An Expansion to The Horus Heresy?

This has been on my mind as well...

Just so there's no confusion here, I'm on about the board game published by Fantasy Flight Games. The reason this came up is that there has been a discussion on the forums about the possibility of an expansion to the game; basically speculation as to whether or not one is being developed, or if it's even possible. The most likely outcome at this point is that they may expand on some of the cards that you need to play the game, since the currently exisiting decks can be a little limiting. The whole thing is available to read here: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=170&efcid=1&efidt=356284&efpag=0 but as I've already posted on it, I thought I'd offer my take on the matter:

An expansion to the Horus Heresy itself seems unlikely. Black Library are publishing a wealth of background information on the matter including a series of about 20 novels, but if you read them the major battles that occur are kind of integral to the fact that Horus ends up at Terra and bombs the place. It would be no fun trying to recreate the entire Istvaan V massacre, for example; Horus has to win that and the game setting would have to reflect it, and for many gamers playing games they know they haven't got a chance of winning is no fun at all. Same with the battle between the Thousand Sons and the Space Wolves; I haven't read that but since the Thousand Sons make an appearance at the Siege of Terra, it's pretty obvious which side wins. So I can't really see them expanding on that because given the setting and the game mechanics, there's nothing to expand on.

What FFG might consider, and I've heard nothing about this at all and I'm purely speculating here, is putting some elements of the Horus Heresy in to a different gaming system all together. Still using the Horus Heresy background, but essentially different games. Again, I haven't read all the novels in the series, but how does a Space Hulk style stealth-em-up sound for Battle for the Abyss? A Roleplaying scenario based on Legion? A questing knights style game, which could probably be done with cards, to represent the early days of the Dark Angels? A space treck through the warp for Flight of the Eisenstein? If these things can fit in to board or card games, then it's Fantasy Flight who have got the imagination to make it happen, and it wouldn't necessarily have to tie in with the currently exisiting game. So what would you like to see?

The other bit that was mentioned on the forums that I wanted to comment on was an exansion that would use the Horus Heresy system to represent the war on Armageddon. On the surface, I think that's a fantastic idea; the 'mass battles' system that HH uses would be great to put on Armageddon and give you a feeling of controlling the whole war. I think that game would work very well. It's not going to happen though, for a number of reasons discussed on the forums, not least of which Games Workshop won't let them do it.

Now there's a lot of spiteful blogs going around about GW at the moment so let me be clear on this: My comments are to do with their intellectual property and their licensing agreement, and less to do with their so-called illicit business practices. For Fantasy Flight to produce games based on the Warhammer/40K background, they have to have a licensing agreement. For those of you who don't know what that means, well, FFG have to ask GW permission - and in all probablity pay them some money - to produce games based on the background. FFG have now produced a wealth of games based on Games Workshop's intellectual property. Now I don't claim to have read their licensing agreement, and I certainly haven't played all the games, but one thing is common to all the games FFG have produced: You can do NOTHING in those games that you'd be able to do by wandering in to Games Workshop one day and asking for an introduction to the game. My obvious example is Horus Heresy, you can't buy that game in Games Workshop and they certainly don't have a game like it. (I never played Epic 40k, but even if there were similarities in the mass-battle system GW don't support the game anymore.) Blood Bowl has been and gone, but FFG have released a card game for it. There are certainly no more roleplaying games you can buy at GW anymore, and FFG have produced quite a few of those. And FFG's games that do involve battles have completely different systems to the games that GW now produce and support.

Stay with me here... Think about what happens in the Horus Heresy game, it's participants, and it's game system. You can buy none of them as a model in Games Workshop. You can't buy a model of The Emporer, or Magnus the Red, Rogal Dorn or Fulgrim to use in games of 40K - and quite rightly so; there's enough balance issues in 40K as it is without putting the Primarchs in the mix. And yes, I'm aware that there are some published rules for use of the Primarchs in Apocalypse or whatever, and apparently there is a model of Angron floating around Forge World, but they're not readily available from the shop, and I've certainly not seen either. Then there's the Adeptus Custodes, the Mechanicus, Pre-Heresy World Eaters, the Fabricator General - I've never seen any of those at GW. What FFG have done is created a game that GW does not even come close to replicating with the models and systems that they have at the moment. I'm not saying they never will - perhaps one day they'll come up with a version of Apocalypse that requires an entire housing estate to play on, in which case it might be possible to use the Primarchs without unbalancing the game; I wouldn't put it past them - but for now, they seem to be happy with their 'replace the core games and army books once every five or so years' strategy.

Whereas Armageddon... The battle was every bit as huge, granted. But if you think about what happened and who participated in that, you'd find that with a more, for want of a better word, contemporary piece of 40K history, GW have the grounds covered to be able to replicate it themselves. There was Ghazkull and the Goffs, who you can buy and paint, Commissar Yarrick and the Armageddon Steel Legions who you can model off their exisiting products, and the Space Marine chapters involved were Black Templars, the Salamanders, and I'm pretty sure the Dark Angels were involved as well, possibly even Blood Angels. You can get models for all of those things already, and there's nothing in the setting that can't be represented from the terrain that GW now produce. So even if FFG had approached GW with the idea, GW are not going to want FFG to build a game that can be done with GW's currently existing product. If people want to do a Armageddon campaign, they can do already do it with the GW stuff, so GW's response would run along the lines of 'Sorry guys, we've got that bit covered already.' Which is a shame, because the system would work really well for that battle.

Now I'm aware the guy on the Forum referred to the original Chaos invasion of Armageddon. I'm not entirely aware of the story for that but I would imagine that GW have all that covered as well. So that kind of expansion seems unlikely.

There is of course the fact that the game may not be big enough to warrant an expansion; would enough people buy it? Well, it's fun to speculate...

I'll be back with some game reports in a bit, but I've just realised what time it is and I really do need to get out of bed now.

See y'all soon...

New models: Khorne Bezerkers

That is actually 500 points...

So here they are, resplendent in all their glory... the beginnings of my new Khornate Chaos Army. And todays Daily Mirror.

How this came about is that I had some Khorne Bezerkers left over from the Chaos Space Marine Battleforce that I got from Games Workshop way back in 2008. I was missing a few sprues out of it; there were only 4 out of the 8 Bezerkers in the box and as I later found out, no backpacks for them. But I didn't notice until a couple of months after I had it and couldn't really do anything about it. So they remained dormant for a while...

Seriously, don't mess...

Then earlier this year I started collecting Orks, and thought how cool it would be to put Ork arms on Khorne Bezerkers so they could use Ork Swords and Axes instead of the usual Chainswords. Not a bad idea, and from this an army list was drawn, but I was going to need a lot of Orks for that and so far I had ten, so I put it on the back burner for a while.

Now, I've been collecting Orks, and Orcs, for most of the year. I've even gone for some Space Marines. But the Chaos Gods do not lose a Champion lightly, and I kept coming back to the army list I'd drawn up. Looking back, the list I came up with is as near as I ever get to power gaming, although I wouldn't strictly speaking call it that because I'm quite sure my army would go down easily to any half-capable player. But at some point, I was going to have to do this army. It was in my blood...

I really liked all 4 conversions on the Skull Champion.

So I got myself down to Games Workshop and brought myself some Bezerkers. Combined with a Lord and the 4 that I already had, I had a 500 point army right there. It was when I broke them out of the pack that the problems started to arise. I noticed that the Bezerkers had some quite distinctive backpacks that the ones I already had didn't have. I also noticed, when trying to assemble them, that the backpacks don't really fit the model. This is nothing that can't be solved with a modelling knife, and you might expect better from Games Workshop these days, but you have to remember that these models have not substantially changed since at least the late 90s, (the actual sprue says 1994,) and it's going to take more than a minor niggle with the fit of the model to persuade GW to re-design them when, aesthetically at least, these models work as well as they need to. The missing backpacks was easily solved by using some other backpacks I have from my old Chaos Space Marines, including the Champion's backpack which, for lack of knowing which sprue was which when I first got those boxes out, I never used. The other problem was more to do with my Army list, as it happens. I wanted the Skull Champions to have plasma pistols and power weapons; the option is there in the codex but the models come with neither. Enter my conversions...

I didn't really intend to convert much of this army as it is something I wanted to put together reasonably quickly for gaming (goodness knows I need a better army than my current one!) but it's Chaos; you can't not convert Chaos. The most obvious ones are the weapons, where I reverted to my original idea of putting Ork arms on the Bezerkers. Keeping it to the Skull Champions was, in retrospect, an easier option, and fits in with my usual trick of keeping characters in the army (basically whenever there is an option to take a Champion-type character, I always take it because I like the character they bring to the army. Especially Chaos.) Plasma pistols were a little more tricky; I had to find some (hard,) and then convert them so they would fit on the model (a little easier.) I ended up cutting the hands off the Champions and sticking the plasma pistols on whatever remained; it worked but they point the guns a funny way. I think next time I might just glue on the whole arm, if that will work. For one of the Champions I gave him the helmetless head that comes with the Bezerkers, and an Ork Jaw to use as an oversized face mask. Ridiculous, but I like it. The other, I gave a different head, I'm pretty sure it was out of the Possessed set that also came with the Battleforce.

Then I had to paint the things...

Mad as badgers, the lot of them.

I began by using almost an entire pot of Mechrite Red in the Spray Gun. This was not intentional, but the gun became blocked and for some reason I could never get the water/paint balance right again after I'd cleared it. But, the Bezerkers were suitably red. I then drybrushed Blood Red over the armour, again thanking my lucky stars for the Foundation paints as this would have taken a lot longer if Mechrite Red didn't exist. (I would have known, by now, not to paint Blood Red straight on to Black, but I would have taken ages building the colour up from Scab Red up to Red Gore, then Blood Red...)

And that's as much as I'm going to say about that for now. There is more, but as I'm pretty much going to paint the army in the same way, it's ground I'm going to cover in future blogs. No, I'd much rather talk about this beast for the time being...

"I'll thank you not to mention my sense of timing and proportion..."

Anyone recognise this? I worked Games Day 2009, and this was the model that came with the ticket - and any staff who worked there. And yes I KNOW - it's a Warhammer model, not a 40K model. Fact is, I really don't care; the model was sitting in a bag of models awaiting assembly, and to be honest I would much rather see it on the table being used in whatever capacity than get rid of it. Don't get me wrong, I see the value in the model as a collector's item, and I'm pretty sure I could have made a tidy sum for it on Ebay, but that's never what I intend by buying models, or otherwise obtaining them. I want to see them kicking ass, not being stuck in a cabinet! My painting's not that good anyway.

I'd like to draw your attention to the brass, that I painted using a guide found in my most recent edition of White Dwarf (Can't think of the number off-hand; it's talking up Dreadfleet at the moment.) How it works is this: First, paint the brass a mix of Scorched Brown and Shining Gold. Then, layer on a neat layer of Shining Gold. I'm pretty sure at this point you wash it down with Devlan Mud (another one of GW's better ideas.) Then pick out the highlights with Burnished Gold, and finally a very light drybrush of Mythril Silver on the raised areas. I was a bit heavy handed with the silver but other than that I think it worked quite well and certainly added some dept to the brass areas.

The axes, by the way, are supposed to be a Daemon Weapon - that's how I'm going to use it at any rate. The colour is supposed to be Obsidian, an idea I got from the Skulltaker article way back in White Dwarf 34somethingorother. It didn't work quite as well as I'd hoped but it doesn't look bad. Finally, I was quite pleased with the cloak and particularly the dirt on said cloak. It was first painted black with a bit of grey mixed in, (this actually required two coats as I did it from red,) and highlighted with a bit more grey in the mix. The muck was Khemri Brown drybrushed on with an old drybrush, and the dust was Denheb Stone done in much the same way. I think that looks very effective.

So when are we going to see these on the table? Probably not all that quickly; as it stands now the army relies on a very quick short game and I envisage it being shot to pieces as it tries to slug across the table. A later version of the army list includes Rhinos for everything but right now it's just these guys and I don't much fancy their chances against an Imperial Guard Gun Line. What's next for the army? If I remember rightly, a Chaos Defiler. That'll be interesting, especially as I have yet to buy such a thing; right now I need to finish off those Orcs, paint some pieces of scenery I've been working on, and there's a load of Soldiers of Gondor that would benefit from some attention as well. And that's just the models I've built. Busy, busy! Not planning on getting any games in next week as I'm fairly certain that the only night I'm going to be free will also coincide with the one day I have to be up early for a conference. If I get any painting finished off before, say, the middle of the week after, it will be a miracle. But watch this space, I've worked miracles before...

8/10/2011: Pool

I had a game of pool against Jeff once more, and I'm afraid once more I didn't make it all that easy...

To be fair, he wasn't playing much better, and when I ended up putting the balls guarding the pockets, which was entirely untintentional but I'm not complaining, I doubt he was thanking me for it. It became a battle of attrition really, and as soon as Jeff started potting balls he was on a roll and I hadn't got a hope of catching up. I had one chance before the 8-ball went in to pot 5 of mine, and I ended up leaving him open for another easy win.

Apparently the tables I play on aren't all that good! A good thing that I'm not very good either. It saves me a lot of trouble. Well done Jeff.

5/10/11: Thunderstone

OK this was a bit of a strange set-up:

Dave and I have had a few goes at the Thunderstone series now, and since his Resident Evil game is played in much the same way, we decided for the first time to use Randomiser cards, which as the name suggests randomly determine what Heroes will be available, what monsters they will face, and what items will be available in the village. It was a bit of a funny draw, we had Dwarves, Redblades, Amazons and Clerics for our Heroes, and Ooze, Undead: Doom and Dragons for our enemies. Our weapons seemed quite poorly equipped to deal with them…

Taking inspiration from what I’ve been doing (I don’t quite know why as Dave has won the last 2 games of this,) Dave immediately set to work on building up his magic power. As we only had Clerics who could use magic, he had to concentrate mainly on what items he could buy. He bought all of the Lightstone Gems and used the money from these to buy most of the Fireball spells while keeping his deck fairly small; on paper this meant that he could be rocking a lot of magical power at any given time and he wouldn’t even need to use a hero to do it. We’d made things very difficult for ourselves by drawing three very powerful dragons as the first 3 monsters in the dungeon and we needed an equally powerful attack in order to take any of them down; Dave’s combination of spells and light did him well enough to take an early lead, but I wasn’t out of it yet…

My strategy was to use mainly Dwarves. They’re not wonderful fighters in themselves, but they get a huge bonus to their attack if you give them an edged weapon. We only had one edged weapon in the game – the dagger – but having dwarves gain an extra 4 attack points every time you equipped one turned out to be invaluable in some stages. However, my deck grew so large that I couldn’t count on being able to draw daggers and dwarves in the same hand, so I took to recruiting Redblades instead, who have a larger attack bonus that isn’t affected by weapons in quite the same way. This took a long time to pull off, but when I did, I could sometimes bring more pain to the Dungeon using cards that have attack effects than Dave could ever hope to manage by drawing fireball cards.

Unfortunately it was too little too late for me. We reached the end of the night and Dave had to go home; we counted up the victory points and Dave had almost double the points I had. I’d have needed a miracle just to stay in the game to the end…

Reflecting on it, my strategy was a good one – I just went about it the wrong way around. Redblades always get +2 to their attack whatever happens, whereas Dwarves only get +1 unless you equip them with an edged weapon, which since the only one available was a dagger often made them little more use than the Militia that you start the game with. Granted, the effect of adding the weapon to Dwarves is huge and only a fool would fail to take advantage of it, but if I’d have brought Redblades first, then I could have done some moderate damage without it being contingent on buying extra weapons. I could have then got in some early kills, and bought some more daggers – and finally Dwarves.

Of course, the Randomiser cards make it extremely unlikely that we’ll ever play with exactly that combination again, but at least I know what I should be looking for next time. Also, checking back over the game we did misinterpret some rules with regard to what counts as a hero and what doesn’t, so we’ll have to concentrate a bit harder on that next time. Still, all in all a very enjoyable game and one day I will have my revenge on you, Dave. Oh yes. I will have my revenge…

Batman Begins (Xbox version)

I've had this game on the Xbox for some time. I gave it another run through last week since Amy has re-kindled my interest in Batman, and here's what I think of the game:

For a bit of context, I've got all the Batman films since the Tim Burton movie back in the 80s, and I've enjoyed all of them up to a point. However, the Batman Begins film really did put some extra strength into the franchise. The acting was (generally) far stronger; Christian Bale makes a far more believable character out of Bruce Wayne for not having to be nice to absolutely everybody, and for having character flaws that don't necessarily involve his alter-ego. Michael Caine was wonderful as Alfred for his sense of humour and also for the fact that he's not as passive as the versions of him I've seen in the past. The villains were beyond excellent; not much masks and make-up going on in favour of more intricate, urbanised bad guys in the shape of the Ra's Al Ghul and Carmine Falcone. An idea that the film explores briefly at the end is that people like The Joker, The Riddler, The Penguin and Catwoman came about less as an intentional antagonist to The Batman, but rather as a reaction to a vigilante in a costume. Scarecrow is, of course, a law unto himself: He creates his costume and persona for his own reasons. But the overall theme of the film was dark, gritty - and the added element of Batman causing fear came far closer, in my opinion, to what Batman was supposed to be. He might be athletic, but so is Spiderman, any of the X-Men, Green Lantern or anyone you care to mention. He might have gadgets but so does James Bond. But rather than fearing his enemies, he gives his enemies something to fear, and that's what makes Batman unique.

This was going to have to play a huge part in the game in order to pull it off, and as a system, it works quite well. Try rushing in to a fight and you are reminded that Batman is, after all, just a man, as you get your proverbials handed to you by five very angry thugs, probably with guns. Take the time to look around the area, however, and you'll soon come up with different ways of tipping the odds in your favour; dodgy scaffolding you can collapse with a batarang, a pipe you can hang from to pick off your enemies without them knowing, or setting off some explosive barrels. Once they're suitably terrified, drop a Flashbang on them, and you can take the vast majority of the enemies out without having to resort to fighting. It's satisfying to do, especially if you like things with a little more depth than 'Let's find something and kill it,' but don't want such a challenge that it is hard to work out what to do. It is a little simplistic, and the auto-target tool means it will rarely take you long to work out what to do, but you have to remember that the only game before this that came even close to having fear as its main mechanic was The Thing. It was a brave move, and really did push the PS2 version of the game to the limits of it's machine.

Get up from that one and you're a braver man than me...

The game has sometimes been criticised for its length (it's not long by comparison of some other games,) but actually it's as long as it needs to be. The 'Fear' mechanic would probably get old if the game were to last any longer; it's just about the right length so that you can do pretty much everything there is to do in the game without getting bored before you reach the end. And there is a lot of fun to be had from what the game gets you to do; it's never taxing to work out what you have to do to beat the level, but the look on the bad guy's faces when they know you're there but can't see you is worth it. When the time finally comes where you have to have a straight fight and kick ass, there are combos for the avid gamers, but button-mashing works just as well. The targeting system is a bit clunky - you'll be tearing one guy a new one, and suddenly start running across to his mate on the other side of the room, and you won't be able to help but blame it for some untimely deaths.

The graphics and settings are brilliant and compliment the film setting; it has the dirty, gritty vibe that makes Gotham City so special and it is suitably bleak; far from Adam West running around in broad daylight carrying bombs. The music is tied in with the film and works well, and the voice acting is for the most part good. One very careless blunder of using the same sound patch for different types of enemy spoiled it a little - Ninjas from the League of Shadows have their own voices, but scaring them with a dropped scaffolding triggers the same fear reaction you heard from Dr Crane's thugs earlier on in the game. But for the most part, the game is presented very well indeed; exactly the level of detail you'd expect from a film tie-in.

So, a game that looks and feels great, if not executed terribly well. It's worth a look though, and 5 years after buying the game I still went back for another go, so it's not without staying power.

I'm a bit busy for games at the moment but I've had a go with Buffy the Vampire Slayer so you might be hearing from that quite soon...

19/9/2011: Thunderstone

I got the original Thunderstone game for my Birthday, and we gave it a go tonight. Actually it was a dice roll between that, Resident Evil, or talking about a novel that Dave wants to write about Tau and Orks. But I'm glad we gave this one a go. It's been far too long...

OK so there are some differences between this and Thunderstone Dragonspire that I played with Dave a few months ago, but they're mostly aesthetic differences and the general flow of the game remains the same. It's been a while, though, so for the uninitiated: You take a party of heroes into a dungeon to take out as many monsters as you can. You need to find the Thunderstone - shuffled into the last few cards - which stops the game immediately, and you gain a number of points based on the amount of monsters you kill and how many points they are worth; the one with the most points at the end of the game is the winner. Instead of going in to the dungeon you can spend some time in 'the village,' where you buy upgrades and more powerful heroes to aid you in your quest, and is literally the only way to deal with some of the game's tougher monsters.

I should mention that we started off with the basic starter set of cards. Normally they would be randomised but the starter set gives you a fairly balanced set of heroes with enough nasties to provide enough of a challenge. We started off with a basic party which would, as ever, needed to be added to. My tactics centred around building up my magic abilities, so I bought a lot of Elf Wizard and Clerics. Neither of their effects are all that much good until they get levelled up; the Cleric's effect of swapping a Disease card for another card is useful but a bit of a gamble because you don't know what the next card will be, and by the time you work it out your already committed into walking into the dungeon; you have to fight something, regardless of whether or not you can win. The attack power of the magic cards are fairly low at first and there are no magic cards in your starting hand, so it was a long time before I could venture into the dungeon to kill any monsters. The upshot of all of this is by the time I finally did, Dave had already got a lot of kills and levelled his heroes up quite a bit.

I began to pull it back when it transpired that because I was so dependent on magic, I no longer needed my militia or any of their associated effects; dropping those cards gave me a more efficient deck and there were a lot more options open to me for attack. I maxed out one Elf Archmage, which certainly helped but I can't quite figure out their effect; you get to put a monster from your hand back in to the dungeon. You don't get to fight it again because the Thunderstone will come up long before you see it, so all you're doing is throwing away victory points. The only reason I can think of for doing it is removing some low-reward monsters to speed up your deck, and in a game with more people that might be a reasonable tactic but it wasn't really going to help against Dave; if I didn't kill something, he would. So, I kept blasting the monsters with magic and whittling down the dungeon, until the Thunderstone was revealed...

Between the Thunderstone and the two of us there were two Nixies, who considering how proficient our decks were by then were very easy to kill. I killed one, and then Dave drew a bad hand so I killed the other, claiming the Thunderstone and ending the game. But did I win? We counted up the victory points, Dave had 39, I had 36. It was a close run, but in the end the game went to Dave.

So what went wrong? Well, Dave spent the earlier part of the game building up an attack force of Squires and Knights, even managed to get a Lord at one point. However, their effects relate to Militia and he'd thrown most of those cards away, making their effects next to useless. He was building up some magic in order to tackle some of the better monsters in the game I was nonetheless making a meal of, he did get an Archmage in the end and it was helping. His fighters, however, were of far more use when it came to dealing with the only monster in the game that halved the magic damage and couldn't be hit by weapons. Worth a whopping 6 victory points, the game was going to go to whoever had that one, and it was only really Dave who could have done it.

So, tactics for next time? Well if I play with that particular combination of cards again I'll think about building up some fighting skill as well as magic. It might be an idea to start off collecting some fighting cards and build up the magic power later in the game. It all depends on what gets drawn in the next go... but it will be interesting to find out.

Well done Dave, it was a close one but you won fair and square.

4/9/2011: Pool

Just a quick one...

This one was at Ye Olde Foundry in Dudley, where I was doing a gig on the same night. I was there with Dave, and though he always insisted he plays his best pool when he's drunk, he still gave it a good go...

I almost feel compelled, when there are blue balls, to try and go for them given my football team. Tonight was no exception but my good fortune ended there. I wasn't exactly concentrating very hard but I could not hit a ball accurately from then on, and ended up losing to Dave still having the majority of the balls left on the table. Not one of my better efforts. But then again, I never said I was any good at this...