7TV Dracula Campaign Playthrough

In this chapter, the forces of light have worked out that Dracula needs to rest in earth from his homeland. They’ve found the final boxes of earth at Carfax abbey, a ruined monastery near Dr. Seward’s lunatic asylum. Unfortunately for our heroes, Dracula’s sinister lackey Renfield has arranged a mass breakout, and Carfax is soon to be overrun by escaped lunatics…

The setting for this chapter is the aforementioned ruined monastery. I couldn’t find anything I liked for this in paper terrain, so I decided to go with the next best thing: Battle Systems. But which kit to use for a ruined monastery? Ah, the “Ruined Monastery” set ought to work…

The heroes’ goal is to consecrate six boxes of earth that have been scattered throughout the battlefield. As the forces of darkness, all I have to do is prevent them from achieving their goal — at the end of the game, the heroes get a point for every box of earth they’ve consecrated (by having one of the main characters spend an action while adjacent), while I get a point for every box they don’t get to.

In chapter 3 I mentioned the Diurnal Deck which serves as the game’s countdown mechanism. After the first turn of the game, each player has the option to flip over two Diurnal cards instead of one. Doing this immediately gives each player two plot points (the currency the game uses to pay for unit activations and some special abilities), but more importantly, it allows some ability to accelerate the end of the game.

Looking over my forces, I see that I have very little in the way of ranged attacks, and all but a few of my characters only do non-lethal attacks, meaning that if the attack is successful it inflicts a condition (such as immobilized, stunned, and so on) so I am looking at slowing down my opponent rather than outright killing her forces, although if I can inflict a duplicate status effect on to a model, it changes to a wound, so I might be able to take out a few of her support pieces at least.

My opponent’s characters, on the other hand, are armed with all manner of Winchesters and revolvers. However, I have one distinct advantage here: six of my models (nearly half my force) are (relatively) innocent asylum patients being controlled by Renfield, and my opponent actually loses a victory point for each one that gets killed. It should make for some interesting game decisions for both of us.

The setup calls for a large, mostly empty building where the bulk of the action is to take place. Unfortunately for me, this makes for a bit of a football field, giving my oppoent with her firearms a huge advantage. I managed to hide around corners as best I could until the grand melee broke out. Once I started moving into base contact, my opponent’s ranged combat advantage was at least a little bit diminished, but she also had some very aggressive asylum attendants (off-duty police officers) that were able to barrel through and knock down a lot of my units.

Renfield was definitely my MVP. He has a great area effect attack that allows him to stun and knock over multiple targets, and he’s one of the few characters I have who can deal damage.

It was a fairly close game. My opponent did a better job with using the Diurnal Deck to control when the game ended. She was only able to consecrate half of the boxes of earth, but she took out more of my figures, including poor Renfield who died very dramatically in a hail of bullets in the final round.