Core Space - Perseus Arm campaign

 

The Perseus Arm campaign. This campaign was started in May 2019 and as usual I put it away because I wanted to complete painting the minis before I continued. Well, I did manage to finish painting the minis in 2022. But I didn’t play it much. Just 2 games… and stopped again. (WHY??!!!!)

Well, this month I decided to finish the campaign once and for all. And whaddya know. I did!

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The trader crews of the Black Maria and the Ion Hope have been "requested" by the Galactic Commission to put an end to the Purge menace once and for all. So they have to work together (no co-opetitive nonsense here) to accomplish this goal.

The climax to the campaign comes in 2 parts. The first part: you need to hack a computer (of course) to take some power generators offline so I could destroy it.

The game was fun. After my hacker with the remote hacking device successfully hacked a computer terminal so the crews could get in to a certain spot to destroy the Macguffins, the Purge came in with a vengeance! I lucked out earlier and for 3 whole turns, no Purge reinforcements! That white model in the background is an Assassin that specifically targets trader ship Captains!!!

Thankfully with a little luck that menace was taken care of, and the mission was accomplished. Lots of things blowing up.

That mission was immediately followed up by Mission 8B -- no rest for the wicked! -- where I now had to interact with 4 consoles to take the security offline so I could blow up the teleporter (?) beaming in the Purge from goodness knows where.

Lots of exciting action but the kicker was when a Live One showed up. It took a grenade to put him down (4 dice!) and my crew managed to escape because the secondary blast only caused 2 damage and his armour took care of one. (The grenade was thrown by a crew hiding behind the table in desperation when all the guns failed to put down the Live One.)

Here, the Purge swarmed out of the teleports, going for the crew of the Ion Hope (top left) as the crew of the Black Maria finally got out of their sector of the ship (bottom right). I think the Ion hope crew managed to whittle down the Purge a little.

That was NOT an easy task! Jace, the Captain of the Ion Hope, went down! Not to the assassin as you might expect but to another Purge at the top of the photo (you can just make out its legs). The dice just did 3 damage twice in a row! And Jace only had armour for physical attacks, not whatever energy guns pump out in the Core Space milieu. 

The finale was a doozy! Weakened by the combat on board the ship, the floor gave way! (The markers on the floor in the photo above were how I determined where the floor caved in. Lucky!) And sure enough almost every model you can see in the photo fell down the hole!

Taking advantage of the fact the Purge were no longer on the table, the Captain of the Black Maria finally destroyed the final macguffin doohickey, shutting down the teleports in the process. Now to mop up the remaining Purge.

Luckily, everyone managed to crawl back up again and the Ion Hope trader crew even managed to revive Captain Jace. Meanwhile the crew of the Black Maria surrounded the cave-in, and just shot the Purge as they climbed back out again. Even though it was a kind of turkey shoot (climbing out finishes the activation), they didn't complete the task and the Ion Hope crew had to finish the job.

And that’s the end of a 4+ year long campaign! There was one final mission in the campaign but it didn’t make sense for a solo game. So I decided to make that the first game in my upcoming 5 Parsecs/Core space mash up! I’ll be using 5P to provide the overall framework for the campaign, and Core Space to actually play out the battles. That means the normal 5P stats will no longer be used.