Quick 40k Game #2

 Last month I played 10th edition 40k for the first time. 

The kid and I returned to battle this weekend with effectively the same forces, and tried to incorporate more of the various layers of special rules. 

The Kid had a Space Marine Vanguard force (light scouty sorts) and I had an Eldar force.  This time I remembered to take a picture of the mission cards, so I can report to you that we had a Sweeping Engagement set up, a primary mission of Take and Hold, and a mission rule of Supply Lines.  That means that we deployed diagonally, with five somewhat offset objectives, and the supply lines mission rule meant that we generated an extra CP if we held onto our home objective. 

This time I actually remembered most of my special abilities, but I still spent a lot of time shuffling through printouts comparing various rules.

Initial set up

In this initial setup picture you can see that the Eldar are on the bottom, mostly centered on the left.  I remembered to set up the guardians on the objective.  Swooping hawks are off board ready to... swoop.  Rangers infiltrated into the forest on the top left.  The large group of marines near the center was shrouded by the librarian, so I could not shoot them.

Wraith blades vs. scout dreadnaught

The dread is a real beast, since it has three heavy weapons, two heavy stubbers, a rocket pod, power fist, and as a vehicle can tank shock... it killed off the wraith blades before finally getting killed by the wraith guard. 

Reivers and a lieutenant drop in to assassinate the Farseer

The Reivers popped in to assassinate my Farseer (the warlock had just been sniped), which they did very successfully.  Then they kill d a few guardians, who then turned left and blasted them off the board.  The lieutenant unfortunately lived.  I feel less bad about my unpainted farseer base when the reiver in the back left has no head... 

Final positioning

Two wraith guard left alive, five guardians, and four swooping hawks left at the start of turn four.  Swooping hawks now toss a TON of dice, so they managed to blast the lieutenant away before getting killed.  Somehow I ended up with seven figures left on the board, but a major win on points?  40k is weird. 

Playing games with painted miniatures is fun, the 40k universe is fun, but I am not convinced that 10th edition is fun, since there is a lot of "game-y" interaction between piles of special rules that hurt my head.  Never-the-less, we are going to play some more soon(-ish, now that school has started up again). 

Quick 40k Game

For my birthday, the main thing that the kid wanted to do was play 40k with me.  You would think that what I wanted would have primacy on a day that is supposed to be about me, but not the case.

We set up the game mat that I made a few years ago, and a couple of small armies.  The kid took an Ultramarine scouting unit, which had a pseudo-dreadnaught, snipers, two squads of guys (one deepstriking) and a small squad of flying guys with autocannon.  I can never remember new marine squad names.  I played Eldar, and took one squad of guardians, two of wraithguard, a farseer, and a squad of rangers. The farseer was shamefully on an unpainted base AND was only about 80% painted, but somehow he did not get killed? 

Board setup, with objectives which garnered points for camping on them

marines being hacked to death by robots piloted by ghosts, and then shot by more robots piloted by ghosts.  Eldar are cool. 

As usual, I forgot to take many pictures, and we ran out of time to finish before my parents came over for dinner, but it was a fun game, even if I did have to ask for clarification about the interaction of CP/Army/Detachment/unit rules with the opposing army CP/Army/Detachment/unit rules about 100 times. 

It did get me painting more units, or rather finishing more units I started last year.  So maybe that is a good thing? 

40k with the kid

My oldest got the mini-Warhammer 40k Starter "First Strike" from my mother-in-law for Christmas, and was pretty excited about it.  He ripped the package open, read all the books, and clipped out and assembled all the figures within a day.

After I helped him scrape off mold lines and glue the figure together, we waited for some good weather to spray undercoat the figures (where I was aggravated by the failure of two newer cans of spray paint.  Fortunately my 15 year old Citadel spray paint still works...)

He then painted all the figures himself, which naturally took quite a bit longer. 

Despite my protestations, he went Ultramarines

 Somehow he had the idea that you can not play the game without painting the figures, so he was pretty eager to get the first few needed for missions completed.

First game First Strike! 

After we played with the first few figures he painted, he rushed through the last few so that we could play a "real" game with all the figures at once.  Since the points are imbalanced, the boys in blue won every time!  Which is probably working as intended. 

Good guys losing to the blue servants of the Tyrant

Now that 9th edition is on the horizon, there has been some interest in getting more figures, so we shall see.  The cost of 40k is fortunately something he is acquainted with, as well as forced obsolescence, so he is relatively patient with getting more.  When the actual starter is announced, we may get figures from it on Ebay, as he is already leery of getting more figures for an army he is not interested in after the Death Guard from this box.

Twenty Years

Somewhere around the middle of November, 20 years ago, a college student mail ordered the Warhammer 40k boxed set from The Armchair General.

I have discussed previously how I found a brochure called An Introduction to Games Workshop at a local hobby store, which as one might surmise from the title served as an explanation of the various GW games.  [And six years ago (!) Tony from Dampfpanzerwagon sent me a copy of that same brochure]  After I got that brochure, I poured over it for hours and hours, and eventually connected the games pictured to Battlemasters and Heroquest, which I obtained at about that time.  I did not ever actually play 40k in those days though, as lack of access and lack of cash were definite problems.

Later, when I was in college, I started viewing the old usergroup Rec.games.miniatures for some reason or other, and immediately realized that this "40k" thing was now starting to be accessible online. I worked up the nerve and bought the starter box and a few miniatures, starting me off a long road.

Hard to believe that twenty years later I am still at it, and that it has been so long.  Maybe some day I will finally paint all of that starter set...

Rationality in the year 40,000

There has been some discussion lately on Ammobunker about the nature of "civilians" in the 40k universe, inspired by Exokan's WIP civilian figures.  Some argued that there are no civilians in the traditional sense in the far off year of 40,000, and that all are subsumed into guilds and factories to the extent that all form a part of the military machine.  Others point to the irrationality of having a workforce comprised of workers dedicated to mindless task repetition, and how this does not allow for population growth or change, even with the constraints of a universe at constant total war.

In short, is a hive populated by generational guilds of skull-faced-lion-maned-mono-task-drill-armed-stiletto-heeled maniacs, or is it populated by sober serfs who work very hard for little reward, but are otherwise fairly familiar members of humanity?

Here is a quote from Thistle, who has an official and public hand in the look and development of 40k: ...they cannot be considered civilians - the very term itself is something i would not weave into the 40k canon a bit like money or latin they just do not exist in the far flung future... [sic]  Civilians as we conceive of it do not exist, just like money [!] seems a bit much for me.

Here is an opposing quote from MarcoSkoll: And, I feel that even as dsytopian as the setting might be, the fact it has sustained itself for the last ten thousand years must mean that huge swathes of its population remain capable of reproduction and parenting.
As delightfully morbid as a butcher with huge hydraulic cleaver for his arm might be, grafting the entire labour force to their tools does mean they're going to find themselves somewhat limited in their ability to raise children.  Seems more on the money, where the strange and colorful aspects of the universe are in fact strange and colorful because the rest of the universe is more mundane, and rational.
Rationality in the blurb-official 40k has always been lacking, as when it is mentioned that the Adeptus Mechanicus and similar only can run and produce machines with the appropriate blessings for the machine spirit, sacred oils, and so on, while at the same time we have hive worlds with populations in the billions, toiling in factories uncountable, which would mean that either every factory has thousands of Tech Priests, and production is staggeringly inefficient, or that in fact machine worship is just a surface gloss, and that workers toiling at machine tools uncounted produce weapons and goods without necessitating any intervention by holy water sprinklers.   Priests of Mars has characters impressed into service on the Techno-Ark as plasma engine serfs, slaving away at cleaning plasma chambers, even unto death, but even those were impressed into service from a world where they worked for wages at normal (if difficult) jobs.

Irrational repetition of tasks also produces non-rational actors, which means that you can not create an effective population of officers, engineers, supervisors, and (importantly) Inquisitors from it.  As these are demonstrably a part of the 40k universe, they must therefore be produced by rational means from rational people, so there must exist at least a portion of the population which is not given over to unthinking total military production.

Another way to look at this question is total number of military effectives of a population.  We could look at the historical example of the Soviet Union in the Second World War, which had a population of approximately 140 million, and 34 million under arms during that period. (~24%).  If one reduces that number slightly to account for the fact that such a high number under arms and so many killed during the war caused a post war population crash, and that the Western Allies produced some of the material used by the Soviet war machine, you could say that 20% of a population under arms is close to a sustainable maximum. So indeed, there must be civilians in the other 80%, as they could not all be children.

Recent works by Dan Abnett in particular, and the Black Library novelists in general, paint a universe where war is constant, but not ever present, as there are sectors where life is, for want of a better word, normal, and there are battle lines, well away from the day to day life of most of the population. Indeed, Ravnor, Eisenhorn, and Gaunt confront the difficulties of the imperial bureaucracy, guilds, and, but still see civilians and humanity as separate from the war machine, and civilians as separate from their jobs.

So just how rational is that far off year where there is only war?  I suggest to you that the rationality of that distant time is alive and well, despite and perhaps because of the irrational times in which humanity lives.  While irrational elements persist, they are a coloration on the drab grey workaday world of the rest of humanity.  Our aforementioned augmented guild worker is part of the reality of the world, but there are masses of rational (but constrained) civilians to support them in their work, by undertaking the less specialized and standard tasks of existence.

Anyway, provided you made it through this, what do you think?

Nurgle Plague Drones

Like most GW watchers, I saw the tiny scanned pictures from the latest White Dwarf, and scoffed at most of the forthcoming Daemon figures.  They seemed uniformly terrible, and certainly overpriced.  What a difference a clear picture makes:

Instead of this:

Now with mangy elephant trunks!

Now I must have them.  I fancy mounting chaos knights on them, or making them scary alien mega-bugs or something.  I do not even know, but I know I love them, and loath only that they cost so very much ($60 for the box, which has WHFB options as well)

And with an ogre head, and some ork arms in the front, they could be some sort of horrid creature to fight in Inq28 too...

Terrain from the past

When I first started reading about Warhammer 40k online, I somehow stumbled on to Terragenesis, back when it was run by Gary James as a sort of proto-blog. He had all sorts of great projects, and in particular a Gothic church that caught my fancy.  I decided to build something similar, when I turned my hand to terrain creation.

I created this as a sort of Sisters of Battle Chapel, since they had just come out at the time of its construction, and my then girl friend was interested in them.  Construction was common cardboard with drywall spackle over it, details with thinner card and from various wood bits.  Paint was common craft acrylics.  As a piece of terrain it was not very useful, since it was not accessible, and therefore became merely a large piece of LOS blocking terrain.

Sisters of Battle Chapel



Here you can see the damage wrought by time and exposure to the spackle

This cottage was one of two made to tie in with the chapel.  As you can see, it had an interior, which made it marginally more useful than the chapel.  Again it was constructed from cardboard and spackle, although in this case it had half timber work done with various bits of wood.

 

These last two buildings were part of a set of three that I made for an art project at school (and designed with an eye to using them for 40k).  As I recall, we were supposed to design a memorial, and this was to be a memorial to "bombed out cities ruined by airpower" or some such, where the buildings would be constructed in a pit, and then the viewer would see them from above as if they were in a bomber. Sounds very "art class" no?

 

Besides the stated goal of the project, my goal was to get some useful terrain out of of this expenditure of effort.  So I had three building ruins, roughly the right size for miniatures to fit in and fire out of the windows, and away I went.  Construction was foam core and PVA glue, supported with pins while the glue dried.  However, as with all school projects, I started it far far too late at night, and had to rush the production, most particularly the painting stage, as you can see here. 

Unfortunately, all of these buildings were packed up after I moved out of my apartment, and then languished in my parents' attic for a decade.  They recently cleared everything out, and the box of terrain came home with me.  I was going to toss it all out, but my son kept them to play with in the garden, where they have been suffering the effects of exposure for a few months.  Once it starts raining again, they are headed for the trash.  A pity, but they have not aged well, and I find them shockingly bad now.

40k with lego

This is a bit more advance than when I played with legos as a kid...

Inquisitors

I have nearly finished reading the Ravenor Omnibus, which I read while on vacation (long plane flights are ideal for light reading). Lots of interesting ideas there for an inquisitor's retinue, as well as various PDF/guard/criminal/scum sorts. Ideas include a gun slinger reaching for a pistol, as well as gun servitors.

While on vacation I also saw lots of inspiring architecture, which will hopefully figure into my future terrain. NYC and Yale in particular had inspiring buildings, which will fit into the pulp or 40k milleu.

No model progress lately, mostly due to being gone and prior to that busy finishing up the bathroom. I hope to get the "Delaque" gang done, and then paint it fairly quickly. Of course, lately, "fairly quickly" has meant months, so we will see.