Critical Ops: Sentries

Kill teams are often sent on critical missions that would prove difficult for a battle group to achieve with brute force alone. Often they must disable enemy communications, assassinate key targets, intercept or destroy supply drops, or gather intelligence so that a full assault can be instigated with minimum risk and maximum impact at a later date. These kill teams often range ahead of the main army, or they are sent farther afield to deal with critical targets outside the main engagement area. They use stealth and guile, relying on the element of surprise to get the job done before the enemy realise what’s happening. Yet even a small kill team may alert vigilant sentries with their presence. Where such a situation could occur, a lone operative is often picked to scout out the enemy lines and breach their defences. It’s a high risk job, but someone’s got to do it!

In this article, you will find the Critical Operations: Sentries rules set, which includes rules for using sentries in your games of Kill Team, plus six new missions in which to field them. These rules expand upon those found in Kill Team: Moroch and can be used with any killzone, giving you even more ways to field your operatives. The sentries rules add a new element of risk and tension to a game, with a lone intruder sneaking past enemy sentries to perform dangerous covert activities before calling in the rest of their team. Completing covert missions like this single-handedly is virtually impossible, but with a degree of skill and a bit of luck, a lone operative can significantly improve a team’s chances of completing its mission. Of course, if all else fails, it’s best to make sure they’ve got a combat knife handy.

Below, you will find six missions from the Critical Operations: Sentries mission pack. These missions use a mission rule called ‘Sentries’, which offers a new challenge for both players. The scoring parameters of the mission objectives vary across the mission pack, so having an expansive roster will allow you to select the right operatives for the mission at hand. They have been designed so that tactical play is rewarded, therefore they are suited to matched play but can be used with any of the three ways to play.

To randomly determine a Critical Operations: Sentries mission, one player rolls one D6 to determine a mission from the table below.

Sentries

Missions from the Critical Operations: Sentries mission pack use the Sentries mission rule, which is a prologue to the battle in which you will play through a series of sentry patrols (see below). The Attacker’s intruders can attempt to infiltrate the killzone, take up key positions and complete objectives ahead of the main assault. The Defender’s sentries must attempt to stop the intruders by patrolling the killzone and discovering them, if a mission uses the Sentries mission rule, the following changes take effect for the mission sequence:

• In the Set Up Operatives step, operatives are not set up as normal. Instead, the Defender sets up two sentries with an Engage order and the Attacker sets up one intruder with a Conceal order (if they cannot be set up with these orders, they cannot be selected as sentries or intruders). These are operatives from their kill team, and they must be set up wholly within the player’s drop zone (they cannot use any rules that allow them to set up elsewhere).
• In the Scouting step, the players do not select and resolve pre-game scouting options. Instead, they resolve sentry patrols, as described below.
• Victory points cannot be scored during a sentry patrol.
• Once the alarm is raised, continue the battle as described below.

Sentry Patrol

Sentry patrols are conducted in rounds, each of which consists of a Sentry phase and an Intruder phase.

Intruder Phase

The Attacker activates their intruder as if it were the Firefight phase with the following additional rules:

• They must have a Conceal order.
• They can only perform Dash, Normal Move, Pass or mission actions (excluding Tac Op mission actions).

Once the intruder has been activated, and if the alarm has not been raised (see below), the Intruder phase ends and a new sentry patrol round begins.

Raising the Alarm

The alarm is raised if any of the following conditions are met:

• The intruder is in a sentry’s Line of Sight (note that, as the intruder always has a Conceal order, it must be Visible, not Obscured and not in Cover to be in a sentry’s Line of Sight).
• The intruder is Visible to and within of a sentry.
• The intruder is within of the Defender’s drop zone (unless otherwise specified).
• The Attacker chooses to begin the assault, which automatically raises the alarm.
• Any other conditions specified by the mission.

When the alarm is raised, the sentry patrol immediately ends after that action and the players set up their remaining operatives as specified by the Set Up Operatives step of the mission sequence (they cannot use any rules that allow them to set up operatives elsewhere). The players then begin the battle as normal with the following rules:

• In the first Initiative phase, the players roll off and the winner decides who has the initiative.
• During the first Turning Point, each time an operative that was selected as an intruder or sentry is activated, the controlling player can change its order (rather than needing to have the order given to it when it was set up before the battle).

Designer’s Note: The Sentries mission rule presented in this publication differs slightly from that presented in Kill Team: Moroch. It has simply been modified as appropriate for the missions presented in this publication; it does not supersede the mission rule for that publication.