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Just a bit of fun, inspired by reading "Wolf of Fire and Ash".

The Emperor {Lord of War}...................1500 points

Emperor: WS 10 BS 10 S3 T3 W3 I4 A3 Ld10 Sv2+/4++

Unit Type: Infantry (Character)

Unit Composition: 1 Emperor

Wargear: Bluesteel Blade, Storm Bolter, Golden Armour, Psychic Hood, Iron Halo, Frag and Krak Grenades

Special Rules: Independent Character, And They Shall Know No Fear, Psyker (Mastery Level 10), Master of the Empyrean, I am not a God.

Bluesteel Blade
The Emperor's bluesteel blade is forged around a core of psycho-active crystals that were coalesced by hand from the dragon lines of earth. It is a Force Sword that has a 2+ save against weapons and effects that would render it even temporarily unusable.

Golden Armour
The Golden Armour is laced with the same psycho-active crystals that form the core of his sword. In addition to providing a 2+ save, it allows him to reroll all armour and invulnerable saving throws he is required to make.

Master of the Empyrean
The Emperor may reroll all failed Psychic tests, and ignores Perils of the Warp on a 2+.

I am not a God
If the Emperor ends a turn with no Warp Charges remaining, he is stripped of all Blessings and his wargear's special abilities cease to function: The Bluesteel Blade is just a close combat weapon, and the Golden Armour is just a suit of Artificer Armour.

Psychic Powers
The Emperor may choose six Psychic Powers from any discipline in the core rulebook. In addition, he knows the following four powers:

Adamantium Body (3 Warp Charges): Blessing. The Emperor's Strength and Toughness scores receive a +7 bonus, he gains the Eternal Warrior special rule, and treats all D-weapons as though they were S10 AP1.

Oathbolts (1 Warp Charge): Blessing. The Emperor may act twice in the shooting phase. He increases the strength of his weapons by 4, reduces their AP by 2, and his ranged attacks inflict Instant Death.

Soul Purge (10 Warp Charges): This is a special Blessing that is used in the assault phase, after rolling to wound but before armour saves are taken. If successful, the target of the attack is removed from play immediately. It may make no armour saves, invulnerable saves, cover saves, feel no pain, resurrection protocols, everliving, or any other attempts to avoid this fate. All enemy models within 48" and of the same species as the removed model must then take a Toughness test at -2 or die. Even Necrons.

Soul Reformation (5 Warp Charges): Blessing. If the Emperor has been removed from play, for example through the use of The Last Laugh, a Tesseract Labyrinth, a Vortex Missile or similar effect, he is returned to the table on full wounds as though via Deep Strike, with the target location being where he was removed from play. Any object that would cause a mishap is removed from play as if it had been hit with a Soul Purge attack, although it does not force Toughness Tests.

Again? I thought people were going to stop doing things like this when the Primarchs started getting rules to use as guidelines.

So? I wanted to, I had an idea, I wrote it down. If you don't approve of the idea, don't bother commenting. If you think the rules should be changed, then say how.

Eh, it's another "Emperor rules" post. The only real difference between it and the usual one with nearly 10s in everything is that it has been shuffled over to psychic powers.

There's not a whole lot to say here. It's your standard "I kill everything" Emperor. He's got all of the best rules, no weaknesses and, because of these, no real things that are all that interesting.

Uh, he has a huge glaring weakness.

Point it out to me, then? I can't see it.

T3 and no eternal snowflake warrior it seems.

unless i missed it

Edit: Though there is that Adamantium Body power.. though would be funny against shadow in the warp

 Desubot wrote:
T3 and no eternal snowflake warrior it seems.

unless i missed it

And a psychic power, rolled on a re-rollable Ld 10 that makes him S10, T10 and EW.

Like I said, it is the same rules, just with one sidestep to the psychic power side. It's not a glaring weakness. It's a small, tiny weakness that waves its arms around and goes "LOOK AT HOW MUCH OF A WEAKNESS I AM. I AM SUUUUUCH A WEAKNESS." But in game terms, it is not.

If he ends the turn with no Warp Charges left (for example, if he casts Soul Purge), he's a T3 model with no eternal warrior and he just has regular artificer armour / iron halo. His resurrection ability only works on things that remove from play while ignoring his protections, he's got no protection against being meltagunned, power fisted or the like.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
If he ends the turn with no Warp Charges left (for example, if he casts Soul Purge), he's a T3 model with no eternal warrior and he just has regular artificer armour / iron halo. His resurrection ability only works on things that remove from play while ignoring his protections, he's got no protection against being meltagunned, power fisted or the like.

Let's look at these flaws one at a time:

Warp Charges - Completely false weakness. Even allowing a reduction of 3 because nobody would ever NOT use the S10/T10/EW power, your Emperor still has more power than any other psyker in the game. He still has 6 warp charges to play with. Soul Purge is utterly pointless until end game, and there's no reason anyone would ever use it, considering the stat buffs, and a Force Sword. So he still has 6 free warp charges to throw around all willy-nilly without even worrying about the first, false, weakness he has in his rules.

T3 model with 2+/4++ - On the surface it sounds like a weakness, but think about it in tabletop turns. Since we've kinda determined that, tactically, nobody would ever not cost Adamantium Body, the opponent has one turn to do anything about it. Which leads me into the next false weaknesss (little out of order, but hey).

No protection from meltagun/powerfist - Uh, he is more than adequately protected. He can, for one, be in a squad for a LOS, making any stray lascannon shot (that somehow hits him because why would you EVER have him in front?) need to get by a 2+, then a re-rollable 4+. And all this assuming you didn't just put him out of sight and free from that. Likewise, assaulting, nobody is ever going to be able to assault him in that first turn so...yeah the fist is kind of a false weakness. You need to consider how someone would use these rules on the tabletop when you make them, not just how they fit with the fluff. This setup is very clear in the most effective use. Turn one, he is either buried in the back of a squad, or ideally out of LOS. And from there on out, he is out ravaging everything in super mode. The surplus of immunities and re-rolls means that the odds of him failing these tests are so tiny (0.3% chance of failing his casting) that he might as well have a single use for best effect.

Ressurection ability - Again, false weakness. For one, he has more than enough Warp Charges to sit on that power AND be S10/T10/EW. When a claimed weakness has an easy solution, it stops becoming a weakness.


My issue with these flaws you point out is that they are flaws only on the surface. When you begin thinking as a player, in the 'how do I use this guy best' sense, those weaknesses don't really do anything. Outside of the 0.3% chance of a double fail on his super spell, what is there to threaten him? And even if he does fail, consider LOS and line of sight rules that make singling out anything in a unit almost impossible from early turns. In the end, you might as well have Empy with straight 10s and EW built in because no rational player would ever not use those. Can you think of any reason where he would want that, apart from the very end when he can just say "okay I blow up your army too". These are not flaws, these are just paths for how to most effectively exploit his rules.

I see your point. Hm.

Suggestions?

 Furyou Miko wrote:
I see your point. Hm.

Suggestions?

First of all, I just want to say that I agree with everything curran has said. Bang on the money.

Second of all, my suggestion is just not to do an Emperor statline.

If you're absolutely dead set on the idea, take a Primarch statline (say Horus), add one or two points here and there to the statline, tweak some of the special rules, give him a reasonable psyker level (4-5) and let him pick a single discipline to know entirely, or roll 5 times as he sees fit.

The primarch rules are the closest thing we have, and it'd be best to stick with them. I figure the Emperor (when FW finally does him) will be between 500-750pts, so a slightly better Horus.

But I still recommend not doing it in the first place; it'll only attract the worst the proposed rules has to offer.

Making rules for the Emperor is always a really dicey solution. Because, in the 40k setting, if anyone deserves being treated special, it is probably the Emperor himself. And this can lead to a lot of very complex weaving and working to make it 'feel right' with Empy's power level, which usually means a lot of very over the top special rules or psychic powers or things that just don't exist elsewhere in 40k. However, we do have something of a direction of his rules with the HH Primarch rules. I really like the "Primarch" rule because it is a clean, simple breakdown of the very basics of being a Primarch without needing to have a huge laundry list of special rules, or to cobble up new ones that do the same things and leave players confused.

So, as a starting point, I believe your Emperor should go with that. It means a boost in his core stats and the application of the Primarch rule. Perhaps it is upgraded to "Emperor of Mankind" and a few more are added to it. Stat-wise, he should be in line with Horus, or slightly better. So I'm thinking along the lines of WS9, BS6, S7, T6, W6, I6, A5, Ld10. He's pretty awesome, but not crushingly so. Remember, he needs to be able to hang with Horus in a prolonged fight. Likewise, the functional rules for Primarch (EW, Adamantium Will, Fleet, Fearless, IWND) all apply for Empy. Maybe tweak them to improve some, but otherwise, it is a solid foundation.

But that is just the core of it, what makes someone special with this ruleset is his specialty rules. Now, if we were to use more of the HH rules, another thing the Primarchs have are rules specific to their Legion. The Emperor, being the father of all Legions, should presumably have access to a similar ability, though more in line with his character. Need to think on that one.

Also, we want the Emperor to be a true psychic beast. Let's start by making him Mastery 5 (or 4, as Magnus' rules are not out yet, and he would be a wonderful benchmark) and giving him the ability to use any of the core power sets. So far, so good. Next, he needs some unique powers as well. I think we can borrow the core concept of your Soul Purge power and scale it more appropriately. While Empy is powerful, no character should have a 48" bubble of "I delete your army". Because really, if that goes off in the center of the board, you just win. However:

Soul Purge - "The Power used by the Emperor to utterly undo Horus. While the power is great, the backlash of such power considerably damages the Emperor as well."

Blessing. Used in the assault phase before blows are struck. If successfully cast, the Emperor makes one attack, if it hits his target, the target is completely removed from play and rules that allow the model to return (such as Reanimation Protocols), or strike back at the Emperor (such as Last Laugh) do not occur. The Emperor takes d6 wounds with no saves allowed after the attack is resolved.

Next up is his gear, which is something that also needs more diving into the lore to do.

 Blacksails wrote:

 Furyou Miko wrote:
I see your point. Hm.

Suggestions?

First of all, I just want to say that I agree with everything curran has said. Bang on the money.

Second of all, my suggestion is just not to do an Emperor statline.

If you're absolutely dead set on the idea, take a Primarch statline (say Horus), add one or two points here and there to the statline, tweak some of the special rules, give him a reasonable psyker level (4-5) and let him pick a single discipline to know entirely, or roll 5 times as he sees fit.

The primarch rules are the closest thing we have, and it'd be best to stick with them. I figure the Emperor (when FW finally does him) will be between 500-750pts, so a slightly better Horus.

But I still recommend not doing it in the first place; it'll only attract the worst the proposed rules has to offer.

Down with most of this. The classical image of the Emperor confronting Horus ( http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/File:Horus_vs_The_Emperor.jpg#.Ux3mnvlWqKg ) puts the two of them at similar size, from that and the fact that the Emperor made the Primarchs out of his own genetics and seeing as he hand Horus were supposedly about evenly-matched in combat I'd suggest starting with Horus' statline (WS 8, BS 5, S 7, T 6, W 6, I 6, A 5, Ld 10, Sv 2+) and the Primarch block of USRs (Eternal Warrior, Independent Character, Fear, Adamantium Will, Fleet, Fearless, It Will Not Die). If nothing else your current rules mean if he starts on the table and the other guy gets first turn the God-Emperor of Mankind is going to get instantly wiped every game by Drop Podding melta-Vets turn one. As to psychic mastery level ten is frankly absurd; right now one and two are what normal human psykers get, three is for exceptional human psykers (up to and including Lorgar) and powerful Eldar, four is literally only for Eldrad and a few Daemons. I'd advise giving him Mastery 4 and something like Eldrad's retain-Warp-charge-on-5+ rule, then give him Loremaster of any psychic lore in the rules. This also has the advantage of getting rid of a power that's likely to make the game utterly pointless; literally the only person in the game who has anything remotely comparable to Soul Purge is the GK Brotherhood Champion and he has to kill himself to pull a model from the board with no saves and doesn't come with "pull half of all enemy infantry within 48" alongside it. The wargear looks reasonable; I'm not sure what "I am not a God" is supposed to accomplish and with a reduced Psychic Mastery Level it's looking redundant.

Curran has (once again) covered it pretty well in better detail than myself, and along parallel lines.

Its really just in the details of exactly what the wargear does, what his 'Sire of so-and-so' rule would be, and how he would go about generating powers.

I wanted to give him a basically human statline, because as far as I can tell, the Emperor is human. He has incredibly psychic power, and he seems to get physically larger as he channels more of it (In the book I based this off, he literally grows larger as he prepares to seal a plasma core into the warp). Remember that there was a lot of genetic and mystical manipulation involved in creating the Primarchs.

That story is what I based Soul Purge off - he puts everything into a psychic strike against an Ork Mekboss and the backlash kills every Ork with a familial link to him on the scrapworld. I don't think he was powerful enough to use the same ability when he fought Horus - he had been fighting all day in that instance, against primarch-level daemons and Marines.

Mastery 5... I didn't want it to seem like he was "only a little better than Ahriman". ^^;

The problem you're having is that you're trying to take a fluff based action and turn it into a literal tabletop translation, which rarely (if ever) works out well or even succeeds in achieving that goal.

You have to take a step back from the fluff, and find a suitable abstraction that fits the theme/feel of the ability you're trying to capture. His mastery level is one such contested stat, as many others want him to be ML9000, because of fluff reason number a million from this one book they read. Conveniently enough, each 40k book takes a wildly different interpretation of the same thing in different instances, so there's no real consistency, which is why the fluff should only be used to capture the theme.

To that end, his ML is fine at 5. Considering every stat line increase represents an exponential growth in ability, it can be safely assumed that the difference between a ML4 psyker and a ML5 psyker is extreme. If Eldrad is ML4, and a stock marine Librarian can be ML2, I see no reason that the Emperor couldn't be suitably represented by ML5.

The thing is, you can't take an event from a book, and make it into a rule; it just won't work. We've had users on this forum try and justify some completely absurd rules because of a single event in one book.

Its pretty safe to use the Primarch rules/statline as a jumping board with some tweaks to make a pretty fair Emperor. Nothing over the top, but strong enough to challenge Horus pretty evenly.

Can't say I like the rules, unless you add in something like "He always gets to go first."

The Emperor dying to a stray Scatter Laser round if an Eldar player went first is anti-climactic and kind of silly. Even if you made him default T5 and didn't give eternal warrior, him dying instantly to an orbital bombardment is pretty anti-climactic.

Warhammer is a scenematic game at heart and being OP in all stages and aspects of the game is what should define the Emperor, if he indeed is going to get rules. Just my two cents.

Here's one way to look at it. You have a character who is so powerful that caused all four gods of chaos to work together in order to kill him off and they failed. That level of power doesn't work well into the table top or really any game.

Fluff wise I know seeing things like punching an ork in the face so hard that every ork on the planet exploded (literally) out of sheer awesomeness. But that doesn't really work that well in the actual game.

Rune Prests...... Take that Emperor.

OK. I think that I've learned something, and I've definitely got this guy out of my system, so thank you everyone for your help. This thread may now die, unless you want to discuss the merits of a human statline vs a superhuman one.

I'd like to fight this original statline with my Rune Priests and Njal Stormcaller.