Secrets of the Monolith

Oh dear.

I’ve been remiss in getting this up on the blog. We played back in January and it’s only because Stuart has written about the game that I remembered at all!

Cast your minds back to January 2023...



When pondering what our next Stargrave mission should be, Stuart mentioned that he had a Necron Monolith and that it would make for a good centrepiece for the Salvage Crew scenario. Salvage Crew is fine but it feels a bit underdeveloped and a waste of a model as impressive as the Monolith, so I went away and came up with something a bit punchier that used the original scenario as a kernel.

I dropped the crashed ship’s piddly blaster and replaced it with an unending stream of Necron warriors, themselves a simple adaptation of the Stargrave Sentrabot. I was a bit concerned that this would be too deadly a change, and in play the robots did prove to be quite dangerous, but overall the balance seemed about right.

Although the wandering Ryakan from the original mission did make an appearance in our playtest I didn’t implement wandering monsters, which would probably have made everything too unwieldy, with players spending more time maintaining the NPCs than their own crews!

I also beefed up the central treasure to offer an incentive to investigate the Monolith. I chose the Alien Artefact loot table to tie in with the theme of ancient alien secrets, and because the possible entries are different and more interesting than the standard loot, waving a further carrot in front of the loot-hungry crews.

It all worked quite well and I’ve used the notes we made to polish the scenario; you can get it here. Please have a go and let me know how you get on!