Each week summary is just getting better and better. This week we’ve received Adeptus Titanicus and a lot of rules to expand that into more than just Titans. The enormity of Epic as a system for many years at Games Workshop is probably hard to believe now, but back in the day it was almost more important than 40k at times and a lot of development of the universe and units happened at this smaller scale before transferring over into 28mm.
The biggest change was the change in format for the magazine, with the smaller pages that we still have today coming in because of their strange desire to get people to cut up their magazines and put them in rules binders. It made sense at the time, but you’d get forums full of hate if you did it today. It’s the same with the new rules as people would complain that there’s not a level playing field and if you missed an issue then you can’t then get those rules until they are put into a book (see Sisters of Battle recently for an example of that). I guess you just can’t win.
Other game systems are still rather too prominent and take away pages from the real games. I’ll let Blood Bowl off as it’s still going today, but I always remember thinking of Dark Future much like some people regard Lord of the Rings today. As for all the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay nonsense, that should just go away if you ask me.
We’ve been very well served with new 40k armies over this week with Chaos Renegades and Squats getting single articles while Imperial Guard got three and enough pages to justify a real book release nowadays.
Marines saw the introduction of Chaplains and Terminators, which are some of the most iconic images for them but I seem to say that a lot at this early stage.
Adeptus Titanicus got new rules for close combat, craters and also tanks and infantry. This pretty much changed the game dramatically right off the bat and really has to be seen as playtesting for the upcoming Space Marine game.
The term golden age really is overused, and I’m not sure it can even be used here despite the fact that we are getting more content each month than we know what to do with rules wise. This was game development through the magazine where rules would be replaced throughout the year and then summarised in a book or new expansion later.
One one hand this is a good thing as the rules got playtested by lots of eager players. On the other hand feedback from this was purely through letters for most of those players and who bothers doing that? We are still in a pre-codex book age and so you needed to buy specific issues to get rules for your armies at this stage and so that made it a lot harder for new players to come into the game, even taking being able to buy back issues into account.
All of this is due to change of course as more books are released and Games Workshop work on expanding the games.
