James' Wargaming Weirdness: Cthulhu Battle Report

I have been a fan of HP Lovecraft from an early age. Its his uniqueness that I like, his ideas are so innovative.

There are lots of HP Lovecraft games these days but I wanted to do a full scale battle.

My friend Ed came up with a scenario - somewhere in the mountains of Tibet in the early 20th century, cultists have opened the gateway to admit Tsathoggua to the material world.

News of this phenomenon has leaked out and now two rival armies are en route to take control of the mighty creature each for their own purposes.

So this was a 3 player game - the cultists and Tsathaggua, and British on one side and Chinese on the other. The Chinese had more troops, but many were poor quality peasants from my Boxer Rebellion collection.

The rules used were WAB with suitable modifications.

The British and Chinese had the objective of capturing Tsathoggua which they could do by beating him in melee. However he is really hard to beat, so 6 artifacts were hidden across the table. Each one of these reduced Tsathoggua characteristics by several points, so a player who collected a number of them would find it easier to master him. The objective of the cultist player was to prevent this from happening.

The artifacts were represented by cards. However in addition to the artifact cards, there were other cards which when revealed allowed the cultist to immediately deploy an monster to attack the unfortunate person who had just turned over the card.

Only when a card was turned would a player know what it was.

The games started with both sides advancing while the cultists remained in the compound. British lancers rode into range and the cultists quickly emptied a couple of saddles. Meanwhile the Chinese moved forward aggressively, clearly heading for the compound.

Both sides went for cards, the British found instead a brood of Mi Go who lost their melee and fled off the board! A lucky shot from the compound inflicted a wound on the British C in C!

While the Chinese found two packs of Yetis who did considerable damage before they were brought down, killing two of their three hero characters. Next to be revealed was a formless spawn which routed two of the Chinese units when they failed their fear tests.

The British seemed most focused on attacking the Chinese and charged them with both their cavalry units. Despite being outnumbered, the cavalry won their melees and the Chinese tried to mob them in vain.

British troops advanced on the compound and were surprised when the cultists opened the gates and charged out to attack them!

Chinese tiger men took advantage of the open gates to charge into the compound but in the first round of melee the cultists gave them a good hiding.

But the tiger men persisted and in the second round of melee routed and destroyed the cultists, leaving the way open for them to tackle Tsatthoggua. Although technically it should then have been the cultists turn, I let them have a go at controlling Tsathoggua. Having collected three artifact cards to reduce his strength, the tigermen overcame the Old One to sort of win the game.