40k Friday: Dark Angels, Grey Knights, and the Focus Thing Again

 

Despite the sidetrack into Oldhammer this week which did take up some time and some budget I did manage to progress on the Dark Angels for 11th. One of the problems though is when you are part of the way into a project and find a piece that brings things to a screeching halt and forces you to reconsider how you want to proceed - and by "you" I mean "me". In this case I was working on a unit of Bladeguard Vets to give the army some melee punch and also to give the captain a unit to lead. My BGV were originally allocated to the Templars but all I had done was build them and spray them black so it was not a big deal to reassign them to the new (old) chapter. Then I ran across a picture online where someone had put winged helmets on their BGVs and it looked really good ...

Winged helmets are a thing with Dark Angels especially on their leaders but I figured the veterans might have them too. Poking around a bit I found these:

That's just too good of a look to not do it so a batch of these is making its way here. My Armageddon captain and standard bearer's heads both popped back off so I can make the change there easy enough but the BGVs I have now ... there's no way. I tried. So the first set will likely be reallocated back to the Templars and a new squad  - with nifty helmets - joins the Unforgiven. I don't really need a second unit and I'd want them to match the others so it's better to put them back in the non-winged-helmet-army. If I need more elite melee Dark Angels there are always the hooded and robed inner circle vets.

With that many wing-heads available that also means my jump pack vanguard vets will likely have them too, and maybe some sternguard vets if I pull together a unit of them as well. For this army it could just be a standard for the leaders and veterans to have them - we will have to see if I can sustain that over time. Now should I take it down to the veteran sergeant level? Have to ponder that - might be too much of a good thing.

I did manage to finish building and basecoating the hellblasters - all heads and backpacks accounted for, sprayed, and attached. So there's a unit ready for the rest of the paint. I picked up an apothecary for the unit as that's an important add-on for a unit that can blow themselves up regularly. They will also have some version of Azrael the chapter master as he is way too useful to not put him in there. I might give in and buy the new one but I'm still leaning towards using one of the versions I have already. 

There is still plenty of work to do but I  feel like I'm figuring it out. 

Also: Obligatory Grey Knights Update:

Special reflection appearance by Nelson Doggo

That's two Dreadknights added since the last update so the finishing continues. It's at least a useable force now with 5 strike squads (probably more than I need honestly). an interceptor squad (need more), 3 terminator/paladin squads, a dreadnought, the 2 dreadknights, and some characters over on the right. Still more to do but I'm happy with the amount of progress I am making.

40K Thursday: Retrograde

 

So after the game last weekend Blaster mentions that he's been looking into 40K again recently - he hasn't played a game since 9th - and while he despises 10th/11th edition (too many cards, too many changes for no good reason) he is interested in trying an old edition again. We discussed that option for a bit and settled on 7th, last of the 3rd edition inheritor generations. Now I won't try to tell you that 7th is the best or my favorite but I am always open to playing a prior edition of the game and if it gets my kid* interested in playing again I'm all for it. His run with the game was 5th thru 8th - and we played a lot when he lived at home and we had Red and Who as well - so somewhere in that range made the most sense. As a throwback here's my take on 7th at the time.

So, interest declared it was time for dad to dust off the stacks and see what I had from 7th. I still had all of my books from then but exactly which book did I have? This was 10 years ago and I have added armies since then so I had some figuring to do. Besides the codexes 7th also had a set of cards for each army - most of them anyway - so I had to take a look at those too.

Objectives & Psychic Powers - useful but not necessary. With four of us in the house playing back then it was an easy call to pick them up. Plus they were handy stocking stuffers.

As it turns out I had a pretty good swath of them and we still have all of those armies so that's good. But ... I added Grey Knights with 8th, Necrons & Imperial Knights with 9th, and Tyranids with 10th. Imperial Guard has been a factor since 6th but I did sell that army off at one point and I must have let the codex go too because it's not here. Plus Harlequins became a separate army with this edition too but I never picked up the book. I was also missing the cards for some of these so ...I mean you can't expect a man to play without the rules for all of his toys ... off to eBay I went!

It is surprisingly cheaper to get into 40K - when it comes to the rulebooks anyway - as they hit the ten year old mark. I suspect the 10-15 year mark is when they bottom out before becoming nostalgia items for some people and the prices begin to climb a bit. Almost everything is still findable online at a pretty reasonable price. I make no guarantees on the miniatures though - that's a whole different animal and might best be acquired at the "army" level. 

The fun part is that nearing the finish line of "completing" my Grey Knights force it is almost completely useable in 7th as-is. The line was redone for 5th edition and has had just a few additions here and there over the intervening years. It's a good feeling knowing a lot of it is likely to be revamped in 11th but what I have is still perfect for any version from 5th to "index" 11th - plus OPR of course. 

As the poster boys for 6th and 7th the Unforgiven actually got a new codex for each one 

It's a little less perfect with the Dark Angels I've also been working on as all of that primaris stuff is out but all of my older firstborn units now have a potential use beyond OPR and memories. Rediscovering those units with an actual chance to get them on the table has been a lift this week.

So anyway there's the unexpected turn for this week. Tomorrow I'll get back to the new stuff.

*At some point I should probably stop calling him a kid since he's now in the upper half of his 20's now with a college degree, a full time job/career, a wife, and a baby. It's a hard habit to break though. I did stop calling him "Apprentice" here on the blog a while back so I have made some progress. 

Necessary Evil Session Zero Coming Up

 

This weekend we will wrap up or expedition to deal with The Emerald Enchanter in Variable Dave's Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign. It's been a lot of fun and since the 0-level funnel we've only lost one character. It happened to be the guy with the possessed sword so that initiated an immediate debate on who was going to pick it up to be the new unpredictable combat monster - right as we head in to the final confrontation (we think) with the Enchanter himself. Hopefully it all goes well.

Once we finish that we will put DCC on the shelf for a while and have our Session Zero conversation for Necessary Evil. I don't worry about this kind of thing before every campaign kicks off but I do like to have an official one with a supers campaign to a) work out technical power details and make sure everyone understands how their characters work and what some of the limits might be and b) to work out everyone's connections to the setting. For example, here are the ten questions I am hitting my players with for this one:

Questions about your character:

1. Origin Story – how did you get your powers?

2. Why did you become a villain?

3. What did you do before the invasion? What kind of villain were you? What kind of jobs did you do or what kind of schemes did you plan?

4. Were you part of a team or mostly solo?

5. Who did you work with? 

6. Did you have any villainous rivals?

7. Did you have a nemesis or archenemy hero?

8. Were you ever caught and imprisoned?

9. What did you do during the invasion?

10. What have you been doing since the invasion?

I don't expect everyone to have ready answers to all of these. Some may not want to commit to everything and others will just not have thought about it all but I want to get the wheels turning and start making some connections between the PCs, other villains in the setting, and the heroes who may or may not have survived. Also, with the game starting after a lot of big events I want them to think about how their character reacted to them and how it changed their life.

I don't think we will be rolling dice on Saturday but I'll be ready just in case. There has been some chatter in the group this week as people start figuring out their character but there is some work yet to be done and that's my priority. 

Longer-term  It looks like I have 7 players lined up and we have 20 weekends left (after this one) so I think we should get 12-15 sessions done in what's left of 2026. Being a supers campaign I won't be cancelling if even half the group is out - you're supers, deal with it - but the holidays will interfere down the road so we will see how far we get. Once I get a feel for how quickly the various plot points move with this group I'll be able to figure it more accurately but the main thing is let's get rolling and see where it goes!

I also need a good name for the campaign that isn't "Necessary Evil" again. Still working on that. Open to ideas if anyone has any.

It's a cool adventure