State of the Union (Heresy)

[Cris R]

Just for funsies,  If   I was  in this FW's persons shoes here's how I would have replied: 

 

Hey James! we've been getting a number of messages similar to your from our  community.  Rest assured we're hearing what you all want.  We understand the lack of communication  can be annoying, especially compared to other game systems like Necromunda, but we have great things coming for the Horus Heresy this year!

 

I'm not allowed to spoil anything of course, but the team has a road map for the Heresy going forward, and we'll be able to divulge bits and pieces in the weeks ahead, here and on the Warhammer Community.   While in these turbulent times, we cannot guaranteed that dates won't be moved around,  but in the next few months. there are many new and exciting things coming  to help capture the scale and grandeur of the setting and ensure  all the Legions have the tools and the toys for exciting, thematic gameplay!

 

We understand that events of these past few years have shaken the community's confidence in our ability to deliver the quality you expect from us, and we are working day and night to restore you confidence in the brand you have invested your time and money in.

 

All we ask is a bit more patience because what the studio is cooking up will be  worth the wait.

 

Have a lovely day and feel free to email us at forgeworld@gwplc.com  if you have any more questions or feedback to give.   We really appreciate it when our customers and fans reach out,  without it, we wouldn't be able to give you the products and services you deserve!

 

()

 

Not to toot my own horn, but I would be a bit more confident if FW was providing messages like the one I made up and wrote out in like five minutes.   

 

 

Not    "We don't have plans for a roadmap."

 

 

Like... Even if you honestly didn't have a plan, you think telling people that is going to encourage them to  BUY! BUY! BUY!.

 

 

It's not. 

 

 

 

 

The reply from the FW Facebook account to Macca's message was ridiculous. That said, anyone who's actually had to deal with comms work for a large organization knows that the person handling responses on a social media account will not post something that long or detailed without getting clearance from the people overseeing the comms department and the organization's broader marketing strategy.

 

And that's the issue anytime someone on here says "if I were GW, I would do this with 30k." GW is a large corporation with multiple levels of bureaucracy and protocols that impact every component of releasing new products and maintaining old ones. And unless you're the CEO or a Vice President who can make a unilateral decision, your ability to make these kinds of calls is more limited the lower you go down the totem pole. Does this likely explain why Heresy is stuck in purgatory? Probably, especially if the key decision makers in the company haven't made the system a priority even though 30k was folded into Specialist Games partially to give it more attention and resources to grow. Still, any recommendation for what GW should do with the Heresy needs to take into account that it's a large company whose size has become a liability - not an asset - when it comes to making the Heresy community feel like our game is one of their major priorities or helping the system grow in interesting ways that respects its heritage.

 

FWIW, this topic has been an important one for business school case studies. This piece from the Harvard Business Review opens up a good three-part series on this issue.

Edited February 11, 2022 by Cris R

[WrathOfTheLion]

Their reply was a poor choice in words, but ultimately probably meaningless, as even Macca mentions in his video on the subject. Even if there is an internal roadmap, if it involves a major marketing push, they're just not going to tell you right now.

[Imren]

It would have taken the person responding to Macca's question a really small effort to speak to the manager that have the overall responsibility for HH game and confirm with that person that there are actually plans in progress without revealing them, and in turn respond on social media accordinly. But obviously he chose not to, judging by his wording and choice of words in his response.

 

I believe that Alan Bligh was the main driver of 30k and was given the freedom/mandate to create 30k (and Badab wars) applying his genuine interest, passion and knowledge of the lore and a feel for what is cool and grimdark (and not grimderpy). I suspect that whoever is supposed to fill his shoes at FW will most likely not have the integrity, passion and knowledge of the lore that Alan had.

 

The decline in interest in 30k from GW/FW has gone so far that today the consumers produce rules and lore (Mournival rules, Varangian heresy lore and rule package, Centurion army list, etc) that is wide-spread in the community and generally accepted at events world-wide. Combine that with the heavy investment so far by the players and relatively rigorous interest in the hobbying aspect among players (just walk in to a 40k event and compare the level of paint and build quiality of armies at a 30k event), and recasting "garage"-factories in Russia and China produce and distribute the models that FW once did but choose not to anymore will result in that 30k will continue to live on quite independent of GW/FW.

 

"You reap what you sow" is a good idiom to apply on GW/FW stepmotherly attitude to 30k post-Alan era. The salt, the frustration and emerging 3D-printing and recast consumption is a natural response by the 30k community to how they have been served by GW/FW post Alan.

Edited February 11, 2022 by Imren

[Pacific81]

I think for many hobbyists 30k/HH has definitely become something of a port in the storm of mental 40k release schedule/constant codex creep and cycle/new 'additions' and moving on of the background and timeline. 

 

Add to this the expensive/niche cost, the relative effort in building an army and the fact it tends to attract more committed hobbyists means that you have a relatively small but very committed and passionate fanbase. Its not just here, you see it in the FB groups and other social media platforms covering 30k. 

 

So, I think it's completely understandable to react strongly when you feel this hobby sanctum is threatened or at least is being allowed to become derelict. In fact, I think it would require some kind of psychological disconnect to not feel this way about something you love - to keep happily smiling while the releases and attention from the parent company dwindle with poor (or in that case, ill advised) communication. 

 

As someone who lives in the wargaming wastes (collecting and playing Epic, which has existed without any GW support for many, many years) I am happy picking my way through 3rd party releases, fan-made rules updates and more recently 3D STL files. It's enough for what I need and I think most of the community too. But, I think for those that have enjoyed the spotlight of constant new FW releases, even plastic kits and regular new book releases, now that the light has been shined away it is not going to be an easy transition. 

Edited February 11, 2022 by Pacific81

[Imren]

I think for many hobbyists 30k/HH has definitely become something of a port in the storm of mental 40k release schedule/constant codex creep and cycle/new 'additions' and moving on of the background and timeline. 

 

Add to this the expensive/niche cost, the relative effort in building an army and the fact it tends to attract more committed hobbyists means that you have a relative small but very committed and passionate fanbase. Its not just here, you see it in the FB groups and other social media platforms covering 30k. 

 

So, I think it's completely understandable to react strongly when you feel this hobby sanctum is threatened or at least is being allowed to become derelict. In fact, I think it would require some kind of psychological disconnect to not feel this way about something you love - to keep happily smiling while the releases and attention from the parent company dwindle with poor (or in that case, ill advised) communication. 

 

As someone who lives in the wargaming wastes (collecting and playing Epic, which has existed without any GW support for many, many years) I am happy picking my way through 3rd party releases, fan-made rules updates and more recently 3D STL files. It's enough for what I need and I think most of this community too. But, I think for those that have enjoyed the spotlight of constant new FW releases, even plastic kits and regular new book releases, now that the light has been shined away it is not going to be an easy transition. 

Yes I think that your description above caught the geist of many 30k players/hobbyists quite well. Many of us feel a bit ambivalent towards the rumoured future releases that may or may not come from FW. Many of us are quite happy with the rules as is that are quite well compiled in one place by battlescribe. Combine that with community own made campaigns and unit rules. and models sourced elsewhere and you have a independent 30k community living their own life in a corner.

[sarabando]

honestly SG could just reach out to a few of the many many talented heresy painters on social media, and once a month done a showcase of their minis, it wouldnt cost much in man hours, or physical cost. but it would keep heresy in peoples minds. 

[Petitioner's City]

It would have taken the person responding to Macca's question a really small effort to speak to the manager that have the overall responsibility for HH game and confirm with that person that there are actually plans in progress without revealing them, and in turn respond on social media accordinly. But obviously he chose not to, judging by his wording and choice of words in his response.

 

I believe that Alan Bligh was the main driver of 30k and was given the freedom/mandate to create 30k (and Badab wars) applying his genuine interest, passion and knowledge of the lore and a feel for what is cool and grimdark (and not grimderpy). I suspect that whoever is supposed to fill his shoes at FW will most likely not have the integrity, passion and knowledge of the lore that Alan had.

 

The decline in interest in 30k from GW/FW has gone so far that today the consumers produce rules and lore (Mournival rules, Varangian heresy lore and rule package, Centurion army list, etc) that is wide-spread in the community and generally accepted at events world-wide. Combine that with the heavy investment so far by the players and relatively rigorous interest in the hobbying aspect among players (just walk in to a 40k event and compare the level of paint and build quiality of armies at a 30k event), and recasting "garage"-factories in Russia and China produce and distribute the models that FW once did but choose not to anymore will result in that 30k will continue to live on quite independent of GW/FW.

 

"You reap what you sow" is a good idiom to apply on GW/FW stepmotherly attitude to 30k post-Alan era. The salt, the frustration and emerging 3D-printing and recast consumption is a natural response by the 30k community to how they have been served by GW/FW post Alan.

golly, yes Alan Bligh was amazing, but so too are his colleagues, many of whom clearly have the same heresy passion, and cowrote it with him. I think Alan would be decking cross to find his legacy being used to diss his friends, especially Andy Hoare, whom he worked with for over a decade and co-wrote lots together with. It's Hoare who now leads heresy, and he is the *best* person to be doing it if (a) based around who was involved in the series and forge world and FFG, and (b ) nevermind his amazing work in the past five years managing and launching several dead games to excellent success (blood bowl, necromunda, at and ai - soon to be the old world too). But it takes time to do that, which is frustrating, I agree.

 

But seriously this approach to Bligh is the most naive, hagiographic and silly approach, one that I think is genuinely offensive to the personality of the person it is claiming to laud. It diminishes everyone he worked with, his own collaborative approach and has no understanding of or evidence of the way the studio itself worked (other than relative silence).

 

And no, a basic customer service person does not usually have a way to elicit a response from the head of a service in a large company.... because that's what the head of the FW design studio is.

 

Sorry to rant, I just hate it this kind of cultic behaviour to Bligh. He was brilliant, we all know that. His death suckerpunched FW. (As did 8th). But this strange hagiographic approach is not helpful.

Edited February 11, 2022 by Petitioner's City

[dicebod]

I've gotta be honest here...the endless complaining from this community is starting to grate on me. I was excited to see the new Exemplary Battles PDF today until I saw the first comment on the FB thread was asking about the plastic box set. Like, GW is not going to respond to that question in that venue.

All signs point to a big heresy reveal at Adepticon. That's like a month away. If there's nothing substantial shown there then sure, melt down. But until then, I wish everyone would just chill out.

[Petitioner's City]

I've gotta be honest here...the endless complaining from this community is starting to grate on me. I was excited to see the new Exemplary Battles PDF today until I saw the first comment on the FB thread was asking about the plastic box set. Like, GW is not going to respond to that question in that venue.

 

All signs point to a big heresy reveal at Adepticon. That's like a month away. If there's nothing substantial shown there then sure, melt down. But until then, I wish everyone would just chill out.

I really agree! I think the insular nature of our communities (online in whatever form) does breed this negativity growth circuit. I wish people could just take a chill pill and relax. We still have a wonderful game, we have fantastic fan made content and we have great content coming from the studio, and we clearly know (however much we shouldn't have that secret knowledge) that something big, ie all that plastic, is happening. Edited February 11, 2022 by Petitioner's City

[Imren]

 

It would have taken the person responding to Macca's question a really small effort to speak to the manager that have the overall responsibility for HH game and confirm with that person that there are actually plans in progress without revealing them, and in turn respond on social media accordinly. But obviously he chose not to, judging by his wording and choice of words in his response.

 

I believe that Alan Bligh was the main driver of 30k and was given the freedom/mandate to create 30k (and Badab wars) applying his genuine interest, passion and knowledge of the lore and a feel for what is cool and grimdark (and not grimderpy). I suspect that whoever is supposed to fill his shoes at FW will most likely not have the integrity, passion and knowledge of the lore that Alan had.

 

The decline in interest in 30k from GW/FW has gone so far that today the consumers produce rules and lore (Mournival rules, Varangian heresy lore and rule package, Centurion army list, etc) that is wide-spread in the community and generally accepted at events world-wide. Combine that with the heavy investment so far by the players and relatively rigorous interest in the hobbying aspect among players (just walk in to a 40k event and compare the level of paint and build quiality of armies at a 30k event), and recasting "garage"-factories in Russia and China produce and distribute the models that FW once did but choose not to anymore will result in that 30k will continue to live on quite independent of GW/FW.

 

"You reap what you sow" is a good idiom to apply on GW/FW stepmotherly attitude to 30k post-Alan era. The salt, the frustration and emerging 3D-printing and recast consumption is a natural response by the 30k community to how they have been served by GW/FW post Alan.

golly, yes Alan Bligh was amazing, but so too are his colleagues, many of whom clearly have the same heresy passion, and cowrote it with him. I think Alan would be decking cross to find his legacy being used to diss his friends, especially Andy Hoare, whom he worked with for over a decade and co-wrote lots together with. It's Hoare who now leads heresy, and he is the *best* person to be doing it if (a) based around who was involved in the series and forge world and FFG, and (b ) nevermind his amazing work in the past five years managing and launching several dead games to excellent success (blood bowl, necromunda, at and ai - soon to be the old world too). But it takes time to do that, which is frustrating, I agree.

 

But seriously this approach to Bligh is the most naive, hagiographic and silly approach, one that I think is genuinely offensive to the personality of the person it is claiming to laud. It diminishes everyone he worked with, his own collaborative approach and has no understanding of or evidence of the way the studio itself worked (other than relative silence).

 

And no, a basic customer service person does not usually have a way to elicit a response from the head of a service in a large company.... because that's what the head of the FW design studio is.

 

Sorry to rant, I just hate it this kind of cultic behaviour to Bligh. He was brilliant, we all know that. His death suckerpunched FW. (As did 8th). But this strange hagiographic approach is not helpful.

 

I disagree that I treated Alan Bligh with excessive and undue admiration in my statements, my statements also do not diminish the work of others, but they do criticize them for their choices on what products to design and add to the range and not, and how often. I don't see why I deserve to be called silly, naive and offensive by doing so.

 

I don't find that the recent range of miniatures and books are as good as the early ones. Some even doesn't take lore background and/or historical artwork into consideration when designing them, such as Argel Tal, Fafnir Rann and Jaghatai Khan.

 

My point is that there is a drop in quality in the products regarding black books, lore and servicing (meaning completing/increasing) the miniature range that in time coincided with his passing (with a year or so of lag). And since the price level (and probably the profit margins as well) on 30k/FW products are on a much higher level than the rest of the product range that GW produce, I find it reasonable to expect at least the same level of quality for those prices regardless of what personnel is in the design/production team. Especially if the prices continue to rise faster than inflation.

 

Strange why so many persons (here in this forum) find it so adverse to criticize what GW/FW produce and/or their attitude and interaction (or lack of) with the community.

Edited February 11, 2022 by Imren

[jaxom]

 

Strange why so many persons (here in this forum) find it so adverse to criticize what GW/FW produce and/or their attitude and interaction (or lack of) with the community.

 

Speaking only for myself, it's because what GW and FW do now has very little impact on my enjoyment of the Horus Heresy. My primary interaction space are black books 1-3 and books 7 & 8 plus the novels. I never really liked the stock miniatures they produced. The early ones captured some of the Rogue Trader aesthetic (which I appreciated, but it wasn't doing anything for me) and the later ones had the small scale issues I couldn't not see once being exposed to tall-scale and true-scale conversions. So going back to those books, converting around the restrictions, those were and continue to be what I with with. Additionally, I spent a lot of time trying to make sense of the First Legion and Dark Angel portions of the narrative and was working on fan-version that incorporated official material with a more interesting source material. I think it's a lot better than what FW eventually put out. The key thing is that I try not to let it stress me out. I step away and work on other hobby stuff. I don't feel any need to advertise it, because it's a personal decision to step away. My yuck may be someone else's yum (for example, I know there are First Legion fans do like what's been done in Crusade) so why should I bash it on the way out?

[Marshal Rohr]

I disagree that I treated Alan Bligh with excessive and undue admiration in my statements, my statements also do not diminish the work of others, but they do criticize them for their choices on what products to design and add to the range and not, and how often. I don't see why I deserve to be called silly, naive and offensive by doing so.

 

The ‘others’ you are talking about can’t say anything without approval.

[Petitioner's City]

Exactly, it's understanding corporate dynamics. Honestly, the best window into this is the interview with James Hewitt on Goonhammer. Hewitt has a complicated relationship with GW for sure, but his experience reflects the studio up til when he left in 2017, but this is like the only window we have into forge world, which as Hewitt presents, was leashed to higher-up desires that could sometimes be hard to understand or arbitrary-seeming:

 

 

Lupe: Why don’t we move on to talking about specialist games? Let’s talk about Blood Bowl – when you were putting the rulebook together and the first expansion, was there any kind of plan about how this would go forwards?

 

James: Maybe? At that point it was very ad hoc. We were situated in the Forge World studio – the FW studio is very much like the GW studio fifteen years ago. The main Citadel studio has gone very compartmentalised, you have the miniature studio with its own management team, and they hand over finished work to publications which has its own management team, and they hand over things to marketing.

 

Forge World, everyone is all in one room. Tony [Cottrell] is the mad king, he runs around spouting proclamations and then things get made or don’t get made. He’s a character to work for. He has a lot of strong opinions about design and things.

 

But that was fine because he cared a lot less about rules than about miniatures, so generally we got on with stuff and weren’t interrupted. So we didn’t have things like sculptors had, for example, where they would spend a week sculpting a thing and Tony would go “argh, change it” and they would change it.

 

But yes, Specialist Games was part of FW. We were a very small team stuck on the side of FW, a nodule, a small growth. Us and Middle Earth. So we were like a parasite…

 

Lupe: To be clear though, Specialist Games now makes more money than…

 

James: There’s been a lot of reshuffling since. As I understand it, FW as it was doesn’t really exist anymore. Because all the 40k and Age of Sigmar stuff has gone upstairs to the citadel team, so FW just does Heresy, Specialist Games and Middle Earth. And of course… Warhammer whatever it is called.

 

Lupe: The Old World?

 

James: I’m not going to make a comment on that, but feel free to record my facial expression [James looked exasperated and amused at this point].

 

But going back, we had a small design team, we had a sculptor, a games designer and a manager. Middle Earth had the same. But then we all used FW’s artists, layout, graphical design. We all shared the same editor, who was a part time editor, who mostly did office management and also did editing as well. The bottleneck was really there, which is why the editing really struggled in the earlier stuff we did.

 

So we were doing stuff in a very ad hoc way. I don’t know if we had much of a plan going forward,as it was uncharted waters, but initially the plan was there would be two plastic teams in the Blood Bowl box, Skaven and Dwarves would be plastic boxes after that, and everything else would be resin. Titanicus, which was the second game we designed, was going to be fully resin. The book was going to be in the same format as the Horus Heresy books, and it’d be targeted at the same people who played Heresy. So just aimed at experienced gamers, it would never be sold in the shops, it’s a completely separate product.

 

Lupe: But that’s an enormous shift from where it ended up, how did that transition happen?

 

James: To give you a timeline, I joined the Specialist Games team in April I think. Blood Bowl was finished in the first couple of months, it didn’t come out until November. The time between us finishing Blood Bowl, handing it over the layout, and then Blood Bowl coming out was spent working on Titanicus. At this point, no one knew we existed, we were like this bunch of people on the side of Forge World, doing our own thing, and it was lovely.

 

So I got to design Titanicus in such a lovely way, in that I got to do a load of research, I got to look at every game that involved giant robots. I looked at Battletech, Heavy Gear, the Mechwarrior video games. How do the Mechwarrior video games handle objectives? And a lot of that played into how objectives worked in Titanicus. Tertiary objectives are almost directly pulled from Mechwarrior.

 

Lupe: That’s such a luxury as a games designer.

 

James: It really is. It never happens. Working on one project at a time for a long period is absolute luxury.

 

The game went through four or five iterations, like complete tear downs and redos. I built it, we’d play it, eh it’s alright, keep the bits that are good, start again.

 

At one point it really closely mimicked the turn sequence of first edition Titanicus, where you lay down order tokens for all your different titans. I really wanted to bring the reactor more to the fore, because that was a really popular thing on the Imperator titan in Titan Legions. You had reactor points in that, but I thought it’s such a cool thing, that should be really key to every titan. So we were drawing on a load of different sources for rules, and over that whole time, as far as we were concerned, this was going to be a resin game.

 

So the level of granularity came from the fact that there would be people who could only afford one titan each. And the game needed to be interesting for them, just as much as people who could afford an army of titans.

 

Lupe: Which makes sense if they’re all going to be resin…

 

James: Exactly, which is why when a titan dies it’s a big event. You don’t want someone to have spent £150 on a Warlord titan, paint it up and it dies and, oh well, it’s dead. That sucks. The whole game was written with an ethos of lavishing the player with good feelings about their stuff.

 

A titan should feel invincible because a) it’s a titan and b) it’s a resin kit they’ve probably spent a lot of money on. So it needs to feel like a really cool centrepiece. So that was our plan.

 

Then Blood Bowl was released and it surpassed all expectations. It made something like 4 million pounds in its opening weekend. None of that came back to us of course!

 

Lupe: [laughs] No of course not.

 

James: It was silly, silly big numbers. But don’t quote me exactly. Or do, but..

 

Lupe: “James is not sure about these numbers”

 

James: Because it’s Blood Bowl, of course it’s going to make that much money. But it had massively surpassed expectations. So the decision was made to immediately put all the Blood Bowl teams into plastic and produce more expansions.

 

So, anyway, Titanicus is all done, it’s been sent to layout and it’s all good.

 

Lupe: To the point there was something scheduled in White Dwarf, which was pulled at the last minute?

 

James: There was indeed. So the miniatures had been sculpted. Chris who was my counterpart and the sculptor in the team, he does it all in a drafting program that doesn’t use a mouse. It’s all coordinates, it’s like watching The Matrix.

 

Lupe: [disbelieving] What, all of the Titans?

 

James: All of the Ork planes for Aeronautica…

 

Lupe: What?

 

James: All of it was done with coordinates. He’d tap a thing, lean back and look at the screen, tap a thing and look at the screen. It was insane.

 

[Lupe laughs hysterically]

 

The guy is some form of wizard. He’d spent ages debigulating the titans. The reason the first two things that came out for Titanicus were the Knights and the Warlord is because they were CAD designed kits.

 

Lupe: So the conversion was miles easier?

 

James: It still took about three months because you have to scale them down in the software and then amend all the details – detail has to be more prominent on smaller models. The Reaver and Warhound were even bigger jobs – he had a pair of calipers and the 28mm model kits, and would measure every angle and every distance, which as you can imagine took forever. So his job was incredibly intensive.

 

[Lupe opens and closes his mouth in astonishment]

 

In the middle of it he was given the Blood Bowl Deathroller as a palette cleanser. Then went straight back to it.

 

So picture the scene, everything’s gone off to the tooling people, everything’s good. And we get a call, Andy our boss gets a call, saying “We’re going to push it back and do it in plastic.”

 

Lupe: That’s a huge investment.

 

James: It was a huge decision and it was clearly not an easy decision to make, and White Dwarf had just gone to print. So Andy got to phone Matt Keefe, editor of White Dwarf, and say “Hiiii, you know that issue you’ve got with loads of Titanicus content? Battle report and everything else… Can you pull that please?” So they had to phone the printers. It was April 2017, 2018 whenever it was? The contents page said Titanicus, and then it was just adverts for shops: “Visit GW Retail!”.

 

I think all the content got reused, although they reshot it so I wasn’t in the photos for the battle report I was playing in, as I’d left at that point, which was weird.. But yeah, it all got pushed back and Chris had to then spend another several months on the kits, because making things on a sprue is very different to resin. So he had to learn how to lay out sprues, which he’s now very good at.

 

Lupe: And I’d like to say, it’s a well discussed fact that they’re some of the best plastic kits GW has ever made.

 

James: He’s a good man that Chris, we like him. So that was a whole drama and that’s how it ended up being plastic. For my money it was baffling when they came out and the decision was still made to put the Warlord and the Knights as the first release. The first titan should’ve been the Reaver because it’s an all-rounder, then the Warhound because it’s smaller but still very cool. Then the Warlord comes out and “holy :cuss it’s a Warlord!” and it shakes up the meta. And you hopefully won’t get people going “but I want the Imperator”.

 

Obviously you still will but not as much.

 

Lupe: I have a number of submitted questions from other Goonhammer authors and one of them is “Do you want to see an Imperator titan as bad as we do?”

 

James: Eh. i think it would be fine. I’d like to see it. I think the thing is, the Warlord is already an exciting thing, I think it’s a shame it came out first, because it didn’t have the chance to be cool and have an impact… It would be like leading 40k with a Stompa. If the first releases for 40k had been a Stompa and Gretchin. So I think the new box, with Reavers and Warhounds, is great. That’s the box I would have released first.

 

Lupe: We thoroughly loved that in our review.

 

James: I would love to see an Imperator, but the problem is where do you go next. It’s the plastic Thunderhawk, once you’ve done a plastic Thunderhawk, what tops that?

 

Lupe: I have to say, looking at the questions I was given, it seems to be “tiny plastic Stompas”

 

James: Yeah, people want Eldar and Orks. When I was working on it, what I wanted to do was I wanted to make the game expandable. One of the problems the very first Titanicus had was the way void shields work was when you got hit with a weapon you lost a void shield. They then brought in the Space Marine expansion that brought in infantry, and they didn’t include any rules that said boltguns shouldn’t strip void shields. So infantry were just pulling void shields off titans. So that was always in the back of my mind, we need to learn from the past and make sure this game works for infantry, we need to make sure it works for Orks, Eldar. So we toyed around with lots of other things. The thing is, it might never happen, because to do a range of Imperial stuff and Ork stuff and Eldar stuff, it’s such a huge job.

 

Lupe: I do notice that Aeronautica Imperialis is in the same scale.

 

James: It is.

 

Lupe: That feels like it might be intentional.

 

James: To be fair it’s the same thing Mantic did, and I’m sure Mantic just borrowed it from GW, which is Mantic wanted to expand their scifi range, so they brought out a skirmish game so you could put all your elite units out for that. You compartmentalise each part, then you grow your range, and you release it later as all one big thing. So that’s Titanicus in a nutshell.

 

Lupe: That’s awesome… that’s mad. I have a couple of questions about Titanicus. Which rule do you wish had gone in?

 

James: Oh without a doubt it’s scale in assault. I posted this as a blog, which I was then asked to remove. I haven’t said this, it hasn’t happened. But obviously by all means pass this on.

 

[both laugh]

 

But I was asked very nicely to take it down. I think a couple of people grabbed it before I did. I definitely didn’t tell them to.

 

Lupe: Obviously, no.

 

James: And it gets passed around. But basically what happened was during development in the game, the close combat rules were a little bit more complex, in that the maximum scale of the attacker determined where they could hit. The way that worked was that every location on your titan had a scale. So a Warlord was scale 7 at one point, its carapace weapon was at scale 8, it’s arm weapons at 4 or 5 or whatever, the legs were always at zero because they’re on the floor. The rule was you cannot hit a location that is more than 1 scale greater than your titan’s scale. So a Knight is only hitting a Warlord in the legs, which is why Warlords have armoured legs!

 

Lupe: Makes sense, so Warhounds can take out their knees, but not go for anything higher.

 

James: A Warhound could take their arms out in combat, but nothing more. A Reaver could uppercut a Warlord in the face. Two problems came up which stopped this, which is what I was talking about in the blog post – the blog post was about compromise in game design. And the big thing was when the command terminals got laid out – and I’d been asking for ages if we could get someone on the design team to do a mockup of the design terminals so I could see if I’ve got the right amount of text on it, and whatever else, and I’d been told yeah yeah, we’ll get round to it. And it didn’t.

 

And at the last minute when it had all been fully designed we realised we didn’t have room to put the scales on every single location. And there were a few other things that had to come off. Like where the critical damage stuff is now like… princeps wounded. Each one of those was bespoke to the command terminal, and it had a set of rules written on the command terminal. But there just wasn’t room. So that came off and it had to become more generic, and one of the other things that had to come off was scale.

 

And the other reason was that during testing everyone kept forgetting that was a rule. Which is usually a sign that’s it’s too complex or it’s not intuitive enough and needs to come out. So I didn’t feel terrible about removing it at the time. But now you have Knights kickflipping Warlords’ heads off, and it just feels weird. It’s not a difficult rule to replicate though, you can put it back in pretty easily if you want to house rule it.

 

Lupe: So as a flip to that, which rule made it in that you didn’t think you were going to keep?

 

James: Didn’t think I was going to, or didn’t want to?

 

Lupe: Either. Both!

 

James: I would have released Knights as an expansion.

 

Lupe: Interesting.

 

James: Everything in that game is about big stompy robots fighting other big stompy robots. The game is designed to put you in the role of princeps senioris, it puts you in control of a battle group, but the game should feel like you’re giving orders to a crew or to other titans’ crews that are then passing that on to the titan. There should be a degree of slippage. It’s one of the few games where I don’t mind there being a ban on pre measuring. Cos normally I think premeasuring should be allowed in game, I’m very vocal about this, I think saying you can’t premeasure things gives you an advantage for guessing distances and that’s not necessarily indicative of the character.

 

Lupe: But the premeasuring in this was a purposeful thing to represent that difficulty in command.

 

James: And to represent the difficulty in maneuver, yes.

 

Lupe: Out of interest would you do that differently now?

 

James: No, no, I think in this game it’s right. Because it’s you asking your moderati to give you a firing solution and he’s thinking of a thing, and is it definitely correct, and it adds a little slippage which I quite like. That said, the game loses nothing just by including premeasuring. It’s a thematic thing.

 

But Knights, they’re not a thematic fit for the core game. Knights, very intentionally, have a much simpler set of rules. They don’t act like titans, they’re a skirmishing force, they don’t have reactors, they don’t have void shields, they don’t repair stuff, they don’t deal with the maneuvering issues that titans do. They were written, very intentionally, after the titan rules. And to me they are an expansion.

 

Lupe: That’s interesting, because… I don’t know how much you’ve followed the game recently…

 

James: There’s an expansion that’s just about running fully Knight armies and I don’t like it at all. It’s not my call anymore, but that’s my view. People talked about it at the time. Duncan Rhodes, he was testing the game for us and he loves his Knights to bits, and he kept saying “ah, can we have more”, and even he understood that all-Knight armies would be a weird choice.

 

I think there’s room for an Aeronautica style separate game all about Knights. About Knight banners doing things.

 

Lupe: I think people would like that.

 

James: Totally. I think in Titanicus they’re fine, they have a very specific role, but they’re not what the game is about. It’s one of my own quirks, I like to design from the theme first, and in this game the theme is big robots. Knights, they’re big robots but…

 

Lupe: They’re not big enough robots?

 

James: No, exactly. So if it were down to me I would have left Knights out of the core game and put them in as an expansion.

 

Lupe: OK. Let’s move onto Necromunda. So, it came out first but was written after Titanicus?

 

James: Well, as everyone knows, I half wrote it, then kicked the door down, lept out the window screaming :cuss you and…

 

Lupe: That sounds exactly like you [James laughs]. The entire time I’ve known you that’s how you’ve always left a room.

 

James: AND ON THAT NOTE… [both laugh] Tell you what, I’ll let you ask a question before I answer it [both laugh].

 

Lupe: Well, I was going to ask about where your involvement in necromunda started and stopped.

 

James: Cool, yes. Well, Necromunda was… so at this point the team was me, Chris and Andy within Forgeworld, and after Titanicus had been written, we were told the next thing we’d be doing was Necromunda. To carry the time line on from before, we had the thing where we suddenly shifted from resin to plastic, and that meant that Titanicus was no longer able to be released in the slot we needed it to be released in, the 2017, whenever it was, release slot. Which was quite funny because Titanicus 2018 is a facebook group, I think previously it was Titanicus 2016, then changed its name to Titanicus 2017…

 

Lupe: Just keep pushing that forwards, yeah

 

James: Well we demoed it at the Horus Heresy weekender in the big floor wars game-

 

Lupe Yes! I was there!

 

James: Yeah, it was really good fun! But that was in February I said “Are you sure? This is way before it’s coming out. It’s not due to come out ‘til November”. “Yeah nah we’re fine. We’re gonna do it.” “Alright.” That was a weird week where I got to find out where you buy 60 feet of canvas to make the board. It was a weird week at work.

 

Lupe: [laughs] I imagine it was! It was pretty weird being there honestly.

 

James: I was speaking to the camping or sailing supplies shop and got them to send us some. But anyway, so we had to make a game that would fit into the November release slot. Now, the prices of getting a game manufactured, remember that this is all manufactured in China. Specialist Games stuff was all done, I don’t know if it still is now, but it was all done in China because there was no capacity in the factory at GW.

 

Lupe: So all the plastic sprues and stuff were done in China?

 

James: Yes, it was another company that was kind of seconded and they were really high quality and made really good stuff. They were the one company to do things to GW standard and they were given a contract to do [the specialist games releases]. So the price of doing that, getting on a boat back to the UK, getting it into our warehouses to be distributed across the world in time for release day means that you need a good solid six months between the game being released and the game being manufactured and done.

 

Basically, I was told in December “you’re starting [necromunda] at the end of December, and it needs to be done by April. It needs to go to the manufacturers in April.”

 

Lupe: Ooph.

 

James: Yeah, so I was cagey about this…

 

Lupe: I bet you were!

 

James: So I sent an email just covering up my back saying “I’m sending you this email just to make it clear that I’ve got a record that I’ve told you that this is a bad idea and it won’t be as good as it could be” At this point, this was after we’d lost Alan, and I was already feeling a bit like “aw come on, this is getting silly” and I sort of made the – I think I made a point in my head that this wasn’t where I wanted to be, cause I’d been saying for a long time “We need another writer. I cannot keep up with this pace” cause it’s exponential. I was still writing stuff for Blood Bowl. Not just supplements, but White Dwarf articles, Blitzmania, the big global league, I had to do a lot of writing for that. Titanicus, I was writing stuff for that. Necromunda, it was gonna be, and it was just this… nothing went away. You’re always writing for all three systems. And I kept saying “We need a second writer. Or can I have a pay rise?” [both laugh]

 

Lupe: One or the other seems reasonable to me

 

James: Yeah, cause the salary I was on was actually the same salary I was on as a store manager. In fact, slightly less than a store manager in London, which just felt like, I mean I’m designing games that are being well received, I should maybe be getting a little bit more money than that.

 

Lupe: 4 million pounds in the first week, yeah.

 

James: Not wanting to sound like a mercenary git, but it’s possible to not be exploited, you know?

 

Lupe: And yeah, I don’t know if we want to talk about this, but I know that low pay at Games Workshop has been a problem in the past

 

James: Absolutely. And I think after I left they had a pay review – not as a result of me leaving, but they had a big initiative. So they increased a lot of pay for a lot of people, so it’s not as bad as it was, but at this point, when the whole Necromunda thing was coming up I was like “This is just not enough time to design a game of this scope.”

 

Because Necromunda was my favorite game growing up. That was without a doubt. There was one issue of White Dwarf where they previewed it – they showed people playing it, and they had the mockups of the cardboard scenery and it mentioned Gang Warfare and I was like “I’m in. Whatever this is, I am totally in.” It just seemed to fit a niche I hadn’t known I wanted to be filled. And then the artwork first came out with the Goliath and the…

 

Lupe: Yeah, that very iconic…

 

James: …the crotch-thrusting Goliath with his crazy BDSM gear. It was fantastic! I was like “Yeah this is amazing!” So the chance to work on it had always been my dream. I had rewritten Necromunda’s campaign system in my spare time, several years previously when I was working for the council between my stints at GW..

 

Lupe: Intriguingly, one of the questions I’ve been given to ask you is “Did you ever have any plans for future in-book Necromunda campaign systems?”

 

James: Oh absolutely. I really wanted to have a system where… the whole thing is a blur, I actually can’t remember what went into the Gang War supplement. But what I wanted was to have was a system where your gang had turf, because gangs have turf and territory. The idea that you are tied in to the area you are in. You’re not just a bunch of randos wandering around and fighting. This is your turf, this is your territory, people here like you because you keep them safe. Or at least, that’s the point you get to. Initially, the locals might be hostile towards you and you’re dealing with that. You have a reputation. As you are seen to protect them from outsiders, from scavvies, mutants, whatever else you get to the point where when you’re fighting on your home turf, there’s a chance that random bystanders would join in, that NPC miniatures could pick up guns and start and you know…

 

Lupe: You kinda wanted to reflect the social role of gangs in this setting?

 

James: Yes, exactly. What basically happened, the thing that kicked it all off back in 2008 or whenever it was, was I played Saints Row. Which is a very silly game that got increasingly sillier as the series went on. But it had a lovely thing where gangs had territory, and when you started a fight in an area, you got attacked by people that were friendly to that gang. And it was like “Oooh that’s compelling!” And you get territories that have special uses. “We’ve now got a weaponsmith in our territory who gives us this bonus.” I was like “why isn’t Necromunda like that? I want grimdark that.” I think some very watered down version of that went into the gang war supplement, but we didn’t have time to do anything too crazy.

 

I’ve always wanted that to be a thing where it feels like you’re carving out a turf, similar to things like Blades in the Dark, role playing games where it’s like turf and territory and control, that’s what I wanted Necromunda to feel like.

 

Lupe: So when did the decision happen to split Necromunda into the board game with the 2D offering and the 3D through the expansion?

 

James: So initially there was a directive. This was another one of those things that was quite frustrating. We had about three or four directives which were all quite contradictory. One voice saying “This game needs to feel like old-school Rogue Trader. Bring back Rogue Trader characteristics and go for the old-school vibe and that sort of thing.” Which is why Necromunda characters have got Intelligence, Willpower, Cool, and Leadership, which are terrible stats because they’re all kind of the same thing. [Laughs] There’s no clear delineation between them. That was an edict, and had to be that.

 

Similarly, another voice was saying that the game needed to fit into a box and be sold as a box game because the trade sales team wanted to have a product they could sell on the shelves as a standalone box game. Okay, but that’s not really Necromunda though is it? Oh, but you also need to do separate rules for doing 3D combat. Okay that’s more like Necromunda, but that feels like a different version of the same thing.

 

So I initially wrote the rulebook, which treated the core box as a self-contained board game. There’s a set of line of sight rules that are abstractions, because you can’t use true line of sight on a 2D board, because walls get in the way. And you can’t expect players to just pretend the wall is there. In an ideal world the rules for 2D walls would say “just pretend the walls are there and use true line of sight” but that’s never quite gonna work, so instead there’s a set of rules about the way line of sight works.

 

Then I wrote the Gang War supplement, which was this big 128 page thing, which had the 3D rules, the campaign rules, and the 6 gangs. The “proper Necromunda experience”, if you will. The problem was that because of the tight deadlines, the book had already been ordered with the printers, and they’d used Death Zone or something as a guide, so basically they could only do a 60-odd page book. And so it got split into Gang War 1 and Gang War 2. The problem is that a lot of Gang War 1 is administrative stuff that should’ve been in the rule book anyway, i.e. the rules for 3D games and the full gang lists. So, Gang War 1 as it went onto the shelf, to my mind, is not a very good value book, because it’s all stuff that should’ve been in the core book anyway.

 

Lupe: Yeah, and people suddenly felt that there was this big uptick and it was a huge improvement from Gang War 1

 

James: Yeah, Gang War 2 was all the fun stuff which we put in and there was hazardous terrain and things. That was all put in to make the Gang War supplement feel more exciting, because otherwise what you’re getting was just dull stuff. The core rulebook though, the core box game, that was written as it came out, because that the brief was for a standalone product.

 

So one thing I’ve seen people point out is that the points values, the credit costs of things are very wildly different between the core box and Gang War, and the justification we used at the time was that the ones in the standalone box game are there for standalone one-off games, the ones in Gang War are for campaigns. The possibly more honest answer is we had literally zero testing time for the ones in the core box – I only just managed to come up with the system and type up the document The costs in Gang War came later, and were the result of some testing after the core box had already been sent to print. Even then we had no real idea, because Gang War 1 was still part of that crazy, four month dash.

 

Lupe: So there’s almost no valuable testing time in that bit?

 

James: Yeah exactly. I mean, when you compare it to Titanicus, which we tested endlessly, we had regular weekly testing sessions… Necromunda was a game that we tested when we could. Like whenever a couple of us could get together we would do it. And we had none because I didn’t have time, I was writing the frigging thing!

 

Lupe: And you had quite a young child at this point as well.

 

James: Yes, during my paternity leave when I was up at the main studio we had Lily… obviously, that’s why paternity leave normally happens [both laugh]. At this point, Lily would’ve been about one, so I wasn’t getting a lot of sleep, didn’t have much spare time, but as I say, I was trying to write this game which was trying to be three or four different contradictory things, while also being the game that I wanted Necromunda to be.

 

And trying to make considerations for how people might actually play the game, i.e. once you’ve painted a model, you’re less likely to convert it, so the fact you have it split between your leader-style characters and your follower-style characters, where your followers don’t really get new weapons or upgrades, they are a thing you buy and paint them once, and your leader characters, you could have different equipment loadouts, so you could have 3 or 4 different miniatures of the same character with different stuff. All of that stuff came from me running Necromunda campaigns over the years and thinking about what happens in a campaign. But as I said I was doing that while also trying to fulfill three or four different briefs that were completely contradictory.

 

Lupe: And supporting Titanicus, and supporting Blood Bowl, and having a one year old.

 

James: And that’s one of the reasons why I left to start Needy Cat Games! I certainly couldn’t be any more stressed or less well paid, so what had I got to lose?

 

Lupe: Was that true?

 

James: Uhh, yeah. Well, I’m stressed to hell and constantly broke, but I’m doing it on my termsthese days which is a whole other thing.

 

 

 

We obviously know things are different from then, but still, useful!

[Astartes Consul]

To move on a bit, does anyone else fancy some idle speculation on what the remaining units given rules in Exemplary Battles will be? Given that we'll probably have some more Destroyer adjacent unites and that they need to be fairly easy to build without FW releasing a new kit?

 

By my tally this is how things stand and a few guesses...

 

Dark Angels - Knights Cenobium 

Emperor's Children - ???

Iron Warriors - Dominator Cohort

White Scars - Karaoghlanlar Destroyers ?

Space Wolves - Watch Packs ?

Imperial Fists - Huscarls 

Night Lords - Atrementar Terminators

Blood Angels - Sanguinary Guard (lol) ?

Iron Hands - Morlock Terminators ?

World Eaters - Red Hand Destroyers

Ultramarines - Nemesis Destroyers

Death Guard - Mortis Poisoners

Thousand Sons - ???

Sons of Horus - ???

Word Bearers - ???

Salamanders - ???

Raven Guard - Deliverer Terminators ?

Alpha Legion - Effrit Stealth Squad ?

 

Still over 50% to go, if they are going to do one for every single Legion

[Cris R]

To move on a bit, does anyone else fancy some idle speculation on what the remaining units given rules in Exemplary Battles will be? Given that we'll probably have some more Destroyer adjacent unites and that they need to be fairly easy to build without FW releasing a new kit?

 

By my tally this is how things stand and a few guesses...

 

Dark Angels - Knights Cenobium

Emperor's Children - ???

Iron Warriors - Dominator Cohort

White Scars - Karaoghlanlar Destroyers ?

Space Wolves - Watch Packs ?

Imperial Fists - Huscarls

Night Lords - Atrementar Terminators

Blood Angels - Sanguinary Guard (lol) ?

Iron Hands - Morlock Terminators ?

World Eaters - Red Hand Destroyers

Ultramarines - Nemesis Destroyers

Death Guard - Mortis Poisoners

Thousand Sons - ???

Sons of Horus - ???

Word Bearers - ???

Salamanders - ???

Raven Guard - Deliverer Terminators ?

Alpha Legion - Effrit Stealth Squad ?

 

Still over 50% to go, if they are going to do one for every single Legion

Sanguinary Guard makes the most sense for Blood Angels. But seeing the way GW found another way to use the Cenobium models makes me wish they would do the same with the Crimson Paladin models, which could use a reason for me to paint them.

[Astartes Consul]

 

To move on a bit, does anyone else fancy some idle speculation on what the remaining units given rules in Exemplary Battles will be? Given that we'll probably have some more Destroyer adjacent unites and that they need to be fairly easy to build without FW releasing a new kit?

 

By my tally this is how things stand and a few guesses...

 

Dark Angels - Knights Cenobium

Emperor's Children - ???

Iron Warriors - Dominator Cohort

White Scars - Karaoghlanlar Destroyers ?

Space Wolves - Watch Packs ?

Imperial Fists - Huscarls

Night Lords - Atrementar Terminators

Blood Angels - Sanguinary Guard (lol) ?

Iron Hands - Morlock Terminators ?

World Eaters - Red Hand Destroyers

Ultramarines - Nemesis Destroyers

Death Guard - Mortis Poisoners

Thousand Sons - ???

Sons of Horus - ???

Word Bearers - ???

Salamanders - ???

Raven Guard - Deliverer Terminators ?

Alpha Legion - Effrit Stealth Squad ?

 

Still over 50% to go, if they are going to do one for every single Legion

Sanguinary Guard makes the most sense for Blood Angels. But seeing the way GW found another way to use the Cenobium models makes me wish they would do the same with the Crimson Paladin models, which could use a reason for me to paint them.

 

 

Guess the Order structure of the Cenobium made that pretty easy for them to do though. I'd hope Crimson Paladins just get a buff in the next FAQ (lol) or whatever updated list format we see...

[No Foes Remain]

Deliverer Terminators for the Raven Guard would be great, maybe a special rule that allows them to deep strike within a certain radius of a HQ or the Warlord which would suit their role quite well.

[WrathOfTheLion]

Word Bearers don't have a terminator unit, that sounds like a pretty straightforward thing to add.

[Astartes Consul]

Deliverer Terminators for the Raven Guard would be great, maybe a special rule that allows them to deep strike within a certain radius of a HQ or the Warlord which would suit their role quite well.

 

They are also now one of only two legions - along with Word Bearers - that don't have a terminator unit I think?

[No Foes Remain]

 

Deliverer Terminators for the Raven Guard would be great, maybe a special rule that allows them to deep strike within a certain radius of a HQ or the Warlord which would suit their role quite well.

 

They are also now one of only two legions - along with Word Bearers - that don't have a terminator unit I think?

 

I believe so, yes. Paves the way for the Word Bearers to get a Termie unit via the Exemp-Battles too.

[Noserenda]

Aren't they pretty much all terminators or destroyers so far? Seems like a pattern.

[lordhellblade]

White Scars- probably their Destroyers

 

Blood Angels- their going the save the Sanguinary Guard for another black book, so probably the Burning Eyes. Round out the First Sphere

 

Raven Guard- Deliverer Terminators

 

Iron Hands- the Keys of Hel Marines. I think Alan Bligh himself said that the Morlocks could be represented by the Gorgon's and that all Morlocks are Gorgon's but not all Gorgon's are Morlocks

 

Alpha Legion- probably the Efferit though we might get a unit based off one of the branches alluded to in Extermination?

 

 

Word Bearers- Vakrah Jal to tie in with Argel Tal.

Some of their ranks are Terminators if I recall correctly. So probably slap the Gal Vorbak special rules on to some Terminators and give them all the option to take hand Flamers because that one sergeant had them in Betrayer

 

Emperor's Children- Sun Killers?

 

Space Wolves- no idea. Maybe something tied to the 13th Company? I mean Wolf Guard are covered as are Destroyers with the Deathsworn. I think a Watch Pack would be a waste of a slot since Veteran Tacs or even Grey Slayers could rep them well.

 

But than again FW was lazy with the DA so I digress.

 

Salamanders- maybe Destroyers? Personally I'd like to see a unit for the Disciples of the Flame subfaction

 

Sons of Horus- Luperci seems like a black book unit, so probably they'll be lazy and give us Catulan Reavers. If what the Dark Angels got is anything to go off.

 

Thousand Sons- a unit connected to the Order of Ruin- probably a Proto Purgation squad with souped up weaponry that screws up Daemons and enemy psykers and get ML1

 

And to round out my salt

 

As cool as the Order of the Broken Claw Cebobium is I feel like the Stormwing or Ravenwing should have gotten a unit in these little exemplary battles. The Ironwing could use a proper unit since I feel FW cheated by slapping Ironwing in front of the Excindo automata

[WrathOfTheLion]

I think for the DA unit and it being 'lazy' so to say, they did go over their process of how they're designing these units in one of the articles. Since they're going back through existing literature and crafting things off that, a lot of the Dark Angels stuff was done like really recently, so that probably affected that a lot comparatively. I don't think they're an easy Legion to just strap something to. Were they to do something different, I think the Deathwing could've used a linebreaker Veteran tactical squad sort of unit. A squad of sword and board tactical marines painted with some Deathwing bone would've been pretty cool I think.

Edited February 12, 2022 by WrathOfTheLion

[Marshal Rohr]

It’ll be Terminators or Destroyers for everyone because those are extremely popular units.

[Cris R]

 

 

To move on a bit, does anyone else fancy some idle speculation on what the remaining units given rules in Exemplary Battles will be? Given that we'll probably have some more Destroyer adjacent unites and that they need to be fairly easy to build without FW releasing a new kit?

 

By my tally this is how things stand and a few guesses...

 

Dark Angels - Knights Cenobium

Emperor's Children - ???

Iron Warriors - Dominator Cohort

White Scars - Karaoghlanlar Destroyers ?

Space Wolves - Watch Packs ?

Imperial Fists - Huscarls

Night Lords - Atrementar Terminators

Blood Angels - Sanguinary Guard (lol) ?

Iron Hands - Morlock Terminators ?

World Eaters - Red Hand Destroyers

Ultramarines - Nemesis Destroyers

Death Guard - Mortis Poisoners

Thousand Sons - ???

Sons of Horus - ???

Word Bearers - ???

Salamanders - ???

Raven Guard - Deliverer Terminators ?

Alpha Legion - Effrit Stealth Squad ?

 

Still over 50% to go, if they are going to do one for every single Legion

Sanguinary Guard makes the most sense for Blood Angels. But seeing the way GW found another way to use the Cenobium models makes me wish they would do the same with the Crimson Paladin models, which could use a reason for me to paint them.

 

 

Guess the Order structure of the Cenobium made that pretty easy for them to do though. I'd hope Crimson Paladins just get a buff in the next FAQ (lol) or whatever updated list format we see...

 

 

Yes, I think that's probably what could happen with that unit and other things that needs fixes like the Day of Sorrow. I really shouldn't be invested in having the Specialist team fix these things when the older Legions need more love but it would be nice to feel excited about fielding the Paladins for once.

 

White Scars- probably their Destroyers

 

Blood Angels- their going the save the Sanguinary Guard for another black book, so probably the Burning Eyes. Round out the First Sphere

 

I don't know whether they're going to save the Sanguinary Guard for another book but I would be neat if a Burning Eyes unit takes a page from the Huscarls and serve as an HQ choice for BAs. We already have Terminators and Destroyers, so a move like this could break up the pattern we've seen in these supplements and offer something different for our Legion.