15mm Wargaming for Fun and Sanity: Flying Lead. The Detective Sergeant's Last Day. Being a VSF Adventure

All lined up and ready to go

Or, never give a psychopathic cultist a cunning plan and a flamethrower. There are a thousand stories in this city. Give me time.

Never has your humble chronicler had a more solemn duty to perform than to report the incidents leading to the death of Mrs Ethel Quatts of Pewters Lodge, Mons and her young family. British citizens unlawfully and cruelly cut down by cunning cultist on the streets of Tokyo.

Regular readers will remember this same lady survived the strange affair of the Venusian Godzillasaur's rampage at the Tokyo Municipal Spaceport as reported by your blogger.

Detective Samurai Omatu of the Tokyo Police was on his last day of duty. He'd been given a young burnt out Detective as his partner for the last month and he'd hated every day.

Following a post in A Fistful of Kung Fu (which we will get, eventually) regarding car chases I've been wanting to try out my ideas. Back to Tokyo after the last in our Godzillasaurus series very nearly ended up in one. But now I have the vehicles to do it. Ok, I haven't painted or based them. Just pretend not to notice.

This will be a 2-parter as I've a new piece of scenery I want to use. I must apologise for the quality of the pictures, everything conspired against us this day including the death of my wife's mother – and still she put up with us wargaming, a process that turns our flat upside down.

The Players. All have been here before so I'm being very lazy, or organised, delete as preferred.

The Chou family convoy in front, a fast (Long) car of toughs, a second with Fu and Su and a lorry with a machine gun hidden in the back.

The The Cult of Mothra Mechanica. Grey cultists that have played the supporting role before, got, painted but not used in the Giant Rat of Sumatra series. Flamethrower and leader in the lead car, another flame thrower in the second plus a lorry doing a period version of a transit in the Sweeney*.

The Tokyo Police, last seen, bought for, painted and used in the finale of Godzillasaurus. These caroom around in fast cars and are mostly sword and big pistol merchants who shoot or chop first (as it saves on the paperwork and interrogations) shouting the Japanese equivalent of “you're nicked” and “'ave it” rather than “'allo, 'allo wotsallthis-then?” or “are we in an 'urry sir?”.

*For our colonial brothers bereft of a proper TV education, a load of narks doin' a blag would drive up in a transit, jump out all tooled up and precipitous like and engage in the old ultraviolence. Never did us any harm.

The Game. I ended up with the Chou's (first time!) proceeding in an orderly manner. The cultists gave chase, cutting up a lorry that crashed into an oncoming vehicle (we did the activations, the yellow got 1 and slowed but the other failed all-). Fu realised they are being chased and pulls over to debus.

(For each section of road I did a quick D6 roll to see how many other road-users and on which side, these proceeded at a medium. What I didn't do wax take into account all the flames and shooting would have had on the horses. Silly sod.)

Pulling level with the van the flamethrower gives 'em a tickle, killing the driver and tragic anti-hero Lin Chou, out of control, the van smashes into a building but the gun team escape. In response to the crash the area car turns up from the side road and start to viciously direct traffic.

Fu's party start to debus and exchange shots with the police. One bodyguard drops, a 6:1 grisly death. They then depart. The cultists van had been idling along (if not activated vehicles in motion go 1 Medium), runs over the dead Chou and is diverted up the side road.

The other car, fed up with being blocked in, drives up on the curb working around the crash before mercilessly running over Mrs Quatts. This alerts the ever vigilant police, the cultists debus and they start shooting at the police, who are also distracted by the machine gun team. At whom a few well aimed shots, and being hemmed in by the wreckage, makes them escape into the buildings.

The cultists wound one officer. The flamethrower decides to finish him off, but the lorry is the path. This time the driver keeps control and the vehicle comes to a halt. Then we roll for casualties – 6 out of 8 perish, so that will be the petrol tank, an enclosed wooden vehicle and wearing long robes.

At the accident scene the rest of the police turn up and start doing the right things. When the lorry goes up they are blocked in and have to get another lorry to reverse before the middle car can investigate. It pulls around the crash and the flamethrower has another go. This time it's worse, a triple, so the car brews up something nasty. That effectively blocked the main body of the cops.

Now the remaining original 3 cops find themselves surrounded on 3 sides by small groups of cultists unable to get any cover. One does the over-the-bonnet roll to avoid a flamethrower, but fails. Another gets behind a cart and takes a pot shot at the cultist leader wounding him. The results weren't too bad but they were scattered, so we presumed, as the cops were beginning to creep closer, that they scattered.

So who won? The Chou's lost 3, 2 scattered, but they got away. The cultists lost 6 and 1 wounded leader, they failed to catch the Chou's. The cops lost 5 and failed to stop carnage.