40k Warscrolls: The Unforgiven

In case you haven't noticed, both the Nurgle Astartes and Unforgiven (Dark Angels) warscrolls are now available in the 40k Warscrolls section!  So what's there?  Let's take a look.

40k Warscrolls: Works in Progress

I haven't posted any new warscrolls in a while, but that doesn't mean I haven't been working on them!  I've just been going slower.  Also, most of what's left to work on is just more varieties of Space Marines (and Chaos Space Marines).  So the two upcoming projects are the Unforgiven and Nurgle Astartes.  These two are going to be Warscroll Compendiums without their own Battle Traits and so forth.  However, they are both very versatile.

   

Battletome: Chaos Astartes

Chaos Astartes are now completed and have a battletome on the 40k warscrolls page.  As per usual, I'll talk a bit about some of my favorite elements.  Specifically, there is a spell in the Hereticus Discipline named Dark Summoning that I was pretty happy with.

Kaldor Draigo and the Grey Knights

A commenter requested Kaldor Draigo, and while I don't generally intend to do special characters (I figure they can easily just be fancier models for the run-of-the-mill heroes), I am happy to oblige when people ask specifically.  So here he is in all his glory...

Battletome: Imperium Astartes

Last Monday, I updated the Space Marine Warscroll Compendium to Battletome: Imperium Astartes.  Now they have Battle Traits, Artefacts, Command Traits, and access to the Librarius Discipline.

40k Age of Sigmar: Battle Traits (Imperium Astartes and Tyranids)

I've only got two armies left to go before I've got the basics out of the way (Dark Eldar and Necrons are both currently in the works), so I'd like to discuss what's next, and that's Allegiance Abilities.  I'm not going to add these to the Warscroll Compendiums until I've gotten a chance to test them because I think that an overpowered Battle Trait could easily get a lot more out of hand than a single warscroll.  But I would like to show off the two I'm currently working on.  I'm starting with Space Marines and Tyranids as I did way back when I began this project, mostly because those are the main armies my brother and I have, so it'll be easy to get some test games in.

40k Age of Sigmar: Wulfen and the Sanguinor

I received a request in the comments to make a Wulfen warscroll, and it rang some bells in my head, so I ended up spending way too much time today revisiting both the Blood Angels and Space Wolves warscroll compendiums.  One thing I wasn't super happy with when I first made them was how the specific chapters interact with vanilla marines.  With the addition of Wulfen and the Sanguinor, I feel like these two chapters are now more like proper Age of Sigmar factions, each with a few of their own "battleline" sorts of units, and their own leader.  The updated warscroll compendiums are available of course at the 40k Warscrolls tab, but here are the two new warscrolls (although many of the older warscrolls in those two factions have been tweaked as well).

The Wulfen are inspired a little by the new Orruk Brutes in that they have mixed weaponry like crazy.  These guys make up the foot troops of the newly minted "Fenryka" faction of Astartes.  I imagine that they would work as their own faction with Wulfen and Thunderwolves making up the massed units and the Wolf Lord at the fore.  They've even got their own Psyker (the Rune Priest), so they really have everything a faction needs.  By renaming them Fenryka, they're also able to work for successor chapters (not that the Wolves have many of those).

Similarly, the Blood Angels are now "Sanguine Astartes".  What they lacked was a leader, so I added the Sanguinor.  Even though he was a special character, I feel like the proper Sanguinor model or Astorath or just some cool looking dude with a jump pack and a big sword could do the trick quite nicely.  This guy is really just a beatstick character with a pretty cool command ability, and he rounds out the faction.  So Sanguine Astartes now has a leader, a psyker dreadnaught, and two units of their own (Sangunary Guard and Death Company) to round out a proper faction.

Of course all this isn't to say you can't mix them with plain old Imperium Astartes, it's just that they have some fun internal synergy now.

40k Age of Sigmar: The Wolves are Here!

I finished mathing the Space Wolves.  I made some minor tweaks to numbers, but here are the warscrolls for the ones I didn't show off before.  The Fenrisian Wolves are eerily similar to Dire Wolves, but I've reworked a few of their abilities.

Thunderwolf Cavalry are kind of retooled from Bloodcrushers and other Juggernaut riding cavalry, however, I decided they ought to be four wounds instead of the five that Juggernaut riders get since the wolves are so much less severe than Juggernauts.

On a somewhat tangential note, I'm currently working on changing up how bikers work as I think the bonus wound isn't really a good AoS mechanic.  I'm probably going to attempt to come up with something 'jink' save related, but we'll see.  Either way, Thunderwolves won't get it, they've got Icy Fangs and Claws.

40k Age of Sigmar: The Wolves are Coming!

There was a request for Space Wolves in the comments section the other day, and I'm only too happy to oblige.  I hadn't really been feeling like working on 40k warscrolls lately, so it gave me the kick in the pants I needed to get back to it.  So here's some preview of the Space Wolves I've been working on.  They haven't been mathed yet, just statted out by eyeballing it.  My favorite by a wide margin is the Lone Wolf.  I wanted the Lone Wolf to be not necessarily awesome, but super flavorful.

The Lone Wolf has a variety of armament options, but most importantly has a death wish and a hard time fulfilling it.  Funny enough, unlike the Blood Angels, who were mostly defined by their troops and elite choices, Space Wolves seem mostly defined by their characters.  So I've also got the Wolf Lord, Rune Priest, and Wolf Priest.

Jaws of the World Wolf seemed like the natural choice for the Rune Priest's psychic power.  I modeled it after the Ogre Butcher's spell.

Because of the Wolf Priest's Healing Balms, he's kind of like a hybrid apothecary/chaplain.  I didn't end up giving him any prayers ability, although I may rethink that.

I'm also doing Thunderwolf Cavalry and Fenrisian Wolves.

40k Age of Sigmar: Grey Knights

Some of the other books I have handy are the Grey Knights and Inquisition books.  So next on the agenda are just those.  I'm giving Grey Knights similar treatment to the Blood Angels with about five warscrolls, but theirs are a bit more oriented toward being a proper faction without necessarily needing support from normal Astartes stuff.

I opted not to make every Grey Knights unit (or even Justicar) a proper psyker because of all the questions that raises about unbinding and so forth.  Instead, each scroll has a psychic power themed ability.  In this case, the basic Grey Knights unit has Astral Aim, which buffs itself and nearby Grey Knights units.  The other neat thing that basically all Grey Knights units have going for them is Nemesis Force Weapons.  I toned the Force Weapons down so that these guys, while elite, aren't super far outside the box on damage output (their damage output is ~.22 dptpw while normal marines are ~.15 dptpw).  They're still a work in progress for the moment, but they're pretty homogeneous (they don't have a whole lot of weapon options to speak of), so it's really just a matter of getting wording just right and fine tuning ability synergies and whatnot.

40k Age of Sigmar: Blood Angels

If if seems like I'm choosing armies to sigmarize totally at random, I'm just working with what I have army books for first before I start borrowing books from friends and family.  Which brings me to the next army, Blood Angels!  For these guys, I actually only made a limited number of warscrolls covering only the units unique to Blood Angels.  Combine them with the Space Marine warscrolls like you did in the old days!

The Death Company are the most important thing here.  They showcase the Red Thirst ability that most Blood Angels have.  They also have Righteous Zeal, as it was important to me that they have synergy with Chaplains.

The Sanguinary Priest is basically a character apothecary.  Really not a whole lot to see here, but it was an important Blood Angels character option.

Sanguinary Guard are a fairly killy unit both at range and in melee with Angelus Bolters and Glaives Encarmine.  They're pretty serious about punching the save out of fools.

It's always a tough call figuring out which spells or psychic powers are most thematic for a caster.  In this case, I felt like the choice was pretty easy.  The Librarian Dreadnought marks my first foray into multi-line keyword boxes, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

The Furiouso Dreadnought probably could have been handled with a normal Dreadnought warscroll, but I think it's important to have a Dreadnought with Red Thirst.  It's intended that this be the Death Company Dreadnought as well since they're both dedicated melee dreadnoughts they really didn't strike me as being all that different.  Anyhow, I'm adding the pdf version of these to my main 40k warscrolls post.

40k Age of Sigmar "Monsters"

I have not yet tackled making warscrolls for "Monsters" (big centerpiece models with damage tables) in Age of Sigmar, but I want to take a crack at it.  The balance is a little different from other units since the attacks (and other stats) can change as the model is weakened.  It might have seemed prudent for me to start with Tyranids, maybe the Tervigon or something, but I decided instead to start with the quintessential centerpiece, the Land Raider.

I began by calculating the damage output of an Empire Steam Tank.  An Empire Steam Tank's damage output looks like this:

0-2 Wounds Suffered
0.32 damage/turn/wound

3-4 Wounds Suffered
0.3 damage/turn/wound

5-7 Wounds Suffered
0.29 damage/turn/wound

8-9 Wounds Suffered
0.27 damage/turn/wound

10+ Wound Suffered
0.25 damage/turn/wound

Since the Steam Tank has a 3+ save and 12 wounds, I figure it's a pretty good guide for the Land Raider.  As a more streamlined 40k model, the Land Raider has a lot less going on than a Steam Tank.  I began with the baseline of the Predator where it has a primary Turret Weapon that deals D6 damage, and a secondary Heavy Weapon that represents both sponsons.  The Land Raider's weapons are all twin linked which beefs up the damage a smidge, and since it has 12 wounds, I had to up the number of attacks from each weapon to hit an appropriate d/t/w value.

At this point, figuring in the Hunter Killed Missile as well, the Land Raider has damage output of:

0-2 Wounds Suffered
0.35 damage/turn/wound

3-4 Wounds Suffered
0.33 damage/turn/wound

5-7 Wounds Suffered
0.3 damage/turn/wound

8-9 Wounds Suffered
0.28 damage/turn/wound

10+ Wound Suffered
0.25 damage/turn/wound

This leaves it just a little more killy than the Steam Tank, however, as I mentioned before, it has a lot less going on.  I am continuing to use the warscroll size as a guide for complexity even though GW clearly isn't tied to that design rule.  I did cheat a little bit however in that I referenced the "tactical weapons" options without listing them.  It's a space saver and I don't think anybody is likely to be too broken up about it since they appear on most of the other Space Marines scrolls.  While I'm at it, let me show off the Chaos Land Raider as well.  It's a little more killy, but only if it gets stuck in.  Basically aside from re-wording things as necessary, I switched out the missile for gross chaos tank tentacle attacks.

These will of course go into their respective Warscroll Compendiums next time I update those.  In the meantime, enjoy!

40k Age of Sigmar: Chaos Space Marine Warscrolls

  I just finished my first version of Chaos Space Marines.  It went pretty quickly because chaos marines are a lot like loyalist marines, just with less regimented tactics and more rippy melee abilities.
  The first change I made was to replace the Tactical Marines "rapid fire" ability with "furious charge".  I also added Autocannons to their tactical weapon options (and removed Grav).  The final step with them was to add an Icon Bearer option.  It was a tough call as to what direction to take the Icon Bearer, but in the end I decided the most flavourful thing the Icon Bearers have done in the past is assist casting in one way or another, so I just went with a simple casting buff.  I went simple because I view the spatial constraint of my warscrolls as a sort of complexity constraint.  Since the rest of the warscroll was pretty much full of stuff that needed to be there, I didn't have a lot of room to do something really fancy with the Icon Bearer.  However, I think that a casting buff channels the fluff and past effects fairly well.

  I'd like to share a couple of other units I thought were especially fun or interesting to make.  Raptors were neat because I got to roll together two units (Raptors and the newer Warp Talons).  I've also been reading the fluff paragraphs about units as much or more than the rules segments to get inspiration for what they should do on the battlefield beyond just recreating what they did in the past.  Raptors have (in the past at least) the Daemonkin special rule, and some fluff about how they are so mutated and possessed that they are basically daemons now.  So I gave them the Daemon keyword, and a Daemonic Visage ability to highlight that part of their fluff.

Chaos Bikers were a bit of a challenge.  Chaos doesn't get attack bikes, so I was losing a chunk of hitting power from the Bike Marines warscroll.  I wanted to give them something cool, but I've been steering away from impact hits because they seem REALLY GOOD.  Reading some Chaos Biker fluff, I was inspired by the description of them as Dark Harbingers, the forerunners of the Chaos Legions.  My Dark Harbingers ability may be a bit much, but I thought some variant of the old Sweeping Advance would be a pretty awesome and flavourful thing for them to be up to.

Lastly, I'd like to show off the Chaos Rhino.  While the transport ability on the normal Rhino allows all Imperium models to hop in, I restricted the Chaos Rhino to Chaos Astartes models so that we wouldn't get Daemonettes and Marauders rolling up in Rhinos (it just didn't seem appropriate).  The second shift is that the normal Rhino had an ability that let it have a chance to repair itself.  I wanted to do something similar for the Chaos Rhino, but in a more hellish bent.  So I came to the Possessed Hull ability.

  I actually managed to get Possessed Hull, Dozer Blade, and Extra Armour all into various vehicle warscrolls so that if your favorite Predator is modelled with a really cool Possessed Hull, you can easily port the rules over.  Because of the constraints of a warscroll, I didn't want to have every option listed on every scroll, but I figure an inventive player with a friendly opponent (they're already letting you use warscrolls some guy on the internet made up!) can recreate their favorite vehicle without too much trouble.

40k Age of Sigmar: Psykers and Wizards

In Warhammer 40k, psykers are the ideological equivalent of wizards in the Age of Sigmar.  When I began working on the Tyranid and Space Marine warscrolls, I realized that I would have to address the difference between psykers and wizards.  What I ended up deciding on was that a psyker would be mechanically identical to a wizard, but would use slightly different words.  I ended up with the following:

[Model Name] is a Psyker.  It can cast one psychic power in each of your hero phases and attempt to unbind one psychic power in each enemy hero phase.  It knows the Psychic Bolt, Mystic Shield, and _______ powers.

I kept the wording as nearly identical as possible so that it would be clear (hopefully) that Psychic Bolt is the same thing as Arcane Bolt.  Mystic Shield did not need a re-flavoring because it already sounded like a psychic power.  Which brings me to the Chaos Sorcerer.

When I began working on the Chaos Sorcerer warscroll for Chaos Space Marines (one of my friends requested CSM, so the Space Orruks will have to wait a little longer) I had originally planned to continue with the Psyker keyword.  But I realized something, only Chaos Wizards can summon Daemons.  I decided that even though it sets the Chaos Sorcerer off a little from the rest of the 40k warscrolls, I feel like their pre-existing ability to summon Daemons trumps that particular consistency.

The next followup is, the Chaos Sorcerer can attempt to unbind one spell per enemy hero phase.  A Hive Tyrant doesn't cast spells, it casts psychic powers, and it can attempt to unbind one psychic power per enemy hero phase.  Since Psychic Bolt is a psychic power, and arcane bolt is a spell, can a Chaos Sorcerer attempt to unbind Psychic Bolt?  Can a Hive Tyrant attempt to unbind Arcane Bolt?  I'm afraid that's up to you players.  This will just have to be one of those unanswered questions of Age of Sigmar.  Since the wording is pretty clear, I can definitely see where they would not, and since the door swings both ways (by gaining the ability to never be unbound, you can also never unbind), I'm not too worried about players gaining an unfair advantage from something like this.

Space Marine Warscrolls - Techmarines and the Brotherhood of Mars

  I promised some more warscrolls and discussion of warscroll design, so I'm here to make good on it.  I'd like to share my solution for Transport vehicles in Age of Sigmar.

  My aim here was to control the functionality of transports without necessarily fully reproducing the mechanics.  A whole column of the warscroll is taken up here by the Transport rules.  I've restricted the occupants to Imperium models without the Vehicle or Monster keywords.  This allows Imperial Guard presumably or Inquisition to use Razorbacks as well since it's kind of a generic transport, usually used by astartes, but available for other factions as well.  I'm going to give bikes the Vehicle keyword, which means that they won't be able to embark in transports.  This does leave Assault Marines and Terminators who can't normally ride in Razorbacks able to do so, but my feeling is that simplicity is more important than that detail.  If someone really wants to load their Terminators into a Razorback, it's not going to break my heart.

  The next warscroll on the agenda today is the Techmarine.  I was thrilled to discover that Techmarines can finally live up to their fluff of being Priests of the Cult of Mars.  I pilfered some Priestly mechanics from the War Priest of Sigmar, and restricted their targets for their prayers to Vehicles and Cult of Mars models.  This way, they can repair vehicles with the Blessings of the Omnissiah as well as synergize with Servitors and hypothetically with Adeptus Mechanicus models.

  On the note of Adeptus Mechanicus models, here is the warscroll for Servitors.

  Nothing too exciting here, but I thought I'd share them just to complete this subset of the Astartes faction.  They follow up on the Tactical Weapons theme of the Astartes, but are clearly less impressive with their single wound and low bravery.  They also have Mindlock, requiring them to stand next to a (typo) Brotherhood of Mars Hero, which I will change to Cult of Mars before I finalize my designs.

40k Age of Sigmar: Space Marine & Tyranid Warscrolls

  As you may have noticed if you've read any of my other posts, I have played Warhammer 40k for many years.  I love the fluff and models.  Having gotten excited lately about the newer fare from GW, Age of Sigmar, I thought it would be fun to make some custom warscrolls for 40k armies.  I started by doing some research, which led me to this excellent interpretation of what warscrolls for a few Dark Angels units might look like.  Since I have a Tyranid army getting dusty on the shelf, and my brother plays Salamanders Space Marines, I figured the Adeptus Astartes would be a good place to begin.
  I started by riffing off of the aforementioned work they did on Dark Angels, likening Space Marines to the AoS native Stormcast Eternals, (namely Judicators with 2 wounds & 4+ saves) but with a few important differences.  I diverged from their formula for Dark Angels because I felt like to be true to Age of Sigmar, a unit ought to fit comfortably on a single sheet.  40k is a tricky fit for that because of their myriad weapon options, but I feel that I have made it work well through use of special rules.
  The first thing I did was to strip down weapon options by warscroll, ending up with a Tactical Squad that can wield Bolters, with a single marine carrying a Heavy Weapon, and all of them being equipped with Combat Knives.  The showcase special rule for the Tactical Squad is their Tactical Weapons, which accounts for their special weapon as well as the Heavy Weapon.
  By making the special weapon types into keywords instead of full weapons, I can reduce the number of weapons on the warscroll as well as the complexity of the rules while still capturing the overall feel of the unit.

  I mentioned before that the Tactical Marines are comparable to Judicators.  Judicators with Skybolt Bows have 2 attacks at 24" at 3+, 3+, Rend -1, and 1 damage.  I borrowed this bolter profile from the Dark Angels I mentioned before and added a point of Rend to it, but some analysis shows that this Bolter profile now deals the same average damage as a Judicator Skybolt Bow.

  To show another side of things, I'd like to also share a Tyranid warscroll.

  This was the first scroll I made for the Nids.  I used the Daemon Prince as my guide for the Hive Tyrant.  The damage output from its attacks is comparable overall.  My aim for the Hive Tyrant was to have its ranged prowess be worthwhile, but not the main event.  The overall damage output is comparable to the Daemon Prince on a basis of damage per turn per wound.
  The units I've examined so far show that damage per turn per wound ranges from .08 for Short Spear Ungors to .66 for Great Weapon Grave Guard.  My observation has been that the reasonable range is somewhere around .15 to .4 dptpw though, and I have been using it as a guideline in tandem with comparing similar warscrolls so far.
  Some statistical specifics about how I calculate this are that I divide the ranged attack damage output (vs a 4+ save) by 2 and add it to the melee attack damage output to calculate damage per turn, and then divide by the number of wounds the model has.  Because of Age of Sigmar's loose mechanical tolerances, it is pretty simple to produce rules that are balanced with existing warscrolls using math and then have fun writing flavorful rules.  The only hard part here was making sure that a Hive Tyrant with 'Many Bladed Limbs' was scarier in combat than a Tyrant without.
  I still have to playtest to see how it goes, but it should be a powerhouse while also being not too difficult to take down.

  I'll be back with more Tyranids and Space Marines, and probably some Space Orks (Space Orruks?) soon.

Sons of Medusa

  Most of us began playing miniatures games by playing Space Marines.  Most of us played Space Marines by picking some colors we like and a cool name for our chapter and going nuts.  Today I want to tell you about the Space Marine chapter of my childhood.

  My first space marines were ostensibly Dark Angels (because they were green and I'm not really sure what I was up to).  But it wasn't long before I read a bit of fluff in the 2nd ed. Ultramarines book about the Grey Knights, a Cursed founding chapter.  Cursed founding sounded pretty awesome (now my marines are Lamenters, I guess some things stick with us).  

  This was before Grey Knights were well known as the daemon-fighting chamber militant of the Ordo Malleus, so I just thought they were:

1) Knights

2) Grey

and 3) because there was a picture of some ultramarines next to them and one of them had a medusa head on its shoulder pad; had a medusa head as their chapter icon (I was like, 11, give me a break)

Anyways, this led me to repaint my marines grey and black with red bolters and bright green (Scorpion Green (now Moot Green) to be precise) eyes and chapter markings.  When I looked through them this morning they were too hideous to photograph, so I'm going to spare you those old models.  But to continue my story, one day it became apparent that Grey Knights were already kind of a thing and they totally were not my radical Cursed Founding guys in grey power armour.  Thus the Sons of Medusa were born (which I'm sure most of you know turned out to also already be a thing).  

  Anyways, since they already had skull decals with painted serpentine hair on their shoulderpads, I renamed them the Sons of Medusa and they had a fresh new backstory about how they pursued some Chaos heretics into the Eye of Terror and were forever cursed to bear the blight of the medusa.  It was actually pretty cool.

  A couple of years later a new Space Marine book came out and I flipped through it and saw this crap (see right).  Who are these impostor Sons of Medusa?  I felt betrayed.  But I was all like "I'm not changing because they're wrong".  So mine remained the Sons of Medusa who had nothing to do with those puce green jerks.

 So I told you that story so I could tell you this story (one of my friends says this all the time, you can hear him telling stories on Storytime with Blake and Highcove at iPodcast Magic Missile).  Many years later, after I'd left the Imperial fold to hang with the Tyranids (and sometimes Space Orks), I came back to my Sons of Medusa with a pack of Naga (from some game or another).  I crafted the Snake Marines.

   There are only two of them.  I guess I'd count them as Space Marine bikers if I had an army to go with them.  But the moral of this story is that even though my childhood wacky creativity with total disregard for sense was constantly crushed by real fluff, in the end it resulted in what I think are some pretty cool conversions and maybe even someday the basis for a kinda neat army (not that I'm likely to build it, but you never know).

   

Then and Now...

  So I saw a cool thread on BOLS today about how far we've all come since painting our first models.  So I took some pictures to post in the thread, but I thought I shouldn't let it go to waste and so I'm gonna post it on my blag too.

  The first models I ever painted were a pack of Warhammer Cave Squigs.  I painted them with Testors oil model paints.  They turned out a lurid glossy purple with glistening white teeth.  Two colors.  But that was all it took, I went out and bought some more models.  Honestly I have no idea where my second models went.  They were a pair of space marine knockoffs for who knows what game.  They had big blocky shoulderpads and static poses.  I painted them red and blue and then drybrushed them with silver... cuz... ya know.  It seemed like a good idea at the time (did I mention I was in sixth grade?).  Anyways, my parents got me a Marneus Calgar and a Razorback for my birthday that year.

Mr. McCragge has since been repainted (he didn't look very good back then).  The Razorback is in pieces.  So the oldest models I have with their original paint-jobs are the Dark Eldar from the 3rd edition 40k starter I got that Christmas.  The Space Marines got new paint-jobs because I actually used them from time to time.  The Dark Eldar were never used again and some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.  History became legend.  Legend became myth.  And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge.  Er, I mean the Dark Eldar.  So anyways, when I saw this thread I rooted around, found them, and took these pictures of a Dark Eldar from 1999ish next to a Lamenters Sanguinary priest from a couple days ago.

It's nice to take a step back and look at how far we've come since the days of globbing on crappy acrylics (or worse yet, oils) over a half-done base-coat and calling it a day.

Lamenters

 Today I'm just posting some pictures of my lamenters.  I may at some point go into some painting details about them.

 It's a Rhino

 Sanguinary Guard

 Tactical Squad

 Captain

Death Company

 Another captain (I'm gonna repaint that power weapon, if anybody's got any suggestions for how, let me know).