After a long journey, the Twin-Tailed Crusade is nearing its finish line. Charred scrubland and verdant soil are being broken as two new settlements – Embergard and Verdigris – are raised in Asqhy and Ghyran. There’s still time for disaster to strike, but at least these fraught expeditions will have walls to shelter behind.
You can read all about the progress of the Twin-Tailed Crusade in Dawnbringers: Book V – Shadow of the Crone, which is available for pre-order on Saturday. Alongside the next chapter of the narrative, Shadow of the Crone includes the brand new Strongpoint Assault battlepack, which provides new rules for teams of players to fight over vital strongpoints. It’s time to lay siege!
Strongpoints are collections of terrain features, representing half-built outposts or reclaimed ruins occupied by exploring armies. They behave rather differently than normal terrain features, and the book includes full rules for using strongpoints in one-off, two-player games… but the real meat comes in Strongpoint Assault team events.
Each team in a Strongpoint Assault has four players, each with an army from the same Grand Alliance.* Every team also has a strongpoint, which it must protect from any rivals, while trying to conquer the enemy’s own headquarters. When conflict breaks out, team members don’t all jumble together in one huge battle – instead, they pair off with players from the opposing team, depending on their battle location.
One pair fights in the West, one pair fights in the East, and a pair fights at each side’s strongpoint, using battleplans decided by their location. The team captains assign battle locations alternately, and in secret – but each captain can reveal the enemy player assigned to a single battle location, allowing for some careful management of match-ups.
The East and West battleplans each have their own special rules, but the Lay Siege battleplan revolves around defending or conquering your team’s strongpoint. The defender spends up to 50 resource points to build the strongpoint in their deployment zone, using a mixture of strongpoint terrain warscrolls.
These fortifications have slightly different rules to normal terrain. For one, they’re considered to be friendly (or enemy) models, and have their own Wounds and Save characteristics, so besieging armies can tear them down with brute force and powerful siege engines. Conversely, the Smash to Rubble monstrous rampage deals 5 mortal wounds to these structures on a 3+, rather than instantly flattening them.
The attacker will certainly want to tear them down as quickly as possible – these new rules cover six different strongpoint terrain features, each with their own powerful defensive benefits. Take the Cleansing Aqualith, which costs 12 resource points – it can Cleanse the Land of Taint each round, healing up to D3 wounds for each defending unit within 12".
The allure of building the perfect fortress and hunkering down may be tantalising, but fortune favours the bold. Your team’s ultimate victory is earned by winning laurels of victory from individual games, and more laurels are up for grabs when attacking a strongpoint, instead of defending it.
Given the extra risk and difficulty of fighting on enemy turf, it’s no surprise that a well-placed victorious assault can be worth several successful defences…
Shadow of the Crone includes complete guidance for running a Strongpoint Assault as a matched play event – but narratively-minded players will find strongpoints at the heart of the next chapter in the Dawnbringer Crusade’s Path to Glory saga. Foundations of Glory tasks players with laying the foundations of a new city, raising its defences, and safeguarding its borders, all as your fellow campaigners seek to tear it down.
This chapter works hand-in-hand with narrative rules from Battletome: Cities of Sigmar, allowing you to construct a characterful settlement with its own quirks – perhaps it’s built atop mystical ruins from a forgotten era, or near a realmgate defiled by the powers of Chaos. Ward off invaders, and you’ll even be able to build up your city’s strongpoint with additional resource points.
The full scope of your defensive campaigns will be revealed when Dawnbringers: Book V – Shadow of the Crone comes to pre-order this weekend, alongside the legendary Saviours of Cinderfall and three new Spearhead army sets.
* Though you could perhaps make an exception for notoriously mercenary armies like Fyreslayers, Ogor Mawtribes, and Sons of Behemat.