Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

At the risk of sounding like a complete moron, I'd like to ask about the compatibility of Fantasy and 40k units rules-wise. I love my IG, and I also love my Dwarfs, and with enough time I think it'd be fun to implement multiple armies into one. PLEASE do not take this too seriously! It is silly and I realize that but I think it could be fun! This is something I’d probably never bring up at my flgs but with a few friends, perhaps.

Before I get gunned down, just let me say that fluff is out of the question. I don't care about the fact that a Dwarf axe wouldn't be able to do jack squat to hardly anything, including flak armour and they'd get torn to shreds by even lasguns. I just think it'd be a fun little excursion, to be able to throw some Fantasyhammer units into a 40k game or two. All stats would be the same, so yes that means Dwarfs (I'm just using them as an example since it's the only army I'm truly familiar with through and through) would often be on equal footing with Space Marines.

I haven't put a very large amount of thought into this, and I'm sure you, the community, has more knowledge of overall rules for both 40k and Fantasy seeing as how I just started playing 40k little more than a year ago and Fantasy maybe 6 months ago.

Biggest problems I saw:

1. Most Fantasy units probably don't have anything to crack tanks since there's no armor penetration so they have no equipment like Melta weapons and such specifically made for anti-armor. That makes fighting vehicle armies hell for everyone. My remedy? Write up basic rules for some of the weapons i.e. runic dwarf weapons or war machines, and perhaps give some cavalry the spear weapons of the IG Rough Riders.

2. 40k Is very shooty, Fantasy hammer is not. Many armies would get knocked out in the first fusillade of fire from the 40k army. However, most of what I can see of Fantasyhammer still has good armor saves if needed, and perhaps ward spells can be expanded? Plus, many Fantasy armies have a good amount of missile weapons when needed, and some (such as wood elves) have very good special effects like insta-kill arrows which my cannon crews and thanes have often fallen victim to.

3. Movement is very different, including unit coherency. I say, let the units be incoherent! Use the basic movement rules from Fantasyhammer for marching, running, etc. but they shouldn’t need to be in blocks; that would just cause an entire unit to be wiped out by a single ordnance blast. However, since close combat requires the units to all go into base contact anyways, just have them loosely reform if need be for the combat based on the rough estimate of how they were beforehand.

4. Close combat: 40k units use 40k rules, Fantasyhammer use Fantasy rules. Spearmen, ranks, and such would be the same as in Fantasy and the close combat is calculated nearly exactly the same in terms of wounds and such. The part where it gets sticky is resolution… This is where I’m guilty of not reading the rules well enough, my friends usually just calculate it out before I even try and tell me who takes what leadership test to not run away. I understand the points system from Fantasy well enough, just not everything that goes into it. Ranks, standards, and such wouldn’t be present to the 40k army so I don’t really know how that could work, whether the Fantasy rules would be dropped in favor of the simple unit strength fraction 40k leadership test or what. It seems like it would be simpler, sure, but that takes a lot out of the essence of Fantasy close combat, which is what I believe makes the game (along with watching my buddie’s first rank of Glade Guard turn around and realize the entire second rank got pulverized by a well-placed cannonball )

5. Magic and dispelling: Magic is, obviously, entirely different. Even Dwarfs, who don’t even use spells, get a dispel pool. Of course, as I said I don’t know any other armies well enough in Fantasy to claim knowledge, so I honestly don’t know how magic casting works except for if a spellcaster does something wrong his head can explode. I’m a bit lost on this one too I suppose, though I imagine homebrew rules for warp vs magic can be pounded out by some veteran players.

Anyways, I just felt like it may be a fun idea for those of us who enjoy throwing fluff to the winds once in a while. Plus, as the rulebook says, “The most important rule is that none of the rules are important,”

I may just be paraphrasing, however.

You would have to create almost a whole new rules set to do this since they both such different systems.

You can easily do Counts As armies though. Like archers = Guardsmen. Monsters = dreads or tanks.

My Chaos force includes Fantasy Beastmen with Imperial Guard equipment. Laspistols, Bolt Pistols, Lasguns, Chainswords alongside the melee weapons that came with the set. Not legal, though Forgeworld does have a rule set for Beastmen Bloodgors in Chaos armies.

You would have to create almost a whole new rules set to do this since they both such different systems.

I know. I do have a good bit of writing and thinking time on my hands though, if I could get opinions on what needs to be reworked I'd gladly sit down and scrawl a few of my own rules out and temper them with the fires of Dakka until they work

Honestly, I wouldn't bother doing that. Just come up with some Counts As stuff. Hell you could line up all your Guardsmen on movement trays to use them in Fantasy. As long as you use GW models a proper Counts As army can even be tournament legal.

What is it you are really interested in combining? The rules or the models?

What is it you are really interested in combining? The rules or the models?

Mainly implementing a Fantasy army into a 40k game and vise-versa. It would be rather simple to do as you said and go from 40k to Fantasy by just lining up the units on a tray and duking it out Redcoat style (No offense meant) except for the fact that my Bassies and Russes would EAT FACE because of blast templates. There's gotta be a remedy for that though...

Anyways the thing for me personally is that my friends and I often play large pitched 3-or-4-way battles in 40k and things are so outrageous as it is (almost an entire powersuit and Crisis suit Tau army thanks to Farsight, a nigh-unhittable Thunderbolt from Imperial Armour, a fully custom-made SM chapter with little to no restrictions but good balancing) that I'd like to throw in my Dwarfs for a round or two, and I think it could be fun to have Eldar and IG versus Vampire Counts and Tomb Kings types of battles, just for kicks n' giggles. Between all of my friends and I we have a full plethora of armies to play with. SM, IG, Tau, Chaos, Eldar, 'Crons, SW, and Dark Eldar for 40k and High Elves, Wood Elves, Dwarfs, Lizardmen, Skaven, Tomb Kings, Vampire Counts, and Brettonians for Fantasy. So in that respect, full armies would need to be implemented into one ruleset or another, or a completely new one forged as stated. I'd be willing to do it, but most of my friends are less radical than I a and would cringe at the idea of throwing the rulesets in the blender for something that has a possibility of being less balanced than the vanilla rules.

Back to the topic, I would love to come up with something to allow seamless blending of both units in a "Dogs of War" style as well as fielding full armies. I'm sure many of you out there could have some great battles too. I see no reason why this couldn't be a fun distraction for a group of your colleagues or flgs. As stated, I'd be more than willing to try my hand at writing out some rules with the help of the community if I just get some hints as to what needs to be changed the most.

Yipyioh wrote:except for the fact that my Bassies and Russes would EAT FACE because of blast templates. There's gotta be a remedy for that though...

No... Do you understand a Counts As army? Like you PLAY using a Fantasy Codex but you use 40k models to represent the units. Like if you used a Russ to count as an Empire Tank or whatever it's called then it would use the Empire Tank rules, not the Leman Russ rules.

There is a guy at the Bowie Bunker who plays IG but uses Skaven models for all his Guardsmen. He's playing 40k with Skaven models but using IG rules...

Lash a few ideas in the proposed rules section, many would appeciate/evaluate them.

No... Do you understand a Counts As army? Like you PLAY using a Fantasy Codex but you use 40k models to represent the units. Like if you used a Russ to count as an Empire Tank or whatever it's called then it would use the Empire Tank rules, not the Leman Russ rules.

I understand that, but I'm not meaning Counts As armies.

I literally mean pitting an IG army against a Dwarf army, for example. Guardsmen are Guardsmen with S3 AP- lasguns and Russes like normal and Dwarfs fight them with Cannons and runic weapons and such.

That's why I mostly just mean making adaptable rules for using Fantasy units with their REAL stats, not Counts As so we could actually play with the real codices and not have to change the info in the codices (except for aforementioned equipment additions for purposes like tank busting) but instead refer to the new ruleset rather than the overarching rules from the core rulebook. I can't think of a thing from the Dwarf codex that would need to be changed except for adding in runes to crack vehicles if I was going to use it in a 40k game as a real dwarf army. However, the overarching rules I mean are things that relate to every fantasy army such as movement, unit coherency, combat resolution, and the like.

The way one of my friends thought of it is it's as if a Dwarf and Wood Elf army were going at it when a warpstone hits and transmutes time into the 40th millenium where they find themselves in a pitched battle between Astartes or IG and Chaos. IOM simply sees them as peculiar new xenos and Chaos just wants BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD so they start wailing on the new guys also while fighting each other. Dwarfs and Elves break and start fighting too. Thanks to some wierd unexplainable *insert plot device here* the weapons of the Dwarfs and Elves seem to work just as well against the new enemies and they can take hits just as well as their traditional combat. *BLAM* Heresy? Perhaps. I just think it's got potential.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Ratius wrote:Lash a few ideas in the proposed rules section, many would appeciate/evaluate them.

That I will! Never wandered into that section of Dakka though, should I pop in without having some rulesets down first and essentially repost the main idea of this thread or should I wait until I've written something directly of the "I have new rules!" variety?

Write some directly imho, thats the fun and interest of that section (I love it there)

Im sure mods will let you repost the original as background though

I think there was something in the old Necron codex about fighting Lizardmen from Fantasy.

Best bet is to use one rules set and do not mix them.

Port the Dwarves over to 40K and follow the 40k rules for the Dwarves. I.E. the dwarf units must be within 2 inches coherency at all times, and if you want to put them in ranks you can, but you do not gain rank bonuses since there are no such things as ranks in 40K.

There used to be rules for this back when the systems were more or less the same. Now they are too divergent. Your best bet is to just bring fantasy to 40k, but a lot of the fantasy stuff won't port over. The magic and psychic phases are too different.

How would a I test do against vehicles?

Just go overboard and have an all-mage army.
Biggest problem would be Fantasy doesn't have AP, you'd have to modify 40k armour saves. But 40k armour saves aren't designed to be modified.

Imperial Dwarfs? I see where this is headed...

I like the idea a lot, and in your proposed example, there is no reason magic rune weapons wouldn't be comparable to say power weapons. If imperial guardsmen can possibly kill a space marine in power armor with nothing more then fists and basic combat knives. No reason a stronger then human dwarf with a big ax couldn't hack his way through the same material. I don't really have any experience with the fantasy rule set, but I don't see why you couldn't have the squad spread out in 2" formation, and if they get into hand to hand they can have the rank bonuses if they make it back into their formation. I imagine those bonuses would help level the playing field of opponents with modern shooting weapons.

An alternative could be thinking of your dwarf army as squats. Dig up the old squat codex and it would give you the 40k comparison of stats and such. A couple of editions ago, but you could modernize it in comparison with an old to modern day IG codex.

I would be all for it though, and if you were in seattle I would totally play against you.

40k Fimir?

Do like.

Well when I saw you had IG and Dwarves I instantly thought of the IG using Squats...IG Squat Teams! I'd love to field those in 40k!

Joey wrote:Just go overboard and have an all-mage army.
Biggest problem would be Fantasy doesn't have AP, you'd have to modify 40k armour saves. But 40k armour saves aren't designed to be modified.

No, but based on the attacker's Strength the Armour Save of the defender gets lowered which I personally believe would work just fine in 40k. If a S4 Dwarf hit a T3 Guardsman who had 5+ armour, it would be a 3+ to wound and the S4 hit confers a -1 to the armour save, so the Guardsman has a 6+ save rather than 5+ for flak armour. I think that's fair enough. AP would work exactly the same for when a 40k unit attacks a Fantasy unit, if the AP is lower than the armour save, no armour save granted.

An alternative could be thinking of your dwarf army as squats. Dig up the old squat codex and it would give you the 40k comparison of stats and such. A couple of editions ago, but you could modernize it in comparison with an old to modern day IG codex.

No. Sorry, I love my cannons and runic weapons too much. Plus the shieldbearers... Goofy as it is I love the image of a burly Dwarf Lord riding to battle held aloft on a giant shield by equally burly shieldbearers.

Anyways, I did a bit of thinking and reading of the Fantasy base rulebook. I'll create a thread in proposed rules and paste a link to it here in due time.

Find a copy of Rouge Trader it was made for 4oK and Fantasy game systems and has rules for cross over.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Bombastic wrote:I think there was something in the old Necron codex about fighting Lizardmen from Fantasy.

It's talking about the old 40K army the Slann. They are Fantasy's "old ones"

I would say just create a hybrid turn scheme to account for magic...and let a lot of the silliness/non-aligned rules just roll...after all, you could come up with some justification for M6 elves and M4 space marines...

The way to "even it up" is to let the fantasy races get more points, say double what the 40K player gets. As for why arrows can penetrate powered armor...just say that "Magic" lets all of this occur, even for non-magical races like Dwarves still have more "Magic" than 40k types...

Alternately, I use a lot of "counts as" stuff in my games. BUT you can run a joint game...my wife loves elves and vampires, so we fight eldar/exodite elves and vampire counts in 40K. It works for us, but then, none of my games is "by the book"...

-STS

It would be tricky to rescale the points costs to balance the game. Expect the 40k side to win a lot.