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Hey everyone,
Without going too much into it (that will probably come at a later post!) I'm designing a non-chaos faction of imperial rebels centered around Tempestus Scions. Essentially, the lore is that their culture embraced xeno-tech, were punished by the imperium, and then took to the stars as mercenaries and refugees.

The non-lore reason is that pretty much everyone in my group plays Imperium factions, so I wanted a good reason to be fighting them all the time :-)

Anyway, I have a few proposed rules that I was thinking about (most likely won't get to PLAY them, but one can always dream!) and I was curious about what the community thought about them, as well as possible point costs for the units.

I want the main infantry to be Scions, with all the rules normally in place, but I wanted them to be extraordinarily tough due to pre-birth genetic enhancement with xeno-tech, cybernetic enhancement, and a culture of always continuing the fight. To this end I had a few ideas as far as making them super-tough:

1) +1 wound. This is obviously the easiest idea, and it's not without it's fun, but it does seem a little lazy honestly.

2) Toughness 5 and a 5+ FNP. I think mathhammer wise this actually makes the unit MORE survivable than just giving it a +1 wound, It also embraces the whole "super tough" thing quite literally and FNP rolls are always crazy powerful.

3) Opponents get -1 to wound rolls against them, or alternately have a 1-2 always fail. This is probably the more balanced option, while still being quite powerful. Obviously a flat -1 to wound is better than 1-2 always failing, but I think it wouldn't be a bad way to go either.

What's your thoughts? I have more rules and ideas I want to include, such as including tanks in the Scion division (with the fluff being that the females of their faction are always trained as mechanics and armored vehicle crew) but for now I want to see what everyone thinks about making a version of super-tough scions. If you have any ideas about point costs as well PLEASE speak up, as honestly, I have no idea how to do point costs well.

Thanks for reading!

I'd say flat T4, or a 6+ FNP. In lore, simply having that T4 over baseline humans or the 6+ is supposed to represent extraordinary toughness.

Don't forget, both the scrawniest Savlar conscript and the grizzled and muscle-bound Catachan are both T3. The jump to T4 is supposed to be a MASSIVE deal.

In short, 2 Wounds is way too drastic, as is T5/5+FNP (that's tougher than Plague Marines!!) - that's not to say the points costs couldn't be adjusted to make it "balanced", but that IMHO, Guardsmen should not be that tough, xenotech or not.

My personal way to represent toughness would be to make a custom Regimental Doctrine, something as simple as "models with this doctrine get a 6+ save against all unsaved Wounds", a Warlord trait/relic to boost the Tempestor Prime, and maybe an "extra gene-forging" stratagem, which might act like the Primaris one: "Select this stratagem when one of your units is targeted by an attack. That unit cannot be wounded by a natural roll of 1, 2 or 3 until the end of the phase."

I actually really like the regimental doctrine ability, and the strategem.

I agree that some of my proposed rules are problematic considering the difference in game between space-marines and humans (t3-t4, s3-s4 mostly)...pretty small as far as rules go, but HUGE in terms of lore.

Hmmm... I will have to think some more on this.

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:
I'd say flat T4, or a 6+ FNP. In lore, simply having that T4 over baseline humans or the 6+ is supposed to represent extraordinary toughness.

Don't forget, both the scrawniest Savlar conscript and the grizzled and muscle-bound Catachan are both T3. The jump to T4 is supposed to be a MASSIVE deal.

In short, 2 Wounds is way too drastic, as is T5/5+FNP (that's tougher than Plague Marines!!) - that's not to say the points costs couldn't be adjusted to make it "balanced", but that IMHO, Guardsmen should not be that tough, xenotech or not.

My personal way to represent toughness would be to make a custom Regimental Doctrine, something as simple as "models with this doctrine get a 6+ save against all unsaved Wounds", a Warlord trait/relic to boost the Tempestor Prime, and maybe an "extra gene-forging" stratagem, which might act like the Primaris one: "Select this stratagem when one of your units is targeted by an attack. That unit cannot be wounded by a natural roll of 1, 2 or 3 until the end of the phase."

I agree with all of this. Simple. not OP. Flavorful. As a wonky alternative, have you considered using Tau rules? They'd have better guns than normal imperials, ethereals could give you a 6+ FNP aura, kroot could represent those whose augmentations lean more towards offense than defense, and you'd have access to plenty of high-tech stuff that you could fluff/model as various forms of xenotech. Plus, humans that want to team up with friendly xenos seem like they'd naturally be drawn towards the tau.

Bear in mind that Gretchin or Ratlings have T2, now factor in that a human is signficantly bigger, and has T3.

Now sure the MODEL size of a Space Marine is similar to a Guardsman, but the artwork isn't. A Space Marine now has T4, the relative size difference is there.

Then add in Ogryns who are far bigger than Space Marines, and they are T5, this is a toughness they share with Sentinels...

I would look through all the existing "build-your-own-chapter/forgeworld/craftworld/whatever" rules and pick two you like, as opposed to being restricted to normal regiments. If you want durability, for example, you could look at stalwart combined with the admech one that reduces on coming ap by 1.

 Eipi10 wrote:
I would look through all the existing "build-your-own-chapter/forgeworld/craftworld/whatever" rules and pick two you like, as opposed to being restricted to normal regiments. If you want durability, for example, you could look at stalwart combined with the admech one that reduces on coming ap by 1.

Does it reduce AP by 1, or treat AP-1 as AP0?

Because I thought it was the latter, and you're describing the former.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Eipi10 wrote:
I would look through all the existing "build-your-own-chapter/forgeworld/craftworld/whatever" rules and pick two you like, as opposed to being restricted to normal regiments. If you want durability, for example, you could look at stalwart combined with the admech one that reduces on coming ap by 1.

Does it reduce AP by 1, or treat AP-1 as AP0?

Because I thought it was the latter, and you're describing the former.

You're right, I didn't bother to check the actual rule.

No worries, Elp. Tis easy to make mistakes, and no harm has been done.