Horus Heresy - Scouring Expansion

[Pacific81]

33 minutes ago, Mogger351 said:

There will not be orks is the simple answer, it seems a little weird to think the HH base game will suddenly get xenos in an expansion focused on loyalists hunting traitors.

Why is it weird? I have an imagination! ;)

[Teetengee]

1 hour ago, Pacific81 said:

My concern is how this will fit with the Heresy ruleset & having tonnes of marines on the board - what will be the Ork equivalent points wise, how will you fit them all on a 6 x 4?!

weren't the orks in the scouring more elite than the current horde?


overall, scouring with xenos could be used as a sort of TOW equivalent, for good and/or bad

[Mogger351]

15 minutes ago, Pacific81 said:

Why is it weird? I have an imagination! ;)

I mean I do too, but the realm of probability quickly smacks down blind optimism

[Matcap86]

Sooo, this could just be another Journal or 2 with mk7 and maybe a castaferrum dread right? Which don't get me wrong, I like, but it's not that different from us getting Tallarn part 1 and 2 now. 

[Jalleo]

I dont see the scouring going for all xenos immediately if it does. Its more likely in my opinion to potentially slowly add them with a different look for each xeno faction since this is so far back. Perhaps they will share models between the ranges but I presume it will be in lockstep with the scouring black library series.

[Subtleknife]

With GW splitting the ranges and wanting a clear delineation, it just doesn't seem likely to me they will include xenos. 

[Petitioner's City]

The problem I have with this is that I feel the team would be - by skipping the Siege and the later stages of the heresy (other than Cthonia and the problematic and flawed treatment of Beta Garmon) - not depicting the stages of descent in both loyalist and traitor sides of the heresy from which the Scouring itself springs.

 

The heresy army lists that exist today are mostly, really, a representation of the late great crusade and early heresy period, with little done to really depict a middle or late sense of the war - nevermind the "after" war. Thus players armies are weirdly generic, rather than being really set in periods. We have a few outliers in the rules - daemon engines, the slow intro of Legiones Hereticus (still as t least seven more to go!), etc - that situate things "later on", but it's frustratingly piecemeal (and sadly it seems entirely dependent on models being released rather than doing deep depictions of periods within the war, and giving players the tools equally for each). Compare the legion army list and legion rules to what is depicted in the novels of the middle and later of the war (including in even now very old novels, which inspired"late war" rules in the Tempus Fugitives rules prior to Betrayal!), especially on the traitor side, and it's not really there ... Yet.

 

Thus you have this weird gap, narratively and even ontologically, for the heresy. I look forward to the rigor of a classic black book approach to the Scouring, but feel this is too soon, and would prefer them to ensure before moving to it, all the tools to start the Scouring are on the table.

 

Maybe an issue for the Siege, though, is studio's inability to depict the majority of the Excertus, too - nevermind the Warp, which is a necessary thing for the heresy (if not the scouring possibly), yet a giant lacuna. 

 

I would hope the studio would seriously focus on - if not "finishing", carrying on with - the heresy, and depicting the fast descent of the legions, and the wonderful complexity of the Siege itself. 

 

I also have never understood why the studio hasn't done even a simple framework of early/middle/late for the war - ie what bolt action does - which would help with both the heresy itself and the scouring. It would really help to give some pseudo-historical accuracy to the game, and especially help with named characters - as if we do step into the scouring, we'll be seeing a big culling of the field! 

Edited March 31 by Petitioner's City

[grailkeeper]

How would scouring era Orks and Eldar differ from 40k Eldar?

 

 

[Matcap86]

15 minutes ago, grailkeeper said:

How would scouring era Eldar differ from 40k Eldar?

 

 

 

There'd be more of them. 

[Mogger351]

14 minutes ago, grailkeeper said:

How would scouring era Orks and Eldar differ from 40k Eldar?

 

 

They wouldn't, that's the problem in reality. The eldar were doing eldar things as per 40k and the orks had been thinned and left weak after Ullanor. The nearest you might get to it is if they decided to tack on either a saga of the beast or great crusade expansion in the future, as that would necessitate different forces for the orks to a large degree.

[ThaneOfTas]

10 minutes ago, grailkeeper said:

How would scouring era Orks and Eldar differ from 40k Eldar?

Mostly guesswork on my part, but I believe that the Eldar Aspect shrines were in their fairly early stages at this point, so I would expect the Eldar to be less uniform than they are in 40k, with perhaps less distinction between the craft worlds and the corsairs. I would expect the Dark Eldar to be closer to the same though.

 

As for the Orks, id expect them to be generally less tough than they are in 40k, their big empires got smashed pretty thoroughly during the Great Crusade. Obviously they will be back by the time of the War of the Beast, but this is a couple of millenia before then

[Astartes Consul]

It's a cool idea and wouldn't automatically mean the end/death of mainline Heresy. If its under the 'Age of Darkness' umbrella then there is already a wealth of existing plastic kits that can be used and a rules system. You could focus on a small number of new plastic kits representing Scouring-era designs, and news specialist units and characters as well. 

 

My worry would be that in further overloads the design studio, which seemed to really be working beyond ideal capacity even during the Heresy 2.0 to 3.0 period.

 

As far as I understand it, back in the mists of time when GW did similar 'expansions' for things like Badab, Vraks, these were run by a semi-independent entity (Forge World) that didn't have the same set of deadlines, KPIs and the like to the main Studio. That approach had its own quirks, for sure. But those projects didn't seem to impact on the way core games were developed, and visa versa.

[Marshal Rohr]

4 hours ago, Pacific81 said:

This setting is such a great idea for a number of reasons. As Captain Idaho had said above it allows a crossover of aliens & Heresy marines. It can also serve as a 'port in the storm' for those of us that haven't enjoyed the direction that the 40k timeline has moved in with new releases (Primaris, Primarchs returning etc.) and would like to see things like MKVII again. 

 

My concern is how this will fit with the Heresy ruleset & having tonnes of marines on the board - what will be the Ork equivalent points wise, how will you fit them all on a 6 x 4?!

Also I think by the time of the Scouring the survivors are decorated veterans, carrying scars (and maybe new arms & tentacles for chaos!) leading to a lot of modelling and conversion/individualisation opportunities. My gaming group and I found that this didn't 'fit' with the Heresy ruleset and its dozens of bulk identikit marine squads; if you have spent a month converting and painting a veterans squad you don't want them removed by a pie plate template and one dice roll in a game. As such because we are grognards we are mixing between using Shadow War for Armageddon (for skirmish) and 40k 2nd-ed (for squad-level) games. There is a link here if anyone is interested:

Sons on the Run - A scouring-era project

The likely answer is that the expansion won’t cover the Codex immediately, it will be the seven years beforehand. By the time they get to the Codex era we will have seen the first Legion specific plastics which won’t be as monopose and will probably be compatible with the monopose kits similar to how the Necromunda champions kits work with regular gang parts to act as a backdoor legion specific part upgrade. 
 

 

Edit: as for why the Heresy feels so scatterbrained and inconsistent there’s clearly been some kind of internal shake up relating to Age of Sigmar and its sub games, the full extent of which we can’t discuss here (obviously) and won’t be revealed for some time, but it tracks with GW lead times. If the Scouring is coming and Old World is expanding as rumored, to me that indicates GW is shifting more focus to its sci-fi IPs and the reason we haven’t seen Recon Marines and Destroyers is because they’ve had some meeting a year or two ago that told them about future realignments and targets they’d need to hit and they’re holding stuff back for that. Mechanicum and Solar both got their tanks and bots and basic troops, but their HQ choices are clearly stop gap rushed sprues.  Sisters of Silence got cut out of Custodes, but I doubt that means they’re gone, they just got the approval to launch them as a heresy line when they weren’t expecting to. 

Edited March 31 by Marshal Rohr

[Orange Knight]

Unless we go back to Heresy 2.0 rules I don't imagine I'll be particularly enthused for this game.

 

Still, it could produce some nice models.

[Son of Rawl]

Only reason I can see for a Scouring setting is to include the Xenos. Otherwise its just Heresy 4.0 with a heavy Primarch restriction for most legions.

 

[Robbienw]

3 minutes ago, Son of Rawl said:

Only reason I can see for a Scouring setting is to include the Xenos. Otherwise its just Heresy 4.0 with a heavy Primarch restriction for most legions.

 

 

The reason is to redo MkVII armour, Castaferrum Dreadnaughts and Mars Patern vehicles 

[grailkeeper]

3 hours ago, Matcap86 said:

 

There'd be more of them. 

 

I suppose it could be interesting to have some powerful Eldar faction that the Imperium would go on to exterminate in M36 or something. Ancient and forgotten history in the 41st Millenium. 10 thousand years is a lot of history. 

I don't see them doing that though. 

[Marshal Rohr]

52 minutes ago, Son of Rawl said:

Only reason I can see for a Scouring setting is to include the Xenos. Otherwise its just Heresy 4.0 with a heavy Primarch restriction for most legions.

 

That is the timeline for this. Mark 4 and Mark 5 this year and next year (AoS’ turn in the cycle) and then Horus Heresy: The Scouring launch box with Mark 7, a Castraferrum, and whatever Mars vehicles the choose to do. We can only

pray we don’t lose even more flavor options and characters in HH 4.0. 

[Pacific81]

Very selfishly I kind of hope they keep some grey areas in the background. My gaming group and I have enjoyed doing some Crusade-era campaigns, including stuff like Randan, and now Scouring-era because it hasn't been explored officially in detail it allows you a lot of freedom.

There are some really great Unification War hobby groups designing & building some really wacky & fun stuff. That all gets lost if we find out canonically what colour pants the thunder warriors were wearing when they defeat Nathan Dume, and you have to buy one set plastic kit to use with whichever soul-less & constipated set of rules GW release alongside it.

[Marshal Rohr]

Considering how badly they’ve handled expanding the lore and outright stripped lore out for product alignment in 2nd and 3rd (and Old World) I don’t think we are in any danger of getting TOO much information. As for color schemes, they can’t even decide on the colors for the Legiones Auxilia, so we are probably safe there. 

[Astartes Consul]

IMO we’re more likely to get a *new* Scouring only Xeno faction than some form of Scouring specific Eldar or Ork list. The commitment to keeping the product streams separate is pretty well defined now. 
 

Also, I’m skeptical that we would see any redos of the Mars pattern kits. They already exist in plastic, and as Old World shows, GW is perfectly happy to repackage ancient plastic and even metal. Besides, if a Scouring  expansion had a similar target audience to Heresy, then the chances of people already owning multiple of the Mars kits are high. 
 

Far more likely there are a series of ‘new’ kits produced. Either fully OOP and previously resin vehicles (Castarferrum as mentioned, maybe some of the Land Raider variants) or some brand news designs that the Studio conjure up. 

[Robbienw]

The Mars pattern Land Raider mold is clearly wearing out, so a good time to do an updated version.

[Astartes Consul]

55 minutes ago, Robbienw said:

The Mars pattern Land Raider mold is clearly wearing out, so a good time to do an updated version.

 

That's fair, actually. I wonder if GW would remove it from 40k all together.

[MARK0SIAN]

47 minutes ago, Astartes Consul said:

 

That's fair, actually. I wonder if GW would remove it from 40k all together.

It might be like the drop pod. 40K gets a pretty faithful update and heresy keeps the old version.

[Hfran Morkai]

2 hours ago, Robbienw said:

The Mars pattern Land Raider mold is clearly wearing out, so a good time to do an updated version.

 

They could always do the MkIIB.

 

What a good looking tank.

 

Hopefully we get redone MkIV and Tartaros before this though because I'm still not building.