Confrontation: Afterword

It's funny how projects can spin out of hand...

I'd thought to start this narrative gaming blog shortly before heading off to take part in my first tournament. Writing up the tournament into a short story seemed like a fun way to kick off the blog - as well as being a great writing challenge - before I moved onto the other projects that I have lined up for this page.

Three months later...

I'd never intended to come back with five blow-by-blow battle reports to type up, and I've largely stuck to that, aiming for covering each game's general flow instead and even omitting some other details entirely (sorry for editing your Stalker Tank from the entire thing Jody). So while each chapter follows the battle it describes pretty closely, it's selective, sometimes leaving out the flyers, or a last-minute, desperate objective grab that wasn't really relevant to the narrative.

Ah yes, the narrative. We won our first game at the tournament and then lost the following four, being tabled twice in the process. Couldn't care less incidentally, we had a great time. The tournament, organised and hosted by Ricky at Confrontation Events (https://www.facebook.com/confrontationevents/) was superb, filled to the rafters with fun and funny players, lots of friends and club members, and the sense of a great local games community. It was a pleasure to attend regardless of the score-line.

That said, a story about an army that fails to win battles continuously might not be a natural draw for a reader. Luckily fate stepped up to lend a hand. After winning our first game we were in a pretty good position, table-wise, and so went up against a big hitter of an army.

Culture shock time. Being new to the whole thing, we'd drafted army lists within the constraints of the tournament rules but sticking quite closely to the 'fluffy' gaming style we play on our regular games nights. We now faced the tournament list your mum warned you about, a beast that was failing to win hearts and minds across the world at the time; consisting of about 70 Fenrisian wolves, in a single formation unit with around four or five Dark Angel librarians joined to it as characters were able to do in 7th edition, I believe it has been dubbed the Barkstar. It stretched across the entire gaming table, one unit that similarly stretched the letter of the games rules to breaking point - it was the ultimate wake up call. That the team fielding it had found the list online and were substituting tyrannid models for wolves and Night Lords for Dark Angels in a WYSIWYG tournament was the icing on the cake.

The sheer audacity of the thing had me laughing in disbelief for three hours straight. As it happens, if we hadn't faced off against that team the resulting tale I came back with would have been far more ordinary and plain. That army, and that game, became central to the overall story. Even the model substitution informed how I would come to describe my 'abomination'.

At this point it's worth noting that there were nearly 30 teams at the tournament, fielding almost every conceivable faction available - there was an amazing Slaaneshi daemon army that I would have loved to have played. Ynarri elder forces, T'au, a genius Ork army with motorised buggies. Yet after our defeat at the hands of a combined Space Wolves / Dark Angels team our next two games were against... Space Wolves and/or Dark Angels. Indeed, we didn't ever face one non-imperial opponent. On the face of it that might have made forging a narrative quite difficult, yet the preceding story had presented itself before we'd even driven home on the second day.

I have a vague timeline plotted out for the Stigmata Seraphim, from their inception 10,000 years in the game's past, to the events that will take place as a direct result of this story. I had no idea that this story would take place of course; of the manipulative, cold-hearted nature that the commanders of my chapter would have taken on by this stage, but it was fun to discover it.

It was equally entertaining to personify our opponents, especially the Dark Angels, sorry Lions Castellant. I like to use home-brewed chapters where possible to avoid conflict with 40k canon. Carving out your own little corner of the galaxy is something that's been encouraged by the game developers since Rogue Trader, and is part of what's inspired this blog. Those character moments between bit-parters were a large part of what drew this story out to its final length but I'm glad they're there. Perhaps someday I'll discover what happened between Eufrayn and Guyyl in the end.

Needless to say, our opponents were good natured, fair players to a man, and won their games fair and square, regardless of the character's shenanigans in this tale. My thanks for both the games and for the permission to take the in-game pictures are gratefully given; any changes to the games are for narrative purposes and not an attempt to suggest that myself and Jody didn't get our arses kicked. They were kicked often.

Other than our strange attraction for Wolf/Angel team-ups, there was another odd moment of note that weekend. It came during the Barkstar game, against an army that some might view as a microcosm of everything that had gone wrong with 7th edition 40k. As I laughed at the unlikeliness of what was happening, it was as though Tzeentch gazed down and laughed with me. An hour into the match, Games Workshop officially announced 8th edition. Suddenly the tournament had a commemorative feeling of sorts, of an era drawing to a close.*

Our first 7th edition tournament, it turned out, was also our last.

I hope that the story I've finally presented here manages to capture a little of the grandiose madness of those games, and also whets your appetites to discover what takes place before and after this tale. Hopefully all will become clear in time.

Just, you know, not too much time.


*I know 7th was only around for a couple of years. But we played it a lot.