Seal the Void Gate! - Shadows of Brimstone

Now that I've gotten all my Shadows of Brimstone figs painted, we're actually back to playing the game again. For our opening game back at the table we decided to create brand new characters and randomly roll the mission. Interestingly, we ended up fighting both big boss monsters, the Harbinger and the Goliath, in the same game. I figured I'd post some pics and a quick write-up of that game for fans of the Brimstone. 

 

No foray into the Old West is complete without some Templeton Rye.

We had six players in total, which maxes out the game and means that while there's plenty of fire support, there are zero revive tokens and the standard monster draws are High Threat cards! For the mission we rolled SEAL THE VOID GATE, which is a pretty good mission. It doesn't take you into the other dimensions, but that just makes it cooler when we do end up traveling to another dimension.

For SEAL THE VOID GATE the premise is pretty straightforward: An alien portal to another dimension has opened in a nearby mine, and monsters are pouring out and attacking nearby settlements. A posse of greenhorns went into the mine with a mystical tome in an attempt to seal the gate, but haven't returned. Your job is to collect your buddies and go into the mine to:

1) Find the previous posse and retrieve the mystical tome

2) Find the Void Gate and use the mystical tome to close it.

-->Are you a bad enough dude to SEAL THE VOID GATE?

The Gunslinger, Rancher, Saloon Girl, Preacher, Law Man, and Indian Scout enter the mines.

The monsters see their doom approach.

 So one room in and we immediately find the dead posse and mystical tome in the boneyard (immediately drew the first of two clue tokens we need). The mission states that once the posse is found you also find the monsters who slew them, which are monsters that are one Threat Level higher than you would normally fight. Since we have six people our Threat capability is "High." So the only thing higher than "High" is "Epic." So we drew a card from the Epic threat deck.

A Goliath and a Slasher appear! Everyone takes sanity damage!

The Goliath and Slasher both cause Sanity checks, and can do up to 5 Sanity damage in one turn just by being on the same tile. Since the Goliath can pretty much hit everyone in a three-square radius, trying to hang back was not really an option, so we all ended up hugging the tentacled monstrosity to point-blank shoot it to death (after tossing a stick of dynamite to wound it first and put down the Slasher).

Get 'im boys!

"You may be immune to critical hits, but you're not immune to lots of hits!"

 Brushing ourselves off and retrieving the mystical tome, we head further into the mine. Some wiseacre decides to Scavenge for supplies in one of the corridors and pulls an... AMBUSH!

Elite Hellbats and another Slasher surprise the party!

Hellbats are kind of a pain to run since they change targets every round, so we focused on killing them first, than stacked damage on the Slasher. Because of the Slasher some of the party take more Sanity damage. We started to reconsider most of our choice's to start with a stick of dynamite in our side bag instead of sanity-healing whiskey, since some of the characters were looking rather crazed by this time.

Die Hellbats Die!

 We walked one more room and found the Void Gate (I swear, I mixed the encounter tokens together from both Core Sets and we STILL pulled both clue tokens right away)! Time to draw another Epic Threat (plus an extra Low threat due to mission rules).

Ack! A Harbinger! But worse...behind him is an undead-spawning Corpse Pile!

My Rancher character, Shamus McFly, focused on the corpse pile with well-placed Hunting Rifle shots, so everyone else could focus on the Harbinger and walking undead. The Saloon girl, who evidently starts with no standard weapons (just a single-shot derringer pistol?!), runs straight up to the Harbinger for some fisticuffs. The preacher ended up healing her quite a bit throughout the battle between attempts to try and close the Void Gate. The rest of us just shot at the Harbinger a lot and threw the rest of our dynamite at it and the Undead.

Saloon girl runs into melee! Everyone else throws dynamite and fires guns.

 Right after the Harbinger is killed the Preacher made one epic roll to finish closing the Void Gate, so no more stinking monsters would crawl out to bother the good people of Townsville. Victory is ours!

Victory! The Gate is sealed and the Town is saved!

I can say that I definitely missed playing this game since the hiatus I took from it to paint all the minis. Even though the encounters are more difficult with six people, there's a lot more opportunity to get help if you need it (and a couple players did go down throughout the game and had to be healed right away).

I look forward to our next game of Shadows of Brimstone! Game on!