Epic: Let's Paint Solar Auxilia Tanks

I've painted the space marines from my Legions Imperialis box, but when I get around to playing it, I'm pretty sure I also want to try including some Solar Auxilia tanks as allies.

**

The first thing I did was rebase my Imperial Navy flyers from Aeronautica Imperialis for Legions.

I really like the dark green I painted my Aeronautica, and it matches my Titans, so I think I'm also going to make my Solar Auxilia vehicles the same color. I tried a base coat of Black Green and a drybrush of Luftwaffe Camo Green, but I wasn't really happy with the result, so it's plain Luftwaffe Camo Green for the Aethon Heavy Sentinels.

My reasoning is that both the Navy and Auxilia forces have been attached to Legio Venefica for so long that they've adopted the same color scheme for ease of identification.

Then it was on to the fun stuff: the tanks. I started with the entertaining lozenges that are the Malcador tanks.

And moved on to the Leman Russes.

With the basic rules, i.e. pre-Liber Strategia, there was no reason to take the basic battlecannon Russ over the Vanquisher, so that's how I built mine.

The Legions core set came with enough space marine tanks to build 2/3 of an armored company, and the Auxilia got the same. So I needed to pick up some super-heavies to be able to field a company, and with my regular Titanicus opponent threatening me with his Titans, I had to pick the Shadowsword. I built the other tank as a Stormblade, and they're both very handsome beasts.

And so here's my armored company!

Finally, since I have a pretty strong inkling that I'm going to be fighting a Titan Legion, I went and bought some Valdor tank destroyers. The shock pulse ought to come in handy knocking down void shields and screwing with the Titans in general, and besides, I really like painting little tanks.

I wanted to be able to paint the gun under the covering, so I left that off for priming.

And here's the end result.

**

What can I say? I adore tiny tanks, and want to paint more of them.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 16: Age of Darkness

He wanted to weep, but the last two years had turned his heart to stone.

 - Rules of Engagement, Graham McNeill, in The Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness

This time on Let's Read the Horus Heresy, it's another short story collection, called Age of Darkness.

**

McNeill opens with a story about some Smurfs doing combat simulations; it's not bad, but they really are the most boring legion. Liar's Due by James Swallow is a really good Alpha Legion story, and after this and Nemesis, I'm kind of a fan. Nick Kyme's Forgotten Sons is, sadly, also very forgettable.

The first Horus Heresy novel I actually read was by John French, and this collection has his story The Last Remembrancer. I quite liked it, and on reading it, I realized why I've developed such a dislike of Rogal Dorn. He's a bully. I'm not sure I've seen an appearance from him yet where he doesn't threaten to murder people for crimes like disagreeing with him, or telling him something he doesn't want to hear.

Chris Wraight's Rebirth is a visit to the ruins of Prospero, and speaking of bullies, the comparison made in it between the World Eaters and Space Wolves is very apt. The World Eaters are a tragedy: genetic super-soldiers literally driven insane by their desire to emulate their deeply damaged Primarch. So far in these stories, in their interactions with the other legions, the Space Wolves and Leman Russ just come across as hypocritical assholes. Y'know, sorcery is terrible, unless a "rune-priest" does it. I freely admit I never liked the faux space viking thing, but it's not as if anything I've read so far has made me change my mind.

Gav Thorpe's story, The Face of Treachery, was just flat and boring. Little Horus, by Dan Abnett, wasn't really anything that special, but the quality of his writing really is head and shoulders above everyone else. I still like the Luna Wolves because of Abnett, and am trying to resist adding yet another legion to my Epic collection. Rob Sanders's Iron Within is a decent enough story about some loyalist Iron Warriors, and Aaron Dembski-Bowden finishes on a strong note by taking everything that was good about Descent of Angels and running with it.

**

So far, these anthologies have been a bit of a mixed bag. Both ones I've read have had some really good stories, a couple of bad ones, and several very forgettable ones. A I write this, though, Black Library are charging 6.49€ for an anthology, and 3.49-3.99€ for a single short story, so basically if there are two stories in an anthology that I'm interested in reading, it's actually cheaper to get the whole thing. So maybe I'll be reading a few more.

Let's Play Cuba Libre

Mmm... organized crime.

 - Homer Simpson, Last Exit to Springfield, the Simpsons, season 4

I remember seeing a copy of Colonial Twilight: The French-Algerian War, 1954-62 at our friendly local gaming store and thinking to myself that anyone who makes a board game out of the Algerian war has got to be mad. Of course, I now know more about GMT Games and can testify that they are, indeed, quite mad. Still, I was intrigued by the idea of an entire series of counterinsurgency games, and since the publishers themselves suggest starting with Cuba Libre, that's what we're going to do.

**

The first impression I got was sheer delight at how small the game board was! We're used to games taking up the entire table, so it was a delight to have some actual elbow room. Despite its tiny size, the board is very functional, and the cards and wooden pieces are excellent.

We're playing as four factions fighting over Cuba: the government, Fidel's rebels, the Revolutionary Directorate of 13 March, and the US Mafia. While the government is trying to hold on to power and suppress the rebels, the rebels are trying to control enough territories to overthrow the government, while the mob is trying to keep its casinos open and make money. While all factions have different win conditions, I was very interested in the asymmetrical nature of the Mafia faction, so that was who I played as.

Cuba Libre is a card-driven game, but in a very clever way: players don't hold cards in their hands, but a card is revealed from the deck, and then the top card of the deck is turned face up. So there's always one card in play, and you can see what the next card will be as well.

The icons at the top of the cards determine the order in which the factions act that turn. In that order, they can decide to pass, play the event, or conduct operations on the map. Once two factions have played, play moves on to the next card, and the factions that took an action last turn have to sit the next one out. In some cards, like Herbert Matthews above, you pick one out of two possible event outcomes.

It's a very clever system, which forces you to think quite hard about your decisions every turn. Furthermore, victory points are scored whenever a Propaganda card comes up; they're distributed throughout the deck, one per quarter.

We started as we went on: I was trying to open casinos and amass wealth, the Directorio massed in the central highlands and Fidel's gang founded bases in the east. Santiago de Cuba attracted huge amounts of police, military and guerrillas throughout, and somehow none of them got much done. The most miserable people on the island must have been the unfortunates who lived in Las Villas, which was constantly being shaken down for resources by the Directory's guerrillas.

When the game ends is determined by when the last Propaganda card comes out. If the deck is prepared properly, it should be in the final quarter of cards: one of cards 40-52. In our case it was card number 49. So with the third Propaganda card showing up surprisingly early, the last campaign turned into a bit of a slog. However, in the end, the Directory won a surprisingly tight game.

We all enjoyed the game and found it quite simple to pick up and play on a weekend day. The asymmetry between the factions and the card-driven system are excellent. I've put in a P500 order for Pendragon, the COIN game set in Roman Britain. Before it shows up, I'm pretty sure we'll bust out Cuba Libre again.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 15: Lorgar: Bearer of the Word

The Tower of Infinite Lords was less impressive than its name suggested.

 - The Horus Heresy: The Primarchs: Lorgar: Bearer of the Word, Gav Thorpe

Greetings from Kor Phaeron! The Lord Phaeron! The Bearer of the Word! The Warrior of the Wasteland! The Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla!

 - Castora, herald-slave of the Covenant of Vharadesh, probably

I decided it would be a good idea to follow up The First Heretic with Lorgar, to stay on a Word Bearers kick. This one's by Gav Thorpe, who was something of a controversial figure back in the day in the Warhammer hobby. I read a short story of his in Tales of Heresy, and it wasn't great. In this Primarchs novel - they don't seem to be numbered - he's taking us to the Word Bearers' homeworld of Colchis.

**

The book starts with a bunch of impoverished nomads on a desert planet, who come across Kor Phaeron's Mad Max caravan. Because I mean of course the religious fanatics are a desert people. There actually hasn't been a whole lot of orientalism in the Horus Heresy series so far, but Lorgar goes a long way toward fixing that. I half expected Kor Phaeron to have a harem.

Anyway the nomads have discovered a remarkable child in the desert. It's Lorgar, obviously, and Kor Phaeron takes him into the caravan and starts teaching him the faith. Even though there's an actual sandworm, it's a lot more Mad Max than Dune, because the religious content is really just thinly veiled Chaos worship. No human sacrifices, daemon-summoning or that kind of thing (yet), but it's very obvious that the Powers who rule Colchis are the Chaos gods.

Lorgar is instructed in their worship, but when he starts having visions of the Emperor and C. Magnus the Red, he replaces Lorgar as the Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla and starts preaching the faith of the One, who will soon descend to them from the sky. Lorgar goes on to take over the biggest religious organization on Colchis, the Covenant, and unify the planet into a theocracy, while Kor Phaeron is an evil bureaucrat.

The problem is that this is all incredibly boring. It's not a bad story, but Thorpe's prose is so lackluster that nothing feels like it matters. Again, Lorgar is a sympathetic character, and so are several of the others, while even Kor Phaeron gets some good moments. But there's nothing exciting, interesting or memorable here, not even any really interesting fluff for wargaming. Given that the Primarchs ebooks currently cost twice as much as the main series, I would strongly recommend avoiding this even if you're a Word Bearers fan.

Epic: Let's Paint a Word Bearers Host

"I would sacrifice the entire Host in order to fulfil the will of the Dark Council, if such was needed."

"And the warrior-brothers of the Legion will lay their lives down if that is what is required of them."

 - Anthony Reynolds, Word Bearers: The Omnibus

I'm hoping to get a chance to play Legions Imperialis soon! So all I need now is to expand the Word Bearers from the starter set into a proper army.

**

To do this, I have an Astartes Battle Group boxed set. It includes models like these Tarantula sentry guns.

And these Rapier platforms, both laser destroyers and quad launchers. The latter are still the only kind of space marine artillery we get. I've painted everything with more or less my Word Bearers standard scheme: Burnt Red basecoat, Dark Red drybrush, details as required.

The Battle Group also includes the fast attack box, which means Land Speeders:

And Scimitar jetbikes.

Two detachments, in fact.

And some Javelins:

And all this means I can now assemble my third formation: a Sky-hunter Phalanx.

**

There are also Leviathan dreadnoughts.

I already painted all my little space marine tanks, so I also went and bought some Land Raiders.

A friend gave me a box of Spartans for my birthday, so I painted two of them for my Word Bearers.

**

Finally, the infantry box in the Battle Group means I can now build full detachments of the support troops, starting with the Terminators:

Followed by plasma gunners:

Missile launcher support marines:

And assault marines:

Not to mention my second demi-company, the 1st (Air Assault) Demi-Company of the 4th Company, II Battalion, Morbid Fane Chapter.

**

So that's a whole pile of Word Bearers!

I'm very happy I've got all this painted up, and delighted that the summer preview told us we're getting heavy armor and artillery. Having painted two companies of tactical marines, though, I have to say I really hope we could get more infantry!

Painting 8mm has been a lot of fun. I won't pretend I'm achieving anything beyond tabletop quality, if even that, but I like the end result and enjoy the process, especially with the vehicles. I hope I get a chance to play soon!

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 14: First Heretic

The first falling star came down in the heart of the perfect city.

 - The Horus Heresy: The First Heretic, Aaron Dembski-Bowden

"No Recall or Intervention can work in this place. There is no escape."

 - Lorgar Aurelian, probably

Here we finally are, with my legion: the Word Bearers. This is my first Aaron Dembski-Bowden book. He's highly rated by both Horus Heresy tier lists and reddit users, so let's see what we get. There's almost an element of danger here, because I'm kind of looking forward to this one.

**

I'm quite happy to say that The First Heretic more than fulfilled my expectations. Dembski-Bowden writes well, and I think he gets a crucial point: the Horus Heresy is, first and foremost, a tragedy.

So, the book finally stars the Word Bearers. Lorgar's seventeenth Legion, formerly the Imperial Heralds, known for their fanaticism in the Imperial cause and as the inventors of Chaplains, the skull-helmed heralds and confessors of the legions. The problem has been that in the previous novels, the Word Bearers have mostly been pantomime villains.

In The First Heretic, we finally properly see things from their point of view. The Word Bearers thing is that they're very religious, and basically worship the Emperor as a god. When we've encountered the Imperial cult in the previous volumes, their holy text has been the Lectitio Divinitatus, which attests the divinity of the Emperor. Lorgar wrote it.

Emps himself, however, does not approve. He also thinks the Word Bearers are moving far too slowly for the Great Crusade, and to chastize them, he sends the Ultramarines to destroy the city of Monarchia that the Word Bearers spent ages building for his glory. The inhabitants of Monarchia get to evacuate and send one distress call, which has the entire legion rush back. Emps himself then forces them to kneel in the ashes of the city, in ritual humiliation.

As I'm sure you can imagine, this is a tremendous success and the Word Bearers immediately mend their ways.

Several of the previous Horus Heresy novels have featured Word Bearers First Chaplain Erbs, always sort of lurking around, doing something villainous and best visualized as Mike Myers's Dr. Evil with his little finger to his lips. We now know where Erbs learned his trade: from Lorgar's adoptive father Kor Phaeron, a fairly ancient augmented human (i.e. not a proper space marine, he was too old for the procedures) who clanks around in Terminator armor like a mechanized Palpatine. The two of them encourage Lorgar to go on a quest to find gods who are willing to be worshipped, and again, those of you who know the lore know how this goes.

At the forefront of Lorgar's quest is captain Argel Tal, a name many people will recognize. He's an excellently written character, and so is Lorgar. The two of them carry the narrative, with Argel Tal as the point-of-view character who has his doubts about whether these are the kind of gods they should be worshipping. The story culminates in the Drop Site Massacre at Isstvan V, where Lorgar duels Corvus Corax of the Raven Guard.

**

This is a very successful book. It's a tragedy for just about everyone involved, from the Emperor on down. It's a successful one because while Erbs and Kor Phaeron are still mostly just being evil, the motivations of the key characters are deeply understandable.

There's some talk in the book that each Primarch embodies some attribute of the Emperor, and passes that on to his legion. It's stated here that Lorgar's attribute is faith, which makes all of his Word Bearers fanatically loyal to him, and at least somewhat explains his deification of the Emperor. Now, because we've read The Last Church, we know that Emps is an angry New Atheist, so we get that this pisses him off. But Lorgar apparently never realizes this until the destruction of Monarchia and the humiliation of his legion.

You really do have to wonder what the Emperor was thinking. If Nicaea and sending the Space Wolves to destroy Prospero were terrible decisions, and Emps not telling Magnus what he was up to seems inexplicable, I think there's a good argument that the ritual humiliation of Lorgar and the Word Bearers is what kicks off the whole Heresy.

Lorgar's greatest personal tragedy is that he's a genetically and sorcerously engineered super-soldier who doesn't want to be a soldier at all. He's a leader but not a warrior, but it's not like the Emperor asked him. He's the Primarch who doesn't want to be a Primarch. Clearly he's happiest doing theology and building cities for the Imperium, so I don't know, why not let him do that?

During the Drop Site Massacre, he charges Corax even though he knows it's a duel he can't win. But he's rather die than watch his legion butchered. That's real heroism. Like I said, how do you not feel for the guy? So far he's a rare Primarch in not being at all a buffoon or a lunatic.

Argel Tal is also very sympathetic. Like I said, he has serious doubts about what they're doing, but his loyalty to his Primarch is such that he doesn't just follow along, but volunteers. Of course, he comes to suspect that he's doing this because of the gene-seed he has from Lorgar, but he does it anyway. The stories of Lorgar and Argel Tal are properly tragic, the setting is very space operatic, and the whole thing is just a satisfying, well-written story.

**

The First Heretic also features a Legio Cybernetica unit attached to the Word Bearers, where some of the battle-automata have been inducted into the legion as honorary members. So I'm very much afraid that's all the justification I'm going to need to paint some Word Bearers robots in Legions.

Finally, I want to point out that Lorgar is consistently described as golden, and after the dramatic events on Khur, he spends quite a long time brooding and smearing himself with ash while wearing only a loincloth.

This, by the way, is where I abandon publication order. Like I said at the start of this project, I absolutely will not read all fifty thousand Horus Heresy books, and even though I've heard good things about Prospero Burns and Abnett's been quite good, I have to be honest and say that I find the whole space viking thing so unbelievably boring that I cannot face the idea of a whole novel of them. Because there will apparently never be another Elder Scrolls game, I have to reserve my viking cliche tolerance for another playthrough of Skyrim. So I will be back next time with something out of sequence.

To sum up, I found The First Heretic grand and intoxicating. It's by miles the best Horus Heresy novel so far, and I'd say that if you're interested in Warhammer and are going to read one book in the whole series, I'd make it this one.

Let's Play Chaos in the Old World

Back before the pandemic, when I was looking for board games for our little group to try, I kept coming across the out-of-print Chaos in the Old World, and finally, I cracked and bought a second-hand copy.

**

Chaos in the Old World is a four-player game where each player controls a Chaos God and tries to corrupt and destroy the Old World.

The board and components are excellent, but I do have one complaint: the miniatures. I like the design, but it's the War of the Ring problem again: they're made of soft plastic, so quite a few of them are bent out of shape, and some of the cultist models have lost their Chaos icons entirely.

Everyone gets three kinds of models: cultists, daemons and a single greater daemon. Cultists generate corruption tokens, and daemons can fight peasants and each other. Each turn, each player gets a set of power points they can use to summon models onto the board and play chaos cards.

There are three ways to win the game, and one way to lose it. First, each chaos god has a threat dial. If they do certain thematically appropriate things, they get to advance the dial; for example, if Khorne kills other gods' models, they get a dial token. If a player manages to advance their dial all the way, they win.

You can also gather victory points by dominating areas, that is, having enough models in them to exceed their conquest value. If a player gathers 50 victory points and no-one's maxed out their dial, they win.

You also get victory points from ruining areas. If an area has twelve corruption tokens on it, it becomes ruined, and everyone who chipped in corruption tokens gets victory points. If five areas get ruined, the game ends and the player with the most victory points wins.

Finally, there's a deck of Old World cards that represent random events in the world; when the deck runs out, the game ends, and if no-one has achieved any of the victory conditions, everyone loses! I like it.

**

We decided the only thing to do was to try playing! We divided up the Chaos gods, and I shamelessly picked my personal favorite, Slaanesh.

At the beginning of the game, the map gets randomized a bit with various tokens scattered in the different areas. As Slaanesh, I was particularly interested in the Noble and Hero tokens, as I get to move my dial if I can place corruption tokens in areas with them. Luckily, one of the early Old World cards had a hero arise in the Troll Country.

I staked out a presence in Norsca to corrupt their nobility, and Tzeentch homed in on the warpstone in Kislev, where we had the first, inconclusive, battle of the game.

Over the first turn, we all homed in on where we thought our strengths would be. I started corrupting the north, and Tzeentch infiltrated Kislev and the Empire. Nurgle favors populous areas and focused on Bretonnia, while the Khorne player mistakenly thought he'd get to advance his dial by killing peasant tokens and carved a bloody swathe through the south.

I realized I was slightly hemmed in in the north, and made a play for Tilea in the south. Nurgle wanted it as well, and we got into a fairly epic fight, with both sides summoning their greater daemons.

Unfortunately for me, Nurgle was victorious, but some of my cultists survived to land a corruption token with the Tilean nobility.

Nurgle switched their attention to Estalia, Tzeentch invaded Norsca, and Khorne started making inroads into the Empire. Nurgle also continued to pile up corruption tokens in Bretonnia at an impressive pace.

Soon enough, we were ready for total destruction. The mechanics for ruination are interesting: everyone who's placed corruption tokens in the ruined area that turn gets victory points, and then the players with the most and second-most tokens in the area get a bigger points haul. It leads to some good scrambles as everyone tries to get in on the action. Nurgle's efforts bore fruit in Bretonnia, and Tzeentch led the way in blowing up Kislev.

The game was now definitely nearing its end. We only had one turn left, and it looked like a pretty foregone conclusion that I would be able to advance my dial to win. Meanwhile, several players were closing in on the 50-VP win condition, but if we somehow failed all of these, we'd actually all lose! So we decided to work together to blow up as much of the Old World as possible.

In the end, we ruined not only Bretonnia and Kislev, but also Norsca, Estalia and the Empire. I maxed out my dial and took the overall win, but all of the other players also exceeded 50 victory points, and we ruined five regions, which means that we fulfilled all of the victory conditions on the last turn of the game. So I feel like in that sense, we all won.

**

I decided I'd do the same with Chaos in the Old World as I have with some other games, and paint the winning models. It took me such ages to finish writing this post that I painted all the Slaanesh models before it was done.

Since they are board game pieces, I wanted to make it very obvious which Chaos god they belong to, so pink and purple were the order of the day.

**

We had a great time playing Chaos in the Old World. The mechanics are surprisingly smooth, and I really enjoyed the theme and the gameplay. Your choice of Chaos god does constrain your options somewhat, so I don't know, maybe this'll get repetitive after some point. I'd love to get the Horned Rat expansion, but it's only available second-hand for absolutely outrageous prices. But the base game itself is just an excellent time, and I highly recommend trying it.