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In the aftermath it was clear that the Rubric of Ahriman had both surpassed his expectations and failed horribly.
Those of the Thousand Sons with sorcerous powers had either survived, and had their knowledge and powers
greatly augmented, or they had been utterly destroyed. The battle brethren whose powers had been slight or
non-existent had been changed. Their armour was sealed shut as if every clasp and joint had been welded together.

- Codex: Chaos Space Marines 2002 and Heroes & Villains of the 41st Millennium: Ahriman of the Thousand Sons WD #275
(I think)

This account can be taken to mean that any Thousand Son powerful enough to count as "mastery level 1" has been either turned into an automaton, with no psychic powers, or powered up intensely to ML 2. There can be no minor pyskers left in the middle.

Of course, I don't want to say for sure that "mastery levels" correlate to anything in the fluff.

However, this is enormously positive for Thousand Sons units. The first sorc-lead units, in the 2002 codex, were psychically a bit laughable. You could pay 280 points for a single bs4 bolt of change, get a nice ap3 template weapon on a unit that always moved as in difficult terrain, etcetera.

The rubiric automata of the time had regular ap5 bolters. This relative impotence on the part of the aspiring sorceror was addressed by upgrading the bolters to ap3.

I take it on faith that anyone with an ounce of awareness believes that Thousand Sons and Tzeentch marines show what is worst about army design. These inferno bolts are not very helpful. The upgraded weapons show very poorly against enemies that have any other save, they are useless against vehicles, they are useless against 3+ save enemies that cannot be gotten out of their transports due to the uselessness against vehicles.

It's a nice rule, actually, you can keep marines hugging cover and that is very valuable.

However, there is nothing about the fluff or models that demands, if you had never heard of inferno bolts, that rubric marines have special ammunition. Very little at all suggests the existence, except that Gave Thorpe & Alessio Cavatore might have decided to slap some kind of rule on them just for the sake of giving them a rule. The icon of flame and its soulfire has just as little foundation and very little use. Both of them were made up as rules first, and then ascribed to background afterward.

Thousand Sons are unstoppable ghostly body guards for powerful psyker commanders. Indeed, with things as they are in the 4th and 6th edition codexes, there is not point in having rules for aspiring sorcerors at all, since they are irrelevant to the relentless ap3 function of the unit. The rules for thousand sons marines make no sense either, since they, like space marines, have t4, but in the case of space marines t4 is attributable to strengthened tissue and redundant organs, while the thousand sons have none, and they, like space marines, have a 3+ save, but in the case of space marines the 3+ armor save is protecting flesh, and the thousand sons do not have flesh. The profile for rubrics cannot be "how hard is it to hurt flesh under armor," it has to be "how hard is it to destroy armor?"


Sorcerors must be aspiring champions with psychic mastery level 2

Rubrics, being that they do not have armor because they are armor, must be toughness 7 and save 6++, and there is no reason for them to have anything other than regular ap5 bolters, or any special rules other than Relentless.

What about 'slow and purposeful'?

Inferno Bolts are a magical enhancement provided by the Sorcerer. It's basically a Blessing that's automatically cast at the start of every turn. That's why Aspies aren't ML2. They are, its just half their power is permanently tied up in giving their squad AP3.

That fluff entry is over 10 years old. Mastery levels were just made. For all we know the augmentation from the rubric is mastery level 1

 CrownAxe wrote:
That fluff entry is over 10 years old. Mastery levels were just made. For all we know the augmentation from the rubric is mastery level 1

If by just made you mean "brought back from 2nd edition".

Even a ML1 psyker is incredibly powerful, capable of twisting time and space to his whim, boosting his strength enough to tear apart a battle tank, or annihilating his enemies in body, mind, and soul with a mere though

A 'minor' psyker won't have a ML at all.

It's also worth noting that due to the level of abstraction seen in 40K, there's no reason to assume that the boost 1KSon Sorcerers received from the Rubric, which is lacking in any objective metric for how much of an upgrade it gave to the surviving Sorcerers, would be enough to make a lvl 1 sorcerer suddenly a level 2.

Look at Marines and IG veterans. Both Tactical Marines and Imperial Guard veterans are BS4, despite the fact that a Tactical Marine will have decades of specialized training (Tactical Marines are the Navy SEAL equivalent of Marines, having mastered every aspect of combat by surviving their tenure under all the other roles), decades of psycho-conditioning, super-human reflexes and state-of-the-art optical enhancements built into his helmet to assist in lining up shots. Fluff-wise it makes zero sense for a Marine and a run-of-the-mill Guardsman veteran to have the same BS, but mechanically the range that exists in a stat-rung is so massive that the vast advantages an Astartes has over a Veteran simply isn't enough to justify having a higher BS. That's just one of the weaknesses of a D6 system.

Similarly, while it may be true that your average 1kSon Sorcerer is stronger than the average joe, on a system where there are only four mastery levels, that gap in power just might not be enough to justify giving them a higher ballistic skill.

This is why fluff rarely works as a justification for a mechanic or mechanic tweak. 40K is an abstraction, and so quite often the fluff has to take a back-seat. In the fluff a single Space Marine can tear his way through an entire Veteran squad in melee, that will rarely ever happen on the table though, and there's a balance/mechanical reason for that.

pelicaniforce wrote:

The rules for thousand sons marines make no sense either, since they, like space marines, have t4, but in the case of space marines t4 is attributable to strengthened tissue and redundant organs, while the thousand sons have none, and they, like space marines, have a 3+ save, but in the case of space marines the 3+ armor save is protecting flesh, and the thousand sons do not have flesh. The profile for rubrics cannot be "how hard is it to hurt flesh under armor," it has to be "how hard is it to destroy armor?"

Make them a squadron of walkers.

I remember a edition where they could not be harmed by shooting attacks with a lower str than 5. But you could get in close and hack them to pieces in CC

The problem with this assumption is that an ML1 psyker is not a 'minor psyker', he's a combat psyker. To borrow an analogy from D&D an ML4 psyker may be teleporting to other planes of existence to borrow a cup of sugar and telepathically compelling demons to lick his boots clean, sure, he's terrifying and at the top of the scale, but an ML1 psyker is still tossing fireballs around like it's the Fourth of July. There are plenty of folks wandering around the galaxy who get 'bad feelings' before something happens or who can light tinder without matches or who can give themselves enough of a push that they could beat the long jump record by a foot but they're not ML1, their psychic powers are too minor to be recorded at the scale of 40k.

koooaei wrote:

pelicaniforce wrote:

The rules for thousand sons marines make no sense either, since they, like space marines, have t4, but in the case of space marines t4 is attributable to strengthened tissue and redundant organs, while the thousand sons have none, and they, like space marines, have a 3+ save, but in the case of space marines the 3+ armor save is protecting flesh, and the thousand sons do not have flesh. The profile for rubrics cannot be "how hard is it to hurt flesh under armor," it has to be "how hard is it to destroy armor?"

Make them a squadron of walkers.

There you go. Actually, I think that since people have conflicts about stuff like riptides vs dreadnoughts, it should be more specific which way toughness vs. armor value is decided.

As far as I can tell, it seems like AV vehicles have a main body or monocoque, like a car does, and that everything like drives, interiors, and systems are attached to that. The rules give toughness to machine-things like weapons platforms, big guns, thunderfire cannons, riptides, nemesis dreadknights, and wraith-things because there they don't have any non-systems parts that are just a frame. If you see the body of a car, it doesn't have any useful systems on it (say, wheels or an engine) but it is still obviously the car or tank, and the wheels etc are just attached to it. Dreadnoughts and Sentinels are walkers with AV because they have a body that doesn't have any active function, and the systems like drive legs are attached to it.

Some people might say that the equivalent to that is a skeleton and everything has some kind of skeleton, but I think the skeleton is more like the axle and wheels (without any tires).

On this reasoning, I think that a Thousand Son is more like an artillery piece, which have toughness, than like a small walker. I would like to try it both ways, but I think that all the parts of the thousand sons are things that have a direct use or are ornamental, and that there isn't a thing like a monocoque that can be deformed or destroyed without simultaneously destroying the wheels, the engine, the guns, the radio, etcetera.

BlaxicanX wrote:It's also worth noting that due to the level of abstraction seen in 40K, there's no reason to assume that the boost 1KSon Sorcerers received from the Rubric, which is lacking in any objective metric for how much of an upgrade it gave to the surviving Sorcerers, would be enough to make a lvl 1 sorcerer suddenly a level 2.

Yeah, I figured I had covered this by saying that I didn't want to say for sure that "mastery levels" correlate to anything in the fluff. Honestly, the main part of the OP is a game-related argument, not a fluff thing. I just think it's nice to open with some thing italicize-able.

Look at Marines and IG veterans. Both Tactical Marines and Imperial Guard veterans are BS4, despite the fact that a Tactical Marine will have decades of specialized training (Tactical Marines are the Navy SEAL equivalent of Marines, having mastered every aspect of combat by surviving their tenure under all the other roles), decades of psycho-conditioning, super-human reflexes and state-of-the-art optical enhancements built into his helmet to assist in lining up shots. Fluff-wise it makes zero sense for a Marine and a run-of-the-mill Guardsman veteran to have the same BS, but mechanically the range that exists in a stat-rung is so massive that the vast advantages an Astartes has over a Veteran simply isn't enough to justify having a higher BS. That's just one of the weaknesses of a D6 system.

I'm completely on your level with this concept. I appreciate that sometime you have to explain that the marines in tactical squads are pretty well good. I know how abstraction can be a thing.

Actually, as an aside, I think it's a good thing, and that it isn't among the "weaknesses." I think the three or four levels of bs2, 3, and 4 are absolutely ideal. I think bs2 as barely capable/nominal, bs3 as useful, and bs4 as reliable are useful classes/classifications. The difference between hitting 63 percent of the time and 74 is completely useless in this kind of game.

Like I said, this is mostly a gameplay argument. It's actually the same principle by which it makes complete sense for a large minority of guardsmen to shoot as well as transhumans. Using fluff, the brief for designing this unit from scratch (if you had never read any of the current or old codexes) is sorceror is a cabal member with ego and agendas, and he has henchmen or a wall of muscle in the form of rubrics; rubrics are walking metal with no flesh.

The unit as it is in the 4th and 6th books doesn't do that. It has two distinct parts, the sorceror and the rubrics, that are not unitary. As far as the way they are used, they are two separate things that happen to share a unit. The unit now has a novelty shooting attack that was invented essentially because the old units weren't powerful. It simultaneously ended up being useless and not following the fluff brief of "cabal member with goons."

Come back to the Guard Vets. Regular guard have bs that is "useful," and the reason you take Vets is to get something that is "reliable." Hence, Vets have bs4, because that just means "noticeably more than half the time." If you gave them the old sharpshooters doctrine, basically preferred enemy for shooting, they wouldn't hit noticeably more than half the time. They just need to have that quality to fulfill their function, it's a complete coincidence that they have the same bs as stock marines.

This is what you were talking around in your post. It was that pretending that profiles are a straight representation of fluff and everyone with bs4 should in the fluff be equally skilled as each other is complete nonsense. Instead, profiles allow you to play units like they would play in fluff. You would use veterans or marines when you want to send only three units to do two or three jobs, and you would use bs3 guardsmen when you are prepared to send five units to do those 2-3 jobs. This is the same with psychic mastery levels. A unit gets the mastery level that gets players to play it the way it behaves in the background.

Similarly, while it may be true that your average 1kSon Sorcerer is stronger than the average joe, on a system where there are only four mastery levels, that gap in power just might not be enough to justify giving them a higher ballistic skill.

Then you just get to this and have essentially confused yourself. There is no "gap" wide enough to justify a difference in skill, because mechanics are about how the unit can be used, there is no conversion rate of fluff power-points to numbers on the the profile.

To get a Thousand Sons squad that can be played the way it behaves in the background, the sorceror has to have psychic power worth protecting with a unit of spirit-inhabited armor. I.E., it has to be a sorceror whose powers are worth the ~200 point price of entry on every sorceror. It is the same as wanting to use a cheap unit from an allied detachment. The price of using that cheap ally includes the price of an HQ and troop. The Thousand Sons are not, in the fluff, a novelty shooting unit. If you want you can give the sorceror ML4, but as long as the unit has inferno bolts, it will not play the way the it acts in the fluff. A psyker that is ML1 is not worth taking a force org choice and four to nine expensive heavy infantry models to protect.