Here is a close up of my terminator apothecary, one of my more recent creations. I added the appropriate apothecary bits from the command squad sprue to a regular terminator model to get the final effect. I think it turned out pretty well. Now, if I could just get Feel No Pain for my entire termy command squad life would be good!
I've been hard at work painting new models, but I figured I ought to show you my space marine army as it now stands. It's called the Star Guard and has it's own unique symbol and history.
As you can see it is a Deathwing army. I originally collected and painted up most of the models a few years ago as the new plastic terminators were first coming out. That meant that you could buy the old metal terminators at discounts, which I promptly did. I had a completed army after a few months of work. I stuck with the force (and painted up a bunch of tyranids in the meantime) until more recently when I started adding more terminators, including a terminator apothecary and standard bearer. Since then I've decided to work on a regular space marine army, especially given the new SM codex.
I just wanted to post a plug for my favorite place to play -- Armoury Games in Pickerington, Ohio. It's a nice shop with (as you can see from the picture) plenty of 40k stuff for sale. If you are passing by stop and visit. Be sure to say hello to the owner Bruce and tell him that 40kOrigins.com sent you.
It’s impossible to know what sort of feelings people will end up having on this subject in the long term, but so far there is a far bit of friction out there over the differences between the new codex and old non-vanilla marine books. One side sees their armies as outclassed, the other that it’s no big deal – or, at least, that you can’t introduce any of the new toys to old forces while keep point-to-benefit ratios fair. Regardless of where you come down on this question, I bet it will pop up as a bone of contention in your games eventually.
What’s sad is that this wasn’t necessary, but is the result of a serious marketing misstep by Games Workshop. This is because what gets people frustrated and angry isn’t ultimately point totals and power ratios, but rather human psychology.
Think about it – here you are a happy player of some non-codex marine chapter and suddenly GW comes out with a new book overflowing with new rules, wargear, and units. Then you find out that none of it – even the stuff with the same names as the stuff already in your codex – is going to you. It is human nature to see this as being unfair even if in the end all the codexes remain perfectly balanced.
In other words, the fact that it looks like you’ve been unfairly treated gets you mad even if ultimately you haven’t. This is an emotional, gut-level reaction that is hard to shake no matter how much rational intellectualizing you employ. Even if you could somehow prove it’s all fair in terms of points and power (and, as I think I’ve shown, there is good reason to think it’s not) the mere fact that you miss out still apt to leave a bitter taste in the mouth.
Yet, these gut-reactions work both ways. If GW had offered every marine army the new updated wargear and unit rules then both sides would have reason to be happy. Vanilla Space Marine players get a new codex full of new units and characters while all the other marine players at least get brand new (and mostly improved) wargear/units. Everyone walks away with something, an outcome that satisfies our instinctive need for moral fairness. In this scenario the bad feelings on either side of the debate get short-circuited from the start.
Instead, GW did the one thing that is most likely to stir the combative emotions – give one side a lot while giving the other nothing (in fact, emotionally it’s less than nothing as some of the comparative effectiveness of your army has been seemingly taken away). This encourages people to grouse, to sit down and figure out all the ways they may have been or may be shortchanged.
Again, it’s human nature. Give something to everyone and (most) people won’t even think to complain. Give one side all the toys and complaining is pretty much guaranteed.
Yes, it’s not that the old books are suddenly useless or unplayable or even uncompetitive, but if you play any of them you might just feel a bit of sourness every time you see your opponent pull out his vanilla Space Marine army and codex.
There are two basic categories of stuff (besides players) we'll need to run the planned games at Origins.
1) Prizes: We'll need these for the RT tournament obviously, but something smaller for the other games would be nice as well. The most obvious source would be donations from gaming shops.
2) Terrain: We'll need literally car fulls of terrain, the more the bigger we get. A basic guess would be 3-5 pieces of terrain per RT table, so if we expect 40 or so players that's 120 to 200 pieces! Fortunately, most don't have to be particularly amazing, but it would be nice to have a few prestige projects, especially for the Apocalypse game.
The first requirement requires us to find giving shops willing to donate. In exchange we could offer various types of advertising. The second will require some money and a lot of work (less of the former the more creative we can get with the later).
We'll cover these two options in much greater detail as time goes on, but for now start thinking about how we can best satisfy both needs.
In my last post on this subject I pointed out what a giant leap the new Space Marine codex represents over what went before. But, you say, all new army books have new toys, things to make other armies potentially envious. So what if the new book has more than usual?
One problem is that it represents a fundamental shift from before. The previous flavors of Space Marines books were all clearly closely related, with one being essentially much like the other with a few different formations or units. Point is that one could easily argue that each was merely variations on the theme and therefore all the same general power level.
The new codex represents a departure from this policy. It’s a quantum leap over the old books, filled with all sorts of new and upgraded items. It suddenly makes all the other SM books outclassed – and obviously so.
Yet, far worse is how it does this – in many cases it is by changing rules for units and wargear! It’s not just a matter of new toys, but also old toys transformed into better ones. Now you can have different forces supposedly using the same wargear and units, but employing different rules. This has two main effects.
One, it makes the advantages of the new book even more glaringly clear than would otherwise be the case. You can compare the exact same thing against the exact same thing. If, say, a new unit comes out for a completely different 40K race it’s hard to judge comparative power levels. It’s apples and oranges. With the new marine codex, it’s apples to apples. You only need ten minutes of reading to realize that the new book is superior to the other related books.
The second problem is worse for the simple reason that Games Workshop has stated (through designers speaking at conventions) that it is not going to offer FAQs upgrading the old marine books to the new wargear/units. This is not only a slap in the face to an entire group of players, but is guaranteed to produce all sorts of arguments. For instance, before I read about this policy my de facto assumption was that I could look forward to playing my Dark Angels with the improved wargear of the new book. After all, storm shields and Land Raiders (among a lot else) are all standard issue, right? If I hadn’t come across these reports I could have easily faced the awkward instance of walking into a game with an army list that was in fact illegal without knowing it. Ironically, the fact that I do will have the opposite effect – how can I use the old rules against the new without feeling shortchanged?
This GW policy makes the old Space Wolf codex a rules disaster. Because GW hasn’t updated the SW book this century it still tells you to refer to the “space marine codex” for the rules of at least half their available units. This means that unlike Black Templars, Dark Angels, and Blood Angels Space Wolves get to use many of the new rules and units. Well, sort of – because the book is so out-of-date you can interpret things in a number of potential ways. For instance, does having access to Land Raiders mean you can get access to Land Raider Redeemers as well (the SW FAQs implies that you can)? What about wargear mentioned in both the old SW book and the new SM codex? Which has precedence? Can there be any doubt that playing Space Wolves or against Space Wolves is practically an invitation to arguments and/or hard feelings?
What’s sad is that problems like these would have been fairly easy to avoid along as GW had just done things with a little more marketing savvy….
I'm talking of course about Titans.
With the re-invention of mass battles under the Apocalypse system, we've seen a tremendous effort of modelling on behalf of some brilliant gamers in our area (gargants, silver towers, tupperware titans) and we've also seen the re-emergence of a lot of the old armorcast superheavy models. The first Apoc game run at Armoury Games here in town featured a truly vast chaos horde approaching a dug in imperial force. I brought my old Reaver titan, who had LITERALLY not seen a game in ten years, and it paired up with Ranillon's classic warhound titan and a few shadowswords for our heavy firepower. Old Nobilis Indomitus was fielded with rules from the Bell of Lost Souls and literally towered over the battlefield, pattering fire off it's adamantine hull.
By the third game, however, titan fever had spread. The forces of order were fielding no less than two eldar titans and FIVE imperial titans, including a warlord titan someone had scratchbuilt out of power ranger bits and a rubbermaid storage tub. My reaver titan was no longer doing the towering. In fact, from it's position in front of the primer-black tupperware warlord, it looked rather diminuative by comparison. It still managed to steal the show though... by dying. The reaver got dragged down in HTH combat by a dozen greater daemons, and it's plasma reactor overloaded inflicting a strength D hit on everything within 31 inches. That 62" blast template wiped clean all the chaos models that were overrunning our lines, and pyrric victory never tasted so good.
But the genie was out of the bag (to mangle a metaphor). The old armorcast models were virtually unobtainable due to the prices they were commanding on eBay, making the new Forgeworld models seem almost sane by comparison. And the new reaver rules out of Apocalypse Reloaded were even more deadly than the ones the fanbase had published over at Lost Souls! Bigger is now better, and machines that tower over my old reaver titan are becoming commonplace. Once the grandest thing on the board, the old armorcast models are starting to look their age, as the scale and even the rules themselves are passing them by as being too small.
The Way of Saim-Hann blog is having a painting contest. You need to paint up a Farseer or Autarch on a jetbike. The winner gets an Eldar Battleforce box! This sounded like the perfect excuse to paint up an idea I've had for a while -- an Exodite Autarch on a flying dragon. Don't know if I'm going to win, but it was fun painting it up.
Click here to see the full sized picture
