1987 - A Huge Year for Tabletop Games

 

You may remember 1987 from such films as ...

It was a big year for this hobby of ours but I'm going to focus in on 3 things. To set the scene properly remember a few things true about the time ...

• No internet. We got our niche news via magazines mainly, which of course were delivered on horseback, via steam locomotive, and by hot-air balloons. We also found out about new stuff quite often by walking into the local game store.
• Technology was just far less of a player when it came to this stuff. Sure, we all wrote a D&D character roller in BASIC programing class or something and we were playing computer RPGs but the most advanced thing for actual play was probably one of those electronic dice rollers with the LEDs. The biggest communication innovation at the time was probably still cordless phones. Character and campaign information was stored on paper. 
  
  

  

  The "Dragonbone"

• The dominant RPG at the time was AD&D - no bloody 2E, 3E, 3.5, 4, Next ... Much like today there were a ton of other games but there was no real competition for top dog.
• The other big fantasy RPGs were Runequest, Chivalry and Sorcery, Tunnels & Trolls, Warhammer FRP, Pendragon, Maybe even Fantasy Hero at this point. 
• Sci-Fi wise it was Traveller with maybe a little Space Opera. FASA's Star Trek was still rolling along although it was about to come to an abrupt end. Star Frontiers was fading but still around as well. Heck Mechwarrior might have been up there too.
• Post-Apocalyptic was still a real genre at this time with Gamma World, Twilight 2000,  and The Morrow Project all active.
• Horror was mainly Call of Cthulu with a helping of Chill and possibly a little Ghostbusters and Paranoia depending on how far you want to stretch the definition.
• Superheroes were strong with Champions, Marvel Super Heroes, DC Heroes, Villains & Vigilantes all on shelves.
• Westerns were ... not really a player. If you wanted to go Cowboy you were probably playing Boot Hill or homebrewing something. 

RPGs were flourishing and it was easily a "golden age" if you want to use that term. So what was new for 1987?

It was a good boxed set

First, this year saw the release of MegaTraveller. Now Traveller is not the force today that it was in the 80's but it was more dominant back then than any one SF RPG is right now. That's not to say everyone loved it, but if you wanted to play with spaceships, robots, and lasers, you were probably playing Traveller. It was the D&D of space games. After ten years and various printings and versions and presentations and a ton of expansions we got MegaTraveller - effectively a second edition of the game. It revised both the mechanics and the setting. 

Mechanics-wise MT unified and organized the whole task resolution system with a more formal approach to how it worked and to how things were presented in rulebooks and adventures. Skills were more tightly defined. Vehicle and ship construction was way more defined. A rough analogy might be original Traveller had a more loose approach to things, figuring out things as they published more like Original D&D did. MegaTraveller was the big new revised version like AD&D. At the time I thought the skill system was genius and the level of detail in the construction system lit my rivet-counting gearhead heart on fire. Other people though thought the whole thing was over-codified when it came to the rules and the approach in general. It didn't help that it turned out to have a massive amount of mistakes, typos, and errata but we didn't know that right away. 

This is not even from MT - this is from original set Book 2 I think. Traveller was always kinda like this.

Setting-wise MT made a lot of bold choices and many people hated them. The largely static Imperium in the background, existing mainly to justify common language, standardization, and interstellar trade - and as the hammer lurking in the background if your players got too stupid - suddenly had a rebellion and split into regional factions and had active war zones and such. Now I didn't hate the idea at the time but it took the setting from being a somewhat generic background where it was easy to focus on your players and tweak whatever you wanted to having an early metaplot situation with a moving timeline where other stuff is changing the map. I think it some ways trying to get by in the middle of an active civil war is a more interesting setting but it is also far more specific than it had been and people really did not like that. I also thought it was easy enough to ignore but when they keep mentioning it in the published products it's hard to forget. 

Looking back I would say MT was the beginning of the end of Traveller's big run. It had a lot of great support from GDW and from another group, DGP, and they would be publishing stuff for it for another 5-6 years but it fractured the community in a big way. Presumably that led to a faster wind-down than Classic Traveller and got us to The New Era and the collapse of both the Imperium in the game and GDW in reality. 

I know it's not as big a player as it was - I'd say Traveller today is "a" sci-fi game, not "the" sci-fi game but this was a pretty big thing at the time if you were active in RPGs. 

Second, 1987 saw the release of the first Star Wars RPG. yes, the West End Games d6 system version we all know and love and revere today. We got the Rulebook, the Sourcebook, and a bunch of adventures and some supporting boardgames and it was glorious. Besides the obvious - it's Star Wars! - the tone on this game was the complete opposite of Traveller and most of the SF RPGs at the time who tended to aim at realistic physics-based assumptions and this game did not care about that at all - at least not any more than the movies did. Instead of a detailed breakdown of modifiers and parameters for each task including how long it would take and how hard was it to try again if you failed Star Wars gave you a fistful of d6's  - roll 'em and get a total! Detailed charts for determining planetary characteristics? Tatooine! Hoth! Dagobah! The game was a revelation and a juggernaut both for what it actually was and for the possibilities it revealed. The system was easy to grasp and teach, and a blast to play. We all knew the setting and it was also great and focused on the Rebellion era and with no prequel or sequel trilogies at the time no one was ruining the thing by trying to be full-on Jedi - just some dabblers and wanna-be's here and there. 

The production values were another standout. Those first two books were not full color but they were two- color - lots of blue accents. They also had some full-color inserts which we really didn't see at the time and it helped that they were funny. They were also hardback books which outside of D&D was not really a thing yet either. The adventures had extra cardboard inserts, paper sections intended to be cut out, and started with a script your players could read out loud to set the tone of the typical "en media res" style they used. 

Lots of cool stuff in those old folders. Not quite the same in PDF.

In the end it was fun and popular and well-done and probably put the final nail in the coffin for Star Frontiers (last supplement published 1985), greatly damaged MegaTravller (Why play in that rebellion when you could play in the real Rebellion?), and may have helped finish off FASA Star Trek as well (license ended in 1989 as they tried to move into that new "Next Generation" thing). I know the FFG/Edge game line has gotten pretty quiet and Star Wars now is not Star Wars then but that D&D announcement got a lot of attention so I'd say it's still a factor even 40 years later.

To me this is still the defining image of 40K

Finally, going in the complete opposite direction of the Star Wars universe, 1987 also gave us the darkest, grimmest future setting of all with the release of Warhammer 40,000 - Rogue Trader. Not strictly an RPG but definitely aimed at campaign play where you accumulated stuff and troops and improved stats over time like the older wargames that inspired D&D. It was simply amazing, utterly unlike anything else we had back then. It out-post-apoc'd the post-apoc games because the apocalypse had happened long ago and never stopped - it just kept getting worse. 

System-wise it was an adaption of Warhammer (fantasy) 3rd edition's rules which were widely played at the time and had quickly become the most popular set of fantasy rules. I know I was seeing it played at conventions around DFW almost as much as Battletech by 1986 and that's saying something. It was easy to understand, detailed enough to make difference between units feel meaningful, and included characters in the same way most fantasy games did which is a big part of the appeal. It wasn't just a space marine army it was -your- space marine force with gear you had picked up, wounds and weirdness you had taken, and you had probably named your characters after a few fights. 

The art was also a huge factor here. Games Workshop had been tapping into a lot of wild and awesome fantasy art for years with Warhammer fantasy and this game gave them the chance to push out in all kinds of new directions. It's hard to emphasize to people who weren't there how NOTHING LOOKED LIKE THIS when it was released. They did a big multi-page ad in Dragon that put me over the top as far as committing to it and, well, it's been a few years and I still remember that ad and I'm still going at it. 

The concept also was so genius that you have to ask why no one else had tried it before. Someone had to be the first one to make it work, right? They just took all of your standard fantasy races and put them in a a sci-fi setting with guns and spaceships and a strong dislike of each other, with magic rebranded as "psychic" to keep wizards and weirdness in the game. GDW's Striker rules - Traveller miniature combat rules-  might have been the most popular single set of SF rules out there prior to this, depending on how you count Battletech and it's hexgrid map-based play. I'm guessing within a year or two that was no longer the case as 40K quickly surpassed other SF miniature games and within an edition or two even surpassed it's older sibling Warhammer Fantasy as far as sales and popularity. 

It became apparent quickly that while Warhammer had been popular before this was a whole new animal. I don't know that we quite realized the revolution it would be but we knew it was new and cool. It's far less new now but it still has some level of cool as they keep coming up with new interpretations of it with videogames, animations, and now maybe a live action show. There are even multiple RPGs for it in print right now! Clearly it strikes a chord with a lot of people. 

That's enough for now for 1987. This idea just hit me one day and spurred this post. I can think of other years that had some pretty big releases so I might go back and pick out a few of those for a similar write-up. Until next time ...

Bringing an Old Green Friend Home

 

I haven't talked about it a ton on here but I have been working on Warhammer fantasy stuff for The Old World - and just because I like it. That older aesthetic from the 80's/90's/early 2000's still means something to me because that's when I got into it and played it quite a bit. I've always loved the "Orcs & Goblins" army and I've worked on one quite a bit over the years but never quite finished much of it. When we started playing Kings of War I played them quite a bit but that eventually faded and everything went back into boxes and on the shelf. 

I started out with 2nd edition and we played some of that and 3rd but we didn't have a lot of miniatures so we played with D&D minis, plastic dinosaurs and knights (sometimes sprayed in different colors), and the large pile of cardboard counters from TSR's Battlesystem 1st edition boxed set got more playing time as Warhammer units than they did in their own rules. 

This one is before I converted to Orc & Goblinism but I do remember it being around back then

By the time 4th edition rolled around the game exploded and the figures became much more widely available and my friends and I started building actual miniature armies, alongside out existing 40K armies and our Epic armies and our Battletech armies ...

It may have some out in 3rd but I found it in 4th and I still have at least two of them. 

The 5th edition was pretty similar rules-wise and we kept right on playing our ridiculous hero-hammer games with over-tooled heroes and monsters.

AZHAG! This guy was my general in most of the battles I fought with the green guys back when and I loved him. Mean in combat, mounted on a mean beast, and able to cast spells because of his magical crown - expensive, but worth it!
Think I still have two copies of him too.

For me Warhammer 6th edition was probably the peak and it toned down the overpowering of individual models quite a bit and felt better to us overall as a wargame. Around the time it came out the greenskins got a new "flagship" in the form of a new Warboss on a Wyvern.

No more sinuous, serpentine wyvern - this guy is a thicker, more brutish take with an underbite - more orcish for sure.

For whatever reason I never managed to get one of these. I mean, some might ask "well how many orcs on wyverns do you need?" to which I would respond "one of each at least, right?" - and now I finally have him. They are not exactly rare but I never ran across one that was a)the old metal version and b) not either badly painted, missing parts, or priced like an art object and not a gaming miniature.

But I finally did find one like that and since I'm working on the orcs in between the 40k stuff I realized it was time. It had become a bit of a Holy Grail thing for me as I wasn't sure I'd ever find one clean and complete. But now he's here and I'm very happy about it. I'm going to try and get him built and primed pretty quickly and then agonize over how to actually paint him for an undetermined period of time but I do have some ideas so it may not take that long.  More to come.

Not-40K Friday: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 5th Edition is Coming

 

Alright, well, I admit that was unexpected. I haven't followed 4E that closely as I have a low-mileage set of 2E books sitting on the shelf and that's what I figured I would run for any campaign likely to develop in the near future. I did look at it a little in 2023 when I ran my one-shot game. As I began picking up their 40K RPG books and AoS books I also looked it over just to see how Cubicle 7 was managing their various product lines. It's only been out around 7 years AND they just launched an Old World RPG which is an alternate fantasy option so I didn't think they would be redoing their main Warhammer game but there it is.

Now I haven't run or played a ton of WFRP since the 80's & 90's - and even then it was always behind D&D - but I've always felt like it's underrated by RPG players in general, and especially as a sort-of traditional fantasy setting RPG that feels very different than D&D. By that I mean it's recognizably medieval European style fantasy with knights and elves and dwarves and wizards but it plays about as differently from D&D as you can imagine while still keeping those trappings. It can be a tough transition for someone who has played D&D to walk into this game and have their expectations rearranged. I think the part of the OSR crowd that's looking for lower-powered D&D could like this - if they aren't completely caught up in classes and levels for mechanics. 

This new edition is launching next year so it's the 40th anniversary edition which is ... weird. Yet another game that I remember being the hot new thing hitting a milestone like that. I am very happy  it's still being produced and supported, especially in a form that looks a lot like the original. 

This is the cover on my original book

I do wonder, business-wise, about launching a new edition of the mainline Warhammer RPG at almost the same time as launching a new separate line of Warhammer RPG. I'm thinking most people are only going to play or run one or the other but I suppose enough people will buy both to make it worthwhile. Also this one is all about backwards-compatibility - a notable trend of late - as the game is in that fairly common place of having been out long enough to have produced a shelf's worth of supplementary books that update or flat-out replace sections of the core rulebook so why not go ahead and integrate that material into the core. It's an admirable attempt and I like it but I also know there will inevitably be some compromises. "Now that the new core rules include systems from the Magic book, we can revise the magic book too and add more spells and items and optional stuff." It's just the way things work with RPGs.

Reading about this has me thinking I ought to do something with it. We are close to finishing up the Temple campaign so maybe a short run in the Warhammer world is a possibility. I had really been thinking about an Old World RPG test run but maybe giving original recipe WFRP another go is a good option too.

40K Friday: 40K, One Page Rules, The Old World, and Kings of War

 

One of the downsides of playing a Games Workshop game long-term is that they drop models and units out of the game - often without any kind of immediate replacement. This can wear on one's soul. Between buying it, building it, painting it, and playing with it - possibly for years - many of us get attached to these tiny figures and it feels bad to see a kind of forced retirement of something like that.  Blaster has just about burned out on the game after being into it for years. He is really displeased with the current state and edition of 40K and the whole 3-year cycle of book-buying and the regular replacement of perfectly good models. I get it and I've been doing this long enough that a lot of that bothers me less but it has been piling up for me too this year as a big chunk of the classic Blood Angels army was culled in the latest Codex and it really took the wind out of my sails for a while.

As just one example back in 2nd edition when dreadnoughts were still metal the BA's got a special dread with a unique combination of weapons called the Furioso. This continued into 3rd. Then somewhere in 4th or 5th we got a brand new plastic kit that made 3 different dreadnought versions unique to the chapter:

This kit made the Furioso, the Death Company dread, and the Librarian dreadnought - all unique units. There was some weapon interchangeability with the Furioso and the DC dread but but you still had the options of dual fists, dual claws, or mixing in a frag cannon with one of those and then the librarian dread had his own special gear and look.

These were all great and the librarian dread was very unusual in being a vehicle that could lead your army since it was a character. 

If you can't tell I love this kit and have built it multiple times. In fact I still have a couple that need to be built which didn't help my feelings on this.

Well, fast forward to the 10th edition Blood Angels release and these options are now gone from the codex. The librarian dread is no more. We do still have the standard space marine 'dex options for the Redemptor, Brutalis, and Balistus - fine. The Furioso is gone - if you paint your Brutalis red it looks the part at least but no special rules or equipment apply anymore. The Death Company dreadnought is still a separate datasheet at least but it's not all that different from the regular Brutalis and neither one has a frag cannon option so that's gone too. For this particular edition we do have the index rules for these things and so we can still make it work but it's debatable if and what kind of Legends rules these will have for the next edition and going forward. So it's going to be swimming upstream to use any of these models in 11th.

Dealing with this for years means you expect it here and there but when it hits a big chunk of a favorite army it hits harder. You might start looking for a refuge from the constant grind. I dug back into One Page Rules looking for relief. It's there, to a degree. Grimdark Future (the 40k type module) has rules for many obsolete 40K units that are perfectly valid and they even divided "Battle Brothers" (firstborn marines) from "Prime Brothers" (primaris marines) and then each of those has subdivsions into the various specialist chapters like "Blood Brothers", "Wolf Brothers", "Dark Brothers" etc. Under the Blood Brothers list there are options for all of these dreadnoughts including the psyker option. So there are ways to keep them on the table within a modern set of rules. This is honestly pretty gratifying to see.

The other option of course is to just play an old version of the game. I have kept all of my old rules and codexes from each edition so I have the full range of options. I do like this idea but I can also tell you "edition bleed" is real so trying to play an old version at times and the current version at other times ... it's more challenging than you think as rules from various editions collide in your head. There is defintely some nostalgia at play here too and if I can get one of the crew to try it I will make the attempt but I suspect using a different set of rules - like OPR - is probably smarter in the long run.

The only downside to OPR is that they change up the rules and the army lists once per year. They did make the promise that it will only be once per year - unlike GW's quarterly (or more) rules updates - but it still does change once per year, which can cause some upset when your army gets nerfed. I still think it's easier to live with than GW's current approach. 

A similar thing happened with fantasy. When GW killed off classic Warhammer Fantasy after 8th edition and replaced it with Age of Sigmar we were left with a completely different setting, the outright elimination of many armies and dramatic changes to others, and a completely different approach to the rules. If you had been playing Warhammer for 20 or 30 years when it happened there just was not much left that looked very familiar. Along comes Kings of War and, well, look at this - square bases, large blocks of units, similar maneuvering, and a lot of very familiar-looking armies. It was an incredibly welcoming refuge for orphaned Warhammer players. It was also willing to make some interesting changes such as eliminating individual model removal and cutting way back on magic items and spells. It was a little less flavorful in some ways but it worked really well and felt like your units were doing the bulk of the work, not your tooled-up level 4 wizard with Von Carsten's Ring riding on a dragon. Hey, nobody said Warhammer didn't have a few problems - but this was a well-done approach that respected what had come before. 

The only negative thing I will say is that over the course of 3rd edition and now going into 4th edition (coming in December) is that Mantic is really looking to promote their own setting and put it out in front rather than being a simple shelter for old Warhammer players. If I'm being honest I don't care at all about their World of Pannithor - not the background, not the armies unique to it, and not the fiction they are publishing. I get it, they are trying to build their own thing and I certainly understand that from the company's point of view, but there is no lack of settings in the fantasy genre and for miniatures I am anchored pretty deeply into the Old World of Warhammer.

Now when a beloved game goes out of print there are usually some fan driven options as well  - like OPR -  and they can be really good. Heck I played some NetEpic 25+ years ago when GW dropped support for Space Marine/Titan Legions and it is still around today! Warhammer had Ninth Age and Warhammer Renaissance seems to have some fans but GW eventually did the unthinkable and brought it back!

They even added a new army this year - Cathay!

Warhammer: The Old World is a truly unexpected gem. They brought back the old setting (pretty much), the old armies (pretty much), and even the old miniatures line (pretty much). The rules are new and are a really nice mix of things from old editions with some new ideas mixed in and I think most people were genuinely shocked to see this kind of product line coming from this company. It was a real effort to bring something back to life, not a token Specialist Games one-off book. It's just amazing and it absolutely kneecapped my interest in Age of Sigmar and even some of my feelings for Kings of War. 

I have a few armies for Sigmar that I will keep for Sigmar, either because they are unique to that game or because I am not going to rebase yet another army. These are my Stormcast Eternals, my Fyreslayers, my Seraphon on team law, then my Chaos Warriors and all of my chaos daemons for team chaos. The rest, including Undead, Beastmen, and some of the Chaos Warrior stuff are being retasked for Old World and I am pretty happy about going square-based with these. 

Who thought we would see these guys hitting tables again as part of a new army?!

So yes, as the years and the editions roll by it is possible to find refuge from much of the chaos. I'm still going to play 40K, but I'm also going to play some OPR. I will pay some attention to Age of Sigmar and Kings of War but I am heavily leaning in to Old World, and I am happy to have the options - some really good options.

Checking in on Warhammer+ with Kill Lupercal

 It's been awhile since I mentioned Warhammer+. GW's subscription service that includes a TVshow/animation app and a separate set of game tool type apps. Frankly, not much has changed. There are a few more animations than there were in 2022 - but not that many. In 2022 I noted there were 10 episodes of Hammer and Bolter, for example. That's their traditional animation series about various random topics. Some of them are really good. Now, 3 1/2 years later there are 16. Not exactly prolific there are they? There are some more lore shows - available for free on many YouTube channels these days, even if not "official" GW takes. The games have all moved to new editions since launch and the apps were suitably revised. So ... sure. It's fine.

The big new thing recently was "Kill Lupercal", a CGI animated "series" - all of 3 episodes - which was hyped up as this an awesome new production. Set near the end of the Horus Heresy it's all about a titan battle group that heads out in less than optimal condition and ends up on a mission to take out the Warmaster Horus Lupercal. The concept is fine and the animation looks good. The problem is the execution.

The whole thing is made up of three 15 minute segments:

• Part 1 is the extremely drawn-out build up of the titan being repaired and various discussions of it's condition and what can be fixed and the Mechanicus doing Mechanicus things ... it's a bunch of standing around and talking and it takes half of the episode before out titan actually walks. They get out of the hanger, shoot up some traitor marines, and then at the end they encounter a lone mysterious titan. That's it, that's 1/3 of our story done.
• Part 2 is a discussion with the mystery titan, getting the other tians in the group introduced and lined up, and then everyone heads off to kill Horus. There is a fight with some superheavy tanks and then more discussion about what they should do.
• Part 3 finally gets to the point of the exercise and we get a real fight against traitor titans and the resolution of the whole Horus thing. This one is pretty good.

This show is analogous to Warhammer+ as a whole: too little too slowly and often focused on the wrong things. 

While the individual shows are better about this, the multi-episode series tend to plod along, especially at the beginning. I'm usually a fan of the gearing-up sequence in a movie or show but there are limits. They also need to realize that most of the people paying for this service are already invested in the 40K universe - they're not newbies. You don't need to explain what sisters of battle, or titans, or for goodness sake Space Marines are - we know. We want to see them doing stuff, not a lore-dump about what they are supposed to be doing. Some of this stuff feels like a cutscene intro to a videogame we're never going to play - let's get to the point, especially if we're going to have less than an hour to work through this story! We don't need minutes and minutes of characters standing around talking about auspex readings and how bad things are and what the Emperor would want  - it's 40k! How about we have those conversations while we're jumping into the action?

Besides the shows being slow, their rate of production is terribly slow.  Under the "Animations" banner on the site there are 12 entries:

• Astartes existed before this was a thing so it doesn't really count as a W+ production
• Angels of Death was their first CGI series and is still the best. Extra points for Blood Angels. It's from 2021.
• Hammer and Bolter was also a year 1 effort and has actually added some new episodes over the years - not many, but some.
• The Exodite is another 3-part CGI series that takes a while to get going and runs 30-something minutes total. Again it looks good but there just isn't that much there. Points for being Tau vs. Eldar and Imperials. It's from 2022.
• Interrogator is a 9-part series using traditional animation that has 15-20 minute episodes and ends up being around an hour and a half total. It's black and white too and a pretty serious dive into the grim dark civilian life of 40K. It's decent and it's from 2022.
• Blacktalon is a 6-part series using traditional animation set in the Age of Sigmar worlds. There are 20+ minute episodes and so you get an actual story here. It's from 2023.
• Pariah Nexus is a 3-part CGI series from 2023 and is one of the better offerings. It ends up being a little over an hour of story.
• Iron Within is a 30-minute CGI one-shot with guard and dark eldar and chaos marines that's more buildup than action. I think it's supposed to be more "horror" than action but ... we all know what the dark eldar are about, and we all know what chaos marines are about so you're not going to surprise anyone with the various bad things that happen. Even the title spoils what could have been one interesting wrinkle. I was disappointed with this one. It's from 2023.
• Broken Lance is a 30-minute CGI one-shot about a knight household. Once it gets going it's not bad. It's from 2024.
• The Enemy Without is a 5-minute glorified CGI trailer about the deathwatch and I'm not even sure what the point of it really is. It does at least get right to the action, so there is that. This one is from 2024.
• The Tithes is a 3-part CGI series from 2024 that totals up to about an hour. There is some interesting variety here.
• Then Kill Lupercal is the lone entry from 2025

So the output has not been great. Nor has it been consistent with formats and story lengths jumping all over the place. Some of this stuff is interesting and even good but there is just not that much of it. Someone could subscribe for a month and watch everything without breaking a sweat.

I really like this one

The rest of the offerings are battle reports, painting guides, lore videos, and pretty much the kind of thing you can find all over YouTube and the rest of the internet. I would not pay a subscription fee for these.

I suspect that most people pay a sub here for the 40K and AoS apps - those are actually handy and useful for building an army and playing some games and encourage one to maintain it. There are alternatives there as well.

There is an annual miniature that's free to subscribers and those are usually pretty cool and this is the only way to get them. Not sure I would pay just for that but it's one benefit to sticking with it.

Also very cool

For now I will be continuing my own subscription here, despite my problems with the service. I do use the apps, I do like some of the shows, and I keep hoping it will get better. We will see.

Not-40K Friday - The Old Chaos Army for Old World

 

I've had the 3D printer running this week to finish out the movement tray expanders for Old World. Something bit me and I got fired up to get the trays I needed done and I also decided to go back through and check figure-by-figure what kind of shape they were in after a decade of disuse.

Somewhat to my surprise they were in really good shape. I haven't used my chaos warriors "in anger" since the first few months of Age of Sigmar and I think the last time I talked about them here was right after the move. I played a lot of chaos armies back in 4th-5th-6th with 7th trailing off into not much by 8th. In the earlier days a chaos army was truly "Chaos" as it mixed warriors, daemons, and beastmen all together and as they were gradually separated in the rules I found myself without enough of any one part to make a real army. I decided to focus on the warrior branch of things and had a pretty solid army there painted up during 5th. That continued into 6th with many battles against my friends' Empire and Dwarf armies and people playing my High Elves.

The silver chaos warriors here are that first multi-part Warhammer regiments set they did in the 90's promising us that troop costs would be a lot more reasonable ... uh, yeah. I liked the rough metal look and so did most of the army this way, discovering that drybrushing silver over a black base coat went pretty quickly and looked pretty good. The banners in this army are paper, drawn up in Visio which was fairly new at the time, enahanced by some interesting fonts - an Ultima font among them - and then printed out, painted, and with some decals added on I thought they worked pretty well. They are still holding together 25+ years later so I can't really complain.

Old Two-Blades over there on the left has seen many hours on the table in both Warhammer and as a D&D character, maybe a GURPS character, and maybe even a Fantasy Hero character so he is well-loved here.

There are a couple of converted chaos wizards in the back and then a unit of marauder horsemen after I mostly got over my "I don't need puny skirmishers" phase. At the very least they are good for soaking up those goblin fanatics before they hit my real units. 

Here in the center is the real heart of the army. The red-armored warriors were my Chosen of Khorne - yes kids there was a time when "chosen" were a paint job, not a special model. The kits at the time only had weapon & shield, then later they added a halberd option - in metal. But in the rules we had an option for two weapons and with Khorne's frenzy rules you can bet I wanted that two weapon option. So, I hand-drilled all of those left hands and added in weapons from various other kits, including 40K Ork melee weapons from Gorka-Morka I believe. The unit leader has a pair of spiked maces and a big cape and he has served as an RPG character more than once too.

On the left middle is my first converted mounted hero - he's one of the metal champions of Khorne (he has a bloodletter-y head) that I cut in half at the waist and mounted up I think using a rough rider of Attila lower half. He usually ended up with a magic sword and then for a long time my favorite thing to put on him was the Chaos Runeshield. Unfortunately his shield has gone missing but I remember what it looked like and I am going to have to recreate it and get him back on the table.

On the right in the middle is my usual warlord for my later games, the metal mounted chaos lord that came out a little later than the rest. He has a huge axe, a decent-looking shield, and is on a nicely sculpted horse. Smaller fights were led by the bloodletter-head guy above but any bigger fight from probably 6th edition on was led by the Horned King there. 

Then in the back we have my beloved chaos knights - no. no one really needs a block of ten chaos knights but it is the hammer of all hammers if you do use the full unit. Shoot them, fireball them, drop a cannonball on them - they can lose half the unit and still blow almost anything off of the board with a charge. They were usually led by the Horned King or Bloodletter-Head which just made them nastier. Granted, for many fights I just took 5 or 6 of them and I'm sure I broke them into two units a few times but the back rank is mostly fill-in guys (including some plastic Battlemasters chaos knights) so I didn't really like fielding them separately.

Almost every force selection started with these two units and one or both of these leaders.

The righthand section of the army has another big block of chaos warriors and these are the earlier chunky monopose versions that I think originally came out with Heroquest but were later sold as a straight-up Warhammer unit. I ended up with a bunch of them through trades and such and decided to make another regiment. I liked the irony of a unit of "chaos" warriors made up of identical models. I used the metal 4th edition era command trio for them, did the same drybrush look as the other unit, and painted up their shields to add some nice contrast. They've been used as guards and evil fighters in many RPGs as well.

Next to them is one of my favorite character models for chaos that I used as a wizard. he has a staff, and has a helmet with no face, but his raised hand has what could be an eye in the middle of it - very strong on the creepy to weird chaos scale.

Then in the back we have a unit of chaos knights from about 3rd edition, with weirder poses, proportions, and looks than the later ones. It's good to mix in some older units into your army when you can - especially a chaos army.

Yeah, these guys. I like mine better but they definitely have a look.

So there is the army that's intact after 25+ years and getting ready to get back on the table. I do have some additional units of similar vintage that I either never quite finished or took a beating in a move at some point, or that my kids got a hold of when they were toddlers - never leave your army out on the table overnight if you have toddlers! -  so I have some additions to make and I am really looking forward to working on them again. 

Old World-wise my next-most-finished army is my High Elves so they will be getting some attention this weekend, then I have a huge pile of orcs & goblins to go through, some Undead to assemble, the Beastmen I finally caved and converted over to Sigmar bases two years ago only to see them eliminated and returned to the Old World line ... sigh ... and then that shiny box of Bretonians guilting me from the shelf. 

More to come for sure.

Miniature Musings - Building for Age of Sigmar

 

Well, I've let it happen. Pretty much every one of my 40K armies has some kind of backlog but they also can all make playable and at least partially painted armies. I try not to let a gathering of plastic sit too long in an unplayable state even if it's not painted. So having achieved that state some time ago I decided to start expanding my Age of Sigmar forces ...

Yep, that's a big ol' pile of angry dwarfs waiting to be built. They are completely unplayable as nothing is built. I wanted to do this one a certain way so I ordered custom stonework-looking bases for the whole damn army and that meant I couldn't really buy already built or painted units so here they sit ... on the sprues. Now this has all developed this year so they are not too backlogged but I haven't made much progress beyond the "acquisition" stage. That's multiple Start Collecting boxes because they are a hugely better deal than the newer options and some individual unit pickups of Vulkites and Hearthguard. Grombrindal there in the blister pack will be my first Grimwrath Berzerker.

Beyond what's already here I don't need much - maybe a few more Magmadroths if I like how they play (I have 3 at the moment) and probably a few more Berzerkers and Doomseekers down the road to have more options. I want each of those to be unique so it will take a little more effort but I'm not in a rush.

The chaos warriors are in a slightly better state though it may be hard to tell. I talked about restarting this journey a while back and I did follow though on that. I put together a squad of chaos warriors, dusted off some knights I picked up a while back, found a heckuva deal on some painted chaos knights (the red guys up there), finished gathering up marauder parts and at least one of the Warcry warbands which seem to be big players in the AoS chaos books. I have some characters put together as well so while it's not all pretty yet I could play them in a 1000 point game at least - progress!

The big additions here were in the Slaves to Darkness army box that came out last fall that came with the new army book, new daemon prince, new chosen (finally in plastic!), and new "Ogroid Theriadons". That last unit is a pack of 3 ogre/troll/minotaur-looking things and I really like them so I added 3 more to make a nasty unit of 6. I used to field chaos trolls in the old days so I like having a brute squad in my otherwise mostly human-ish force and these are the new heavy hitters. I already had the prior Start Collecting box with warriors, knights, and the lord on karakadrakadrakka thing sitting around from a prior flirtation with these kinds of thoughts. Converting some of my old characters to round bases meant I had a pretty solid force right away so now the big task ahead is to finish building and get the rest of the painting done.

Then there are the Beasts! I've been bouncing these guys around for more than 20 years and I may finally get them onto the table as an actual army soon. In the early to middle years of Warhammer Fantasy "Chaos" armies included everything - warriors, beastmen, daemons,  whatever. Over the years as they expanded the range they split each of those forces off into separate armies which felt very forced at times but that's how it went. These beastmen started off as add-ons to my Chaos army that was mostly chaos warriors. The daemons I had back then eventually became a separate army and ended up used in 40K more than fantasy. The beastmen though just kind of sat. They made good gnolls for D&D but I didn't really care about building them out to be a full Warhammer army. A few years ago I seriously considered making them a "The Herd" army for Kings of War so I picked up a Cygor/Ghorgon to be a potential centerpiece but I ended up just letting them all sit in a box for the next few years. 

This year as the Sigmar interest developed and I started going through boxes and drawers sorting out fantasy parts I realized I had a pretty good amount of them. With the Beasts of Chaos battletome coming out for 3rd edition as well I figured the time was right so I started basing them up and adding up points and I realized I didn't really need to add much. I have enough old figures that are effectively Gors to make the battleline units I need. I have old metal shamans and beastlords so the characters are covered. My old metal dragon ogres are complete and while they aren't as pretty as the newer ones they are still perfectly usable here. The Chaos Warhounds I bought years ago to use as Flesh Hounds in my daemon army when the official models looked bad are still the current model for Warhounds  so why not pull them back into the army they're supposed to be in?

The minotaurs are a pure indulgence on my part - I like minotaurs, I like the current GW models in particular, and I thought an all-minotaur army would be a fun skew list to play so i started buying some. Right now I'm at 6 which will probably be one unit and I also picked up an old metal Doombull I can use to make them Battleline. This is really the only part I have spent money on with this army other than the book and it's probably the most playable of the three. 

Future acquisitions will likely include more of the giant monsters as those would be fun too. More minotaurs obviously. I'd like to get up to 18 of those to be able to throw out 3x 6-bull squads. I know Bestigors and Ungors are major parts of the army but I just don't care about them that much. One day I'm sure I'll want some but for now it's mainly what I have plus Bullgors. 

Beyond these newer arrivals I still have the half-painted-mostly-built Seraphon army in the miniatures closet from a few years back and also the large pile of Stormcast and Blades of Khorne I acquired through multiple boxed set purchases back in 1st & 2nd edition. 

There are also the 4 daemon armies that are mainly for 40K but work perfectly well in AoS too and those are actually in pretty decent shape - probably the most "done" of any of these forces. It helps that you can play them in both games. 

So yeah, this is a fairly stupid way to get into an army - stumbling into it with half-done units over multiple editions. I would not recommend doing it this way at all. The choose it/buy it/build it/paint it approach, ONE army at a time, is far more sensible. So if you're not already invested in one of these games do it that way, two armies at most so you can play games or teach people on your own. Hopefully I can make enough progress on these to feel it's worth posting about them again later this year. Maybe even play some actual games too ...

Onward!

Age of Sigmar: Return of the Chaos Warriors

 

After the move comes the unpacking and as a part of that process I got to spend time with things I had not really  touched in a long time. One of those was my old school Chaos Warrior army that I built from about 3rd edition WHFB through 7th edition. It was one of the few armies that I could say was "finished" back then - though they're never really finished, right - in that I had a decent sized force that was fully painted and didn't really lack anything. 

Since the end of WHFB it's been sitting in a wall-mounted display case in the game room providing occasional armored guards for D&D games and not much else. Putting it back up in the new hobby room gave me a chance to look back through it and beyond realizing how many arms and horse tails I need to re-glue it reminded me how much I liked the whole Chaos Warrior thing and that I've missed not having an active force of big armored elite soldiers to stomp things with on demand.

So ... let's see where things are in Age of Sigmar ... oh look there's a big new army set coming out for Slaves to Darkness - the more dramatic name we have now for the old Chaos Warriors army. I had picked up some of the newer style knights and warriors a few years back but never did anything with them. With the prospect of some new releases, at least one possible player, and an interest in building something completely new, well, it all came together.

So now there is a pile of plastic in one corner of the hobby room and I have built my first unit in the new place. It's just one ten-man unit of chaos warriors but a) I am finally back in business after months of zero building or painting and b) it's an elite army so it will only take a few units to make it playable. Heck, there may only 20-30 of these guys in the army anyway, along with some knights and characters. So it's technically a new army but it's very manageable in terms of avoiding a big backlog.

Meanwhile, the old veterans await the return of The Old World ...

Not-40K Friday - The Evolution of Warhammer Dragons

There's a cool post over on Warhammer Community that runs through the designs of dragons for Warhammer over the decades and it's worth a look if you've been around fantasy miniatures for any length of time. There are 4 or 5 of the metal "S" dragons floating around here so it felt relevant. You can see changes over time in all of the fantasy ranges, not just Warhammer, and the trend has been towards the bigger and bigger, especially the last 5-10 years. That's one of GW's brand new big dragons up top and I admit it's pretty impressive and hits a lot of the right notes for me. 

This is one of the classic S-dragons, maybe the first as the high elves were I believe the first army to be able to take an actual dragon as a mount for some characters. This version was around 4th edition (there was at least one earlier non-S version for 3rd) and set the pattern for many years. I have a pair of these, plus a pair of the dark elf version of the same vintage, plus some of the orc war wyverns with a similar look. I had mixed feelings about some of those color choices even when this thing was new but that was the look they used across the entire range.

This is probably the least-Warhammer paint job I have ever seen on one of these beasts but it does show that the old models hold up pretty well if painted well. This makes me want to do something with my unbuilt models like this. 

I remember when these came out for 6th or 7th edition and it was shocking ... compared to the old guard metal models above this thing is just a revolution. That pose! Apparently plastic does allow a much greater range of options as there's no easy way to get something like that out of the old versions. It would take a ridiculous amount of pinning and also never moving it anywhere for any reason to get one of the older models to look like that. 

These newest versions ... that's another one up there ... they're just amazing. bigger and beefier, less serpentine and more dino-beast. They look more like D&D dragons have looked for a long time. Also more of a Hildebrandt-looking dragon:

Nothing wrong with that. I've probably used my old dragon miniatures more in RPG encounters in recent years than in straight-up miniature battles in recent years. It's always a big moment when a dragon shows up - at least it should be - and I do like having a decent miniature to drop when they do. Even the RPG-specific dragons have much bigger options now than they used to with some of the Pathfinder Battles gargantuan dragons coming on an 80mm base. 

Anyway it sent me down a trail so I thought so I would share.

40K Friday - Checking in on Warhammer+

 

This new service? Product? "Thing" started in late August and I gave my initial impressions here. Now it's been a few weeks  - how is it going?

I admit - I am a little disappointed. New material comes out on Wednesday so we've had the launch plus three release windows and it has been s-l-o-w - much slower than I expected. 

The high point: Angels of Death. This black and white and red CGI series is exactly the kind of thing I want from a Warhammer Animation Studio. It looks right, it sounds right - the voice acting is solid and the music is good too - and the developing story is interesting. The service released with the initial episode and a new chapter has dropped every Wednesday so far. 

Hammer and Bolter is the more traditional animated series with one-off stories from around the 40K universe. It released with 3 episodes and now has ... 3 episodes. Yes, the same 3. It makes no sense but that's where it stands. 

Battlereport is their channel for ... battle reports. There was one 40k battle and one Age of Sigmar battle at release and now we have three 40k batreps and one AoS batrep - yes, the same one.

They have added a new show "Loremasters" which talks about stories and backgrounds in the Warhammer universes. So far we've had one episode discussing Abaddon the Despoiler. 

They've added at least one painting guide. The 40k app has been updated regularly. They've released a beta of the AoS app which I have not tried yet. The vault has had some new material added like extra issues of White Dwarf.

So far it feels slow and underwhelming. Angels of Death is amazing but the rest of it is just ... intermittent. What was the plan here? Was there not enough in the can to sustain a steady release cycle for these other shows?

Where is the rest of Hammer and Bolter? I wasn't overwhelmed with the first 3 but I was hoping it would get better. So far we have almost a month of nothing. Great job!

It's GAMES F'ING WORKSHOP - How on earth can you not produce a battle report for at least one of your games every week? It's what you do! What a tremendous dropping of the ball.

What is the point of "Loremasters"? A game design type explanation from "outside" the universe might be cool, or hey, maybe this kind of stuff would make for a good animated series topic? More show, less tell? Nope! We get 18 minutes of a guy basically reading the Abaddon info from pretty much any of the Chaos Marine Codexes over the years. The first half of it is more about Horus anyway so we get to hear that story again. They intersperse a bunch of art that you've already seen if you're a chaos player but a lot of it is literally showing a man's face as he reads a bunch of well-known lore. It's like an incredibly dull audiobook which should not be something we have with the 40k universe. "Abaddon did this. Then he did this. There was a battle. He won. Then he went somewhere else. Then he destroyed Cadia." - it is incredible to me that they landed on the least interesting way to convey information about some of the biggest events in 40K . It drains all of the life and energy from them. 

I'm not giving up on it but I do feel like they are letting the opportunity get away form them. A steady, solid stream of content would make this thing look a lot better. The battle report thing especially seems like a missed opportunity. It's not that expensive to make, you have people on staff already, you have the models and the terrain, and it shows people what they are supposed to do with your game! I don't understand why they don't have one for every single game they currently produce  on there already!

Anyway check back in a month or so when I touch on this again - hopefully with more positive things to report.