Friday, November 13, 2009

Now back to our regularly Scheduled Program


I just got back from my wonderfully relaxing and productive vacation! Boy it sure is nice to leave real life behind and just relax.

I got a few things painted and a ton of models built while I was away. Pics to follow soon.

Here are a few things I decided to do while I was gone.

I will be doing one ‘Rules from the Man-cave’ post a month. Some will be the house rules that we use and others will be a rules proposal put forth for discussion. This month’s topic will be the reintroduction of Overwatch in 5th edition, because it was brought up in the last post by more than one of you.

My buddy has put his Necrons on hold until after the New Year, due to financial issues. So this frees me up for my projects. I really need to get the Soul Reapers finished beyond their pathetic 3 color tabletop state and I need to start working on my Space Wolves revamp project again. Now obviously the latter goes on the Space Wolves blog.

Every Monday I will be naming the unit of the week, that I intend on painting, I will post a starting pic followed up by a progress shot on Thursdays and finally the finished pics on Saturday or Sunday.

The Soul Reapers Mini-dex is complete as far as the Special Rules are concerned. Everyone in my group has decided that the rules are fair and balanced. I have decided much to the chagrin of my Imp Fist wielding mate that I am dropping the Ancient Enemies rule completely. He doesn’t really care that much but liked it from a Background/Fluff perspective.

So these are the final army wide special rules for the Soul Reapers:

Fear is for the weak: Soul Reapers have been in service the Chaos for ten millennia and know that the Dark Gods watch over them.

Soul Reapers never have their leadership reduced by more than –2 Ld as the result of losing an assault. If the Unit loses the assault by more than -2, then immediately take any remaining modifiers as armor saves. They may also attempt to regroup even if the squad has been reduced less than half strength through casualties.

Undivided We Stand: The Soul reapers detest the though of becoming single-minded minions of any particular Chaos God. Because of this the Soul Reapers make very limited use of the Cults of Chaos. A Soul Reapers army my only contain one unit of Berzerkers, Rubric Marines, Noise Marines, or Plague Marines for every HQ model in the army. Cult marines never count as the compulsory troops selections.


Icons of Chaos: The Soul Reapers make no use of icons dedicated to the Chaos Gods. They may only take the Icon of Chaos Glory as listed in the Codex Chaos Space Marine.


So work still continues on the Special Characters, although Titus is solid and probably set.

2 comments:

  1. As a basic rule, I'm somewhat skeptical of house rules. That caveat/display of bias aside...

    Fear Is For the Weak seems to be the biggest fix/change/question. The cult troop restriction and icon restriction is something you can pull off in the existing chaos codex, but FiFtW is the big fix.

    The text cut off in the middle, but the questions I have are:

    Did you remove vulnerability to sweeping advances?

    It looks like you'll be stuck with Ld8 with a re-roll at the lowest for a squad with an Icon of Chaos Glory, and then a nod to the No Retreat! Rule. That honestly reminds me of 'Stubborn' combined with And They Shall Know No Fear.

    Would it not be more streamlined to just give them STubborn, or take an HQ that grants the army Stubborn? Well, that and the regroup-below-half deal?

    Just food for thought. All things considered, I think you might want to figure in some kind of points increase (like maybe 2-3 per head) for the extras, or at least look at Space Wolves as a guide for cost, as you do have better leadership than them for the rank-and-file.

    That aside, I hear you 100% on the vacation Sometimes it's nice to get away from the grind and just refresh yourself.

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  2. Thanks for the comments and feedback. I know that house rules aren’t everyone’s cup o’ tea.

    I realize that two of the rules can be done without a rules restriction, but it is done purely for theme.

    I fixed the text in the FiFtW rule, forgive my poor copy and pasting. They have no invulnerability to sweeping advance or the auto rally like ATSKNF grants loyal Marines.

    I basically gave them the ability to rally under half strength. We were looking to create a unique rule with a flavor of its own, not some cheap cliché rip-off of ATSKNF.

    We did try Stubborn in a few games, it was way to overpowered with the IoCG; they were basically Fearless without the drawback. I didn’t want to remove or rewrite the IoCG so we dumped Stubborn. We also didn’t want make them Fearless or overpowered.

    We did look at the Space Wolves when making the decision not to add any points to the units.

    This is what we determined looking at the Wolves; they are 15pts each with the same weapons load out as the CSM’s, plus they have three Special rules and a base Leadership of 8. So taking into account the base leadership of 9, we have given the non-fearless models in the Chaos Marine army one special rule. We have no intention of messing with the points for special weapons, like GW did with the Wolves.

    Thanks again,
    -Jim

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