Cain indulged the current obsession for the fourth time this weekend hauling his Night Goblin swarm over to pit them against the primal fury of the beastmen in Warhammer Fantasy Battle. We rolled ‘battle for the pass’ for the scenario, which means the armies fight it out starting on the short ends of the 6′ X 4′ table rather than the long ones as normal. This gave a very compact center with little room on the flanks for maneuver or trickery. At 1500 points per side, that made for quite the crowded table with few places to escape the big blocks of rank n file. A tough fight for the goblins to start with as the table set up neutralized the Gobbo advantages on the flanks (there weren’t any!) was exacerbated by a bit of terrain that worked just a wee too well in the beastmen’s favor: the Anvil of Vaul (oh and his fanatics).
The fanatic didn’t go exactly the right way shortly after this shot
Under normal circumstances, the Anvil of Vaul, which gives Flaming and Magical attack augmentation to all units within 6″, would be a pretty even bonus for both sides in a fight, but I just happened to choose Blackened Plate as my only magic item for the army (man was 1500 points a squeeze). Blackened Plate gives a 2 up ward save to the wearer against flaming attacks AND a 4 up ward save for any unit he is with. In the clutch block on block fights during the battle, all within 6″ of the Anvil of Vaul, this gave my main Gor unit, who usually go skin with no save at all, a horrific advantage over the Goblins leading to their decimation, flight and subsequently ending up inside a stomach for their pains. Still it was a great game and we’re finally getting down the rules. It’s been tough to remember the fiddly bits here and there and to remember that Charges are resolved before compulsory movement (a big change from almost every Warhammer ruleset I’ve ever played) but we’re getting closer. One makes a big investment getting into a game like Warhammer, and committing to an edition and so far I couldn’t be more pleased with the games played– all just a total blast that makes 4 hours go by in a wink.
My list was finally legal after struggling to reconcile the 7th edition book with the 8th edition rules (sorry Cain) but was not fully painted, which is my personal shame as I really dislike hitting the table with unpainted stuff:
Gorbull (General)
Blackened Plate*
Wargor (Battle Standard Bearer)
Bray Shaman Level 1 (Lore of Beasts)
Core:
38 Gor with additional hand weapons, standard, musician and champion (both the Gorebull and Wargor joined this unit)
10 Gor with additional hand weapons, musician (in ambush)
29 Ungor with spears and shields, standard, musician (the Bray Shaman joined the ungor)
2 Tuskagor Chariots
5 Chaos Hounds
Special:
Razorgor (played by a Hound of Scathach from Confrontation)
I accidentally picked up a Dark Elf army real cheap today with the 7th edition book in tow. I cracked it open a few minutes ago and not only has it been obviously exposed to rooms filled constantly with smoke from them tweeds, it reeks as if it was regularly used to hold quantities while it’s former owner was, say, packing a bowl or rolling a fatty not that I would know about any sort of things like that.
As of 1:10 PM today, I made my quota for miniatures painted for the month. 4 Ungor, 6 Gor AHW for a total of 68 points added to the 1000 or so painted I have. That means In 5 months if I can keep pace I’ll have an additional 340 points for the beastmen army. That’s it? Ouch….
These were from a set off ebay that I picked up pre-built and pre-primed, so there are some mold line problems on some of them. Recipes– I hate it when people post pics of their stuff and don’t post recipes. Flesh is over a black undercoat, Dark Flesh, Vermin Brown and then Vermin brown with a slight amount of bronzed flesh for the final. I use the dynamic layering method so no washes, and only drybrushing where it really makes sense. The axes turned out pretty well as I overbrushed the blades and then cleaned up the head of the axe with a wash of black to just lightly cover the dry brush. Again, these are core troops, so if hold one to your eye you will see the impressionist style that layering methods create (as opposed to blending). and each color only at most, four layers (In contrast to 10+ for a blended model).
This batch of models includes the first time in history that I enjoyed painting shields. The plastic shields GW is putting out are just exquisite.
Now I just have to keep momentum and get more on the table to drive the horn in some more Night Goblin ass. Next up is 5 more Gor AHW.
Over the summer I fell into obsession with old west miniature gaming, well, painting them that is as I only got to play once so far. I had a goal to get through that involved painting 8 miniatures and completing two full gangs for Warhammer Historicals Legends of the Old West–gangs that I have been ‘working’ on since 2005. Over the Xmas break, I was able to finish all but two, and knocked the remainder out over the worst weeks of January.
Rock lobber, doom diver with a bunch of goblin meat between
Now after my first play of Warhammer 8th edition, I took a long view over my painting table and backlog in order to get to 2000 points painted. 50 beastmen, 1 chariot, a chaos spawn, a hound of scathatch, a giant and 5 harpies. 59 miniatures all told, with two of those being big models that will take weeks to complete. At my rate– about 5 miniatures per year that will take me until my kids are deep into high school. The bottom line is, I’ve never tried to paint an entire army before– sure Necromunda gangs, blood bowl teams, etc. but nothing equaling over 100 models– it seems totally insane. So to keep it reasonable, but to have a goal, I’m going to try to paint 10 miniatures per month, not including the big shit–the Giant will take me more than a month probably. At that rate I should be able to spend a few hours here and there on week nights and then one big chunk of time on either weekend day.
The motivational part is that my 1000 points painted hit the table this weekend, and though it was chaotic game where we absolutely did not get the rules right, my stuff just looked totally awesome on the table, even painted as mediocre as it is. Of course, the game itself was just great fun, 4 hours went by in a snap (and I stood for the whole game, forgetting to get a chair!).
Yes that's the tower from Dark Tower
The game was against Night Goblins, with their whirling fanatics, a doom diver and a stone thrower. All three did horrific damage during the initial turns of the game, but not enough to save the hapless goblins once the beastmen closed in for the kill. The beastmen themselves aren’t that great, just tough, but when you take into account that most of the time they can reroll misses on any round of combat with a slight chance of Frenzy happening, they get a ton of hits in combat with the potential, however slight, of just going totally fucking apeshit. Though the beasts smashed most of the Goblin army it was actually a very close run thing and a lot of luck in the pinch.
What I loved was the huge combats– just too fun, but also the insane terrain on the board. We randomly rolled and just about every roll had some crazy magical mystery terrain. The forest on my left was a fungus forest that caused Stupidity in my army, but helped the goblins! In the center was some sort of Necrosphinx who granted wishes or ate characters who tried to solve her riddle, and on the right flank was a Tower of Blood overlooking a dismal fen. The tower of blood shot the dicepools into the stratosphere– causing units within 6″ to have Frenzy (double attacks) and Hatred (Reroll misses). Never in my wargaming career have I rolled so many dice.
I’ve got a medium-size collection of gaming books, old D&D, some of the older White Wolf stuff dealing with the effete, paederast blood-suckers, loads of the obligatory Warhammer Fantasy/Battle/40K books, almost everything published for Exalted (of course) and quit a few random books here and there bunged from musty used bookstores I couldn’t pass up at the time. Many of these books are impressive in their binding and artwork and design, some are pretty hefty collections of paper, especially the 2nd Edition Exalted books– however, nothing could have prepared me for the sheer size and gleaming glory of the Warhammer 8th edition hardcover. I’d even seen it and handled it in stores before, but you forget you see, you forget just how huge it is. Clocking in at over 500 pages literally packed with full-color images throughout–it can easily be deemed the Armageddon of miniature war-game books. I contrast it to my first miniature wargame rule set from the late 70’s: Swords and Spells and it’s staggering reminder of how far we’ve come in the hobby– that a company that sells toy soldiers and some books to a tiny portion of the planet’s population could pull together the cash to write, design and publish something so massive it cannot even be used as crapper reading without a crapper reading stand– it’s just that friggin’ huge.
And so officially begins my descent yet another miniature gaming obsession that will produce probably less than 20 painted miniatures and 2-3 actual games in the next year. Sad but probably true.
I guess I was a bit off in my post last spring about a new version of AT-43 coming out—looks like after some craziness and confusion Rackham Entertainment has gone into liquidation. Neither of their websites come up and it looks like all news around the interweb tubes confirms that they’ve gone dark. I think the lines will likely survive in some form, but holy crap I never expected to see one of the better rivals to Games Workshop’s fantasy and sci-fi dominance hit rock bottom so quickly. While I really liked the rules to AT-43 when the full version finally came out, I was not impressed with the new version of Confrontation, specifically the prepainted miniatures*, while the same figures as some of the older lines, just looked crappy to me (where the AT-43 pre-paints looked really great on the table).
* not that I’ll ever actually get the time to finish painting my Drune…
I finally got to bust out my Old West miniatures and town over the Xmas break after almost 5 years of on and off painting for everyone’s virgin gun down. We used Wargame Foundry’s The Rules With No Name to good effect as it’s a great pick up and play set of rules. I just made up a scenario where a wagon tipped over in the middle of the town, breaking open some luggage that was filled to the brim with gold! We had three players, and each player had three models (two gunman and one shootist) and won if they could survive or get off the board with the most gold in hand. Gold was gathered by moving into touch with the wagon and rolling a d6. I had to make up the action deck for the game before hand, so the players didn’t get a chance to pick their models from my meagre collection, but I did allow them to give them names, a fun way to start off the shootin.
TRWNN has an interesting impluse system for initiative wherein you build a stack of cards made up of all the models in play and add in a joker card (that instigates a reshuffle of the deck when drawn) and one card representing each class of character (Civilian, Gunman, Shootist). The cards are shuffled and then drawn to determine who’s turn it is to act. You can’t hold back a model’s turn and you don’t really know when each model will move again, so it makes for an aggressive game without a lot of dilly dallying around. There is a way to control when your models move if you get a bit lucky. When a class card is drawn, a player can take that card if one of his character cards is drawn next that is equal or above that class level. For example, if a Gunman card comes up, the next card drawn is a Shootist or Gunman character, that player of that character can take the class card. The class cards can be used to interrupt other model’s turns at any point (even in response to being shot at) to give another model an insta-turn. This system gives a semi-random feel to the order of turns, and my only complaint was that some characters don’t get to move turn after turn if the joker card just happens to come up a lot.
This system of impulse is very much keyed to individual models and wouldn’t work too well if you were trying to simulate fights in big groups unless, like Confrontation, you allowed multiple models to act when a single card was drawn.
All I can say about this particular game was that my dice were the hottest I’ve had in a long time, and I almost felt guilt as my tiny lead men shot the tiny lead men of the others again and again. One of my gunman killed outright two models in his first two turns of shooting, and I had my shootist out in the open, completely out of position relative to one of the other shootists, only to have one of the other shootist’s shots all go wild– and then said shootist was gunned down instantly with just about the best rolling you can have. See below.
We did not use the morale optional rule and this revealed an oddity about the TRWNN system– models can be wounded over and over and over at point blank range and still have a good chance of staying in the game (a model can be knocked out and come back on a dr of 1 whenever that model’s turn comes up). One of the models had been shot and wounded 12 times and was still on the table, granted he couldn’t move, reload or turn in place, but he was still there, holding gold.
I would absolutely use the The Rules with No Name again, especially for pick up games like this. It’s very beer and pretzel’s and though the scale seems to work best with just a few models on the table, the level of detail with the shooting and wounding is such that this isn’t a drawback, but simply what the ruleset is supposed to simulate. Eventually as I get more models painted (in the next decade or so) I’d love to have a go with the Legends of the Old West rules, but that’s a dog for another day.
The new Blood Bowl computer game by Cyanide has given many of us fanatical fans of the game a chance to sandbox with teams we either don’t have miniatures for or wouldn’t normally play. However, with the arrival of the free patch to the game a few weeks ago, I can eschew all the other teams that I pretend to love and get right down to playing my all-time favorite, the ‘coaches’ team’ as my brother calls them: the insidious Dark Elves.
In reviewing the team in the computer game, I give the developers at Cyanide immediate points on the score board for absolutely NAILING the aesthetic. Having started back in high school with First Edition Blood Bowl, the crunchy, spiky look of the original illustrations and models by Aly Morrison have stuck with me as the essence of how Blood Bowl teams should look. While I thoroughly enjoy many of Gary Morley‘s sculpts for third edition (in contrast to 2nd editions more ‘sports-like’ armor), I think a few of his lineman models were phoned in, and this is especially true with the Dark Elves (circa 1994 mind you).
While I’ve played the Dark Elves in many leagues and tournaments, I hadn’t played them with the new Living Rule Book 5.0 set up, and had a bit of a shock as all I remembered was that the number of blitzers increased from two to four. The major change in the roster is that the throwers have now been replaced by a runner (with a skill that I have never selected for a player in my entire career as a Blood Bowl coach: Dump Off) and the team has a new position: the Assassin with Stab (a new skill) and Shadowing. Unlike many teams, the Dark Elves have no ‘big guy’ to hold the line or push all the smaller players around, yet they are one of the best running teams in the game. How? Agility. Agility increases the Dark Elves mobility on the pitch by a vast amount and while you can pass the ball with them, it’s often short passes or even side/back passes, the real gains are made running through and sometimes over your opponents. That said, you are never going to out-casualty a bruiser team but that’s not what wins games: putting it over the line does and Dark Elves are excel in this region of play.
I’m going to try to shy away from telling you how to play the Dark Elves but I want to review each of the positions and how they synergize with each other. Inevitably you’re going to see my slant as how I like to play, and that’s always up for discussion, or if needed, a quick game to show my superiority.
Lineman: Dark Elf lineman (and their cousin lineman for the Hight Elves) are the best lineman in the game, hands down. They have average speed, average armor, average strength and an awesome 4 agility. You could have a team of only Lineman and still win matches. What really puts these guys into the win column is the combination of 4 agility, access to Agility skills (i.e. Dodge) and 8 armor. They are one of only two teams that have lineman with 8 armor and 4 agility consistently across the team. As much as your opponent will expect to beat up your elves, the 8 armor assures that you will rarely be taken off the pitch without some mighty blow action and as they progress, the Dark Elf Lineman have access to the ideal two-skill mix in the game: Block and Dodge. Even without the Dodge skill your Dark Elf Linemen are able to dodge away on a whim to get into position for a 2-dice block somewhere else. The best skills to get as they progress with normal rolls: Block, Dodge, Tackle, Frenzy, Dauntless. On Doubles get: Guard. Once you get 3-4 of these naughties with Block and Dodge, your opponents will be sweating it. Do NOT bother with Dirty Player–it’s been nerfed so bad and these guys are so valuable: it’s a waste of a skill slot.
Runner: I’m still not sure what to think about the runner as he’s just not fast at all, living up to his name not in the least. He can hold on to the ball with sure hands, but the replacement of Dump Off instead of Pass is quite confusing to me. Dump off as a 3 agility player is a crap skill; most of the time the ball will simply land right near the opponent’s players in a scrum and you’ll wish you had just let it scatter normally. With 4 Agility, Dumping off the ball has a much higher percentage of success, but I have really rarely seen this skill work well. Also, you really don’t have that many issues picking up the ball to justify a slot for a player with Sure Hands; a Blitzer is quite a spot better starting with block to hang onto the ball. Runners are the only players that have access to the Passing skill set however, so if you are going to run a throwing game, you’ve got to pick up at least one (eventually). The best skills with normal rolls? Block, Pass, Nerves of Steel, Side Step. Doubles: (let’s face it, he’ll be in a scrum or on the line like everyone else) Guard.
Blitzer: Here you have your storehouse of amazing potential for popping out the ball on defense and scoring on offense– and you can get FOUR of these naughty boys. The 4 agility means they can get in places to lay a block that most other players can only dream of, and while their movement is nothing to masticate over, they’re fast enough. That said, get Dodge first, then Tackle is a must as well as Strip Ball. They cannot get strength skills like most other Blitzers, so on doubles, look at the strength skill tree for either Guard or Mighty Blow. A Blitzer’s essential duty is to run through, over or around the opponents line, sack the ball carrier, pick up the ball and either pass back to a pocket or run it in for a touchdown. Leap, while still dangerous with 4 agility, is awesome to get as a 3rd or 4th skill. With four of these guys available, you can tailor two as defensive ends (tackle as second skill) and two as scoring machines (dodge as second skill).
Witch Elf: As tempting as these ladies are to have on your team, they cannot go it alone and need to be fostered and protected during their early, pre-Block career. The only way to do this is, again, start with all lineman and a blitzer, build up your team and then add in the extra positions once your other players are toughened up. That said, the Witch Elves are crucial to the later league/season success of the Dark Elves. You will be praying to Nuffle at each skill roll for a +1Ag or +1 St as it will blast your naughty lady into the top of the scoring roster for your league. Without stat upgrades they are still fast, dodgy and if you can get them Block and Dauntless, gift their opponent’s players with a trip off the pitch to see the fans more often than not. Best normal roll skill progression: Block, Dauntless or Catch, Leap. On doubles– get Juggernaut. They are not blitzers, so keep them as far away from the opponent’s line as possible and have them run in for a Blitz only outside a big scrum. They are also not catchers, and you don’t need a lot of catch skills with their four agility. What’s more, as filthy as they are, I can’t stop staring at their sweet cans.
Assassin: The Assassin goes against one of my rules for playing a non-crunchy team (which the dark elves certainly are) and that’s to never ever rely on getting the opposition off the pitch. That’s stuff the dwarves and Chaos teams do– not the elves. The Assassin appears to be the Dark Elves answer to the ‘Big Guys’ on other teams, which, by the looks of the other big guys, puts him in the ‘maybe if I had a ton of gold lying around I’d get one of them.’ While shadowing is nice, I would love to see the Assassin get tackle and diving tackle– making him a dodging player’s nightmare, but leaving him a stomped corpse against any hardcore rushing teams. Again, I would say that the Assassin is absolutely extraneous, and if you have one and have a roster of 16 players, he’ll rarely see his feet on the pitch. I’m going to start a team with two of them as an experiment however, just to make sure (Note: it didn’t go well).
This is your future if Nuffle is with you.
If you are a new coach you may want to run the humans or orcs for awhile to get the hang of it. As noted above, the Dark Elves are IMO the coaches team, they have some glaring weaknesses (they are expensive) and they don’t have a very clear path to victory (i.e.: they aren’t tough, they aren’t fast and they aren’t the best passing team) but are not wussy elves that you will be worried about flying off the pitch with every armor roll.
And the (going insane from having a second kid) western obsession continues unabated. While I have GW’s Legends of the Old West, I’ve been hunting around for another set of gunslinging rules to check out that had a bit more detail to the stat line. Having checked out Savage Worlds and found it fairly muddy in the rules department, it was time to look elsewhere. Many moons back, Wargames Foundry founder Bryan Ansell wrote a set of free rules called the Rules With No Name, but they were in such an ‘alpha’ version that I didn’t bother taking them seriously. Foundry has revised, completed and put them all into a beautiful hardback book that I just accidentally ordered. Members of my erstwhile gaming group– prepare yourselves for some miniature mayhem. With paint being slapped on pewter between changing diapers and cleaning up milksplosions, the entire ERTL cow town 1/64 scale building set coming in the mail, and a new sandy-beige bolt of felt slapped across the 4′ X 4′ gaming table– high noon is coming for all of us.
