Tankpot

In the empty dark of the cockpit, Genevieve screamed. At first, she had screamed because of the pain, the broken bones and psychostigmatic injuries that matched the damage to her knight armour. Then, she screamed because of fear, at not being able to open the escape hatch, at not being able to goad her knight into action. Now, after hours, maybe days locked in the pitch black of what she had accepted as her coffin, she screamed with rage. She hammered at the inert slab of the hatchway panel with her fists, roaring curses and damning her own inadequacies. She cried out the names of her sister and her uncle so they could come to her aid, even though they must surely share her fate, or worse. In the empty dark of the cockpit, she finally fell silent, and began to sob. What an ignoble way for a Knight to die. Brought low by rabble armed with crude elctromagnetic pikes, they swarmed her, shorted her systems and left her there. They would be back, with las-cutters and melta torches, and the

The announcement of Warhammer: The Old World has got spirits up among the folks who still pine for blocks of infantry, fantasy Frenchmen and a time when ‘Orruk’ was only three letters. I can understand why. AoS represented the first time I could find myself engaging with Games Workshop’s fantasy line, but there’s a lot to like about the classic, Tolkienesque tones of the original Warhammer Fantasy Battle. AoS removed entire armies to fit the new setting, and while I love the soft reboot of Bretonnians as Flesh Eater Courts, some, like I say, still want those lance formations and grubby peasantry armed with billhooks. What’s more, so many of the video games based on Warhammer Fantasy still take place in the Old World, not least the wildly popular Total War games. The reality is, if someone were coming to Warhammer from the outside, because of games like Total War: Warhammer and Vermintide, Age of Sigmar would seem very unusual. Who are these big gold folks with hammers? Why are those e

When I first raised this idea on Twitter, I got a lot of positive comments, even a confirmation of my reasoning from a Black Library author. I also had a few folks not quite follow or misunderstand what I was trying to express, and that's fine, because Twitter isn't necessarily the best place to get a point across. Regardless, it was probably worth writing it up in full anyway. One thing that has always bothered me about the Eldar, specifically Craftworld Eldar, is a certain incongruity in their lore with regards to gender. They are described as making no distinction between genders societally, so why are one of their Aspect Warrior shrines so overtly female in form and membership? Why are there no male Howling Banshees? I am aware that the lore states mostly female, but that's still a cop-out in a species that doesn't view one's gender as a meaningful barrier to opportunity. It's an awkward way to write around edge cases and doesn't actually do justice

Sisters of Battle are coming! They’re almost here! I’m excited. I’m excited because its an army I’ve always wanted to collect and play, but by the time I had the wherewithal the first time round the old metal range had lost its lustre. And had become prohibitively expensive. So a new plastic range is super exciting! The models look amazing! They have upped the detail and approached the range with a more respectful eye. The Repentia look less fetishy, the boob-plate power armour is less… booby. The faces on the new models reference a range of ethnicities and ages. In all, if this new range is going to be the main example of female representation in 40k, well, it’s certainly not awful. Could be better, obviously. But certainly not awful. I know that I’m not the only person excited, too. There’s been a lot of people looking for a cheaper and easy to collect range of Sororitas, and people who’ve wanted the warrior aspect to be brought forward, and the sexy aspect toned down. These mod

I mentioned on Twitter how weirdly uncomfortable it made me feel when Mario ‘captures’ an enemy in Super Mario Odyssey. You’ll take control of a bad guy to solve a puzzle or to navigate a level, then discard them. Sometime, you’ll capture an enemy, then use their purloined husk to obliterate their comrades.  A friend of mine drew the analogy that it’d be like taking over noted alt-righter Richard Spencer and using him to punch all the Nazis but I don’t think that’s true. For one, I’m not sure that a lot of the armies of Bowser are there by choice, they don’t share the same goals. They strike me as drafted auxiliaries, like in the Roman army, hordes of goombas fighting because they are made to. Which isn’t to say they don’t want to fight Mario, or want to expand the borders of Bowsers domain, but they have had the choice to fight or not made for them. Koopa Troopers and goombas are clearly distinct peoples; Bowser does not strike me as the kind of individual interested in forming c

Let me speak to you of us. We are nine, all told, and have the grand honour of being living memory. Our brothers are dead, or have crossed the rubicon and been reborn. We have not. We cannot, or choose not to, but nevertheless, we are all that is left of a grand history that has stood against the dark for more than ten thousand years. There are those that stand with us that bear our names, our symbols, our colours, but they are not us. We stand as relics among their vitality, their brightness, their... innocence. We are the Legion's Last. The midday rush had finally petered out and, at last, the bar was mercifully quiet. He'd sent the kitchen staff and the servers to get themselves something to eat, to enjoy an hour away from work. The sounds of the street outside seemed so distant, so inconsequential. He was alone in here, as far away from the troubles of the Galaxy as one could hope to be. Teso sighed, and smiled. He walked around the room, calmly cleaning up glasses

The purpose of these rules is to make vehicles in 8th Edition Warhammer 40,000 more interesting to play on the tabletop without sacrificing too much of the simplicity of the current ruleset. These rules will modify the way vehicles work in four key ways: Facing Weaponry Armour Walkers In the current rules, vehicle facing, e.g. the direction any given vehicle is pointing, is not an issue. While this does make the game very quick to play, it also makes traditional considerations of armoured combat, such as relative armour thickness and the way weaponry is mounted, irrelevant. As such, vehicles rarely feel like vehicles, instead feelings no different from a monstrous creature. The solution, then, is to reintroduce facing. In these rules, facing is intended to affect how easy or hard it is to damage a vehicle, and what directions weapons equipped on said vehicle may shoot in. These rules also acknowledge that the current ruleset has enabled conversions that drastically alter

(Quick note, this is another tumblr post I've gone back and edited and put on here.) I mentioned on my tumblr, briefly, in a response to a reader letter in an issue of White Dwarf, that I had a reason for why I think there shouldn't be female Space Marines. Just so we’re totally clear by Space Marine I mean specifically Warhammer 40,000’s Adeptus Astartes, I’m not saying Pvt. Vasquez or Samus or whomever shouldn't exist. I think it is very important that the Adeptus Astartes should be male, and it isn't anything to do with the game’s fictional reason for why this is so. In 40k, only men get to be Space Marines, or rather, only boys. They are taken at a young age, in pre-or early puberty, and physically and mentally made into killing machines. The fiction justifies why it’s only boys that get taken because of some vague notion of the process requiring ‘male’ hormonal development. Gimme your trans takes on this, I crave them. But, for the sake of brevity and to ho

I really like Warcry. I haven’t had a chance to play it for… five days? Now? And I literally can’t stop thinking about it. I’ve instantly found a faction in the Untamed Beasts: the synergies and strategies were immediately clear to me when I began to play with them, and that’s not something that happens often. The game is fun; actually sitting down to play never takes more than an hour, there is a fluidity to the game that is never overly simplistic, and the models and scenery just look great on the table. I’ve yet to get into the actual campaign portion of the game but it is fleshed out in a way that I didn’t expect. There’s a lot of character to it, and thats neat. The character, really is the key here. See, the immediate comparison one can make to Warcry is Kill Team, its Warhammer 40,000 cousin. Both are skirmish games, both take place on a small field, both are designed around a modification of the core rules of the larger tabletop war-game they draw from. Now, anyone who’s f

(I originally wrote this back in 2017 on my tumblr blog, and am posting it again here, with some edits, because I watched ten minutes of GitS2017 last night and I found myself yelling the same frustrations I had at the time at the screen again) Ghost in the Shell 2017 is a patchwork of ransacked imagery used to tell yet another story where Scarlett Johansen gets used by the powers that be. Understand that I’m not just talking about the stuff it lifts from the 1995 anime, the 2004 sequel, Ghost in the Shell: Innocence , or even the stuff it takes from the second series of Stand Alone Complex (SAC) and GitS: Arise , although that is certainly present. The imagery it co-opts is broader, taking a story that is deeply, fundamentally about the rise of Japan as a consumer electronics superpower, about the modernisation and global identity of East Asia. It twists the core philosophy at the heart of Ghost in the Shell , a story about connectedness, society and finding one’s identity withi