The Butcher’s Anvil: The Battle for Beta-Garmon II
As the Warmaster’s traitor legions carved a path toward Terra, the Beta-Garmon Cluster became a killing field. At its heart lay Beta-Garmon II, a vital forge world and lynchpin of Loyalist supply lines. Control of the planet would open a direct path to the Sol System—and the Throneworld itself.
The battle for Beta-Garmon II was waged across volcanic wastelands, hive-scars, and void-blasted manufactorums. The fighting reached apocalyptic levels, with Legio Mortis, Legio Fureans, and other traitor engines clashing with Loyalist Titan Legions such as Legio Gryphonicus and Legio Atarus. Vast maniples of Titans walked, their god-engines raking the surface with plasma and fire, reducing entire continents to ash.
Skirmishes gave way to full-scale engagements as both sides committed ever more forces. Loyalist defenders staged desperate counterattacks, but the traitor legions, driven by hate and led by dark prophecy, would not relent.
In time, the world began to fracture—physically and spiritually. Warp breaches tore open the skies as traitor forces enacted blasphemous rites, corrupting the land itself. The defenders bled for every inch, but the tide was turning.
Beta-Garmon II would become known as The Butcher’s Anvil—where the hammer of Horus fell hardest before the Siege of Terra began.
The Decimation of Beta-Garmon II: A Campaign Weekend
The intention was to play a simple hex-based campaign, with a BIG GAMETM deciding possession of the three central hexes. The physical map was made using the old Planetary Empires hexes and mounted in a frame so we could all see the section of Nyrcon City we were fighting over. Individual games would be for specific hexes. Here’s a pdf are the campaign rules:
As you can see there are rules to help the BIG GAMETM, which was a three player per side 5000 point game, flow. Multiplayer Adeptus Titanicus games could really grind down with individual players activating individual titans across multiple phases per round. We did the Orders phase in parallel, and used the card mechanics (described in the document) for Movement and Combat phases. As GM, I could look through the card deck to see who would activate next and get things going synchronously where there was unlikely to be any interaction. In general we did the Damage Control phase in parallel, though where there was danger of overload we did that first!
I added a Joker mechanic to the cards. This simply involved adding a joker card to the GM deck and then following the rules below when it’s drawn:
Randomly choose a player
They choose a titan and roll a d10:
1: Void shield failure! Void Shields drop…
2: Void shield flicker! Reduce Void Shield level by 1
3: Stumble! Move D6” in a random direction
4: Stagger! Move D3” in a random direction
5-6: Burst of speed! The titan may move up to 1+d3” in a direction of its choosing
7: “Yes Princeps”! You may change the order on this titan
8: Sooth the machine spirits! You may reduce the Reactor level by 1
9: Quiet running! You may roll dice for damage control equal to you servitor clades
10: Fire! The titan may make a free attack
The idea behind the Joker was to add a curveball that would ease competitiveness a little. The card mechanic can already lead to imbalance. I decided to lean into that. As GM, I tried to make sure nothing too unfair happened, but I was also striving to ensure the game would run in a timely fashion.
The Venue, Doing Homework and the Friday Evening Game
The venue for the games was the beautiful (just look at the photos – wow!) CastleHouse in County Tipperary. Here’s an AirBnB link, so check it out. The house comfortably accommodated all seven of us. It is really beautiful in and out!
Dave, our host and avid wargamer (that a massive understatement!), prepared printable titan terminals that could be edited with pencil and eraser. This saved a massive amount of space as the physical terminals need quite a bit of room. Each player had a clipboard with their terminals. This worked very, very well! The main effort for players was making some notes on the weapons their titans had, though typically the damage and repair numbers were all that was really needed as people usually remembered the other stats.
While Dave prepared a BBQ (Yum!) we had a couple of 1500pt games to fight for the B1 and B5 hexes (essentially, whichever side lost out would lose their flanking hex).
It was great to get titans on the table and I played my one game (as a player) of the weekend. My Legion Mortis faced Patrick’s Gryphonicus. I focussed on my left flank and had a decoy warhound on the right. This worked well, allowing me to concentrate on an enemy Reaver and Warhound while a Warlord and another Reaver got distracted on the right. Some good void stripping and focussing on damaged areas brought the left-flank titans down to little damage. I was then able to swing right and start hitting the other titans from the side and front. The decoy Warhound survived (surprisingly) and ended up harrying the enemy from the rear.
As it turned out the honours were shared with the loyalists winning the other battle, so no hexes changed hands.
The BIG GAMETM
With the homework done and a hot breakfast devoured (Thanks Chris!), we kicked off the BIG GAMETM. We used the Engage and Destroy objective, which scored VPs based on destroyed and structurally compromised titans.
This game took about 6 hours to play, which given there were 6 players with at least 1500pts of titans/knights each was pretty good. As GM I had to be a little ruthless at times as time was my main consideration. This meant halting rules discussions, making LoS/percent of titan visible calls quickly and encouraging quick play. To be fair, none of this is really fair when playing a game like Adeptus Titanicus, which rewards care and precision.
The card mechanics kept things moving and I actively looked ahead in the GM deck to see who could activate. I never adjusted the sequence unless I believed there would be no direct consequence. With such a big battlefield players necessarily had to concentrate on their own sector, so indirect consequences were rarely observed, i.e. how well the right flank was doing when you’re focussed on the left.
There was significant mayhem as you’d expect… titans stumbling into buildings and friends (thanks to the Joker and concussion weapons), dramatic titandeaths with consequences for friends and foes and just general shenanigans. The Loyalists carried it in the end, eking out a major victory by the narrowest of margins (105 VP to 77 VP). They occupied all of the central hexes.
Summary
I had a great time with this, both in preparation: it encouraged me to finish my Blood Angels LI force anda couple of Legio Astorum warhounds and I looked into how to structure a campaign weekend and big game. I wish we’d had time to play more games on the Sunday, but people needed to split early. We’re planning to keep the map active and any Horus Heresy era game will result in hexes changing sides.
Taking time to play a big game was really epic and worthwhile. The players played in the spirit of the game, acknowledging that the cards compromised things, but sped up play. An acceptable trade off. Without the card mechanics we could easily have been playing for another few hours.
Until next time,
Owen