With now 2 children and way more responsibility at work then years prior I have not only ran out of time to play Warhammer... I have also ran out of brainspace.
It's been roughly a year since I have been up to date on rules. Last time I played was with the Leviathan cards, meaning the meta and rules have come and gone in many different permutations in the time between.
I needed not to keep up to date, I needed to go back.
The goal was to setup a very narrative battle, one that would allow us to focus on the mission and not worry about anything else.
So we went back to the peak before the break and reshaping of Warhammer...
We went back to 7th edition...
Ashes Beneath the Cathedral
A Narrative Battle Report – Astra Militarum vs. Orks (7th Edition)
Hold Until Relieved
The Warp scar that split the heavens bled across distant constellations the night Cadia died. Astropaths on this world screamed themselves hoarse, then silent. After that came only the storm-lit dark and the slow understanding that the Gate had broken and there would be no rescue.The 122nd Cadian Line had been in transit when the news came. Scattered by the warp storms that followed, only a fraction of the regiment reached this world at all. Their colors were faded. Their unit markings scorched and repainted. Their numbers stripped to the bone. They dug in around the ruins of a cathedral on a patchy hilltop because it was the highest ground available, and because Cadians die on their feet, looking forward.
Their final order, received before the vox-static swallowed everything, was three words:
+++ Hold until relieved +++
No one believed relief was coming.
Then, at night, the orks came screaming.
Terrain was a mix of home-made, Temu prints and the Titans Terrain cathedral expansion
The table set-up for the day
The Mission: Ashes Beneath the Cathedral
This was a narrative engagement built for story over score, using a custom 7th edition framework that threw out the tournament rulebook in favor of something grimmer and more personal.
The Setup:
The 122nd holds a fortified cathedral position – dense ruins, barricades, layered trenchlines – against a full ork onslaught across a killing field. The imperials are outnumbered and undersupplied. The orks have numbers, momentum, and a Warboss who keeps not dying.
Primary Scoring:
The orks earn victory points for pushing units into the Cadian frontline and backline. The imperials score by destroying ork units. Simple math with brutal implications: the orks just need to arrive.
Key special rules that shaped the battle:
- Dawn of War – Night fight penalties in the first round, with searchlights that reveal as much as they illuminate.
- The Ork Horde – Destroyed ork units can respawn from the board edge. The green tide does not recede.
- Low Supplies – From round 4 onward, every Cadian heavy weapon risks running dry on a roll of 6. The guns are falling silent.Space Wolves Reinforcement – A single squad of Wolf Guard Terminators is inbound by teleportation. Whether they arrive where they're needed depends on whether the ork Mekboy's signal scrambler can be stopped – and whether the Warboss cooperates.
Deployment
122nd Cadian Line
The 122nd Cadian Line fields two Leman Russ tanks (a Vanquisher Commander and a Battle Tank), seven infantry squads in layered defensive positions, autocannon teams atop the cathedral, a Wyvern mortar battery, a Company Command Squad, and a lone Ministorum Priest blessing bayonets in the forward trench.
The Cadians have been in contact with a Space Wolves strike cruiser from the lone company known as the Stormriders, led by the wolf lord Atsurr Stormbringer. Reinforcements are actually coming, but not in time to rescue them from the ork horde just yet, they need to earn their extraction!
Held in reserve: Unnar and Leifvar's Chosen – five Wolf Guard Terminators in full plate, arriving by teleport. Their destination is in doubt.
Forward scouts were sent to evaluate the Ork threat...
... they were unsuccessful.
The left flank was held by a Kasrkin team led by a Space Wolves scout, with a reserve infantry platoon squad and the Wyvern on the back.
The foremost trench was guarded by a large platoon infantry squad with flamers, joined by a ministorum priest.
Platton Commander Castor Rhenn leads from the reinforced ruins of the cathedral. A little bitter as someone who was passed over for promotion once too many times but still a loyal servant of the Emperor's finest.
Platton Commander Benedar Krael and his command squad at the central forward barricade with the Leman Russ reserves in the back.
Heavy weapon batteries hiding on the rooftop of the cathedral.
Low on supplies, the last defenders setup their stance across the killing fields.
Guntarck's Green Tide
Guntarck's Green Tide brings Warboss Guntarck "Da Unkillable" at the head of his personal mob with more boyz mobs stretching across the line in a wall of choppas and bad intentions. A Nobz mob on the left flank has been told not to kill anything until it gets across the trench, and a tide of gretchin that has been told to stay out of the way and has absolutely no intention of listening.
Big Mek Rukkruk Da Fixa grinding forward in the center with his Killa Kans and oiler grots clustering around him like iron satellites, Tankbustas jostling for position with their bomb squigs straining at their leashes.
Bringing up the rear, arms folded, staff planted in the dirt, is Uggrim da Waaagh-Seer – who is not advancing, has made a private arrangement with someone about whether the Warboss survives the night, and considers the killing ground ahead of him to be someone else's problem.
Guntarck's Green Tide is anything but subtle.
Dawn comes, three voices in the Dark...
The Priest
The priest noticed the smell first – promethium, turned earth, and beneath that the iron-sweetness of old blood soaked into the trenchline wood. Confessor Aldric Vasque had been blessing weapons for four hours without pause, working down the formation from man to man until he eventually found himself at the right flank trench with oil and litany. His autogun servo hung close to his head. The power maul sat unlit at his belt. The men around him were pale in the darkness, but they held their line. They had bayonets fixed. They had faith, or something close enough to it that it would hold until the shooting started.
He had heard the distant thunder of the horde for an hour before they crested the killing ground.
A boy, really. Seventeen, maybe eighteen. by his side grunted "They're coming loud."
"They always do," Vasque said, and touched the aquila at his throat. "That is not courage. That is hunger. Hold your line. The Emperor sees every man who holds his line."
He could see the shapes now. The massed silhouette of things too large to be human, moving fast in the dark.
He ignited his power maul and started a battle hymn loudly in low gothic so as the troopers could eventually follow along, keep their discipline...
The Veteran Sargent
Fifty meters back and eight meters up, Sergeant Petyr Dannek stood on the roof of what remained of a bunker and watched the green tide emerge from the dusk through his magnoculars. He had held this position for six days. His squad had two heavy bolter teams. They had scarce ammunition for considerably less than that, but all things considered an elevated position and heavy weapons at the ready were a mercy the quartermaster had managed on this fateful day.
The Tank Commander
The Vanquisher, the one without a name painted on its hull because the previous commander had never gotten around to it, housed Executor-Sergeant Mael Torris who was running cooling diagnostics and listening to the vox channels as they fractured into static. He had survived four engagements since Cadia's fall. He had survived because he understood one thing about armored warfare: a tank that stays still dies. A tank that moves chooses where it dies.
His battle-tank squadmate was ahead of him in the column. He could see its searchlight raking the killing ground, hard white light cutting through the dark and picking up the glitter of mob-iron, the yellow glow of ork eyes.
"Contact left," his gunner said.
"I see it," Torris said. "Wait for the light, aim for their ugly walkers."
The battlelines drawn at the break of first light.
A formidable horde of rampaging orks.
The emperor's finest, staggered defense lines and hunkered down heavy weapons to cover their approach.
Start of the battle - Shots in the dark
The Cadians shot first, and in the dark they shot well.
The Vanquisher's searchlight caught the Killa Kans in full relief and the tank commander didn't hesitate – the Vanquisher Cannon cracked once and a Killa Kan came apart in a shower of scrap iron. The autocannon teams on the cathedral roof raked the boyz mob on the right flank, keeping them pinned, while the heavy bolters hammered the center, and the Wyvern's mortar dropped indirect fire across the left where the gretchin were trying to make themselves look insignificant.
The orks took the punishment and kept moving.
They always keep moving.
Initial casualties managed to thin he advancing horde down, but would it be enough?
The enemy seemed certainly unfazed by their losses.
The night fight hampered everything – shots that should have killed clipped and wounded, mobs that should have broken kept their nerve in the dark. The horde closed the distance faster than the Cadians wanted.
And then...
WAAAAAAGH!
The Nobz hit the left trench first...
They led with their assault grenades, keeping the counter fire scattered and making a trench seem less like a formidable defense and more like an adsault ramp.
They came crashing into the Kasarkin squad in a collision of iron and flesh. The Space Wolf pack leader fought with them, blade rising and falling, but the Nobz were too many and too brutal. The Kasarkin were obliterated – not broken, not retreating, gone, their position overrun in one savage charge. The Space Wolf died on his feet, and that was the left flank taken over by the greenskin before the sun had properly risen.
Simultaneously, on the right, Warboss Guntarck cleared the trench.
He crossed it in one stride, pointed at the priest, and issued a challenge in the form of a sound that shook the trench walls. Confessor Aldric Vasque heard the challenge, looked at the Warboss – three meters of iron and fury and absolute confidence – and made the only decision a priest of the Emperor can make.
He crested the trenchline to meet him.
The First Voice Falls
He was going to die. He had known it the moment the Warboss fixed those yellow eyes on him. A priest does not survive a Warboss in single combat. The mathematics were unkind.
But that was not the point.
The point was the men in the trench behind him, who were watching. Men whose faith was a thin thing stretched over hollow bones, who needed to see someone walk toward the impossible without flinching.
He lit the power maul.
The Warboss was already moving, reaching for him with one of those enormous hands, and Vasque ducked under the grab and swung the maul into the joint of the thing's knee. He felt the impact travel up his arms.
The Warboss barely noticed.
The second blow came down on him like a falling wall.
He had time for one last thought – not a prayer, something simpler, something that surprised him with its smallness: I held the line.
The trench held. His squad, still reciting the war hymns he'd drilled into them for six days, fixed bayonets and pressed forward into the combat he had started.
He didn't see it.
Battle Progress - The Line Bends
Vasque's death did not break the squad. It enraged them.
The infantry platoon around him continued to hold – singing, actually singing the battle hymns the priest had taught them, which unnerved even the orks momentarily – and the Warboss found himself mired in the trench with a squad of lunatics who refused to break. They couldn't hurt him. He couldn't entirely ignore them either.
The center, meanwhile, was turning critical.
The Mekboy and a partnered Nobz mob boss hit the tank column. The Vanquisher, its searchlight still burning, was now in close range of a mob that very much wanted it dead. The Killa Kans ground forward through the wreckage of their fallen brother. The Tankbustas were repositioning with their bomb squigs.
Torris in his Vanquisher Tank saw what was happening to its squadmate and opened fire – one more Killa Kan came apart, the heavy bolters stitching across the approaching Nobz – but the numbers were wrong. The Mekboy's mob reached the Battle Tank and what happened next perplexed even his experienced eyes. The Orks claws torn apart chunks of the tank's armor, where they would lob explosives in or pull the paniked crew out the result was the very same: chaos.
The tank commander did not have the time to order their companion to evacuate.
The Battletank exploded.
The reverberating explosion lit the center of the battlefield in a brief terrible orange, and in its light Torris could see, very clearly, how alone his tank now was.
On the backfield right, Sergeant Dannek watched the explosion and made himself breathe normally. His heavy bolters had been hammering steadily throughout, and the autocannons on the cathedral roof had felled the last of the Nobz mob on what was their reserve backline – all but the Nobz boss, who stood among the dead of his squad like a bad weed.
"Load fresh belts," Dannek said. The gunners didn't need to be told, but saying it aloud meant his steady voice would also keep the gunners themselves steeled and functional.
Then a bomb squig found the commander Vanquisher Tank.
It came in low and fast, the kind of thing that's hard to stop because it's too small and too quick and too absolutely committed to the task of dying against something important. The explosion that followed was not as spectacular as the first Battle Tank – the Vanquisher's ammunition hadn't cooked off cleanly – but it was sufficient.
That tank too, was gone...
The Second Voice Falls
Torris had gotten the hatch half-open when the squig hit.
He didn't feel the explosion. One moment he was reaching for the release mechanism, the next there was just white, and then a sensation of heat so complete it stopped being painful and became something else entirely – a kind of warmth he hadn't felt in years, something that reminded him, absurdly, of a kitchen on Cadia, his mother's kitchen, the heat from the oven, the smell of–
The Vanquisher Tank's hull split along the left sponson. The fire inside was thorough and patient.
No one came to check on the crew. The battle had moved past them.
On the ork side of the center, two figures were having an argument.
"Da signal's still weak," the Mekboy said, holding up the scrambla – a device that looked like a radio built by someone who understood neither radios nor the concept of "finished" – and squinting at it. "I need 'im further forward. Just a bit. Just over da trench, like."
"He's busy," said the Nobz boss.
"He's krumpin' some runts! I need da extra boost or da squig-signal's gonna cut out before da big wolves arrive–"
"HE'S. BUSY."
The Mekboy looked at the Warboss, who was currently holding an imperial guardsman at arm's length while the man stabbed him repeatedly in the forearm.
"He don't look that busy," the Mekboy said, "I need need 'im over that trench, what zog is he doping hiding there?"
Late Battle - The Shrinking Ground
The left flank crumbled when the Wyvern tried to tank shock the incoming boyz mob.
It was not an unreasonable decision. The Wyvern had been mortar-dropping indirect fire across the ork left all battle, and a tank shock against an infantry mob is a legitimate tactical option. The problem was the mob in question had been advancing through heavy fire for three rounds and was in the specific psychological state that orks enter when they stop caring about whether a vehicle hits them.
They were unfazed.
Then yet another bomb squig found its way to the lighter vehicle chassis and finished the job.
The Wyvern died without glory on the left flank, and the rear infantry squad that had been sheltering behind it was now very exposed and between and angry mob of orks and a flaming wreckage.
The Warboss – finally done with the trench, the broken squad routing toward Dannek's position, the hymn-singing interrupted by boots on the run – crested the forward barricade in pursuit. This brought him to the exact position the Mekboy needed. The scrambla lit up green.
At the very same time, the Vulka Fenryka bondsmen and iron priests on board of the strike cruiser watched the teleportation coordinates of their wolf guard terminators.
But the Mekboy got his signal boost.
A few runes got swapped on the hololith display in front of the bondsmen, not something they could notice in time...
Unnar and his Wolf Guard arrived in the heart of the ork advance. Not behind the lines. Not in a clear landing zone.
Surrounded.
Two terminators went down before they could swing a blow – dragged under by numbers, by weight, by sheer tide. The remaining three fought with the fury that every Space Wolf is trained to bring to the moment they know they're going to die. They killed ork boyz in clusters. They killed beautifully. It didn't matter.
More ork reinforcements were already coming up from the board edge.
Meanwhile the Warboss had finally scattered and broken the morale of the few survivors of Vasque's defiant squad – the same men who had watched the priest die, nbow ran towards Dannek's position.
The veteran sargent would not have it and barked them back into formation, his refusal to let them fall back further had now given their rifles a purpose.
They reformed, turned around, and they charged at the Warboss.
They shot at him first. Volley fire, everything they had. He took wounds. He bled. He was, by any reasonable assessment, nearly finished.
He was on his last wound when he hit them.
He killed them all.
Dannek watched it from the bunker roof. He had not looked away. He made himself watch so that he would remember them properly.
"Reload," he said. The gunners reloaded.
The Final Turn: The Cathedral Burns
The end was not fast, but it was complete.
The company command squad made its last stand on the ground floor, surrounded.
Wolf Guard Battle Leader Unnar died somewhere in the middle of the ork mass, having killed something like twice his weight in orks. Nobody wrote a number down.
The autocannon teams atop the cathedral roof held longest – they were in a strong position, their weapons were still finding ammunition, and orks climbing crumbling stonework are briefly easier to target than orks charging across open ground. But the ork horde had numbers for every casualty, and the cathedral walls, already damaged, did not make good fortifications once the orks began tearing them apart from the outside.
The Third Voice Falls
It was the ammunition that went first, which was appropriate.
The heavy bolters were shooting dry, not both at once but one then the other, the crews tilting their heads as the belt ran out and reaching for more and finding nothing. The autocannons on the cathedral roof were still firing. Dannek could hear them.
The orks had reached the cathedral. He could see them scaling the walls.
The Warboss was somewhere in the mass below and he had been, Dannek had heard this via vox, shot repeatedly by autocannon fire when he exposed himself – genuinely savaged, rounds going in, the big body shaking – and then apparently kept moving anyway.
"Is he dead?" someone had asked on the vox.
Nobody had a good answer.
His last heavy bolter team fired its last belt. The gun went quiet in a way that guns go quiet when they are truly empty – not jammed, not cooling, just done.
Dannek set down his magnoculars.
The orks were at the base of the bunker now. He could hear them on the walls.
He picked up his lasgun, checked the charge – full, he'd barely used it, because a sergeant who is shooting is a sergeant who is not commanding – and stood up to his full height on the roof of the bunker.
Below him, the last of the 122nd were holding positions they could not hold, firing weapons that were running dry, doing it anyway because Cadia had given them a particular understanding of the word "anyway."
He fired.
He kept firing.
He was still firing when the first ork reached the top of the bunker and that, at least, was something.
The orks raised themselves to the top of the ruined nave and found what they had come for – not the humans, those were secondary, almost incidental – but the gun. The big gun. The one mounted on the cathedral tower, the one the imperials had been pointing at the sky, the one that the autocannon team claimed was the most impressive piece of hardware on the battlefield.
They claimed it with considerable ceremony.
They would not discover until considerably later that it had run out of ammunition approximately two days before the battle started.
The grots had found this profoundly funny.
The Final Score
12 Victory Points for Orks vs Cadian 8 Victory Points
A Solid Ork Victory. The ruins of the cathedral, what remains of them, belong to Guntarck's Green Tide.
Somewhere in the debris of the central advance, near the wreck of the second Leman Russ, the ork Weirdboy stood and looked at the battlefield with the mild expression of a man reviewing the outcome of a sporting event he had watched from a comfortable distance.
"See?" he said to no one in particular. "Told ya he'd make it."
The Mekboy, still clutching his scrambla, did not look up from the new pieces of imperial iron he was already cataloguing.
"Barely," the Mekboy said.
"Barely counts."
"Da autocannons hit him seven times."
"An' he's still walkin'."
The Mekboy turned to look at where the Warboss was currently pulling a lump of what had been a cathedral pew out of his shoulder armor. The Warboss appeared to be in excellent spirits. Several orks were standing at a respectful distance, watching him, in the way that orks watch something impressive with the faint hope that the impressiveness might be transferable.
"He's still walkin'," the Mekboy agreed, slowly.
A long pause.
"...I still ain't payin' you the teef."
"You said if he lived–"
"I said survived. Dat ain't survived, dat's technically still movin'. Dere's a difference."
Guntarck pulled the pew-fragment free, looked at it, and threw it at a passing grot. The grot dodged with the practiced ease of something that has spent its life being thrown things.
The Warboss looked up at the sky, where, very faintly, the lights of descending drop pods were becoming visible.
He grinned with every tooth he had left.
"More," he said.
WAAAGH
Ashes Beneath the Cathedral was played as a 7th Edition narrative engagement using custom mission rules. No formations, no named characters, no lords of war – just dice and story. The Space Wolves arrived too late and in the wrong place. The priest died on his feet. The sergeant died last. The Warboss will not stop moving.
Some things don't need a clean ending.
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