Red King's Rampage

Through an extraordinary act of generosity I have acquired shining new copies of the latest editions of not only Giant Monster Rampage and Atomic Super Humans, as well as the Toy Battle Systems Rules Digest (which has loads of optional and extra material for both games). I still need to properly explore ASH as a game; the more I play GMR the more I think that it could be a good superhero skirmish game. But I need to get myself into The Zone before giving it a try. I am certain that GMR gives a good giant monster game, though. With new rules books to play with I have been looking at redesigns of some of my monsters, as well as some new designs. I played a quick game this evening, pitting Kiryu (who, as any fule kno, is Mechagodzilla) against one of Ultraman's foes, Red King.

Here's Kiryu:

Distance 3 Dexterity 4 Toughness 4 Instinct 3
Drill 2"/2
Blade 2"/1 Daze
Laser Blast
Mechanical Blast (2 Charges)
Freeze Blast, increased to 5 Wounds with Intensity (1 Charge)
Boost
Alternator

I'd not used Charges before, and was interested to see how they worked. They made the Absolute Zero weapon from the first Kiryu properly viable - very dangerous, but you probably only get one go with it. Making the missiles charges as well helped relieve the load on Kiryu's Atomic Power.

Kiryu was defending the city against Red King. Who isn't red. I found this figure for a dollar in a local market.

Distance 3 Dexterity 3 Toughness 5 Instinct 3
Fist 2"/2 Daze
Fist 2"/2 Energise
Barrage Blast
Leap
Tenacity

Descriptions of Red King emphasise his strength, so I game him two meaty fists, with the Energize allowing a dangerous punch and the Daze stunning opponents to prevent retaliation. Some incarnations could fire explosive rocks from their mouth; this seemed like a good power for a city-destroyer.

Red King set about destroying the city. Ineptly. This building resisted him for a couple of turns.

Meanwhile Kiryu used Boost to zip around the battlefield. The water restricted things a little. technically Kiryu should have Flight, but I couldn't afford it in a 200pt version. I may yet drop the Boost, and either add Flight or revert to the Leap I used to give the mecha. Either would have made the water less of a trial.

Using Boost Kiryu crossed the water. It doesn't pay to get caught wading, as an attack can cause you to stumble and fall if you're not aquatic.

Red King finally got his Atomic Power together, and starting bombarding the city. The red counters are the number of potential hits each building has taken, and they were under this kind of punishment for a couple of turns. Red King used AP to boost the radius of effect of each burst, so whilst they only do 1 Wound each, buildings were being hit by two or three bursts at a time.

With Kiryu closing in, Red King runs for it, leaping the narrow stretch of water. Whilst bombarding the city he had come under laser and missile fire from the mech, and had suffered a fair bit of damage, despite his toughness.

Red King settled down to destroying some more buildings, with his fists and with bombardment, but a couple of turns with the initiative, and judicious use of Boost saw Kiryu finally get to grips with him.

It was a titanic battle, worth of a movie. Kiryu couldn't get the charges in the missiles regenerated, but a few zaps with the laser started to cause the damage to mount (including one critical hit). Both monsters made use of their close combat attacks with Daze in order to prevent the other retaliating. Finally Red King was looking critically damaged - this was the moment Kiryu had been waiting for, and he fired the Absolute Zero weapon. And missed. At point-blank range. Abandoning bombardment for a turn, Red King piled all of his power into his fist, energising it to score 5 wounds if it hit. Which it did, rolling a critical as well, for a total of 6 wounds on Kiryu; 200pt monsters take 10 wounds, so this was a powerful blow. Fortunately Kiryu saved a lot of them, but both monsters were down to their last wounds and neither could make recovery rolls. It would come down to whoever got initiative next. It was Kiryu - a blast from the laser, a slice from the blade and then in with the drill to finish Red King off. Victory.

It was a close game. Although his close combat attacks had been poor when it came to demolishing buildings, the bombardment had mounted up a steady total of hits. Red King needed to destroy 30 building sections to win; he got 23.

Charges were interesting to use. In the end-game Kiryu couldn't regenerate them, but early on he used Atomic Power to up his chances, and did manage to 'reload' some missiles into the Mechanical Blast.

I would have tried my experimental rules for getting up from a knockdown, but neither monster was knocked down.

I did find that the Building Toss manoeuvre was rather good - too good in fact. For a small penalty you can attack a building, then use successful attacks to throw rubble at other buildings. On the fly I scrapped that move, and specified that when a building collapsed it generated rubble objects equal to the number of sections it had. These follow the standard rules for objects. In addition, although I think there are no limits in the rules, I only allowed the throwing of one object a turn. This meant that you could demolish a building in close combat, then throw rubble at another building in the same turn, but  not as frequently as you can with the Building Toss manouevre. It seemed to work well, giving both monsters ammo to use, but without overdoing it.

You must be fed up with giant monsters by now; I'll try and hold off for a bit, although I can't promise anything.