Battle Report: Dwarfs Fortify the Road and Break the Cathayan Caravan
Battle Report: Dwarfs Fortify the Road and Break the Cathayan Caravan
Sometimes a battle report starts with careful planning, balanced lists, and measured expectations. And sometimes it starts with a Dwarf engineer looking at an old road, a bridge, and a river and deciding that if it was once Dwarfen, then it should clearly have a cannon pointed at it.
This time we played a Warhammer: The Old World game from our Border Princes campaign: a fortified Dwarf force holding ground against a marching Grand Cathay caravan. It ended up being one of those games that had everything we love about The Old World: exploding artillery, absurd dispels, fleeing banners, a giant construct getting chopped down, and magic going catastrophically right and wrong at the same time.
The story before the first dice
All the Dwarfen banners in the region had worked through the night to finish their defenses before dawn. The Forgewardens completed their section exactly where the Thunder River crossed an old stone road that had not seen proper use in centuries. Adrax Forgeborn, naturally, saw no reason why a Dwarfen road should remain unfortified just because nobody had marched on it for three hundred years.
The stone was Dwarfen. The road was Dwarfen. The bridge was Dwarfen. The river had not yet offered an opinion.
By breakfast the earthworks were up, the guns had been hauled into “strategic positions” — which, according to Adrax, meant literally any place where a cannon could physically fit — and two engineers had already fought and then drunk together over the proper width of a ditch. In other words: the works were sound.
Then the forest on the far side of the road fell silent. First the birds stopped. Then the stream. Then even the wind seemed to hold its breath.
A gong sounded once. Then again.
Then came the rhythm of hundreds of terracotta feet. Wagons rolled behind them, dragon banners swayed in the mist, incense smoke mixed with the river fog, and above it all towered a Cathayan Sentinel, taller than any tower the Dwarfs cared to acknowledge as structurally reasonable. At the head of the caravan flew Shugengan Daj the Egg Seller on his Longma, calm as a tax collector arriving exactly on schedule.
Adrax stared at the Sentinel, then at his fortifications, then back at the Sentinel.
“That green one in front is in clear violation of acceptable height regulations for our roads. Artillery! Reduce it to compliant dimensions.”
The armies
Grand Cathay
Characters [459 pts]
- Shugengan General [155 pts]
- Shugengan Lord [304 pts]
Core [410 pts]
- 10 Jade Warriors
- 6 Jade Lancers
- 10 Jade Warriors
Special [130 pts]
- 1 Cathayan Grand Cannon
Rare [250 pts]
- 1 Cathayan Sentinel
Dwarfen Holds
Characters [226 pts]
- 1 King
Core [419 pts]
- 20 Longbeards
- 11 Thunderers
Special [568 pts]
- 16 Hammerers
- 2 Gyrocopters
- 1 Cannon
Rare [337 pts]
- 13 Irondrakes
- 1 Organ Gun
Battlefield and deployment
Because the Dwarfs were fortified and defending the field, the Border Princes campaign rules kicked in: one hill was removed from the Cathayan deployment zone. On top of that, an extra low linear obstacle was rolled and placed under the eastern hill.
That gave the battlefield a very “prepared kill zone” feeling right from the start.
Cathay rolled first turn. Despite being down by roughly 300 points, they did not look remotely intimidated.
Turn 1: the caravan advances
The Sentinel immediately pushed up the western flank toward the Dwarfen line and opened the magical phase with a Fireball.
The spell scored 11 hits, but only managed 3 wounds. A nasty opening, but not the devastating blast Cathay probably hoped for.
On the eastern flank, Shugengan Daj the Egg Seller led the Jade Lancers forward toward the hill that the Thunderers were about to occupy.
Cathay also chipped in a few wounds from the cannon and the Ring of Jet carried by the Lancer champion. Not dramatic yet, but enough to show that the caravan had threats in multiple phases.
Dwarf reply: hills, guns, and immediate aviation failure
In response, the Dwarfs climbed onto the hills, brought their shooting into position, and sent both gyrocopters forward.
One of them attempted an early bombing run on the Lancers.
It did not go well.
In fact, it went so badly that none of the bombs hit the enemy, while all of them somehow exploded on the gyrocopter itself. So one of the little machines ended its glorious service in round one, having achieved the rare distinction of being more dangerous to its pilot than to the opposing army.
Meanwhile, the elite Irondrakes formed up in a single absurdly wide 13-model rank right in the center of the battlefield.
From that position they opened fire on the Lancers, hitting on 4s. Sadly for the Dwarfs, the winds of ballistic skill were blowing firmly toward Cathay that day.
Cathay loses its cannon the hard way
In the next Cathayan turn, disaster struck the caravan’s artillery park. First came the misfire. Then came the 1 on a D6.
The result: the Cathayan Grand Cannon exploded, taking the whole crew with it.
That was a massive swing. With the cannon gone, Cathay lost one of its best long-range answers to the Dwarfen gunline.
Lancers bounce off Thunderers
Already reduced by about 20%, the Jade Lancers decided to try their luck in combat. They charged the Thunderers on the eastern side.
It did not become the glorious breakthrough they needed.
Despite being armed only with hand weapons in the melee, the Thunderers held and drove the Lancers off.
At that point the eastern flank was already looking shaky for the caravan.
The first magical turning point: “of course the Dwarfs dispel it”
Then came one of our favorite moments in the game.
Armed with what was jokingly described as “Meet Your Hammer”, Daj the Egg Seller cast Spectral Doppelganger. The roll came up 9, plus 2 for wizard level, leaving the Dwarfs needing what looked like a miracle to stop it.
They needed double sixes on the dispel.
So naturally, they rolled them.
That was one of those perfect The Old World moments where the table just stops for a second and everyone laughs because, yes, obviously the Dwarfs did exactly that.
By turn three, the caravan is in ruins
After three turns, Cathay was in dreadful shape.
The Lancers had managed to rally, but the Cathayan general was now heading toward the table edge at speed, fleeing for dear life.
Both units of Jade Warriors had also been whittled down to basically standard bearers and champions.
Still, Cathay was not done. One of those battered Jade Warrior remnants, together with both Shugengans, charged the Dwarf general’s unit.
The second magical turning point: from snake eyes to total devastation
Daj the Egg Seller tried Spectral Doppelganger again.
This time he rolled snake eyes.
That added a fifth miscast to the campaign’s Tearing the Veil of Chaos pool — bad news on a wider campaign level — but then came the absurd recovery: on the follow-up he rolled a 12, scoring Perfect Invocation.
And just like that, the Hammerers were erased.
It was a brutal swing and probably the single most explosive successful spell of the game.
The Sentinel falls, but not gracefully
Elsewhere, the Dwarf cannon also had problems of its own, misfiring and becoming stuck for the next two turns.
But while the artillery sulked, the Dwarfen infantry solved the Sentinel problem the traditional way: Longbeards with great weapons hacked it down in close combat.
The giant construct collapsed with a very appropriate TIMBEEEEER, and on the way down it managed to kill one Longbeard.
A worthy final complaint from a model that had spent the whole game being offensively too tall.
Banner versus gyrocopter: the smallest side plot in the biggest battle
One of our favorite little episodes happened late in the game.
In a desperate act, the last surviving Jade Warrior standard bearer ran from a gyrocopter, rolled 12, and got just far enough away to stay out of reach of the machine despite Swiftstride.
From there, for several turns, the banner and the gyrocopter basically spent their time shuffling two inches one way, then the other, locked in a ridiculous miniature chase sequence while the rest of the battlefield collapsed around them.
We love this kind of thing. Massive monsters, legendary magic, and then somewhere on the edge of the field one brave standard bearer is just refusing to cooperate with the script.
Irondrakes go hunting characters
At another key moment, the 13 Irondrakes charged the Cathayan general in the flank.
They lost 6 models, then withdrew in good order, reformed, and calmly took up a better firing position.
Supported by fire from the Organ Gun, they then shot down the Cathayan general.
Not long after that, they also killed the second Shugengan.
At that stage, only scraps of the caravan remained.
The survivors were basically just the battered remnants of the Lancers…
…and that one stubborn Jade Warrior with a banner.
Result
Dwarfs win 1260:774, scoring a rout of the caravan.
It was a really fun game with a very Old World rhythm to it: early shooting, weird movement scrambles, artillery disasters on both sides, one enormous magical spike, and then a slow but decisive Dwarfen grind into the remains of the Cathayan force.
Our thoughts after the battle
A few things really stood out to us:
- Cathay started strong, especially with the Sentinel pressure and mobile characters.
- The exploding Grand Cannon hurt a lot.
- The double-six Dwarf dispel was probably the emotional turning point of the game.
- The Perfect Invocation Spectral Doppelganger deleting the Hammerers was the wildest single moment.
- The Irondrakes did a lot of work despite some shaky early shooting.
- The Longbeards killing the Sentinel in combat was exactly the kind of grumpy Dwarfen solution we wanted.
- The lone standard bearer vs gyrocopter subplot deserves its own saga.
From a narrative point of view, this one was perfect. The Dwarfs fortified an old road because of course they did, declared a giant construct to be in breach of road regulations, and then proceeded to enforce compliance with black powder, stubbornness, and axes.
That is, honestly, peak Dwarf behavior.
If we play the rematch, we fully expect the river to finally state its position on the matter.