You know where you are? You're in the jungle!

He had never seen jungle like this.  A dense wilderness that spanned the entire continent.  He recalled the wooded regions at the outskirts of Hive Geminus, the isolated patches of natural growth that had yet to be claimed by the crushing industrial sprawl.  There, nature would eventually succumb to the progress of man.  But here, on the deathworld of Logetera, nature would not be so easily swept aside.  It would consume any structure and reclaim any land that man foolishly tried to take for himself.  

This was evidenced by the ruins that Brother Sergeant Godwyn and his squad stalked through.  They were the remains of some human settlement, overgrown and corroded, returned to nature.  The roots of the trees forced their way through the crumbled remains of plascrete walls and iron gates.  Branches and vines coiled around long dead power lines.  Godwyn wondered if 40 Gemini, the shrine world, his home, would have seen a similar fate had the Emperor’s Angels, The Exorcists, not arrived when they did.  He imagined the Great Basilica similarly overgrown, except instead of trees and life, it would have been masses of writhing tentacles blossoming with eyes and mouths and teeth.  He shuddered at the thought.

A quick flash of red through the trees ahead brought his attention back to the present.  One could hardly see more than 6 meters ahead in this dense jungle, but they seemed to be coming to a clearing.  With a few quick hand gestures, Godywn rallied the four other members of his squad and arrayed them along the treeline looking out along a narrow path.  Up ahead was a ravine, spanned by a makeshift bridge.  And moving onto the bridge were the tall, lithe figures of Drukhari wyches, their red armor contrasting against the green of the jungle.  

Godwyn raised his bolter, taking aim down the path.  His fellow marines followed suit, each one picking a target.  The xenos seemed to be unconcerned with the exposed position they put themselves in.  Were they really so foolish?  He didn’t waste any more time speculating on the minds of these pitiful creatures.  His finger depressed the trigger of his bolt rifle, and he felt the familiar kick as he and his squad unleashed a volley of bolt shells down the path.  The wyches fell almost simultaneously as the bolt rounds hit home, detonating within their bodies.  The wyches were blasted apart, limbs and viscera thrown into the ravine.  

One of the wyches in the back of the group was quick.  She was taller than the others and carried a long bladed weapon.  Their leader perhaps.  She moved fast and seemed content to use her fellow warriors as shields.  But eventually she had no one left to soak up the gunfire.  Godwyn pressed the attack, his bolter roaring, and the tall warrior fell in a bloody ruin just like the others.

The smoke cleared, and Godwyn looked out on the blood soaked path ahead of him.  No sooner had the echoes from the gun fire faded than the vox bead in his ear crackled to life.  “Objective secured,” Chaplain Benedict exhorted triumphantly.   “Squad Haluyn is pursuing the xenos leader.  All other squads rally to my position.  Glory to the Emperor, in whose light we are compelled.”

“The Emperor’s light compels us,” Godwyn said to himself.

Andrew:  Using the open war deck to play narrative games is such a stark contrast to the rulebook matched play missions that we have all become accustomed to.  You just need to accept going into it that this is a different game.  It’s not about scoring points, it’s about telling a story.  Throw in a crazy battlezone, like this 3rd Edition Catachan jungle, and you can have some fun narrative moments.  It’s just a shame that playing these kinds of games seems to be anathema to the 40k community at large.  Could you imagine asking someone to play a game where your shooting range is limited to 6”?  Where you can’t just blast someone off the table on turn 1?

Oh yeah, we also had debris falling from orbit doing mortal wounds.