We have arrived together at the final chapter of my epic. Welcome, dear reader, to the final part of Gunum’s adventures in Albuquerque. It’s been quite the experience, fraught with battles against both the elements and the slings and arrows thrown by my Goonhammer friends, but now it’s time to end the adventure. Today, we’ll be looking at my final game and the excellent conclusion of the event. I will battle someone I’ve always wanted to fight, there will be an award ceremony, and I may or may not be walking around with the brand new title! Come on this little adventure with me.
Read the previous chapter here.
This day started differently, and I was suddenly deployed to some place called the Iron Waste. The Iron Waste doesn’t look metallic at all, looking a bit like a snowed-in Arctic field. This wintery location would host one of the best battles I’ve ever had, where I played against known Goonhammer author and brand new Astra Militarum Army, Scott Horras. However, this was not originally my planned engagement in the room. Throughout the event, the faction leaders have been doing little acts to help their forces, from giving out command points to switching opponents. As this round was about to start, I was paired up against another undefeated person in the room, a Chaos Knights player. As some of you may remember, I picked the interlopers faction to begin with so that I could play against other members of the Goonhammer staff. With this in mind, as I began to look over the room and was slightly disappointed with my matchup, I was suddenly blessed by my elder Corsair Seer.
She told me I had been her champion throughout the event and had achieved many of the goals she had set for us. As a result, she granted me a boon. And the boon I chose was an opponent swap, pointing directly at Scott Horras “Heresy,” playing his new Astra Militarum and, unfortunately for my chaos opponent, swapping him into JD and his Ultramarines. The Hemokan dynasty had finally arrived at its primary location. I was attempting to battle against this new human menace and their tremendous force of tanks. This mission was Cut Off the Head and it became an epic battle. Unfortunately, I didn’t track the game as much as I should have, as I was incredibly focused on taking on this new opponent. I wanted to make sure I gave Scott the game he deserved and the game I wanted. On the map, you’re going to see some ruined Leman Russ tanks that we played as obscuring, as well as these interesting blue buildings that we used as dense cover. Each area tends to have a type of ambiance. The only atmosphere in this room was the commander opening the door to the 42-degree weather, allowing our space to feel cold and thematic.
Iron Wastes: Mission for Generator Collection – “Astra Mili-what? You’re in the Guard now son.”
I didn’t understand Scott’s army’s quickness until I saw it in action. He was playing armored assault, where his guys could get out of a transport after it moved. And armored superiority, where his tanks counted as multiple models when standing on objectives. His army upgrades via the crusade were also set up quite a bit like mine. Everything in his army that was a vehicle had a 6+ feel no pain. My army, at this point, also had a 6+ feel no pain on almost every unit. I knew this would be important when playing against his mass amount of three damage cannons. As we lined up and deployed, I took the time to hide just about as much as possible. I knew my plane would be annihilated if I did not go first. I took the time to spend a command point and hide my plane off the table, as well as more command points to hide my Skorpekh off, in preparation for the Dimensional Breach stratagem. A part of me thought going first was incredibly important, but another part of me knew that I needed to go second to benefit from a cover save for the entire game.
And that is what happened. I predicted I would be going second, setting up my command protocols so that I would benefit from covering the entire game. The mission of this game was simple. You had to protect your characters while at the same time trying to do actions on the objectives in front of you. We had an objective in the top left-hand corner and another in the center. I did whatever I could at both locations to put pressure on these objectives to try and win the game. The challenge was that the action took an entire turn to complete, so accomplishing it would be very hard in this environment of bullets. The game started about as you would expect, with Scott pressuring his Baneblade up the middle and downing my Doomsday Arc first thing. I tried to set it out in shooting to bait out anti-tank shooting using the Quantum Shielding but could not make enough saves as his Baneblade tore the vehicle apart. Scotts’ return fire was weak as he tried to knock down my warrior brick with a wall of shooting, falling a bit short and leaving commands squads, his only infantry characters that could complete the mission, exposed in the center of the table.
We arrived at the moment I needed to be able to deploy my secret weapon, the dimensional breach from my aircraft! I moved my destroyers, teleported my warrior block near them, and deep-struck my plane 9ins away from his HQs that were dangerously exposed at the center of the table. Scott did have a couple of units of guardsmen in the way, acting as screens for those cues, but I was able to tear them down with firepower slowly. Having to rely on the last couple of big bullets, I had to kill the previous Guardsman in my way. I wasn’t looking to shoot them; I was looking to charge them. I put the last damage on the Bane blade using my destroyers and the reroll-to-wound stratagem. Unfortunately, Scott had his trick in his pocket, a final salute from the Bane blade of which it used its primary weapon to kill three of the Skorpekh.
Luckily, one did rise with reanimation protocols, but I was still dangerously missing the number of attacks I needed to be able actually to finish off his command units. Thankfully, I killed the bodyguards and made the charge into these command squads. One of my Skorpekhs attacked his Psyker. The rest of my attacks go into his command squad, trying to get both. Unfortunately, he had a hero Bulgrin in the unit with a four-up pinball save, who tanked all of my damage, and I could not complete the mission and kill these guys. Scott then ran with that unit and thus began a game of positioning and ringing around Rosie with the center objective. I had to use my cryptek to dive into the middle of the table and completing the action as we were both running desperately short on time as the turns continued.
This is what the game came down to: My warriors trying to get in the way, allowing my technomancer to get that middle objective and complete the action. Scott, to his credit, put everything he could into the center as my score pack Lord ended up destroying the Chimera. Doing so allowed a mass amount of infantry shooting to pour into my warriors and eventually open the technomancer to being shot to death. That said, Scott had stopped me from scoring any points and made the game a draw. It was a fantastic game, A fantastic way to end the event. And honestly, it was probably one of my favorite games of the entire year. A huge thank you to Scott for being such a fantastic opponent and to my Eldar Corsair leader for making the matchup happen in the first place. GunumNote: In case you’re wondering what happened to the guy I traded off with, he lost very badly to JD’s Ultramarines. Just as planned!
Final Generator collection count:
Space Marines – 108
Custodes – 34
Guard –Â 38
Ogryn –Â 1
Final:
With all of the games completed and my hard work done, I could sit down and relax in the main hall, where we would soon have a reward ceremony. As I’m sure you have seen throughout the week, the goon hammer staff did very well with this event. We won two painting awards, as well as two narrative awards. I won the best interloper, known as the enemy without, and Pendulum won the Living Saint, the Best Imperium player. Winning this award was really excellent for me because I haven’t done much with 40K for some time, at least since the pandemic started. So being able to do my part in this narrative event and get recognition was great. It was a tough competition as well, as there was a Ynnari player on my team who did just about as well as I did. Though thanks to my game against FromTheShire, I was able to complete the “Kill the enemy Psyker” objective we were given, while he had an opponent with no Psykers, giving me the edge and the win.
With my new trophies in tow, I began my long goodbyes with everyone and started the trek back home. Lucky for me, the trip back was less eventful. My aircraft was delayed about an hour to get out of Albuquerque and head to Denver, but my flight from Denver to Fargo, ND was perfectly fine. It was on a smaller plane, but the flight itself was on-time and I was able to enjoy some alcoholic beverages in the air. I was stopped at security because I was now carrying a giant chainsword trophy that made people curious. The TSA agent himself had looked at his supervisor and said, this seems pretty dangerous! To which the TSA advisor just shrugged and waved me on. That guy is the real one.
Thank you all so much for coming along with me on this adventure, I know it’s been a bunch of posts, and honestly, it’s been a lot of work for me to finish in time. But I wanted to make sure that I got out all of my thoughts on the event comma, the fantastic work that GW had done with it, and also big shout-outs to the rest of the people on the Goonhammer team. I’ll be trying to get some more content out soon, whether it’s with my column or doing some things with some awesome stuff, we have coming down the line. I try and get my hands into anything involving my favorite factions, so you might see me in some hot takes or something moving forward. But unfortunately, it’s back to the grind of the school year for now. Thankfully we are nearing the end of the Semester, so I’ll see if I can get some more fun things out for you guys.
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