Here’s some more gamer stuff from Andy Bryenton:
The first test game has come and gone, and it’s been a great success. Very narrative rich, very exciting, and quite a close victory for the Prador, which is satisfying.
As I explained before, taking a complex and savage race like the Prador and turing them into a Warhammer army has meant inventing new unit types and battlefield roles for what would seem to be in your books a very versatile and non-unit-bound species.
I’ve tried to base the whole structure on the hierarchy of Third, Second and First Children, with the big, legless Adult hovering at the top of the pyramid.
So… here are the categories:
HQ (command units)
Adult Prador
First Child ‘Tribune’ (Delegated mission leader… he’d better hope he’s successful!)
Troops (Basic units, usually in groups of 10-20)
Third Child Interdiction Squad (medium range railgunners with a couple of heavy weapons)
Third Child Assault Squad (code-named ‘Eliminators’ by the Imperium)
Third Child Scouts/Infiltrators (Code-named ‘Intruders’ by the Imperium)
Human Thralls (fitted with suicide bombs for extra nastiness!)
Elite Units (Rare, S.A.S – equivalent troops and tactical command groups. Ususally in small groups)
Second Child Tactical Commander (Leads units of Third Children. Code named ‘Executors’)
Second Child Shock Troops (Heavy, shock-assault elites. code named ‘Eviscerators’)
Spatterjay Thralls (Feel no pain, have no fear… virus-infected Thralls which are hard to kill)
Fast Attack (Outflanking, surprise attack and fast response units)
Prador Attack Drones (bladed, high-atmosphere insertion anti-personnel weapons)
Prador Gun Drones (code named ‘Eradicators’ – anti-armor rapid deployment drones)
Heavy Support – (Heavy weapons, defensive units and tank-killers)
First Child Tankhunter (a First Child of lower status than the Tribune, deployed in the role of tankbuster and long-range heavy railgun / particle weapon support)
King’s Guard (I had to put these guys in! What’s heavier in hand to hand combat than a huge, armored, Spatterjay-Virus-mutated Prador with a bad attitude? That’s a rhetorical question!)
Thrall Barge (A hovering Thrall control, processing and deployment vehicle, lightly armed with point defense masers. For extra horror, it can enslave enemy troops and core out their living brains on the fly!)
This army list closely follows the pattern of other Warhammer 40k armies without being too powerful or too weak. The unique tactical facet of the Prador army is its pheromonal web of control and command, in which a strict hierarchy must be preserved. On the tabletop battlefield, lower-order Prador cannot stray too far from a commanding ‘officer’, lest they become subject to randomly determined disobedience effects, up to and including killing each other instead of the enemy! The plus side of this is a set of instant-effect Chemical Imperative orders, obeyed without question or the burden of morality…
For example, in the test game, the poor old Adult Prador was under seige, shot down to one remaining wound by a heavy tank. Just before he could be charged by a rampaging Daemon (yep, there’s gonna be some wierd crossovers in this thing!) he successfully issued the pheromonal command ‘Feed Me!’, devouring the Second-Child commander of a nearby unit and re-gaining one wound to weather the assault.
Another unit successfully issued the ‘Show No Mercy!’ command, firing into a melee which included their own troops. While Prador casualties were high, the enemy were routed by attrition.
Sadly, though, the First Child commanding the front-line assault got out of line, and his disobedience cost him his life. He rolled ‘Paralyzed by Indecision’, and was powerless to stop a group of heavily armored humans slicing him limb from limb!
So, short answer, things are rolling along nicely. Another of the Northland Wargames Alliance has voiced his intent to raise an ECS force to crush the Prador menace!
