Battle Brothers: Graveless Dead

Part of the Fate of Heroes series - spoilers ahead!

Fortunately with the truce, traveling through House Grimmund's lands isn't bad - while the towns increase their prices due to the Spears involvement in the noble war, at least their soldiers are also more keen on fighting the undead than holding grudges.

On the march the company avoids wandering groups of undead and nachzerers until they start climbing the higher mountains of the North. There they meet Alfgeir the crusader who asks to join them in their virtuous quest - Gander readily agrees. Not much farther they find the ruined site of the artifact, guarded by a large force of skeletons.

Those backline pike skeletons are dangerous!

With long axes at the ready, the front line shield wall serves as a distraction while the heavy weapons flank the more dangerous spear men. This works well, until the shield wall breaks and everything goes to hell as people forget how to fight. Raz and Gillian are downed. Craizee is killed, reanimates and backstabs Alfgeir, slaying the crusader. With morale teetering on the brink, Gander orders a retreat - abandoning his fallen allies.

They would be the first four (of the currently thirty two losses) he could not dig graves for since joining the Spears of the Church.

Battle Brothers: Professional Killers

Part of the Fate of Heroes series - spoilers ahead!

After word spread of their vampire run in, the Spears are now considered "Professionals" and even purchased their own supply cart to help carry loot. While being couriers and hunting dire wolves were still the staple jobs, the nobles of House Folsach - the House of the Valley, requested they clear out some greenskins nearby.

These young orcs are fearsome but are no match for the Spears, even with their "stun" charge moves mainly because it still makes them hit the spear wall. On the way back Majorn spots a necromantic ritual though, and urges the Spears to investigate. They do so and find zombies, and of course, a necromancer!

Physically the necromancer is just a guy in robes, but he can continuously raise the fallen and buff one zombie per round to go "crazy". This is particularly bad if said zombie is armored and is holding a meat cleaver as Tartarus finds out, when he is relentlessly hacked into.

The usually slow zombies get an action buff from necromancers.

Dead, he stands up almost immediately to fight against his living brothers, and it is up to Gander to put him down. By that point Craizee had reached the Necromancer and made him a corpse too. At least the ancient coins they find on him are worth a bit of currency.

Battle Brothers: Spear Wall

Part of the Fate of Heroes series - spoilers ahead!

With the string of recent victories, morale is high as a banner for the Spears is created. The Nord Craizee is recruited as the company goes to hunt the rampant dire wolf packs roaming the forests.

The large white flags means their morale is breaking.

These critters are fast, but are easy prey as they keep lunging against the front line spearwall. The same tactic works well on zombies encountered at some random ruins, the only difference is - they get back up, making for a marathon battle but one still won by caution.

The company eventually arrives at Wiesendorf who not only have hauntings at the graveyard, but also a fort of bandits raiding their supply lines. With a quick scouting run it turns out the "hauntings" are also bandits, so the Spears set out to rout both locations.

These bandits are wise to the spear wall method, and counter with delays or ranged attacks forcing the Spears to charge. Ultimately this leads to the death of S***A who is piked while spear walling (pikes out range spears), and Moaning Knight (one of the original three) who takes an arrow to the knee... and another to the face.

Coppertopper the messenger and He-Alve the strange, scaled one are recruited as replacements, but Faltran and Bloodfire know they'll never be able to replace their fallen comrade.

TESO: Not so Graht

Adventures of Skyrim - spoilers ahead! You can follow the rest of the story here!

Despite all my efforts it seems the Lion's Guard went ahead and captured some pact soldiers which led to my return to their valley encampment the Nord dagger man, Craizee, and together we killed every single Lion Guard scum left in there. At this point I definitely regret reviving King Emeric. Anyway, there's still hope for an alliance with Queen Ayrenn so I sail over to the giant forest of Grahtwood next, and this place is a mess - story wise.

The trees here are massive!

It's like they put piece meal ideas everywhere, such as a rebellion, a vampire den, the Worm Cult messing around, freeing forest spirits, a showdown against Sheogorath's new favorite mortal, assisting an Ordinator of Almalexia shutting down a dolmen and so on with no main thread tying them together like in past zones.

At least I got to push a drunk wizard off a tower.

Ultimately I just need to retrieve pieces of an ancient machine so that the Bosmer (who are actually cannibalistic since they don't eat plants) recognize Ayrenn as their true leader. Her brother Naemon tries to use the machine first which turns him into an ugly daedra which I destroy easily. Ayrenn (who did no work for any of this I might add) doesn't change at all, just powers up(?) and then sends me to fetch her next accessory over at Greenshade.