Epic: Knights

What with his wisdom and his chivalrye,

He conquered al the regne of Femenye,

That whylom was y-cleped Scithia;

And weddede the quene Ipolita,

And broghte hir hoom with him in his contree

With muchel glorie and greet solempnitee

 - Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, the Knight's Tale

I very much enjoyed building my first 28mm Knight, so when I got into Adeptus Titanicus, I knew I wanted some Questoris Knights. You can field Knights as a support banner to go with your Titan maniple, like the Cerastus Knights in the starter set, or with Doom of Molech, as a whole Knight army of their own. Last year, you could still get the original Questoris Knight box as well as the one with the extra weapons, so I bought one of each. Then when I fucked up the bases on my Reavers and had to wait for new ones, I had time to start building the Knights!

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I'll be magnetizing the Knights' main weapons and the rocket pods; the meltaguns and heavy stubbers are just far too fiddly so the Scion is getting a meltagun and everyone else is going to make do with the stubber. Other than that, though, weapon decisions with these Questoris Knights are easy, since there's just one of every gun in the box! So that's kind of disappointing. At least they look like they'll be easy to magnetize, with every kind of weapon attaching to an identical shoulder piece.

I started by gluing magnets to the inside of the carapace, so each Knight can hold a rocket pod, or something else, in case they ever introduce more carapace weapons. As for the rocket pods themselves, I ended up cutting off the bit that's meant to go into the hole in the carapace completely, and replacing it with a 1/16" * 1/32" magnet.

I think the end result is very cute!

The arm weapons were a lot more fiddly. Yes, it's possible to drill out the shoulder joint and insert a tiny magnet, and I did it. Twelve times. Mostly during online meetings!

The weapons were actually easier to drill!

Here are all the little weapons:

Like my 40k Armigers, these Knights are part of the Auxilia Daedra and bear their colours. That is, the metal bits are Gunmetal Grey with a Black Ink wash, and the armor plating is Black with Natural Steel edges. They are Knight Banner Azura, named after their Scion.

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Last year, I tried to get a copy of Traitor Legios at my local gaming store, but they had just run out. Rather than leave empty-handed, I consoled myself with a box of Acastus Knight Porphyrions. I picked the Porphyrions because, well, they were available at my store, and also the other kind of Acastus is just ugly.

These guys are big, by the way. They're only slightly smaller than a Warhound.

I did the same thing as with the Questoris knights and left the banner on the Lord Scion; I also had a leftover dome from the Dystopian Wars Islands and Archipelagos set, so I stuck that on the other Acastus's base. With no weapon options, there was nothing to magnetize. I still painted them in stages, with the main body first, armor plates and such next, and the weapons last; I even did the weapons in stages because of the plating. Still, painting the big surfaces was so much easier that I finished these guys before the Questoris Knights.

In keeping with the Auxilia Daedra naming conventions, these are going to be the Knight Banner Molag Bal.

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At this point, obviously Knights are a thing. So when Forge World announced they were doing adorable little Knight Armigers, of course I had to order some. The components are, well, tiny. I think those leg stabilizers have to be some of the smallest things I've ever glued.

Here's a side-by-side comparison of Armiger, Knight and Reaver weapons, just for the heck of it.

Although speaking of weapons, I do have a complaint. In 40k, Armigers have to take a carapace weapon; either a largely useless heavy stubber or a somewhat more expensive meltagun. In Titanicus, the heavy stubber is rightly ignored, so you just get the choice of upgrading your Armigers with meltaguns. But the box comes with two meltaguns and one heavy stubber for three Armigers. The meltaguns are ten points each! Frankly, there is no way I'm spending 20 points upgrading a banner that explodes if a Warlord looks at it, especially when an additional Armiger is only 25 points. It's completely mad to include this ratio of meltaguns to heavy stubbers. Yes, I can just leave the carapace weapon off entirely, but that's annoying because it can't be done in 40k.

But that's really my only complaint, because despite some of these parts being very tiny indeed, building these little guys was a breeze. I actually enjoyed myself, which, I have to admit, was not at all what I expected! They really are very tiny: here's a poor-quality size comparison with a Questoris Knight and a Reaver.

Here they are!

They're so cute I'm seriously debating getting more.

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Here's the current lineup of Auxilia Daedra:

As with the Titanicus starter set miniatures, these were all excellent fun to build and paint. As soon as I get to grips with the Titanicus rules, I will be fielding all of them! I'm also kinda excited for the Dire Wolf, and just thrilled in general to see new Titanicus releases.

Let's Read Tolkien 85: Vae Victis 7-9

Gondor, the Pelennor Fields 

March 15, 3019 

The Mordorians only realized that they had been had when the brown splotch of Rohan’s army began spreading through the northern edge of the white fog blanketing the Pelennor Fields, while Gondor’s troops poured through the opened gates of Minas Tirith, quickly congealing into battle formations.

These chapters are quite short, so this time I'm doing three of them, because it means we can get through this military history fanfic and back to the actual story!

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We left off last time with the Mordor army camped in front of Minas Tirith. Gandalf's coup bought just enough time for the cavalry of Rohan to get into position and charge the Mordorians. The battle goes poorly for them, however, until a mystery force of undead warriors lands to the south. The Dúnadan leading them tricks the commander of Mordor's South Army into fighting a chivalrous duel with him - only for one of the walking corpses to stab the Mordorian officer in the back. It's a very appropriately dastardly thing to do.

That was chapter 7. In the next one, the battle is still raging; the Mordorians have figured out that incendiaries can stop the undead, and most of Aragorn's walking corpses are toast. They did, however, succeed in drawing off Mordor's catapults from Minas Tirith.

Next, Éomer rallies the rohirrim cavalry with a frankly strange and cringy speech about martyrs getting to go to heaven and have sex. In the translation, he talks about "houranies", by which we assume he means houri. It's a weird and orientalist interlude, and I don't really get where it fits in with the maniacal allegorism, where previously the Free Peoples had stood for a barbaric west and Mordor represented an enlightened east. I don't know if he's trying to pawn off orientalist stereotypes of Muslims onto westerners or what the idea is. In any case, I can't help thinking he'd have been better off just having Gandalf offer everyone an indulgence.

The combination of the undead attack and Rohan cavalry charge decides the battle. Éomer and Aragorn meet on the battlefield, and it turns out that Éowyn has fought in disguise as one of the rohirrim. She acts like a willful child and proclaims her love for Aragorn, who returns it and sends her off to be treated for her wounds in Minas Tirith. This leads abruptly into a brief retelling of the Last Debate, where it turns out she's being held as a hostage to ensure Éomer's submission to Aragorn. The final assault on Mordor is then recounted sort of off-hand: there is terrible slaughter, King Sauron is killed in combat, everyone lies about it afterward.

**

So, whereas parts of the previous chapters read like badly written fan fiction, all of this does. The retelling of the battle of the Pelennor fields isn't really all that interesting, even when it isn't childish and orientalist. The first part really leans into Aragorn being an asshole and it works decently, but then the Last Debate fanfic very clumsily underlines how he's an asshole, and we got it the first time around. If the next chapters were more inept quasi-military history, I think I'd quit. But I don't have to. At the end of chapter 9:

However, the wizards of the White Council had somehow forgotten one factor: namely, that there is a certain Someone in the world Who rather abhors complete victories and assorted ‘final solutions,’ and is capable of showing His displeasure with same in the most improbable ways. Even now, that Someone was dispassionately surveying the vanquished – all that flotsam cast ashore by the passed storm – when suddenly He rested His gaze upon a couple of soldiers of the extinct South Army lost among the dunes of the desert of Mordor.

Next time: believe it or not, Haladdin and Tzerlag.