Finally, a game!

 So, the weekend before last I actually managed to play the first scenario of Rangers of Shadow Deep that I’ve prepping for for… well, a year and a half at this point!

So, to set the scene: there’s a blog post breaking down my party, but for a Tl;DR rather than a ranger it’s a Paladin from Lorenthia, the kingdom that was swallowed by the Shadow Deep, who whilst zealous is not particularly adept at politics, and so was manipulated into being outside of the kingdom so as not to thwart the ambitions of some less savoury types at court. Joke’s on them though, as their kingdom was destroyed and they’re presumably all dead, whereas the Paladin survives, offering her services to Alladore, leading raids into the Shadow Deep to have her vengeance.

I won’t do a turn by turn breakdown, but here are some pics snapped during the game:

The abandoned village:

I made dozens of trees and bushes, and only ended up using a handful! Not to worry though, the next scenario is set in a forest so they’ll get their time in the sun I’m sure.

A zombie shambles into the village past the outhouse:

The posse form a circle to defend the village:

I was very lucky at the start of the game, being able to pick off single zombies at range before they threatened anyone, and being very luck in what event cards I drew, resulting in far fewer zombies bundling onto the board than there could have been!

I was able to split the party up to grab the majority of the clue tokens in the first few turns, almost immediately finding the missing Rangers body in the woodshed, resulting in my Halfling Rogue acquiring a shiny new magic sword, and the Paladin finding a treasure token (which was later revealed to be a Herb that I can’t see myself ever using, but not every roll can be a winner)

My Savage also cleaved his way through multiple zombies, managing to roll two critical hits during the game, and generally being an efficient murder machine

I do also enjoy that entirely randomly I ended up finding a surviving villager cowering in the outhouse:

I was admittedly tempted to use him as backup for some of my characters to gang up on zombies, but decided not to risk him getting eaten and so he spent the rest of the game shrieking in terror and scrabbling round the well trying to avoid being seen by any zombies (which is fair enough, as they were probably his friends and family…)

My initial luck with dice rolling ran out a bit towards the end of the game, and my Savage barbarian got mauled by a zombie (he’s strong, but with no armour when he gets hit he gets hit hard), and my conjuror who had been sent off to stay out of trouble and grab a distant clue token getting ambushed by a zombie…

My wounded Savage was able to sprint round the outside of the village to rescue him though - that ganging up bonus really helps!

(That die showing a six is how many health he has left after a single hit from a zombie previously!)

So, with the party pairing up to gang up on any remaining zombies I was able to clear out the rest of the village in short order, and the Paladin rushed over to Heal the wounded Savage. While this was going on, the next Event Card flipped revealed… a building collapse, so I was quite pleased to be able to replace the building with a suitable footprint of rubble pieces:

So, at this point, it’s just my models on the table with a couple of turns to go. I was tempted to call the game there, but figured I should probably play it out to the end in case any more zombies appeared (plus, out of game, I could always do with killing some more zombies for the XP!). And appear they did, with four appearing for the last turn (see what I mean about being lucky earlier in the game, it might not have been such a smooth ride if they turned up four at a time from the very beginning!), starting a mad rush to try and wipe out as many zombies as possible before the game ended!

I managed to wipe out a couple, gaining enough XP to gain a level when the scenario ended. Having found the missing Ranger, some strange tracks and an eyewitness, we were able to discover that the zombies were a result of some weird spiders that have some sort of be romantic venom, so it’s off to the woods for us next time! Well, as soon as I’ve made some more trees to use as nest trees:

(Some old salvaged Citadel trees taking a bath in a baggie as they were too awkwardly shaped for the pot I was originally going to use to strip them in)

Obviously, in order to get to this point, the Tally took a hit when I spent some birthday money to get a copy of the updated hardback RoSD rules, and added some miniatures to the order in order to qualify for free shipping (which is just sound financial planning, after all):

Which takes the Tally to:

19 vs 23 = -4

So dipping into the red, but not so far that I can’t get out of it with a little focus on clearing some half painted miniatures out of the queue.

Obviously I’ve not been doing that though, instead I’ve been planning for the next Rangers scenario (all I need is some nest trees and cocoon tokens), prepping a staggeringly ridiculous number of miniatures for undercoating based on what I like the look of rather than anything sensible like what I might need for future scenarios), and also dealing that it’s almost Zomtober, so prepping even more miniatures for that!