Hey all and welcome once again to this place of most random musings.
Over the last few days I have been on an ever decreasing spiral into craziness. Falling like a stone from the sky heading deeper and deeper into the 'dropzone'. My once fragile and this sanity word and now shredded to tatters as I fail to 'command' my own mind.
The hints are all there if your willing to see them.
If not let me explain.
96 Hours ago.
I bumped into a wargame i had seen, liked but never really ventured much of a look into. A couple of random twitter postings got my 'hackles' up and sent the curious wargamer in me searching.
72 Hours ago.
Curiousness let to the birthing of a demonic screeching within my wargamer heart. It lead to my previous blog post and a spate of twitter/fb outbursts.
48 Hours ago.
Armed with too much information, a lot of bad intentions and a healthy dent in my bank balance...an order was placed.
Over the last 48 hours.
The keening demonic shrill has grown in volume, shredding my sanity, the resistance within my wargamer heart. All hope has been lost in a tirade of frothing madness. Hours spent drooling over pictures, reading forum posts. More hours lost in youtube videos. Blogs, reviews, battle reports all digested with so much gusto that you would think fat-bastard had stumbled into an all-you-can-eat buffet at 'baby back ribs r us'.
Other games were pushed aside, the tribulations of this once sporadic hobby butterfly were quashed and scattered to the 4 winds. A game had stood up from amongst the masses and grabbed my attention in much the same way a stubbed toe stops you in your tracks.
A small twist of fate before work a few days ago took me down a path that ultimately bought me here. Waiting for the dispatch of my parcel, waiting to get my mucky ink stained, paint flecked hands on 'Dropzone Commander'.
I don't truly know why this game has captivated me so....but it has. It has taken my attention, my painter side, my gamer side, my fluff loving crazy side and my imagination, and it has wrapped them all in a sci-fi game that i just want to throw myself into.
With any luck the great guys at Firestorm Games will receive their resupply of command cards tomorrow and dispatch my 2 player set, city board, scurge/ucm command decks. This will get me started for sure!
A short piece of fluff ahead of our first game (when it arrives).
The city of Galrath was quiet, too quiet. The occasional crackle of flames from a burnt out building was the only indication that life had ever existed here.
The twin suns had long since set over the city and the streets were enveloped in a darkness so complete that vision was reduced to scant feet. Every now and then a flicker of flame would throw up shadows against the vacant city walls, a maddening dance of light and shadow that went unnoticed by the sightless empty windows of the streets around.
Galrath was a dead place. It had been that way since the scourge had invaded. Here and there elsewhere across the planet, small pockets of human resistance still fought on...but not in Galrath.
Or so the casual surveyor would think.
In the darkness things moved, alien things. They skittered across the streets searching the empty buildings and desolate alleyways. Driven by an iron will, they carried out their task.
Scant hours earlier, the scourge had discovered the meaning of invasion for themselves.
It had started with blistering contrails from the sky, where they impacted, the surface erupted in billowing clouds of debris and flame. It was followed by slower moving objects, lazy, lumbering dropships that disgorged vehicles and men in their thousands.
For the men and women of the resistance, it was as if a new nightmare had been borne upon them by the scourge, a new wave of death and destruction that reached out with uncaring hands to crush lives.
To the scourge it was a familiar sight, it was a sight being repeated across many of the taken worlds. It was the sight of United Colonies of Men liberation armies. A sight that heralded war anew.
However in the city of Galrath, the streets had remained empty. The fighting had not reached the city yet, but the scourge were searching for something.
In the darkness something else moved too. Silent and stealthy, small teams of Legionnaires moved across the eastern side of the city. They moved with purpose and direction. Like the scourge they were searching, Unlike the scourge, they knew what for.
As dusk had settled over Galrath a flight of Condor dropships had sped across the sky with a heavy escort of Archangel interceptors.
For the briefest moment Galrath had know life and war as the sky was criss-crossed with anti-aircraft fire.
Then they were gone, all that is, except for a lone condor. A burst of fire had shredded the fuselage and sent it crashing down somewhere in the eastern sector of the city.
Nothing should have survived the crash, but as is the way of these things something..or someone had.
Amongst the twisted wreckage of the condor dropship, Marshall Feldpattick, commander of the 669th Legionnaire division cautiously flicked the switch on his emergency beacon. Pinned in place by the weight of a Wolverine across his shattered legs, he knew it could mean rescue or death, he knew his beacon would be picked up by the ships in orbit, but he knew the scourge would sense it too.
High in orbit, aboard the UCM Flagship Saratoga, the emergency beacon was picked up, decisions were made and forces were tasked.
The men moving silently across Galrath's eastern side, were some of the best in the 669th division. Recon and stealth specialists, they had been given a high priority mission.
To extract the Marshall and recover the 2 intel packs he was transporting.
To UCM high command, the Marshall was considered expendable, to the men of the 669th, he was not.
War was coming to Galrath, as surely as the sun would rise in the morning, so was the war.
Like i said, Dropzone Commander seems to have captured every side of the hobbyist within me. I hope you enjoyed the short 'story'. It's been a long time since i even attempted to write something like that...so it must be a sign of something eh...even if it's my continued spiral down into madness.
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