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!!!

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.

They 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.

The assault on Black Reach box set is a decent Ork subsidy.  20 Slugga Boyz, 5 Slugga Nobs, 1 Klaw Warboss and 3 Deffkoptas is an excellent first step for any Ork army. After the release of Black Reach I was able to pick up the 20 boyz portion for a fraction of what it would have cost me to buy those box sets.

However, unlike our good friends the ~*SPAZE MAREENS~* it’s not all sunshine and lollipops for the aspiring Warboss. Orks are a horde army, and by the very nature of “quantity over quality” you’re going to be buying/assembling/painting a lot more models to get to the same level of points. The basic Boyz Mob is going to be at least one box of 10 Boyz, and can range up to 30 Boyz strong.

Indeed, footslogging Orks should always run at least 20 strong, because a 6+ armor save and terrible leadership means you want to stay Fearless as long as possible. The Burna/Lootas box is another great example, because regardless of how you assemble them, both types of units are going to want more than 5 models thus requiring multiple purchases.

Also unlike the Space Marines, the range of models isn’t nearly as well represented in plastic kits. The recent surge of Ork releases has thankfully remade some units in plastic (Nobs, Grots, and Stormboyz), but you’re still looking at a large swath of models that are only represented in expensive and annoying metal kits. Killa Kans, Deff Dreads, Big Guns, Kommandos, MegaNobs, and Tankbustas are still metal kits. Grots and most of the non-Nobz are up there with transports for the most absolutely abysmal points-per-dollar ratios around.

Orks have some similarities to the Space Marines in that the second you start putting them in transports, your cost to have a complete army is going to skyrocket. Transport options for the Orkz are pretty sweet overall. Trukks are great and cheap in points, Battlewagons are fantastic (the new plastic kit and upgrade sprue kick ass), all Ork transports can be open-topped for leaping into the fray fast and easy. The only downside to all this is that you’re not getting nearly the same bang for your dollar.

There is a solution to this! Enter the gooniest part of the Orks: conversions

Do you have:

• a lot of free time (lol you are playing this gay hobby of COURSE you have free time)
• no money
• questionable taste
• the ability to fashion crude shapes out of plasticard and your enormous collection of children’s toys?

If you answered yes to any of those, you are qualified to convert Ork shit!

HELL YEAH BRO

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.

Often, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Characters

Not counting the special characters, you have six options to choose from, and they all can lead your army. They break down into basically three categories: heroes, wizards, and forest monsters; and each of those has a lord and hero choice.

Highborns and Nobles are your heroes– ass kicking, forest dwelling, quasi-pedos who can be tricked out in a ton of different ways thanks to kindreds, spites and magic items. You can also plop them on some sweet monsters: forest dragons, great eagles, and my personal favorite (because it looks so fucking cool), the great stag.

Of course, to ride that stag, you’re going to have to get the Wild Rider kindred upgrade, but it’s worth it for the ward save and immunity to psychology. Give him the Dawnspear or the Spear of Twilight (either is a good choice) and some magic armor, and you’ll have a nice and killy general. You can cheap out and put him on a horse, but then you’re not riding that sweet fucking stag, and thus missing the entire point.

Wild Rider isn’t the only kindred you can take, though, and there are some even killier options available.

Alter Kindred nobles make great trouble shooters. Their M9 means they can get where they need to be, and it will fuck your opponent’s mind the first time he sees this lone elf charge from 18 inches. There’s two schools of thought concerning the Alter Noble. The first says he’s best used as a mobile sniper with either the Bow of Loren or a Hail of Doom arrow. This is pretty cool, but there’s an even nastier combo available. Give him the Amber Pendant and a greatsword and maybe some magic armor if you have the points, and now you have 4 WS6 S6 attacks that always go first. Setting him up like this makes for an aces monster hunter. Also, he will make High Elves cry. Remember, though, Alter heroes can’t be your general, so it’s generally a waste to use up a lord slot bringing an Alter Highborn.

“But I want my general to be an awesome Elf tree ninja,” you say. That’s cool; there are other options. Waywatcher kindred turns your general (or a hero) into a ninja sniper, but there is a problem. You’re going to want to give this guy the Bow of Loren to take advantage of his BS7 and A4, but when you shoot that, you lose killing blow. The other option is the Hail of Doom arrow. You could cheap out and make him Scout kindred instead, and then you don’t have to worry about the killing blow conundrum, but you’ll also miss out on the Forest Stalker ability. Of course, you can then give him a suit of armor, but you don’t need armor. You’re playing Wood Elves, dammit.

Or if you want him to go shithouse up close, you can give him Wardancer kindred. Yeah, it eats up the points, but that’s mitigated by the Blades of Loec being fairly cheap and Wardancers being death machines.

The nice thing about Kindreds is that their points are offset by requiring less than the usual number of magic doodads to make your guy effective. You can either save a few points, or you can use the difference to buy Spites. A Murder of Spites ups any melee character’s killing power, and the Annoyance of Netlings is fucking great if you face a lot of challenges. A Blight of Terrors is worth every one of those fifty points as long as your opponent isn’t immune, so it’s a pretty situational choice. Don’t bother giving your shooty heroes the ranged attack spites, though. They should be using their magic bows and arrows.

Now, you don’t have to give your heroes a kindred, but you’re kind of an idiot not to. There are two exceptions to this. The classic Highborn on an Eagle is still a viable option, but he’s going to need some good magic gear to be really effective. Also, your BSB can’t be a member of a Kindred. You want to bring one of these guys. You’re not playing Empire. You don’t have hordes of barefoot, codpieced jackoffs to throw at your enemy, so the rerolls on breat tests are a must. He’s also good for that extra CR.

In the wizard department, you have two choices: Spellsingers and Spellweavers. The latter are just Lord level versions of the first, so the same comments can apply to both.

Your wizards either have Glamorweave kindred or they don’t. It’s a good choice, especially because it opens up the Unicorn mount. Yes, in the real world, unicorns are for housewives and little girls; but in the Warhammer world, they’re magic murder horses. And yes, you can just put the lady on a regular old horse, you cheap bastard, but you’re missing out on all the cool unicorn abilities. You don’t have to take Glamorweave to ride a horse, and not taking it gives you the option of riding an Eagle. And you can always just have your wizards walk around, but put them in a unit of Glade Guard if you do that.

Unless you just want a scroll caddy, it’s worth buying the level upgrade on your Spellsingers. You can skip out on it with a Spellweaver if you need the points elsewhere. You should always bring a dispel scroll anyways because it will save your ass. Otherwise when it comes to magic gear, give the poor elf some sort of ward save. Also, don’t forget that your vanilla wizards are BS4 and carry longbows. You can give them the Hail of Doom arrow. Your opponent will not expect your wizard suddenly unloading an entire volley.

Spellweavers and Spellsingers can also take spites. Here’s where I like to take the ranged ones, especially on Singers. They don’t get much in the way of magic attacks, so giving them A Pageant of Shrikes gives them some nice offensive power.

One last thing concerning Spellweavers: give them the Lore of Beasts. Bear’s Anger alone makes this a worthwhile choice, and the other spells really complement your troops.

And that brings us to the tree beasts: Treeman Ancients and Branchwraiths. Ancients are mean fucks, but they eat up a rare slot, and don’t do much more than a vanilla Treeman. Unless you’re going for an all forest spirit army, use the lord slot on something else. Branchwraiths, on the other hand, are excellent all around heroes. They’re tougher and killier than Nobles, and you can make them wizards, which I always do. It’s also worth giving them A Cluster of Radiants so they can generate that extra dispel die. A Branchwraith set up this way makes a great general for small games.

TL;DR: There are a shitload of different options in the character section, and you should go back and read about them.

Core Units

You have four or five options in this section depending on what kind of general you bring. Eternal Guard count as a special choice unless your army is led by a Highborn, but since they’re included in the core section in the book, I’ll cover them here.

Glade Guard are your backbone, your bread and butter, your other metaphor for fundamental choice. Unless you’re doing the all forest spirit schtick, you want to bring at least one regiment of them. The optimal build is a regiment of ten with a musician. Unlike other armies’ missile troops, these guys are better used on the move. They don’t suffer the -1, and they become S4 within 15″. They also rank up normally, so as long as there are 5 of them left, you can charge them into a flank to negate ranks. This is nasty, and something generally not expected of unarmored missile troops.

Now, common wisdom says that full command is a waste of points and a liability on missile troops, but you can run Glade Guard with full command and pull of some dick moves. Remember what I said about flank charging them to negate ranks, well full command makes that trick even better. And since your army is devoid of banners, the 100 extra VPs they make your Glade Guard worth can be the bait in a trap. Still, it’s better to save the points for something else.

Glade Guard can be upgraded to Scouts. Scouts are okay, but most people don’t like them because Waywatchers are so much better. That’s true, but 5 scouts is an 85 point speedbump that can tie up a lot more points than they’re worth. That’s really the only way to use them.

Glade guard riding horses are called Glade Riders, and they are excellent, albeit expensive, fast cavalry. A unit of 5 is good harassing and flanking unit, but don’t expect them to do much damage on their own.

Finally, there are the Dryads. They’re your basic melee unit, and they’re good at what they do. Dryads are tough, killy, and mobile– the essence of Wood Elf tactics all rolled into a 12 point package. These leafy ladies are your main asskickers, and they can tangle with most troops, infantry and cavalry, in the game. They’re best in units of 10, and I like to bring Branchnymphs to spring challenges with. Dryads are going to end up doing most of your fighting, so watch out for magic attacks than can drastically reduce their durability. Wights, Tombguard, and Grail Knights can cut them down quickly.

Eternal Guard are the core unit I use least, but that doesn’t mean they suck or anything. In fact, they’re your best and practically only source of static CR. They’re best used as a bodyguard for your BSB, since he will make them Stubborn. The amount you want to bring depends on how many points you’re bringing. 14 is a good number for most games around 2000 points, and you can scale that up to 24 for really big battles.

Special Units

The special section is where some of my favorite Wood Elf units reside. They’re mostly geared towards melee, with one unit filling a harasser/warmachine hunter role.

That unit is Warhawk Riders, and they’re the worst choice on the list. Don’t fret if you’ve already bought some of these sweet looking sumbitches, though; they have their uses. Those uses number exactly two. The first is to use hit and run to add some extra CR to a fight. The second is to swoop in and kill warmachine crews. They suck and die at everything else.

Wardancers are one of the iconic Wood Elf units, so it’s good that they’re good. They don’t have the resilience of your Dryads, but they pack even more killing power. Their dances allow them to adapt to their enemies’ abilities, and they’re always good at dumping out a ton of WS6 S4 attacks on the charge. Wardancers are best used as trouble shooters. Keep them near your Glade Guard where they can fend off things like fliers or Tomb Scorpions or run forward and join the main battle group. It’s worth bringing the command upgrades with Wardancers. Run them in regiments of 8 or 10.

Treekin are the poor man’s Treemen. Individually, they’re not as good as their big brothers, but you have to bring at least 3 of them, which is the perfect amount. Treekin aren’t as mobile as some of your other melee units, but they are tough as nails, and they can negate ranks by hitting a flank. Be careful, though, they have trouble dealing with a lot of static CR on their own, and they’re not stubborn, so use them in tandem with your Dryads or other melee units to provide some beefy backup.

Wild Riders are an interesting unit. And by “interesting,” I mean fucking awesome. They’re fast cavalry that hit like knights, and they cause fear. Of course, they’re pricy, but they usually earn their points. Wild Riders have the added benefit of still being good at killing on turns after the charge thanks to their bonus attack and ward save. They’re immune to psychology as well, which makes them great monster slayers. 6 to 8 is a good number of Wild Riders.

Rare Units

Wood Elves get three great rare choices to choose from. All have their roles, and all are good at those roles.

Great Eagles are cheap warmachine killers. You get a lot for 50 points with these guys, but the problem is they take up a rare slot that you’d rather use on the other two options.

Treemen are expensive but worth every point. The only thing they really have to fear is fire, but otherwise, they can be relied upon to stomp just about anything else they face. Their strangleroot attack can mash nearby units, and their woody fists can smash whatever gets into melee with them. Be careful, though, they’re stubborn, but they’re only LD8. So keep your BSB nearby.

Finally, Way Watchers are the Tom Behringers of Warhammer. They cost a lot, but they can deploy right on top of a prime target and wipe it out with their ranged killing blow. Bring Waywatchers to your battles and watch your opponents give up on taking independent characters. Arch Lectors riding their popemobiles, Runelords with their Anvils, Hierophants with the Arc of the Covenant, I mean Cask of Souls– all will seem like mammoth wastes of points after your regiment of 5 waywatchers do their assassination trick.

Conclusion

Wood Elves are fucking awesome. That’s the conclusion you should draw. Even their suck choices are pretty good, and their good choices are really good. You can play a gimmick, theme, or just take whatever you think looks cool, and you’ll still end up with a competitive list for friendly games; or you can min-max the shit out of them and bring a top tier tournament ready list. And their model range is amongst Games Workshop’s best, so whatever you end up taking, it’s going to look rad.

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.

Indulge your ‘spergmaster and let’s go over some concepts drilled to death by powergaming blogs: explaining why certain trends are very popular in the year of our Lord 2009 whilst playing yon 5th edition of the grim dark future of war-hammery.

The 5^th Edition of 40k introduced several sweeping game changes:

• Run! This new rules means basically anything with legs can move an additional d6 inches in lieu of shooting.  Your 4′x6′ board just got a lot smaller, which cuts down on the turns available for shooting the enemy before they get close enough to krump you.  The Fleet special rule used to confer this benefit, now instead it allows a unit to assault in a turn after it runs.
• Shooting uses True line of sight and the rulebook affords 4+ cover saves for shooting through other units.  As a result, this has devalued low AP weaponry like plasma.  Any unit can also voluntarily pin themselves to improve their cover save, and in cases of objective holding there’s often no downside for doing so.  If everybody in the game has access to at least a 4+ cover save fairly easily, your best bet is to drown them in wounds and let probability sort them out.  Quantity has a quality all its own, etc.
• Assaults are often settled in the first or second round, with the brutal new rules for combat resolution.  The potential for frequent multi-assaults and the 6 inch pile-in movement means that usually everyone gets to swing, and being Fearless results in additional armor saves if you lose combat.  There are no more consolidations into new assaults either for the victor.
• New Wound Allocation rules are a cause for much wailing and gnashing of teeth, because if you have wounds in excess of the number of identical models in a squad, you must allocate them before rolling your saves.  Likewise, if you have a squad of entirely identical models in your squad, you simply roll the total number of saves and pick up casualties.  In general two axioms apply: firstly, the more simultaneous wounds that a squad has to save, the greater the odds of their upgrade characters like powerfist sergeants or heavy weapons dying.  Secondly, the more unique models a squad contains, the better able to isolate instant-death or no-save wounds onto a single doomed model, in order to give the majority of the squad a good chance at survival.

Ok, so we’ve established some basic concepts that are new to 5th edition gameplay.  Hopefully I can refer to this shit without having to explain it, when giving an overview of how different armies are faring, when I attempt to describe the experience of collecting and playing that army.  If you think I’m wrong or misinformed SUCK A FAT DICK please comment on the article or hit up the forums, and we can get a discussion going!

For our purposes let’s make a few basic assumptions:

1. that your time and money are not limitless
2. that you prefer plastic models (lighter, easier to assemble, cheaper)
3. that you are versed in the fluff enough that I don’t need to rewrite the concepts behind each army.  If this ISN’T the case and you desire an indepth look at a faction or army, I suggest the Lexicanum as a good place to start.

This dovetails into some points covered by the recent update on Points-per-Dollar costs of various models. For a player that’s looking to keep things on the cheaper side, an army of models who have high individual point costs is going to be cheaper than a more horde-styled army.

For the first portion of this ongoing article, I’m going to cover the flagship army of the Warhammer 40k universe: the Space Marines.  They are iconic, and have attracted a lot of people to the hobby via the Dawn of War series of games and the 40k novels; not to mention they’re by far the most common army to find on the tabletop.  It’s worth taking the time to unravel the different variants, seeing as they offer different gameplay experiences.  A solid core for the army is readily available in the starter set, Assault on Black Reach.

Codex: Space Marines

Codex: Space Marines was released pretty recently, and was written with 5th edition in mind. As we would expect, it’s an eminently flexible army, and it can change based on the inclusion of special characters or wargear choices.  A Captain on a bike allows bikers as troops, for example, and a Master of the Forge can enable a player to take up to 6 dreadnoughts.  You can use the special characters, which incorporate sweeping changes based on the fluff, to further specialize your army.

The ability to split your basic troops consisting of 10 models into combat squads gives you the flexibility to handle objective games, and the option to curtail unit count for kill-point games.  The range of transport options available helps to insulate you from small arms fire and mitigate the risk of getting shot to death at long range.  Drop Pods are completely unique in 40k gameplay, and no other army has the quite the same range of transport options that are available to the Space Marines.

They are forgiving of newbie mistakes, and it’s difficult to make a complete dud of a list.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that every list will be strong, but simply that their basic troops are so useful and sturdy that they don’t give you that many bad options.

From the poor-man hobbyist standpoint, it’s hard to say no to these guys.  The Black Reach set acts as a GW-sponsored subsidy to play this army.  You get over 500 points of models for a fraction of those individual kits’ MSRP, which puts every single other army’s starter box to shame.  Reselling via eBay and other sites means you can always get marines on the cheap, just strip the paint and start fresh.

Their model range is extremely well represented in plastic, with only some of the HQ models, the veterans (sternguard/vanguard), and a few others in metal.  The quality of these sculpts, as flagship products, is top-notch.  They are easy to paint, easy to kit-bash and convert, and with the Allies rules you can mix-match the other Imperial forces to boot.  They’re never far from the pages of White Dwarf and every future expansion will always figure them prominently in artwork and conceptual design.

The Space Marines have been given so much leeway in their fluff that different Chapters often bear very little resemblance to each other.  The Imperial Fists are known for a completely different style of combat from say, the Raven Guard or the White Scars.  A fluff-minded hobbyist has a wealth of novels, backstory, and internet resources to base their army on.  That said, there are only a few Chapters that differ so greatly from the range of options presented in the codex that they require their own special army books.

What’s great about playing a variant chapter is that there’s no requirement to purchase anything besides the basic space marine plastic kits.  Sure, you CAN buy the upgrade sprues but it’s not necessary by any means.  A marine is a marine, and at their most basic level these distinctions are just palette swaps!

Blood Angels

Compared to the codex marines these dudes are far more expensive points-wise, as every unit is also paying for a member of the death company.  However, the core army concept is a very solid one: Assault marines as troop choices (scoring units), fast vehicles, and awesome special characters.  Furioso Dreads and Baal Preds are great units, very strong and have aged well.  Overcharged Rhinos get your dudes where they need to be.

The special characters are potent, and grant some great benefits to your army; this helps to mitigate the point deficit you incur when playing Blood Angels.  If you’re opposed to using special characters it’s something to keep in mind when weighing pros/cons.  This army codex is available for download for free from GW you shitbirds, so give it a gander if you’re curious.

Dark Angels

Hey here’s your chance to play that all [Terminator/Bike/dress-wearing] army you’ve always wanted, and ALSO complain about how shitty your wargear is compared to the Ultramarines!

They do have a pretty sweet plastic upgrade kit, and as silly as it would seem to have robed supermen in power armor, it’s a decent look.  The Ravenwing battleforce is a great way to accumulate lots of Space Marine Bikers, and the Deathwing is the only way to take Terminators as troops currently.  Stubborn as an army rule is not particularly unique to the Dark Angels anymore, seeing as Lysander can grant it to codex marines currently.

Black Templars

Highly divergent from codex marines in that every single troop choice can be up to 20 men strong, can take bolt pistols/CCWs, and their scouts can be mixed in with their power armor dudes.  The vow that grants the entire army Preferred Enemy is really nice and makes them pretty damn competitive.  The Land Raider Crusader is basically THE Black Templar transport, and it kicks a lot of ass.

Righteous Zeal often feels like it’s overkill what with the speed of 5^th edition movement, and they are subject to a lot of special restrictions such as no Librarians and target priority checks.  However, they too have an awesome upgrade set and an easy paint scheme to boot.

Space Wolves

With their new codex revision around the corner there’s no point in overanalyzing these guys.

Early rumors look to maintain their status as the very best assault-oriented loyalist army, with an emphasis on blood claws/grey hunters being awesome in combat.  Current HQ choices are efficient in terms of points and the Stormcaller special power will get you punched in the dick by friends and enemies alike!

I’ll break here, and pick this up next time with a more high level look at the other armies of 40k.  For now, I hope that this has given a decent overview of 5th for me to build off in the future with less preamble and more down & dirty army nitpicking.

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.

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.