Terror On The Headland

[Wirelizard]

It was a dark and stormy night...

... and four survivors of the wreck of a coastal steamer found themselves on a storm-wracked beach, clutching a few supplies rescued from the waves, when a flash of lightning revealed a building on the headland above them.


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Corey (Burgundavia here on LAF) built the headland and supplied most of the other players (his usual AD&D group, looking for a diversion) and most of the figures were mine, except for the red-robed cultists, who were his.

It was a fairly RPG-like setup - each of the four of us had one Grade 3 character, and Corey GM'd and ran the cultists.

The building was dark and silent when we approached - but was that a terrible human scream, or just random storm noise?!

Peering through a window revealed a snug lightstation - with a man tied up and gagged in one corner, and a trickle of blood running down the stairs leading up to the tower! Entering the building our heros un-gagged the man, only for him to scream the house down in apparent total insanity. Heading up the blood-dripping stairs, we discovered a terrible sight - a chanting figure in robe and mask who had just hacked the beating heart out of a woman bound to a table!!

A brawl broke out in the tower, with an SMG-armed cultist and his knife-armed leader on one side, and on the other, the 2nd mate of the wrecked ship, wielding two knives with great skill, while the two surviving female passengers had a pistol and a rifle between them.

The cultist flunky was eventually put down, but the cult leader, still chanting, leapt out of the window and escaped, for the moment, into the storm.

The last member of the party was downstairs still - lack of room to get into the excitement up in the tower - and happened to notice, in a flash of lightning, a trio of heavily-armed cultist approaching the building! He braced the only door against them, and held it until the end of the game - the cultists never got into the actual building!

The other heros shot through the windows and even right through the door itself to scare off the cultists; the cult leader re-appeared out of the storm to shoot through one of the back windows of the building, until a headshot from one heroine's pistol caused him to plummet from the cliff and be swept away in the raging sea...


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One cultist wounded one of the heroines with his flamethrower (!) but was killed by a shot to the head through a window; the other two were flushed out of their attempt on the door by suppressive fire around the gap in the door as they attempted to force it, and then ran into the deadly rifle fire of the second heroine, who had slipped out a side window and gone around the corner of the house.

The 2nd mate made it out another back window and attempted to round the side of the house to attack the cultists, but he lost his footing on the cliff edge in the howling storm and plunged into the sea. Unhurt, but he ended the game still struggling to get to the safety of the beach.

Aside from burns on one of the heroines, the rest suffered only minor injuries, while the dreadful cult was shattered - at least for now!

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The headland is a chunk of 2" thick foam insulation, the building is made of Hirst Arts fieldstone. Neither is totally finished, but they're done enough to game on.

[Burgundavia]

A few other notes:
-the heroes had 12 grades of characters (4 x 3) while the cultists only had 8 (3, 2, 1, 1, 1). However, the cultists were able to pin the heroes inside the building, to their advantage.
-it was my regular roleplaying group, but we actually play Arcanis, which is a D&D 3.5 deriv set in a world very similar to Ancient Rome
-the scenery piece needs a lot of work, but the pictures are crueler than the eye. The flash really shows the white flecks in the paint of the building.
-the only Hirst Arts mold used was the basic fieldstone mold
-base is cloroplast (corrugated plastic) 16x24, left over from my campaign for local council last fall.

All in all, it was a lot of fun. It was the second time I have run .45A for my group, this time a more standard "D&D adventure" as opposed to the nearly pure gunfight we had last time.

[postal]

very nice

[Operator5]

Excellent stuff.

If you really want to have some fun with a scenario like this. Start the heroes with no weapons (as they have been shipwrecked). Watch as they try and wrestle guns away or just get away from the cultists.

[Wirelizard]

If you really want to have some fun with a scenario like this. Start the heroes with no weapons (as they have been shipwrecked). Watch as they try and wrestle guns away or just get away from the cultists.

We thought about that, but somehow our survivors managed to keep hold of their weaponry despite the raging sea!

To be fair, the cultists were heavily armed - five of them, with a pistol, a rifle, two SMGs and a flamethrower (!) between them. Unarmed survivors would have had a rough time of it.

The more lightly armed cultists aren't off Burgundavia's painting table yet, apparently...

[Burgundavia]

There is a bunch of stuff that is on my painting table. I am terrible at actually finishing projects.