I had thought about working on more of the Guard this weekend. I try to break things up into chunks as I go so I don't burn out or get bored with what I'm doing which means I am usually working on at least two armies at any given time. This weekend though something came out of left field and bit into me hard.
That's right for some reason I went down the rabbit hole on Grey Knights. It's been a while since I posted about them here - that was 9th Edition 40K and here's where I started talking about them for 8th Edition and they have been an army here ever since those days but for some reason I took them off the shelves and put them in a box after the move and just let them sit.
Now the distraction started while I was looking at my Iron Warriors and thinking I needed to do some updates as I have added parts and pieces the last few years but I haven't really sat down and hammered away on them. A lot of my stuff is old-school, my marines are mostly still on 25mm bases, and I haven't really finished out even the new stuff that I have added. So I was thinking I should put in some effort on them as I wrap up the Tyranids as there has been a lot of "new" for Chaos Marines recently and their rules seem to work pretty well so I should get some games in before 10th goes away - or at least modernize them a bit going in to 11th.
While doing this I decided to make a "Conclave of Chaos" on the big table and drag out all of my other chaos stuff too - World Eaters, Death Guard, some of the daemon stuff - to see if I had things loosely assigned to one army that I could use in another.
While doing that I had to move my Grey Knights Holding Facility (a big cardboard box) and while looking down into it I realized I had been ignoring them this entire edition and they were far more "modern" than the IW's. Well, they're at least on the right size bases. The path of distraction is insidious ...
So I made some room next to The Conclave and started sorting through my Knights of Titan and discovered things I had picked up in the last round of GK interest and never finished and some things that were - I have a painted Kaldor Draigo! Of course it turns out they took him out of the latest codex! But I have a Draigo! Also more normal powered armor guys, more termies/paladins, and more characters than I remembered. I also have 4 dreadnoughts ... not sure why I went to 4 but OK. I have an unbuilt Dreadknight which syncs up perfectly with the one new model the Grey Knights got for 10th which is an upgrade kit to more readily distinguish a Grand Master Nemesis Dreadknight from the regular Nemesis Dreadknight.
The main thing though is that there are a couple of thousand points worth of painted GK's that just need to be sorted out. I am fixing some of their bases along the way - I painted for several hours this weekend and it was all snow base updates. They were not super-unified before but they will be now. The vehicles need more work as there are a lot of "well it's silver at least" vehicles right now but it shouldn't be terribly hard to improve on that. Right now the plan is to tune up what's done/almost done and then based on what that looks like get some of the other stuff finished. I did manage to pick up the codex for 10th and read through it and I have ordered the dreadknight upgrade sprue so I am fired up about it all.
The downside of all this is twofold:
- This army has not done particularly well in 10th edition and the way they work now is *significantly* different than what they did in earlier editions. They used to be the all-psychic space marine force where each squad had powers and each character had powers and I can tell you the cognitive load of running them in 8th or 9th was massive. It was challenging, it was fun, but it was the most complex army in-play that I have ever tried to run. They had potentially 5 different melee weapons in each squad, plus a choice of 3 different support weapons at 1 or 2 per squad, and then each squad could pick from at least 1 psychic power out of 6, then the characters had a different set of powers to choose from ... it was a lot. But it fit the lore!
Fast-forward to 10th and all of that has gone away. They do still have the 3 support weapons to pick from but all of the melee options are now "Nemesis Force Weapons" and have a single statline. The psychic phase is gone and the various abilities are just pre-set per unit as a special ability if they have one at all. The psychic down-tune is a general 10th edition thing but it hit the psychic-focused armies pretty hard. The GK's signature feature now is teleporting - every unit has deep strike, they can pick some units up off of the table during the opponents turn, and there are ways to jump on and off and around the board more than any other army in the game. Hey, mobility is a huge thing in this kind of game and they have a ton of it but it is a very different thing than what they used to be. A lot of long-time Grey Knight players are not happy with this take on the force and have pulled back from playing & building and talking about Grey Knights. It's a shame but that's where a lot of people are these days. - Secondly there have been rumors for some time that the GKs are getting a full refresh in 11th edition - that's models, not rules. So I am diving in and building/painting/prepping a bunch of models that are going to be "obsolete" in a year or two. I will be sad to see them go because I absolutely love these things. They are just about the coolest of the firstborn era plastic marines with their awesome helmets and inscriptions and weapons and the GK color scheme just lends itself to making these things look amazing. That said they are from 5th edition, circa 2010, and a lot of that stuff is getting replaced now. They do look tiny compared to all of the primaris stuff and the new scale for marines but to me that doesn't mean they look bad - they just look small. Also, scaling has never been a strong suit for 40K, right from the start, even among the same army, so it really doesn't bother me.
So sure, we will see all-new models for the Grey Knights in the next few years. OK. Right now I have a pretty nice pile of the current ones, and I have rules to play them, so that's what I'm going to do. I am hoping that when the update comes they don't change the structure of the army a whole lot so that what I have will still work and I can keep playing with what I have while I contemplate if/how/when I want to upgrade to the newer stuff.
They might not! They might turn it completely upside down! If they do, well, Blaster has been making some noise about how strong Eldar were in 5th Edition so we might have to have a retro showdown and see if they were really all that tough.
More to come.