Twilight Emporium

First pass at playing over Google Hangouts

Necromunda – Five members of my gaming group were able to meet up over Google Hangouts to have a pit fight. We used the rules I posted up the other day day and it was pretty successful. After three games we did have a few issues that need to be addressed before we play again.

First off being locked in a tiny fighting pit with a Corpse Grinder armed with Paired Heavy Chain Cleavers is bad news. Corpse Grinders are a very strong in close combat and many of the abilities they have seem to be an over correction to the weakness of close combat in Necromunda. If you don’t have a chance to shoot and pin them or stay out of charge range there’s little hope of beating them. Right now we’re considering limiting pit fights to the original six house only, it makes sense from a fluff perspective and puts everyone on a more even playing field. The downside is the non-house gangs are really cool and everyone wants to be able to play their favorite character. The compromise is to eliminate the “scary” part of the masks and remove any ability that flat out takes a model out of action. We’re going to try this next week and if it doesn’t work out better than we’ll go to just the original six gangs.

The other issue we had was a chess board isn’t big enough if you count squares as 1” the easy fix is to change them to 2” squares and count a diagonal move as 3”. Intially we opted to use a chess board because everyone could easily replicate the board state at home. In practice I use my laptop and phone to both join the call and suspended my phone above the board. So it wasn’t necessary for everyone to have a board at home. That being said we’re going to use the game mat that came with Dark Uprising next week. I’ll make a number and letter key for the grid so we can easily call out our moves.

We’ll also be tweaking a few things.
• Showboating: Models only get one action on turn one.
• We Want Blood: Ranged weapons aren’t allowed until turn three.
• From the Hip: Weapons with the Sidearm trait may be used on turn two.
• FIGHT CLUB: Fighter may purchase any items from theBook of Judgement Trading post up to Rare 9.

Apart from those minor snags we had a great time and played three games. We’ll try again next week with the tweaks detailed above.

Necromunda – Prior to all this COVID nonsense I was participating in two separate Necromunda campaigns. Neither of my gangs was doing particularly well, but I was having fun. Both campaigns were moving along and didn’t seem to be in danger of stalling out, then the world went to shit and getting together for games wasn’t going to happen.

After a few brainstorming sessions we decided that running Necromunda pit fights over video chat seemed to be the most feasible way of playing. Only having one model per player to keep track of and an easily translatable grid seemed to make sense. In the event that this goes well we can continue to have fights during lockdown and generate some credits for our gangs when we can meet back up face-to-face.

Here’s the rules I came up with, I’ll post a follow up later this month with some type of after battle report.