Tuesday, January 4, 2011

You're a very special boy!


So there are three things I hate.
1) The fact that since I have become an English teacher I spot grammatical mistakes everywhere but not in my own writing!
2) People that moan about Games Workshop whilst still buying their plastic crack.
3) When Games Workshop write stupid characters that don’t fit their own fluff (oh the irony).
So I thought about what I can add to the blog and I came up with what you are reading now. This is going to be an irregular piece about Special Characters that I think are awesome. Now lets be clear, I don’t mean broken and uber powerful, I mean a well written and thought out character with rules that represent their fluff really well (see point 3).
First up is Pedro Kantor. I love this guy... Seriously. He is cooler than Artemis360’s leather jacket.
Special characters in the space marine codex modify the rules of the army which gives the player a chance to build armies that synch with the fluff better and this is Kantor’s strength.
Now I know that a lot of you out there are saying, ‘oh yeah, this post is going to descend into min, max lists, with a sh** ton of stern guard in the list. Right?’ Well I’m a Necron player so yes I have been on the receiving end of the three units of sternguard with combi weapons in drop pods making me phase out before I have rolled a dice. But honestly that list is powerful but easily countered (for anyone with options in their codex, so not my tin cans then!)
So like I said I don’t like him because
he is powerful. I like the way his rules work. He’s not just a single model, he creates a certain build for the army.
Let’s look at the crimson fists fluff. We are told that their home world was crippled by an Ork Waaaagh and that the chapter was almost wiped out by the Orks after their fortress monastery was destroyed.
So if you are a crimson fist that survived the campaign to drive out the orks you are going to be a veteran of some description. So making the sternguard scoring makes sense as clearly resources would be limited and so there would not be much terminator armour to go around (after all it is cheaper to give your vets some fancy dan ammo then a whole new suit of rare armour).
Sternguard give you a lot of options to do some fairly crazy, fun, killer units, but they do get expensive quickly. Even considering the price it is tempting to take three units of sternguard if you take Pedro Kantor because then you have three very powerful scoring units that can take out most things in a round or two of shooting.
The expense is the important part here because if you are doing an army that is less then 2000 points then you have already spent a fairly large chunk of your points. You also don’t need to spend a large amount of points on your mandatory two troops choices. Now this is the part that is clever. The wording in the codex says that sternguard are scoring (not troops). So you still have to take your two troops choices. If you want some points left over for some support vehicles then the best solution is to take scout squads.
And that is the good part as far as I am concerned. The Crimson fists are described as rebuilding themselves which means the majority of their number will either be scouts or veterans with very few ‘normal marines’ representing the survivors of Rynn’s world and the new recruits.
In a nut shell I love Pedro because his rules push you into building a flavourful fluffy army (even if it is still powerful). A combination of good wording of the rules combined with sensible point costing means that if you run a Pedro wing you are likely to take a list that truly represents how the Crimson Fist would be. Now I know that you don’t have to follow my train of thought, you could still choose tactical squads... My point is that the rules seem to me to be guiding you in a certain direction and that is how I want the rules for special characters to work, I want them to guide me without necessarily restricting me.
So my little chickies, thats my two cents... What do you think, any suggestions of other characters you love?

3 comments:

  1. Agreed! No other character makes you build a list that fits the fluff so well.

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  2. is it possible to be cooler than the leather jacket of Artemis

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  3. Well I thought not until I witnessed your extensive hat collection!

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