Battle of Hangman's Bastion

Greetings!

It is time for another one of those narrative battlereports of mine. This one pitted my Sunsplitterz against a force of Stormcast Eternals, a foe I haven't faced in a while (and one that my orruks have never before fought against!). This battle is part of a Grand Alliance -based map campaign run at our local game store, and my orruks are now attempting to push into a region called the Everkeep. Sounds ominous, right?

We played the Siege Battleplan: The Great Wall from the Age of Sigmar Core Book. I strongly recommend it: it features two objectives beyond a line of defensive positions, with the attacker having to take them both or die trying! The defender starts with half his army on the field, with the rest marching in on aroll of 5 or 6 from the 2nd battleround onwards. What's more, the reinforcement roll doesn't get any better from that initial treshold of 5-6... They might not arrive at all if the dice don't favour you.

How did sticks and stones fare against heaven-forged sigmarite armour, then? Read on to find out!

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The day dawned bleak as Warboss Grom led his warband towards the overgrown walls looming in the distance. The region they were pushing into was heavily fortified by the forces of Order, but Grom had chosen this place to be the target of their attack for a reason: with the majority of their tribe still mustering its numbers for a full-scale invasion, the Warboss and his warband had been sent to scout out the enemy region and to claim a foothold there. What better to test their mettle against than an overgrown bastion manned by roughly a score of humies?

The sun of the Realm of Ghyran climbed ever higher, eating away at the shadows clinging to trees and crumbled towers. Having crept closer to the silent walls in the morning gloom before sunrise, Grom now bounced up from the tall grass and let out a mighty cry of "WAAAAAAGH!"

Rising to his warcry, his warband of over twoscore Sunplitter Orruks jumped up from the rocks and grass and dashed for the walls ahead. A clarion call rang out from the ramparts, a sentry alerting his comrades of an incoming assault.

In the heartbeats it took for the orruks to reach the overgrown fortifications, the walls filled up with Stormcast bowmen and the only visible gap in the walls was blocked by a cohort of Liberators emerging from the depths of the nearby watchtower. This day, the realm would wake to a red dawn.

With an almighty crash the Big Stabbas plunged straight into and over the half-a-dozen Liberators holding the breach, running them through with spears the length of a dracoth. As the soul-stuff of the impaled Stormcast plunged upwards to the skies in blasts of lightning, the Judicators on the walls unleashed a hail of sigmarite arrows that tore down two of the Big Stabbas on the run.

This did little to halt the advance of the orruks, however, who pushed on through the gap and into the courtyard.

Another hail of shafts rained down from the walls, cutting low half the number of the first mob of boyz. The rest turned tail and ran, scrambling back out into the woods in terror. Only the mob's boss remained, determinedly striding ever forward,

There was movement in the distance beyond the overgrown courtyard. A thin line of Retributors, carrying huge hammers crackling with the power of thunder, was slowly marching towards the fray. By means either mundane or magical, the Sigmar's Finest had summoned reinforcements to hold the line.

The orruks' advance was not so easily hampered. The remaining Big Stabbas and Warboss Grom himself climbed up the walls to fight the Judicators raining death upon them, while the rest of the warband was pouring in through the breach in the walls.

The Big Stabbas found it difficult to maneuver atop the battlements, however, and they didn't manage to contribute in the carnage at all. It fell to Grom to commence slaughter, but even he found it difficult for his axe to bite through the sigmarite armour. One of the Judicators was brought down by a volley of crude arrows from the Arrowboys below, while two more were felled by the Warboss himself.

Splitting one Stormcast in half with his axe and covering his eyes in the following death-flash of the sky-warrior returning to its maker, Grom cast a worried gaze at the enemy reinforcements. His boyz would have to hurry up in order to clear the walls and prepare to blunt the inevitable counter-attack that would follow. Another Stormcast lunged at him, only to have its gladius turned aside by Grom's axe, which then proceeded to decapitate the metal-man in another flash of lightning.

The Stormcast bowmen were quick to response after recovering from the initial momentum of the orruk assault on the walls. A cloud of arm-length arrows spat out once again, this time clearing the wall of Big Stabbas and Warboss Grom in a single volley, their pin-cushioned corpses rolling limply down the crumbled battlements.

Down on the courtyard the Lord-Castellant, having been tasked with the protection of the Hangman's Bastion, sent out his Gryph-Hound to assail the lonely orruk milling around on the flagstones. Beast fought beast as the two clashed, the hound raking a deep gash across the orruk's chest, while the dumb brute failed to hit the agile creature with its chompa.

The Arrowboys sent a hail of twisted shafts onto the walls, cutting down the remaining half of the Judicators. The walls were clear now, but the Retributor reinforcements were stomping ever closer. To answer this newly-arrived force of enemies, the warband's Wardokk infused a mob of Morboyz with the most brutal beastly spirits he could find, magnifying their fighting potential as they hurtled across the yard to crash into the Retributors.

In the shadow of the now-empty walls the Gryph-Hound sprang on the orruk boss, biting out his throat and leaving the brute writhing on the gory flagstones.

The Morboys struck the enemy reinforcements like a rolling boulder, their bone-shivs and weepwood clubs battering at the armoured giants in a rain of punishing blows. A cohort of lesser warrior would have fallen to such a ferocious charge, but not the Scions of the Storm. Only one of the Retributors fell to the orruk attack, while in return the mighty warriors bashed the Sunsplitterz to oblivion.

Heavy hammers struck out to shatter bodies and fracture skulls, while in some places the inbound storm-energies of the heavenly weapons blasted out on the impact, reducing their targets to clouds of wind-blown dust. The Wardokk and the Arrowboys saw this display of celestial violence, and as the remaining few Morboy survivors scrambled back through the breach towards safety, the Sunsplitterz turned tail and ran for the safety of the woods.

Having lost their Warboss, their Big Stabbas and two mobs of boyz, the orruks had taken a severe beating without achieving their goal and claiming the Hangman's Bastion. As the brutes withdrew into the wilds, a Lord-Relictor strode in at the head of a force of Liberators, ready to re-man the walls once more.

The Lord-Castellant surveyed the field, tallying their own casualties. Sixteen of the Sigmar's Finest had been brought low by the attack, but their line had held. The Everkeep deeper in the region would be safe from the attentions of the forces of Destruction... for now.

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Major Victory for the Stormcast!

There was nothing I could do. It all went well in the beginning when I burst through their initial garrison, but as the first reinforcements of the enemy arrived things started to look grim indeed! I thought a buffed-up unit of Morboyz would be enough to keep the Stormcast away from the first objective but alas, the Retributors were too awesome to be hindered by twice their number of orruks.

Ah well, maybe next time!