Skypehammer Round 7: A Stitch In Time

The Cabal's internecine struggles continue. This time, it's the Neverborn who decide they've had enough of colouring inside the lines...

Thousand Sons vs Tzeentch Daemons!

It is fire. It is a whirlpool. It is light, curling into and annihilating itself. It is a hurricane, blowing in all directions at once and sweeping everything before it. It is the tide, pouring through the breach, staining the fields in a corruptive sheen, washing the old life away and bringing something... else in its place. It is a womb that spews forth decadence. It is home to the grave, a barrow for hope, the gift of horror, the poison that kills love. It is the antithesis of the soul. It is entropy. It is forever. 

It is the Warp. It has come to Averment, and we, its spirits, have come with it.

You would pour it in a bottle, water the crops of your enemies with it. You would tie it into a garrotte to choke your old lover. You would hold it to the wax of the world and see it melt, just to say you did. 

Can you hold Nothing? Can you limit Everything? Can you try to comprehend the opposite of Understanding?

Or will you, as we have, as all will, become Chaos too?

Having now passed the halfway mark in our campaign, it's getting up close and personal...

• Three factions (the heroic Alliance, the evil Cabal and the enigmatic Unknowables), with eight different armies divided among them.
• Factions will pair off against their opposing armies in 500pt battles.
• All matched play rules apply, and all supplemental rules are available.
• Armies can only be selected from the models in my collection.
• No restrictions on how armies are built (i.e. detachments), but every army must have a warlord that must be named and cannot be changed.
• Every army gets 5CP, no more or less. These can be spent on pre-game stratagems.

Having formerly been thralls of The Cabal, Kraken's Daemons spewing out of the Averment Breach have decided their preference is to back the Unknowable cause. Now it falls to Rapid's Thousand Sons to bring them to heel.

Cult of Confusedly - Thousand Sons

++The Breach is opened, but its power must be harnessed to our will. These denizens of Fate’s Architect follow our god, but not our purpose. Drive them back, yoke their strength, take control of the sector in the name of The Cabal. After all, once The Purge and Black Legion have finished destroying each other, someone will be required to lead it.++

• Ra'ul Wunes - Ahriman on Disc (HQ)
  Black Staff of Ahriman, Inferno Bolt Pistol
  Warlord: Otherworldy Prescience
  Psychic powers: Diabolic Strength, Glamour of Tzeentch, Weaver of Fates
• Daemon Prince of Tzeentch (HQ)
  2 x Malefic talons
  Magister: Aetherstride
  Relic: Arcane Focus
  Psychic powers: Arcane Focus, Death Hex, Infernal Gateway
• 11 x Chaos Cultists (Troops)
  10 x Autoguns, Heavy stubber
• 2 x Chaos Spawn (Fast)
  Hideous mutations
• 6 x Tzaangor Enlightened (Fast)
  Fatecaster greatbows

Cults of the Legion: Cult of Magic

Points: 498 | Level: 32 | -1CP for Magister

The Fire Choir - Daemons of Tzeentch

~ We are abroad. Set loose in this desolation of a million feasts, our numbers can only grow as the Breach exacerbates. This banquet is for no other god but the offspring of Great Manipulator alone. And for no mortal soul to control, whoever they pray to. We are unknowable, even to our most devoted acolytes. It is time the exiles of Sortarius were instructed in who is truly the master, and who is the chattel. ~

• Xl'ch'tz, The Unmaker - Changecaster (HQ) (Warlord)
  Staff of Change
  Warlord trait: Daemonspark
  Relic: The Impossible Robe
  Flickering Flames, Gaze of Fate
• 20 x Horrors (Troop)
  Coruscating flames, Daemonic Icon, Instrument of Chaos
  The Blasted Standard
• Exalted Flamer (Elite)
  Fire of Tzeentch, Tongues of flame
• 3 x Flamers (Elite)
  Flickering Flames
• 6 x Screamers (Fast)
  Lamprey bite

Points: 496 | Level: 28 | -1CP for Blasted Standard

Mission and Deployment

No Mercy is from the original rulebook, and about as straightforward as it gets: 1VP for destroying an enemy unit, with the bonus VP for First Blood, Linebreaker and Slay the Warlord.

Each side has a potential 5 Kill Points to give up, so this should be a close contest. Although when you double-down on Tzeentch, who knows what might happen?

With alternating deployment, the Daemons cluster up on their right flank, the Changecaster and Exalted Flamer behind their screen of Screamers and Flamers. The mass of Pink Horrors, once again, go into the Warp.

The Thousand Sons spread out a little more: Cultists and Spawn strung out on the left flank, with Ahriman's flying circus of Tzaangor Enlightened and the Daemon Prince in the ruins on the right.

Turn 1 - Daemons of Tzeentch

Averment's Breach hung in the air like a seeping ulcer on the face of God. 

Ra'ul stared hungrily up at it. His survival had been a miracle, but he was accustomed to the miraculous. Throwing his consciousness out from the mind of the Tzaangor Shaman moments ahead of the bolt shell that blew it apart, he had clawed his way from frame to frame, dragging his soul half-way around the planet until he found a weak enough mind to reshape to his purposes. An elderly anchorite of the desert, willpower sapped by a decade of solitude, had woken one morning with a new purpose in his step. Ra'ul sorted through the old fool's mind, dug up the dunerider he'd ridden out to his exile, rewired the vox and contacted his warband. 

Now, he was back in an appropriate body and back in control. 

The spell he'd set in the Mechanicus relay had paid dividends. The other members of his circle had been sifting through the returns for the last few days and discovered something vital. 

Averment wasn't so much the site of the breach as the cause of it. Changer praise whatever curious techpriest had shaped the relays in a bygone age, they had wired the relays to probe the Warp. Clumsily, of course, without any of the nuance or intelligence of a sorcerer. No, this was the equivalent of thrusting your naked arm into a beehive and feeling around to see if you could grab something. But what daring panache! What bold technology! You almost had to admire them, the blind groping fools!

With the right minds behind it, you could tear open the wall and let an infinite goldrush of metaphorical honey pour through. The Thousand Sons had tapped the motherlode, the breach was holding. To the uninitiated, it looked like a dark hole, spreading across the sky and spraying out a waterfall of night. But with his third eye, Ra'ul could see what it really was - potential, a first glorious tidal wave pouring through that hole in the sky, a scintillating spurt of incredible energy.  He was in exactly the right place to divert it to his will, and with it, he could achieve anything. No, everything. 

If, of course, he could keep his feet beneath him in the flood...

The Daemons are keen to get stuck in, but also keen not to get shot full of arrows. Accordingly, they hold back the advance a little to keep the characters out of sight behind the power generators.

This leaves them out of range for any offensive psychic powers, ranged weapons or charges, so the Daemons have a quiet opening turn as they hand the initiative over to the Thousand Sons.

Daemons 0 : 0 Thousand Sons

Turn 1 - Thousand Sons

Ra'ul held up his staff and braced his feet wide, the core of his Psy-chi in the pit of his stomach. The lines of his arms and the staff, then his feet and his disc, made the twin triangles of eternity, locked tip-to-tip. Harnessed eternity, not the double loop of the logic botherers. This had focus. It could be a wall against a tide or an edge to cleave a foe. 

Foes, he had. The Warp was alive with them, the will of the stuff of chaos. A million boiling soulless things, each wanting to exist, to root themselves in his dreams and grow tall into the weave of reality. 

His minions were with him. Tzaangor, eager to drink deep of the warpblood. The members of the cult, as hungry for power as the warp-things were for form. The spawn, those spoiled things that the cultists would doubtless soon be. Prince Alumoch-A, a near-perfect fusion of both warp and weave, but dependent on both to exist. That wasn't for Ra'ul, he knew who he was and on which side of the walls of reality he stood. Ra'ul would remain Ra'ul, but the Warp would do his bidding or be banished. 

Braced for the rush, he threw himself open to the incoming energy and let it crash against his defenses. 

Seeing the daemonic host heading towards them, the Cultists show little enthusiasm for moving forward. The two Chaos Spawn leave cover and swing around towards the centre.

The Daemon Prince advances forward, getting sight on the Screamers and able to attempt a very ambitious charge (Aetherstride allows him to do this). The Disc-riders scoot around the centre, so they can thread the needle and get line of sight on the Screamers.

Ahriman opens the Psychic phase with aplomb: buffing the Enlightened with Weaver of Fates and Glamour of Tzeentch, and the Daemon Prince with Diabolic Strength.

The Daemon Prince is less impressive, and immediately rolls a Perils of the Warp. The Adepts of the Immaterium stratagem prevents disaster (Kraken is eagerly waiting to use his Daemonic Possession stratagem to double the damage caused) - until he attempts a Smite, and rolls another Perils of the Warp. This time it takes a CP reroll to avoid trouble, and the resultant mortal wounds downs a Screamer, but Rapid is left wondering what school of magic this Tiscan attended.

The Shooting Phase is some ineffectual autogun fire, and some pretty effectual arrows from the Tzaangor, felling two more of the Screamers.

With the front rank gone, the Daemon Prince is now out of attempted charge range, and so the battle round ends bloodless, both sides circling each other warily.

Daemons 0 : 0 Thousand Sons

Turn 2 - Daemons of Tzeentch

Opening himself to it, Ra'ul heard the voice of the Warp. 

Forth we pour, bedlam into the sheepfold. Wolves to the lamb-men! 

Surging on the currents, our purpose shapes us. Desire to create, and you have dreamed us, the shifting flame, the enkindling ones. Call us caprice, call us innovation. Whimsy and fever-dream, that we are. What you thought solid and set, we can unmake. We shall curl you a new reality. Our breath undoes the bonds of the universe and sets it free. You cannot hold us still, your chains are molten sand. 

Flamers of Tzeentch, the will of the wandering wonders! Glory redoubling, recursive to your senses, to see and to exclaim aloud with such force your brain shrieks light like a sun and expires, supernovoid! See how deadly we shine! 

Screamers of Tzeentch, the flash of insight, the realisation of how wrong you are! The mindless feedback howl of hate when you see your flaws exposed! Hear us and be destroyed!

Horrors of Tzeentch, the love of a little boy who learns he can crush and maim, murdering ants for the pleasure of power! Flex your muscles, see them burst beyond restraint and flatten the world! Feel how good destruction is! 

And here am I, the Unmaker, Xl'ch'tz.  I see your double triangle, wizard, holding at the eye of my storm. But I am great round Nothing, the circle about your square, squeezing you to zero as I spiral inwards! Behold the inevitable, and despair!

Nothing for the Daemons to do but press forward, and so forward they go. The three remaining Screamers race around the Daemon Prince, while the Changecaster and Flamers move up behind. They are about to look a little exposed, but then the Pink Horror bomb lands and surrounds them in a sea of blancmange.

Such is their excitement that the Horrors forget to use their Blasted Standard in the Psychic phase. The Changecaster instead readies a Flickering Flames for them … and rolls a Perils. Not really having the wounds to spare on his diminutive warlord, Kraken spends a CP to reroll the outcome.

In Shooting, the Exalted Flamer fails to wound the Daemon Prince, though the Flamers manage to burn a few off him. The barrage of 60 shots from the Horrors split between the Daemon Prince and Cultists, but do pretty badly, even by their standards. A couple of Cultists fall and the Daemon Prince goes down to four wounds.

This should leave him ripe for the picking with the Screamers’ lamprey bite, and they duly charge in. The Horrors also make the 9” charge into Cultists and Daemon Prince, leaving a gap for the Changecaster to follow. With the flying archers circling like vultures, Kraken reckons the Daemon Prince melee is the safest spot. Sadly, he fails the charge, even with a reroll.

The Screamers go first, and underperform, only taking two wounds from the Daemon Prince, who interrupts combat to hit back and tear down all three of them. The Horrors do their best to even the score, but only beat up a few more Cultists and leave the Daemon Prince on a single wound.

The Cultists disperse two of the Horrors, but reality blinks and one of them pops back into the ranks.

So the turn ends flat for the Daemons, having failed to remove any of their targets, and giving up First Blood and a Kill Point for the Screamers.

Daemons 0 : 0 Thousand Sons

Turn 2 - Thousand Sons

It was like being on fire. 

No, like becoming fire. His fingers dissolved into twinkling motes of power. He tried a rite of abjuration to strengthen his wards, but even trying to shape that power just drew more of the blazing maelstrom into his body. This was change! This was power! This was...

This was what it wanted. What it needed. It would take his thoughts and make them real, but the price would be his own existence. He could feel its mind, hot against his own, desperate to flow through him and become manifest.

The world around them dwindled to sparkling ash as they met. Ra'ul, pinnacle of a pyramid of spell and incantation, a speartip held aloft by the finest minds of his warband and thrown into the deep waters. Xl'ch'tz, the current of those waters, the hungry suction of the abyss. 

He would not give in. He would surf this wave, direct it where he wanted it. 

The Thousand Sons press their advantage by closing the net. All except the Daemon Prince, who’s had quite enough of the net and scrambles away to safety. His place is taken up by the two Chaos Spawn, while Ahriman leads the Enlightened around the rear – with nothing standing between them and the Changecaster.

Ahriman doles out his usual buffs to the Enlightened in the Psychic Phase, though the Changecaster denies his Smite and the Daemon Prince seems somewhat coy about bothering the Warp again.

In Shooting, all eyes turn to the Changecaster, who gets lit up with arrows like Saint Sebastian. Due to his Impossible Robe, he just manages to cling onto his final wound, and the Enlightened and Ahriman both fail to cross the short distance to charge him.

The Spawn have no such problems, and bundle into the Pink Horrors, ripping apart half a dozen of them, and causing another half-dozen to dissipate.

Before they go, the Horrors do manage to tear down the last remaining Cultists, and force their champion to flee in terror (who would blame him? this battlefield is no place for a human), so at least Kraken gets off the mark with a Kill Point.

Daemons 1 : 2 Thousand Sons

Turn 3 - Daemons of Tzeentch

Give in!

That voice, that mind, hungry beyond measure. Ra'ul saw the souls of his cultists flow away like mercury as the warptide shattered their physical vessels. The spawn embraced the tide too eagerly, hurling themselves into it to complete their change. Prince Alumoch-A attempted to channel the flow and it tore him into a million new shapes, each more implausible than the last. Only the Tzaangor understood the danger, but even they were not immune to the thrill of chasing it. They heard the call of Xl'ch'tz as well, and were tempted beyond measure. 

Alone, Ra'ul stood in the face of the Warp and shut out any possibility from his mind that he would fail. He was infinite, his mind braced against itself, both immovable object and unstoppable force at one moment. Two triangles, tip to tip, balanced and perfect. There was no alternative. His plans would not change. Eternity was his.

The Warp would obey him, or be thrown back. 

With enemies all around then, the Daemons press on ahead and regroup – notably around the wounded Changecaster so he can’t get picked off again.

The Horrors fall back from the Chaos Spawn, the Flamers press forward and the wagons are duly circled.

In the Psychic Phase, the Changecaster fails to get off Flickering Flames, but the remaining Horrors do remember to activate their Blasted Standard, wiping out the Daemon Prince.

All the Flamers then burn down the Chaos Spawn, reaping another Kill Point from their charred husks, and pulling the Daemons back into the lead.

Daemons 3 : 2 Thousand Sons

Turn 3 - Thousand Sons

You are with us already, the voice said. We are you. 

Look! The shape you make, the shadow you would throw with our light. Those are not triangles. They are the letters that make up the sounds of the name of God. A and Z, combined beginning and end. Don't you see it?

No, Ra'ul said. Two triangles tip-to-tip. What I give returns to me. The energy I burn is my own, I fuel my own fire. I am the flame. You are, in fact, me. 

Ha haa, laughed the voice, it is not so! Delude yourself no longer! We are infinity! We are boundless! With your finger, you draw your line in the sand. But we are the sand, and we are your hand! LOOK!

And for an instant, he did, and his mind folded and refolded, forged anew in molten fire.

Everything rests upon Ahriman and his plucky band of archers. If they can kill the intervening screen of Pink Horrors (and there’s not many left now), then they’ll have a clear run at the Changecaster and that will be game.

Ahriman starts casting psychic powers again – and now it’s his turn to roll Perils of the Warp! With all the Command Points long-since spent, he has to take it on the chin and lost two wounds.

The Shooting Phase also falls slightly short, as the Tzaangor almost kill the entire unit of Horrors, except for the two directly in front of the Changecaster. This makes for a longer charge that the Tzaangor can’t quite make. Ahriman has no such problems and flings himself at his opposite number (the Exalted Flamer intervenes to join this boss fight, but achieves precisely nothing).

The Horrors are downed pretty quickly, but it’s all eyes on the big fight. Ahriman rains blows down upon the Changecaster, but his invulnerable save (and some help from the Locus of Trickery) almost keeps him alive. Almost. He fails his final save, but then activates the one-use saving throw from the Impossible Robe. And he passes! Somehow the Changecaster hauls his final wound through that fight in one piece!

It’s another Kill Point for the Horrors, but the Thousand Sons have let slip their chance to put this game away, and now the Daemons get to fight back.

Daemons 3 : 3 Thousand Sons

Turn 4 - Daemons of Tzeentch

For that one second, Ra'ul burned. His consciousness was spilt against the walls of the world, leaving a thin shadow to mark his passing. Use a man as a lens to look at a nuclear blast, and you will see how thin a silhouette he is. From the point of view of the fire, he may as well not be there at all. 

And yet he was still there. He still, for that tiny moment, existed. 

Balanced against the force of eternity, Ra'ul remembered himself. Fire roared around him, through him, within him. It was him. 

But he was still there.

Although before they can fight back, the Daemons fall back. The three Flamers do their best to encircle their warlord, who eschews the chance at Smiting Ahriman in favour giving them Flickering Flames.

The Exalted Flamer instead tries blasting Ahriman, but fails again (he’s really had a shocker of a game) and the Flamers go into the Tzaangor, but roll low and only bring down a couple.

That’s it for the Daemons, and it doesn’t look like it will suffice.

Daemons 3 : 3 Thousand Sons

Turn 4 - Thousand Sons

Two triangles, tip-to-tip, Ra'ul remembered. 

NO! the voice howled, as it realised what it had done. 

So it proves for the Thousand Sons. The Disc riders continue to terrorise them, taking out the Flamers with Smite and magical arrows. The Changecaster is charged by the pack and his luck does not defy the odds for a third time.

With just the Exalted Flamer on the field, and now far behind in Kill Points, the Daemons concede the victory, and the favour of Tzeentch, to the Thousand Sons.

Daemons 3 : 6 Thousand Sons

Victory to the Thousand Sons!

Pouring itself into him, so desperate to make his desire manifest, it had shaped itself into his thoughts. It was part of the triangle, zig-zagging eternally back and forth in the pattern set in his mind. With that perpetual motion thrumming away in his heart, there would be nothing he could not do. 

There - with a thought, he set Xl'ch'tz as a ring around his double triangle. No, a sphere, he now realised, seeing the shapes from new perspectives. And a twin pyramid within, the two points pressed together to make an eight point star. The sacred Ben-Benet, he recalled, a silvery lecture hall in distant Tizca flashing briefly across his mind's eye. 

This power will not last, he thought, but the things I shall achieve with it will never die. 

I am a finite eternity, Imperium's End. 

Campaign Map

More sectors open up for the factions to claim ... but what's in the middle one?

Locker Room

As expected, that was a brutal affair and there really wasn't much left when the dust settled. Slightly less anticipated was the sheer number of Perils of the Warp - Tzeentch wasn't messing around that day!

I think things started to unravel for the Daemons when the Horror bomb failed to land. Leaving the Daemon Prince and Cultists alive for another turn took out the momentum that the Daemons badly needed to sustain. It didn't help that the only model with the tools to bring down high-toughness units from range - the Exalted Flamer - had a big off-day.

Still, when invulnerable saves and psychic powers are in play, you never know what might happen. It might have swung back in the penultimate turn - very entertaining game.