A bit of threadomancer....some old SOTR battle reports I put on another site (2)

[Glenn]

A bit of a change in pace.....a bank robbery...of sorts...SOTR style

She listened carefully to his words, hearing "family vault, gold, time to get away from the war"... and "vampire"

He was quite the most suave prisoner she'd ever captured, his two soldiers equally polite as he.

He was....according to the papers....Count Alkelly of Romania and, so his story went...he had had enough of the ravages of his nation under the clouds of flame and gas and wished only to steal a treasure his family technically owned and then get to a neutral country. In return for her aid and that of some vey mercenary Germans equally ready to leave the war behind he promised her wealth unbound.



Sergeant Haas had been with Mi13 cell Gawain for two years now but with the rest of the cell currently split across the war and herself only recently recovered from injuries her chance encounter at the prisoner interrogation centre had left her genuinely intruiged.

So it was that three days later, she, the Count, his two remaining retainers and seven turn coat Germans including a technical specialist were carefully making their way through the thick forests in the west of the Counts old lands.



Ahead lay, she knew, a fortified watch tower supported by a section or so of Mech grenadiers and possibly a light anti aircraft gun.





And if all went to plan inside the watch tower was a stairway leading down into a warren of tunnels



Guarded, so the count assured her, by German wonder weapons



The off switch to which....he said...he knew where to look, hence the technical specialist amongst the turn coats



Far inside the warren of tunnels lay the vault where his family gold was stored, guarded, he confessed, by a German vampire.



So..into the forest then, stealthily moving to the watch towers defences



Where, after an exchance of sniper fire to take down a machine gun team, small arms fire and a torrent of smoke grenades a vicious melee began led by Sgt Haas and the opportunistic turn coats.



The fire fight and melee ranged across the narrow front line and both sides took losses



The anti aircraft gun took its toll, of both dead and downed, before finally being over run



Finally, with three of their original ten killed the seven remaining looters prepared to breach the bunker, the technical specialist, camouflaged as a medic stood back whilst the others shot their way in past the remaining troops inside.



Sgt Haas took the specialist and what was left of her team of five to find and switch off the wonder weapons defences before they could be used whilst the count and his remaining team members prepared to fight off the reanimated dead that were beginning to sense their arrival





Throughout the tunnels gunfire occurred as the would be looters became split up in the face of oncoming zombies and the worrying sounds of the first wonder weapon powering up.



The count and his men ,reduced further in numbers by the zombies, faced the newly arrived floating mechanised horror.



Haas and her own team ran back desperately to help the count and his men against the wonder weapon and even  more undead as the technician succeeded in stopping the second and third mechanised horror powering up.



Finally the looters destroyed the wonder weapon and held back the undead, but not before the returning technician fell foul of some wandering zombies.



Where there had once been ten there now only remained four survivors but the way to the vault was at long last clear.



Ahead the vampire sensed their blood and took mist form to hide in the winding caverns and tunnels



Perhaps greed...or perhaps caution....caused the four survivors to split into pairs and to head separately to the vault, the vampire bided his time and appeared behind the count and his remaining Romanian retainer.



His last retainer killed by the vampire the count ran in terror only to find Sgt Haas and her last ally, as the vampire reached them the scene was set for the final struggle.



Tearing through the last turn coat German with vicious joy the vampire found itself a little too close to Sgt Haas and a white phosphorous grenade....



And so....it ended as it began...Sgt Haas and Count Alkelly alone...but this time with a small fortune in gold to plunder.

And as to whether one or both walked out with the gold.....is another story.

...

Another experiment with role play and wargaming, huge amount of fun inspired by watching Kellys Heroes a couple of weeks previously and with me wanting to find some reason to use the (so far only five) Romanians I've painted up!

My opponents were Ian and Paula, part of my rpg group but not normally part of my wargames circle.

We used the starting point of Paulas Mi13 character Sgt Haas from our weird war role play game and a captured Romanian count. His tale of greed and possible treasure appealed to Paula in the rpg and made a perfect set up for a one off battle.

The looters consisted basically off two slightly modified command teams (one elite, one veteran) and although they were on the same side they took separate turns and initiative and so on. One team (Sgt Haas') had an officer (Haas) and four other soldiers, all armed with either smgs or assault rifles (with one technician being the alternative to the command team medic and carrying only a pistol), the other had the Count as an officer and two Germans with smgs and two Romanian retainers with semi auto rifles (that we allowed to have a sniping rule if they fired as one shot weapons)

Against them were two squads of mechgrenadiers (green) including a team for a light anti aircraft piece (in game terms it was a  twin linked lmg) above ground and two units of ten zombies, three dhrones (unpowered  at the start of the game) and a vampire in the tunnels below.

We pretty much stuck to the normal rules for SOTR with just a few minor rules tweaks for things like the dhrones only powering up one at a time and the technician being able to stop them with a successful moral/skill check etc and each team had a couple of secret orders. And then......after that the story above hopefully pretty much tells how it all occurred.

SOTR more and more impresses me with its potential  for small scale heroics as well as bigger battles and its ability to drag in some of my rpg players who'd ordinarily not touch a wargame is a big bonus for our group.