The Defence of Sotha: Aegida's Lament

This month's Horus Heresy supplementary review is a long awaited welcome to the Night Lords' Atramentar Terminators!

The supplement is available via the Warhammer Community here, and this time we are focused on when the Night Lords invaded the outskirts of the Ultramar Empire to try to capture the Pharos -- the full events of which are told in the Horus Heresy novel by the same name. Key to the Ultramarine's defence of their realm, the artefact is clearly a grand prize for either legion to possess. 

In the supplement, we learn more of the Night Lords who undertook the invasion to attempt to capture it, along with witnessing their grizzly acts in the process. The Ultramarines who defend against this are well accounted for too, but the stars of the show are the Atramentars.

Clearly the series is going to be selecting units that have been explicitly noted in the novels but never really allowed the chance to shine on their own or given any rules of their own to play with. The Atramentar are such a welcome addition to the Horus Heresy rules set, and their absence has long since been lamented. This is now brought full circle and we witness their full g(l)ory here in this release.

I will review the unit separately in a future post (incoming later this week with a little luck) and will review the mission provided in this publication too as a third post. For this post though, I am continuing my amazement and excitement at seeing these important parts of the Horus Heresy come to light. There are certainly bits in the publication that will pique the interest of veteran Night Lords and Ultramarine fans alike. The writing is high quality, coherent, and in line with expectations of what happened for the battle of the Pharos in the novel, along with new light shone on the combatants that were immediately to hand. Excellent stuff really!

[Aside: I am personally looking forward to seeing future rules for the Effrit Stealth Squads for the Alpha Legion. Please please please Warhammer Team, if you read this blog can you grant my wish? Love from me! xx]

The Battle of Pluto: Hydra’s Devastation

Fresh out of the Warhammer Community today is the first in what promises to be a high quality series of releases for the Horus Heresy: Exemplary Battles in the Age of Darkness. In this case, it is The Battle of Pluto: Hydra’s Devastation. This particular release centres around the battle of Hydra and is one of those very notable battles in the Heresy that hasn't received as much attention as it might otherwise deserve -- and hence the release.

Here, we get to grips with the Alpha Legion tearing into the outer solar system defences around Terra. Arranged against them are the forces of the Imperial Fists. These events are covered in the Black Library release Praetorian of Dorn. The release is a solid 12 pages long (10 not counting the covers) and gives us a new campaign to fight that consists of 3 individual battles, along with a new unit: the Huscurl Squad. All this set with a good amount of background material and lore that would make some of the earlier writers of the black book series proud, I would like to believe.

The so-called "legendary battles" themselves are entertaining. The first one (A Spear in the Void) represents the Alpha Legion making a surgical strike on Hydra with the Imperial Fists defending. The second (Maelstrom of Carnage) deals with the aftermath of the first game and is effectively a Zone Mortalis game. Whoever won the previous game is the attacker here and must push on into enemy territory to either damage things further, or to kill off the remaining forces (also depends on your point of view I guess!).

The final game is "Nucleus of Destruction" and represents the clash between Dorn and Alpharius at the culmination of the Battle for Hydra. The outcome is decided by who kills the opposing Primarch. All told, this is an interesting series of connected games that can feature in a connected campaign for the dominion of Hydra. 

We will review the new Imperial Fists unit in a distinct post. 

About the only thing that I can say I'm slightly down on is that fact that this publication might not end up in physical publication format. But that's life. And I'm very pleased to see the Horus Heresy line get some quality attention like this. It certainly bodes well for the future. Bring on the second edition of the game!

Flux Battle Objectives

A long while ago, I posted a series of posts about novel implementations of battle objectives (I: Primary Objectives, II: Secondary Objectives, III: Sub-Plots). Before I left Melbourne for the UK, I said to my gaming group that I was going to write the full suite of them all up in a system-agnostic style (i.e. they're not written explicitly for 40k at all - they're an entirely new system of objectives, but they're certainly easy to use for 40k and other systems without effort) for publication. And now, I've finally got around to doing it!

Here are the "Flux Battle Objectives": http://www.wargamevault.com/product/141874/Flux-Battle-Objectives

And as can be seen in the image (which is the front cover of the publication), I've also been messing around in GIMP (the free analogue of Photoshop). The image was created in multiple layers and the only outside photo I've used for it is the planet's surface which was done by taking an image of some sand!

If you enjoy it, a rating and a comment would be nice to receive on the publishing site. And if you know me personally, I might be able to arrange a complimentary copy for you - write to me.

Random Name Generator: Greek Sites

Today, I thought I'd try something a bit more adventurous. Following on from the various random name generator lists I've been toying with, I thought I'd have a go at trying to make a Greek sounding random location name generator.

From the outset, I'm going to emphasise that I'm not a native speaker of Greek!! I do have some classical training from many many years ago, but overall, I'm not going to vouch for how "Greek" these names might or might not come out as sounding to native Greek ears.

Here's the idea. Take an element from the first column (Element Alpha) and combine with EITHER an element from the third column (Element Omega), or an element from the second (Element Beta) AND third column (Element Omega).

Element Alpha	Element Beta	Element Omega
A	Ac	A
Ab	Acter	Aca
Ach	And	Ae
An	Apo	Age
Ar	Bae	Ana
Cary	Cae	Des
Chry	Che	Dos
Cor	Chi	Dus
Dec	Dan	Ene
Ele	Delt	Essa
Eur	Den	Gora
Ger	Er	Ia
Gy	Geth	Inth
Hera	Hen	Kis
Ill	In	Kos
Ith	Iph	La
Kas	Ko	Lis
Leb	Lan	Ma
Lor	Mak	Me
Me	Man	Mos
My	Mo	Nae
Nau	Na	On
Ol	Nar	Os
Pan	O	Phon
Par	On	Pia
Pha	Phi	Polis
Pre	Phla	Pylae
Pser	Re	Ros
Ptol	Ron	Rya
Rho	Sil	Sos
Siph	So	Tas
Sy	Ssa	Tha
Sy	Sta	Thon
Ta	Th	Tia
Tau	Tor	Tis
Tha	Ve	Tus
Ther	Y	Us
Thra	Ymp	Ymna

Using this format, I'm able to generate names such as: Olympia; Rhodes; Caryanda; all of which are real Greek places, as well as invented others which are reasonably pleasing to my ears: Pserphlathon; Medeltus, Olmakene, etc. Enjoy!

Random Name Generator: High Fantasy Sites

Battles and roleplaying locations are not random places. They have names. This can be seen in publications from Games Workshop (e.g., Lion's Gate spaceport on Terra), through to Dungeon and Dragon's Forgotten Realms setting. So, following on from my posts about random names for both English / Anglo-Celtic sites and Norman / French sites, I thought I'd have a tilt at some high fantasy names for towns, villages and other sites.

Below is a list of nouns. To generate a random name for a high fantasy site, simply take two of the components and run them together. Some may require them to remain as two words, or perhaps even add an apostrophe-s to the end of the first word to make them work. But in general, I think this will work very well.

Arbour
Black

By

Cairn

Candle

Castle

Chain

Crown

Crystal

Dagger

Dale

Deep
Desert

Dragon

Edge

End

Fang

Fell

Forest

Gate
gods

Hall

High

Hold

Hollow
Home
Ice

Iron

Keep

Land

Lion

Moon

Moot

Mountain

Old
Reach

Rift

Ring

River

Road

Rock

Run
Sea

Shadow

Silver

Star

Stone

Storm

Summer

Tide

Tower

Town

Under

Vale
Wall

Ward

Water

Way
White

Winter

The observant amongst you will be able to pick out some "famous" sites (assuming you're familiar with the source materials in question!) such as:

Daggerdale (Forgotten Realms -- there are lots of other "Dales" in there too)
Waterdeep (Forgotten Realms)
Lion's Gate (Warhammer 40,000)
Ice Reach (Dragonlance)
Whitestone (Dragonlance)
Crystal Desert (Guild Wars 2)
Bywater (Lord of the Rings)
Winterfell (Game of Thrones)
Castle Black (Game of Thrones)

There's also some real world names in there too, such as:

Silverstone (famous for its racetrack; located in Northamptonshire, England, UK)
Blackwater (a name shared by several places in England, Ireland, Australia, Canada and the United States of America)
Summerland (a name shared by several locations in Canada, the United States of American and Australia)
Mountain Gate (California)

I'm drawing the line at "Ring Road" though….!

Names for Battlesites, Villages, Cities (Norman / French naming)

In yesterday's post, I explored some (random) names for English (and Anglo-Celtic) locations. The main bit of feedback I received was the need to do this kind of job for other cultures and backgrounds. I completely agree with this. But the main issue is that as I move further away from Anglo-Celtic backgrounds, the less familiar I become with the terminology and the rules.  That said, I'm going to give French and Norman names a go today.

The rules of French are a little different. Not only do nouns possess gender (unlike English), but the ordering of the noun / adjective can in some cases be the reverse of what it is in English (but not always in place names).  This makes creating a random table somewhat harder.  For example, should a place be preceded with "Le" or "La" (the French for "The") can be a tough determination to make. Nontheless, I thought I'd give this a good bash. Moreover, due to the first point, there are common elements in both the first two tables (example: Ville- and -ville; this can be both the start and the end of a name!) - hence one needs to keep an eye on this so as not to generate "Villeville" as a name!

As with the previous post, generate two "elements" from the charts below and run them together. The added caveat is that some characters may need to be subtracted (or added) to make them run together better and sound more authentic.  I've not included prefixes (Le, La), or suffixes (-sur-Mer) here, as my French knowledge is not that extensive, but one could glean several examples by looking at google maps. Here's the charts.

Element One	Element Two
Beuz	ances
Bos	ardy
Breq	bec
Bruque	beuf
Caude	bonne
Compain	boscq
Cor	châtel
Crique	clives
Cros	court
Dau	dalle
Écale	elle
El	eux
Étain	fleur
Har	gard
Hébé	hague
Hau	ham
Mesnil	hurs
Mont	ingy
Neuf	mesnil
Sott	nay
Tocque	ris
Toll	ron
Tonne	tot
Tour	tuit
Veules	val
Vigot	ville
Ville	vy

Here's some example resultant names:

Neufcourt
Sott-mesnil
Vigotfleur
Étainelle
Dauboscq

Suitably Normandy sounding, but perhaps needing some smoothing around the edges and some consonant shifts.


[Postscript: in writing this, I had to figure out how to add accents to text on a Mac for the first time - please don't judge me on that! Those looking to do similar for the first time, check this out: http://french.about.com/od/writing/ss/typeaccents_8.htm ]