Warhammer 40,000: Let's Play Filthy Casual - 500 pts Word Bearers vs Blood Angels

Of the coming of these monstrosities and evil Forces, no man could say much with verity; for the evil of it began before the Histories of the Great Redoubt were shaped; aye, even before the sun had lost all power to light; though, it must not be a thing of certainty, that even at this far time the invisible, black heavens held no warmth for this world; but of this I have no room to tell; and must pass on to that of which I have a more certain knowledge.

 - William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land

It's now time to play some 9th edition Warhammer 40,000! We're trying the Filthy Casual rules for a slightly more accessible attempt at 9th, which, frankly, seems a little difficult to wrap my mind around. Here's what I'm bringing to the table.

**

I enjoyed playing Chaos in Gladius so much that I also wanted to make some models based on it. I started with the Chaos Lord from Blackstone Fortress. The Lord is my favorite unit in the game; there's nothing like them walking up to literally anything and smashing it to pieces with their thunder hammer - and if you're very lucky, immediately turning into a Chaos Spawn afterward. I gave them a Statuesque Miniatures head, and I think it worked beautifully.

Which does remind me that I need to make a Chaos Spawn model. Proxy Studios later changed the Gladius rules so that Chaos characters don't get turned into Spawn any more, because they're cowards.

**

My Chaos Cultists were instrumental in my first 8th edition victory. They got shot to pieces, would have run away if not for my Dark Apostle, and then outflanked the enemy with Tide of Traitors. The models are quite dear to me as they were a very succesful Escher gang in our long Necromunda campaign back in the day. Obviously I wanted more cultists, and Brother Vinni had some models that suited the aesthetic exactly. I got Anna the Bonecrusher to be our cultist leader, and Veronika Zemanova because, well, I had to.

I thought the Necromunda Ambots looked really cool, and someone on reddit suggested fielding them as Mutilators in 40k. I took a stab at converting one, with a Chaos Marine head and one of those spiky things from the Chaos Terminator sprue. I think it worked out all right:

So I made two more, with CSM bits and a Statuesque roider head.

And here they are in my Word Bearers colors:

So how could I not try them?

**

Last year, I was lucky enough to get to teach a course on Trumpism at the Espoo adult education center. Taking Richard Hofstadter's Paranoid Style in American Politics as my guide, I talked about colonial and early USian anti-Catholic propaganda like the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, a direct predecessor of the satanic panic of the 1980s and its latter-day reincarnation as QAnon. A prominent anti-Catholic publication of the tine was the splendidly named American Protestant Vindicator, which led directly to the firm conviction that my Word Bearers absolutely need a Vindicator. Well, here it is!

This is my first shot at the black-and-silver Daedric look that I used for my Renegade Armigers on a vehicle, and I think it worked out pretty nicely.

**

So here's my 500 point Word Bearers army:

HQ - Chaos Lord - 80 pts

 Plasma pistol [5], thunder hammer [20] = 105 points

Troops - 29 Chaos Cultists - 145 pts

 13 × autogun (0), 13 × autopistol & ccw (0), cultist champion w/autopistol & ccw, 2 × flamer [10] = 155 points [260]

Elites - 3 Mutilators - 105 points [365] 

Heavy Support - Vindicator - 130 pts

 Havoc launcher [5] = 135 points [500]

I will be facing Shaun's Blood Angels:

HQ - Primaris Lieutenant - 80 points

Troops - Assault Intercessor Squad (5) - 100 points [180]

Troops - Assault Intercessor Squad (5) - 100 points [280]

Elites - Judiciar - 85 points [365]

Heavy Support - Eradicator Squad (3) - 135 points [500]

**

We set up some of my fairly ancient Necromunda terrain and rolled up a mission, ending up with Encircle.

I got the first turn, and my plan was simple: charge.

My Vindicator's shooting did absolutely nothing to anyone, and return fire from the Eradicators knocked it down to four wounds remaining. The Mutilators advanced on the objective on the right, and my Chaos Lord and Cultists charged the Intercessor squad in the center. The Judiciar used his special ability to make my Lord fight last, and he took several wounds – and then wiped out the Intercessors with his thunder hammer.

Meanwhile, the Mutilators were having a bad time: they failed their charge and the Eradicators knocked one of them out. The remaining Intercessor squad charged them, but the Lieutenant failed his charge roll.

In the central mêlée, the Judiciar charged both the Chaos Lord and the Cultists, the latter of which would have made for some hilarious overwatch if it was available. He killed my Lord, but was in turn swamped by the Cultists. The Judiciar promptly failed all his armor saves and was killed!

The Cultists consolidated into the Eradicators at the cost of a few casualties, the Intercessors finished off the last Mutilator, and the heavily damaged Vindicator continued to hang onto the objective.

At this point, I had a decent victory point lead, and elected to use my stratagem, Tide of Traitors, to regroup my cultists so they could hold the objective on my left.

With the cultists out of the way, the Vindicator opened up on the Eradicators, killing two of them! In retaliation, the Eradicator sergeant blew up the Vindicator with his melta rifle.

The Primaris Lieutenant made a heroic charge into the cultist mass and killed five of them, but to no avail.

The game was over: although the entire Chaos army except for the indomitable cultists was wiped out, I won the game with 25 VPs to 15.

This was a tremendously entertaining game, with lots of dramatic moments. I had a great time.

**

What did I learn? For starters, to not rely on my Vindicator's shooting ever getting anything done! Heavy D6 is so swingy, because a couple of bad rolls on the number of shots means nothing happens. I love how the model looked on the tabletop, but I feel like those points could have been better used.

Mutilators are garbage. They're excruciatingly slow, yet when they do get into combat, they're not that great at it either. I rolled poorly for their AP every time, so they barely made a dent in the Intercessors, but it's not like they have the attacks to seriously threaten lighter-armored units either. I don't really get what they're for. I was also a little surprised by how fragile the Chaos Lord was.

The star of the whole show was obviously my venerable Escher gang. Maybe it was the familiar surroundings, but for whatever reason, they really excelled. My opponent and I agreed that the shocking death of the Judiciar was a turning point: after that, the cultists and Eradicators tarpitted each other, letting the Vindicator clock up more victory points, and the remaining Intercessors couldn't close the gap. I'm obviously delighted by how well the cultists did, and I'm definitely keeping them as the core of my army.

As a general note, I like the Filthy Casual rules, because I think the complexity of 40k is getting a bit much. Even without stratagems, secondaries and so on, it was challenging enough to keep track of all the various auras, special rules, doctrines, chapter tactics and what have you - and all this despite the fact that my army is still basically an 8th edition one. I'm looking forward to a new CSM codex, as I think the army needs it badly, but at the same time I dread how many different sets of special faction rules it's going to have in it! I think the game is already too complicated for its own good, and looks to be getting worse.

Still, this was fun, and we're definitely playing more. I'm already thinking about my next 500-point army list...

Let's Read Tolkien 83: Vae Victis 3-4

Middle Earth, the arid belt 

A natural history brief 

Two types of climate epochs follow one another in the history of any world, including Middle Earth – pluvial and arid; the growth and shrinking of polar ice caps follow a single rhythm, which is a sort of a pulse of a planet.

Talleyrand, as depicted in the

KOEI video game L'Empereur

I said climatology and I meant it. Yeskov is a biologist, and he talks us through the idea that planets go through cooler and warmer climate periods. This, he states, is "obscured" to historians, even though climate change is much more meaningful to history than most of what we consider important historical events. This is exactly the kind of reductionist Jared Diamond nonsense that non-historians love, where they take something that's obvious to any historian, in this case something I teach as part of our high school history curriculum ("climate impacts society!"), and present it as a devastating new insight that none of us have heard of. It's nonsense in terms of Yeskov's own story as well, but I'll get back to that.

What we're told is that Middle-earth (I don't know why the translator insists on "Middle Earth") is entering a drier phase, and that's bad news for Mordor: with less rainfall hitting the mountains, agriculture in Gorgoroth goes into a crisis. They decide to fix the problem with an irrigation scheme drawing on Lake Núrnen, charmingly depicted in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. The trouble is that while this is initially succesful, in the longer term poorly done irrigation will lead to so much salt building up in the soil that it becomes a wasteland, and as is explained to us in a slightly excruciating but factual infodump, this is what happens to Mordor.

We're told the architects of the irrigation scheme were sentenced to twenty-five years in the lead mines, by the way, which suggests I was on to something with my Soviet Mordor schtick in War of the Ring. Seeing as how Mordor is "the smithy of the nations", they can compensate for this by importing food, and their prosperity continues: a full-fledged industrial revolution is underway, with steam engines and everything, and King Sauron VIII even proclaims a national literacy law.

For what it's worth, I have an issue with this story. Yeskov writes that Mordor "could trade its manufactured goods for any amounts of food from Khand and Umbar. Trading caravans went back and forth through the Ithilien Crossroads day and night". Khand is southeast of Mordor and Umbar, as we know, is to the south. If food imports from Khand and Harad are feeding Gorgoroth and especially the city of Barad-dûr - how? How does the food get there? Caravans, he says, but that's a terribly uneconomic way of hauling food. At some point, and it isn't very far, the animals hauling the grain or whatever else start to need so much fodder for the trip that there's no room for anything else. Maybe you could haul food from the Anduin to Minas Morgul, say, but getting it to Barad-dûr? But there's no conceivable water route to Barad-dûr either, and if there was enough rainfall on the Gorgoroth plateau to dig canals, they wouldn't be necessary to transport food in the first place.

I would suggest that given the technology involved, transporting enough food to Barad-dûr to feed a city simply can't be done. Logistics on this level couldn't be carried out by land until the invention of the railroad, and even though we've heard of steam engines in Mordor, so far they've been stationary and there hasn't been so much as a whisper of rails. This idea that Barad-dûr subsists on imported food is, I think, impossible.

So in my opinion, ironically enough, Yeskov hasn't quite thought this through. It's not like this is a fatal flaw, but if you're going to have a go at Tolkien for this stuff, it's only fair you be held to the same standard yourself.

**

We move from climatology and irrigation to completely different things, with this dramatic paragraph closing the third chapter.

But it was exactly at that time that the words that changed the entire history of Middle Earth were said; strangely, they repeated almost exactly a prophetic utterance made in another World regarding a very different country: “A nation that is unable to feed itself and is dependent on food imports cannot be considered a formidable foe.”

Somebody asked about the quote on stackexchange, and I have no idea where it's supposedly from either, or even what the country is. The parallels made in the following chapter are all intensely 20th-century, and Britain comes to mind first, but I have no idea who would have said something like this about them, or indeed anyone else for that matter. It could be that the idea got lost in translation.

The scene it sets up is a meeting of the White Council in the Tower of Amon Sûl. Again, the diacritic is wrong in The Last Ringbearer, where it's rendered Amon Súl, like Barad-dúr (sic); later on we also get Nazgúl, as if the acute accent was the only diacritic that exists. In Appendix E of the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien explains that the acute accent is used to mark long vowels, with the circumflex (^) used in Sindarin for long vowels in stressed monosyllables, because "they tended in such cases to be specially prolonged". So it's not a horrible crime to write Amon Súl instead of Amon Sûl, but with modern word processing, swapping out the circumflex is inexplicable. The only message I'm getting from it is that the translator can't be bothered to write names properly.

The White Council of this chapter consists of Saruman, Gandald, Radagast and a fourth wizard dressed in blue. Gandalf has just finished advocating that they go to war with Mordor. With the aid of a foretelling device called the Mirror, which I presume is the Mirror of Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings, the wizards have determined that the development of industry and technology in Mordor will outstrip the western nations and soon become unstoppable. Gandalf's proposal is to enlist the elves, "the inhabitants of the Enchanted Forests", on their side, and offer to lend them the Mirror for the duration of the war. The elves, Saruman warns, are only ever out for their own advantage. He argues against war, referring to it as a "Final Solution of the Mordorian problem", and predicting that if Gandalf wins, he'll write history to justify himself, i.e. the Lord of the Rings. Saruman fails, and resigns his position as head of the council.

The prose is not only clunky but melodramatic; it shifts jarringly between registers and fairly clobbers you with anachronisms, so I have to be honest and say that the fourth chapter isn't exactly pleasant to read. It ends with a quote from, of all people, Talleyrand. But thematically, what's being set up here works as an anti-story to the Lord of the Rings. Gandalf says:

The Middle Earth [sic] is a multitude of peoples living in harmony with nature and the heritage of their ancestors now. These peoples and their entire way of life are now under a dire threat, and my duty is to avert it at all costs.

The idea of protecting the immemorial customs - the mos maiorum - of Middle-earth from evil innovation is basically identical to Tolkien's theology of the Machine; in Tolkien's terms, Gandalf is setting off to fight Sarumanism, just as he did in the Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's Gandalf would probably not have taken this as far as launching an offensive war to destroy science and literacy, but many of Tolkien's fellow religious conservatives certainly do, from Afghanistan to Alabama. So the Gandalf presented here is a very credible evil doppelgänger to Tolkien's kindly wizard, indeed quite close to what many critics of Tolkien seem to have imagined his Gandalf actually was. Tolkien's Gandalf stressed that he felt pity even for orcs; Yeskov's Gandalf dismisses pity as weakness. Maybe this is something like what Gandalf would have become if he had accepted the Ring when Frodo offered it to him. In that sense, what we have here is both a counter-narrative to Tolkien and, arguably, a very Tolkienian exploration of how power might corrupt even Gandalf.

In his speech against Gandalf, Saruman makes the argument that Gandalf is jealous of Mordor, which works as an inversion of the position in the Lord of the Rings, where Saruman imitates Sauron. Here Saruman's argument is that magic, as used by the wizards, can never really advance; on the contrary, as time goes on, more and more of it is lost, whereas science and technology can grow. This is also a fair extrapolation of Tolkien's conservativism: new things are Sarumanism and therefore bad. But it's also an interesting inversion of one of the points of Tolkien's cosmology, namely that evil can never truly create new life. Here it's turned on its head: conservative, backward-looking magic can't create new things, but science can.

**

So chapters 3 and 4 are a bit of a mixed bag. Where the certain clunkiness of the prose was, at worst, tolerable and at times almost endearing in the first two chapters, here it's at times difficult to read because, well, it's quite bad. There's a didactic, almost smug tone to the infodumps of the third chapter, and Saruman's heavy-handed, anachronistic moralizing is very poorly executed. Tolkien used anachronism deliberately to create distance between the narrator and the story; Yeskov uses it to batter the reader into submission. I don't know if it's an artifact of the translation or a quality of the original, but these chapters especially left me with the unfortunate impression that Yeskov may be very clever, but not nearly as clever as he thinks he is.

Having said all this, the counter-narrative is taking shape, and I'm definitely interested in seeing where it goes, even if it's rough going at times.

**

Next time: diplomacy.