How to Set Up a Table for Narrative Play, Part 3: Working with Nachmund

We’ve written a ton about competitive terrain layouts but in this short series we’re looking at how to make good layouts for narrative play – layouts which go above and beyond the paintball arenas and bare MDF often presented in competitive formats. Last time around, I looked at how to use Sector Mechanicus terrain when making layouts and looked at a couple of missions from Pariah Nexus. If you've missed our previous articles in this series, you can find them here:

This time around I'll be looking at Nachmund - both the terrain kits and the campaign book.

The Nachmund Terrain

This is easily the most dire set I've looked at. Yeah, Sector Mechanicus is open, but its problems are more easily solved in my opinion. The set you get with Nachmund looks nice, but has some big issues.

The fences here are really bad. They're too short to hide anything and too long to easily work with. They're best used for providing cover for infantry units but that's about all they do, and unfortunately the benefit of cover isn't enough to save units from good shooting. They're OK to have around objectives but you need to pair them with line-of-sight blockers which force opponents to actually come over to the objectives and fight for them.

That's where the buildings come in - theoretically, anyways. There's a huge problem with big closed buildings in Warhammer. They take up a ton of space and unless you can embark within them similar to a fortification (something 40k rules don't really support), units will need to either hide behind them or move over them. And while they're doing either they tend to be completely exposed, stopping whatever benefit you'd like them to have.

It's always hilarious to hear people shit on L-shaped ruins but the reality is that those are very effective for Wargames - they can be arranged into large structures easily while their open nature makes it easy for models to hide behind the walls and still move through whatever ruin they're attached to. If you do a full building with four walls it may look better but what you actually end up with are boxes which eat up a huge footprint on the table without actually being great to play on.

This is especially true for the Nachmund buildings, which are too short to block line of sight to vehicles or other large units, but you can "fix" this by stacking another building on top of them. Of course, this just gives you an even taller building that's harder to walk over while still taking up a massive footprint. And they have major playability problems with objectives - objective marker mats cannot sit on top of a building and the ground, making it difficult to have them sit near the edge of a building. And that's not ideal since you want objectives to be challenge-able from outside the building.

Ultimately I think the large short platforms are... OK, particularly if you treat them as obscuring ruins which block line of sight across them, but they need that rule to really function.

This is another area where bases really help, and it's relatively easy to build based ruins using the wall sections of the Nachmund/Moon Base Klaisus Terrain. I built a Mechanic Shop of sorts using a combination of this terrain and the Ork Mek Shop kits, which you can see above, which works as a kind of "U-Shaped Ruin" in games and can narratively be used to house a vehicle like a Rhino or Goliath.

Building for Missions

There are two missions we'll look at here, both of which are in the Nachmund Gauntlet Crusade Book: Supply Raid and Purge After Inload.

Supply Raid

Supply Raid is a mission using Dawn of War deployment - always tough to work with - and a novel layout for its objective markers. In this mission all five are deployed along the center line and removed during the battle. It's meant to represent a battle over vital supplies.

Whenever we build a layout we want to do a few things: First, create hiding spots for deployment, second, reduce lines of sight between the objectives on the table, and third, create staging points for melee units to move up the table.

That's tough to do with the big buildings, and my immediate thought is to drop two of those diagonal to each other. The location of the objectives here is crazy - you can see how close those circles are, and so my next step is to add pieces for the middle of the table to separate those objectives. Once I add those I end up moving the buildings back and adding additional buildings and area terrain to each side and corner.

Munitorum containers really end up being a decent working solution for the middle here, giving us separation between the middle objectives. It might make more sense here to put them in an L shape to break up the middle a bit and I'd probably come back and do that on a second pass here.

On that note, cargo containers and crates are really your best friends when it comes to fixing layouts and terrain sets and they work very well here narratively since the theme of the mission is a raid on supply lines.

Purge After Inload

This mission has players fighting over cogitator info-shrines containing vital intelligence which must be purged after a data upload action is performed. it's notable for a more interesting objective layout and a Crucible of Battle style deployment.

Again, working with Nachmund terrain is always a challenge but it's doable. Here I opt to put one tall building in the middle of the table with corner ruins on 12x6" terrain bases. Those should provide hiding spots for infantry to hold home objectives while letting the objective be touchable from the other side of the area terrain. The Infopurge action finishes at the end of your opponent's next turn so it needs to be something you can safely do without it just being a death sentence for your unit.

I've added smaller terrain features and trucks on the table edges to block long sightlines and added some features around that middle building to create hiding spots where units can hold those objectives while not being completely exposed. The fences here are the weak links and I think this is a mission which would ideally prefer to have a more competitively-minded layout and terrain but it's workable using mostly Nachmund terrain.

Final Thoughts

That's a wrap on Nachmund. Next time around I'll look at building large centerpiece terrain features for use in games and talk about how to build large, useful features which can actually work as play pieces. So check back in next week for that one - it's a reader request. On that note, if you have anything particular you'd like to see here, let me know! I'm happy to cover other terrain challenges.

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