Hakuna Matata

I resolved early this year that I was going to make a point of distancing myself from competitive Warhammer. I realised that competitive tournament play was not really what I was interested in, and that making a conscious effort not to get sucked into it was perhaps the best way to ensure that other things got more attention.

The majority of the regular Warhammer players at our club play competitively at tournaments. Actually, nearly everyone who has ever played Warhammer at the club has also played in tournaments, but those who have persisted with it as their main game (rather than keeping it as an occasional game and focusing on something else) tend to focus very heavily on attending events and trying to be competitive. As someone who has retained Warhammer as my primary game, I tend to get somewhat pulled along by this. I ended up attending several tournaments last year (6 if you count the ETC), as well as running one. This was slightly busier than normal, but for a very long time I would have been attending 4 or 5 tournaments every year.

For all that I have been attending plenty of tournaments, it's been quite a long time since I was going into an event looking to perform really well. I no longer make lists with the intent of winning the event, and when I get solid comp scores it's normally because I've just entered a list that deserved it (I'm not one of those trying to “ride the comp train” by sliding through a list that's sneakily tougher than it looks). Winning Axemaster last year was basically an accident, brought about by my list gradually toughening during the year as I painted more stuff that worked together to make the list better (many of them new toys that appeared with the current incarnation of the Empire army book). If had already had Demigryphs painted and no Spearmen, you probably would have seen my list getting weaker as I kept painting, rather than the other way around...

Anyway, some people probably don't understand entering a tournament without trying to do especially well in it, but from experience I can assure you that there are plenty of people who approach events with this mentality. Some people are just looking for a weekend full of gaming, and a bit of socialising. There was probably a time when I didn't really understand such people either, but now it seems I am one of them.

Lores of Magic: The Lore of Slaanesh

And now we come to the final Lore of Magic in the new Warriors of Chaos book, the Lore of Slaanesh.


UPDATE:
The Daemons of Chaos were re-released shortly after the Warriors of Chaos, and they use the same Lores of Magic. However, their Lore Attributes are different. I will include both in this review.

Lores of Magic: The Lore of Nurgle

Continuing with our review of the Lores of Magic in the new Warriors of Chaos book, next we will look at the Lore of Nurgle. As with the Lore ofTzeentch, many of the spell names found here already exist in the Lore of Nurgle in the Daemons of Chaos book, although the effects are often different.

UPDATE:
The Daemons of Chaos were re-released shortly after the Warriors of Chaos, and they use the same Lores of Magic. However, their Lore Attributes are different. I will include both in this review.

Lores of Magic: The Lore of Tzeentch

It's been a while since I reviewed a Lore of Magic. I've had a couple of requests to look at the Skaven and Wood Elf Lores, however right now I thought I might focus on something that generates a bit more excitement, with the new Warriors of Chaos book. Maybe then I'll get into a rhythm and can look at those other lores that are now well overdue...

I've chosen to start with the Lore of Tzeentch, however this was pretty much a random decision. The people I have talked to about the new book seem to rate this as the weakest if the new Lores. Let's take a look and see if there is actually anything wrong with it, or if this is just a matter of personal preference.

As an aside, I notice that the Lores in the new Warriors of Chaos book seem to be a blend of the spells from the old book, and those found in the Daemons of Chaos one. I wonder if this is an indication that we could find the exact same spells in the new Daemon book, when it appears. Time will tell.

UPDATE:
As predicted above, the Daemons of Chaos were re-released shortly after the Warriors of Chaos, and they use the same Lores of Magic. However, their Lore Attributes are different. I will include both in this review.

What next?

After the excitement of Hel Fenn and then, less than a month later, the biggest event on the gaming calendar in Cancon, I am afraid I suffered a little bit from hobby burnout. At least, I assume that was my problem. In the few weeks since Cancon, I have achieved little in the way of modelling or painting, and I haven't played a game of Warhammer either (despite making it down to the club twice). The lull felt kind of natural to me and thus I didn't try to push myself to do anything much. But now I've had time to recover and it's back to work.

My painted Empire army continued to grow admirably last year, but there are still gaps I am yet to fill. The main one is Reiksguard Knights. Granted, I have a couple of different Knight units painted, and was able to substitute in the Knights Snow Leopard up at Cancon when I put Reiksguard into my list and didn't have time to paint any. However, the Reiksguard are an easily recognisable part of the Empire army, and so I actually want some dedicated models for them. It also happens that I am quite comfortable painting Knights (I've had a fair bit of practice now), so a unit of Reiksguard feels like a good way to ease myself back into the realm of hobby productivity.

Eventually I expect to be able to field a regiment of 30 Reiksguard, but that felt like too many to prepare and paint in a single go (I am trying to ease myself back into this, after all). Instead, I am doing about half of them at once. If I am enthused, I can then go back and do the second half of them when these ones are done. So, the first wave is 16 models. Below you can see their current state.

16 Reiksguard Knights, almost ready to be based and painted.

Lessons from Hel Fenn

A massive game of Warhammer like this, with several players and huge armies, takes a lot of effort to put together. 

Well the battle is over, the report is written, and it's finally time to step back and take stock after the Battle of Hel Fenn (actually, I started writing this article weeks ago, so by now it is well past time for us to take a look back). This was the most ambitious thing our gaming group has ever tried to do, and to be honest it's resulted in the largest (at the very least, the longest) battle report I've ever seen. I'm delighted with how it all worked out in the end, and as a whole I would say the project was a success. However, there are always things to be learnt from an exercise like this, so I thought I'd take a look at what went right, and what could be done better in the future.

Cancon 2013 – the aftermath

The madness that is the annual Cancon road trip is over, and I've now had at least 1 decent night's sleep with which to recover. At 8 games over 3 days (and alongside hundreds of other gamers playing other things), Cancon is really the biggest event on the my calendar. It's also become the biggest Warhammer tournament in Australia for the last couple of years, with some 94 players this time around. It's great to see such good numbers, with people travelling all the way from Melbourne, Brisbane and beyond.

I started off this tournament with the intention of doing what I've done every tournament for the last couple of years – taking photos and writing up each and every game in some detail. However, this time things ended up being a bit different. I found myself getting pretty tired, and I completely lost my rhythm on the second game (for reasons that I shall explain). I started to forget the camera, and when I then remembered, it felt like I'd missed the boat. The end result is that I have basically no photos of anything except my first game. Without pictures, it may be a but hard to follow these games, and at times I've kept it more brief than normal. Hopefully it will all make some sort of sense.

First up, I was not entering Cancon this year with any intention of challenging for a place. I submitted what I knew to be a severely flawed army, based entirely around my amusement at the animosity between Kurt Helborg and Marius Leitdorf. Marius in particular is a funny character with his madness requiring him to take a leadership test each turn or roll on a chart. Once I'd decided to take both of these special characters, I then went the whole hog and put in 2 more. Because, you know, why not? Ludwig Schwartzhelm is the Emperor's personal banner bearer and champion, a character who has been around forever, and is really not all that great in the game. Luthor Huss is relatively new on the scene and is actually pretty good value, but hey – I needed someone to make up the numbers.

By the time I had spent nearly 900 points on largely vulnerable characters, there wasn't a lot of room for anything else in my army. A couple of light wizards went in to try to give me some ranged firepower and the ability to fortify the characters in the hope of extending their lives a little, then I had to get some knights for them to lead (because all 4 of the special characters are mounted). It had to be at least 2 units for a couple of reasons. Firstly, stacking 4 characters in a single unit would have been silly. Secondly, with Marius and Kurt despising each other, it would have been unreasonable to expect them to share the same unit. I'm pretty sure they would have come to blows, or flatly refused to work for me. We couldn't have that, so 10 Inner Circle Knights and 10 Reiksguard swallowed most of the rest of my points. The rest of my army was there just to give me some variety in the list. I've shown the list before, but here it is again.

• Kurt Helborg, Reiksmarshall of the Empire (Army General)
• Marius Leitdorf
• Ludwig Schwarzhelm (BSB)
• Luthor Huss
• Battle Wizard of the Light Order (Level 2)
• Battle Wizard of the Light Order (Level 2) with Dispel Scroll
• 10 Reiksguard Knights with Standard, Musician
• 10 Knights of the Inner Circle with Standard, Musician
• 40 Halberdiers with Standard, Musician
• Detachment: 5 Archers
• Detachment: 15 Swordsmen
• 1 Great Cannon
• 5 Outriders with Musician, Sharpshooter
• 10 Crossbowmen

Total Army Cost: 2400

My army on the day. Bit of a dark pic, I'm afraid.

Anyway, as I was saying, I had relatively modest expectations for this list. With pretty weak magic, a single cannon, and none of the things you would normally expect to find in a strong Empire army, I was clearly going to be under-manned. I figured I'd be happy to win 4 games and finish in the upper middle of the tournament. Here is how those plans worked out. As is often the case, this will all be from memory, so apologies to anyone whose army (or actions) I misremember...

Oh, and in case you were looking at the half-painted stuff in the last post, I did get everything to a point where it at least looked reasonably finished. Some last-minute painting on the Friday night up in Canberra saw to that. I'll put up some pictures later.