Miniatures, Bases, Beastmen, and Hassles

 

One of the challenges of being involved with miniature wargames is basing. It's been a question for a long time, sometimes tied to questions of scale. Do you build your Pictish army in 15mm or 25mm? Then once you decide that are you going to base it for DBA/DBM, WRG Ancients, or some other game. if you're lucky your favorite game, or one of the popular ones, will be on smaller bases and some other game of interest will be on bigger bases meaning you can use sabot bases which is a fancy term for putting a larger base underneath the smaller base to increase the footprint to the proper size. In many games you can actually mix scales if the basing is correct, which can look pretty weird when someone's 6mm Gauls go up against someone else's 15mm Early Imperial Romans but I get it. Do you want to play a game right now? Even if it is Romans vs. blue-painted hobbits? Sometimes you just have to roll with it.

With the Warhammer family of games - and a lot of modern miniature games really - this attitude is less present. I blame it on the competitive-first mindset that's become so prevalent over the last decade or so. A lot of us play these same games far more casually, more "narratively", but so much of the focus online is on tournament stuff and efficiency and point costs that people forget that's not the only way to play the game and one of the sticking points is basing.

So space marines and orks originally came on 25mm bases. Ten years or so ago the went to 32mm round bases. Now leader characters for marines are mostly on 40mm bases, even if they are not in terminator armor, and some leaders have gone to 50mm rounds. My beloved Captain Banderas of the Crimson Fists started on a 25mm and got moved to a 32mm and now ... will probably stay there as I have bigger Primaris versions with a similar look that would fit on those much larger bases without looking lost in that space. 

Old Azrael

In casual play it doesn't really matter - and realistically game-play-wise it doesn't really matter - but people can get snippy about it. It doesn't really matter because smaller bases let you pack more figures into a smaller space - this can be important in a big melee fight - while bigger bases block some figures out. In contrast if your unit has aura abilities, with a radius effect, a larger base will let them cover more area on the table. So yes a marine character on a larger base can do leader effects over a bigger area but gets blocked out of some combats if they are part of a squad. There is actually some balance there but there is still some community pressure to put your models on whatever the current official base size happens to be. My metal Chapter Master Azrael of the Dark Angels came on a 25mm. Later I put him on a 32mm to modernize, as I did with the 6th edition starter set Captain that looked an awful lot like Azrael but was plastic and slightly bigger. Then somewhere in 9th or 10th they put out a new Azrael and he's on a 50mm base. (insert furrowed brow here) As much as I would be fine continuing to use one of my older models it just looks silly putting Old Az on a base of that size. So at some point I will probably break down and buy the new one - I'll grumble about it, but I will probably do it.

New Azrael

The other challenge is when they just change up the whole damn thing. I built a lot of armies for original Warhammer Fantasy Battles. Those were on square bases, typically 20mm and 25mm for infantry. In 2015 they killed off WHFB and launched Age of Sigmar with round bases. Now it's been long enough this doesn't make me angry today on its own but the aftershocks still rumble through. 

Around 2023 we had been playing around with some AOS and I decided I might as well unify my Beastman army that had been in various stages of development since the old WHFB days. So I pulled a bunch of Gors - the main Beastman troop type - off of their square bases and put them on rounds. This was some 40+ of them so it took some time. I picked up some other units too, building them all on the current round or oval bases for Sigmar. 

Then in early 2024 the rumors started up and were eventually confirmed that spring: The "Beasts of Chaos" were being dropped from Age of Sigmar. They were being added to The Old World, which was sort of good news as I was interested in the new version of the old game, but it also meant I would need to look at rebasing a bunch of stuff less than a year after rebasing them the first time. 

No, I was not happy. 

No, I still haven't rebased them ... but I'm looking at it because a bunch of them are painted and playable and would be good to get on the table again.

One of the main expediters of this is the creation of movement tray expanders. I've talked about these before when discussing using my old armies as Old World bumped up base sizes too, of course: all the old 20mm based figs are now on 25's, and the 25's mostly went to 30mm bases. Well, they also make them to convert round bases to fit in the footprint that a square-based unit would take. I already had them so I printed one out for my 50mm based Bullgors (minotaurs) and yes! - they fit perfectly! Now I've printed out some that adapt 32mm bases so my Bestigors are viable. No rebasing needed!

The only real dilemna here is with the Gors - of course the most numerous unit in the force would be the problematic one. Gors, years ago, were on 25mm square. Sigmar moved them to 32mm round. With Old World, for various reasons, they left them on 25s instead of bumping them to 30s like every other larger infantry unit. You can fit 32s into the space for 30s, but you can't fit 32s into the space for 25s. Looking at how almost everything else in the army needs minimal work I am leaning heavily towards bending the official rules and just leaving them on their round 32s. It saves me a ton of work, potential damage to painted figures, and the only reason I can see that they left the 25s in was to allow one specialty army to combine Gors and Ungors (a lighter, weaker type of beatman) in a single unit. I don't really care about doing that so I'm not hurting my options. I also don't trust GW not to put them on 30mm bases anyway in a year or two so that decision is probably made. 

I have to admit this is giving me some ideas now ...

So yes, when not working on the 40K stuff I do dip into the fantasy side and try to make some progress. Movement trays and adapters and similar utility aids are a great reason to have a 3D printer around but even if you don't they are widely available online and it's a great feeling when you realize you can just put some new shoes on an old army and go.

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.

40K Friday: Balance Dataslate and Thinking About Age of Sigmar

 

The new balance document is out as is the new points update. There are a ton of changes there  - except for Tau for some reason. I'm playing a lot less 40K these days so I find myself caring less about these kinds of adjustments and getting more annoyed when they have to make major changes to army books that were released just a month or two back (orks) and make dramatic changes to how things such as universal stratagems work. I'm much more a fan of start adjusting points first, possibly for multiple rounds, then if you still have a problem you start adjusting the rules mechanics. With this edition it seems like it takes forever and is heavy-handed when it does come through.

Age of Sigmar is getting a new edition in a few weeks and I will probably check it out as a I have several very-low-mileage Sigmar armies floating around. I'm not sure how hard I'm going to dive into this one as interest has been low here in general. They do seem to be changing up quite a bit of the mechanical side of the game so it should be an interesting read at least. That said the starter box is looking mighty pricey and considering I have no interest in a Skaven army I may be buying just the book this time. We will see.

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 ...

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.

40K Friday - Warhammer+

 

I did go ahead and sign up for this. I've been subscribed to the 40K app since it came out so I went from spending 3$ a month for that to 6$ a month for that plus some shows and it doesn't bother me at all. I spend a great deal of my free time thinking about, building, painting, playing, and watching 40K stuff and do some side work in Age of Sigmar at times too so this is just an extension of that. I've watched most of what's available at this point so I thought I would share. 

But first ... there has been a lot of complaining online about this, threats of boycotts and such. GW had a talk with some of the people making videos online a while back and some of them joined up, some of them quit. This stirred up some people and had them slagging GW as doing bad corporate behavior, treating fans badly and then it turned into the usual piling on about increasing prices as well. 

I don't care about any of that. 

Some of the videos were cool, sure - but you don't own it. Trying to make money making videos of something you don't own ... there's your sketchy behavior. We've seen this with CBS/Paramount and Star Trek fan films already so  it should not have surprised anyone. 

As far as prices ... I started buying Warhammer miniatures in the mid-80's ... before 40K was a thing. I could give you a bunch of "back in my day 30 marines cost $22" stories but there's not much of a point. Prices go up, GW prices doubly so. No one is making anyone play this game - it is completely optional and a luxury. Just part of the deal.

So what about the service? 

• The 40K app is the same app it has been - there were no major changes for the launch. It's very nice having the rules and FAQs and codexes all in one place. For research and theorymongering it's handy. For army building ... I still like Battlescribe better.
• There is not a new Sigmar app yet. It's supposed to be coming but the Azyr app that's been out for a few years now works pretty well. We will have to wait and see how this goes. 
•  "Battlreport" - right now there is one for 40k and one for Sigmar. Each one is about an hour long. The 40k one was competently done with some nice informational graphics as the game was going on. There are YouTube channels I would still rank higher for entertainment value but it was their first effort. I would expect to see a lot more of this.
• "Hamer and Bolter" - there are 3 episodes of this right now and I have very mixed feelings. They are about 20 minutes long and cover very different parts of the 40k universe. The stories are OK but nothing really knocked my socks off. My biggest issue is that all 3 are in that limited-motion anime-style that honestly just looks cheap to me. I see people defending it as a "style choice" and sure ... maybe it was ... but it still looks weak.  Hopefully they will consider changing up the "style" moving forward too. 
• "Angels of Death" - the best part of it so far. It's a Blood Angels story with an incredibly cool black and white ... and red ... color palette. It's CGI but it's done in a visually interesting way. It too is only about 20 minutes long but it has by far the most promise in my eyes and I am very much looking forward to more. 
• There are some other videos - painting guides, how to play videos for each of their games, but a lot of them are out on YouTube for free already so it's not really adding a ton of value here. 
• The Vault - this is a repository of books and magazines that I expect to become more interesting over the next year or two. Right now it has the fluff sections from the Gathering Storm books, some other campaign books, last year's White Dwarfs, and all of their "Warhammer Visions" magazines. If they fill in a lot of the older material it could be a lot of fun.
• The miniature - if you subscribe for a year you  get to pick a 40K mini or a Sigmar mini as a bonus. I picked that nifty Vindicare assassin pictured up there. It's a nice bonus but honestly I would not subscribe just to get a miniature - if you really want one they will be on eBay next year one they start going out. 

 

So - overall take? I'd say it's an interesting experiment with a lot of potential down the road but with limited material right now. If you're into either of their major games I'd say give it a try but if you don't care about the app or the videos it's safe to wait a while and see where it goes. 

GW Goes to Numbered Rules!

 

It may be a sign of the apocalypse but Games Workshop is putting rule numbers into one of its flagship games! The article is here but the shocking - shocking! - image above conveys the important part! I mean it's only been 40+ years since Squad Leader and Star Fleet Battles started doing this 

GW's will be prettier and easier to read but considering this was done in 1977 it should be ...

I'm kind of impressed. This is the kind of thing serious wargames do and it seems they might finally be treating AoS as the kind of game that benefits from tighter and more organized rules. It's not an RPG! If you're going to run tournaments for it, might as well make the rules better.

A page from Star Fleet Battles Expansion #1 ... the one after The Movie - yes, the first one! People still play these games today and SFB at least hasn't had a major rules revision in about 30 years - because once they got it figured out they didn't feel the need to keep messing with them. Errata - sure. Change for the sake of change? Nope. 

Will this carry over to 40K? Lord I hope so. It will probably be in the next edition but doing it in AoS 3.0 lets them work out any kinks before they take it to the big game.

It has to be said that neither 40K nor Age of Sigmar are anywhere near the complexity of modern Squad Leader or SFB (or Federation Commander) but any set of rules can benefit from being organized in a sensible way, and a competitive game can benefit even more. 

So bravo GW! Bravo!

Forced Character Grouping in Soulbound - and Elsewhere

 

I'm having a hard time finishing my read-thru of Soulbound and it took me a while to figure out what was dragging down my interest. I love the setting and think it's set up well for an RPG. It wasn't so much the mechanics although I'm still debating my opinion on them. It was one particular element:

Much of the game is tied to the concept that this isn't your typical fantasy adventuring party - you are "soulbound". Granted, it is in the title of the game, but I didn't realize it would be the dominant concept - with mechanics, yes - in the game that it is. Yes, I could probably run a party without it but a lot of the game is presented with the idea that your party is soulbound ... except for the Stormcast. Yes, weirdly the posterboys of the whole Age of Sigmar universe are NOT Soulbound ... but the idea is still that the rest of the party is and any Stormcast are there as trainers/advisers/guides/spies. 

Maybe if it doesn't work conceptually for one of the core character archetypes for your setting it is not a great idea for your first big RPG in the setting?

he effect of this approach, and what rubs me the wrong way, is that your party is locked in to being "Agents of Sigmar". They are tied to one god, mostly, and one faction (order) certainly. It feels like a straightjacket, conceptually. Your party is tied to the Big Agenda ... they're not really free agents in charge of their own destiny as you would see in most other RPGs. This is really a sticking point with me. 

The old Warhammer had characters starting out at ridiculously low power levels (this was a feature not a bug) but you had the freedom to do whatever the group decided with your Rat Catcher/Outlaw/Agitator/Acolyte all-star team. Soulbound does up the power level and I'm fine with that, it's a different game, but your direction is far more limited. You are probably not going to be digging through dungeons for gold and magic - you'll be sent there to recover some threat to the world or some powerful tool for order. You won't be running a free trader here - at best you might be escorting someone important from place to place. 

It's not mechanics - though there are mechanics tied to being Soulbound.

It's not setting - there's nothing inherent to the setting that makes this required to be a wandering adventurer.

It's ... feel. I just don't like the feel when the party concept is dictated by the rulebook in such a heavy handed way. 

Now there are other games that have similar approaches. 

The FFG Star Wars game is one and I wasn't a huge fan of it there with certain assumptions about a party unity mechanic whether it was Obligation in Edge of the Empire, Duty in Age of Rebellion, or Morality in Force and Destiny. Those at least could be broken down to an individual character level so you could mix characters from different books and people could come and go as they pleased. That's a little different than "oh and if you die after this ceremony your soul explodes and is gone so you can't even come back through some kind of divine shenanigans."

The FFG 40K RPG's took a similar approach where there were multiple books each covering a different type of game. Inquisitorial retinues are a very different type of campaign from an Imperial guard squad or the crew of a Rogue Trader. It made sense for that setting.   

Shadowrun assumes you're all shadowrunners ... but that's more of a social status and lifestyle choice rather than a permanent mechanical lock. You don't have to undertake illegal operations - it's just  an easy way to make a lot of money. You could be a .05 essence hot dog vendor if you want!

The various Star Trek RPGs do tend to assume that you're in Starfleet and part of an organized command structure that will be given missions and generally ordered about. Considering that's 99% of the source material though it totally makes sense. It would be weird if you weren't ordered to do something that spiraled dangerously out of control. 

D&D and superhero games and Traveller and other sci fi games do generally assume that you're going to be part of a mostly bipedal humanoid group of beings that will work together to achieve some common goal. That's it! There's usually no mechanical structure to it and no setting rule to it. The PC's are part of a team because it makes sense and they want to be there and they could leave at any time. 

The other big offender here of recent origin is the Savage Worlds version of Rifts. Original Rifts was a wide-open setting  -pick one of these crazy character types and then YOU come up with a reason why you're all together ... or let the DM do it. New Rifts presents everything around "The Tomorrow Legion" which is a do-gooder organization that serves as a base and provides other support for good-guy adventuring parties out there fighting the good fight against the multitude of evil beings and organizations on Rifts earth. The world is sometimes presented as  TL intelligence reports, the adventures often start with "The TL sends/has asked you to go to X and investigate something" and it's just a heavy-handed conceit that I totally ignored when I started my game. 

Part of the Rifts problem is that people were playing the game for two decades plus before this construct was added to the setting. The author of the conversion has stated that he wants to play clear-cut heroes and that's fine but it's a shades of grey setting, not a black and white one. There was no big organization of Good and that's part of what made it interesting. I believe there was a mention made as well of people not knowing where or how to start a campaign. How did you start your D&D game? How did you start that old Traveller campaign? Star Wars? Any approach that worked in those would work in Rifts. It's really not that hard. How did any of us manage to play Gamma World or Twilight 2000 without an obvious good guy organization to join? 

Hint: If that's what you want then GO BUILD ONE IN THE GAME! YOUR GAME!

I guess in the end that's what I'd like to see with Soulbound. I'd like to see "Soulbound" status as something players worked to achieve in the game, something desirable and with clear, tangible benefits in the game, and some serious tradeoffs - like that whole exploding soul thing. Instead of being the assumed party origin and just making it part of the back story, how about making it the object of an adventure path produced for the Sigmar RPG? That way if your players just want to look for loot to power up before the next wave of Chaos/Undead/Orc invasions they could do that, and a group that wanted to join the big leagues could follow that path. It's sort of like starting at "Runelord" level in Runequest. I mean, sure, you could, but you've missed out on a lot by doing it and you've assumed a lot about the characters prior lives.

The Mortal Realms for Age of Sigmar is a great setting with  multiple worlds, interesting magic, a variety of threats, steampunk dwarves, airships, lots of character options and built-in reasons for wildly different character types to be working with each other. I wish this first exploration of it had been more open and less ... channeled. Hopefully the future will open it up more. 

Sigmar Monday - Getting Started

My approach in getting into Age of Sigmar at this point is to go back to the beginning and pick up things in the order they came out. This should help me in both the game rules and the lore. Rules-wise there have been various updates - allegiance books, battle tomes, campaign books, and general's handbooks - that add to the game and there have also been lore releases outside of those with various novels.

This is easier because Games Workshop has taken an approach to releasing the game by using an ongoing story that shows the progression of the setting in chunks. The initial boxed set and novella covered the history of what happened between the end of the Old World and the beginning of the new. It described the resettling of the various "realms" and the emergence of the new gods, starting with Sigmar himself. The history part wraps up with the invasion of this new world by the chaos powers and the retreat back to a single realm by the non-chaos forces. The "now" part of the game kicks off with Sigmar's return to the realms, the first invasion with his new Stormcast forces to re-open a single realmgate and begin a war to reclaim the realms for order and life. The boxed set contains six scenarios - "battleplans" - that describe this initial campaign. By the end of them, Sigmar's forces have reclaimed this first gate and are ready for more.

The original hardback continues this with additional battleplans and text that cover the expansion of this campaign beyond that first invasion. Then there are a series of "Realmgate Wars" campaign books and novels that describe the liberation of the other realms and the battles across them. That's pretty much the story of the first year or two of the Age of Sigmar game. The second big arc is just getting started now with the "Malign Portents" campaign and series of releases that seems to focus on the Death faction but is also bringing out a bunch of the Elf lore too.  It should be an interesting year. I expect that AoS will get more attention this year now that the initial blast of 40K new edition support is out and done. We will see.

I admit that I have really come around on the lore for the game. Early on it was dismissed as "bubbles" of stuff that the various races lived in and it all sounded pretty shallow. Reading through the actual material though - well, it reads more like Runequest! It's a time of myth with gods and divine agents shaping the land and creating new races who sometimes do not get along. Time is vague (and flexible), geography is vague (and flexible), and heroes sometimes have multiple lives to live.

There are some elements of Planescape for D&D as well, and some from Stargate too. The 8 realms each seem to be associated with one of the old 8 winds of magic themes - heavens, metal, fire, life, death, beasts, light, and shadows. If you ever played an Empire wizard in the Warhammer RPG or miniatures game these should sound familiar. They each have inhabitants that fit that theme, while the powers of Chaos threaten all as they invade from outside of this reality.  They are not described as "planets" and there are not all-encompassing maps of the the whole realms, just certain regions where the fighting is taking place - they're more like "planes". To travel between these realms most beings need to use realmgates which are physical structures that connect one realm to another. Magic rituals can seal or open them so much of the wargame focus is on locating, controlling, and either opening or closing one of the gates.

A "Baleful Realmgate"

Now I like this for the miniatures game as it's definitely ramping up of the setting to a mythic high-magic that fits the figures well. I also like it because there are some new RPG's coming out later this year too:

• There's a 40K RPG that is taking a different approach from the old one both mechanically and thematically. 
• There's an update of the classic old world version of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying that looks like it's being handled well and is basing off of the 2nd edition mechanics which were heavily based off of the 1st edition mechanics which is exactly what I was hoping for someday.  
• On top of these there is also an Age of Sigmar RPG being developed, separate from the classic version above and I think there are a ton of possibilities for this one. 

The best description of the difference between on those last two is this quote:

WFRP 4e is meant to be the “Look, a Bloodthirster! Run!” game, while Age of Sigmar is meant to be the “Look, a Bloodthirster! Charge!” game. Different power levels, different gonzo levels. C7 said that while they and other writers on WFRP4 are big fans of the classic Old World, they’re actually really looking forward to Age of Sigmar as a chance to do something that feels very different within the Warhammer mythos. C7 said they have hopes to develop Age of Sigmar’s setting into something very special, and those who were originally turned off by Age of Sigmar should give the RPG take on it a second look.

Like I said above, I see a lot of RPG potential in there for some adventures outside the typical D&D approach, but they will still be taking care of the classic Warhammer fans too. Well done!

Originally I was thinking I just wanted a set of fantasy rules that was current and supported and the fact that they look a lot like 40K 8th was just a bonus. After reading the fluff though, I am buying into the game and setting as a whole, not just as a set of rules. 

So far, for AoS I have the starter set, the original hardback book, the four grand alliance books, and the first general's handbook. The GH is out of order but I wanted some point values to get started. I expect we will be working our way through these early battles for a while and I am still building the starter set miniatures, but I am betting I can be caught up to the game's "now" before the end of 2018.  Updates to follow. 

Planning for 2018: The Miniatures

With the resurgence of Warhammer 40,000 last year it was somewhat easy to maintain focus as we were rally only playing the one game - everything else fell by the wayside as dove back in to 40K full time.

(Well, except for the RPGs - more on those coming later)

Now X-Wing, Attack Wing, and Armada are virtually painless as "side games" as they come pre-painted and have all of the relevant rules included with the model, I don't need to build them, I don't need to paint them, and I don't need to buy an expansion book to run them. The only downside is that I am a little less attached to them as I didn't paint them. Now you can paint them or customize them:

...but that does eliminate the huge benefit of being pre-painted. One of these days, but not right now.

This month, though, I have re-discovered Fantasy mini's via Age of Sigmar: The Second Look A Few Years Later much like I did with Pathfinder and 4E D&D and 5E D&D. Sometimes it takes a while for things to sink in...

So how to manage this? I'm still building and painting armies for 40K and now I'm charged up about this Sigmar thing and looking at what I have for that has also re-sparked my interest in Kings of War. How do I make usable progress on armies for these games instead of ending up with a bunch of half-efforts? Let's look at it in the context of "2018". How do I get things done for all of these games this year? This guy has a pretty good idea: Nick Williams blog post.

It took me forever to get a full, painted Warhammer army together. I got my first set of Warhammer rules in 1984 (second edition) but didn't play a ton in the 80's and when I did it was with my Battlesystem counters or with other people's miniatures at Cons. I had multiple armies in the 90's, mainly High Elves and Orcs, but only some of them were painted. I finally got my Chaos Warriors organized, built, and painted in the early 2000's during 6th edition ... and they are still my only fully painted fantasy army! Those same High Elves and Orcs now form the core of the Kings of War armies for blaster and myself and yes, they are still only partially painted.

Given this, I like Nick's ideas:

• Limit your games! This is similar to my constant reach for "focus" in my gaming. Play the same game a few times in a row. Play the same army for a while! Learn how the game - and a particular army - works! I have a tendency to jump around between games so I have to keep this in mind.
• An army for each that I am proud of! This is more complicated as I have several painted armies:
• 40K - Crimson Fists, Imperial Fists, Iron Warriors, Iyanden Eldar, Grey Knights (new for 2018!) and my old Howling Griffons - but I am always working on more. Plus there are unfinished units intended for those painted armies too. 
• For Warhammer/KoW/Sigmar I have my Chaos Warriors
• Bolt Action is the other game that lurks on our fringes and I have some sprayed 20mm figs but nothing I'd rate as "proud"
• Oh, and Frostgrave, but that runs off of our D&D mini collection so no real worries there. 

So, limit games and try to finish one army - I can work with that. I just have to decide which one!

Games is fairly easy: 40K is top dog, with Kings of War a neglected favorite and Sigmar my current obsession. 

Armies: 

• Kings of War - finish my old warhammer Orc army! I see others that I like but I would like to push this one over the "Finished" line before I start another.
• Sigmar - I have a box full of Stormcasts and Chaos guys now so I should probably start with them. I have an idea for a fairly easy Stormcast paint scheme so that's probably where it will start. The 40K Daemon army works as-is in this game so that could be a bonus. After that I am split between Lizardmen (have some leftovers from the Warhammer days) and Vampire Counts and a "Death" army in general.
• 40K - So many options - build new stuff for my Iron Warriors? finish the Blood Angels? 
• I just put together 30 bloodletters so I'd say a Daemon army is probably at the front of the queue. I have all of the units I just need to finish building and painting them. Being able to use it for two games really makes this one important.
• I've been playing around with the World Eaters for a while and they're mostly built. I really should finish them up and paint them
• After that I'm leaning towards my Dark Angels as I have several lists I like that use a mix of certain units that would not take that long to finish if I just locked in and worked on them for a while. 

That's the plan for now. We will see to what degree I can stick to it. Maybe I can work up some kind of split schedule where I work on two armies per year - start one this year, finish up the one from last year, play both as the year goes on. That would be nice.

For 40K I'd like to finish the Blood Angels but I'm reading a bunch of DA books so they're more in my head right now. I love my Orks but I've made a conscious decision to set them aside until their codex comes out. Death Guard are an army I go back and forth on so they may show up at some point too. 

For fantasy in general I've always wanted a dwarf army and I'd say a Mantic Dwarf Starter is in my near future, probably for KoW. It's easier than hunting down an old Warhammer dwarf force unit by unit. I'm also liking the idea of an undead army and I'm thinking a more VC-type force for Sigmar and rescuing some old Tomb Kings stuff for a KoW Empire of Dust army. Not sure how far any of that will get in 2018 but it's good to have a plan, right?

The New Game for 2018

More than a year back I ran through all of the miniature games I was looking into and trying to find time to play. Well, a lot of those candidates fizzled out given our limited time and my reluctance to dive too deeply in unless at least one of the Apprentices was excited about it. As far as that 2016 list goes:

• Bolt Action - they went to a second edition and my interest cooled because it seemed like everything else was going to new editions too and there's only so much money to spend. I really should have a decent set of WW2 miniatures by now given my interests but it just hasn't happened. Maybe next year.
• Dropzone Commander - it seemed like a great replacement for Epic but the Apprentices were not super excited and then the creators seemed to get really caught up in their Dropship Commander Kickstarter and development and now they've sold their company off to another company ... call me when you get around to releasing second edition.
• Frostgrave - we've played a few games of this and we like it so it will likely get played a few times this year too. It's an easy game to have "on the list" without buying a bunch of expensive books and huge armies. 
• Flames of War - looked at the new edition, decided to skip it since their own fans seem to hate it. 
• Kings of War - we liked it, played it quite a bit for a while, then once 40K 8th edition came out it's been gathering dust. I think we may be giving it another try soon though.
• X-Wing - I bought the kids (and myself) a bunch of ships for Xmas 2016 and ... no one wanted to play it. As teenagers I know my friends and I would have killed for a game like this but for whatever reason it's just not anything they really care about. I haven't bought a ship for it since, nor have we played it in more than a year now. 

The latecomer: Armada. I talked about it here and while we haven't played it a ton it's the one Star Wars game that Blaster at least is interested in playing again. I picked up some more ships for it not too long ago and we're trying to find a place to give it the first run of this year.

Lately thought I was feeling a lack of fantasy gaming and I kept hearing good things about Shadespire. 

It's a skirmish sized game where you have a band of 3-5 characters from a particular force that fight it out on a tactical map. The characters are pre-set per band, but you have cards that let you customize everything from gear to objectives. It can be anywhere from 1 on 1 to a 4-way free for all and sounded fairly interesting as it plays really fast too - less than an hour is what I keep hearing. 

The base game comes with Sigmarites (the gold armored posterboys of Age of Sigmar) vs Khorne Blood-somethings - basically barbarians or chaos marauders. There are expansion sets now for orcs and undead. Sounds cool, and you can pick up the whole thing for about $100. 

Then I started looking around. I had picked up the General's Handbook for AoS a while back and was really impressed with what it did for that game. Maybe fantasy is the right answer, but not in the limited-and-somewhat-close-to-an-RPG form that is Shadespire.

I can get the starter set for Age of Sigmar, the big original one, for about the same amount. It has a good chunk of two fantasy armies in it. I'm a lot more friendly to the rules now after playing 40K 8th. Finally, I am busily building up my daemon armies for 40K and they are completely usable in AoS with no changes at all! With our leftover High Elf, Greenskin, and Chaos Warrior armies from Warhammer and Kings of War, plus my daemon forces, plus Apprentice Red's Wood Elves, plus what comes in the box, we could have 6-7-8 armies right now using a similar set of rules to 40K and using terrain we already have! 

So, Shadespire is sitting down for now and somewhat to my surprise we are moving into Age of Sigmar in a big way. I don't expect it to replace 40K but I expect it to jump to the #2 spot pretty quickly.

I know we only have a limited amount of time to play these thigns. I also would rather spend a big chunk of the budget diving deeply into one good game than spending a little on half a dozen games we play once or never play at all, so I try to pick one main game to dive into for the year - especially when it comes to miniatures. This year it's AoS. 

More to come, for sure.

Age of Sigmar - First Game Report

So Warhammer Fantasy Battle has been replaced by Warhammer Age of Sigmar in the last few weeks. This is a whole new system with a shiny new boxed set and a new core book that is only tangentially related to what has come before - more on that later.

So did we go buy the big new box? Oh no - In a stunning move, GW has released the rules for AoS on their website for free, along with (even more shocking) army lists for all of the current armies in the game! I was shocked, surprised, and very happy to see this as it's been a  long time since Games Workshop has taken this approach to any of their games, and they've never done it for one of their "main" games. Maybe someone there finally gets it!

Given the rules and army lists and given that we already have several fantasy armies floating around the house we decided to give the new game a try. Apprentice Red brought out his Wood Elves while I dusted off my Chaos Warriors. After re-skimming the rules again and choosing our actual units we got started.

This won't be a long report.

On the right I took a mounted chaos lord, a chaos sorcerer on foot, two units of chaos warriors, and a unit of chaos knights.

On the left Red took two units of glade guard, a unit of waywatchers, a unit of dryads, and a wizard.

The one mistake we made was using the special terrain rules as written. That meant that every piece of terrain on the table had some kind of extra effect (tracked via the red die in each one) - out to radius of 3"! We quickly dropped the radius effect and just applied the effect to units inside the terrain. Even that meant that two of Red's units and one of mine were paralyzed for half the game because of bad rolls. Also, with the terrain effect being random (and with some of them being random every time a unit touches them!) it's difficult to plan around them or use them in any way.  This is not a desirable situation and we will be altering it the next time we play.

On my right the elf guards and the wizard moved up but were out of bow range on their turn. This would be very bad for them as it meant that on my turn (Red went first) they were within charge range of my chaos knights.

So ... yes - Chaos Knights work pretty much the same way they did in prior editions of Warhammer.

The knights and dryads locked up for two turns after this, mainly because they were too close for me to charge and backing off to set up another charge just does not seem like the chaos knight way of doing things.

Over on my left the infantry advanced with some protection from the chaos wizard, but he could not stop the Khorne warriors (the red ones) from being ensorcelled by the !#@$@#$% hills for two turns. Fortunately the elves were having some similar problems and only got two turns of shooting off during my advance. It hurt because wood elves have some nifty shooting abilities but Chaos Warriors are  2-wound troopers so it didn't hurt as much as it could have. I lost 3-4 men out of each unit.

Once they close in of course, it's a pretty short fight. Chaos warriors also still work about like you would expect them to based on prior editions of Warhammer.

So, what do I think of the new game after one session?

Good:

• It plays fast - we ran through first time setup, selection, and 4 turns each in about 2 hours and I would expect that to be faster if we played again
• There are not a lot of "fiddly bits" - the rules are 4 pages long so there's not much need to look stuff up so the focus does stay on the table and not in the "book"
• Free rules and free army lists is a great choice - multiple thumbs up for this!

Bad:

• Terrain rules are overdone and too variable. There are some good ideas here but it could be a lot better.
• There are not a lot of the nitty-gritty tactical decisions left from prior editions of Warhammer. From how to size up your unit, to formations, to maneuver, most of that is gone. It does speed up the game, but it removes a lot of the "weight" of the game too
• Most of the unit customization from prior versions of Warhammer is gone too. There are a few choices on some units, but tooling up a chaos lord is nothing like it was before.

My biggest positive impression is that it's much easier to grab some sheets, set up some units, and start (and finish!) a game now that it used to be. That's a strong feature and in my experience it's the way a lot of games are going nowadays. Simpler & faster is beating out detailed, tactically rich, simulation type games. Presumably because most players are willing to make that choice. and prefer it. It works for me for now, and I have the older versions of Warhammer (and a bunch of other fantasy rules) to use if I want to get more crunchy again.

Short version: this is the DBA version of Warhammer and I predict it will spark a revolution and a new following much like DBA did years ago in the ancients world.

My biggest negative impression is that when you take away all the unit customization, character customization, magic items, and consistent terrain rules, you take away a lot of both the pre-game and in-game strategy and tactics and turn it into a card game where it's mainly my unit stats vs your unit stats. No more angling for a flank charge, no more setting up to use a one-off magic item, no more screening one unit with another, and no more chance for an otherwise intact unit to flee with a failed leadership roll  means that unit stats (and the die rolls) determine most of the outcome of the game. 

The Big Controversy:

The internet has been aflame with the lack of point values and how it ruins the game. I don't think it does. Again, card games work just fine without point values and that's kind of what it feels like. I think there may be some kind of structure needed for a formal tournament and we are already seeing limits on the number of wounds etc but I wonder if a simple limit on spamming things wouldn't solve the problem. Something like "no more than three of any single unit" should do it, combined with designating certain special types as "unique" so we don't get three "Galrauch the two-headed dragon of chaos" units showing up in one fight. I think that would be enough of a limit to keep the game interesting for everyone.