New Year, Old Friends: Introduction
New Year’s Day, for a lot of people, usually means stumbling out of bed late and feeling awful. But for my pal Patrick Eibel and me, New Year’s means Warhammer 40,000. Every January 1st, we get together and have a slugfest to see who will claim bragging rights for the year. We've been friends since 1983, and have been having these New Year's Day battles for--well, quite a while now, going back to the bad old days of Second Edition 40K.

Last year, we ran one of the battles (don’t ask me to remember which one) in the Blood Deserts of Auros IX Campaign. This time, the big throwdown was on December 31, 2001 and pitted my Fighting Tigers against Pat’s Space Wolves.

Games of Marines vs. Marines usually take some suspension of disbelief: why would the loyal servants of the Emperor be fighting amongst themselves, especially between Chapters not known for being hostile to the other? It’s a fluff-driven question (“fluff” being the 40K background material). While it would be easy to imagine Space Wolves scrapping with their arch-rivals the Dark Angels, it is more difficult to see them against Tigers, who (as I have mentioned in Codex: Fighting Tigers of Veda) regard the Wolves as their only Space Marine allies. 

The answer is rather simple: the Wolves and Tigers meet periodically to renew their bonds of friendship and have “training sessions” against the other, using blank ammunition and computer simulations. Sometimes the Tigers go to Fenris and contend with the icy darkness of the hostile winter. Sometimes the Wolves go to Veda and deal with the torrential rain and thick jungles. Sometimes they meet on a planet neither is familiar with.

Such is the setting for this battle report. In addition, this batrep was truly a “training session” for Pat and me. Usually we use these New Year’s Day games to experiment: this year, I proposed that we “test drive” the lists we were going to use at the January 12th 2002 Rogue Trader Tournament at Dream Wizards. Pat readily agreed. Astute visitors will notice that the lists presented here are slightly different than those mentioned in the RTT article.

Pat recently bought a house and set up a gaming room, so I was more than happy to visit his place and fight the first battle in the new digs. Pat has a 4' x 4' table, painted up like a yellow, sandy desert, and has a lot of Necromunda scenery. So while technically I was on “his turf” and perhaps should have written up the battle as being on Fenris, I thought the table looked more like “somewhere else.” So for the sake of this battle report’s story, the “training session” is set on “neutral ground,” the dead world Charon Delta, not far from Fenris. 

One more thing. Because of point limitations, I intended to bring a vastly less expensive version of Raja Khandar Madu to lead my strikeforce. I justify this in the story by having it set years before she became co-ruler of the Fighting Tigers, when she was a kshatriya, or captain. 

On to the armies.
 

Next page: Army Lists

Related Pages
Rogue Trader Tournament (01/12/2002)
Raja Khandar Madu
 

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© Copyright Kenton Kilgore February 2002
 

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