A Kabalite's Rise to Glory

As it turns out, someone at my local GW has decided to run a 40k campaign from now until roughly the end of April, so I figure this is the perfect way to build up my fledgling kabal. The points values are going to be very low to start off with, but escalating higher and after a few weeks we'll be moving to a map based campaign. There's 3 factions - the Imperium form team 1; Orks, Tau and Nids on team 2; and team 3 consists of Chaos, Eldar, Dark Eldar and Necrons. Dependent on margins of victory and the like, we can earn more points to upgrade our army as we go, with big jumps at set points. The rules for the first campaign turn (two weeks) I'm just going to summarise: 300 points, 50% must be troops, no vehicles with an AV of >12, and you can only use troops, fast attack, or heavy support. No monstrous creatures or named characters. The idea is that your sergeant (or equivalent) is the warlord, and grows in stature as the campaign goes on.

I took (and this will be my basis for subsequent lists):

10 Warriors, Sybarite (warleader), in a raider with splinter racks

5 warriors, blaster, venom, additional splinter cannon.

8 of us turned up for the first day, and we got things started with some paired games, done along faction lines for fluff. The Kabal of the Eternal Masquerade (thanks to the name generator here!) would play their first game tagged up with Necrons (10 Immortals, 4 destroyers) against a combined alliance of Blood Angels (10 man tac squad with lascannon, melta and plasma pistol, and a 4 man scout bike squad) and Grey Knights (5 man strike squad with some stuff, razorback, and a dreadnought). Night fighting for turn one, and the DE/Cron force won the roll.


Deployment ran thusly; lascannon squad at the back, melta squad has pinched the GK's razor. The bikers infiltrated and scouted down towards the Dark Eldar. We've got 4 objectives - aiming to control each ruin is the name of the game for this one. The Imperials failed to seize the initiative.

Turn 1 - DE


And a brutal turn 1. The venom and raider advance towards the scout bikers, whilst the Necrons just plod forwards. The dual cannons on the venom kill 3 of the scout bikers, and its the work of a moment for the warrior squad in the raider to bring down the final member for first blood and a pain token (of course, my sybarite wanted the first kill ). The necrons managed to shoot down most of the strike squad.

Turn 1 - Imperial


The forces of the imperium advance, the razorback disgorging the combat squad who want revenge. The dread stamps forwards. The combat squad fires a melta and plasma shot at the venom, but the flickerfield dissipates it. The remaining anti-tank volleys at the raider, but only succeeds in glancing it and stunning it. Other firepower knocks over a few immortals, but one gets back up.

Turn 2 - DE


The venom scoots around the back. Stunned raider can do nothing, and the toasters shuffle a bit. My raider squad gets a few hits thanks to splinter racks, but only kills one marine. The venom squad gets another, and the necrons finish them and the last grey knight. The venom itself plugs some shots into the tactical squad with lascannon, but only kills a few.

From this point on, its pretty straightforward. The raider is wrecked, and the warriors lose two when they go into the nearest building for an objective thanks to cluster mines. The venom keeps dodging the heavy bolter on the razorback, and the destroyers glance the dreadnought to death whilst the venom squad finishes off the combat squad. The game ends in a crushing victory for the ancients - killing all but a razorback, getting first blood, linebreaker, both enemy warleaders, and 3 objective; all for the loss of a raider, a destroyer, 2 warriors and two immortals.

The other campaign game was a hard-fought draw between two Necron players and a Space Wolf/Dark Angel pairing... in true Dark Eldar-y fashion I turned on the Necrons in a 1 on 1 game immediately but got hammered

Apologies for the vaguely crappy report; first time using battle chronicler rather than photos, and being a rather short and small game. I'm hoping to keep this thread as a generic campaign log, with battle reports going in as and when I get games. They'll probably be a bit rubbish to start off with, but hopefully they'll get better as points (and my battle chronicler aptitude!) increase.

A great report, look forward to the next one! Added this report to the The Big Thread of Illustrated Battle Reports Sticky.

Thanks for sharing the pain.

Hi Panic,

Nice job on the reports. Cool idea for building up your army, looking forward
To the continuation of this

What are you planning on adding ??. Are you keeping your Hq or can you change it as you have more points. ??.

Regards Forgotten

Sounds like a great idea. It's a good exercise in learning how units function and how their roles shift in different size armies.

A few weeks back we upgraded to get an actual HQ rather than a glorified squad leader, but we have to use that as our HQ for the rest of the campaign. I've actually got quite a sizeable force due to bonus points - the better you do, the more points you have to spend on your army. At certain stages the points jumps so that everyone is working from the same minimum, but you still keep your bonus points.

I've been holding back on further updates until today, because today marks the start of the map-based portion of the campaign (planetary empires style, I think) - the past month has been about jockeying for advantage heading into the map based portion.

The factions have been jumbled slightly, so that DE are now on the 'new world order' side, as have guard...however, due to a lack of players this team is struggling. The ancients are ahead, but the two front runners are each from the other factions. Standings check show that there are 15 players... for the top section we have:
Dark Angels with 780 points
Dark Eldar with 766 points (me)
Necrons with 689
Chaos with 687
Necrons with 653
Necrons with 633

Everyone else has <600 points, and there's two pretty clear front runners with a 77 point gap between second and third.

I'll update tonight with another battle report hopefully, and let you all know how things are going!

And we're off! Today's game was a Relic battle involving me and Imperial Guard versus a nasty dual-Necron alliance. Will try and post a proper battle report tomorrow if I can beat battle chronicler into submission.

Nuts and bolts breakdown: we did jack-all turn 1 short of kill 2 wraiths for first blood, my army got shot to bits on their first turn, but the guard came through where it counted and we tag-teamed them, leadership-bombing two warrior squads with a psyker battle squad on turns two and three, getting the one on turn 2 off the table, and knocking one away on turn 3 so it couldn't claim the relic (the other squad they had was just out of range). Moment of the match was my archon taking down a destroyer lord with mindshackle scarabs in a challenge, never even needing to turn on his shadowfield. Ended up having to end after 3 turns, with us winning 3 VPs to 0, with all 3 secondary objectives, nobody with the relic. If it had continued, good chance we'd have overrun them thanks mostly to the guard with the PBS. More to come next week!