40K Friday - The Coming Thing

 

I've been working on RPG stuff more lately than miniatures. A big chunk of the Necrons are done so the urgency is a little less at the moment. The hot topics right now are boarding actions, Arks of omen, and 10th edition so ...

The rumors are flying now about tenth. It's pretty clearly coming in June of this year based on past releases and multiple rumors from multiple sources. This makes it hard to get too excited about spending money and time on further 9th edition codexes. The Imperial Guard book is the last one I will pick up as I just can't justify the World Eaters book when it will be out of date in 4-5 months and I might not even play them in that time. The new edition is supposed to be a big reset rules-wise, like 8th was, with some kind of index-like approach like 8th as well so this isn't a case where codexes will roll over into the new edition until replaced by an update. At the moment it sounds like they will be unusable in tenth so ... yeah. 

Arks of Omen is in a weird place. It's mainly for 9th rules-wise but it's the big edition change-over storyline so I still want to get it for the fluff as much as or more than the rules. Knowing where the story is going is still interesting after all these years and so makes this a little more palatable then dead-on-arrival codexes at the end of an edition. I did start digging into Kill Team so I have the spaceship terrain for boarding actions - I should really paint that stuff up.

The starter box is rumored to be Marines vs. Tyranids which would be just fine by me. Tyranids are one of the few long-time armies I do not have so I'd say they will be my new army for tenth. Rumors disagree now on whether they're going to be presented as Blood Angels or Dark Angels but I doubt they're going to put any chapter-specific details into the starter box marines this time so it's more about what the art will show than anything else. 

There are more and more rumors that the Dark Angels Primarch is coming back. I'm pretty OK with this as it will give us a second example of what GW thinks a marine primarch should look like in the modern game and it will liven up the fluff situation with two of them back and potentially being rivals on some level. Time to get those lingering Dark Angels finished up!

The big one for me is the recently-popping up rumor that 10th will see the end of the Primaris/Firstborn distinction - they will just be "marines". This opens up so many possibilities within marine armies that it will be a lot of fun just exploring the options if true. Hellblasters in drop pods, Aggressors in Land Raiders, Assault Intercessors jumping out of Rhinos, Bladeguard in Stormravens ... lots of cool options added to the toolkit. Plus the elimination of some character redundancies like Primaris techmarine vs. Techmarine and the like, and let's not even think about all of the Space Marine Captain datasheets that could be excised. 

So while it's always tricky at the end of an edition I like what I'm seeing so far both now and for the future.  

More to come.

What's Going On in February

 

In recent weeks I've managed to run two sessions of FFG Star Wars and two sessions of Deadlands. It feels good to be back on track. The Deadlands campaign has now hit 19 sessions and this weekend will be the first "real" session of the new Star Wars campaign. 

For Deadlands I am running "The Flood" and it has gone pretty well even with some player turnover. I had 6 players at one point and we've lost two of those but added one new so we are still running with 5. This means we've had a ton of consistency and in a somewhat more "plotted " campaign that means a lot. Since it is a published run with a definite end I expect we will finish this one up later this year. The players have been really good about respecting "niches" and some of them have created some very memorable personalities. Lately they've been getting into some fun stuff like blowing up an ironclad and participating in the Shan Fan Kumite martial arts tournament. I really do need to put those session summaries together ...

For Star Wars I used the Edge of the Empire Beginner Game - which I had somehow never run, despite owning it for years -  to test out the system with my current group of players. It went over quite well even though the dice are hard to find right now. At the end of that run (which stretched over two sessions because we get sidetracked a lot and were learning a new system) we have a party with some experience and a ship of their own which had traveled to Bothawui - because that's where one of them is from. There will be some party shuffling as some of the characters were pre-gens and I expect those to be altered or outright replaced before we begin but we decided to continue onward from this point instead of starting completely new. I was fine with this as it gives them some grounding in the universe and a potential known adversary for Obligation purposes in Teemo the Hutt if they want to use him.

These guys look more and more like Traveller Aslan to me - anyone else see that?

The challenge here is that we decided to stay with mainly an Edge of the Empire type campaign where most of the campaign ideas I had written up in the past were more rebel-centric or set in the Clone Wars era and Jedi-centric. Right now we have no force users and the preference was to start right around the end of the republic. So, sketchy parts of galactic society right as the empire takes off ... yeah I have nothing written up specifically for that. So a big part of the RPG think-time these past couple of weeks has been how to start things off, where things could go down the road, and what places and groups are significant in this time period. I've spent more time on Wookiepedia this week than I have maybe ever and I have to admit it's been fun. I'll post more on the campaign planning later.

So yes it's been a pretty active January and February and it feels like we are finally rolling consistently again and everyone is invested in keeping it that way. It's a good place to be.

Meme-ish Monday