Posts Tagged ‘introduction’

Part two of “Spergin About 40k Armies”

by frest - December 28th, 2009

Part one of this article can be found Here.

Welcome back to my brief survey of 40k in the 5th edition of the grim dark far future.  I think I got a little long in the tooth last time, since Space Marines are so fundamental to the setting. It was also pretty boring for anyone that isn’t totally in <3 ruv wif spaze mareenz <3 <3

So WIFOUT FURVHER ADO, here be da Orkz!!!

warhammer_Ork_by_urukhai777

Orkz are built for two things:  rolling lots of dice and doing random-ass crazy bullshit. Both of these fit in great with 5th edition, making Orks fairly strong regardless of army composition type (mechanized or footslogging). Remember last time when I said that it’s often best to just flood the opponent with wounds and let probability sort things out? There is nothing quite like seeing a half-blind Ork, with a rusty gun held together by chewing gum and twine, mowing down the Emperor’s Finest. With only a few truly terrible choices in their army book, you can see why they say green is best.

In general, Orks have terrible ballistic skill (but can assault after shooting with almost every gun they have) and have a high number of basic attacks. They are weak against AV14, have no psyker defense, and their individual leadership is pretty shitty. This is mitigated by the Mob Rule ability which allows them to substitute the number of models in a squad for their LD value and makes them fearless if they have 11 or more models.

orkThey have one of the most efficient basic infantry units in the game.  Ork Boyz are tough, cheap, and have a lot of basic attacks. They can only do one thing but they damn do it well: make you roll lots of dice.  With furious charge, Mob Rule, and the option to take slugga/choppa for EVEN MORE ATTACKS or Shoota for a decent number of Str 4 shots, the Ork Boy is a pretty sweet deal.

Nobz deserve special mention because they are a particularly feared sight on the battlefield, and rightly so. They’re stronger, faster, and with 2 wounds even tougher than the average Boy, and can take a frightening range of wargear options. Aside from the usual bosspole, klaws and ‘eavy armor, they can get a warbanner for higher WS, an invulnerable save, feel no pain, or even Warbikes for increased movement and the constant 4+ cover save. The number of options means a Nob Mob has an easy time making unique models, which means that spreading wounds around is cake.

Recalling back to the previous article and the changes to wound allocation, this means that your Nobs can take a SHITLOAD of abuse before giving up the ghost. Each Nob has two wounds, you can easily give them unique wargear, and thus you can often allocate a separate wound to every Nob before you have to take a casualty. They are vulnerable to instant-death from Str 8, attacks that bypass Feel No Pain, pieplates, and abilities that target morale, because the Mob is capped at 10 Nobz max (although HQs can bring this to 11 and Fearless, at least until the first casualty. Bosspoles help!). They excel at krumping just about EVERYTHING.
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What to play in Dark Heresy, and how to play it: Part Two

by Danger - Octopus! - August 20th, 2009

DH01
Following on from my previous article, I’ve covered the most basic careers (Assassin, Guardsman & Scum) and move onto the next three: Adept, Arbitrator and Cleric.

These careers are where things start to become more complex and, seemingly, difficult to play without a good grounding in the 40k universe and/or roleplaying.  Even a long-time fan of the 40k wargame could struggle, since taking the role of a zealous member of the Ecclesiarchy is rather different to moving that squad of Space Marines out of cover and flaming some greenskins.

However,  these three careers can easily be made more simple by thinking of them in more familiar terms, rather than as part of the 40k mythos.  Some players will no doubt be fine and able to come up with character concepts that fit the universe and into the Dark Heresy game, but others will hopefully find these articles helpful!

Adept

The Adept is an interesting class, since you can do so much with it.  While it might seem that playing a learned academic would need the kind of background knowledge that would necessitate decades of poring over game rulebooks and back issues of White Dwarf, it’s really not the case.  The crucial fact to remember is that 40k is a very medieval universe, and the Adept is all about specialisation, as far as gameplay goes.

In game terms, the adept will start with some vague general knowledge and end up with much more detailed knowledge about specific aspects of the Imperium.  However, for roleplaying purposes, you can just make it up.  When the game calls for your knowledge you can make a skill roll, but the rest of the time?  Your adept can be filled with the arcane knowledge of millenia past, so the knowledge you roleplay him as having doesn’t need to have any relevance to the Imperium of the 41st Millenium.

cadfael1Often, the Adept will lead an existence like that of a medieval monk, but one who has stumbled into intrigue much like Cadfael; he could be a logician skilled in ancient machines with all the eccentricities that this entails such as someone from Hackers or Whistler from Sneakers.

A great concept for an Adept is someone much more at home in their cloistered existence, who relies on someone else to take care of all the details like gunfights, monsters and car chases.  Marcus Brody from the Indiana Jones series, or any nervy computer nerd comic relief from a big blockbuster action movie, like Boris Grishenko.

Anyone familiar with Call of Cthulhu could easily transplant a twitchy researcher who has Learned Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. If you envisage your adept spending time as a Chirurgeon then any of the dour pathologists from police shows such as CSI or Morse would be suitable inspiration for a concept, or rather more sinister medical students recruited by an Inquisitor wanting to use their skills and also to keep a close watch on them.

Arbitrator

As with the Adept, it’s easily possibly to play a representative of Imperial law without having a lot of knowledge of the details of it.  Specifically, the remit of the Arbitrator is to investigate crimes against the Imperium, witchcraft and corruption… which you can easily pick up ideas about from the main rulebook without needing to know about smaller petty crimes and the ins and outs of Imperial law.
judge_dredd
The original inspiration for GW’s Arbitrators is pretty clearly Judge Dredd , but there are plenty of other concepts for the Arbitrator player.   Whether you’re wanting to borrow from The Wire (a low-ranking Arbitrator, picked by an Inquisitor perhaps because he’s above the usual corruption, or as part of some political game going on in the high echelons of the Imperial bureaucracy), CSI (in the same way that the characters in CSI all seem mysteriously competent at every last aspect of police work, the Arbitrator fills the roles of beat cop, investigator, SWAT team and indeed judge) or even The Sweeney for a rough-edged Arbitrator who is keen on violence to get the job done and would shoot you if you even tried to bribe him.

A more thoughtful Arbitrator who tried to avoid the violence and leave it to others could end up being like Inspector Morse, whilst The Shield could serve as inspiration for the Arbitrator a little more keen on violence.

Whilst the description of the Arbitrator definitely leads towards the more muscle-bound investigator, it’s a simple matter of picking skills carefully to end up with someone more at home in Law & Order than the fast-paced glitz of the original Miami Vice or the more gritty and violent remake and you could even end up taking a more hard-bitten film noir style take on the Arbitrator.

Cleric

The Cleric is a great opportunity to really have fun in the 41st millenium.  To paraphrase Douglas Adams – the thing about the Imperium is, it’s big.  Really big.  A Cleric character needs to follow the Emperor in some form. That’s really it.  You can worship the Emperor as sun-god, as some kind of battle deity, as an all-knowing architect and creator – there are endless variants of the Imperial Cult and options for making up your own obscure sub-sect.  There is a lot of crossover with the Adept if you’re playing a more sedate priest, so concepts from there are equally applicable, but then there are roles only really suitable for a Cleric.

There are rabble rousers dedicated to rooting out evil in all its forms like Frollo in Hunchback of Notre Dame or any of the many portrayals of the Spanish Inquisition as well as messianic priests, particularly one of the more muscular persuasion who leads with sword and flame.  The obvious inspiration would be Joan of Arc or indeed any charismatic leader.  Think of Henry V inspiring his troops with Kenneth Branagh’s great oratory or military pep talks.  Crusader knights, as in Kingdom of Heaven are a key inspiration, or for the more politically oriented priests, think of Cardinal Richelieu in the Three Musketeers or the Machiavellian machinations of the Vatican during the Middle Ages.
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Borrowing from pop-culture depictions of mystic rituals, whether Masons, Kabbalah or even the supposed extremes of Catholicism all make for starting points for a 40k Cleric.  As with the Adept, you can make up a lot of what your character knows and believes in, since the Imperium is large enough that anything someone could believe or study is out there somewhere!

Whether trying to play an honest priest caught up in events bigger than him, or someone trying to be a great leader of men who wants to sacrifice themselves for the cause, Cleric has many options and enough available skills that it’s easy to specialise while keeping it different enough from the other combat careers and even focusing entirely on the study and oratory, if your play style runs that way.  Some of the later advances even allow for crossing over with some of the specialised aspects of combat, so you could aim to make a warrior monk, as seen in endless Kung Fu films.

In the third part of this series, I’ll cover the three careers that in my opinion can come across as the most difficult to play, particularly without an in-depth knowledge of the background – Imperial Psyker, Tech-Priest and Sister of Battle.

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Tree Hugging

by Ted Royston - July 24th, 2009

Wardancer

The first Fantasy Battles mini I ever bought was a Wood Elf Wardancer. That was back in ‘91, and I’ve been playing them ever since. I’ve had my dalliances with other armies: Orcs & Goblins, Dwarfs, Bretonnians, and I’ll admit I’ve always wanted to put together a nasty Clan Pestilens horde. But I always go back to my Woodies, and Games Workshop helps me along by making them one of the best armies in the game.

It’s appropriate that The Patriot is playing as I sit down to type this. Not because of any joke conflating the Crown’s taxation offenses with GW’s ever climbing prices, but because the film’s battle scenes focus skirmishing irregulars making a joke of rigidly organized battle lines.

Like the “Indian” fighting revolutionaries depicted in that movie, the Wood Elves don’t play by the rules. They don’t maneuver around in large static blocks. They don’t win a fight by piling ranks on banners for combat resolution. There’s not a warmachine or suit of heavy armor to be found in their list. Their basic melee infantry are skirmishers. Their shock cavalry are fast cavalry. Their missile troops work better when you move them. Beyond a statblock shared with the other Elf armies, the Wood Elves have nothing in common with any other army.

Wood Elves win battles by exploiting the tremendous difference between their playstyle and that of more staid Warhammer armies. That line of battle you work out with your Empire or High Elf army means nothing to a Wood Elf general, except as something to pull apart and destroy in pieces.

Whereas most armies work best when you run them like one giant machine, the Wood Elves function best when you think of them as flexible strike forces focused on destroying key parts of that machine. A Wood Elf army is flexible and mobile in ways that Empire and Greenskin players can only dream of. Dwarf and Undead players will gasp at how fast your army can move about the board. Even their cousins, the High and Dark Elves will have a tough time keeping up with a Wood Elf army.

When you look at the Wood Elf army list, you’ll see entry after entry that can move fast and strike hard. You’ll also notice an almost complete lack of armor saves, but that’s mitigated by the fact that you’ll be the one deciding when and where the fight happens.

But enough blathering; let’s take a look at the list, and see what it can do.

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A Sperglord’s Guide to 5th Edition 40k

by frest - July 23rd, 2009

Warhammer 40k logo

Often the thread in GBS prompts people to say something along the lines of, “I really like the concept behind this army, but HOW DOES IT PLAY?” or the dreaded “Are they any GOOD?”  I see it in my local nerd store all the damn time; people bemoaning the cosmic injustice of their preferred army of plastic men being slightly less potent in a Sci-Fi war-game.  For the uninitiated or would-be hobbyist, these sort of arguments about balance and relative power are mystifying and frustrating.

You may find yourself in that limbo, trying to decide whether the army that tickles your creative fancy will give you a decent shot at ever actually winning a game.  You might have a dusty army of old models from a previous edition, collected during your wayward youth, and are considering playing with them now.  You might even be already mentally committed to our silly hobby, but want to minimize your financial outlay (fool me once, every single CCG ever).

Let’s set this one down easy right now.  Barring an extremely competitive local metagame, you can have fun and successfully win games of Warhammer 40k with any army. However, this doesn’t mean that they are equal!

You’ll find me using this big gay word METAGAME an awful lot.  What does it mean, you say to yourself, while stroking your neckbeard and letting your glassy doll-eyes stare unfocused at your collection of anime wallscrolls.  Fear not, gentle goon.

In this context, META usually means self-referential or self aware.  So when we ’sperg out and act like mildly retarded children about our strong opinions on balance within a wargame, we’re being meta.  We’re referring to the game-within-a-game, the counters and the interplay between armies that all approach the same basic ruleset from different perspectives.

If your local nerd store is populated by ultra-competitive nerds, then it’s going to be tough going for armies that are currently disadvantaged by the changes in the rules.  If your bros and dudes are fans of narrative gameplay, fluff-based armies, or generally don’t like taking beardy lists then you can often find a lot of entertainment value in playing less potent armies.  For the casual player, your local metagame will have significant impact on how much fun you have when playing pick-up games of 40k. Use your flawless common-sense and unfailing social graces to investigate this before you start buying stuff, because this can save you a lot of grief.

NEEEERRRRRDDDSSSS

NEEEERRRRRDDDSSSSS

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What to play in Dark Heresy, and how to play it: Part One

by Danger - Octopus! - July 21st, 2009

The Warhammer 40,000 universe can be an intimidating one.   Given the vast array of cultures, ideologies and beliefs covered by the Imperium and protected by the light of the Emperor, it can be difficult to work out exactly what you want to play in Dark Heresy.  An Inquisitor can recruit anyone, anywhere, so if you can be absolutely anybody, how on earth do you work out what to play?   If you roll randomly for your career path, you could end up with something you have no idea how to play, or even how it fits into the universe.

If your players are familiar with 40k but not regular roleplayers, or if they’re roleplayers who’re unfamiliar with the 40k universe, there are a lot of choices to make and it can, at the start, be tough to find a hook to hang your character around.   Coming from a wargaming background, if you’re starting Dark Heresy because you’re a big fan of the tabletop 40k game, it can be a very strange transition since the familiar space marines and bolters of the wargame are the near untouchable elites that your characters will most likely never even see in the roleplaying game.

The Dark Heresy game played by the book is at a very different kind of level to the wargame, and is less about sweeping battles, epic conflict, superheavy tanks and high commanders as it is about the individuals living their lives in the Imperium of Man.   In this article, I hope to give a few suggestions and ideas for how to pick a career and roleplay it in the universe of Dark Heresy.   The first part of this is to go through the various careers, and to relate them to modern day inspirations.

The basics of what you need to know for role playing in the 40k universe are very simple – the Emperor  protects humanity, and you pray to him.  That’s really all that there is.   If you’re from a more civilised part of the Imperium then you might well know more, but there are untold worlds where this is all they know, and sometimes even this is cloaked in allegory and mysticism.   You might live on a world of steaming jungles, praying to your sun god in the hope that one day you are taken by his sky warriors to join the mighty armies fighting across space.

Such a closeted character could be seen as a challenge to play, but in fact it actually can work for you if you’re unfamiliar with the setting since your character’s wonder/confusion at the multiplicity of worlds in the Imperium would mirror the player’s.   Some careers would seem to demand more knowledge of the setting than others, but there are often ways to work round it so that a new gamer can find a way to think about his character as more than just a collection of numbers on a page, and someone new to 40k can slot their character into a universe that’s been crafted by various writers for over two decades.

Obviously, starting characters don’t have too many points to spend, and most of the examples will be beyond a starting Acolyte, but hopefully this can give you an idea for the kind of familiar archetypes that can be put into Dark Heresy, so you can see the character where the character may end up, and you can play through the career to get there (since no one starts off as the one-man army, ultimate killing machine or genius, you have to work at it…)

The three simplest careers for character concepts are probably Assassin, Guardsman and Scum, particularly for those new to roleplaying or 40k.

Assassin

40,000 years in the future, there are many people who will pay to have other people’s lives ended prematurely.  Together with the over two ’simple’ careers, it’s quite easy to fit modern examples of this career into Dark Heresy.  If you were a cool calculated killing machine like Agent 47 from the Hitman games, a dour but practical gunman with an otherwise quiet life like Léon the cleaner or a quirky and talkative gunman as in Grosse Point Blank, you could easily have lived your entire life on a backwater world with little knowledge of the Imperium other than the laws you broke and the rituals and prayers that everyone knows.

A perceptive Inquisitor might have noticed you while travelling through and recruited you to his cause, taking you off-world for the first time.   If all you’d ever known was murder on your isolated world, you could (as a player) learn more about the Imperium as your character did.    Think of the scene in the film Nikita where the heroine is following someone around a shop, copying her because she is unfamiliar with how to act in normal society, or the awkward social interactions of Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men.

An Assassin could easily be recruited purely on his skills, inducted to function as a weapon to be deployed by the Inquisitor.  He may have no need of interpersonal skills or knowledge of other cultures and world.  Together with Guardsman, it’s a good career to start out with if you want to see how the game works.  You could follow the orders of the Inquisitor or more confident players, acting confidently in combat but deferring to the others after that.

Guardsman

In many ways the simplest career to make a character concept for.  A soldier, another number in the endless ranks of the Imperial Guard.  If you were inducted from a quiet world then spent the rest of your life until the game starts under arms, all you’d need to know as a player would be the army such as Kurt Russell’s character in Soldier.

To be honest, for a Guardsman, there is really one one thing you need to do as a player unfamiliar with the game, and that’s to watch Starship Troopers which pretty much perfectly captures the atmosphere for a “one man among many” type of Guardsman.  Any war movie could serve as inspiration, but Starship Troopers is about as 40k as you can get without a lawsuit.  The third book of the comic The Ballad of Halo Jones is also a great example of what war would be like in the future for someone coming to terms with life as a soldier in a meaningless war.

As examples of hard-bitten veterans, Predator and Aliens show examples of the kind of upstanding xeno-hunting warriors that the Inquisition would recruit in a moment (if they didn’t need mind-cleansed)

For someone taking the one-man-army type route, Rambo and Commando are the obvious inspirations, along with the many, many imitations.

Almost any war film or TV show can serve as the inspiration, from the the once-competent but now aged veterans of Dad’s Army (age and lengthy periods of inaction being a great explanation for why you don’t have high level skills after years in the Planetary Defence Force, to a relative rookie amidst the jargon-laden action of Generation Kill, which could easily be translated into the 40k universe.

Scum

Such a wide catch-all class, there are nearly endless inspirations for Scum characters.  As with Assassins, they could easily be people who previously lived a life on just one world, never travelling and never getting involved with the bureaucracy of the Imperium, save to avoid arrest or worse.  From scheming villains like Fagin in Oliver Twist and Stringer Bell/Avon Barksdale in The Wire, to con men like Maverick, to fixers, dealers, goons and mobsters like the Mafiosi and Made Men of the Godfather and various Martin Scorcese films such as Goodfellas, Casino and The Departed.

A simple street thief, rural highwayman, stealthy cat burglar or stick-up artist like Omar in The Wire or any of the wannabe gangsters in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels – all could be fit into the 40k universe, prized for their unique skills that an Inquisitor would not be able to find on the right side of Imperial law.

Zorg, in The Fifth Element,  Bruce Willis and Danny Aiello in Hudson Hawk and Chow Yun Fat in Once A Thief could all be the basis for interestingly different Scum characters, but there’s no reason that Scum absolutely have to be on the lower levels of society.  They may fraternise with low-born criminals, but they could easily be someone educated and well-off using the poor and needy to their own advantage.

For a more social type of Scum character, someone who is all about the interpersonal skills, making them a smooth-talking but dangerous person like Mr Morden in Babylon 5.

In part two, the slightly more complex but still easily playable classes of Adept, Arbitrator and Cleric.

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Back to the Hive

by Ted Royston - July 21st, 2009

I’ve been gaming with the same batch of guys for almost ten years now, and the one game that has been a constant for that entire time is Games Workshop’s oft-ignored game of gang warfare in the underbelly of the far future, Necromunda. We’re roleplayers at heart, and Necromunda’s focus on leveling a small group of guys appeals to our wizard- and elf-making hearts.

But that’s not the only reason we’re still playing a fifteen year old game with some pretty dusty rules. I mean, let’s face it– Necromunda is based on the wonky second edition of Warhammer 40,000. The ridiculous prospect of shooting a ganger with a Lascannon attests to that. The game’s only real balance is that just about everybody has the same random access to the same random crazy shit.

And that’s why we still play Necromunda. It’s “balanced” by its randomness. And as long as you take that into account, you can add houseruled nonsense to your heart’s content. We’ve added train robberies, bank heists, and bar brawls. We’ve added Orks, Eldar, Kroot, and Genestealers. We’ve added ultra-rare equipment, upgradable territories, and vehicles. We’ve added all this by following one simple rule. Just make sure that everybody has to roll on the same table, and make sure that a “1″ results in comically awful consequences.

You can expand your Necromunda game to include the whole of the 40K universe, or you can keep it faithful to its hive-gang roots, which by themselves are an excellently generic gang fighting game. The basic game, human gangs using small arms and melee weapons to fight over territories, can be transplanted to many a different setting, be it post-apocalypse, dystopian future, space western, or the back streets of 1930s Chicago. Just muck with the equipment lists a bit and use some different terrain and Necromunda gives you rules for any setting where you want two gangs of guys (or mohawked gals) to shoot the crap out of each other.

The best part about all this is the rules are free. They’re right there for you to download on GW’s site. You can use the miniatures and terrain you already have. It’s a game that will cost you nothing.

And that’s the third reason why we’re still playing Necromunda. It doesn’t cost us a dime. We spent maybe thirty to forty bucks a piece almost ten years ago, and that’s the whole of our Necromunda investment. There are few miniatures games out there that you can get into so cheap, and if you’re already a miniatures gamer, you probably have all the stuff you need.

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