Warhammer Store Free Beastman

 

At the weekend I was in Bristol for a LARP - a player run event sent in the Empire setting, where a bunch of magicians were getting together to discuss magic and politics. I travelled down the night before so I had an easy commute on the day, but found myself with a spare morning. I decided to check out some local gaming shops, and pottered into the local Warhammer store.

I ended up spending all my available time there, as these days you can assembled a miniature which you can then take home and keep. This month's miniature was a Warhammer 40,000 chaos beastman, and they're a bit of the setting I've been fond of for quite a while.

You seem to need to assemble the miniature in the store, but you can use their tools to do so. They also give you a little cardboard box to take him away in. He also came on his own dedicated sprue, so they're casting these up specifically for the "assemble and take away" thing in the stores.

He was a fun assembly job - not too complicated, not too many parts. He's clearly been designed for the younger modellers or newer hobbyists to be able to take part in.

This is the sort of thing that's good for Games Workshop stores to be getting involved in. There were also folk coming in for their Duke of Edinburgh Award to do painting and crafting. In game store activities like this that let people learn about the hobby are how we get the next generation of gamers.

Some thoughts on my plans for Games Workshop games

 

With more than half the year gone, I thought I'd have a bit of a ponder about my plans for the rest of the year. For September, I thought it would be a good idea to try and get in a game of That There Warhammer 40,000 New Edition. I've got a Deathwatch force that I might need to fiddle about with to make work, but I'll put together an army and find someone to play down at the club.

I do have quite a few commitments in September already - so there's a small chance I won't manage to fit this in. If so, I'll do it in October and everything else can slip to the right by a month in turn . . .

I've still not played Age of Sigmar. This is completely daft, as I really like the look of it. October shall be the month of Age of Sigmar (except if it isn't), and I shall finally play a game of that there fantasy game, and see if I like it.

I had a learning game of Warhammer Underworlds a few years ago. I own a couple of painted Stormcast warbands courtesy of Squiggle's Studio. I have a big pile of unpainted warbands on top of that. Let November be the month I get in a game of Warhammer Underworlds with my own models and a Rivals deck.

As I mentioned, September is a busy month, so everything may slip a month. If it doesn't, I do have December free. So lets have a suitably "stealthy" bonus objective. The club has a Boarding Action terrain set, and I should be able to put together a boarding action team really easily. I'm keen on the idea of Boarding Action sized painting projects, so I'd like to see if it's as much my jam as I suspect it is.

A Lazy Combat Patrol Hack

I'm still not going out yet because I think everything is down to risk management and I'm not risking my life to play toy soldiers.

I've also not yet got a copy of the new Warhammer 40,000 because I have no interest in either a subscription app or a dead tree copy, and for some reason Games Workshop haven't released the e-book copy yet for civilised people.

But that doesn't stop me reading internet sites and writing an elegant and balanced game mod for Combat Patrol games to give the Inquisition a bit more flexibility.

Inquisitorial Clash

• Select a force using the Patrol Detachment as usual for a Combat Patrol game. Your Warlord must be an Inquisitor.

• Units with the SISTERS OF SILENCE Faction keyword can be included in a INQUISITION detachment, without preventing that detachment from being an INQUISITION detachment. Note that this does not prevent INQUISITION models in that detachment from gaining any detachment abilities, however SISTERS OF SILENCE units cannot themselves gain any detachment abilities. Similarly, those SISTERS OF SILENCE units are ignored for any rules that state all units from that Detachment must have at least one Faction keyword in common (e.g. in a matched play game) and when documenting your army's Faction.

• Units with the ASTRA MILITARUM Faction keyword can be included in a INQUISITION detachment, without preventing that detachment from being an INQUISITION detachment. Note that this does not prevent INQUISITION models in that detachment from gaining any detachment abilities, however ASTRA MILITARUM units cannot themselves gain any detachment abilities. Similarly, those ASTRA MILITARUM units are ignored for any rules that state all units from that Detachment must have at least one Faction keyword in common (e.g. in a matched play game) and when documenting your army's Faction.

• Units with the GREY KNIGHTS Faction keyword can be included in a ORDO MALLEUS detachment, without preventing that detachment from being an ORDO MALLEUS detachment. Note that this does not prevent ORDO MALLEUS models in that detachment from gaining any detachment abilities, however GREY KNIGHTS units cannot themselves gain any detachment abilities. Similarly, those GREY KNIGHTS units are ignored for any rules that state all units from that Detachment must have at least one Faction keyword in common (e.g. in a matched play game) and when documenting your army's Faction.

• Units with the ADEPTUS MINISTORUM Faction keyword can be included in ORDO HERETICUS detachment, without preventing that detachment from being an ORDO HERETICUS detachment. Note that this does not prevent INQUISITION models in that detachment from gaining any detachment abilities, however ADEPTUS MINISTORUM units cannot themselves gain any detachment abilities. Similarly, those ADEPTUS MINISTORUM units are ignored for any rules that state all units from that Detachment must have at least one Faction keyword in common (e.g. in a matched play game) and when documenting your army's Faction.

• Units with the DEATHWATCH Faction keyword can be included in ORDO XENOS detachment, without preventing that detachment from being an ORDO XENOS detachment. Note that this does not prevent ORDO XENOS models in that detachment from gaining any detachment abilities, however DEATHWATCH units cannot themselves gain any detachment abilities. Similarly, those DEATHWATCH units are ignored for any rules that state all units from that Detachment must have at least one Faction keyword in common (e.g. in a matched play game) and when documenting your army's Faction.

• Your Warlord does not count as an AGENT OF THE IMPERIUM for the purposes of limiting the number of AGENT OF THE IMPERIUM models you may take in your detachment. (This does not supercede the rule that only one Inquisitor may be taken in an Inquisition Detachment, but does mean that you could use an Assassin's AGENT OF THE IMPERIUM rule to add it to your Inquisition detachment.)

This "writing rules" lark isn't all that hard, is it? I haven't managed to get any games of 9th edition 40K in, sadly, so please do let me know if you decide to use my weird house rules, and how you got on?

Warhammer World New Year's Open Day: Staff Displays

Remember that New Year's Open Day I went to? There was a ton of cool staff hobby there, and I haven't posted the photos yet.

This is Andy Hoare's Space Slann army, which is rather obscure and pretty darned cool.

I think this is an early Confrontation / Necromunda playtest figure.

Some models from Jervis' collection, I believe.

Annoyingly, I didn't make a note of whose figure this was at the time, and now don't remember. It's a nice conversion I still wanted to share, tho!

Warhammer World New Year's Open Day - Painting Table

One of the things on offer at the Open Day was an opportunity to paint an already assembled Chaos Warrior and take them away with you afterwards. Having managed to paint nothing but scenery all last year, I was a bit nervous of getting back to painting, but I managed to get a bunch done and I was pretty pleased with how he turned out.

He's not quite finished yet, so I'm not ticking a figure off on the "figures painted this year" list, but it definitely enthused me to get more done - and reminded me what an hour or so of concentration and painting can actually achieve!

Warhammer World New Year's Open Day - All The Gossip

Without further ado, I'm going straight into the assorted pictures and nonsense I managed to pick up at the Open Day. There's no real revelations here - there's prettier pictures over at the Warhammer Community site - this is more about what I saw and what I thought about it.

Lets start off with Blood Bowl. The new stuff here was some additional Goblin Secret Weapons, including one with wings, one with a pogo stick, and an 'Ooligan with a bunch of noise making gizmos. These are the sort of thing I expect my darling wife may pick up at some point...

There's also an alternative troll sculpt if that's your thing. This one seems to be wielding someone's leg, which is pretty cool. Some extra variety is really nice to see.

Helmut Wulf and Karla von Kill had already been announced (and can in fact be ordered from Forge World now) but it was great to see them in the flesh. Karla is a bad-ass female character whose background is simply that she's a great Blood Bowl player. That she's sensibly dressed is a relief. Meanwhile, Helmut Wulf is a lunatic with a chainsaw. What could possibly go wrong?

On to Necromunda. If this figure looks familiar, that's because it was formerly available for the now discontinued Forge World Renegades range. The discontinuation inconveniently made it a little harder to get a Rogue Wyrd for your campaign, so he's getting a repackage and rerelease into Necromunda. Which is kind of sweet.

The Am-bot is a robot designed to look like an Ambull that any gang can hire. It looks like either there's more than one way to build the kit or more than one version going to be available. I love these to death, they're great.

Wait a second. A Blackstone Fortress expansion . . . called "The Dreaded Ambull". Surely not?

Apparently so! The Ambull is back in 40K as a monster in Blackstone Fortress. I cannot foresee a circumstance where I won't be buying this. It's amazing!

They also had an early copy of "Urban Conquest", a new campaign system for 40K. I really like this, it looks well thought through and rather clever.

You make a "map" of the city by dealing cards into a five by five grid in a wallet. It's designed for four players, with different starting map layout options. Each "campaign" turn can be after any number of games, including none if you've missed a round! You rank the players depending on how they did, then they do stuff like capture territory, select strategies for the next round of games, and accumulate their victory points.

This would be a lot of book keeping if there weren't reusable stickers supplied with the back so you can just fold the map up and get it out next time, with all the player positions and stratagems all neatly laid out. The designer also said it should work quite well for Kill Team. I'm not sure if it's designed for it or if it would need a little modding.

The pack is designed to handle the usual campaign woes of people missing weeks, or getting a drubbing and ending up near the bottom - it's intended to be quite forgiving of that and give people who are significantly behind ways to catch up. It's not just a case of winning the most games - if you outmanoeuvre the other players on the campaign board, you might win the campaign without having won as many games as them.
 

There were a bundle of other releases - this was a Mechanicus who'll be in a Kill Team expansion box. I'm assuming there will be 40K rules for them as well. There was also a ton of Genestealer Cult stuff, an announcement of a Ghoul vs Skaven box, and various other things I didn't have time to find and photograph.

The goblins, or "Gloomspite" were also out in force. Jes Bickham has been making an all troll / Troggoth army. I'm resisting things one for now - I had a few good talks about what I'm looking to get out of Age of Sigmar and I'm getting slightly more concrete thoughts about what I want to collect. I'm going to keep those to myself for now.

I'm pleased to say that a weekend away seeing amazing hobby stuff, and hanging out with awesome people has really ignited my hobby keen. I can't wait to get underway with various projects, and then tell you about them on here.

A nice scenery idea from Warhammer: Tottenham Court Road

A while back, I was pottering through Warhammer: Tottenham Court Road, and what should catch my eye...

Of course, it's the scenery. This Arcane Ruins set was painted by basing black, drybrushing with green, then a gloss varnish to give it a reflective feel. Definitely a method I'll want to try myself later.

Warhammer Fest and the changes at Games Workshop

So, the other weekend, my wife and I headed down to Warhammer Fest for a pleasant weekend of geekery and nonsense. By now I expect most of you who keep track of the wargaming news will have seen most of the new stuff announced at the event. If you haven't, I recommend the live feed page Games Workshop themselves put out here.

Trish has finally finished the Khornate Dragon

There are two big changes front and centre at Warhammer Fest. The first was previews - showing things in advance of their pre-order date. The second was more about representation and in particular a better balance of female representation.

A whole bunch of new stuff got announced at Warhammer Fest - a new edition of Age of Sigmar, two updates to AoS factions, the render of the next plastic Sister of Battle, the Dark Elf Blood Bowl team, Adeptus Titanicus, and that Cawdor are coming next for Necromunda. It's saying something that I didn't get to go to the Forge World Seminar as the tickets went too quickly, but that I didn't really mind...

Also, if you looked around, you could see other previews that hadn't even been announced on display in miniature cabinets, as demo items on people's desks, and so on. There was a lot of openness about the next three months.

I'm certainly interested in the new Adeptus Titanicus game. The buy in price point is likely to be a little high, but this is really nice stuff so I'm not too worried. It looks like it's going to be an interesting game focussing on the titans, with mention of the need to focus on your reactor management, and having cards available to configure your titans. The models also come with slots to magnetise all the weapons.

The other side to the changes were the number of really good female models of varying types. The new Stormcast Chamber has a high proportion of women, with sensible armour.

Also, the way the line infantry's armour has been modelled is rather androgynous, allowing for either make or female heads to be added without a problem - and it looks like there's female heads available for the kit.

With a two year lead time for miniature design, Games Workshop needs to be really careful fixing its historical problems. If they make a mis-step and do something wrong with their model design, from feedback to fix can be months or years. They seem to be aware of this, though, and are making an effort to get it right first time.

On the Blood Bowl side of things, we're seeing more teams with women players from the start - the new Dark Elf team has a sensible mix of men and women, and while they dropped the ball on the starting human and orc teams, they've introduced some cool female star players and they seem willing to listen to feedback.

Cheerleaders are a problem. The real world concept for them is fundamentally pretty sexist, but Blood Bowl, parodying such things, and historically using them, is left in a difficult spot. The route they've chosen to take is to make cheerleader models, and to try and do them as sympathetically as they can in the circumstances.

Personally, I think this is the best approach they can take. With the number of third party suppliers in the market, there's a risk that if Forge World don't make cheerleaders, other companies will make really offensive ones to pander to the lowest denominator. This is a place where Games Workshop and Forge World can use their position as market leader to put out sensible cheerleader models and hopefully cut down on the profitability of the more offensive sexist tropes smaller companies might be tempted to make.

Hence, in this particular case, orcs in the Blood Bowl universe have women again, rather than being fungus. The approach they've chosen to take is that these are some of the bigger, burlier orcs (who happen to be female) who cheer the players on with threats of violence if they don't play better. I think that's probably a better comic approach than some of the more outright offensive options taken in the past.

All in all, I'm really interested in how Games Workshop does with all this change. It's always a challenge, but so far they seem to be broadly doing pretty well with it, and long may that continue!

WarhammerFest: Part V - A few hobby paint recipes

In the last of my WarhammerFest pictures, here are some helpful pictures of various paint recipes the hobby teams had done to help you understand how they got some effects.

As I've been being slack with the blog while going to and recovering from Empire LRP, hopefully some of you will find this useful.

WarhammerFest: Part IV - PaintySim's Golden Demon Photos

My wife, PaintySim has long been better at painting than me - and it seems she's much better than photography, too! Here's the photos she took at WarhammerFest this year, mostly of Golden Demon entries.

OK, this is the one photo not
from Golden Demon!
It's a Kharadron Overlords diorama
Made by GW staff...