Another year, another Goonhammer Open Baltimore. My attendance was, as usual, more personal than business – I don’t as a rule “help” with “things”, but I did try to pitch in around the margins, enough to let me feel important without really inconveniencing myself. In this case it meant playing in the Narrative, a thing I also don’t generally do, on account of Rob needing an extra guy. With a three year old at home and only my 34-week pregnant wife to handle her, I’d normally have begged off, but this is Rob, the one person who could have convinced me to leave the house, and I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to hang out, eat like trash, and not sleep enough.
In order to play in the event, and apparently unlike most of you, I actually did read the event pack, or at least skimmed the part about needing a 2000 point list and a 1000 point list, with some FLY units. I erred here, assuming from previous Narratives that there would be a need for fortification-busting. Look, I said I skimmed it.
These constraints, along with zero hobby time, two years of rust to shake off, and a need to cram the entire army into a 12-inch cube for transport, led to two of the worst and easiest to pilot lists I could think of.
A Machines (990 points)
- 2×3 railsides
- 1×2 missilesides
- 2×3 Stealths
- 1×1 Ethereal
B Machines (1000 points)
- 6 Stealths
- Coldstar+Crises, 10 fusion blasters
- Enforcer+Crises, 10 missile pods
- Enforcer+Crises, 10 plasma rifles
- Enforcer+Crises, 6 burst cannons and 4 missile pods (I ran out of burst cannons)
I used the Experimental Prototype Cadre in all my games: it was easier than the others. Savvy readers will no doubt have noticed the complete lack of battleline, infantry, or any serious attempt at objective play or board control.
The B Machines ended up playing into 4 of my 5 games, because nobody else read the goddamned packet, a fact about which I will still die angry, and I got press-ganged 3 games in a row to tables where you needed to Fly in order to move around, because I was the only one on my team who brought any. It’s a fun way to play, and the tables each had lovely custom terrain and missions, but I also did a lot of it.
As far as the actual narrative part of the narrative, I have to undermine the point I made not too long ago on this very website and admit that I’m part of the problem: I paid no attention to any of it. I zoned out during many of the briefings. I was given a hand-crafted personal objective, to help myself and my team. I actively avoided learning what it was. Norman texted me my mission. I did not read it. I was not going to risk scoring any points, even by accident. This came up in the first game, when my opponent stopped to do his Activity, and I asked what he was up to. “Oh it’s my special mission order, I’m supposed to loot data canisters for my faction. What’s yours?”
“I don’t know”, I said.
“Oh, ask Norman or Rob, they can help you”, he said.
“No, I’m good.”
In the third game, I nearly shouted at my teammate when he asked me to do an Item Foraging or whatever, instead of the dumb plan I was in the middle of failing to execute. I agreed, then immediately shot with that unit and let the action fail.
So it went. In some ways, this was in keeping with my character – we were the mercenary team, here to do a job, not ask questions. If you wanted the enlightenment team, those are the other guys. We’re the dumb idiots who love to fight. In other ways, it reflects my low moral fiber, who can know which it is. I jumped around the board, heedless of objectives. I ignored mission goals, which I did not even read in the first place. I had control of an alliance-level leader character and forgot to even deploy her. Later, after she got TimeCop-ed, we got a new faction leader, and I deep-struck him into a position to mishap on purpose and get overwatched to death, because he hadn’t cost me any points so he wasn’t really my problem. I didn’t even check the score most of the time.
If there is a reason for this – actively working to make myself a liability – it’s that I was on the clock, and my overriding objective was to make sure the actual players got a good game – maybe not always a challenging one, given who I am, but at least one where they had to work for it – and still got to Do Their Thing, and I tried to oblige that. I wasn’t playing an NPC punching bag, but I also wasn’t aiming to steal glory from a paying customer, which meant punishing them without gunning too hard for the win. I just wanted to blow up stuff, and get blown up in return.
I think it worked. I had my first experience with en Feugan fire dragons this weekend, where they obliterated two crisis squads in a single activation and piled back into their truck after. Normally I’d have been grinding my teeth at that particular move, but it goes to show how much a good opponent visibly having fun matters. In the moment, this was the funniest thing in the world, and I think that game, up to and including and past the point where half my army dissolved to Elf Melta Bullshit, was the most enjoyable one I played all weekend.
This was our second year at the BWI Sheraton, and the air conditioning was fixed this time – possibly too fixed, as I’d only packed short-sleeved shirts. It’s not as impressive a venue as the Baltimore Convention Center, but it meets our needs, and you don’t have to walk half a mile to find the doors or the parking lot. Packed into a corner between a half dozen other airport hotels, the lobby seemed to always have at least one uniformed pilot in an easy chair waiting for their Uber. I had a dream about a plane crash on Saturday night, which may have been related.
I stopped at the organizers’ table first, and commandeered a small corner to unpack my army (one of the perks of working here is getting to make myself at home) and get to thieving. We had swag bags, but since I wasn’t actually a ticket holder I didn’t want to grab a whole one. What I did do – have always done, will always do – is go through the bins and steal one of every piece of flair that had gregbot on it. I feel this is fair: if we use my robotic face on merch, then I get to claim one, even if I don’t deserve it. This year that amounted to a hilariously petty t-shirt that I adore, a measurement widget, and a die-cut sticker. I say I stole these items, but a minute later our event lead (one of the Kevins) walked over and handed me a dozen more gregbot stickers to pass out, so in the annals of brazen heists I think maybe this doesn’t rank highly.
Half of the room was dedicated to the Grand Tournament and Narrative, with a substantial aisle in between, breaking up the effect of each row being a single 80 foot long table that we’d had last year. The GT tables were GT tables: we’ve standardized on Bandua terrain sets and mats, which are practical and fit for purpose in a way that’s easy to take for granted but really shouldn’t be. The Narrative tables were something else entirely. There were boarding actions tables, flooded tables, Cityfight tables, a space table, and others, each one a bespoke warzone with a huge QR code on it. The QR codes were a great solution, since everyone has a phone anyway, of getting dataslates and mission scenarios shared around.
The other half had sections for Kill Team, Blood Bowl, Underworlds, and Necromunda. I didn’t admittedly take, or have, time to examine most of these, but the Necromunda ones were impossible to ignore. They were near the door, for one thing. For another, if there’s anything I’ve learned over the years, it’s that Necromunda weirdos are the most devoted sickos you will ever find in this hobby, with the exception – and on this point every single Necro player I spoke to agreed with me – of the Mordheim weirdos. One table had a 20-story skyscraper on it. Another featured the iconic Domino Sugar sign from the Baltimore waterfront, on an Inner Harbor themed table. Just wild shit, custom built, painted, and weathered to hell. Completely on another level. These didn’t look like wargaming tables. They didn’t even look like dioramas. They looked more like old school hollywood miniatures, the sorts of things you’d see blow up in slow motion with poorly-composited actors green screened in jumping away from the fire. I’m not going to play Necromunda, I don’t have 20 years to steep in whatever it is they’ve been up to in order to get up to that level of vibing with the setting and the game. I am not built that way, but I have to respect those who are.
Did I win my games? I don’t know, and you’re asking the wrong question anyway. What the Goonhammer Open is to me, isn’t a tournament. It’s a two day trip through dozens of random little interactions with the coolest people in this hobby that I last saw a year ago, and a handful of former strangers that I’m now going to look forward to seeing next year. Those are what I go for. Some of them do happen to occur as part of a game of Warhammer, but the game itself is at best incidental. The fuck do I care about victory points, compared to that?
Before lunch on Saturday, our Blood Bowl organizer came over to ask me if I wanted a CostCo hot dog, because he was going to CostCo. I obviously said yes, and then while he was out getting the dogs I went to Chick Fil A with the Goonhammer App Development Team and had lunch. Then I ate the hot dog also. What made the dog special was the Omni-Condiment. Dude included a small tub with a bit of every hot dog covering in it, all mixed up, and a little spoon so I could smush it around. On day two, Andrew (who rules, easy top-5 in the attendee power rankings), brought in Krispy Kreme donuts, including a small pile of the little paper hats. There was a point that morning where I was about to get mad shitty at someone, and I stopped, because I had the thought I can’t be having that attitude in this hat. That would be ridiculous. No one wearing a Krispy Kreme paper cap could get away with being a dick. And it worked! It bought me some time to calm down until I could go eat a big messy sandwich, which immediately fixed my attitude. I made the usual rounds of the GT area, and spotted the incredible Ad Mech conversions from a fellow Greg, that I played against two years ago, and was pleasantly surprised when he remembered who I was. I got two games in against Rocco – who you may remember from when I bullied him into writing about Yugioh for us – and bullied him into bringing an Astraeus in a game where it couldn’t fit through the terrain to move and I had six rail rifles pointed at it. Two of our three Kevins tried to get me to play Necromunda, which honestly almost worked because each of them had their own monster truck. The third Kevin and I talked about Dark Angels for longer than is probably healthy. Condit was present. As were his hateful Iron Hands Dice. I’ll stop there because there are too many and this is already turning into that one paragraph from Blood Meridian, but know that all weekend long I was serendipitously bumping into people and being reminded of why I got into this mess in the first place.
I ended the weekend exhausted and ready to never play Warhammer again, as I brace for having a newborn at home for the second time. I think I needed the Goonhammer Open more than it needed me, but god did I need this. If you were there you know what I mean, and if you weren’t, well, that’s a You Problem and you have a year to work on it before you make the same mistake again.
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