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 Yodhrin wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Robed Mechanicum look awkward? You've seen Tech-Priests before, yes?

Besides which, Mechanicum are supposed to look awkward and inhuman. I actually find the Thralls to be the least impressive of the ones on offer so far, partially because they're nothing you couldn't approximate by converting existing figures anyway, but mostly because they're not the better-scaled proper-resin Servitors I was hoping we'd get out of FW as part of the Mechanicum range.

 Bonde wrote:
I'll be using them as GK henchmen for an Inquisition army with IG allies. I'm mainly going to use Thralls as gun servitors. I'm not sure if I can get away with using a Myrmidon destructor as a Jokaero weaponsmith or an Inquistor or something because of the size.
I do really hope that the AdMech units will get proper 40K rules at some point.
The Castellax Battle Automata makes for a good GK Dreadnought though.

I emailed FW on that score pretty much the moment they officially acknowledged the existence of the Castellax; no dice. They didn't rule out 40K rules, but they used their standard "no plans currently" response, which likely means they'll keep their powder dry on Mechanicus rules until they can put them into a full Imperial Armour book. Given that they're almost entirely dedicated to producing the HH range now, that possibility is a few years away at best.

Thanks for the info. This means that buying AdMech units won't be a complete waste of money gaming wise if you don't plan on playing HH in the future. They are beginning to have quite a few miniatures in that line, so making an IA book with them really makes sense.

I might get the Myrmidons to act as Nurgle Obliterators.

I am waiting for Skittarii my titans bases look kind of bare.

Seems i will be making myself quite a large Mechanicum force if these Myrmidons are anything to go by, Looking forward to seeing how the Skittarii look as well !

Nice. Looking forward to see the rest of the Thallax appearing with their weapon options and, hopefully, the Castellax options...

they will be doing the weapon variants for the castellax, i just dont know the time frame.

luckily for my zone mortalis force the current options are adequate enough. I just want those pesky secutors to be ready!!!!!

If we're assuming admech makes its way to 40k you may as well start buying now - stagger the astronomical costs of a 2k list by investing early!

Just checked out the winter 13/14 catalog update - it looks like the Achilles Alpha comes with twin linked Volkite Culverins for the sponson. That's cool.

Given how the Mechanicus is supposed to have all sorts of High tech goodies and exotic weapons, I could easily see a potential HH Mars book having a note that the Admech list in it is 40K approved in addition to HH era.

If we ever get done with this HH craze, there were multiple IA books on deck including one with the Adeptus Mechanicus getting a big role.

Yep, fully expecting mechanicus to get a true 40k army list in an imperial armour, since so much of the HH stuff is weird and skewed.

 Bonde wrote:

 Yodhrin wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Robed Mechanicum look awkward? You've seen Tech-Priests before, yes?

Besides which, Mechanicum are supposed to look awkward and inhuman. I actually find the Thralls to be the least impressive of the ones on offer so far, partially because they're nothing you couldn't approximate by converting existing figures anyway, but mostly because they're not the better-scaled proper-resin Servitors I was hoping we'd get out of FW as part of the Mechanicum range.

 Bonde wrote:
I'll be using them as GK henchmen for an Inquisition army with IG allies. I'm mainly going to use Thralls as gun servitors. I'm not sure if I can get away with using a Myrmidon destructor as a Jokaero weaponsmith or an Inquistor or something because of the size.
I do really hope that the AdMech units will get proper 40K rules at some point.
The Castellax Battle Automata makes for a good GK Dreadnought though.

I emailed FW on that score pretty much the moment they officially acknowledged the existence of the Castellax; no dice. They didn't rule out 40K rules, but they used their standard "no plans currently" response, which likely means they'll keep their powder dry on Mechanicus rules until they can put them into a full Imperial Armour book. Given that they're almost entirely dedicated to producing the HH range now, that possibility is a few years away at best.

Thanks for the info. This means that buying AdMech units won't be a complete waste of money gaming wise if you don't plan on playing HH in the future. They are beginning to have quite a few miniatures in that line, so making an IA book with them really makes sense.

Woah there bud, sorry I should have been more clear; that was total speculation on my part, literally all FW said was their normal "we have no plans currently" form email. Also, my speculation was meant to imply that anyone waiting for 40K rules for these will likely be waiting a fair long while.

Still, 40K rules aren't strictly necessary these days. Take SM with Iron Hands tactics(despite GW's frankly atrocious and seemingly fan-hating retcon of the Iron Hands fluff, the rules serve this purpose well, although I'd encourage people to borrow a friend's Marine 'dex rather than buy one, because they don't deserve to be rewarded for utterly gutting one of 40K's most interesting factions); MotF(count-as Archmagos), ven dreads(count-as Castellax), Terminators(count-as Praetorian Battle Servitors), Centurions(count-as Myrmidons) Scout squads(count-as Skitarii). Ally in some Imperial Guard if you want a couple of big Servitor blobs and some tanks, as well as access to Psyker Battle Squads(count-as Electro Priests), and/or use the Inquisition supplement to add in more esoteric stuff. Another alternative is to ally in Dark Angels, since their Terminators can grab plasma cannons, and you can grab a Techmarine with the power field to make your dreads a bit tougher.

You lose out on the more interesting stuff, but if you're not lucky enough to game in an environment where nobody will take a hissy fit over using the HH Mechanicum rules in 40K games, it swerves that issue by being composed entirely of standard codices.

I've never really followed IH. Most of their fluff seems to have come from the BL novels? And what did GW do to them?

What did GW do to ret-con the Iron Hands exactly?

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
What did GW do to ret-con the Iron Hands exactly?

I seem to remember reading someone complaining about them changing what hand the Iron Hands lop off.

Imagine GW took the Space Wolves, made them into a Codex chapter who thought their own Primarch was an uncouth barbarian and a total berk, who they now strive to distance themselves from as much as possible. They now have Chaplains and Apothecaries, and "Wolf Priest" is a vague honourific that any Space Wolf can have regardless of rank, skills, or achievements. The character of the chapter is rewritten so that they are ashamed of what used to be their core characterisation, and rather than werewolf vikings in space, they are now an army of tee-total stereotypical reserved middle class urban Swedish guys. Also, while the new fluff claims that they are now exemplars of restraint and moderation, the actual depictions of them in the new 'dex/supplement's short stories show them to be petty, spiteful, vindictive, and irrational.

That would be roughly equivalent to what GW have done to the Iron Hands with the new SM 'dex and the Raukaan supplement.

The only Iron Hands fluff I've really read is from Deathwatch, and that pins them as a cruel and spiteful bunch that depise weakness. Has that changed?

 Crimson wrote:
Thralls look lovely, not sold on Myrmidons. I don't get why everyone seems to like them so much, they look awkward, especially those robed lower bodies.

That being said, Mechanicum stuff overall is amazing, an I would like to buy some. However, I absolutely won't until they get official 40K rules. This is what bugs me in this HH stuff, there are so many things that just are not usable in normal 40K; that can't be good for the sales, can it?

Yeah myrmidons are ok. But dem thralls...

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The only Iron Hands fluff I've really read is from Deathwatch, and that pins them as a cruel and spiteful bunch that depise weakness. Has that changed?

The Iron Hands were not cruel and spiteful so much as ruthless, uncaring pragmatists. They saw their duty as being to preserve the Imperium of Man as an entity, not to save individual people, regiments, cities, or even worlds. They would throw whole Guard regiments into a hopeless meatgrinder without a shred of remorse if that was the most expedient way of achieving the objective, but from their perspective that was not wanton cruelty, just using a tool for its intended purpose. They certainly despise weakness, but they were egalitarians in that regard, since they held everyone to the same standard including themselves. There was animosity with the Raven Guard and Salamanders in particular, as the Iron Hands saw them as particular examples of weakness due to their retreating during the Dropsite Massacre rather than supporting Ferrus in his push to kill Fulgrim and Horus - in their eyes, the RG and Sallies shirked their duty by valuing their own survival more than achieving the mission objective, and that even if all three Primarchs had fallen and all three Legions been decimated, that was a price worth paying to end the Heresy right there, once and for all. From their perspective, had his brothers followed and supported him, they might even have succeeded without having to make such a huge sacrifice, but instead they abandoned Ferrus to the Traitors.

In the new fluff, they believe Ferrus was a moron, blinded by emotion, and so their hatred of weakness and ruthless pragmatism has been rewritten as them striving to achieve a cheap ripoff of Vulcan Logic. Despite trying to depict them as being emotionless Borg-Vulcan hybrids in the descriptive background, the fiction betrays that completely with a story about them fighting in the same theatre as the Raven Guard, in which they don't merely display animosity or distrust as they would have in the old background, but shows them deliberately engineering the situation to force the RG to fight a hopeless battle alone and outnumbered, then deliberately jamming the RG's comms so they can't even communicate effectively. Not because doing so was essential to victory, or even a shortcut to it, but just so they could watch them die. I mean hell, you half expected the end of the story to be them dramatically throwing off their sorcerous cloaks to reveal they were an Alpha Legion warband all along.

In the old material, their organisation was a reflection of their core values and the traumatic experiences of the Heresy. Each of their ten Clan Companies was a self-contained force, with its own Armoury, vehicle pool, and Librarius, as well as their own veteran squads and the right and responsibility to recruit from amongst the Medusan population for themselves. Each Clan had its own mini-fortress monastery, a huge pre-Heresy mobile crawler that moved around the surface to avoid the planet's constant tectonic instability. They were led by the Clan Council, who had control over the fleet assets, and was composed of leaders and honoured veterans from each of the Clans, and very pointedly did not have a Chapter Master, as one of the lessons they took from the Heresy was that giving any one individual(save the Emperor of course) control over large numbers of Space Marines was just inviting disaster. The Clans would even come to blows on occasion, and that wasn't seen as a problem, but as an opportunity to weed out the weak and inferior, providing the Council stepped in before things got out of hand. Because of their close relationship with the Mechanicus, they had no Chaplains, instead their senior Techpriests were initiated further into the mysteries by the AdMech than any other chapter's, and they became Iron Fathers - Techmarines and also spiritual leaders.

Now? They're a totally standard Codex chapter, from composition to company colour markings. They kinda-sorta still have the Clan Council, only now it's the Iron Council, and they nominate one of their number to be the Chapter Master. The vaguely democratic aspect is supposed to preserve the original mistrust of authority, but again that's undermined by the fluff for the "current" era, in which they just keep re-electing the same guy, because he's super-duper awesome apparently. The Iron Father as a specific role and rank is gone, now it's just an honourific that any random chump can have.

Their Bionic augmentation used to be one of the core aspects of their characterisation, and there was an intriguing ambiguity about the reasons for it; was it just simple expediency, whacking on a bionic arm instead of waiting for a vat-grown replacement limb, which over time resulted in heavier augmentation than other chapters? Was it an extreme manifestation of their hatred of weakness, the idea that the flesh may fail, but the machine will not? Or did they have a genetic flaw lurking inside them like the Blood Angels, some extreme form of posthuman body-dismorphia? Regardless, they saw their augmentation as a strength, and I've argued in the past that their perspective is vindicated in Wrath of Iron, where their ruthlessness and augmentations allow them to succeed where most others would have failed.

Not any more. Now their super-duper-awesome Chapter Master has decided that this whole "bionics" thing is bad-juju, and they need to become a more touchy-feely and fleshy Chapter.

Literally every aspect of the Chapter's background material has either been dropped entirely, been minimised until it's barely there anymore, or taken and completely retconned into the polar opposite of the original. The Codex was pretty bad, but it at least left some ambiguity that allowed IH vets to adjust our head-canon to the changes without totally undermining everything we've worked on for years, but the Clan Raukaan supplement(or more accurately, the "3rd Company" supplement, since the Clans are just vacant names for the Codex-adherent company structure now) actually reads like it was written as a deliberate " you" to anyone who played the chapter before Ward or whatever other illiterate barely-sentient baboon they assigned to rewrite it all.

Seriously, they might as well have made this the cover for it(nsfw):



Anyway, sorry for off-topic, I'll mump back off to 40K Background now.

Yodhrin, thanks for the summary- used to really like the Iron Hands fluff, had no idea how much they butchered it. That's too bad, and kind of unnecessary, since they were hardly the only chapter with unconventional organization...

@Yodhrin: Thanks for the summary. That's... horrific. I'm going to keep to the fluff I already have (all the stuff in First Founding for Deathwatch). Way to totally retcon something GW.

What author wrote this new IH background?

 Ouze wrote:
That's pretty lame, even for Forge World.

Wtf?! The internets have told me that FW models are OP! I am disappoint

The new admech stuff is cool.

Did FW ever get around to giving updated rules for Shadow Captain Korvydae? He was the only badab character not updated.

Nicely said Yodhrin.

I rather like the thralls. Nothing revolutionary, but very nice looking nonetheless.

And yes, those Myrmidons wold made awesome Obliterators, whoever said that.

How long before we see Chaos versions of the Mechnanicum? Really want a small force to go with my Titans but they are Chaos ones.

I am quite disappointed with the look of the mark III command squad. I will probably have to get the mark II one and hope no one notices. That helmet on the mark II is fething awesome!

Edit: Seriously, look at how awesome that guy is! I would totally be swapping their arms around though, making that other dude hold the banner.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

Looky Likey wrote:
How long before we see Chaos versions of the Mechnanicum? Really want a small force to go with my Titans but they are Chaos ones.

Those new mechanicum guys could easily be painted as Chaos, with a couple of CSM bits chucked on them.

 ph34r wrote:
The new admech stuff is cool.

Did FW ever get around to giving updated rules for Shadow Captain Korvydae? He was the only badab character not updated.

They have not.

Red Butchers are up, anyone else think they're a little uninspiring?

http://www.forgeworld.co.uk/New_Stuff/WORLD_EATERS_LEGION_RED_BUTCHERS.html

Saw the models at GD last year and they were one of the highlights of the Forgeworld cabinet, just got the e-mail, and yeah, they don't look all that.. I'm blaming the paint job.