SPACE HULK KILL-TEAM MISSION GENERATOR

Feel free to create your own Kill-team missions based on these advanced Space Hulk modifications. Below, you'll find a few guidelines that will help you generate these missions. Don't feel compelled to follow these ideas precisely - just use them as a launching point for your gaming fun.

Deathwatch Terminators explore the confines of a Space Hulk - Click to enlarge.

MAPS & TERRAIN

Though the old board maps from Space Hulk are fun, you don't have to stick with them. Just imagine a rusted out, Tyranid infested space ship and go from there. You'll want a lot of terrain to create close confines. Create several avenues to the objective, but make sure none of them make a bee line there. Offer many areas for Genestealer entry so the Tyranid player has plenty of options. Just keep in mind how far the Terminators have to move to get to the objective area - too far and the Genestealers will be able to pick them off at leisure, too close and the Tyranids won't have a chance. Check out the "Boarding Actions" section of the Battlefleet Gothic: Invasion booklet for even more fun ideas. If you want to make a modular board, check out this page of the article.

FORCES This aspect is the tricky part. In the Kill-team rules, on average, the brutes get 202 points to spend on squads to the Kill-team's 160. That ratio reflects the fact that the Kill-team is always outnumbered during its dangerous missions. With the Space Hulk modifications in this article, the Terminator Kill-team is even more outnumbered.

Based on the penalties from the Kill-team rules, a standard Terminator squad breaks one immutable law and gives the Brute player a lot of extra points to spend on a Boss. However, the regular Space Hulk game didn't have any Bosses in the regular missions, so it didn't make sense for the Tyranids to have one in the two missions in this article. Instead, we make up for that by adding even more Genestealers to the missions! Check out the chart below to see how we translated the standard Termagant Brute squads into Genestealers.

Terminator Kill-team Roster	Kill-team Cost	# of Genestealer Brute Squads
1 Terminator Sergeant with storm bolter and power weapon, 4 Terminators with storm bolters and power fists	200	7
1 Terminator Sergeant with storm bolter and power weapon, 1 Terminator with heavy flamer and power fist, and 3 Terminators with storm bolters and power fists	210	7
1 Terminator Sergeant with storm bolter and power weapon, 1 Terminator with heavy flamer and power fist, 1 Terminator with assault cannon and power fist (breaks a second immutable law), and 2 Terminators with storm bolters and power fists	230	8

We needed the Genestealers rather than Termagants (the normal Tyranid Brutes) to make this more like Space Hulk - plus, the Termagants wouldn't have much of a chance against Terminator armour. With a little math, we figured out the equivalent number of Genestealers. If you want to play games with two Kill-teams, just double the number of Brute squads from the chart above. If you just want to play a regular game of Kill-team between Terminators and Genestealers, then all you need is the chart above.

Bringing in the Space Hulk blips left us with another problem: how do you translate Kill-team Brute squads into an initial number of blips along with a blip generation rate per turn? Check out the chart below.

Genestealer Brute Squads	Blips at Start	Blips Added per Turn	Blips in Tyranid Pile
7	2	1	3 "false alarm" blips, 5 "one-squad" blips, 1 "two-squad" blip
8	3	1	3 "false alarm" blips, 6 "one-squad" blips, 1"two-squad" blip
14	4	2	6 "false alarm" blips, 10 "one-squad" blips, 2 "two-squad" blip
16	5	2	6 "false alarm" blips, 12 "one-squad" blips, 2 "two-squad" blip

We didn't want to dilute the actual number of Brute squads that make it onto the board, but since the blips "regenerate," we didn't want to go too crazy, either. In general, we tried to make sure that all the Brute squads got on the board by Turn 6. You will likely have to play your mission a few times before you get the blip rates set correctly.

OBJECTIVES

The two forces clash - click to enlarge.

The objective really makes or breaks your mission. Does the Kill-team have to hold a room for a certain number of turns? Do the Terminators have to fight their way across the board to torch a room with their heavy flamer or activate some system on the space hulk? Does the Kill-team have to recover an item and carry it out of death's grasp? Does it have to kill a certain number of Genestealers? The sky's the limit! Much like the blip rates above, there's no really way to know how an objective will affect your mission's gameplay until you get in there and try it out.

KILL-TEAM SPECIALISED KITS AND BOSSES

Since we made these Space Hulk modifications under the Kill-team system, you can add in elements from Kill-team to make your games even more off-the-wall. Want to give the Genestealers acid mine booby traps as a specialised kit? Want to give the Terminators a prototype auspex that lets them force one blip per turn to convert? Hammer out a points cost and go for it. Want to add a Broodlord or a Lictor as the Genestealer's Boss? With all the immutable and mutable laws broken by the Terminator Kill-team, the Tyranid player easily has enough points to spend on a Boss like these two. A Carnifex might be a little over the line, but if you give the Terminators something to offset the difference and find a way to fit a Carnifex on the board, it just might work.

Genestealers rush to engage their foe - Click to enlarge.

GOLDEN RULE

The golden rule from the Kill-team section in the 40K rulebook still applies: you and your opponent need to cooperate to have fun constructing missions like these. We strongly recommend that you trade places and play the mission from both sides. Keep tweaking the mission design until you're both satisfied - change the map layout, the blip rates, and the objectives until you find the right balance. You'll likely have fun along the way, and in the end, you'll have a mission that you're proud to share with your other gaming buddies.

SIMPLE KILL-TEAM Intro Simple Mods	SPACE HULK TERRAIN Intro Room 1 Room 2 Corridor 1 Corridor 2 Gallery
ADVANCED SPACE HULK KILL-TEAM Advanced Mods Map Reading Tiles Mission 1 Mission 2 Mission Generator

Previous: Mission 2 - Exterminate.

Related Articles:
Tyranids | Space Marines

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