The Animosity Weekender 2024 - UK Meet-Up

I ran my first narrative Warcry event at Warhammer World for the UK Animosity Discord meet-Up event on Sunday (21st January 2024). And it was really enjoyable! I want to do it again.

It was for the Animosity Weekender 2024: Rolling Thunder which (by design) coincided with the Las Vegas Open - a huge convention, where Naro, who is also one of the Animosity GMs, ran the AoS narrative event.

The Animosity Weekender there consisted of a one-evening Warcry event, followed by a three-day AoS event. An entirely grander affair than mine! It was at a ticketed convention, with the AoS narrative run for 24 players, over 3 days, and included doubles games, one-against-one games, and a huge multi-player siege game finale.

My little event was just a one-day, 10-player, 3-game narrative. But still a much more structured thing than the previous Discord Meet-ups, or any other events I've hosted: They have always just been "lets get together and play a few games".

For the first time ever, I asked players to pre-submit rosters, I scheduled rounds, I recorded match-ups and results, and wrote an evolving subplot that was to be decided by the results of the games each round.

The Narrative

Mogrek’s journey upstream from Frørholm with a horde of 1000 Rogue Idols took him to the Fiammascura Realmgate where the Ur-River passed from the Shadowsea in Ulgu to the Ashfall Delta in Aqshy.

The news of his warpath spread far ahead of his advance and the horde swelled as greenskins (and others) flocked to join in with the inevitable fighting at his side.

A defensive counter-attack was planned by Atressa Redhand to stop him reaching the Prime Dominion: Five islands in the Ashfall Delta will be the staging grounds.

With the coming of Mogrek’s Waaagh! A great bow-wave of magical energies washed along the ley lines that intersect in Ashfall Delta. Wapkagut, a canny Warchanter among Mogrek’s lieutenants, realised they could tap into this power and use it in the coming war for the Prime Dominion.

To this end secret work must be done, so several warbands (collectively called “Mogrek’s Sneaky Gitz”) have been dispatched to the island of Brimnstorn to make preparations: Quick-to-build but lumpen and crude Effigies of Gorkamorka must be constructed across the island, then primed to focus and harvest the rising tide of magical power.

Detachments of Atressa Redhand’s forces (known as Redhand’s Agents) have also been tasked with stopping them; either by disrupting the rituals or by destroying the effigies.

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The Green Deck

The Red Deck

The Setup

Players were divided into two teams of 5: Mogrek's Sneaky Gitz (or the Longblades) and Atressa's Agents of the Redhand (or the Redhands). There were not an equal number of people from the Discord coalitions playing, but I had recruited some friends as "ringers" who I used to fill the shortfall on one team (thank you Ross and Richard!).

I dealt the tarot cards I made for this purpose, one to each player, and explained they should find the Warcry board marked with the same Roman numeral as their card. As there were two of each numbered cards (a red deck and a green deck), they all found themselves with an opponent from the other coalition.

The Board Numbers

To speed things up between games, we didn't use the Aftermath Sequence from the Narrative Play campaign rules in the Core Book. All 3 games were played using the same 1000 point warbands. The narrative was created by the team results of each round of games, as the Battleplan in use for each subsequent round was decided by the route through a branching quest:

The Branching Quest

The Battleplans

1. Collect Components
2. Construct Waaaghfanes
3. Improvised Construction
4. Harvest the Power
5. Hastey Harvest
6. Rout Them!

The Quests

At the start of each battle, each player secretly picked one fighter in their warband as a Questing Fighter and one Quest from the list below for that fighter to attempt in that battle and noted both down. They could only attempt each Quest once.

• Bloody Handed
  At the end of the battle, you complete this Quest if the enemy leader has been taken down but your Questing Fighter has not.
• The Spoils of War
  At the end of the battle, you complete this Quest if your Questing Fighter is carrying Treasure, or is within 3” of a Treasure that is not being carried.
• Take Possession
  At the end of the battle, you complete this Quest if your Questing Fighter is within 3” of an Objective at the end of the battle (regardless of who controls that Objective).
• Vantage Point
  At the end of the battle, you complete this Quest if your Questing Fighter is further vertically from the battlefield floor than all enemy fighters.
• A Different Path
  At the end of the battle, you complete this Quest if your Questing Fighter survived without making any Attack actions (shooting or melee).
• The Brink of Death
  At the end of the battle, you complete this Quest if your Questing Fighter has not been taken down but has more wounds allocated to them than any enemy fighters that have not been taken down.

Narrative Path Dice

I didn't use “the number of games won” to decide which coalition had the advantage after each round. There was an added element of uncertainty instead: I used a system of Narrative Path Dice rolling - an idea that I was introduced to by my local Warhammer Store manager who uses something like it in his in-store campaigns.

The Narrative Path Dice were D6s, in the colour of the Coalitions (i.e. red or green). They were used to influence the branch of the “narrative tree” the campaign takes next, and ultimately decide which Coalition achieves victory on the day.

I had a small wooden box with two linen bags inside; each containing 60 dice of the appropriate colour. At the end of each round I handed out the Path dice to players, for playing games and completing Quests:

• Win = +5 dice
• Draw = +3 dice
• Loss = +1 dice
• Quest completed = +1 dice

At the end of each round of games, I gathered the players, one Coalition on either side of a table, and they all rolled their Narrative Path Dice together, in front of the other coalition. They sorted the dice by result, putting all the “sixes” and “ones” together.

The coalition with the most sixes won the narrative path.

(The tie-breaker, if both coalitions got the same number of sixes, was the side with least ones wins the narrative path.)

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Wapkagut despatched Mogrek's Sneaky Gitz vwith orders to collect parts he thought were needed to make his Waaaghfanes. Meanwhile, Agents of the Redhand were tasked with trying to stop them.

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Once everyone had an opponent battle commenced playing Battleplan 1: Collect Components (based on Glimmers in the Dark, a Victory card from Heart of Ghur), each game used a different Deployment and Twist card, so no one had quite the same game as their team mates!

Wapkagut sent out the warbands he called Mogrek's Sneaky Gitz to collect parts needed to make his Waaaghfanes. But the Agents of the Redhand interceded and stopped them.

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With the Redhands gaining the upper hand in round one the round two was Battleplan 3: Improvised Construction (based on Seize Territory, another Victory card from Heart of Ghur). Again, each game with a unique Deployment and Twist. 

I told the Redhands, as the winning side of round one, to hang on to their tarot cards. I asked the Longblades to talk amongst themselves and choose who each of them would fight in the next round (and to try to avoid playing the same opponent twice). I shifted the board numbers along one place as well, so as many people as possible would have a different battlefield.

Having been prevented from getting everything they needed to make the Waaaghfanes, the Sneaky Gitz made the best of a bad situation: They jury-rigged whatever magical junk they could find into something that might do the job.

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The Longblades managed to wrestle control back after the second round of games. The meant the final game of the day was Battleplan 5: Hasty Harvest (based on Entrance to Talaxis from Stealth and Stone).

So this time it was the Longblades who kept their tarot cards and the Redhands picked who to battle. I once more shifted the board numbers along one place.

The Sneaky Gitz cobbled-together what could only be described as an unreliable solution and gathered some of the tide of Waaagh! power coursing along the ley lines… hopefully Wapkagut will be satisfied.

The Agents of the Redhand mounted a valiant counter to the Sneaky Gitz plans, it was not quite enough to stop them but it made a difference.

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The last dice of the final roll of the day gave Mogrek's Sneaky Gitz the edge, and they achieved a minor victory for the Longblades, on the tie-breaker of "least ones"!

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I hope everyone who came had as much fun as I did on the day. They all certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves and I got some really lovely feedback from many of them, especially about the tarot cards! As I said at the top of the page, I want to do it again!