Another Warhammer Quest journey with @wobin today, and oh my GOD was it a shocker. 😫
We played a Scavenge journey where you go around searching for loot and fighting off hostiles, but Radukar the Wolf (the MAIN big bad of the whole game) made his first appearance, my character Cleona was so badly wounded she ended up out of action (thankfully she didn't end up dying), everyone was constantly failing attacks they should have easily made, and we rolled so poorly on the end of turn event table that we ended up at the "Nightfall" point (where all the monsters are much more powerful) FOUR turns earlier than we should have otherwise. 😬
It was an absolute rollercoaster, even outside of Cleona being taken out of action everyone else had multiple times where they'd taken so much damage they were only two short of being taken completely out of action, only to claw their way back and then get wounded all over again, then right at the end it was a mad scramble to get everyone to the exit point. As is frequently the case, hero of the match went to my dwarf Dagnai Holdenstock who was able to be inspired early and just slaughtered his way through everything. He got an upgrade in the post-game phase where damage from his weapons can't be ignored, which is going to be REALLY good because there are three or four types of hostiles that have some sort of "Roll the D12 and on a (certain number) or higher, damage is reduced by X amount" and it bit us so many times.
A full two months after the last game (oops), we had @wobin over for another Warhammer Quest game! We did another Deliverance journey, where you need to stay ahead of the Suffocating Gravetide curse and warn the citizens of its approach, and we absolutely smashed it despite the Vargskyr making an appearance. We found from the last one of these we did that as long as you can get sufficiently ahead at the beginning it's not too much trouble to keep clear of the Gravetide, it's when you get stuck fighting hostiles and can't make any forward progress that you really end up in trouble.
To be fair, @yayKM's character was VERY heavily wounded in that fight, but thankfully I had a very convenient healing potion equipment I was able to give her and she rolled very well and was able to recover all the wounds she'd lost. We did a lot better this game, everyone ended up inspired, and my dwarf Dagnai singlehandedly faced down an entire room of zombies and skeletons and took most of them out, barely taking a scratch in return!
The next game is going to be a rough start though, I rolled EXTREMELY poorly on the event table at the end of the game, and THE big bad, Radukar the Wolf, is going to make an appearance at the beginning of next game despite him ordinarily not showing up until we're Level 3 (we're Level 2 right now). 😬
We continued our Warhammer Quest campaign today with @wobin by defeating the mighty Vargskyr!
It was a very interesting variation on the standard journeys: instead of the hostiles we faced being randomly selected from the encounter deck, we started out with all six corpse rats and all six dire bats, divided into two groups, plus the Vargskyr itself. The Vargskyr didn't start on the battlefield and they represented it striking stealthily from the shadows by making its activation involve rolling the D12 and whichever of the lychgates (the red door things on the edges of the tiles) was on the die, the hero closest to that would just straight up take a damage, no saving throw or anything. To actually get it to come out in order to damage it, you had to get to the "mysterious objects", which are the skeletons and the columns with the raven on top, at which point it'd pop out and absolutely wallop the hero that activated it, then vanish as soon as any damage was done to it, and you'd have to get to the next mysterious object, and so on.
It started out looking VERY rough, almost everyone was at half health quite quickly, but thankfully we were able to rally and once we got through the initial hostiles that started on the battlefield we had some very lucky rolling where the hostiles _didn't_ respawn when it was their turn to activate. After that it was a case of getting enough damage onto the Vargskyr which we were able to do (and once all the mysterious objects were gone it'd remain on the battlefield so we could really wail on it).
So now we're all at Level 2, so there'll be more hostiles to face, and the Vargskyr will actually potentially come back as one of the hostiles drawn from the encounter deck when we play our next regular game! 😬
@yayKM and I started a new campaign of Warhammer Quest with the last four heroes this afternoon! @yayKM went with the two heavy hitters and so I took Qulathis the Exile and Octren Glimscry who are are much more fragile but can still deal a reasonable amount of damage. We began with a Scavenge journey in order to start gearing up early, there were a few rough moments and some terrible early rolling, but we actually managed to get all four heroes inspired—which we've never done before—and ended up with some good equipment out of it! Lore-wise the location we started out in was the Ven Alten estate, Ven Alten being the family of one of the heroes @yayKM is playing.
And pleasingly, with the rest of the zombies and bats fully painted, we didn't need to resort to ANY unpainted miniatures at all!
I'm definitely closing in on the end of my Warhammer Quest project, I've finished the rest of the deadwalkers and the bats! Only thirteen miniatures left to go out of the sixty-odd in the box. Really happy with this second batch of deadwalkers, I didn't do any drybrushing at all except for the robes and instead just highlighted everything manually. It comes out a lot more strikingly.
Glaurio ven Alten III is ready to avenge his family's deaths!
One more hero to go (who is actually mostly done but the base texture paint is currently drying) and I'll have the full eight completed, woot.
Qulathis the Exile is now finished, and I've done Octren Glimscry too!
I'm particularly happy with how the base for Qulathis came out. I've been putting snowy bases on all the heroes to make them REALLY stand out on the board compared to the hostiles (https://virtualwolf.org/media/posts/2443), but given Qulathis is a wood elf and is all done in greens and browns like you'd expect, it felt sort of weird for her to be on a fully snowy base, so I decided to split the difference and have partially half-melted snow instead. I think it gets the point across, and looks terrific to boot.
The big lad is done! I added some extra highlighting to his face and the highest points on his body, and of course no self-respecting bat-demon-thing would be complete without some blood effects.
Plus, I started Qulathis the Exile, one of the other heroes, before dinner and have made this much progress on her already.
FINALLY did some more painting tonight! I'm working on the Vargskyr from Warhammer Quest, the huge bat/demon thing that's the first of the big bads we need to kill in the campaign and I want to make sure it's actually properly painted before we kill it. 😅 The Vargskyr itself is done, I just need to do the basing for it. I'm making good use of the box of skulls I got for Christmas to make a much more interesting-looking base, and I've included one of the skeleton warriors to give a sense of scale of just how enormous this thing actually is.
I also didn't realise I hadn't done any of the Warhammer Quest miniatures since August. 😬 Just haven't been in the painting headspace I guess, but hopefully this'll get me back.