More Deadly Than the Male

Oh dear, I see the man-babies are apoplectic with rage about female characters in Warhammer 40,000 again. This time it's because it's been revealed that the Adeptus Custodes -- basically even more Space Mariney Space Marines -- include women in their ranks.

Gnash! Wail! Gasp! Etc!

This is sort of a retcon. I say "sort of", because I don't think it's ever been stated that the faction is all-male, it's just that no one's mentioned female members before.

Obviously the thing that's annoying these very mature and sensible people is the change to "established" canon and NOTHING ELSE, so I imagine that they are also furious about:

• Squats.
• The origins of the Necrons.
• Space Wolf commander Leman Russ.
• The Sensei.
• The half-human, half-Eldar chief librarian of the Ultramarines, who may also have been a tennis player.
• Where Squigs come from.

All changed or removed from canon, so all similarly rage-inducing, I'm sure, because it's about the sanctity of canon. Nothing else. Nope.

I don't always agree with Games Workshop's decisions -- release your old books as print-on-demand, you cowards! -- but this is glorious. Well done, GW.

Imperial Phase

I have the new Epic 2023 box and although I haven't played it yet -- ye gods, teeny tiny multi-part miniatures! How am I supposed to put those together at my age?! -- I have impressions of the first variety.

• In terms of rules, it is pretty much second edition Space Marine/Titan Legions, which is good, as Space Marine 2 is the best wargame Games Workshop ever made. Fact.
• Titans are simplified. I won't miss the aiming minigame, but the old location-based damage charts were fun. You can't blow their arms or legs off any more. (sad face)
• Titans do still have huge reactor meltdowns when they die, and that's ace.
• The terrain rules are new and very weird. They are a mixture of excessive detail (every inch of the board is one of about five different terrain types, which you have to track and have their own rules and modifiers) and odd abstractness (you may be able to draw clear and unobstructed line of sight to a model but if it's "within" certain terrain your models can't see it). There's also what looks like an orphaned reference to roads giving a movement boost, but no associated rules, which may be a case of earlydraughtitis, or just ambiguous writing; who knows?
• Speaking of inches, everything is measured in them. This will make Jacob Rees-Mogg and the Brexiteers happy, and is better than that strange Pentagon-Circle-Triangle-Square thing GW did in Kill Team, but anything other than centimetres for Epic is abhorrent.
• I'm not sure the Space Wombles can legally field all their models in the box, unless I've misunderstood the army building rules, which is very possible.
• The rulebook could have been 100 pages thinner with the exact same content, but I think that's a battle we lost a long time ago.
• The order counters are terrible. They are thin, cheap, and nasty, with none of the hefty girth of the 2e counters. Expect to see a swathe of variants on Etsy within days.

That all may seem overwhelmingly negative, but the core rules of the game are solid, and the miniatures are great, and I am keen to give it a try... as soon as I get someone younger and more nimble to construct the models. More on that if/when it happens.

OH! And drop pods are rubbish now. Back in the 1990s, you would literally drop the markers on to the table and hope for the best. Now they are relegated to a deployment special rule. Cowards.

Somebody Once Told Me the World Is Gonna Roll Me

I love this old article, from White Dwarf #136, because it's so pro-fun and pro-hobby. This is Games Workshop saying "here's a new ork vehicle for you to build and use, and you don't have to buy anything!"

(Except for the issue of White Dwarf, of course.)

If I were in charge at GW I'd keep the full article on the website forever, and I'd update the rules with every new edition of 40K, to keep the Gobsmasha, and the enthusiastic hobbyism, alive.

This is probably one reason -- among many, I admit -- why I am not in charge at GW.

The Inner Temple of the Golden Skeleton

Over at the resurrected Grognardia, James has shared an early Dungeons & Dragons map from Steve Jackson, co-founder of Games Workshop. This reminded me that the other co-founder, Ian Livingstone, now and then shares an image of one of his early dungeons.

I can't be certain, but I think I remember Sir Ian saying that this was the first dungeon he ever designed for the game. I haven't been able to find a better quality image, and I'm too intimidated by Sir Ian's awesomeness to ask him for one.

(Not that I have any influence over such a giant! I don't mean to suggest that he and I are pals or anything.)

Update! Joe at Explore: Beneath & Beyond has done some heavy squinting and has deciphered much of Sir Ian's dungeon key.

Hardly Everchosen

I stumbled across this art today:

(I discovered that it's from a 2015 Age of Sigmar book and I can't tell you who the artist is because in 2015 Games Workshop wasn't big on giving credit to individual staff members.)

What struck me about the picture was how different it is to the standard GW house style, which tends to be more painterly. Actual drawings have very much gone out of fashion in Nottingham, so I was surprised but happy to see eight pages of this at the beginning of the book.

Alas, it's presented as a flashback and the final page blends from this style into your bog-standard GW painting, so there's a sense that it's literally "only a dream", but it's still nice to see a different style of art appear in a modern GW product. Maybe there are more that I have missed.

Not So Grim and Perilous

Comics writer and professional Gavin Norman impersonator Kieron Gillen rambles here about the aesthetic of Warhammer, how the original Warhammer setting is probably racist, and how Games Workshop may not be the Evil Empire it is often portrayed as, and -- to be fair -- was for a good number of years.

It's worth reading, but the first bit jumped out at me because it's something I've been saying for years: yes, the Warhammer games are all about the GrimDark™ but that this is supposed to be funny, because, by gosh, how could it not be? It's so over the top that I cannot understand how anyone takes it seriously.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay characters are rat catchers and students pushed into fighting the legions of Chaos by bad luck and poor judgement. Is that not self-evidently funny? Both Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Fantasy Age Battle of Sigmar are full of puns and ridiculous names; one of the Space Marine primarchs -- the most super duper of the super duper genetic soldiers -- is called Lionel. You can stick a random 80's trash fantasy novel apostrophe in there but it's still not a name that evokes the image of a hardened killer of alien scum.

The other, more famous, KG sort of blames the Americans, which I don't think is quite fair, but the obfuscation of the essential joke at the heart of the Warhammers does seem to have gone hand in hand with Games Workshop's global success. I don't begrudge the world these less comedic versions of the franchises -- and as Coop says here, Games Workshop has done its fair share to move away from the humour -- because if what you like about 40K is that everything is festooned with skulls, then good for you.




I don't think I'm trying to make a point. What I'm not saying is that anyone is doing Warhammer wrong. I think what I am saying is that to me there's an essential humour at the heart of the game lines -- even more so in some of the spin-offs like Blood Bowl and WFRP -- and it always baffled me that few people seemed to recognise it, so it is good to see someone of Gillen's profile also pick up on it. It's simple validation, I suppose.

Questing Again

It's official: I have no idea what Games Workshop is playing at.

It's produced a version of Warhammer Fantasy Battle that looks like it's fun to play. It's bringing Blood Bowl back. It's brought genestealer cults back, so now I'm about 75% less sad about my dad throwing out my old cult.

Today brings the news that Warhammer Quest is coming back.

There's been a recent change of management over at GW and the new bosses seem to have a fondness for, well, games. At this stage, I wouldn't be at all surprised if we see a new edition of Oi! Dat's My Leg! before the end of 2016.

Chris Bone, I Love You

Well, well, well.

(Image from, and more details at, tinyplasticspacemen.com)

You're So Chuffing Special

Well well. Games Workshop has already surprised me once this year by producing a version of Warhammer Fantasy Battle with charm and character and -- most surprising of all -- a sensible price point. I thought that was a one-off and that the company would soon return to its predictable and unadventurous form, but it seems that I was quite wrong.

Back in the good old days Games Workshop produced all sorts of wonderful stuff but as time went on, more and more of the interesting games disappeared and the company began to focus its attentions on Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Fantasy Battle and, in later years, The Lord of the Rings. Some of those other games survived for a while as part of the so-called Specialist Games brand before that too shuffled off into oblivion.

The Specialist Games family included Blood Bowl -- one of the greatest board games ever created -- and Necromunda and Mordheim, two smaller-scale skirmish war games that I have never played but are always being discussed in glowing terms by those who have. The Specialist Games site also hosted the Dark Future rules as a free download for years after the game went out of print, a gesture that was so uncharacteristic of Games Workshop that it seemed like it could only be some sort of clerical error or cyber-vandalism.

Anyway, the point is that it was a sad day when the Specialist Games division disappeared.

Today, Games Workshop announced that it's setting up a new Specialist Design Studio and some of the upcoming titles include Blood Bowl and Necromunda. This has come as a bit of a surprise; even after the official announcement, it still feels like a hoax. Games Workshop said these games weren't worth supporting, that the cost was too much and the audience too small, and yet here we are.

I wonder if it's because this ponderous giant of an organisation that doesn't do market research and doesn't watch what its competitors are doing has at long last noticed that Fantasy Flight is making plenty of money republishing old Games Workshop board games and role-playing games, that Hawk Wargames is doing well with something that looks a lot like Space Marine, and that Mantic has had considerable success with more or less reviving the entire Specialist Games range?

Perhaps it's something more boring about maintaining copyrights and trademarks, or maybe there's someone new in charge who has a fondness for the old days. Perhaps the company is desperate and is trying anything to win back customers. Whatever the reasons behind the move, it's exciting news and I'll be watching this new studio with interest.

Rolling in the Old World

My opponent has three dice and needs to roll fours, fives or sixes to hit my armies. Each six counts as a hit and allows him to roll another die.

Ah.

No matter, I still have a good chance of scoring a couple of hits on my four dice.

This sort of thing is why, if you want to win at a board game, you choose me as your opponent.

In the Grim Darkness of 2015 There Is Only (Edition) War

In a bold move that is quite uncharacteristic of a company that has made a business plan of biennial releases of nigh-identical rulesets, Games Workshop yesterday rebooted its Warhammer fantasy wargame as Warhammer: Age of Sigmar and the reaction has been fascinating. I'm used to seeing edition wars in role-playing game conversations -- well, in conversations about Dungeons and Dragons for the most part -- but GW gamers tend to grumble a bit about new editions then buy everything anyway; those that don't go and play older editions or other games and leave the discussion. This time it's been a bit different.

Early on there were rumours that the game would be using circular bases as standard, although the square bases of the previous editions would remain legal. This seemed to be the worst news ever according to a lot of the online fans although I couldn't see that it would make much difference, but then I haven't played since about 1998 so I may have missed a particular subtlety.

The bulk of the rules for the new game were released yesterday and confirmed that yes, circular bases were in, so I imagine that there has been much gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair around the world. The rules do seem to be somewhat incomplete; the basic game mechanics seem to be there and GW has released free rules updates for its existing model range for the new game, but there does seem to be a gap in terms of how the models work in the new game.

With the Age of Sigmar boxed set the expectation seems to be that you have enough rules material to use the contents of the box; here are the rules for twenty chaos warriors because twenty chaos warriors came with the game. Fair enough, that makes sense. It gets more complicated once you look outside the box, at existing armies; if you want to use your orcs -- or Orruks™ as they are called now -- then you have rules for them, but how many units of orc boyz can you field? How many troll mobs can you bring to a battle? That bit isn't clear and it seems to be driving the fans insane.

My assumption is that at some point a standalone rulebook will be released and army building mechanics will be included, but perhaps GW should have given some idea of how it would work, or provided a basic version; as it stands they've left players of older armies with just enough information that they know they haven't been abandoned but not enough to know how to play the new game, and I can understand why that's frustrating, but perhaps not to the level of the frothing mania I've seen online in the past couple of days.

Perhaps the oddest revelation of the past few hours is that the rules contain stuff like this:

This sort of thing is common in board gaming -- "the player with the pointiest ears goes first" --and was also a frequent occurrence in the days when Warhammer was called Warhammer Fantasy Battle. These days there are remnants of this approach in the animosity rules for orcs or the way goblin fanatics work, but in general the sense of humour and fun has been ground out of GW games over the years so it is a surprise to see it return, and in a major release. It's been a nasty surprise for the same sort of people who think circular bases are the work of Satan Slaanesh, but it's a pleasant surprise for me, as I miss the days when ork vehicles really would go faster if you painted them red.

I find myself quite optimistic about this new edition of the game. The idea seems to be simpler rules and smaller and more affordable armies and as someone who got priced out of Warhammer in the previous century, that's a move I welcome. The release of free rules is something to be applauded even if everyone else has been doing it for a while and there is a certain level of bravery in such a sweeping reboot of the ruleset from such a conservative company, and I feel that should be encouraged.

Yes, it is a shame that the old setting is gone, but the game world GW has been pushing for the last couple of decades isn't the one in which I've been playing so I'm not too bothered. If I were a fan of the previous edition of the rules I could be miffed that they've been scrapped but if I were such an adherent, there's nothing stopping me from playing an older edition.

This looks like a version of Warhammer that I can not only afford but that looks fun to play, and so I find myself interested in the game for the first time in a couple of decades. I don't know what GW considers to be the criteria for a successful product launch, but it works for me.