Tuesday 26th July was 'Giant Killing' night at Warhammer World, where the idea was to bring down some gangs that had got ahead of the pack by pitting two smaller gangs against them and duffing them up a bit, plus the smaller gangs would get double experience points to ratchet them up the ratings faster. This saw my Last Action Heroes (already depleted in numbers from last week's adventures) teaming up with James's gang Bouche's Babes (also Delaques) to take on campaign leader (I think) Andy and his Van Saar gang Crucible's Ghosts. Added together, our 'gang ratings' were actually higher than his and we outnumbered him by one model.
It didn't show.
It started relatively promisingly as Andy's shooting was below par, even with his higher Ballistic Skills and various superior weaponry. However, our ability to take his fighters down was low due to most of them being tougher than usual and needing more than one wounding hit to drop them. I was doing fairly well keeping him pinned down on my side of the board for the first couple of turns (and Sly kept up his good work by scoring a wounding hit that actually did put someone down), but then Andy began to find his range. Even a couple of people down wasn't disastrous and we could have rallied the fight, but at the start of a turn where I was planning to charge Harrison into close combat with one of his fighters (a fight I was confident he'd win), and run up and flame a couple more into oblivion, all of which might have turned the tide in our favour... my gang failed its leadership test and we ran away. James bravely fought on for one turn alone, but hadn't factored in that with my gang now off the board, every gun that Andy could bring to bear was going to be turned on him. The next turn was spectacularly messy as Andy proceeded to obliterate everything in sight under a withering hail of fire, and James didn't even check to see whether his gang stuck around next turn, instead choosing to run away.
The post-fight was particularly painful. Two out of three of my fighters who needed to roll for injuries ended up dead, which is awful luck for a one-in-six chance of death. I said goodbye to Jackie (gunned down by Billy 3-Flamers) which lost my gang our Marksman, and also to Shia (murdered by Yanni) who had just become a ganger and was looking half-useful with his Hipshooting skill and a hand flamer. James came off rather worse, as out of (I believe) six fighters who took injury rolls, two died (including a fighter named Rutterkin, renowned throughout the campaign as about the hardest bastard around) and two more were capture (including Bouche himself, the gang leader).
With a remaining gang of only four models (compared to an average of about ten, and Andy's collection of seventeen), James took the only reasonable step in the circumstances: a last-ditch Rescue attempt to try and free his captured fighters to make his gang actually viable again. The Rescue luckily went off without a hitch; Andy rolled a '1' which mean he only left one sentry guarding the hostages, and all four of Bouche's Babes turned up and liberated their gangmates without once setting off the alarm that would allow the sentry to start shooting or the rest of the gang to show up. As a result he got a massive boost to his income and experience for 'beating' a much larger gang, and left the night thinking that things might not be quite as bad as he'd first thought. I, meanwhile, was only able to replace the able Jackie and the not-great-but-useful-in-some-ways Shia with a new juve Jason (Statham), who gets an autopistol and the instruction to stand in front of the rest of the gang and let the enemy shoot him.
Rather annoyingly, the 'Giant Killing' night turned out to be anything but. Out of the three games, in two the 'giant' gang won, and even in the other the giants still inflicted several casualties. The gap between the best and the rest is wider than ever, and The Last Action Heroes are limping onwards but to no obvious purpose...
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