White Dwarf is Pretty Good Right Now

 

As my readers in the UK will know, the other week was too hot to do anything sensible. Conveniently, I found the latest White Dwarf lying around, and thought I'd give it a read. I have a subscription, but I've not been reading them for a little bit. I was notably pleased to see that the packaging it came in was now recyclable.

The big focus of this issue was that Jervis Johnson has retired, so they were taking a look at his career. I don't think there's any dispute that Jervis has been a massive influence on the Games Workshop hobby over the years. The issue really served to emphasise that.

The J Files were an old article where Jervis was given some column space to have a bit of a ramble on whatever he felt like. It saw a final return for Jervis to talk about the importance of the hobby to people and the impact it has on people's lives. I like talk pieces like this in moderation, and they weren't enough here that it started to drag.

There was plenty of delicious nostalgia this issue, looking over loads of stuff I remember from my Yoof. Being reminded of loads of cool articles I would read at school, or in my bedroom at home growing up was a nice feeling. I keep thinking about going back to re-read this, which is always a good sign.

In a "what's old is new again", they're doing "Tale of Four Warlords" again. There was a little bit of reality crashing in as these articles were written back in the middle of full lockdown. If it wasn't for that, the new figures aside, it would have fit happily into the White Dwarfs I remember and love.

There were a good few fan / hobbyist armies articles as well. They gave me a bunch of hobby ideas and got me really enthused about painting. I kind of want to stop writing this blog and go back and look at the models again.

There was also a whole bunch of rules for stuff. A couple of 40K articles, some Blood Bowl stuff, scenarios for Aeronautica Imperialis . . . While I don't play all the small games, new content for most of them was a really good sign of support that I appreciated. Age of Sigmar just had hobby articles, but I suspect that this is due to the recently released new edition and production schedules.

I particularly felt the article for Torchbearer fleets looked excellent. This was an option to build an army around the combined fleets escorting Primaris to meet their new chapter. While I was a little sad they missed Sisters of Silence out of the models you can take in it, it gives a ton of interesting options. I'm not sure if it's legal for tournaments, but that level of "new stuff you can try" really got me excited to see what else they'll put out.

So, in summary, White Dwarf is pretty good right now. I did give that away with the title, but this isn't really a complicated concept. They've got a good balance of hobby stuff across their different games, new rules and fun games you can try out if you're playing regularly, and stuff that could inspire you to a new hobby project. It felt a lot like the old White Dwarfs I used to read as a kid, and that can really only be a good thing.

Games Day 2012 - News, Rumours and Information (Part 1 - general information, Chaos Codex)

Firstly, a quick apology - there are no flashy pictures of swanky models here. My phone was stolen a while ago and I couldn't afford a new one, so I'm using a pretty archaic phone for my pictures.



What most people actually see at Games Day

I attended the first Forge World seminar and took notes of that, but for the rest of the day I'm going to rely on my memory. As such, I'll write that stuff up first before I forget, and then cover the stuff where paper is acting as my memory.

The sales area was much better laid out this year, and there were clear groupings and a separate queue for Forge World. I had pre-ordered the show only models like a sensible person, so avoided the Forge World queue entirely and just picked up the show only Blood Angels captain for the wife to paint. Everything else I can just buy normally at a sensible time and not cart it around a convention for a day. I still don't understand people who buy anything other than limited edition, show only or similar items at Games Day. It makes no sense to me.

Payment was quick and easy - they had put a lot of time and effort into sorting out last year's problems!

I saw the new Chaos Codex. I had a chat to Robin as I skimmed over it, but the main things I picked up were;

• Cult units are back to Elites
• Cult units are moved to Troops by taking their signature character or a Lord or Sorceror with the right mark
• Daemon Princes with the right mark does not move Cult units back to troops
• You can only move units to Troops for your Primary Detachment - you can't do this for allies at all
• Abaddon moves Chosen to Troops
• They're moving towards putting Troops choices in a Codex before Elites as that makes things a lot easier layout wise - as you've got to have a HQ and two Troops, it makes sense for them to be first.
• Weapons and wargear have been split to Ranged Weapons, Melee Weapons, Daemonic Gifts and so on, so that things don't have to be listed over and over in multiple unit entries.
• There are some unique chaos artefacts which the devs were quite surprised "aren't all over the internet already". I spotted one which was a Scroll, possibly of  Magnus...

I'm afraid I'm not a Chaos player, and there were people behind me who were, so I stopped at this point and let people check if their current unit builds were utterly ruined by the new Codex (those of you who take two Daemon Princes and all Cult units as Troops are going to have to have a rethink!).

I had a chat with a few of the studio about how they manage the creative process and meet deadlines. It seems that there has been a swing more towards the miniature designers coming up with cool model ideas and the rules guys coming up with mechanics around it, and less of the rules guys coming up with unit ideas first.

This apparently happens in cycles - Grey Knights was towards the other end of the spectrum, with some clear holes in what was needed for the army being covered by the rules team first and passed back to the designers. There's no hard and fast rule, though - sometimes someone will have a cool model sculpt half done but not be sure what gun to put on it - so they'll ask the developers what holes there are in the codex. The example given was "Well, this army has enough ranged firepower already, but anti-air is pretty new in 6th edition and we need more units like that".

They're working with small project teams with one lead developer being in charge of the background, descriptive text and flavour (I was standing too near to Jes and Jervis to use the word "fluff", even now I'm back at the hotel I keep glancing over my shoulder to check I won't get a ticking off). So one person writes up the descriptive text, and a team of people work on the rules to develop them and get them working.

There's usually two or three cycles between the writers and the editors, who will look out for both typos and clarity of intent. For example, one editor mentioned that one of their first books was in a system they were unfamiliar with - and when they couldn't make head or tail of some of the rules, they realised that they needed to make them much clearer before publication.

Generally, the studio might be working on around 10-12 large projects between the drafting and publication stage, at various stages in the pipeline. This is bigger releases such as Codexes and other army lists, rather than smaller things like 2 page iPad releases, which aren't tracked quite so heavily. There'll be around the same amount of projects again at the pre drafting / brainstorming stages that haven't got anywhere near the editors yet.

All in all, they do know where there are big gaps in the older Codexes - Sisters of Battle & Black Templars, for example - but without a good range of inspiration, both in terms of models and rules - they won't progress. They try and avoid early leaks because this leads to a lot of disappointment in buyers who were hoping for new models - especially if an early draft gets binned and they decide to come back to it later.

A good number of people are working on projects they still can't talk about. Those who've been working on the Hobbit can say "we've been working on the Hobbit", but nothing more. The Perrys have, for example, been doing that pretty much exclusively in terms of their GW related work, to no-one's surprise. Given that it generally takes a year to cycle through one of these projects, we probably have at least one more big release due other than the Hobbit relatively soon.

I had some other interesting discussions about scheduling and planning which will interest no-one who isn't a project manager. I will not bore the internet with this sort of stuff!

Some of the sculptors are now working entirely in the digital format - some use a mix and some still only sculpt the old fashioned way. There is definitely a move towards more plastic models - some of their sculptors have been doing nothing but plastics at all - there is likely to be more plastic than Finecast in the future, in general terms.

Given the size of this post already, I'll put up a separate post with the Forgeworld Seminar, and a further separate one with my personal experiences so the rumour hungry don't have to read through them!

My news & rumours post continues here.

Death World Battle Mission vs Space Wolves

So, when Paul came over to do some 40K, we had time after the first game to fit in another - so I suggested we used the same army lists to play a Death World Battle Mission from April's White Dwarf.

We rolled up "Search and Rescue", and I got first deployment. Here was where we came across the first challenge. The scenario uses alternate deployment, with each side getting to deploy within their own table half but at least 18" away from an enemy...

Unfortunately, we don't have a gaming board, and the dining room table is 6' x 3' - so I very quickly denied most of the battlefield to Paul, and he got a horrid clumped deployment that he just didn't recover from. My squads ran forward, grabbed all the objectives and ran away with them while the rest of my army shot his advancing Space Wolves off the board...

The Death World random events were pretty fun and random. They did disadvantage one side or another at completely random, which meant that there was an additional element of complete chance in the game. This might not be to some people's taste, but it was genuinely good fun. I'd certainly recommend people try them out.

I think I also need to think about the thin table. Sim is adamant I shouldn't invest in some table boards right now, so I think introducing a house rule about the narrower table and the distance units are from each other may be worthwhile. They still need to be out of assault range of each other, but perhaps, where Fleet isn't involved, something under 18" may be worthwhile for "distance deployed apart"?