Halpi's Rift: Keep the Flame Alight

This week saw our intrepid warbands venture onto the Empyrean Plane, the home of the Shining Ones. The Men started with control of the beacon and wanted to keep it alight in the hopes of attracting some Celestial intervention, the Undead wanted to prevent this from happening.

We'd played this scenario before and under the original rules it proved very difficult for the attacker to win, this time we played the FAQ'd version. In the updated version it was only a short action to light/douse the beacon and this could be done even if an enemy was in contact with the beacon if the model taking the action was not engaged with the enemy. This makes it much easier for the attacker to win and gives the defender more work to do.

The first move saw the Undead push up and the Men largely hold position. The Men were shocked to see that one of the Undead archers looked surprising like Akatasos, a former brother in arms who had fallen and they thought been safely buried after the last battle. 

In the second turn the Men tried to peg the Undead back by charging three foot guards into their lines, the Undead moved their left flanking force back into the centre. Two of the Foot Guard were cut down in short order and the Men also took some pot shots into the archers sending Akatasos back into the grave from which he was raised.

In the third turn the Undead managed to finish off Foot Guard and moved forwards to position themselves for charges in the next. The Men rushed towards the beacon and also put some withering fire into Radolf (the werewolf). Radolf had been incapacitated in the two previous battles by the ranged fire of the Men and this time he was knocked down but not finished off.

In the picture below we can see the start of round 4 where Radolf is on his feet once again and just about to charge in and kill the Ogre warrior in on fell swoop, he was then finished off by Senban the Men's leader. The remaining Undead archers also managed to remove one of the Men's Hunters.

By the end of turn 4 the Undead had pushed up to within charge range of the Beacon and also caused enough casualties to take the Men over their break point. With no way of being able to stop the Undead from putting the beacon out the Men withdrew from the field rather than face mounting casualties.

With the battlefield secure Leonard the Revenant healer in the warband was able to work on Radolf who was once again brought back from death with no ill effects, the others in the warband have now started to call him Radolf the Undying. Necromancer Hare was also able to use his arts to reconstruct the corpse of Akatasos so he could be compelled to fight again. Things did not go so well for the Men as the Newbie Foot Guard who had just been recruited into the Warband perished from his wounds and some of the others received some lasting wounds.

I also completed the Great Winged Half-breed for Mr T's Abyssal Dwarf army, this was a surprise gift for him to add into his army. Knowing that his painting speed is not the highest I thought I would tackle the large part of the model and leave him to work his magic on the rider.

The head and saddle are metal and add a lot of weight to the model so I glued them together and painted them separately from the rest. With hindsight it would have been easier to paint the wings before gluing them on as well but it wasn't a massive issue. I went largely with the red & black studio paint scheme and used the new Army Painter metallic colours for the scales and then mostly contrast with a black wash and dry brushed highlights for the rest. Once all stuck together it's a large and imposing model and hopefully with grace the field of battle once Mr T has enough Abyssal Dwarfs to play a game with.