My BOYL 2025

 A quick BOYL post, if nothing else so that I can more easily remember which ones I've attended (it looks like my last was in 2023 2022, according to a bit of a camera photo search).

My gaming for the weekend was the Siege of Praag (Mordheim) where I played in the morning and evening scenarios. As with so many of the demonstration and participation games at BOYL it looked fantastic. The guys running it had learned from games they'd seen running previous years and worked out how to keep things flowing and actually get to a conclusion in the allotted time.

And my enjoyment was helped by my minotaur having a blast (and somewhat riding his luck) in the first scenario.

My minotaur happily facing the majority of a warband as it tries to cross one of the bridges. Meanwhile my actual "heroes" are having less luck nearby.

As is so often the case when playing a game you've not played in a while, game one was vaguely getting my head around the rules. For game two I thought I knew more what I was doing, but the dice were less in my favour and my tactical brain deserted me. My Norse got bogged down and eventually all but wiped out.

My Norse cross one of the bridges into Praag. What should have been an objective-winning position...

Another highlight was seeing the reproduction of the table featured in the WFB 3rd Edition rulebook, complete with the old plastic Fighting Fantasy ogres. The amount of work that must have gone into it is incredible, not just the modelling but sourcing the figures, and is indicative of the efforts that people make to have BOYL be such a success.

I've a rather tatty cardboard original of the Maisontaal monastery and have long been intending to make a new and somewhat more robust version, so I took plenty of reference pictures!

View of the "back" corner of the monastery, which gave Geoff some creative license for adding an extra breech

As always the Foundry display cabinets give new things to be discovered. The original Bagrian stood out to me this time for some reason!

The original Bagrian from The Vengeance of the Lichemaster

Looking forward to next year already!

BOYL 2019 - some thoughts

BOYL has been and gone and I've finally found time to catch my breath. Given nearly two weeks have passed there's not much point in a pics and appreciation post so instead to cover that off I'll link to Asslessman's review on his Leadplague blog and an overview of the Saturday on Shadowkings (the only day I was able to attend this year).

I wanted though to set down my main impressions of the day. It also set off some broader thoughts about the games that work well and not so well at BOYL but that's a topic for another post. First to mention Warmaster, which I'm sure most people reading this have heard of, as indeed had I. Seeing it in action on this magnificent table was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me. I'm increasingly becoming convinced that I want to treat WFB as a large skirmish game so I'd be keen to give Warmaster a go at scratching the "ranked up units" itch.

The thing I actually played though was the Realm of Chaos table, which was a good game but not the one I expected. There was lots going on on the table, with warpstone lumps bringing in extra mutations, shrines and other landmarks to interact with and civilians to capture.

Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves with fun goings on, outrageous dice rolls but mostly just a background for admiring little lead people and generally sharing the hobby with other like-minded gamers. My regretful conclusion though is that Realm of Chaos isn't the game for me... I love the extra detail and background the books bring, and the warband generation and advancement aspect is undoubtedly fun. However the battles are what sink it for me - with the small size of the warbands and the relative power of the champions after even a couple of rewards or mutations it very much fits into the Herohammer mould, which just isn't my thing.

Rather than ending on a negative note I wanted to mention in passing one magical aspect of BOYL which is that of having the creators wandering the venue. Tony Ackland was there with some of his portfolio, John Blanche judged the painting competition, Rick Priestley and Nigel Stillman watched games being played with their rules (sometimes several editions at once!), Kev Adams was sculpting for charity and of course the Ansells host the whole thing. It makes for a slightly surreal but very special day.

Are we the baddies?

One of the warbands I rolled up for BOYL has a dark elf champion. Since he gets chaos armour as a reward I needed to find an elf-type figure in heavy armour which was a bit of a struggle. I settled on the rather lovely Evil Knight from Midlam Miniatures. He's slightly too tall which I'm doing my best to get over, a bigger issue was the theatrical raised fist which I resolved by repositioning it slightly, drilling through it and giving him a halbard to hold.

I really enjoyed the opportunity to paint a classic Khorne colour scheme - usually I try to go for generic schemes to give me flexibility but I can't see me using this figure for anything else, as a non-Khorne elf champion (without chaos armour) I can represent with the figure on the left.

I don't think I've put him up on the blog before, I finished him off after BOYL a few years ago but forgot to post about him when I got back. I see dark elves as embittered exiled sea / high elves so he's a standard elf warrior with gloomy, but again generic, colours, and a shield design out of the high elf list in Warhammer Armies.

Let's see how my new Khorne champion fairs tomorrow!

Four human followers of chaos

So I did manage to finish these in time for BOYL... now I have just one champion to complete and I'm ready!

Comparing the Slaves to Darkness and Lost and the Damned followers tables is interesting. For humans the former gives the option of light or heavy armour, a spear or a bow, and a shield. The latter table is "slightly different ... and better reflects the current range of Citadel Miniatures" or, to put another way, better reflects our setting.

Previously when I've generated human followers I've gone with the heavy armour option so I could use my chaos warrior miniatures. I wanted instead to get some bow-armed figures painted to give me more tactical options, as running a very small warband can be a bit dull.

The only humans I have with shields and bows are Khan on the right from the C01 Barbarians range, and a chaos thug which I didn't want to use as he has a near-identical posture. They're a bit of a mixed bag but I think that's fair enough for the collection of followers who might end up in a champion's retinue: the Marauder thug is clearly headed down that path while the two Renaissance archers are probably more recent converts from one of the backgrounds that the Lost and the Damned table provides - brigands or unemployed mercenaries perhaps.

They're very different sizes - the classic Citadel / Marauder figures being much bulker and the Front Rank archer (third from left) noticably skinnier as well as slightly taller. The Foundry (ex-Citadel) archer on the left is really quite tiny, after I first bought these my feeling was that actually they were too small to use but I'm coming around to the odd sizes being natural human variation. He's been modified with a dark ages warrior head to make the historical figures look less orderly, of all of them I think I'm happiest with how he's come out.

Now to try and finish my spare champion...

BOYL Sunday

There probably ought to be something here about how belated this post is, but wait until you see my next one...

On my way to the Sunday of BOYL I took a diversion to Warhammer World to pick up a copy of the reprinted 40K, since my old one has the traditional late 80s binding...

It was kind of interesting to see Games Workshop's headquarters, which really brings home how big a company it is. Anyway, I got my hands on the new, much thicker, edition:

Top: original, practically loose-leaf edition. Bottom: thicker and so far pristine!

And then back to Foundry, where I'd arranged to use my accumulated painted chaos force in a 1,000-point-a-side battle against Paul D's orcs and goblins (and goblins). We'd opted for 2nd edition, which remains my favourite edition for nostalgia reasons, although it was interesting to be reminded just how much of what I consider Warhammer hadn't been included by that point (e.g. no beast handlers or minotaurs yet). And to be reminded of the joys of calculating points values down to quarters rather than merely halves.

I'd expected to be outnumbered, but not quite to this extent!

1,000 points buys a lot of goblins and orcs

I started out sending my chaos hounds out on the flank, with a target of the bolt throwers but stopping off via the nearby unit of orcs. I know this isn't the best way to use the hounds, one day I might even remember that! They hit the orcs hard, but not hard enough.

Meanwhile my main force was heading for the enemy centre, in good chaotic tradition. Not unexpectedly the goblins have fanatics waiting for this sort of thing. It turns out that in 2nd edition fanatics don't have quite the impact I'm used to from 3rd edition, so I let disposing of them tie me up rather than ploughing on through.

Oh-oh, fanatics

Part one of Paul's cunning plan was that one of his heroes had a weapon with the Sleep Attack ability. It knocked out the hounds' handler, and deprived of his leadership they routed at their first check. Meanwhile my mortar was killing the odd orc here and there, but overall having very limited impact.

Part two of Paul's cunning plan was a shaman with Zone of Steadfastness. A minor bonus of the zone is that these goblins became immune to psychological effects, but the real point is that it tripled their number of attacks. Even with their low weapon skill that's a lot of fightiness, and they held off the charge of my minotaur and beastmen -

And quite quickly killed the minotaur. Paul was particularly keen that I captured this moment of the battle!

The minotaur falls to the unexpectedly mighty goblins

The goblins versus beastmen battle became the main focal point. The beastmen were slowly whittling them down, but couldn't afford the casualties they took in return. And meanwhile my chaos warriors, having taken a diversion to avoid the fanatics, were very slow in arriving.

By the time they did get to the battle, it was looking like a bit of a lost cause, although in points terms I had the majority of my warband still in action. But this fight was all happening within the Zone.

My beastmen had been very resiliant, passing several rout tests, but eventually the shear numbers of orcs and goblins chewed them up.

I generally find this sort of simple game as a good, relaxing way to spend BOYL Sunday, as everyone tends to be a bit frazzled after a full Saturday. What to start painting for next year and, especially after a lost battle like this, how to play things differently, then tend to occupy the brain on the drive home.

In hindsight I was annoyed with myself for my approach to the second half of the battle (and a bit about the hound deployment). I sometimes wonder if wargaming isn't really the hobby for me!

I try not to meta-game either in army selection or during the battle itself, but to both me and my battlefield alter ego it was fairly apparent that even that number of orcs and goblins shouldn't be all that worrying to a combat-centric chaos force such as this. The shaman was clearly the main threat on the field. Once the trap of the Zone was sprung I should have thrown everything at trying to kill him, certainly my mage's powers and perhaps my un-engaged warriors. But equally I should, contrary to the normal approach for a chaos force, have tried to widen out the battle and not have everything fighting in the Zone.

Still, well done to Paul: his minions' plan was a good one, whereas I didn't really have much of a plan!

BOYL was last week...

... but I've only just properly got back to the internet via Sussex (holiday) and London (work) so have only got to blogging about it now.

Given the lateness there's no point in me doing a general write-up and loads of other people have done great ones already. So on that topic I'll just link to Thantsants' and Whiskey Priest's posts, which in turn link to lots of other write-ups.

I hadn't been sure about what to plump for as my Saturday game but in the end Thantsants' Rigg's Shrine game caught my fancy. Currently having vikings on the brain and recently-ish having played the Kremlo scenarios I thought it'd be interesting to do a Kremlo conversion to bring to the game. I'd originally planned to spruce up an extra unit of vikings to bring with him but in the end only managed to add a single berserker to my group.

I was pretty happy with how he turned out, given that he's only my second substantial conversion. There are several bits that aren't how I'd like, and results are never as good as the concept you have in your mind's eye, but he's definitely good enough. I was helped by the fact that I was taking on something alien, and the eye lets you off where it would be far more critical with a human figure, and also because Kremlo is a bit of an oddity having a very different head shape to other Slann of the same era. I used Kremlos by Thantsants, Aiteal and Greblord as references, as well as the C32 Palace Guard for general size and shape. In the end he's a bit between those two and so not recognisably either, but he did the job.

At the event he bumped into two other Kremlos, including this one of Harry's who turned out to be the last Kremlo standing. Side-by-side the flaws with the head are more apparent, with mine being rather too plain, but I'm happy enough with him.

The Rigg's Shrine game looked spectacular, with the jungle looking great but overshadowed by the sheer amount of work that the shrine had taken Steve to build which really showed in the end result.

Here it is fully assembled after the game -

And in action, with the final showdown near the high altar -

Best of all the game was fast paced (we got through nearly 20 turns) while still allowing plenty of time for chatting and admiring little bits of lead. It left me with a desire to get more stuff painted, and soon (perhaps the year after next) to contribute more substantively to one of these big games. As Whiskey Priest points out in his call to arms, to get the most out of BOYL you really want to be rolling dice, and there are relatively few games - such as this one and the Helsreach board - that cater to pickup players. One of these days I need to do my bit in that regard.

So that was my Saturday - next I'll look at the 1000 points of chaos versus orcs game that Paul D and I had planned for our Sunday.

A single dwarf

Even I can manage to get that painted...

Kimril is another of those figures I've owned for an awfully long time, and only just got around to painting. I'm pleased in a way - he's looking a lot better than he would have done if I'd painted him in my youth, although still far short of the standard of a lot of stuff in the Oldhammer scene.

There's a bring-a-giant-slayer spot on what it seems will be one of the fabulously decorated tables at BOYL, where hopefully he'll get a run-out and come to a suitably glorious end.

I'm really looking forward now to getting some paint on some other dwarves, which after all was one of my first objectives when I got back into the hobby, but currently it looks as though they're about fourth in the queue. So next year probably...

Very belated BOYL report

I only managed a single day of BOYL this year, but it was as inspirational as always.

I spent the day playing Norse and Harry's and Siege of Dumezil Hold scenario from the First Edition Redwake River Valley campaign (although actually a lot of the day was spent wandering around chatting and admiring other people's models).

Harry has created a lovely set of dungeon tiles to go with his Frostgrave winter terrain, which allowed for the exterior and interior of the siege / assault.

My lads were leaving the messy fighting around the gate to some other fools (who did have the help of a couple of giants!) while we attacked a couple of sally ports. Our objective was to kill the dwarf king and destroy an artefact of theirs, leaving them too demoralised to help in the war against Psammon.

An interesting aspect of First Edition is that a character's attributes are rolled and adjusted for their species. I ended up having my hero Gublub (formerly Grack the Wise) with a very low intelligence and subject to stupidity, while my shaman Gruk the Loon was subject to frenzy. The latter came in handy as he also rolled up a mostly useless selection of spells.

As with the system of traits in Dragon Rampant I do think these random attributes really add to the game. Although sometimes you're going to end up with something a bit duff it does make you think of the leaders more in terms of personality than just as a generic champion, and also embrace the possibility that they're not actually very heroic.

I'm not sure whether it was Gublub's stupidity or my own tactical ineptitude that enabled the dwarf king and the dwarves' sacred artefact to escape, but in my defense dwarves are no easier to dislodge from tunnels in first edition than they are in later versions. We did decide though that the surviving orcs wouldn't be too unhappy - with the dwarves having fled and their commander felled by the devestatingly effective elven bows they were now in possession of a rather comfortable dwarven hold. Given his size Gublub seems favourite to become the new leader but I'm not so sure - Gruk is just as good in a fight and being subject to frenzy might tip the balance! If nothing else if should make for some interesting leadership debates...

The Rise of Morcar

There were several other impressive games on the day but for sheer weight of models on the table a mention has to be given to the Rise of Morcar game.

This scale of battle isn't really my cup of tea, but it's good to see someone doing it, and not only to see some of the models that had been produced for the occasion. Though having said that, somewhere in amongst that lot for example are some of the most interesting chaos spawn (or other gribblies in that vein) that I've seen. But equally when you focus in on what looks like a "normal" unit, and it turns out that actually it's a unit of trolls, then that's not my Warhammer.

But if this is your cup of tea then Snickit's write up contains lots of pictures, if you've not seen them already.

So that was BOYL '15!

Good to see people already planning for next year, I can't wait to see what springs from the hive mind as the focus event for that. Oldhammer Ahoy pipped the Deathrace to the highlight title for this year, at least for me, and the photos over on Shadowking's blog showcasing the quality and quantity nicely illustrate why, although they looked even better "in the flesh".

Captain Crooks travelling from the other side of the world to put on a game rather puts everyone else to shame though!

I was glad to get my caravaners onto the beautifully prepared table for the Fallout game -

The Nuka-Cola bottle caps are re-roll tokens, which we each had 3 of, and hint at the shear level of effort that LegioCustodes had put into preparing for the game. 

The game was a great showcase of how GM'd scenarios outshine straight forward two-player games. There were six of us playing, with only the supermutants and the Children of the Cathedral having the luxury of knowing who was "against" them (everybody) or who they were "against" (everybody).

I spent the game feeling decidedly out-gunned, but my objectives didn't actually set me against anyone and I was extremely fortunate that all the potential obstacles in my path were either dealt with by other players or decided they had other groups they'd rather fight elsewhere.

I managed to achieve my objectives without firing a shot, and with only one or two unsuccessful shots aimed at me. I had the occasional feeling that it'd be fun to take a more active role than was strictly necessary but was conscious that to do so would probably go badly for me, never mind the fact that ammo you use is ammo you can't sell later!

Fantasy remains where my heart is, but on this showing I would happily paint more stuff with guns.

A post apocalyptic diversion

When LegioCustodes of Oldhammer 40k suggested a game of Rogue Trader set in the Fallout universe for this year's BOYL I thought that'd be a great opportunity to wallow in two different forms of nostalgia, plus I'd only have to paint a handful of figures so that'd be no problem...!

I must learn that I'm (a) slightly obsessive, and (b) a very slow painter. But with lots of forbearance from the family, plus abandoning the plan to include cargo with my brahmin conversion, I'm finally done, and with nearly a week to spare.

As an added bonus I've finally painted a couple of Imperial Guard figures I bought when they were new (one of them even has base colours from then), and got some practice with painting flesh tones other than green. Still a lot of work to do on that (especially my attempt at "weather-beaten Caucasian"), but while there's bits I'm not happy with they're a lot better than they would have been if I'd painted them 20-some years ago.

Stone thrower alternative house rules for Warhammer Fantasy Battle 3rd edition

I got two good games of WFB in over the BOYL weekend, on Saturday participating in the staggeringly impressive siege game, and on Sunday a "smaller" 3000 point orcs and chaos versus undead battle.

As I start once more to get a feel for the game a few rules begin to stand out as off or a bit broken, one of these being the power of stone throwers - particularly in comparison to bolt throwers - to the point we partially house-ruled them during the siege game. Another aspect then reared its head during our Sunday game, and further thoughts since make me want to take this further.

I'm clearly not the first to notice the power of war machines in 3rd edition, it's quite a common theme over on the Oldhammer forum and in fact Dreamfish and Gaj have already introduced some house rules which attempt to tone them down somewhat.

I think those rules take the toning down a bit too far - while you don't want stone throwers to be the focus of a battle, having them being devastating but unpredictable is part of their charm! That said I've always stuck to 3- or 4-man throwers, the large template from a 6-man thrower adds another dimension.

With this in mind these rules attempt to make a couple of things less broken -

• The accuracy of speculative fire in the rules as written
• The attractiveness of stone throwers as a way of killing opposing characters

Speculative fire

Speculative fire as written seems far too powerful, since it's meant to represent the crew chucking rocks at a target which they don't actually know the location of - speculatively. They might have seen a unit move behind a wood or hill but they've no real idea of where it is, and certainly not the exact location of the unit leader (unlike their controlling general).

With this in mind in the siege game we doubled the "miss" chance, so that as well as deviating twice as far the missile also deviated on rolls in the range 1-16, rather than only 1-12. How to handle the direction of the additional deviations is up for debate, you could roll an extra d12 for these but I like the neatness of having everything resolved with a single dice roll, like this -

You could also ban the targeting of characters with speculative fire - or, in the words of Erny, just remind your opponent not to be an ass!

Survival of the fittest

In later additions of Warhammer there's apparently a rule called "Look out sir" where a character, if targeted by a war machine, is only hit 1 time in 6, with a normal trooper being the true target the rest of the time.

To be honest I mainly object to this rule on account of its name - it doesn't seem to belong in a Bretonnian or Empire army, never mind orcs and goblins! It also seems to give characters a bit too much immunity compared to the rules as written, so I'd suggest something like this instead -

Heroes are quicker, more ruthless and luckier than is typical of their kind. As a result, when associated with or leading a unit, not only do they not get hit by ordinary missile fire, they're rather less vulnerable to war machines as well. If a hero is a target in this situation then roll 1d6:

5-6: the hero spots the incoming projectile, or perhaps reacts quicker to a warning shout, and manages to move out of the way. They take no damage
3-4: the hero is slow to react and only manages to avoid harm by shoving past their fellows, inadvertently pushing one of the troopers into harm's way. If there is a "spare" trooper (i.e. one not originally within the target area) they take damage in place of the "hero", if not no additional damage is caused
1-2: the hero is hit as normal

Aside from the above two suggestions I'm also not sure about the points values of stone throwers, particularly in relation to bolt throwers. I've noticed that Warhammer Armies doubles the cost of both of them compared to the 3rd edition rules, but stone throwers still seem rather cheap for a couple of reasons -

1. For a target you can see the hit chance is always 40% with a stone thrower (13-20 on d20). By contrast for orcs or humans (BS of 3) the hit chance with a bolt thrower is 50% under optimal conditions but given any modifiers (long range, soft cover) this swiftly drops away
2. For stone throwers any target under the template is automatically hit and you then just need to cause a wound for each individual model. For bolt throwers second and subsequent casualties are subject to diminishing returns - not only do you have to wound the previous target in order to have a chance of wounding further targets, but also the strength of the missile is progressively reduced. Therefore bolt throwers just aren't the mass killers that stone throwers can be.

Countering this is that bolt throwers don't present a threat to their own side in the event of a miss, and also have no minimum range, but taken overall still seem much worse value than stone throwers. I feel then that stone throwers should cost twice the points of the equivalent bolt thrower (as in fact was the case in 2nd edition).

Comments? Thoughts?

I love this stage of miniature painting...

... when you finally get to the shading / highlighting bit.

My painting's going very slowly at the moment, mainly due to real life commitments, and I've pretty much resigned myself to not getting the miniatures I want painted done by the time BOYL 2014 comes around.

However I did realise while painting my last batch of orcs that I struggle with enthusiasm at the base coating stage, so this time around I tried changing from my normal routine. Rather than basecoat everything then shade and highlight second, I tried with a couple of chaos warriors doing each main area fully from basecoat to finished, then moving on to the next. It does seem to help with the motivation side of things, even though I'm not sure it makes me any faster. So I think I'll stick with that approach for a while.

I'm not 100% happy with the way these two ended up. The shields especially I think are rather weak, after thinking with my last batch I had done a decent job on shields. And the green armoured guy has a rather heavy handed shading wash, amongst other things.

Other than doing the bases I need to move on to the next pieces now though. I'll come back these along with others of my recent efforts once I can field a useful amount of painted figures. Meanwhile the lesson learned is (surprise) preparation is key - although I'm loath to chop at the figure the green chap needs to lose his shield boss to give me a flat area to work on, whereas his compatriot needs some work to flatten out the join between his shield and the figure.

I've a battle looming in less than a week though, and at least 3 more figures (ideally 5) to get done by then...

Why I Oldhammer

Setting aside for now the question my wife occasionally raises of why I wargame at all, I thought I should note down what the Oldhammer movement means to me.

Zhu's Oldhammer Contract is a great starting point which I'm pretty sure everyone signs up to, but as with all groups of 2 or more people everyone has their own particular emphasis or preferences. There's a definite strand of archeogaming, which (while I love the old figures) seems to me to be a bit too much of the public face of Oldhammer. There are also hints of preferred rule versions, which while it's good for me as I've no idea what happens in versions later than 3rd, is kind of missing the point - there's no reason you can't play Oldhammer with the current edition (8th, apparently, thank you Google).

As seems quite common amongst Oldhammer gamers I was introduced to and played the game in my early teens, played for a while (in my case until my early 20s), became disenfranchised with Games Workshop in general and WFB in particular, and eventually left the hobby. At the time I put my loss of interest down as a reaction to GW's increasingly obvious business plan behind the game, with built-in obsolecence of the armies as new models and rules were released seeming like a bit of a kick in the teeth given the cost of collecting the army in the first place.

In hindsight though a bigger issue was losing contact with my old group of gaming friends on leaving home to go to university, and hence pretty much only playing "line them up, knock them down" battles against other players who (like me at the time) were only focussed on winning.

Prior to that, while I'm sure my friends Ed, Greg and I were just as guilty of the sort of gamesmanship and bad behaviour that the Oldhammer movement is the antithesis of (we were teenagers, after all), we did play a good mix of scenarios in amongst our more standard battles, which definitely help place the emphasis more on playing a game than playing to win. We were also strangely reasonable in our selection of armies, with none of the abuses of fine-tuning and over-powerful combinations that seem to mark how the other half lives even today. It's good that Thantsants researches this stuff so that the rest of us don't have to!

So, to summarise, while it's a bit of a bonus that I can be sure my rule set or army won't become obsolete, Oldhammer to me is a fortunate collection of like-minded gamers that I'm sure did exist 20 years ago, but were just too hard to find before the internet happened! In a way the really odd thing about last week's Bring Out Your Lead! is that there was (it seemed to me) an undercurrent of surprise about how much fun it was. Which shouldn't have been a surprise given that it was a weekend of playing games, drinking and chatting, but it's kind of damning of the wider hobby that this was the case.

The saga of Grumdin the Proud (Bring Out Your Lead Realm of Chaos warband)

Chaos attributes: Teleport, Overgrown body part (head, x2)

Grumdin was once a proud commander of war parties for the dwarven hold of Karak Hirn. His career came to an end during an expedition against a raiding party out of the Black Mountains when, at a council of war, he killed the arrogant and distainful leader of a contingent of allied Knights Panther. Sent home in disgrace he then inflicted a severe beating on the elder placed in judgement over him, and was exiled forever from his hold.

Wandering the Empire, growing increasingly embittered by his fall from grace, he fell pray to the whispers of Khorne, the Blood God. Beastmen and other creatures who were drawn to him were forged into a travisty of his former command and, swearing vengence, he fell upon the outlying outposts of his former home. After initial success his warband were met by an organised dwarven force and were slaughtered. Grumdin escaped, using his new-found ability to teleport, but saw the defeat as the sign of his god's disfavour. Hearing rumours of a gathering of the followers of the hated Slaneesh in the Chaos Wastes he gathered together the few survivors of his defeat and headed north in search of death or redemption.

Bring Out Your Lead warband

I seem to have been bitten by the bug in a big way. I'm not sure if I'll be able to attend Bring Out Your Lead, but if I do then a warband seems to be the way forward.

I thought I'd roll up a couple from Orlygg's guidance, one based around a level 15 hero and one on a level 10. I'm pretty sure the whole thing will be a fairly brutal affair, I'm curious whether a bigger warband or a tougher leader are a better bet. Although being Oldhammer it's probably more down to how the dice land...

Chaos Undivided Champion

In my young day Chaos wasn't all this Khorne vs Slaanesh stuff. It was big lads with ridiculous armour and crazy stats, laying waste to all before them. So I reckon an Undivided warband is a good plan, and I'll see which side is short-handed on the day.

Human level 10 hero (picked)Random reward (I assume)
Chaos weapon
Attributes to be picked (need to work out which are positive and negative, and take one of each)

Retinue: 2, 48, 54
2d6 beastmen: 2, 2
1d6 chaos goblins: 6
2d6 humans: 2, 4


Champion of Khorne

But in the spirit of the occasion, it seems like I should pick a side as well. Slaanesh never really appealed to me, so Blood God it is.

Dwarf level 15 hero (picked - I always hankered after these minatures back in the day, I used this as an excuse to head to eBay last weekend)
Chaos armour
Chaos weapon
Attributes to be picked

Retinue: 41, 10
2d6 beastmen: 1, 1 (ouch)
1 chaos warrior: 5 = Marauder

Once the chaos dwarf arrives later this week I just need to check out what I do for the humans. I have probably around 20 in my collection, but most of them aren't warband material. I'll probably have a couple of my mercenaries make an appearance though.