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. 

Something Funny Saturday

 

40K Friday - Dreadnought Decisions

 

I picked up a Leviathan Siege Dreadnought earlier this year - that's the monster in the picture up there - and this has lead to a conundrum: I'm not sure which army to put it in. It's a Forgeworld unit which means they're a little pricier than regular 40K so I'm not looking to pick up a half-dozen anytime soon -AND- they cost you a Command Point for each one you include in your army so I probably don't want multiples in an army anyway unless I have a particularly cunning plan. 

Now Contemptor Dreadnoughts are all the rage right now because of the variety of weapons they can include - the current meta-winner is putting two "twin volkite culverin" for a ridiculous number of shots and the chance for a bunch of mortal wounds. I love Contemptors and I do have a half-dozen or so of them scattered across several armies, loyalist and traitor alike. 

That said Leviathans are still bigger and still very cool and pack weapons you don't get on the Contemptor class.  The issue right now is having only one of them and having roughly ten armies it could join. Some of them are right-out from the start though:

• While it would be hilarious to paint one up to match my Rogue Trader Howling Griffons I just don't think that's the smartest use of the beast as I so not put them on the table all that often. Plus I use my two old metal dreads as Contemptors anyway so the "exotic dreadnought" box is already checked. 
• My Dark Angels have a lot of other options and I just don't like adding it here. Plus there is a very cool DA-specific Leviathan that I'd rather hunt down for them anyway.
• The Blood Angels on my shelf have a bunch of dreadnoughts already including a Relic Contemptor  with quad lascannons and cyclone launcher. It may happen someday but right now I don't feel like it adds that much to my force.
• Imperial Fists: This is an all-Terminator force that has zero dreadnoughts right now. If I'm going to add some to it I'm not going to start with a Leviathan. 
• The "White Marines" which are a separate force I picked up as a whole that are painted a lot like White Scars but not as White Scars. This is not one I'm looking to expand right now so ... no.

Yeah, I have too many power armor armies, I know. But let's talk about where the big dread makes sense:

Death Guard Leviathan

• Crimson Fists! I've been adding dreadnoughts to this army over the last few years as a particular area of focus. The only current types it does not have are a Leviathan and a Deredeo. Putting a big punchy dread in here would fit just fine.
• Black Templars! I've allocated a pair of Ironclads here and a regular dread or two but I do really like the idea of a big monster that could shoot and fight in melee to accompany the crusader squads into combat.
• Death Guard! You don't see them on the table a lot for DG but they do look good in the color scheme. It would add another tough unit to an army with a lot of hard targets already. Only conflict here is that I'm working on a pair of relic Contemptors for this force so it becomes a question of CP cost.
• World Eaters! I have two Helbrutes in this army so there is room for more but I also have a Maulerfiend and a pair of Defilers I like to take here with a Lord Discordant so I feel like the Leviathan could get lost or force me to reallocate some of this stuff.
• Iron Warriors! I have 4 Helbrutes here so in that sense I am over-nautted but I have not put anything else in here that's particularly exotic. The rest of the heavy stuff is normal tanks so there is room for another fun unit. 

One of the reasons for this post is that I would like to get it painted and on the table so I need to commit at some point and while pondering a thought occurred to me. Loyalists have the Redemptor Dreadnought - the newer Primaris dread that is much bigger than the traditional dreads and is a very popular choice right now. More specifically my Crimson Fists have two of them, Blood Angels have one, and my Dark Angels have one ... but it's not an option for Chaos. There's not a comparable big dread for Chaos - other than the Leviathan.

Redemptor Dreadnought

So this has helped me narrow things down. I was really leaning towards making him a Black Templar but I could just put a Redemptor there and put the Lev into one of my Chaos Marine forces. Right now I'm leaning towards DG or Iron Warriors. 

And that's where it stands right now - down to the last few choices. Hopefully  I will figure it out this week and get this particular project started.  

Something Funny Saturday

 

40K Friday - 40K, Change, and The New Ork Codex

 

No I don't have a copy of it yet but there have been much sharing of the contents of the limited edition book that some people do have already. So we know how it's going to work.

Stepping back a bit there are 3 main ways an army changes in 40K

• The biggest overall change comes from a new edition. This resets everything from movement to terrain to combat rules to army structure. From 3rd to 7th edition the basic setup was an HQ unit + two troops. 8th edition changed that up by introducing a variety of options for building your force and it also introduced Command Points as a currency to spend on everything from more exotic force structures prior to the game to unit upgrades outside the normal point cost to dice re-rolls during the game. 9th kept both of these concepts but changed up both how CP's are acquired and the exact elements of each of the force organization options. 
• The other area that can change up an army is a new codex. This is the book that covers what your army is, what it can do, and how it does it. Unit capabilities, point costs, psychic powers, special rules for the force, special rules for smaller groups within that force - there are a lot of elements to an army and the codes pretty much defines all of them.
• The final channels of change in 40K are the annual Chapter Approved book and the bi-annual FAQ updates and the post-release codex FAQ. 
• Chapter Approved comes out once a year and lately has been updates to the matched play missions and the secondary objectives - these are both new to 9th edition.
• GW adopted a new FAQ policy a few years ago where they put out updates in the spring and in the fall to adjust any out-of-balance units or rules and to adjust points costs. This works quite a bit better than the old "random" approach or the old "never" approach - neither of which was something you could count on.
• They have also stated a policy of releasing an update about a month after a new codex comes out to address any big balance issues or errors in the book. This is a really nice approach that helps keep things clear with the newer releases. 

For Orks, while 9th edition has been out for over a year and people have mostly adjusted to that change we are now in the "new codex" phase and like most of the 9th edition books it is an extensive re-working of how the army works. Not so much in the units themselves - though there are a lot of new ones here - but in how the weapons work, how the leaders work, and how morale works in particular. I thought I would hit the highs and lows in general today:

• Downside: You can only take 9 mek gunz in an army now instead of 18. I don't care personally as I have never run them but some people are understandably upset. 
• Upside: Many guns are "Dakka" weapons now and get more shots than they had before. These tend to be the mainstay ork weapons like shootas and big shootas and the warbiker guns so it has a big impact across the army. This divides the gun into two ratings. At half maximum range or more the gun has the same number of shots as before.  At less than half the gun has 50% more shots. In general this is great as the closer you get (or they get) the meaner your shooting gets.  This is generally better than the old Dakka rule of an extra shot on a to-hit roll of 6 - it's more reliable at least and let's you plan around having that higher rate of fire.
• Downside: Many ork guns that went to Dakka used to be Assault. This let you move with an extra d6" and still shoot with a -1. Dakka guns can no longer fire if you advance and in a melee-focused army that definitely slows you down. 
• Upside: Orks are Toughness 5. That's a major change. It seems like it's been discounted in some quarters because this particular change came out first but it is definitely a big change. It is nothing but a positive and it demonstrates GW's willingness to "mess with the numbers" in this edition - finally! For most armies, most of the the shots you fire and the punches you throw are at Strength 4 or less. Putting all of those weapons at a 5+ to wound is a significant boost. There are a fair number of S5 attacks out there too, from heavy bolters to heavy flamers, and putting those to a 4+ to wound is also helpful. This is all good.

• Downside: Ork morale has drastically changed. For most of the last 20 years Orks could ignore leadership in large mobs because the effective leadership number = the number of boyz in the mob. In a game where leadership capped at 10 and ork boy mobs capped at 30 - and were often fielded as 30 - morale was only an issue for small bands and even then mainly after significant casualties. 
  
  That is no longer the case. 
  
  The old "mob rule" rule is gone and now orks take morale checks just like everyone else. That means with a leadership of 7, killing as few as 5 boys puts your mob in danger on a 3+. If that check is failed then you will lose 1/6 of your boyz on average. That would take a 30-boy mob down to 20 in one turn from light casualties. The only benefit orks now have is that they can ignore the "below half strength" modifier on those checks if they are near another ork unit that  is not below half strength. Sure, that helps, but it is a dramatic change from how orks have handled morale for a long time. Also, this change somewhat offsets the T5 boost - You will take fewer casualties from say a volley of boltgun fire, but you have a much higher chance of failing a morale test if you do take any casualties. 
  
  Now there is the generic once a game "autopass morale for 2 CP" stratagem that everyone has and there is an ork-specific strat that allows passing morale for some mortal wound damage on the unit as the leaders knock out the cowards and it can be used multiple times but it i still taking boyz off of the board so it may not always be a great choice.
  
  This morale change is 100% negative and is already forcing players to look at different approaches. I'm seeing a lot more MSU lists with ten-boy squads instead of massed 30 boy squads. I think there is still a place for big squads - strats hit a little harder, Da Jump is a bigger deal on bigger mobs as is Warpath ... but I think it will be interesting to look at popular ork lists in six months or a year and see how they compare to end-of-8th-edition-codex lists.

For me I'll have to learn to live with these changes over the rest of the year. My normal ork force is a bunch of goff boyz on foot or in battlewagons with deff dread and 'naut support so there are definite impacts here. I have no big take on the beast snagga boyz yet ... I'll probably try using my skarboyz as beast boyz at first. Part of the fun of a new codex and new edition, right?

Thinking About Non-D&D RPG's Again - also, Cyberpunk Red

 

Well apparently it's that time of year as I did this last year too. With an opportunity to run something that isn't D&D or Pathfinder as a possible ongoing game I started digging into options and found a lot of the same options as last year on my mind. Trying to narrow it down a bit:

• Star Wars is still an option. My players all have some interest at least and really any of the 3 major system options are fun. I have several campaigns outlined so it's really just a matter of picking this one and then deciding what to run.
• Deadlands (Savage Worlds) would be a strong choice as I have a lot of good campaign material and we have liked the game whenever we have tried it. 
• Rifts (Savage Worlds) is a strong contender just because it covers a lot of similar ground to those two others and everyone has things they want to try. We've had some short runs in it but no long sustained campaign recently. This might be the easy consensus choice.
• Shadowrun is in the mix as I went looking back through my campaign binders and found tons of notes waiting to be unleashed on a party. This would probably use 2nd or 3rd edition for a variety of reasons. Might discuss that later - especially if we end up playing it. 
• "Some kind of superhero thing" - yeah that's how I phrased it to my players. Lot of options here as I've discussed in the past.

One that I thought might be a fun idea is Cyberpunk Red, but after reading the quickstart box ... probably not. I have a weird relationship with the game. The system looks great. I know it's good and I really want to like it but the setting I think is too much like a Wild West game without any supernatural elements: Everyone has a bunch of cool abilities they want to try out but after one good firefight half the team is dead or in the hospital for a month. I think that lack of powers or magic or psi or that "extra something" leaves my group with a lot less interest than they might have. 

Plus ... anytime I start thinking about scenarios/missions/adventures I keep thinking it would be more fun ... a lot more fun ...to do this in Shadowrun. I guess I'm just a Shadowrun guy and not a CP guy at heart. I think with a good GM it could be a lot of fun and I would definitely play it given the chance but that GM is probably not me. It just doesn't speak to me in the right way.

So that's where things stand at the moment - more to come. 

Something Funny Saturday

 

40K Friday: Grey Knights for 9th Edition

 

Pretty fired up about this one - the Grey Knights have been around since Rogue Trader  where they were a very specialized unit - not an army - that dropped in to fight big daemons typically. They are Space Paladins after all and they definitely look the part.

This continued on into Epic which is where I painted my first batch - the requisite 4 squads of terminators that were something any Imperial force could use. That was around 91-92 when the second edition of that game came out so I can say that on some level I've been playing Grey Knights for 30 years, right?

So I've always liked them but I never built them up in 40K, even after their emergence as a separate army and subsequent domination in 5th edition. I finally decided to fix this gap a few years back in 8th edition and I am very happy about it - I love the lore and I love the models.

Lots of good news this week with a new codex coming next week:

• New Stuff
• New Psychic Abilities
• A bunch of updates to units and strats and powers

I think it looks very promising  - it's always hard to tell with isolated chunks like this but I like the pieces I have seen so far. 

I have probably 4000 points total now with around 3000 of that painted so I'll be ready to go when the book comes out but it is a good reason to dive in and finish the rest of those units too. I don't really need anything new at this point  - maybe the new Crowe model - but it would be nice to have another one that I could call "finished" with a shiny new codex.

The Tomorrow War

 

It's a new movie on Amazon Prime that you may have heard of ... Chris Pratt, time travel, aliens, fate of the human race ... it checks a lot of typical sci-fi boxes.

NOTHING BUT SPOILERS BELOW!

I kind of want a prequel to tell us about this guy now.

Longtime 40k player take: It's Imperial Guard vs. Tyranids

But I have to admit ... I liked it better than I expected to ... a lot better.

The premise: Current day Chris Pratt is an ex-special forces sergeant who is now married, has a daughter, and teaches high school biology while trying to get a more scientific research type gig.  He's happy but frustrated. Then a terminator bubble/gateway pops open in the middle of a soccer match and humans from 30 years in the future walk through and announce that humanity is being eaten by aliens in their time and they need help. That help involves sending humans from "now" forward to "then" to help shoot aliens for a week, after which they return home ... if they live. Somehow the entire world agrees that this is legit in fairly short order so a worldwide draft is set up and people get notified at random that it's their turn to go. They get a brief training period - a week or less - and then they get sent forward 30 years to shoot aliens. 

As you might guess, this does not typically go well. Humans are still losing and the survival rate is something like 20% for the draftees. 

This is where I have some questions:

• They do go out of their way to cover the potential paradoxes in that only people who are dead prior to the current future time are drafted - no running into yourself.
• They also explain that they can only travel a fixed distance so it's only 30 years forward or back - to the day. This avoids some other questions and considering time travel was developed during an apocalyptic war it makes sense that  there might be some limitations.
• I'm still not sure how it works from our end - apparently you just need the one transmitter in the future and you can jump back and forth. Seems pretty loose but ok. 
• Location is never defined - apparently you can drop a shipment wherever you want and pick up form wherever you want. So it's kind of a teleporter too. This isn't discussed at all in the movie but it's hardly a dealbreaker. 

My biggest problem with the film is the aliens. A completely non-technological species the size of a horse ... there's just no way. There's no way they are going to take over almost the entire planet facing modern military technology. 

• They have tentacles that can shoot a spike to maybe pistol range. Wheeee! It is not particularly lethal because we see multiple characters get hit by one and survive so they aren't poisoned or anything. They are also not terribly accurate as we see many, many spikes embedded in walls or cars or other objects and they are not always surrounded by bloodstains. Plus we see a lot of missed shots during the action scenes. 
• Typical assault rifles can shoot 600 rounds per minute or more. Even with a 30 round magazine that's a lot more lead in the air than the aliens can toss and Planet Earth does not lack for bullets. They also have a much greater range, hundreds of meters, than anything we see from the aliens.
• A lot of time the movie acts as though assault rifles and pistols are the only weapons humanity has against these things. Sure, in a room maybe - but how did they get into the room? I don't think we see a single grenade used in the entire thing. We do see an M2HB in action so that was nice. 
• If the aliens had some superior technology or were spewing out some contagion I could see the problem but they don't - no heat rays, no black smoke, no force fields or super-tough alien metal ... they are basically animals. Mean animals that eat people sure, but still just animals to all appearances. They don't even have acid blood as an up-close hazard! We don't see them reproducing by laying bunches of eggs or anything like in some other movies so we don't know how any of that works. 
• If they have overrun so much of the world then presumably they have exhausted the food supplies on those other continents in the course of this 3-year war, right? Once the Russians are gone, what do the monsters in Russia eat? Given their size and activity level they would need to eat a lot.
• Back to how do these things overrun the world - They are roughly horse-sized. They are bright white in color. They are not particularly stealthy - no predator camouflage here. So again, how do they overrun any reasonably defended position? Helicopter gunships don't have to be  50 feet off the ground and in jumping distance to do what they do. We have infrared, night vision, thermal sights ... they're not going to sneak up on anyone really.

 

Now despite all this I still liked the movie. I just had to let go and take it as a given that somehow some way a series of colossal screw-ups meant that humanity was losing and losing badly to these things. I kept waiting for the big conspiracy-expectations-subversion-twist that the aliens were really from an experiment gone wrong on earth or some government or corporate bad guy was responsible for them but there was none of that - thank goodness. The movie stuck to its' original premise and that made me quite happy. There are some interesting twists along the way but nothing that is flat-out stupid beyond the core premise of the aliens over-analyzed above.

Well other than the final defense of the last human holdout. Seriously - it's in the middle of the ocean and they are totally surprised when a huge wave of creatures swarms up out of the ocean. They apparently had no early warning system set up, no picket ships, no mines in the water ... it's laughable and whoever was responsible for that should have been fired - if they weren't eaten.  

This movie does steal/homage from a LOT of other films. Alien, Aliens, Apocalypse Now, Terminator (it's sort of a reverse terminator in concept anyway), The Thing, Independence Day, Starship Troopers, ... even Stranger Things feels like an inspiration for some of the scenes here. 

Chris Pratt's family figures in significant ways, not just a motivation to "get back". The supporting characters are given just enough personality and capability to cover why they are there and to make it enjoyable while they are. The special effects look pretty good. 

It's not Star Wars. It's not super-deep. It is one of the better sci-fi action movies to come out in quite a while though and that surprised me. If you like this kind of thing it's definitely worth a couple of hours of your time. 

The Cortex Prime Handbook

 

I really like this book. It is exactly the kind of shoring-up or reinforcement that is useful to someone who already has a Cortex game like, say ... Marvel Heroic Roleplaying! Yet it is also an up-to-date full presentation of the system and the concepts behind it that a new player could use to begin playing. 

I won't break down every part of it because if you've played one of their games before then you have a good idea of how the system works. This is the most comprehensive presentation of that system published to date. The structure:

• The Core system - tests are the big focus here
• Characters - Stats, powers - all the different categories that might appear on a character sheet, experience, and yes - character creation, which was a source of complaints in the Marvel version at least. I don't see any gaps here.
• Scenes - this is a primer on how the game is structured and how conflicts work - combat and other types of conflict as well.
• Sessions - GM advice and how NPCs work in this system.
• Settings - this is one area I mainly skimmed because it has some good advice on defining a setting for this system specifically, with examples. I liked that. Then it goes into 3 new settings for the game. They're fine but I wasn't really looking for new settings with this book.
• Powers, Abilities, sample milestones, vehicles, and some sample characters.- it's the "stuff you can use in play" chapter. 

One refreshing thing is the way options are presented - as "Mods": equally valid choices you might use in any game, not as a Standard with some optional Variant rules. This is nice and it does discuss why one might be a better fit than another depending on the setting or just on what the GM and players want the game to do. The Doom Pool form Marvel is one option. Assets and Complications have some options. Your "Prime Sets", those different categories on your character sheet, are variable depending on the campaign. It looks to me like it takes every option they have ever presented in one of their prior games, refines them, and presents them side by side. It makes me think a lot of the 4th edition Champions BBB where we finally saw all of the options that the Hero System had been building over the prior decade presented in one volume. It's that good. 

I still love these character layouts - everything you need to know is right here!

Like that Hero book I think this one might be a lot to digest for someone totally new to the system. It's great but it's also somewhat generic in presentation and given the abstract approach of the rules it might be hard to picture what is happening with some of the rules interactions. There are examples and they do help but it is quite a bit different than most RPG's, especially if someone is coming from a strictly 5th edition D&D background. I think a totally new player would be better off finding a copy of one of their prior releases that covered a specific setting. Like ...

Yes, I will probably always view Cortex through a Marvel lens - a superhero lens at least as you could easily run DC characters with this as well. I think it's a great setting for playing characters you already know which is probably why they had so many licensed settings and why character creation was not tightly defined when this book was released. I've never been big on playing "known characters" in any other genre, and not many other systems, but for this one it just became the default for me and my kids and friends have had a ton of fun with it over the last 9 years. This book should only add to the fun.

If you want to see the system in play here are some examples of how it can go:

Session 1 from our campaign

Session 2

Session 3

Some thoughts after building some new characters in the system

There have been additional sessions beyond these but I never wrote them up. It has been one very drawn-out campaign with players and characters coming and going but it has always been a great game to play, with much laughing and much quoting of old books/shows/movies of course. A lot of that is the setting and characters but the system drives that as well. I am very happy to see a current, in-print book that could allow others to discover the fun we have had with this game.