AE Bounty Battle Report "Valkyrie Ambush"

The Bloodborn pirates under the command of Captain Cyclopse had been causing problems for the citizens of Station 42 and the surrounding area. Eventually their victims decided to do something about it. Pooling their resources they hired the well known bounty hunting team known as "The Valkyrie".

The
Valkyrie

(Standard Crew)

Valarie (Gunsel Individual Elite
Hero)

M/3 RC/3+ CC/3 A/3(4) S/2 DR/6 W/4

Equipment: LRF Slugthrower, Shock
Grenades, Light Armored Suit

Abilities: *Solo *Hunter (Human)

Hero Type:Unkillable

Traits: Impervious (5+), Unstoppable

Action Points: 4

Kara (Bounty Killer Individual
Regular)

M/3 RC/4+ CC/3 A/3(4) S/3 DR/5 W/3

Equipment: LRF Slugthrower, Adrenal
Booster, Light Armored Suit

Abilities: *Solo *Hunter (Human)

Traits: Berserk

Action Points: 2

Vera (Bounty Killer Individual
Regular)

M/3 RC/4+ CC/3 A/3(4) S/2 DR/5 W/2

Equipment: LRF Slugthrower, AP rounds,
Light Armored Suit

Abilities: *Solo *Hunter (Human)

Action Points: 2

Alecia (Lurker Individual
Regular)

M/3 RC/4+ CC/3 A/3 S/2 DR/5 W/2

Equipment: Shock Gloves, Electrolaser
Pistol, Cloaking Field

Abilities: *Solo *Hidden Deployment
*Hunter (Human)

Action Points: 2

The Bloodborn Pirates

Standard Crew

Captain Cyclopes (Human Veteran
Blooded Warrior Hero)

M/3 RC/3+ CC4 A/5(7) S/3 DR/5 W/3

Equipment: Particle Beam Rifle, Light
Armored Suit, Personal Magnetic Field

Ability: Apathetic, Command, Get up and
shoot!

Quartermaster Grimm (Human
Regular Individual)

M/3 RC/4+ CC/3 A/5(7) S/2 DR/4 W/2

Equipment: Particle Beam Rifle, Light
Armored Suit, Personal Magnetic Field

Ability: Apathetic, Issue Equipment

Quartermaster Vinnie (Human
Regular Individual)

M/3 RC/4+ CC/3 A/5(7) S/2 DR/4 W/2

Equipment: Particle Beam Rifle, Light
Armored Suit, Personal Magnetic Field

Ability: Apathetic, Issue Equipment

The Ductrats (Human Green Squad)

M/3 RC/5+ CC/2 A/3 S/2 DR/3 W/1

Equipment: LFR Slugthrower, Light
Armored Suit

Ability: Apathetic, Random Equipment

Da Gurlz (Human Green Squad)

M/3 RC/5+ CC/2 A/3 S/2 DR/3 W/1

Equipment: Slugthrower Pistol, Light
Armored Suit

Ability: Apathetic, Random Equipment

Knowing that pirates can't pass up a free ship the Valkyrie use their own ship as a decoy to draw out Captain Cyclopes and his gang. The pirates close in to inspect their new prize.

The Valkyrie spring their trap. Early in the fighting one of "Da Gurlz" is shot down by Valarie's LRF slugthrower. Grim and Vinnie take cover in a rocky outcropping while the Captain and the Ductrats make a long flanking maneuver.

The fighting gets serious. Da Gurlz rush forward and shoot at Vera on the hill but they are gunned down in turn by the Valkyrie. Captain Cyclops, completely unfazed takes two shots at Vera on the hill and she falls. Kara and Alecia trade shots with Vinnie and Grimm the two pirate quartermasters. Kara takes a would and the Valkrie quickly discover that both pirates have personal magnetic fields. "That's going to make them hard as hell to kill in that position! Flank em!" shouts Valarie.

Captain Cyclopse takes up a positon in the rock after his own personal magnetic field fizzled out and he took two wounds. Valarie fires a hail of lead into his position and the Captain goes down. "Die Scum!" she exclaims.

Kara and The Duct Rats shoot it out on the other side of the hill. "I'm hit...again" Kara says as the she guns down the last of the crewmen. Vinnie and Grimm snap off several shots with their particle beam rifles but for the most part miss their targets. "Guess we shouldn't have drank the Captain's rum eh Grimm!" says Vinnie.

Vinnie and Grimm attempt to move into better positions seeing that they are getting flanked. Kara and Alecia charge Vinnie who puts up a stronger than expected defense. Alecia is wounded in the exchange but they take the pirate down. "Take that Sucka'" Alicia stays as she kicks Vinnie in the head.

Kara then moves up to get in a better position to take out Grimm but Valarie shoots the last pirate down with a barrage of fully automatic fire.

"Damn that was a hard win" says Valarie. "Those people better pay up" replies Kara.

Note: I ran the Bloodborn Pirates who suffered their first loss in this fight. My wife and Daughter ran the Valkyrie. This is the first time we have played with the Bounty Hunter crew and it's a nasty crew to face. The scenario was "Ambush". The Pirates has Tertiary objective as a dirty trick with Assassination and Delaying action as their secondary objectives. The achieved both of these objectives by Assassinating Vera and lasting for over 6 rounds. The Valkyrie had "Faulty Technology" as a dirty trick which they used on Captain Cyclopes's Personal Magnetic Field and their secondary objective was also delaying action. The Valkyrie won the primary objective as well and their faction objective and their secondary objective. A clear victory for this bounty hunting crew.

AE Bounty Battle Report " Boon's Irregulars assault a smuggler's hideout

A truck pulls up outside the hideout of the crew of the "Hotrod Pricess"

Whisper the crew's hacker points out the window. "Hey boss these must be the guys my contact back at Statin 42 told me about". Vincent the crews pilot looks out the window "Alright Lisa and I will go see what they want You guys stay here and cover us". "Hey it's going to be hard for us to cover you with this storm blowing in" replies Tommy.

Several men and women get out of the truck and spread out. They seem to be armed and they start making their way towards the old abandoned com bunker that the smugglers are using as a base. Vincent and Lisa take cover behind some rocks. "They don't look friendly" Lisa says.

The Storm is making it hard to see very far ahead. Redjack scans the field in front of him and sees some movement over near some old fuel barrels. "Got you" he says under his breath. A shot rings out and Lisa is struck in the arm by a high caliber bullet. Moments later another shot hits Vincent in the leg.

Vincent and Lisa flee away from the sniper. "Damn that guy is good!" Vincent says as he ducks behind an old crate.

Vincent hears the sound of boots splashing through the mud behind him. He spins around and brings his boosted particle beam pistol "Betty" to bear on a large target. Chuck goes down screaming and clutching his leg as the beam burns through his thigh.

Vincent and Lisa reach the bunker as the intruders close in. Tommy and Mike spot Carson Boon the leader of the militia group "Boon's Irregulars" moving up along the edge of an old crater. The pair opens fire and several shots ping off Boon's personal magnetic field although one shot gets through. "Damn it!" Whisper yells. "I was trying to hack that idiot's field but it's defense software kicked in and gave me a virus!"

From inside the bunker the smugglers put up a strong defense as the militia members move in. The bunker was built for a full scale war and most of the militia members shots are in vain. Whisper continues to try and hack Carson Boon's personal magnetic field. "I got it!" he exclaims.

At almost that exact moment Boon appears in the doorway of the bunker and open fires on the first target he sees. Whisper goes down in a hail of fire before he is even aware of his attacker. Tommy and Mike are both gunned down moments later by Redjack.

The fight turns desperate. Boon and Vincent tangle briefly in hand to hand but Vincent give boon the slip and makes a break for the door. He turns and snaps off another shot which hits Boon in the shoulder. Lisa guns down two militia members hiding near some rocks but more close in.

Vincent takes another shot at Boon and hits him in the arm then turns and runs but Red lifts his rifle and takes a whot. Vincent goes down shot in the back by a green militia member. "That's for Chuck you bastard!" Red yells. Bleeding from several wounds Boon opens up on Lisa and takes the last smuggler down. Bonnie walks into the bunker and looks around at the carnage. "Hey Boon isn't that the hacker we were suppose to capture?" Boon just shrugs.

Note: This is the first game of AE bounty I have run with my home brew smugglers list. Even though they were wiped out to the man I felt the list did exactly what it was suppose to do. I did forget that Vincent the crew's pilot has a personal magnetic field which would have helped him resist the wounds he took but I don't think that would have changed things in the end. I'll be posting the crew stats for the smugglers and my rules for this in the next day or so. We were afraid that the hacker rules would be too powerful but they seemed quite balanced. The hacker got two viruses trying to hack and only managed to hack one piece of gear although he did fry Boon's field.

I think we are about ready to begin an actual AE Bounty campaign based in our Spaceport setting. We just need to finish a couple more projects and play a few more practice games.

Holy Gamer Pals Batman!

Apparently the gods want me to play Warhammer 40K. Or at least my friends do. Anyhow one of my gamer friends came up with a brand new 5th edition rule book that he couldn't account for. He also had a Terminator Assault Squad with Thunder Hammer and Storm Shield and a spare Librarian so he just gave them to me. Over a hundred bucks worth of stuff for nothing.

So the same friends girlfriend also paints minis and she gave me a great tip for mold line removal. This is an electric manicure tool and it's like a dremmil with a very low power motor. It's perfect for removing mold lines and light flash without damaging the figure you are working on. It was about $7.00 at Walmart.

Got Fist?

Well I've done it. I've started painting Warhammer 40K figs again. Here are some Marines from the "Assault of Black Reach" boxed set I'm painting up as the Crimson Fist chapter. I'm in the process of heavily weathering them at the moment. I used a lot of drybrushing and cheap craft paints. Suck it GW! I'm pretty happy with the way they turned out.

Here's a shot of them prior to the weather and wash.

Quick and Dirty Com Stations

Here's another "Evening Project". These actually took me a couple of nights but that's mostly because I dropped one during basecoating and had to put it back together. I also started them late the first night I built them. These only took a couple hours to build none the less and they are made almost entirely from junk.



Here you can see the parts. The antena are made from a couple of wooden beads and a toothpick. The dish is from the guts of a deodorant dispenser. The arm holding the dish up is the top of a plastic disposable shaving razor handle. The white part is a soda bottle cap and the clear part is a tub from a powdered drink mix container. The hardest part was using a razor saw to cut the plastic razor handles down. Very simple.

Quick and Dirty Bunker

We needed a bunker for the AE Bounty Scenario "Hold the Fort" and despite 20+ years of miniature gaming I didn't really have one. My wife made this one out of foam core and I painted it. It only took a couple hours most of which as waiting for glue and washes to dry.

A lot of the time I will sit around thinking that I need to build some piece of terrain for a game or scenario I'd like to run but then I start over thinking the project and it doesn't even get started. A lot of the time these are simple projects that I just need to get stuck in on and do start to finish in a few hours like we did with this bunker.

I've decided I want to try a new project called "Evening Projects" based on simple terrain projects that can be finished in a few hours. Hopefully I will have at least one of these projects a week so keep an eye out.

AE Bounty Battle Report "Pirate Raid"

We played our second game of AE Bounty Thursday night playing with pretty much the same crews as we did in our first report. The only major change in the list was that the green squads in Boon's Irregulars replaced their grenades with AP rounds.

We randomly selected the "Robbery" scenario from the book. The pirates has the secondary objective "Assassination" and the militia had the secondary objective "Capture".

I was playing the pirates and my objective was steeling loot from the militia's warehouse in the center of the table. The dirty trick I had selected for the battle was "scouts" which allowed me to set up the "Duct Rats" in hidden deployment. In the last battle this served me having three pirates with sub machineguns gunning down militia from turn one however the battlefield condition we rolled was "darkness" so they needed a 6 on a d6 to hit anything. Still with a rate of fire of 3 it seemed like a good idea.

Rolling 9 dice helped the "Duct Rats" score hits but their targets all had medium cover which added quit a bit to their armor saves. Redjack the militia sniper has the "Hunter" ability with "human" chosen as the target race. That gave him +1 strength to his shots. He was also a crack shot and he also had the "Crack Shot" ability which allowed him to ignore up to 2 points of cover. With two shots and a better ranged combat skill than the pirates he quickly started eliminating them.

By the 2nd turn Captain Cyclopes had managed to pick up a bag of loot and head for the table edge. I had to get two bags of loot off the table to achieve the primary objective of the battle. I chose to use my captain and my two quarter masters to be my looters because they had more action points than my crew and just picking up a bag of loot cost an action point.

Things just kept getting nastier for the "Duct Rats". My wife moved two militia around to flank me and I managed to shoot one down but Redjack dropped another pirate.

By the third turn Carson Boon had got into the fight. Fortunately for the pirates Vinnie the Quartermaster had picked up another bag of loot and was heading off with it. Grim was not so lucky and ended up in hand to hand with the militia leader so "Da Gurlz" charged down the hill to help him. Boon was wounded in the first turn due to being highly outnumbered.

By the end of the third turn Captain Cyclopes had made it off the tabled edge. Vinnie looked close behind with the 2nd bag.

By the fourth turn militia members Smith and Jones charged into the combat at the warehouse. During the fighting "Da Gurlz" were wiped out but Grimm the quartermaster managed to put another wound of Boon.

By the end of the 4th turn Vinnie was right at the tables edge with the 2nd bag of loot but it would be another turn before he could get off the table with it.

Grim managed to hold off the militia with some amazing hand to hand combat rolls. He even managed to take Jones down. What really helped him was that Quartermasters get a natural 4 armor value and he had a light armor suit with made his armor value 5. Since no one in the fight had any hand to hand combat weapons it was pretty easy for him to resist strength 2 attacks.

At the end of the battle the pirates had achieved the primary objective of getting two bags of loot off the table. The militia had achieved their faction objective of 1000 creds due largely to the 500 cred bonus for wiping out two thirds of the pirates. According to the rules it was a tie. Playing this scenario was quite a bit of fun and I think you could easily add it into a story or map based campaign. We will hopefully be starting some kind of AE Bounty campaign soon in our "Station 42" setting.