Horus Heresy New Edition, or Just Horus Hearsay?

[roryokane]

1 minute ago, Mmmmm Napalm said:

this journal tactica format makes me think we're losing the lengthy, in-universe-history campaign books like the Black Books, Siege of Cthonia, etc. I know they'll have some fluff but at just 50 or so pages. i doubt there will be much room for setting stuff that the old stuff was chock-full of. unfortunate.

That seems to be GW’s way, sadly. For some reason they don’t see fluff delivery as one of the core parts of their rule books any more - certainly not in the pseudo Military History style of the FW stuff. Which is a real shame, since it’s some of the best world building they did.

[HeinzD]

So World eaters are basically immune to falling back? Damn, that sounds pretty damn good, pretty sweet for meele focused units that want to be charging into anything anyway.

Even better for HSS and such, chilling miles away from everything else, not needing to charge, so having basically no drawback.

 

Only thing that kinda sucks, if you dont fail leadership, or dont even have to check in the first place, you feel like you have no bonus, well, you could argue, if thats the case, all is going good anyway. 

 

Also, i like that it could be worth to play units with bad leadership, or even killing off your Sergants first, since the only thing they are better at now is LD, lol

 

[Mmmmm Napalm]

12 minutes ago, roryokane said:

That seems to be GW’s way, sadly. For some reason they don’t see fluff delivery as one of the core parts of their rule books any more - certainly not in the pseudo Military History style of the FW stuff. Which is a real shame, since it’s some of the best world building they did.

it really is. Imperial Armour and the Dark Heresy rpg and its supplements are the gold standard for 40k fluff in my opinion. the former's pseudohistory style is awesome, as is the latter's extensive info on the particulars of the calixis sector; an important aspect of 40k worldbuilding is establishing whats unique or interesting about a given locality. otherwise it all blurs together, the various cultures of the imperium being ignored solely in favor of the various adepta. 

Edited July 1 by Mmmmm Napalm

[Irate Khornate]

2 hours ago, Wibbling said:

 

Then don't buy it. Don't play it. Let it pass you buy. Find other players who want to stick with 2nd. You're not forced to. It's a game. Not law. 

 The local community has withered away for a multitude of reasons. At this point it's I'm looking at selling off everything and just finding a new hobby. Probably the healthier option to be honest so I can stop dwelling in so much negativity and disappointment.

[Captain Idaho]

Seeing the Chaos traitor boys haven't rules for say Gambits when they're Iron Warriors, reassures me that each Legion will get a Rite of War, Gambit, Reaction and whatever extras.

 

I'm confident of that at least, which is on par with HH 2.0.

 

 

[Joe]

Named characters have their own unique gambits as well, so I expect the listed example is Perturabo's.

[Brother Kraskor]

Pleased to see the corrupted EC rules will be in the Liber, rather than having to buy another book again. But then again I have paid near £200 for Fulgrim so GW still wins this one 

Edited July 1 by Brother Kraskor

[Astartes Consul]

44 minutes ago, Brother Kraskor said:

Pleased to see the corrupted EC rules will be in the Liber, rather than having to buy another book again. But then again I have paid near £200 for Fulgrim so GW still wins this one 

The house always wins, brother. 

[jaxom]

1 hour ago, roryokane said:

That seems to be GW’s way, sadly. For some reason they don’t see fluff delivery as one of the core parts of their rule books any more - certainly not in the pseudo Military History style of the FW stuff. Which is a real shame, since it’s some of the best world building they did.

 

1 hour ago, Mmmmm Napalm said:

it really is. Imperial Armour and the Dark Heresy rpg and its supplements are the gold standard for 40k fluff in my opinion. the former's pseudohistory style is awesome, as is the latter's extensive info on the particulars of the calixis sector; an important aspect of 40k worldbuilding is establishing whats unique or interesting about a given locality. otherwise it all blurs together, the various cultures of the imperium being ignored solely in favor of the various adepta. 

NGL, with the turn around times on some of those books; if I were corporate/management, I’d be looking for things to slash page count too.

 

The FFG RPG books had great management at the studio level, and FFG corporate couldn’t muck too much without pissing off GW’s liaisons who really liked the FFG studio team. 

[BitsHammer]

1 hour ago, Mmmmm Napalm said:

this journal tactica format makes me think we're losing the lengthy, in-universe-history campaign books like the Black Books, Siege of Cthonia, etc. I know they'll have some fluff but at just 50 or so pages. i doubt there will be much room for setting stuff that the old stuff was chock-full of. unfortunate.

I really think Bligh was the one who made the Black Books, and Imperial Armor, the way they were. 

[Redcomet]

2 hours ago, roryokane said:

That seems to be GW’s way, sadly. For some reason they don’t see fluff delivery as one of the core parts of their rule books any more - certainly not in the pseudo Military History style of the FW stuff. Which is a real shame, since it’s some of the best world building they did.

Current GW seems very RoI focused and a 400 page military text probably doesn’t drive sales enough for them. That or the GW teams are too overworked to produce them, having to cram every game into a 3 year release model

[Ripper.McGuirl]

2 hours ago, BitsHammer said:

I really think Bligh was the one who made the Black Books, and Imperial Armor, the way they were. 

He also contributed quite a bit to the FFG books.

[Joe]

Alan would be deeply uncomfortable with the pedestal people put him on were he still alive - he himself acknowledged that he was far from a perfect writer, and more importantly, wouldn't have been happy to see the contributions of others trivialised. 

 

There are many, many reasons why Imperial Armour and the Black Books turned out the way they did - and even then, they weren't without their downsides at times. Many of the people who worked on them are still at Games Workshop to this day - Tony Cottrell, Neil Wylie, Andy Hoare, John French, etc. If there's one thing that can be said about nerd culture it's that we take one individual and either praise them for everything that goes right, or blame them for anything that goes wrong; even if they had no major involvement with either.

[jaxom]

1 hour ago, Ripper.McGuirl said:

He also contributed quite a bit to the FFG books.

Black Industries maybe, not once the writing shifted to FFG.

[Marshal Rohr]

1 hour ago, Joe said:

Alan would be deeply uncomfortable with the pedestal people put him on were he still alive - he himself acknowledged that he was far from a perfect writer, and more importantly, wouldn't have been happy to see the contributions of others trivialised. 

 

There are many, many reasons why Imperial Armour and the Black Books turned out the way they did - and even then, they weren't without their downsides at times. Many of the people who worked on them are still at Games Workshop to this day - Tony Cottrell, Neil Wylie, Andy Hoare, John French, etc. If there's one thing that can be said about nerd culture it's that we take one individual and either praise them for everything that goes right, or blame them for anything that goes wrong; even if they had no major involvement with either.

I don’t think we should hate on the writers, but the project of the Horus Heresy has suffered without his vision. Financial growth and widening player base isn’t indicative that the new stuff is just as good, it’s indicative the new stuff is more accessible. While I think Andy has done a decent job keeping a sinking ship above water and bringing it into port, these 3.0 changes are a good sign that Alan did have a clear vision for how he wanted the game to play and the current team has a very different vision. The death of Rites and FOC bonuses is going to be a big problem, because for years people have been brought into the game because you can do the Rites and because you had the ability to feel like you were doing something different. 
 

Rites flattened out a lot of what people took, sure. Everyone wanted to play their archetype, so every army ended up the same, but what made people enjoy it was that call back to Index Astartes era Space Marines. The way they fixed this is by trying to expand the Rites into always on rules, while restricting the the thing that made Rites work with the new FOC. So instead of seeing a bunch of the same legion running the same lists, now you’re going to see a bunch of the same lists, just painted different colors like in 40K, which is fundamentally bad. It bottlenecks the only social element. 
 

If you went to an event and played three games, you’d play a possible 18ish different legion lists or Mech/Solar and the occasional hipster legion list like someone running a rarely taken Rite. What will happen now is you no longer play 18ish different legion Rite lists, you play the same few choices in every game with a few flavor units mixed in. That was everyone’s complaint about 2.0. You’d play a bunch of games against AoD Box armies, Lascannons, and dreads because it was what was in plastic. 
 

The new changes double down on that bottleneck. 

[jaxom]

26 minutes ago, Marshal Rohr said:

The way they fixed this is by trying to expand the Rites into always on rules, while restricting the the thing that made Rites work with the new FOC. So instead of seeing a bunch of the same legion running the same lists, now you’re going to see a bunch of the same lists, just painted different colors like in 40K, which is fundamentally bad. It bottlenecks the only social element. 
 

If you went to an event and played three games, you’d play a possible 18ish different legion lists or Mech/Solar and the occasional hipster legion list like someone running a rarely taken Rite. What will happen now is you no longer play 18ish different legion Rite lists, you play the same few choices in every game with a few flavor units mixed in. That was everyone’s complaint about 2.0. You’d play a bunch of games against AoD Box armies, Lascannons, and dreads because it was what was in plastic. 
 

The new changes double down on that bottleneck. 

I’m waiting to see the whole picture. The Wolf teaser (which I think supports what you’re saying) is very incomplete without knowing what unique units carry over; possibly with old Rite rules moved to them. The Night Lord teaser (which I think supports the opposite of what you’re saying) is incomplete without the Tactica.

 

It’s a whole lot of hurry up and wait until Liber either leaks or gets released.

[BitsHammer]

2 hours ago, Joe said:

Alan would be deeply uncomfortable with the pedestal people put him on were he still alive - he himself acknowledged that he was far from a perfect writer, and more importantly, wouldn't have been happy to see the contributions of others trivialised. 

 

There are many, many reasons why Imperial Armour and the Black Books turned out the way they did - and even then, they weren't without their downsides at times. Many of the people who worked on them are still at Games Workshop to this day - Tony Cottrell, Neil Wylie, Andy Hoare, John French, etc. If there's one thing that can be said about nerd culture it's that we take one individual and either praise them for everything that goes right, or blame them for anything that goes wrong; even if they had no major involvement with either.

I meant more the style and structure of the books FW released. Content was something that could be argued in terms of quality, but I think he was the one who wanted them to be done as historicals and when he died we lost that vision.

[BitsHammer]

Getting back to 3.0 I can get why Night Fighting might have been canned (though I argue it was one of the best tools the game had to ensure people didn't commit to a ranged alpha strike army, or at least meant they had to pay extra to do so), but the article going "don't worry Night Lords you're still scary" tells me that they might have done them dirty by over simplifying the faction. 

 

I could be wrong, but I really hope the army has more going for it than a penalty to other people's mental checks.

[Marshal Loss]

Disappointed but not surprised that they didn't actually show us anything for the EC (or the DG, or the SoH, or the AL, etc...) but at least we have both the normal and corrupted rulesets available at launch. I just hope we still have access to augments and the like. 

[TheTrans]

2 hours ago, Marshal Rohr said:

If you went to an event and played three games, you’d play a possible 18ish different legion lists or Mech/Solar and the occasional hipster legion list like someone running a rarely taken Rite. What will happen now is you no longer play 18ish different legion Rite lists, you play the same few choices in every game with a few flavor units mixed in. That was everyone’s complaint about 2.0. You’d play a bunch of games against AoD Box armies, Lascannons, and dreads because it was what was in plastic. 

I think you nailed i there mate! Even with plastics for 'lesser' factions, 2.0 was absurdly dominated by Marines I found locally (much more than in 1.0) in 2.0 because no one really wants to build a high model count army, to get stomped by the same 2-3 unit choices!

Hell I saw a comment somewhere (maybe reddit or FB) but jesus, some guy said something along the lines of 'well its good there isn't as much differentiation between legions, they are all based off the same archetype anyway" which dear god.. like if thats the logic we're running into from the, I'd imagine newer, community members, its a sad day for flavour and variation! 

I think 2.0 was upsetting as well as so many of the cool 'grey area' armies and combinations and stuff got nixxed. I loved AODC, you could do so many themtically cool things with that, same with Blackshields that had some real differences! Hell you could even get funky within set legions, or the proper Arch-magos archetpes for mechanicum. Not even delving into the god-level sandbox that was Militia and Daemons (and then allying them, with an AODC etc etc).... While sure, 3.0 looks like its one-step above 'take what you want, who cares' allows all sorts of 'freedom' with list building, I (and others mileage may vary) really enjoyed working on the 'grey area' armies, that still had limitations you had to be mindful of when it came to list building. 

But hey, I imagine someone will appear and say stop being negative, we don't know the whole story yet.. and sure, we don't, but people can read between the lines yes? Like we can see a significant change between 1.0 and 2.0 and the 2.0-3.0 change is, already, bloody huge, and I don't see stuff twisting back towards the vibe of 1.0 no matter how many Arcane Journals (re DLC) drop.

[Marshal Rohr]

1 hour ago, TheTrans said:

I think you nailed i there mate! Even with plastics for 'lesser' factions, 2.0 was absurdly dominated by Marines I found locally (much more than in 1.0) in 2.0 because no one really wants to build a high model count army, to get stomped by the same 2-3 unit choices!

Hell I saw a comment somewhere (maybe reddit or FB) but jesus, some guy said something along the lines of 'well its good there isn't as much differentiation between legions, they are all based off the same archetype anyway" which dear god.. like if thats the logic we're running into from the, I'd imagine newer, community members, its a sad day for flavour and variation! 

I think 2.0 was upsetting as well as so many of the cool 'grey area' armies and combinations and stuff got nixxed. I loved AODC, you could do so many themtically cool things with that, same with Blackshields that had some real differences! Hell you could even get funky within set legions, or the proper Arch-magos archetpes for mechanicum. Not even delving into the god-level sandbox that was Militia and Daemons (and then allying them, with an AODC etc etc).... While sure, 3.0 looks like its one-step above 'take what you want, who cares' allows all sorts of 'freedom' with list building, I (and others mileage may vary) really enjoyed working on the 'grey area' armies, that still had limitations you had to be mindful of when it came to list building. 

But hey, I imagine someone will appear and say stop being negative, we don't know the whole story yet.. and sure, we don't, but people can read between the lines yes? Like we can see a significant change between 1.0 and 2.0 and the 2.0-3.0 change is, already, bloody huge, and I don't see stuff twisting back towards the vibe of 1.0 no matter how many Arcane Journals (re DLC) drop.

This is my main contention too. “We don’t know the full picture” but they have explicitly said each legion gets an extra auxiliary detachment, gambit, etc. So we know exactly how they’re going to implement this. They also specifically said some legions get a special apex detachment or detachments, which means the solution to elite spam was simply stick those in the limited section of the FOC. We don’t have the bespoke details of each legion, but they’ve told us what coming for everyone and it’s not a pretty picture. And it will be much worse for Mech and Solar, who won’t get the same attention or care by their own admittance. 

[Brofist]

It takes a team of people to make games and to write books, but having somebody really enforcing the creative vision is what gets you a tight creative product. Many examples of movie, game, music, comic, and trad game creative visionaries passing or leaving studios only for said studio/project to fade into obscurity because they were that strong central creativity. Maybe that wasn't Alan, humble as he ever was, but its only natural to put him into that sort of category.

 

Not to say the folks still at GW aren't trying to do the same, but sometimes they're just not as good, or the political environment in the studio has shifted because that person is now gone. Its all speculation of course, but is it really that surprising it all started to change after he was gone or to blame people for thinking he was that creative heart keeping the vision in line?

[Petitioner's City]

14 hours ago, BitsHammer said:

I really think Bligh was the one who made the Black Books, and Imperial Armor, the way they were. 

 

So you are forgetting several people, as @Joe mentions, but also get your history right!

 

The first IA book Alan led on was Badab, but the "historical" style was long established by this point under IA's innovator and lead writer, Warwick Kinrade. The historical feels was also the models, which also has much to do with Cottrell and the others involved, as well as their love of genuine military history. Honestly all it takes is a good to realize the way people put everything to do with Forge World on Alan is deeply offensive to the fact he really only joined it long after the format and style and quality was deeply established. 

 

Bligh, and French and Hoare, were so perfect for IA, and then heresy, because they could write FW's established historical style so well. A style that begin in the softbound 2000 book, and really was established from Taros on. I think Alan's first contribution was late in Vraks, then Badab - he was a great successor as lead to Kinrade. But the black books were also Bligh and French initially, also current heresy honcho Andy Hoare, also Neil Wylie, etc.

 

Beyond this you had so much also that was just FW of old that gets weirdly tied to Alan.

 

11 hours ago, Ripper.McGuirl said:

He also contributed quite a bit to the FFG books.

 

Yes, along with ... Owen Barnes, Andy Hoare, John French, Adam Smile, & many other familiar - and unfamiliar - names. At FFG they hired these wonderful creatives as freelancers.

 

 

 

10 hours ago, jaxom said:

Black Industries maybe, not once the writing shifted to FFG.

 

No BI was  before Alan was really a games designer (his earliest publications were for Specialist Arms, in articles his bestie John French was writing); FFG hired various peeps as freelancers, including Alan.

 

 

This was one supplement by Bligh and French as leads:

 

 

And here's RT's core book:

 

 

Lots of familiar names, that can be easily found by googling 

 

@jaxom you should watch the voxcast with Andy Hoare where he talks about this, including FFG 

 

 

 

 

 

11 hours ago, Joe said:

Alan would be deeply uncomfortable with the pedestal people put him on were he still alive - he himself acknowledged that he was far from a perfect writer, and more importantly, wouldn't have been happy to see the contributions of others trivialised. 

 

There are many, many reasons why Imperial Armour and the Black Books turned out the way they did - and even then, they weren't without their downsides at times. Many of the people who worked on them are still at Games Workshop to this day - Tony Cottrell, Neil Wylie, Andy Hoare, John French, etc. If there's one thing that can be said about nerd culture it's that we take one individual and either praise them for everything that goes right, or blame them for anything that goes wrong; even if they had no major involvement with either.

 

Again I really agree, but it's also that we forget Kinrade so much, as well as everyone else who worked on and established what IA was in its first decade. 

 

 

Edited July 2 by Petitioner's City
Removing pic

[Brother Kraskor]

8 hours ago, Marshal Loss said:

I just hope we still have access to augments and the like. 

You do make a good point - no mention of legion wargear in the new Rites of War. But surely they'd not cut that out, given they actually sell us a lot of the stuff? 

[Wibbling]

17 hours ago, Irate Khornate said:

 The local community has withered away for a multitude of reasons. At this point it's I'm looking at selling off everything and just finding a new hobby. Probably the healthier option to be honest so I can stop dwelling in so much negativity and disappointment.

 

There's no need to sell off. Just find another interest and come back at a time when you want to. These days I only collect the models I want to. I make lists up and occasionally game with my group but none of us are raging hardcore fellows. We all like tanks, so we don't bother with the damage table, for example as the book keeping is tiresome and it's  no fun when 5 of your 17 predators can't move/shoot. We play asymmetric games - 5000 on one side, 3000 on the other but behind fortifications, with no force org. It is, at the end, a hobby. Make it your own. Take a break. It'll be there when you're ready.