First the big news. Games Workshop has already released their first FAQ for N26. And, apparently, I wasn’t the only one who noticed that there weren’t any plasma pistols in the Orlock house gang list but a bunch on the weapon sprue because that was addressed with this little line:
Page 64 is, of course, the Orlock house weapon list. Unfortunately, I jumped the gun and started putting together this guy to stick with the theme.
The nice thing about Orlocks is that I’ve painted enough of them at this point, this was essentially just a day’s worth of work. And it’s not wasted since I might run it at some point. This disappointing thing about this build though, is the way Rapid Fire is now handled in the new edition’s rules, which is to say, it’s not. You get a single shot with a single attack. Which really kicks this guy in the balls, power-wise. And since close combat isn’t nearly so deadly as it used to be (more on this in a bit) not having more stopping power is a real issue. Fortunately, at least the plasma pistol has returned.
I did get another game in of N26 though and it was a good time because I was with some fun guys. Had a good day of playing hooky from work and spending an afternoon over a gaming table. But, I definitely had opinions about the edition after another game.
One of the things that I liked about the new actions was that there was now an Engage action, an additional way to get into Close Combat with a fighter. Well… now I know why that exists. Because your fighters are going to spend a lot of time on their butts. Since every hit is a suppression (unless you successfully pass a Nerves of Steel skill check), a lot of guys are going to go down regularly. This is a side effect of not factoring terrain or distance into the Hit calculation. If it’s always a raw Ballistic Skill roll, it will succeed about half the time. Just never when you want it to.
This doesn’t mean there aren’t more wounds. But get ready to see a lot more fighters on the ground.
your fighters are going to spend a lot of time on their butts
While on the subject of Engage, I might as well bring up the Close Combat point from above. Because you’re not stacking Injury Dice on successful wounds (and thus doing away with murder dice!) and since a result of “Injury” doesn’t take anyone out of action, get ready for juves to be whacking each other over the head, again and again with nothing much else happening.
Genuinely dangerous fighters will, of course, remain dangerous. But this edition definitely puts its thumb on the scale of ranged weapons being more dangerous than close combat.
Lastly, GW has really made a dog’s dinner of ammo checks and when a gun is jammed. They’ve really relegated the Firepower Die to almost irrelevance. Almost. You still need to roll one for Rapid Fire and the jam face still kind of matters. But, mostly, people will be rolling a second d6 along with their hit die to satisfy the Ammo trait. This is a change I just don’t understand. I can understand adding the Ammo trait to designate the weapons that might jam or run out of rare ammo. That’s fine. But we always rolled the Firepower die with weapons before. Why not just keep on doing that?
Worse still is that the FAQ actually made things more confusing than before and now the new way to handle things is across two totally different documents.
It’s weird.
On The Table
I’ve been painting at a real snail’s pace lately. But I am happy to say I basically have these Goliaths completed. I didn’t really need them, in any sense, the campaign I’m going to be playing Goliaths with already has a complete list. But I didn’t have anyone with these load-outs and I wanted to use the shoulder rested pose on another mini. So I changed the head from a hammer to a cleaver. This turned out to be a lucky change since cleavers are more dangerous in this edition. And then I gave him a flamer just because…
His buddy got the grenade launcher, which is a neat piece of kit, and a stub gun that was put onto a different arm for pose reasons. Happy to be done with them, though! Just need to do eyes and bases and I think I can throw some varnish on and call it a day.
Unfortunately, my Escher sisters haven’t progressed that much. They were made more or less impossible with the latest edition unless I want to spend a lot of money to get them a 5+ save. Which is kind of a bummer because Armor was supposed to be their whole thing. So I have to admit, I’ve lost steam on this gang.
I did build one carrying a plasma cannon which will basically only be possible with a trading post visit but, aside from their armor, they are probably mostly playable. It’s just harder to differentiate them from every other Escher gang out there.
Speaking of Escher though, I did come up with the idea for the next gang I want to build. Be on the lookout for a Khorne corrupted Escher gang. I’m really going to lean into chainswords and auto-pistols and a lot of berserker to get them into close combat. I have a small sculpting idea I think I can execute, so that’ll probably be my next big gang project… I just need to order a Khorne Blood Bowl team to make it happen!
