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And we're back!

We're coming into the homestretch finally. Chapter Approved 2004 didn't have much IG related content so we'll skip that. Which, as far as I know, leaves only one last stop before we hit Codex Black Crusade and the cut off for this era.

I'd almost forgotten it which is a shame since this magazine played an important role in making me the bitter and broken man I am today.

Yes I'm talking about the last and final Adeptus Arbites list from Citadel Journal #29 from 1998!



The Citadel Journal (or CJ as the cool kids liked to call it) was sort of an in-house fanzine for GW games. Black and white, noticeably cheaper than White Dwarf with a lot of fan-written articles given semi-official blessing. It was sporadically available in GW shops or from mail order but would frequently disappear without warning.

I think I still have the issue with the first Thunderhawk rules, the one that used toilet rolls as engines. I should review that one day.

But every so often an official-official article would slip in the like 3rd edition Harlequin rules (with Troupe Choices, I always liked that touch) and this, the Adeptus Arbites.



The Arbites have been around since Rogue Trader and are Imperial law enforcement, not beat cops but sort of a combination of the FBI/Scotland Yard+SWAT teams. Power-wise they kind of sit above the Imperial Guard but below the Sisters of Battle. Around Storm Trooper level.

And they are also a 100% original idea and certainly not an excuse to reuse Judge Dredd models with a bit of green stuff in a new game!





The army list, apparently snuck out without warning, is about what you'd expect from an army with 4 metal models.



Elite Arbites with Bolters.



Troop Arbites with Shotguns.




And shield and maul Arbites with a 2+ armor save and not much else.




And bike Arbites!

Two new choices that require multiple metal kits, saws and green stuff.



But you could add 1 Arbites Unit to any Imperial Army.



Or you could field an entire army of Blue Boys!

An army with no weapons above Strength 6! (OK you could get a combi melta for a 1 shot S8 weapon).

Would it have killed them, to include a Leman Russ option? Even just the autocannon one?



But it had some neat conversions (with grainy black and white photos)



And it was clearly a labor of love for all involved.

Again, this is consistent with the other weird IG regiments from this era. A lot of conversion work for not much benefit.

GW for example had a shock maul Arbites figure from Rogue Trader but didn't include it in this article. Granted the design was different but that model+a shield would have been an easy sale for this army.

And putting this list in White Dwarf, instead of a hard-to-find B&W magazine, would also have boosted sales.

All I can say is for a famously money-grubbing company GW sometimes makes it really hard for us to give them money.



In closing I want to include the ad for the pre-resin, all metal, 400GBP Thunderhawk. Note that you must be "absolutely barking mad (or American)" to order this.

I mean a 400GBP model? Who would buy such a thing?

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

We're coming into the homestretch finally. Chapter Approved 2004 didn't have much IG related content so we'll skip that. Which, as far as I know, leaves only one last stop before we hit Codex Black Crusade and the cut off for this era.

Heresy. It had the updated armoured company rules.

Codex: Eye of Terror was my last, great highlight of 40K gaming. I jumped into the Lost and the Damned hard, and when support for them faded in 4e, I kind of fell out of interest in the game. After that, I mostly just dabbled in 5e for a while as a way to spend time with friends.

I request you cover that list as well as the Cadian list, as traitor guard being in there counts, right?

Lost & The Damned was a fantastic (and not especially balanced) list. Had tons of fun with that one.

The mutant kits they put out - a sprue of Catachans, a sprue of Zombies, a sprue of Ork Boyz, and a Chaos Mutation Sprue - was such a joy to build. I think I ended up with 90 of them.

It was just "Here, got kitbash stuff!". So I went wild using them, a box of Marauders, some Flagellants, leftover Necromunda plastic and metal parts, even some original Genestealer Hybrid plastics from way back in the day. Some models I made it my aim to use parts from as many kits as possible. Tremendous fun.

And with that in mind, you might be able to see why I'm so harsh on GW's no model/no rule stance these days, and the endless reduction of options, both in rules and modelling.

And we're back!

I strayed a bit by talking about Kroot and Preachers and such so I may as well make one more stop before closing this out (and yes I will look at the Lost and the The Damned) by looking at the boys in black (plus one girl in black), the Assassins!

RT and 2nd edition had assassins as customizable characters



With RT rolling on random charts for gear while 2nd allowed you to pick your own wargear.

Why yes, I will take an assassin in power armor, with a displacer field and a vortex grenade and polymorphine, thank you. (I could have taken terminator armor but I didn't want to be cheesy you know)

But late 2nd edition and 3rd moved the assassins into temples with very specific equipment and roles. There was the guy who shoots you in the head, the girl who stabs you in the back, the crack monkey who just straight up kills you, and the spooky dude who no one ever used unless he was fighting the Seer Council with ANY NUMBER of models.

There were so many special rules GW published an actual Codex Assassins at the end of 2nd edition, it was only like 16 pages and only cost about US$10 (AUS$45) but it was still a whole book for just 4 models. It was a sign of the bloat that had set in and had to be fixed in 3rd.

The 3rd edition BBB had army lists in the back of the book with simple 'get you by' rules that took several paragraphs printed on tiny bits of cardboard and compressed them into some streamlined rules.



What's that? The Eversore has 12" charge, +d6 attacks and a bolt pistol and power weapon? That's it? No rules for his backpack? No rules for him exploding when he dies? Nothing else?



And the Vindicare is just a sniper with AP2? No rules for his 3 kinds of ammo? No rules for his face mask?

It was glorious.

It also lasted like 3 months. Maybe less.



At least this time GW included it for free in White Dwarf. And good on them for doing that. And for making it a booklet rather than a series of articles. No complaints there.



And check out that Wayne England cover (RIP)! That's worth the price of a White Dwarf right there!



At just 10 pages, 1 per assassin plus a scenario, and a whole page for the table of contents it wasn't really an overload.



Plus a few pages were art or fluff.



Still the rules were back to almost the same level of detail. The Calidus Assassin got her poison needles back, the Vindiacre his 3 magic bullets, the Eversore his quick shot rules etc.

My personal favorite was the Eversore for the sheer lack of ambiguity of his technique. Hide him in a unit, then charge 12" and Kil! Kil! Kil! I did not like the Calidus since was one of the few units that could move your opponent's unit ("A word in your ear") before the game and I always thought that was unsporting. The Vindicare was also a goodie, but too unreliable at taking down targets. You'd miss 1 time in 6 and fail to wound half the time (without your magic bullets). And I never used the Culexus.

But they were fun mainstays in any IG army and still are. The modelling opportunties are great too. I used some of Copplestone's Predator models for a while, then converted a Tallarn to serve as my assassin. Whenever I have some stray models I still convert up some assassins just for fun.

I for one would love it if we got a proper Assassins codex. Some basic Death Cult gals as troops, the 4 temples as elites/FA/Heavy Support and a customizable Omega Don level assassin lord as your HQ. Never happen but it would be fun, an army for people who think Harlequins and Custodius have too many models.

Love the Castigator.

And we're back!

Having strung this out as long as anyone could possibly expect it's time to start with final book in the seemingly-never ending 3rd edition IG supplements, Codex Nose of Horror.



Coming 3 years after the successful Armageddon worldwide campaign, Nose of Horror was an attempt to turn things up to 11 (12 in Australia) with a campaign that wasn't just about a single planet with an ill-chosen name, but one that could settle the fate of the Galaxy itself.

Like Codex: Armageddon, Codex: Nose of Horror presented 4 new mini army lists: More Fallen Than Usual Space Wolves, EZ paint Eldar, Nuttin But Cadians and the Lost and the Damned.

Nothing particularly interesting to say about the first two lists and the Cadians seems a good way to end this, so let's jump right into the Lost and the Damned!



L&D was one of the coolest army ideas GW had. Back in Rogue Trader it was clear that vast majority of Chaos forces were cultists hiding in the sewers, Imperial Forces turned traitor and unspeakable mutants pouring out of the Nose of Horror, with Chaos Space Marines as the rare elite among them. But from 2nd edition on CMS have been the star of the show. The 3rd edition Chaos Codex didn't even have cultists, you had to track them down in White Dwarf.





L&D were also a unique experiment because there wasn't a single official model for them, everything was kitbashes, conversions or repurposed from Necromunda and Fantasy. It was an incredible opportunity for conversions.





The only real product made for L&D was a mutant kit consisting of 1 Catachan, 1 Zombie and 1 Ork sprue together with a sprue of mutant heads and limbs. It was awesome.



I forget if there was a kit of L&D tanks, but honestly for a stock Leman Russ with some iron fencing added this is pretty good.





And for the more ambitious there were guides for converting various metal models for your army.



But even the most basic kitbashers could have a unique army of horrors from hell!



Rules wise, L&D were kind of a hybrid of daemons and Guard that ended up playing like foot slogging orks.

The army had Chaos Marines or Greater Daemons as HQ, Traitors, nurglings and mutants as troops and some stray Daemon and IG units to round things off.



Traitors were infiltrating mobs of IG-level humans with a choice of weapons. So you could go with rifles and a heavy weapon or go for CC weapons and pistols.



The mutant rules were wonderfully simple. Big mobs of guys with pointy sticks (you could pay points to get them lasguns) and roughly Ork stats. Then you could add on 1 of 4 bonuses. The problem was there was no easy way to get them into combat so basically you were only interested in the one that made them cavalry.

You could turn them into fearless plague zombies, but then they moved as if in difficult terrain, which made them even more pointless.



They could also get 'Big Mutants' basically almost Orgyn but with the same issue in getting them into assault range.



So like a lot of these variant IG armies the Lost and the Damned asked for a lot of work from models and collectors but with only minimal returns. Of course I never tried and maybe there was some abusive CSM/L&D combo I'm missing.

Of course the other problem is that you could do all that work drawing on models from a half dozen places, and then find the list was invalidated a few months later. And today, almost 20 years later has yet to have an update.

But that's a discussion for another time.



Really nice art though.

I loved Lost and the Damned. Always wanted to do an army of Tau Auxiliaries who mutinied and went over to chaos based on it.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
The only real product made for L&D was a mutant kit consisting of 1 Catachan, 1 Zombie and 1 Ork sprue together with a sprue of mutant heads and limbs. It was awesome.

Yes it was. I've mentioned before that I have around 90 of the things. Mixed in Marauder, Tau, old Necromunda bits, and tried to make models with bits from as many kits as possible. Used it as an opportunity to build some Scavvies for Necromunda at the same time.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
The mutant rules were wonderfully simple. Big mobs of guys with pointy sticks (you could pay points to get them lasguns) and roughly Ork stats. Then you could add on 1 of 4 bonuses. The problem was there was no easy way to get them into combat so basically you were only interested in the one that made them cavalry.

Nah they were great. Giant mobs slogging around, doing a bit of damage here and there. Didn't need the cavalry profile to be worthwhile.

I absolutely LOVED that Chaos Horde list. So fun to build armies with, and great imagery.

I miss the Lost and the Damned. The mutants bag was either $15 or $20 and great deal.

I fielded them as Word Bearers Auxiliaries.

I used a Greater Daemon as the compulsory HQ and a Word Bearers Chaos Lord with Demagogue to make my +4 save mutant blobs fearless. Added some deep striking Obliterators, a few squads of infiltrating traitor guard and some Defilers. Spare points went to some bloodletters or daemonettes.

Tangent:

 Insectum7 wrote:
I absolutely LOVED that Chaos Horde list. So fun to build armies with, and great imagery.

If you're looking to do some fun kit bashing I recommend the Star/Frost Grave sprues. There's tons of them and they're usually under $10. There's humans, alien heads, Gnolls, snake men and other cool stuff.

I've been using this seller but there are many more, including Brigade Games in the US and Northstar in the UK.

https://www.ebay.com/str/spruedude


So far Frost/Star Grave have been almost 100% compatible except for some oddballs like Gnoll heads. Oathmark used different head joints but arm swaps are easy.

I think the L&D list was fairly powerful. You got IG tanks and defilers, better guardsmen, which could both infiltrate and go MSU (las/plas 6 dudes) or horde, and the mutants were pretty decent for the points.

The aspiring champions with fist hidden in a blob of mutants was great. Ld 10 I believe he conferred to the unit, and you then had two hidden fists. With S4 upgrade, the unit was a serious threat in close combat. 3pts flamers are also good. Just remembered that he could be a sorcerer too, with S8 shots.

The list was better than CSM at playing greater deamons, as you had no expensive characters that could end up as the host.

At 25pts each, the big mutants were not that bad either IMO, but I never actually had any minis for those, so that is theoretical.





Automatically Appended Next Post:
Something like this for 1500pts I think would do ok in 3rd. Three big blasts to kill MEQ, lots of AP2 and S8/9 shots, and the power fists hidden in a swarm of wounds would likely wear down most units in close combat.
I think there might have been some serious abuse available with veteran skills too, which I believe conferred to the unit. The champions could buy stuff like tank hunter, counter charge, furious charge for 1-3pts. Absolutely totally balanced of course.

HQ -
2x aspiring champions, mark of Tz, bolt of change, powerfist, frags
2x aspiring champion, mark of Tz, bolt of change

Troops -
2x30 mutants, boss, fist, 2x flamer
4x6 traitors, plasmagun, lascannon

HS -
2x Leman Russ, heavy bolter, smokes
1x Defiler

I really enjoyed the LatD list. Somewhere I've still got somewhere between 30 and 60 mutants in storage.

My problem was that in our local group, we had several well established players. Including a marine player with the model selection to tailor a list with a heavy bolter in every available heavy weapon slot for his list.

Not even the cavalry upgrade could get your mutant hoards through that sort of nonsense with enough bodies to damage a Space Marine line. Honestly, I think that era of late 3e and early 4e was where I was starting to get disillusioned with the 'win the game in the list-building stage' nature of the game. I wanted to play flavorful lists with LatD and the Ulthwe Strike Force (my main army was around 4000 points of Craftworld Eldar painted up as Ulthwe from the get-go.)

But flavorful couldn't win against tailored list-building, and that started getting depressing.

Eye of Terror was peak 40k for me. Loved all the lists that were made to highlight kitbashing and conversions. I wrote up so many lists for LotD, but never had the models to play any of them.

I think the World-Wide Campaigns were awesome for the hobby. A lot of people complained about the outcome, but the "outcome" was never the point.

The fan made content for each of those campaigns was really great and fun to follow along with. It made me want to emulate it, which eventually led me down a yellow brick road to making my own games.

The Eye of Terror Campaign was my favourite time in the hobby. Great fun.

Eye of Terror was such a fun codex as well.
The Lost and the Damned list is still one of my two projects Ive always wanted to do-a full Traitor Guard army.

And we're back!

We'll close our look at the Eye of Terror codex with the Cadian list.



This would be the final appearance of the 2nd edition metal Cadians and the first time the 3rd edition look would start to appear. Plastic Cadians and a new codex would follow a few months later.



The big addition of course was Creed and his platonic life partner Kell. Creed was a 'come the hour come the man' sort of character, after everyone who outranked him was killed in a treacherous attack, he assumed command and turned the tide. A reliable heroic trope suitable for officers and commander types. He was not a combat monster by any measure but a support and coordination character who allowed IG character to choose missions and whether or not to go first. (The orders mechanic would follow in the next IG book a few months later).



The Cadian army list took out the abhuman options, added Psykers (who had been absent for all of 3rd edition) as well as more Storm Troopers (Kasrkin, but without models at that point) and ahem, the Youth Army.



An update of the old White Shields, they were very quickly renamed conscripts which I think was a wise move. Like suicide bombers, child solders are just a bit too close to home for amusing grimdark.



Kasrkin, the best of the best of the 3rd best Imperial army after Marines and Sisters, could be taken as elite Storm Troopers who could deep strike and infiltrate, or 0-3 troop choices with the same stats but without those special rules. An odd difference but again it would all be swept away a few months later so no biggie.



Sanctioned Psykers were a weird one, as far as I can tell they were free, but with random powers including a 1 in 6 change of 'no usable power'. But free. So there was that. And again, they were the first IG psykers in 3rd edition.



Plus some general rules, reroll 1s to hit (if you're BS3, except for plasma, except for sniper rifles...), slightly improved morale and some other bits and bobs. Again like a lot of the other sub faction lists a lot of stuff for not much benefit.

And that's kind of the story of 3rd edition IG. It was a time of incredible creativity, with some real labors of love (anyone who spent hours sculpting quilting onto metal Marine Scouts to make Drop Troops has my respect). But to what end?

By all means spend time and money making Chem Dogs or Ork Hunters or whatever, they still going to be a fairly mediocre choice.

Meanwhile several armies that actually existed on shelves, which you could buy and paint never got any special attention. Which to me is just... odd.

Moreover by the end of things you could easily make an IG army that required a dozen or more books to use as Death World Vets join the Steel Legion with support from Imperial Armor and a squad of Arbites and an Inquisitor and some Kroot. Clearly things were getting out of hand and required at least a soft reboot.

So I guess I will have to keep going at least a little bit further with a loot at Codex Imperial Guard 3.5!

Coming when I get around to it.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
The orders mechanic would follow in the next IG book a few months later).

No, that was the 4th Ed Codex. The next Guard book was the one with the Doctrine system. It would be some amount of years before 'Orders' became the thing that Guard did.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
An odd difference but again it would all be swept away a few months later so no biggie.

Not really. Those rules just became the Stormtrooper/Grenadier rules.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Sanctioned Psykers were a weird one, as far as I can tell they were free...

Says 12 points per model right there on the page.

You feelin' ok, Kid?

And I said this in my Doctrinal review: The second best result on the Sanctioned Psyker table was "No Result". That's how bad the powers are.

Orders were in the 5th edition codex. There was no 4th edition codex, Guard were stuck using the 3.5th codex. This still used the leadership bubble around officers, which could be spread via vox casters.

You out nitpicked my nitpick. Well done.

And I wouldn't call using the 3.5 book being "stuck" with anything. That book was amazing.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
The orders mechanic would follow in the next IG book a few months later).

No, that was the 4th Ed Codex. The next Guard book was the one with the Doctrine system. It would be some amount of years before 'Orders' became the thing that Guard did.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
An odd difference but again it would all be swept away a few months later so no biggie.

Not really. Those rules just became the Stormtrooper/Grenadier rules.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Sanctioned Psykers were a weird one, as far as I can tell they were free...

Says 12 points per model right there on the page.

You feelin' ok, Kid?

And I said this in my Doctrinal review: The second best result on the Sanctioned Psyker table was "No Result". That's how bad the powers are.

LOL, thought I was over this cold, guess not.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
You out nitpicked my nitpick. Well done.

And I wouldn't call using the 3.5 book being "stuck" with anything. That book was amazing.

I started playing at the tail end of 4th and both codices are sitting next to me

It was amazing, but by the middle of 5th edition everything felt distinctly overcosted with 2 editions of codex creep. I still look to it for the lore though, brilliant book.