Onward Kislev!

Some time ago I managed to get my hands on some of the increasingly rare Kislev models that used to be part of the Empire army range back in 4th and 5th edition. I wanted them as part of my preparation for my ridiculously ambitious plans to recreate the Battle at the Gates of Kislev. I made a lot of noise about these plans a while back, however I've been focusing on other things since then. This doesn't mean I have not made progress. My painted Empire army has come along steadily since then, and the Chaos forces at our disposal are better prepared too (thanks largely to Owen, who is exceedingly mad and very fast at knocking out painted stuff). 

Anyway, the Kislev game has started to become a bit of a joke around here, as one of those things that is talked about, but will never happen. I've kind of treated it as an eventual goal rather than something with a specific time-frame attached to it, but it might be time to address that. I haven't done the maths yet, but we must be pretty close to having the painted army sizes I had imagined, and with Warhammer 8th edition coming to a close sometime in the second half of next year (so the rumours suggest), I feel I need to make use of the existing edition's rules, which work so well for large games (who knows what next edition will bring). 

One thing that has not advanced over the last year or more (actually it's more like 2 years. Sheesh!), which is the state of my actual Kislevite models. I have Horse Archers, Winged Lancers and Kossars, and they are all as unprepared as they were when I got my hands on them. This is unacceptable, as they are basically the only essential element in the game - the thing that will add the appropriate flavour. So I am finally starting work on them.

I decided to start with some Horse Archers, as I thought they might be fastest to paint. First I had to do some repairs, including adding tails - because the previous owner had not attached (nor included) a single tail to the whole batch of 12 of them (nor the 10 Winged Lancers that came with them). Maybe he doesn't like tails. Anyway, whatever the reason, I was well short in the tail tally. 

12 Kislev Horse Archers, looking for paint.

Lores of Magic: Lore of Athel Loren

There are no two ways about it; the Wood Elf book is old and in serious need of an update. Rumours currently suggest that this might happen around May 2014, but that's still 6 months away. So in the interest of completing my reviews of the Lores of Magic (there's only a few left now), I figured I might as well give the Wood Elves the treatment.

Interestingly, the extreme ancientness of the Wood Elf book has both its perks and its downsides in terms of the spells here. An echo of a bygone era...

Lores of Magic: The Lore of Dark Magic

I feel slightly bad that I've seen numerous searches hitting this blog looking for the Lore of Dark Magic, and of course they're all finding the old Lore from the previous book. Now that there is a new book, I should really be updating the review. If you actually were looking for the Lore from the previous book, you can find it here.

Lores of Magic: The Lore of Dark Magic

Dark Elves are the only race with access to Dark Magic, although nowadays they have the full range of the Lores of Battle Magic in the rulebook to choose from as well. So, with 9 Lores to choose from, let's hope Dark Magic stacks up.

Warhammer World Series – Dissecting the match-ups

Throughout the World Series, we were tracking how each army performed each round. Ideally this will help us to decide whether to re-use some of the match-ups next time around, assuming that the arrival of 9^th edition and any new army books hasn't completely stuffed with our plans.

I'm going to walk through each table and give a brief summary of how they all went. Below is a table that shows all of the matches and gives a simplistic rating based on their battle point differences, but the table-by-table section will give a better picture.

Yeah, good luck reading that without opening it properly...

The analysis is always going to be a bit difficult by the time you allow for some wild dice rolls in some of the games. It's also going to be slanted by the fact that the tournament included plenty of players with a wide variety of skill levels – numerous Masters players and some who almost never attend tournaments. Such varying levels of experience clashing can produce some misleading results. Anyway, let's have a look at how things went...

Thanks to Ben over at Eureka Wargames Association for the use of some of his pictures here. You can read his account of the tournament here. 

Table 1: The Underground

Scenario: Watchtower (with modifications)

Skaven vs Night Goblins

Battle Points: Skaven 76, Night Goblins 64

Results: Night Goblins 3, Skaven 3, 1 draw

Table 1

This was probably the most wacky of the tables we set up. It involved an all-Goblin army against a Skaven army, fighting it out on the club's cave terrain. It was the only table to use the Watchtower scenario, and in this case the objective was not a building at all, but an open section of terrain (a chunk of warpstone being mined from the ground, made for the occasion by Owen of Terrain for Hippos).

This was always going to be a crazy game. And with the scenario, (control of the warpstone was worth 800 points) results were predictably wild. I know of games where the thing ended up controlled by a single Night Goblin Fanatic, and another where a single Troll survived to hold it after his unit passed a Leadership 4 Stupidity test to move onto it... The caves also caused some people a bit of grief, especially when the instruction to ignore the 1” rule for the impassable cave walls failed to get through in at least one game.

Anyway, after all this madness, each army walked away with 3 wins, and somehow one game even ended in a draw. All in all, I can't imagine a more ideal table for the tournament, and I'm glad we went through with it.

Table score: 10/10

Warhammer World Series 2013 Aftermath – Part 3

This is the third and final part of my account of the Warhammer World Series tournament held on the weekend. Below are the links to the first 2 parts:

Part1 (games 1 and 2)

Part2 (games 3, 4 and 5)

Game 6 – Rowan Keating

Table 8 – Aerial Duel

Scenario – Battleline

My army:

Bretonnians

• Bretonnian Lord
  • General; Heavy Armour; Questing Vow
  • Virtue of Heroism
  • Sword of Strife
  • Enchanted Shield
  • Royal Pegasus
• Paladin Battle Standard Bearer
  • Heavy Armour; Battle Standard Bearer; Questing Vow
  • Sword of Might
  • Gromril Great Helm
  • Warhorse
• Damsel of the Lady
  • Magic Level 1; Lore of Beasts
  • Warhorse
• 8 Knights of the Realm
  • Lance; Heavy Armour; Shield; Standard; Musician; Gallant; Barding; Knightly Vow
• 6 Knights of the Realm
  • Lance; Heavy Armour; Shield; Standard; Musician; Gallant; Barding; Knightly Vow
• 4 Pegasus Knights
  • Lance; Heavy Armour; Shield; Standard; Musician; Gallant; Knightly Vow
• 4 Pegasus Knights
  • Lance; Heavy Armour; Shield; Standard; Musician; Gallant; Knightly Vow
• 5 Mounted Yeomen
  • Spear; Bow; Fast Cavalry
• 5 Mounted Yeomen
  • Spear; Bow; Fast Cavalry

Rowan's army:

Vampire Counts

• Vampire Lord
  • General; Lore of Vampires; Lance; Heavy armour; Magic Level 1
  • Enchanted Shield
  • Dawn Stone
  • Quickblood
  • Hellsteed
• Vampire
  • Battle Standard Bearer; Magic Level 2; Lance; Heavy armour; Shield
  • Nightshroud
  • Hellsteed
• 5 Dire Wolves
• 5 Dire Wolves
• 27 Zombies
  • Standard; Musician
• 20 Crypt Ghouls
  • Ghast
• 4 Vargheists
• 4 Vargheists
• 6 Black Knights
  • Barding; Lance; Heavy Armour; Shield; Standard; Musician

This table was one of those constructed with a particular theme. In this case, it was as close as we could get to a workable “aerial duel” type of game. Rowan chose the Vampires and away we went.

After deployment and vanguard moves.

Warhammer World Series 2013 Aftermath – Part 2

This is the second part of my account of the Warhammer World Series tournament held on the weekend. You can find the first part here.

Game 3 – David Lowe

Table 16 – Super Sub-Optimal

Scenario – Battleline

Lizardmen

• Saurus Oldblood
  • General; Cold One; Great Weapon; Light Armour
  • Luckstone
• Skink Chief on Ancient Stegadon
  • Spear; Light Armour; Battle Standard
  • Enchanted Shield
  • 2 Giant Blow Pipes
  • 4 Skink Crew
• Skink Priest
  • Magic Level 1; Lore of Beasts
• 20 Saurus Warriors
  • Shield; Standard; Musician; Spawn Leader
• 10 Skink Skirmishers
  • Lustrian Javelin & Shield; Shield
• 10 Skink Skirmishers
  • Lustrian Javelin & Shield; Shield
• 2 Jungle Swarms
• 3 Kroxigors
  • Great Weapon
• 1 Razordon Hunting Pack
  • 3 Skink Handlers
• 1 Razordon Hunting Pack
  • 3 Skink Handlers
• Troglodon

David's army:

Beastmen

• Beastlord
  • General; Shield
  • Sword of Swift Slaying
  • Armour of Destiny
• Gorebull
  • Frenzy; Heavy Armour; Battle Standard
  • Brass Cleaver
  • Charmed Shield
  • Gnarled Hide
• Bray Shaman
  • Lore of Beasts; Magic Level 1; Braystaff
  • Ruby Ring of Ruin
• 24 Gor Herd
  • Shield; Standard; Musician; Foe-Render
• 9 Ungor Raiders
  • Short Bow; Musician
• Tuskgor Chariot
• Tuskgor Chariot
• 10 Chaos Warhounds
• 1 Razorgor
• 1 Razorgor
• Jabberslythe
• Spawn of Chaos

After a strong start, my game against Hieu had dropped me back into the middle of the pack. My next opponent would be David Lowe. After looking at the lists, David chose the Beastmen because he was more familiar with them. As it happens, this was another questionable choice – the Lizardmen definitely had the upper hand on this table throughout the tournament.

This game started late because I was chasing a couple of things from a TO perspective, and the game itself didn't exactly move like greased lightning. We didn't get to the end, but enough things happened to get a result. I didn't get a ton of photos because I was a little distracted.

That Carnosaur is really a Troglodon. As if anyone in their right mind has the proper model. Poor, useless sod...

Warhammer World Series 2013 Aftermath – Part 1

The weekend saw the second running of that most unusual of tournaments, the Warhammer World Series. I was organising the event, however once things are up and running, the World Series is not the most difficult tournament to run. So I was also able to play the “bye-breaker”, which was needed because we had an odd number of players. So Baron von Gumby, most feared of non-competitive players, would ride once more! As usual, I took photos during my games and will give a bit of a run-through of how they went.

For those not following earlier, the World Series involves players arriving at a table and finding 2 pre-determined armies waiting for them. They then dice off to choose between the armies, the loser of the roll-off gets to choose table sides, and they play the scenario assigned to the table (generally Battleline). The full list of tables and armies has already been published, but I will repeat the ones I played on here for convenience as we go along.

Also, as I was the gumby player, I would not be rolling off with my opponent to choose armies – I would let them choose, and then we would roll off for table sides. Given I wrote nearly all of the pairings, it seemed the only fair way to do things. Besides, then I wouldn't have to try to choose what to use...

Game 1 – Nick Gentile

Table 5 – Family Feud

Scenario – Battleline

As usual, Nick is excited about being excited.