Wargaming Wednesday: The Pure Insanity of Warhammer 40,000

NOTE: Cross-posting this from my Post Modern Pulps Blog, going to post one of these a day until I get caught up, and then I'm going to cross-post Wargaming Wednesdays every week.

I'm dedicating Wednesdays to wargaming and role-playing games. Although in recent years I haven't been able to get in much (or really any) of either tabletop wargaming or pen-and-paper RPG playing, I still count both among my hobbies and interests.

Today I just wanted to highlight the wargame I am most invested in on an emotional level - Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000. For those who don't know what it is - I'll do this REAL QUICK - a bunch of British tabletop miniatures folks had a set of wargaming rules called Warhammer. It had armies of Elves and Dwarfs and guys with swords and pikes, and orcs and goblins, even skeletons and ghouls and "chaos" warriors and monsters. Basically every fantasy trope you can think of circa 1985 or so, thrown into a blender. Warhammer became super popular, and as it grew, they decided to do a version of the game as a sci-fi skirmish game, which they decided to call "Warhammer 40,000".

Just Another Day in the 41st Millennium

The universe of Warhammer 40,000 has changed somewhat in the 30+ years since its inception, but, well, I'll just cut and paste in the quote that appears at the beginning of most of their products:

It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries The Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the Warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

Yeah, it's like that. This is the kind of science fiction wargame you dream up when you're a young British nerd who subsists on a diet of heavy metal, Michael Moorcock, Tolkien, the punk aesthetic, European political chaos, Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, the Alien franchise, Hammer horror films, and a thick, heady dose of Generation X nihilism.  The "good guys" in the Warhammer 40K universe are the Imperium of Man, but you quickly realize that in 40K, "good" just means not quite as demonically horrifying as the "bad guys", but still pretty goddamn awful. The Space Marines, genetically modified super-humans in a suit of nigh-invulnerable power armor, might be call "the Emperor's finest", but they're also know as "The Angels of Death", and they'd stomp your skull into paste as soon as look at you if they thought you were a threat.

'Ello Guv'ner!

Even the Imperial Guard, the "good little guys" who were just your normal humans in basic body armor and carrying basic guns - somewhat analogous to regular army guys of today, just with sci-fi trappings - are often portrayed as psychotically violent and xenophobic, or just plain insane. Many of them come from "death worlds" where everything there tries to kill you, and it's basically Rambo with a plasma rifle and a chainsaw sword.

Some of my favorite parts of 40K are when things get delightfully subversive. There are nuns in 40K, but they are sociopathic religious zealots running around in black powered armor with all-white hair (white head covering, black outfit, like a nun's habit), blazing away with guns and flamethrowers, slaying heretics and the "impure". The Space Marine chaplain isn't a kindly older man giving you spiritual guidance...well okay he is, but he's also an eight foot-tall crazed murder machine in coal-black armor with a skull-shaped helmet, smashing people to pieces in the name of the Emperor and driving on the troops with his "inspiring presence". Yeah, it's like that. Even the Librarian is a force to be reckoned with, as "Librarians" are actually Space Marines with psychic powers, who can blow your body apart with their minds, set tanks on fire, and cause all sorts of supernatural havoc.

Yes, this is one of the Good Guys.

If anything, my biggest criticism of 40K in recent years is that they seem to be toning down the darker, more punk-rock elements of 40K in favor of something a little more family-friendly. There are still demons and mutants and heretics, but the Good Guys are a little more Good and the Bad Guys are a little more Bad. While 40K has always bee appealing to teenagers, I think Games Workshop knows that they need to aim for a younger audience, in order to get brand loyalty at an earlier age *and* tap into the "toy money" of the parents, rather than 30- or 40-somethings who have discretionary income, but who can also say "$35 for a single model an inch and a half tall? Ehhh...".


And that's my other big complaint - the cost. New model kits and new pricing structures mean that a playable, "competitive" army can set you back $400 or more if you buy everything at store prices. Sure, hobbies can be expensive, but the nature of wargaming is such that you feel the need to buy the newest, coolest stuff, as the rules and the "meta" changes to give different armies an advantage.

Glorious Old-School '90s Boxed Set Artwork!

But despite these problems, I really like the universe of Warhammer 40,000. It's cruel and violent and cynical and bloody as hell - in fact, it reminds me of that other British dystopian setting, JUDGE DREDD, in a lot of ways - but back in its earlier times, 40K didn't take itself as seriously as it does now, and I think the new, more serious 40K has lost a little something because of that.

Now, pardon me while I go burn some heretics - I mean, search on eBay for an out of production miniature...

My First Game of BOLT ACTION WW2 Miniatures Wargaming

Over two years ago (wow!) I picked up the BOLT ACTION core rules book, several Army Books, and a small force of British Commandos (naturally - new readers, look to the left of this article...). I reviewed the game in the abstract over on the Post Modern Pulp Blog, but I figured an actual game report was best suited to this blog (I'll put a "Hey, take a look" post up over on PMP pointing back here as well).

This past Friday, my friend and fellow author Dan Eldredge and I got together to play out a game of Bolt Action for the first time. Neither of us has had the time to fully paint our armies, and we agreed to not do a full battle report (the shame of a formal bat-rep containing unpainted miniatures would be too much for Dan to bear...), but we had the day to get together and enough miniatures to fight a good-sized battle, so we brought together everything that was assembled and decided to just have a go at it and try out as many of the units and rules as possible.

In short, I fielded a mixed force of British Army and Commando forces, with a bunch of weapons teams, a Daimler armored car, and a Sherman tank. Dan fielded a platoon of Panzergrenadiers in half-tracks, along with several weapon teams, a squad of veteran late-war grenadiers carrying StG 44 assault rifles, and a Tiger tank (yikes!). We played an "Envelopment" scenario, where the attacker (Germans) tries to break through the defender's (British) lines. This seemed well suited to our units, since none of my infantry had transports and I had a ton of weapons teams (mortars, AT rifle, Vickers machine gun, etc.), while Dan had mechanized infantry and a powerful tank. 

British on the near side of the board, Germans on the far side

One immediate difference we noticed between Bolt Action and Warhammer 40K (which we've both played a lot over the years) was the effects of pinning and morale. The more a unit takes fire from enemies, the more they are "pinned", and a pinned unit has to take a morale test in order to do...well...almost anything. A unit can get pinned into utter uselessness without taking a single casualty, a situation in stark comparison to 40K, where many armies have very high morale and many units are Fearless or Stubborn or otherwise ignore various morale situations. The mission began with a bombardment of my lines, and although I only suffered one casualty, many of my units suffered pinning and a couple even broke and ran! This caused me quite a bit of trouble early on, as a number of my units couldn't get into the fight for the first couple of turns (thankfully I had a lot of units, so I wasn't completely hampered in this regard).

Dan's Panzergrenadiers made a bold thrust into the center of my lines, determined to punch through my regular infantry and split my forces. My poor infantry section stood their ground for a short while, before weight of fire from several squads of Germans, as well as their support weapons, caused the unit to suffer too many casualties and eventually break and get wiped out. In Bolt Action, if you lose half a unit's models in a turn, and they fail a morale test, the unit is destroyed. This definitely keeps the tempo of a battle going and prevents tiny remnant units running around ineffectually.

The Poor Bloody Infantry, about a turn away from being wiped from the board. Note the Tiger in the distance...

Once Dan's infantry had punched a hole in my lines, he also managed to immobilize my Sherman with a single shot from his Tiger. I quickly found myself staring into a lot of enemy gun barrels, and decided some audaciousness was in order. So, I turned to my Commandos and sent them into the teeth of the enemy, bayonets and daggers gleaming, Sten guns blazing away. In Bolt Action, an assault is dangerous - the enemy gets to react by firing on the charging unit if they start far enough away - but there is no draw, just victory or death for the attacker. Thankfully for me, Commandos are "Tough Fighters" and excel at the assault, and so I wiped out one of Dan's squads in a flurry of bullets, blades, and bayonets.

An empty shell crater is all that's left of the Panzergrenadier squad, while their mates to the right look away in horror...

At this point, Dan's officer jumps into the half-track and opens fire on my Commandos with its machine gun, and the other infantry squad also opens fire, as does the advancing Tiger tank. Seeing my center forced open yet again, my Forward Artillery Officer calls down a barrage of artillery fire on the German squad (see the white die with the bulls-eye in the photo above). Unfortunately, the blast radius of the barrage is HUGE, and over the next two rounds, a number of units - both friend and foe - are pinned or damaged, and my poor medic and his stretcher-bearer (the bare metal models in the top-right of the above photo) are killed by a heavy howitzer shell!

Determined to press on, Dan drives his Tiger tank through the bombardment zone and tries to get off of my size of the board, since his infantry are so pinned by the bombardment that they're refusing to embark on their transport. With my Sherman immobilized and out of line-of-sight, and my armored car on the other side of the board (he's been sniping at a German MMG unit and the veteran Grenadiers all game), all I've got to deal with the tiger is my lone PIAT anti-tank gunner, who lost his loader and broke and ran in the opening bombardment. He's finally collected himself and lost his pinning penalties, and he moves forward, finally getting within good range for a shot at the Tiger's flank.

Steady hands now, lad! Make it count!

He misses with his first shot due to moving and firing and long range, but the second shot hits. I roll a "5" for damage, enough to cause a penetrating hit, and I get another "5" on the damage table, knocking out the Tiger. With only one infantry squad left, Dan makes a roll to see if the heavily-pinned unit will board its Hanomag half-track, and it fails. At this point, Dan concedes defeat, since he really can't get anyone off my side of the board in the next turn (this was the end of turn 5).

Overall, we both had a lot of fun. The rules move fast once you get the hang of them, and while the game isn't exactingly realistic, there are enough elements that make sense to give it a feeling of completeness and logic. The effects of pinning especially can be very frustrating, but it makes sense that your men aren't just blithely going about their business as shells explode and bullets snap all around them. You also need to make sure you're using your officers' Morale bonuses to their best effect, something I think neither of us paid much attention to during the game.

I'm not sure when we'll have another chance to play, but we're both looking forward to another battle, this time with the game mechanics more firmly understood and a better idea of how the game itself plays out. When we do, I'll be sure to post another report.

Until next time, Cheers!

New Games Workshop Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game Surge

Games Workshop, the company who makes Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Warhammer 40,000, and within the last 10 years, The Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game and War of the Ring, has put out a whole new set of sourcebooks for the SBG army lists.  The original sourcebooks were, in my opinion, scattered, bloated, and annoyingly hard to keep track of since they focused on areas rather than races.  The new books are much more focused; there's a book for all the Good non-human races (The Free Peoples), the Good human races (Kingdoms of Men), Mordor, The Fallen Realms (Isengard and other Evil human peoples), and the last book for Moria and Angmar.

You can find the listed books by clicking here.

I've picked up the Free Peoples book, and I like what I see.  There was a discrepancy for a while between some of the models that only had rules under the War of the Ring game (for example, the Dwarf King's Champion).  Now, every model and unit has a SBG entry, with a few rules tweaks that make sense to me.  For example, there is little point nothing that every model comes with a hand weapon since by default all models come with one, so the only wargear listed is that which the model possesses that stands out from the "default".  In addition, where there are multiple versions of the same character model (In particular, Gandalf, Galadriel, and Elrond).

One thing I don't really like is the "Warband" rules in the beginning of the book, under Choosing Your Forces.  Basically, every force you put on the table consists of one or more Warbands.  A Warband consists of a "Hero" and 0-12 warriors.  Heroes can be fielded on their own, but you cannot field warriors without a Hero.  I see this as a two-fold strategy; first, to encourage the "heroic" nature of LotR gaming by having Heroes who can use their Might points and so on to turn the tide of battle, and second, to sell more Hero models.  I can acknowledge both strategies as making sense from GW's perspective, but it annoys me nonetheless.  One of the appeals of the SBG is that each individual model can make a difference and fights their own battles.  To introduce a rules that essentially says every warrior must be led by a Hero, and each Hero is only able to lead 12 warriors at a time, means that you're going to have 5-6 heroes running around at any one time.  I actually preferred the idea that you could field a force that only had 1-2 Heroes, and that the "little guy" could do most of the heavy lifting in a battle.  For some races, having to field 5-6 heroes is going to eat up a massive amount of points, as each captain is usually worth 6-8 times their number of warriors.

In the end, it is easy enough to ignore this complication.  Many of the scenarios in the other books have a detailed listing of what sort of forces should be fielded, and the Warbands rule is mainly intended for "pickup games" (read: Tournaments).  It gives a certain level of standardization to the game, but I still feel like one of the appeals of the SBG was how every model mattered, and each model was a Hero in its own right, if it fought well enough and turned the tide of battle from defeat to victory for its side.

This "surge" in SBG models and books is no doubt in preparation for the Hobbit movie, which comes out in December.  GW will no doubt be releasing a slew of miniatures and some new books, and I guess some standardization was in order.  I'm looking forward to the new releases, and I'm sure to be commenting on them here as time goes on.

Painted Miniature: Old School Ranger

This miniature came to me from the same fellow who gave me the dwarf from the previous blog post.  Unfortunately I completely forgot to take a "before" picture of the unpainted mini, but there wasn't much to get excited about except a somewhat battered lead figure. 

Unlike the dwarf, I decided to paint this fellow in green shades, given his obvious ranger appearance.  He's got a sword, a bow and arrows, and a very "Horn of Gondor"-like hunting horn.  The clothes are all shades of Games Workshop greens, the horn is Bleached Bone (as are the arrows) banded with Dwarf Bronze.  The hilt of the sword is also bronze.  I gave the greens a wash of Thraka Green and his flesh tones and the horn a wash of Delvan Mud. 

All in all I think he turned out...okay.  Part of the problem with these old lead minis is it's SO easy for them to get dinged up, and this one spent about twenty years rattling around in the bottom of someone's painting case, and I don't think it was a terribly high-quality sculpt to begin with, but it does have a certain degree of homely character to it, and the model overall was fun to paint (I was listening to The Fellowship of the Ring audio dramatization while painting, so there was some good inspiration going on at the time.

Painted Miniature: Old School Dwarf Warrior

A friend of mine was moving a couple of years ago, and in order to clear out some of his junk, he gave me a box of random miniatures and painting supplies.  A lot of it was just junk that I wound up throwing away, but there were a few miniatures worth keeping.  They sat in a drawer for a long while until recently, when I based them and decided I wanted to paint them up for the heck of it.

Here's the Dwarf Warrior.  He's an old lead miniature, probably at least 20 years old.  If someone recognizes the manufacturer, please let me know:

He's a gnarled, tired, battered old fellow, but his armor is in good repair, he's got a few good pouches, and his axe looks well used but still capable of chopping up goblin skulls.  Here's the finished product:

I'm not a great painter, so bear with me here, but I really like how he turned out.  I base coated him black, then painted his armor Boltgun Metal (I use Games Workshop paints...), making it look like chainmail.  But I then gave it a black wash several times, darkening it to a blackened iron look, and brushed on a light coat of Dwarven Bronze.  For the hair and beard, I layered on Shadow Grey, Fortress Grey, and finally a little highlighting with bleached bone.  The leather items and the shield were all various layerings of Beastial Brown, Vermin Brown, and Snakebite Leather.  The skin was Vermin Brown with Dwarf Flesh over that.  Finally, I gave the whole miniature several good washes of Devlan Mud, which gives him a great dark, dirty, weathered look that, in my mind, brings the whole miniature together.

So there we are.  I think this guy came out all right.  I need to do a better job of basing him, covering up the gaps, probably adding a little rocky soil, but all in all I think the old fellow came out well.

Getting Back into the Gaming Groove

Coming back to RPGs after a year or more of being on hiatus is weird, but I'm beginning to enjoy the process again.  One of the things I've started working on is actual playtesting for the T&B RPG.  I'm developing a magical "post-apocalyptic" mini-setting, which I'm calling "The Mad God's Sandbox".  I'm populating it with a lot of less than bog-standard fantasy races; ratmen, lizardmen, birdmen, inscect-men, sentient undead and golems as non-human PC races.  I'm trying to come up with some fun adventures and interesting ways in which I can play with the rules and see how they help or hinder gameplay.

The response I've gotten from the Delta Green adventure was very positive, and I hope to have a follow-up adventure in a few weeks.  The players all seem to be attached to their pre-gens in one way or another, so at most I think there will be a little skill-tweaking and re-shuffling.  Hopefully that game will continue on in a happy fashion.

I'm also trying to get back to working on my 40K miniatures.  It has been over a year since I've played a game of 40K, but I've made some new gaming contacts and it'd be nice to get a game up and running soon.  I recently went through and took stock of my models and what needed to be done to make some improvements, so I have my "work orders" planned out for the next few months.

Also, my old Castles & Crusades gaming group may be finally getting back together after more than a year and a half hiatus.  That should be a lot of fun - if we all remember what we were doing when the game ended last time!

Anyhow, just wanted to pass along some updates and let the world know that the blog is still alive and kicking!

Old School 40K Crimson Fists Scout Squad

First, apologies for not having posted anything in such a long while. I'm currently on vacation, and I am using some of this time to catch up on blogging as well as working on my miniatures, so hopefully this week and the following weeks, I'll have more content for you to read.

While my last post featured a ten-man Crimson Fists scout squad for Warhammer 40K, I had mentioned that five of those minis were from the Space Marine Land Speeder Storm boxed set. However, I felt that it was silly to put five boltgun-armed marines on a vehicle whose best purpose seems to be delivering a small squad up close and personal for an assault, something boltguns aren't well suited to allow.

So then, who do we put in the LSS? These cranky old cusses, that's who.


These are five very old Space Marine scouts given to me by my 40K buddy and fellow blogger Darkwing from over at Arcadia Prime. The three metal models (#'s 1, 4, and 5 from left to right) are as-is except for the addition of a couple grenade packs. The second model is plastic, and I gave him a modern bolt pistol because the original is just hideous looking (I actually think the metal scout bolt pistols don't look half bad, considering). The scout sergeant in the middle is, I think, a little more recent (and by that I mean still probably from the early 90's), but I got rid of his crappy-looking bolt pistol and his ugly chainsword and instead gave him one of the new pistols and a power fist, which was originally a Space Wolf 'fist that I converted by carefully removing the wolf's head emblem from the back of the hand.

And before anyone comments, I am an absolute crap painter. I'm especially bad at painting faces, and it's made all the worse by the fact that these supposedly near-juvenile scouts all look like mohawked clones of Ernest Borgnine. I suppose my mediocre painting skills are one of the reasons I was attracted to Necrons and Orks for so long - both races are pretty easy to paint, the first because they are fairly simple, the second because, well, they are supposed to look messy and ramshackle. Regardless, here they are - my first painted Crimson Fists.

I've heard tell that five close-combat scouts loaded in a LSS (which can be armed with a heavy flamer for close-in support) make for a nice disruption unit. Their Scout abilities, open-topped nature of the speeder, and the overall speed of the unit means that it can threaten most any enemy unit on the table, especially good for going after vehicles or fire support units that can be threatened by these boys in close combat. I highly doubt they'll survive the whole game, and probably won't perform all that well every game anyhow, but I'm looking for a unit that's interesting for me to play, not necessarily something that will win games every time.

My next miniatures-related post should feature some Space Wolves, so stay tuned.

40K Friday: New Crimson Fists Scout Squad

Although it seems a little silly to do so, I've actually begun work over the last few months on not one, but two Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine armies: the Space Wolves and the Crimson Fists. I've always had an interest in the Space Wolves - their unorthodox fighting style, a great range of wild, unkempt models, and cool techno-barbarian flavor. I began buying their models as soon as their new codex came out, although I attempted to collect them years ago just before I began the Ork army I've focused on for the last five years or thereabouts.

But to flesh out the model range for my Space Wolves, I've bought a few boxes of standard marines, and with all the extra bits I began accumulating, I began thinking of a Codex: Space Marines force that I could build as a possible "beginner's army" to help new players learn how to play Warhammer 40K. Around this time, the Space Marine Battles novel Rynn's World came out, depicting the epic battle to save the Crimson Fists chapter after their world was invaded by orks and their Chapter-Monastery was destroyed, wiping out hundreds of marines and leaving alive only a fraction of the chapter's manpower to defend the world against the Ork invasion. I found myself really drawn to the fluff written about this chapter - an army fighting back from the brink of annihilation, a shadow of its former strength, and yet still committed not just to surviving and rebuilding, but to continuing the fight against the enemies of the Imperium.

Because of their vastly depleted numbers, one of the unit types you commonly find in a Crimson Fists army are Scout squads. Scouts are newly inducted Space Marines who have not been raised to full Battle-Brothers and serve as skirmishers and raiders, learning how to fight in the Astartes fashion from the flanks and rear of the battles rather than toe-to-toe with the enemy. As the Crimson Fists would be relying on these new recruits to do a lot of fighting until their main battle companies are brought into full strength, I decided to pick up some scouts as one of the first units of Crimson Fists I was to build.

With this in mind, I grabbed one box of standard scouts, and one Land Speeder Storm, a fast skimmer vehicle that transports a five-man squad of scouts into battle. While I have another unit of Scouts that I'll be using in the LSS, I did decide to use the scout models that come with the transport and mix them with the five-pack of scouts I had purchased to make one ten-man unit equipped with boltguns, a heavy bolter, and a Scout Sergeant who could be represented rules wise by Scout Sergeant Telion - I felt that having a grizzled, extremely competent scout sergeant leading my men makes sense for an army like the Crimson fists, who must now rely more than ever on these new Astartes to keep the chapter alive.

Here are the standard Scout models I've got assembled (but as yet unpainted). The heads for the heavy bolter scout and my Telion stand-in are actually Space Wolf Scout heads.


These five scouts are the models I converted from the Land Speeder Storm box. I always thought it a little silly that a rapid strike vehicle like the LSS, open-topped and perfect for rapid assault strikes, was modeled with boltgun-armed scouts, weapons that would prevent the scouts from charging from the LSS after firing. I guess the scouts just looked too cool with their bolters, like a bunch of Delta Force commandos about to hop out of their AH-58 Little Bird and kick some unsuspecting bad guys in the teeth.


The combat blades are left over from the other scouts box, the second model on the left and the rightmost model actually have standard SM bolters from the Tactical Marines box. The three marines on the right are standing on pieces of plaster "brick" that I broke up to give them something to stand on - their poses wouldn't have worked otherwise, but I think they look just fine here, and actually make the unit as a whole a lot more dynamic and more interesting than simply having ten guys standing around holding their guns in two hands and looking in various directions.

Comments and questions are welcome - hopefully next week I'll have some more 40K models to show off!