Kill Team

One of the more interesting 40K games Evan and I played was with my cousin using a mission Evan cooked up: his Navigator Scribeguard (Imperial Guard) against a mix of the recently awoken Blood Mormont Primaris Space Marine chapter and Adeptus Custodes. He ended up winning, managing to get a unit off the board to spread heresy!

That was a proper game of 40K, but many of the games Evan and I have played have been with model counts far closer to skirmish games. I was excited when Games Workshop first announced Kill Team, official skirmish rules for 40K. The game sounded like exactly the sort of thing I was looking for: a bigger focus on narrative gaming with rules that are straightforward and modern.

I picked up the Kill Team boxed set a few days after it launched. My original plan was to get the rule book, but I am a sucker for these boxed sets. The game comes with a lot of terrain and sprues for two kitbash friendly units I have been interested in: Genestealer Cult Neophyte Hybrids and Skitarii Rangers/Vanguard. I have wanted that cultist box for a while. It seems like the base for a lot of interesting modelling projects.

We played one game of Kill Team to test out the rules, playing a simple mission that continued on from the 40K mission mentioned earlier. I made a small Space Marine list from the miniatures I had on hand for our first game and made up a mission that picked up where our last 40K game left off. The mission tweaked the ambush mission from the core Kill Team rule book.

After that game there was a big gap in our gaming. I started building a new Kill Team mixing the sprue that came in the boxed set together, dubbing the models the Skitarii Dravidian. (The Skitarii Rangers in the squad are all named after Tamil numerals.) Evan started work building new Imperial Guardsmen out of some sprues our friend Gus sent him some time ago. These two forces served as the inspiration for a narrative campaign we are trying to get going: The War of the Intolerable Question

Like a glittering toxic icicle, Shentech’s manufactorum needle hangs above the infamous hive world of Necromunda, just outside the jurisdiction of Lord Helmawr. No one goes there, and no one leaves–but the manufactorum isn’t idle.

Once a year, a single, battered, yellow canister grav-chutes to a disused landing pad in the spires of Hive Primus. Marked with the Shentech seal, the canister is claimed as salvage, assayed by Helmawr’s inspectors as pharmaceutical compounds, then sold to the waiting Shen agent for a tidy profit. What happens then, precisely how this compound is employed, is a secret of the Navigator House. Or it was until recently, when a report from an Astartes Kill Team on Salmagundi showed the same Shentech canisters present on the planet of the Blbliarchs. The compound was being used somehow in their hypno-savant training.

It was yet another link between Salmagundi and their recidivist employers, the Navigators of House Shen. For the Custodes, the revelation of the compound offered a tantalizing opportunity to smash one of House Shen’s few verifiable assets–and destroy or damage the capacities of their legal team in the process.

The Custodes mobilized one of their many assets on Necromunda: a zealous and crudely innovative local church of the God-Machine. Well-equipped and motivated to learn the secrets of the Needle and stamp out any techno-heresy they might find there, the ops team was shuttled to orbit for the assault.

Debris and dust filling the landing bays showed the station had been inviolate for centuries. Beyond the airlock were dignitaries of the Needle’s degenerate laborii tribes, long-limbed and twisted parodies of their dutiful, hive-dwelling counterparts, planetside. The language was barely comprehensible but the invaders knew instantly that their smash-and-grab mission was going to be more challenging than they’d thought: the laborii were many; and might cling impudently to life. What was worse–the station possessed its own dedicated security detail–somewhere deep in the needle, a force of vat-spawned guardians were rising from their dormant state. The worshippers of the machine god made camp as the sour notes of an ancient klaxon wailed.

There are two forces in play to start, Evan’s vat grown soldiers tasked with defending the manufactorum and my rag-tag Skitarii elimination clade who have invaded. Perhaps in later games we will introduce other units or factions—if we build anything interesting or someone else ends up joining our games. We know there is one weird faction on the station itself to start, the Labourii. Evan came up with 6 regions in the station, and I helped expand them all so they each had 2 areas you can interact with if you win the mission. These provide some additional hooks for the game. We also press-ganged our online friends into helping us come up with a d66 table of events to have happen after each mission.

We have played 2 missions so far, a little bit hodgepodge as we settle into the game and try and figure out how to best run a campaign. It’s been fun to build and paint something with a concrete goal and purpose in mind. I’m thinking about other models that would fit in with the theme of this campaign to build as well.

Kill Team is a fun system. It’s quite simple: if you are familiar with 8th Edition Warhammer 40K you’ll understand most of what’s going on. The turn structure mirrors 40K, but besides the movement phase, all other actions are done in an “I go, you go” fashion. List building is much simpler, as the set of models available for you to use is so small. The game seems like a good introduction to Warhammer 40K, which I assume is quite purposeful on Games Workshop’s part.

I have been digging into Necromunda to get ideas for our campaign. Necromunda offers up a slightly more complex skirmish ruleset, but one that I think suffers from its mix of old and new style rules. With Kill Team there is no arguing about whether a unit is hit by an explosion’s template or not, for example. Necromunda’s advantage is a much richer campaign system, more interesting lists of weapons for your units, more complex rules for injuries and experience, etc.

I’m hopeful Evan and I can get something interesting going with this Kill Team game. Let’s see.