Playing Rogue Trader: Battle at the Farm

Yes, this is for real! We are playing Warhammer 40,000 using the rules first appeared back in 1987. Of course, we had to play the mytical 'Battle al the Farm' between Crimson Fists Space Marines and Snagrod's Orks.

Legendary primeval  Rulebook. If you never played this, you are too young

Rynn's World has been invaded by infamous Ork Warlord Snagrod the Arch-Arsonist of Charadon. The Space Marine Chapter of the Crimson Fists, dwelleres of that planet, are driven to the brink of extinction after a missile destroyed their fortress-monastery. Their remains, leaded by Commander Pedro Cantor, had to really do their best not to prevail, but even to survive.

Pedro Cantor and 15 Space Marines find shelter in an abandoned burned farm. But they cannot find rest, as a horde of Orks under the command of Thrugg Bullneck are heading just there. Thrugg hid a chest of jewels when he burned the farm and now he's taking advantage of a rutinary patrol to try to recover them secretely without their boys knowing anything about that...

The whole story is better told here:

Directly from the pages of the rulebook

I played the role of Thrugg Bullneck and Mighty Miguel from Laserburn assumed the role of Pedro Cantor. As a matter of fact you can find all the campaign in his web, I'm translating here the most of it for the record.

The Space Marine forces were these:



Squad Rodriguez



Squad Patts

Squad Culln



Pedro Cantor


The Ork forces were these:



Sergeant Hruk's Squad




Ork Squad #2




Ork Squad #3




Ork Squad #4



Thrugg Bullneck (well, an ordinary Ork mini)



So, you wanna see what happens next with all these people? Let's battle!

 Turn 1: the Orks moved and advanced towards the farm.




Old MacDonald had a farm, ee i ee i o!



'Ere we go! 'Ere we go!

Nothing else happened that turn, of course. Right after that, the Crimon Fists realized that something was happening, so they decided to look up:



Hey, dude, what's happening out there?

They begun to shoot, but nothing happened. That's why the Orks roared and advanced again. As a matter of fact, the following turns were more or less the same: advance, shoot, advance, shoot...




Shoot'em up!



Oi! Resist, boyz!

At some point we realized that something was going wrong; it was, of course, the very deployment. We had set the Orks really, really far from the farm. They could do absolutely nothing in order to achieve their objective (i.e., stay a whole turn inside the farm main building with Thrugg or Hruk). Turn after turn they were heading to it as fast as they could and the building was impossible to reach.
So yes, this was just a shooting gallery, we had screwed it up. But what the hell, we were not going to repeat it at this point, so we just kept on playing.




Fewer and fewer Orks each turn




And fewer!!

As you can see, there was no much tension, but we were still enjoying of the absurdness of the situation. We made a clash of bosses:

This pic could have been taken 25 years ago, but it wasn't

And the inevitable conclusion was:




Ouchie!

 Well, and that was all, folks.
This game wasn't compensated at all due to the enormous distance (we did not measure it at the beginning, I must confess) so this was just shooting practice with green targets, nothing else.

Had we done it better, the battle would have been much more fun. However, we enjoyed it enough, gaming with RT rules again. If you haven't played this game, I encourage you to do so.

But don't worry, you will have the opportunity to see more Old School gaming over here...