Spitballing ideas: Warhammer Quest: Tyranid Attack!

[Gillyfish]

An idea that occurred (to me) in Brother Tyler's estimable Space Hulk thread was how cool/interesting it would be to have a new version of Tyranid Attack/Advanced Space Crusade.

 

Perhaps this time, instead of squads of marines, you might have survivors of squads or escapees from a hive-ship gobbling up ships it has encountered. This might allow for a Warhammer Quest style game akin to Darkwater, compete with map book depicting the various innards of the hiveship as the survivors try to kill off this threat to their homeworld/Craftworld, etc.

 

Any thoughts on this idea? Worth pursuing?

[Cactus]

This is a great idea. If I owned any of the original Tyranid Attack or Advanced Space Crusade tiles* I would immediately be writing a Blackstone Fortress conversion mod. 

 

*Did GW reuse the ASC floor art for Tyranid Attack or am I misremembering?

 

[Gillyfish]

I believe so, yes. If they didn't then they definitely looked very similar.

 

I can definitely see a scenario for the survivors of either a failed assault and/or a gobbled up vessel grouping up together to desperately try and take the vessel out with them, giving you options for some of the following:

 

• Space Marine Scout
• Power armoured marine
• Terminator
• Imperial Naval Rating
• PDF/Guardsman
• Tech-adept

..and so on.

 

Options would also work for Eldar, Orks, etc., although it seems less likely that they might find common cause with some of the above.

 

Note that I am going very much with the classic model/class ideas here. I would probably give starting stats to each and perhaps some equipment cards distinct to each class. So scouts are fast and can achieve objectives and carry special items like melta bombs more easily whereas terminators are slow, but heavily armoured and can dole out punishment.

[Brother Tyler]

I'm very intrigued by this idea. It's worth noting that Games Workshop has sort of implemented this idea with the Space Marine Adventures series of games (Space Marine Adventures: Tyranid Attack!, for example). It would be great fun to see other protagonists, however. It might be worthwhile to come up with a basic "campaign" that allows a player to choose a single box (e.g., Rogue Trader Entourage and Voidsmen-at-Arms or Imperial Navy Breachers) as their protagonist team. Many of the kill team boxes, including those for xenos and such, might serve as alternatives, giving players a bit of freedom. And I like the idea of each scenario having its game map/board presented as a page, though the page size would limit the map size. There are many games that have done this to really good effect (e.g., Escape from Stalingrad Z and Stuffed Fables), so it should be eminently feasible here. And the antagonists could either be print and play tokens (like the Space Marine Adventures games) or players might use a few boxes of miniatures (potentially as replacements for tokens).

 

If you're talking about a single team of protagonists that might have a variety of individuals, including xenos (as in Blackstone Fortress), perhaps an Ordo Xenos Inquisitor might serve as the basic theme, allowing for a variety of Imperium models/classes and a few sanctioned xenos.

 

 

[Gillyfish]

The Xenos Inquisitor team is a really fun idea. There is definitely a lot of room for expansion out from the base idea. 

 

I had been thinking of something akin to the Warhammer Quest: Darkwater set which uses a map book. having played a few games of that one of the key things you realise is that movement is fundamental to success, so, in the example of a Space Marine team above, whilst many people might look at a Terminator and be attracted by how survivable and 'killy' they are, the scout may well have far more importance in achieving your objective(s).

 

Darkwater re-uses many of the same pages but with different missions (drawn randomly from cards for each Act of the game) as you get further into the Nurgle infested cathedral and you gain or power-up more treasure/abilities as you go.

 

A similar approach to exploration (deck-based with choices for missions based on the cards drawn) might work as you try to reach a key organ (the end of each Act) and then each Act might get harder as the ship's defenses awaken and they begin to co-ordinate against you.

 

Based on what you have said, I quite like the idea of themed 'teams', which would also work better for advancement and wargear cards, not to mention potential expansion.

 

There is a key difference in this game to Darkwater though; Darkwater has the idea of a 'boss' for each act and a final boss to win. This would be about destroying the ship's organs, so there is a different focus and that might change the structure a bit. A three-Act arc might still work, but you might not have boss-fights, so much as harder missions as the hive-ships defences are utilised to try and fend you off. You would want the organ encounters to be memorable, so perhaps one might be wading through bile to reach the organ, another might be collapsing key ventricles which feed the organ so it chokes, etc. These would need to be memorable and there might need to be some variation to ensure replayability.

 

Side missions might include killing off a local synapse creature which is co-ordinating defence against you, freeing prisoners, sealing off/purging brood-chambers before the occupants awaken and poisoning nutrient pools, as well as 'wade through creature type x before the timer runs out to escape the area'.

 

[Cactus]

I disagree about the different focus. Boss fights around 3 major organs sounds like a fine combination. It makes me think of the dungeons in the Legend of Zelda games, where your objective is an item but you have to defeat a big monster to get to it. Go wild designing unique bioforms to defend each location!

[Gillyfish]

That's an interesting take Cactus. One thing I have been pondering is how the hive mind would work on board an actual hive-ship.

 

The analogy of a body's immune system sort of works for this, where the players are initially facing little resistance until they are spotted/attack something and the ship realises they are there and mobilises its defences. Given they are on-board their own ship, would they always count as within synapse range (effectively), or would the destruction of certain objects, organs and adversaries reduce that (and affect the behaviours available for lower level Tyranid creatures)?

 

The idea of an in-built creature as part of an organ could work (and feels rather Aliens, which is a definite positive). So perhaps Tyranids have actual creatures acting as organs, in the same way that they have symbiotic creatures as weaponry?