units, but holding on and playing the mission has paid off. This wasn’t a great mission and while I think the concept of a deep strike deployment was interesting, the execution wasn’t and being able to deploy this close really makes it a “win the roll-off to win the game” type scenario, especially since there was no end-of-game scoring for the player going second.
Robert was a really good opponent and as it turns out, a Houston local. We swap contact info and talk about local places to game. He’s there with a few other people and it’s interesting to see how we’ve missed running into each other so far.
With Round 4 in the books we head to dinner up at the hotel bar. The food is decent but the service is terrible. I crush a hotel bar burger and Scott swings by to let us know that he’s facing down Kelling in about 20 minutes. We head back down to the World Championships floor to check out the game, while a few folks make a detour over to the main hall to watch the nightly briefing. They’ll fill us in later but there’s nothing we’re missing.
Horras vs. Kelling: The Decider
After a rough start on Thursday, both Scott Horras “Heresy” and James “Boon” Kelling have gone 4-0 on Friday and Saturday to end up at 5-1 and 4-2, staying within one game of each other heading into the final day. It’s very possible at this point that they could end with the same record, in which case we’d never really know who the better player was. Hence, Scott has challenged James to a tiebreaker. And we’ve all turned out to see it.
One of the big questions coming into this event was how Kelling’s lack of practice would affect him. He admittedly hadn’t played 40k in more than two months heading into the event, and for that reason more than a few people had their money on Scott to outperform James at the World Championships. That said, James’ lack of practice was definitely on display in this game, where his not having gone up against Rogal Dorn tanks before was pretty obvious. Most specifically in the way he showed a lack of respect for their ability to kill targets in Overwatch. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lost a whole goddamn rhino to Dorn overwatch where they somehow get two lethal hits with Multi-meltas and spike the damage.
The dice were also not on Kelling’s side. His opening Fate Dice roll was 1,1,2,2,3,6.
Kelling at one point tired to Overewatch a Chimera with Fuegan, using a 6 to hit only to roll double 1s on the wound roll and fail to do any damage. Then he moved forward for a charge with his Avatar, only to get hit for three mortal wounds from a Kasrkin mine and lose another dozen to Overwatch Dorn shooting. Just brutal shit, all for Kelling to attempt a desperate farseer-aided 10″ charge into Scott’s Dorns, which failed.
The net result is that while Kelling manages to stick around a bit and do some damage, Scott is able to hold the upper hand almost all game long, riding a game win. Scott now holds the tiebreaker between the two players. On the plus side, this is good practice for James, who may have to take on an Astra Militarum player tomorrow.
As the game between Scott and James winds down, I head back to my room and I’m surprised to find Bryce and the missus still up. Some of it’s jet lag and some of it’s letting him stay up a bit later. Still, once I get back we wrap up and prep for bed. There’s one day left in the Narrative, and two more games to go. I don’t sleep particularly well but that’s par for the course at these things.
Day 3: Sunday
Welcome to the final day of the event, made cruel by its earlier start time, moved up by thirty minutes. As a result, I end up skipping breakfast initially and heading to the briefing instead, where we’re all very close to finally opening these weird doodads and tapping into their power. Then it’s off to Ochari for round 5, pitting us against the Interloper team for the first time.
…or it would be, if several members of the Interloper team hadn’t decided to play each other to do some weird infighting narrative they’d take it upon themselves to do. I understand the appeal of doing something like this but it leaves multiple players in the Chaos battlegroups with no opponents, and is just kind of a dickish thing to do without asking first – we show up to the room with opponent-less tables and it takes twenty minutes to actually sort what’s going on. We end up working with the Vox Localum to find someone from another room for one of our team to play, while Jack Hunter and I team up to play against Steve and his Orks. Rather than do a full 3k, we talk to Steve and find out he wants to run a Stompa, so we agree to run 2500 points on our end against 2800 on his end, and we all agree to forego Crusade rules. This is a solid handicap to play with, but it turns out it won’t mean much in this particular mission.
Round 5: vs. Steve’s Orks
Steve has a beautiful Ork army, just chock full of cool conversions for units of every type. He’s rolling with a Stompa, a Gorkanaut full of Meganobz, and a Battlewagon full of Ghaz, to name a few things. Jack and I split unevenly, with me taking the Land Raider, Vindicator, and one Rhino full of Legionaries. Our plan is to take out the Gorkanaut early while Deep Striking the Crisis Suits to take out the Stompa.
This mission is even more about going first than the others – our armies deploy only 6″ apart, and the goal here is to hold the middle of the table objectives while destroying your opponents’. This makes going first super important for the Orks, but it never happens. We win the roll-off, kill the Gorkanaut and everything inside, plus a couple of Ork dreadnoughts. Steve responds by sending Ghaz into our backfield and destroying one of our objective markers, then we retaliate by killing the Stompa with a unit of deep striking Crisis Suits, who drop about 30 damage on it with Fusion rifles.
By turn 3 Steve has seen the writing on the wall and we call it. He’s got a wonderful army and was real fun to play, but there’s not much he can do with this mission and the misfortune of going second. This mission also didn’t really have objective markers, and so had me back on Veterans of the Long War.
One more round, and before it starts we grab lunch back at the food court. This time it’s a gyro and curly fries for me. Solid combo – 7.5/10. It’s also Sunday and so football games are on, but I won’t be able to watch them during the final round. In our briefing it’s revealed that we have, in fact, activated all three of the doodads, and each has some bonus in our final game. For Chaos, we get a once-per-game activation to get [DEVASTATING WOUNDS] and [SUSTAINED HITS 2] in melee for a phase, but this kind of isn’t that big a deal to me given my Chaos Lord and Master of Executions already have Dev Wounds. Still, it can be good on my Terminators.
The highlight of this briefing – and of the little stage plays this weekend – is Glitcha and Zoggit. Before the final Ork doodad can be activated, it needs to be repaired by Zoggit, who exits stage left, only to be electrocuted before a burnt skeleton wearing Zoggit’s helmet is tossed back out to center stage. The whole thing is very funny, but made even moreso by Bryce expressing genuine sadness over the event – “Oh no! Zoggit DIED?” he says, then asks me why everyone’s laughing. He’s not traumatized or anything, but it’s pretty funny.
Round 6: vs. Spears of the Emperor
The vibes in this game were rancid, thrown off from the outset by an opponent who was either doing a bad job talking shit or just looking to start something out of the gate. He was there with a teammate who likewise had bad vibes, including a moment where he took umbrage with me giving my battlegroup teammate playing him advice on which contagion to take against the three units of Deathwing Knights he was about to face. Before the game when I was attempting to run him through my army I told him I had a legends unit (the sorcerer on bike) and asked him if he was familiar with its datasheet, to which he responded that he “had been playing this game for 22 years” and then turned to his teammate to say “I told you it’d be that kind of game.” I have no idea what that meant, and he didn’t elaborate when I asked him.
This is some wild shit, and it was at least good to get validation from everyone around me who heard this exchange later asking me what his problem was. For the record, I’ve been playing Warhammer since 1996 and I couldn’t tell you what most of the Legends datasheets are. I don’t think those two things are related, really – but what do I know? He’d later issue an excuse to the effect of “being pissy when he’s hungry,” but the damage had been done.
Starting this game off on the wrong foot was a shame, because I was hoping to enjoy it more – his Emperor’s Spears were legitimately very pretty, with some crisp highlights and a nice blue color. His army was also just putting out some wild damage, with things like a BS2+ Ballistus Dreadnought with a 3-shot lascannon and a 6-man unit of Eradicators with BS2+ and [PRECISION]. This led to a brutal game where anything I moved forward I’d essentially be losing, forcing me to find ways to trade effectively. Ultimately I only won this one because he pressed forward too aggressively early, leaving objectives untouched and allowing me to outpace him on scoring pretty early. That was important, because he was throwing haymaker after haymaker in the shooting phase and if I didn’t get out to an early lead with some good trades, I wouldn’t have been able to make up the difference later. Our faction mission was to do something for Nurgle – it was incredibly vague what – but I took the Plague Marines and had them kill some Eradicators at midfield, so I guess that counts. I think the Imperium goal was to kill our warlords which was more or less guaranteed with that Precision Eradicator unit and a mission which required your Warlord be on the table to get the Linchpin-like scoring bonus.
Following game 6 I headed back up to the hotel bar to meet up with Kelling and some of the GH crew. Kelling’s finished 1-1 his final day, dropping a fast game to T’au, while Scott is still playing his final game after winning his first on the day. All he needs is a win to tie Kelling’s WCW record and pull ahead. We talk for a while, watching the end of the Cowboys-Commanders game and the start of the Packers-49ers game while mashing refresh on Best Coast Pairings to see the results. Ultimately Scott would lose that last game, meaning he finished a game behind Kelling in the WCW’s official games, though both would beat their StatCheck/Elo projection. Additionally, with a win in the head-to-head, Scott has ensured both players are 6-3 on the weekend, with him holding the edge. Kelling may have the better WCW record, but Scott’s the winner on pure games played this weekend.
The Awards Ceremony
With game 6 behind us, there’s only one thing left to do and that’s hit up the Awards ceremony. Before that, I head back down to the WCW floor to check on the finals. In a stunning upset, Folger Pyles has beaten John Lennon to take the championship, meaning Lennon has once again finished second at the WCW, for the third year in a row. That’s brutal, and while there’s nothing whatsoever to be upset about or ashamed of in an incredible run like that against the game’s best competition, I know it can’t be easy to deal with. Still, John’s an incredible sport about it.
We head over to the main hall for the final briefing and Awards Ceremony. Turns out the Imperium won, but at great cost. Yawn. That’s every 40k story, and while it’s a bit of a change of pace from the last two years which saw the Interlopers win, it’s still pretty boring. Glitcha is turned away at the last moment by a shot from Dynost’s ship, while Chaos infighting prevented them from claiming the system/planet.
The Awards Ceremony starts up. There are awards for best battlegroup and worst, for best Cosplay, and best Army Display (Dave Gormley wins this in a walk). Heroes of each faction, plus the Protagonist (most fame) and Antagonist (most infamy). Quinn Radich wins the Antagonist award, and it’s cool to see him back at this year’s event after he couldn’t make it last year.
Oh, and I won the Best Painted award – Master of Parades.
This fuckin rules, and it’s equal parts elation and relief. I’ve been working toward this for the better part of three years now, first with Black Legion and now with Night Lords, painting an entirely new army this year with the express purpose of taking home this award. It feels great to walk home with this, and it’s more or less my primary goal coming into this event.
On that note, it’s a new award, and these are both lovely and pretty damn heavy:
As a shiny, gold award Bryce is immediately enamored by it and asks if he can have it. I tell him no. He says OK but if I win one next year he can have that one. I kneel to his level and hold him by the shoulders and tell him very sternly that if he wants one of these awards he’s going to have to paint an army and win it himself because he cannot have mine.
He is not happy with this at all.
After some poking and prodding we get there and he cheers up a bit. Which is good, because we’ve already booked an escape room for that evening. While some of our crew are heading out Sunday night, we and more than a few others are flying out Monday, and so there’s lots of time to do other fun stuff. So we hit up the Escape Room place next door to the hotel, over in that food court area.
It’s an old west-themed room and a pretty fun challenge – the hardest of the rooms they have. We do a decent job with it (they had a physical puzzle that is an absolute pain and eats up a lot of our time), and manage to escape with just a few seconds to spare. It’s a good way to wind down the weekend and I’m glad to be out of costume for it. We follow that up with a visit to the pizza place across the street, and then chase that with drinks in the hotel bar again, closing the place down as we talk to various staff and people from the Kill Team championships. We also talk about the painting competition – Jack and Craig are now INCREDIBLY MOTIVATED to try and win next year and that means it’s going to be even harder to win. I need to paint a new army, but I have some ideas.
Monday
Our flight is delayed but we get home OK. I’m completely exhausted when we arrive, and end up passing out on my couch for a few hours. It takes another day to fully recover. It’s been a crazy event, and while I had a blast, I’m glad that it’s both over and that I have another holiday coming up to stay home immediately following.
Final Thoughts
Having been to all three Grand Narrative events so far, it’s interesting to consider this one in the broader context of those, and how it stacks up. On the whole I think I enjoyed the event more last year, in part because it felt like there was more for Bryce to do, and the layout created more of an open space that was good for collisions between the two player groups. This year certainly had some more impressive props and costumes, but last year’s story felt both more novel and like we had a greater impact on said story. There were a lot of small improvements this year to things like the World Championships (no double elimination) and narrative terrain, and I hope that they keep going with those next year – it felt like if they spend another year improving terrain and doing the missions it’ll really be something special.
Here are my thoughts on the specifics around this year’s event:
What Worked:
- The characters were solid. Glitcha and Zoggit stole the show, but all of the Lord of War characters were solid again this year. The acting was on par with prior years, and it’s always a highlight of the show. Players built a little altar around Zoggit’s corpse, which I thought was great. Also, the props the Lords of War handed out – things like Teef and Chaos badges – were really nice.
- The artefacts. While it was a little bit lame that the artefacts were guaranteed to get used, they were all visually very cool, and unlocking them was a fun process, giving players some fun moments. It was also cool having these completed artefacts have an impact on the final rounds. And while it was lame, I totally understand it – you can’t wheel out a maguffin like that and have it not get used, nevermind what it cost to make. If there’s a thing I’d like to see them expand on here more, it’d be this – only having six things to activate them really limited the number of people who felt like they’d be honestly contributing, and while failing to activate wasn’t an option, how about being able to get them a round earlier?
- Kill Team. The Kill Team integration was really solid this time, and having a Kill Team player in our Battlegroup made everything feel connected while giving us a way to see what was going on/find out what was happening in Kill Team. Plus, it was just great having JD on our team. That guy’s great.
- The Vox Localum. For the most part, the Vox Localum were great. Steve in particular was great, and most of the Vox Localum I had were very helpful, if spread a bit too thin. It seemed like they were short-staffed this year and that’s a real shame.
- Event Materials. The rules and missions were mostly printed on thick, glossy cardstock. This was pretty great, and it was cool having the missions be secret reveals each round. I just wish they were better.
- The opponents. This is a weird one and not necessarily something GW does but this year all of my opponents had a working knowledge of the game in a way that wasn’t necessarily true last year. Some of that is tenth edition being older, some of it is GW doing announcements telling people to learn the rules before showing up, and some of it is blind luck I’m sure. But I had four or five legitimately challenging games (depending on how you want to classify the first, impossible mission against Gabriel), and
What Didn’t Work:
- The Missions and Special Rules. I really appreciated that they put in extra work making custom missions, Battle Traits, and Crusade Relics for this event – the Pariah Nexus rules wouldn’t have been a good fit at all! But the rules they wrote needed another pass or two – the Relics and Traits were massively overtuned, and the missions combined with the terrain to create some terrible go-first-and-win scenarios. They also weren’t really asymmetrical and didn’t feel connected to the narrative.
- The Terrain. There was definitely more and better terrain this year than last. But they also double the size of the event, and there wasn’t nearly enough of it this year as a result. Normally there are good fixes for this – you can use area terrain bases to shore things up and create line-of-sight-blocking on a table and I have no idea why they think this can’t or shouldn’t be done in Narrative games. Hell, there were even rules in the new missions which referenced area terrain, only to be played on tables that didn’t have any.
- The Tarot Cards. The Tarot cards this year were once again used for pairings and this time featured John Blanche artwork. These were too small – it was really difficult to read them or distinguish them from a difference, particularly in darker rooms. These needed to be 4×6″ cards or just use the ones from last year. That said, I’d rather go back to the Albuquerque method, where defenders picked tables and attackers picked matchups. This gave both teams solid agency and made it way quicker and easier to see if there would be matchup issues. It also makes it possible to pair people up a bit more according to their skill levels and army.
What Was Missing:
- Faction Briefings. I missed the individual faction briefings with our Lord of War. These were much better for keeping up on the story, and felt much more intimate. Some of our better story interactions happened in these smaller, faction-specific briefings.
- Stuff for kids and spouses. There were more kids at the event this year, but less for them to do. Last year there were video games and a couple of nice common spaces to hang out – those were sorely missed this year, and I’m still not sure why they didn’t have Space Marine 2 out for play. I am once again asking to add in some small events and fun stuff for kids and spouses – painting classes, open play, video games, more than a few of these are available at every other GW US Open event, and would be great to see at this event.
- Communication. Comms felt like a bit of a mess this year – things got lost in the shuffle, some swag was never given out (my battlegroup never received our event coins), some had to be replaced, and things like the faction Discords need a strong rethink in terms of how they’re run and operated. The lack of strong moderation, announcements, or pins in those Discords is a huge miss, and it’s the kind of thing that’s easy to solve. When there were issues, there was little to no communication around them, and the sparse messages posted on the discord would get quickly drowned out by other chatter.
So yeah, ultimately the set dressing and people were great, but as usual I think they need to spend a little bit more time on the “game” aspect of things. The props and costumes are cool, but I want to play Narrative to feel like my games matter and are part of the story. And so far three years in, I still don’t really feel that way. I’m fine to dress up in costume (though I’m not a big talk-in-character person), but ultimately I see narrative as less about just playing regular games in the Star Wars Hotel and more about taking part in a shared story and in that regard I think the Narrative has a lot of work to do. I don’t even need the story to be super malleable, either – it’s never clear to me how the mission I’m undertaking matters, or will affect things. It’s not clear why I’d ever seek fame or infamy – or even how the objectives related to those actually relate to those (this year in particular), and there’s seldom more connection between a location and its battlefields than the mat being used. The lords of war walking around handing out stuff was cool, but no one seemed to know what the hand-outs actually did – I think teef were supposed to grant re-rolls? That wasn’t super clear.
It’s always hard to grade the narrative. I had a great time, but I could have a great time hanging out in a dungeon with the Goonhammer crew. The event itself was a lot of fun, with some very cool moments, but I have many, many notes on what could have been better. Quite a few things were improved from last year, but about as many still need addressing or were a step down. It’s still a great event overall – there’s just nothing like it being done anywhere in the hobby – but for my friends who went in prior years and decided it wasn’t for them, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a compelling reason for them to give it another shot. The people in my battlegroup had a great time going, and I know that even with his gripes, Jack wants to go back and try and beat me on Best Painted next year. I know I’m planning on going back, if I can’t win a golden ticket before then.
Next Time: Back to Death Guard
That does it for my recap of the Grand Narrative but I’ll be back as usual next week doing prep for my last event of the year, a teams event at Rise. That’ll involve Death Guard, so check back to follow my progress painting up three defilers and a host of Deathshroud Terminators. See you then.
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