Infantry may not be the stars of Warmachine, but that doesn’t make them any less important. From screening high priority targets to overwhelming a foe with sheer numbers, infantry plays a critical role, especially in the armies of Cryx. Today, I’m taking a look at our character unit, the Withershadow Combine.
IN SHORT: With solid defensive stats and a slew of special abilities, the Withershadow Combine can tip the balance in Cryx’s favor and even construct whole warjacks during the battle! No, seriously, they can do that!
STRENGTHS: The three Iron Liches of the Withershadow Combine bring a diverse and powerful set of abilities to the tabletop. Let’s step through them.
All three members come with Dismantle. This gives them an extra damage die in melee against warjacks. Combined with a base P+S 13 and their ability to buy new attacks if they have souls, the Withershadow Combine can inflict a tremendous amount of pain on a warjack, which is just awesome because …
The ability Dark Industries allows the Withershadow Combine to build new Cryx warjacks out of enemy warjacks! There are a few conditions to pull this off. All three Iron Liches must be present and be engaging the enemy warjack in melee when one of them destroys it. After that, replace the enemy warjack with an equivalent-sized Cryx warjack of your choice. Note that the new warjack is autonomous, and so does not start in your warcaster’s battlegroup.
Also, Dark Industries does NOT work on Colossi, so no free Krakens, because that would be silly.
The Withershadow Combine also has strong defensive stats. As long as the leader, Maelovus, is alive, the unit has Stealth. Add in DEF 14, ARM 16, and 5 hit boxes each, and the Combine is fairly resilient by Cryx standards, especially at range.
Each Lich can cast Dark Fire, a decent attack spell that collects the soul of destroyed living models, allowing the Combine to inflict damage at range and stock up on souls for a later attack (such as an attempt to pull off Dark Industries). With a respectable magic attack of 7, they can certainly pull this off. Oh, and they also come with Terror.
In addition to these abilities, the other two Iron Liches have their own special abilities. Admonia allows a warcaster to upkeep one spell for free with her Black Arts ability. She can also clear all enemy upkeep spells within 5” with her Unbinding ability. This also inflicts D3 damage to the controlling model, per upkeep cleared, allowing Admonia to inflict some minor damage to the enemy warcaster or warlock.
Tremulus comes with an awe-inspiring ability: Puppet Master. Target a model or unit, friend or foe, and then chose a CMD, attack, or damage roll to reroll. You can even choose which dice to reroll, greatly increasing the odds of a favorable outcome. Seriously, how many uses are there for this ability? It is incredibly potent ability.
Under normal conditions, I put this ability on the warcaster. Cryx depend heavily on debuff spells. Missing a key debuff attack at a critical moment can be disastrous. But with Puppet Master active, you get a free do-over!
WEAKNESSES: At 5 points, the Withershadow Combine is a bit pricey. They’re almost the cost of three separate solos, though it’s a fair price for what they bring. Stealth can help protect them at range, but there are plenty of ways an enemy can bypass that defense. Plus, if Maelovus goes down, so does Stealth.
That leads to the toughest part of pulling off a successful Dark Industries attack: all three Iron Liches have to be alive. Take out any one of them and your opponent takes out the Dark Industries threat.
And naturally, if there are no warjacks in your opponents army, Dark Industries and Dismantle have no effect. That doesn’t mean the Withershadow Combine is bad against Hordes, just that they’re not quite as versatile.
SYNERGIES: From allowing rerolls of attack spells to upkeeping for free, the Withershadow Combine can help out almost any Cryx warcaster. The one possible exception is Goreshade the Bastard, who lacks upkeep spells. That doesn’t mean the Combine is bad with him, just maybe not an ideal combination.
Warwitch Sirens are great toolkit solos to have around, and their Power Booster can come in handy if the Withershadow Combine pulls off a successful Dark Industries. Remember, the new warjack is not automatically part of the warcaster’s battlegroup, and so cannot be allocated Focus. The Warwitch Siren allows you to bypass this problem by using Power Booster to give the new warjack a Focus token.
Lastly, since Dark Industries requires all three Iron Liches to engage the target warjack in melee, it can be tricky to wear the warjack down AND leave enough room for the Combine. Infantry with Reach, such as Bane Knights, can certainly help deal out damage while keeping space open for the Combine to finish the warjack off.
JUST FOR FUN: Executing Dark Industries on a full strength target is normally not the best idea. Ideally, a warjack should be softened up before the Combine moves in for the kill. But how soft does the target need to be? Let’s assume a charge attack with no extra souls available for additional attacks. Even against a Khador warjack, the Combine will do an average of 21 points of damage.
Obviously, there are a lot of permutations that can affect the outcome. But in general, if a warjack is at roughly half-health, it can be a good opportunity for the Combine to strike. Note that if the target has a defensive upkeep spell, consider having Admonia clear it with Unbinding instead of attacking.
SUMMARY: The Withershadow Combine is a powerful character unit with a diverse set of abilities. While their flashiest abilities are geared towards taking down warjacks, that is nowhere near the extent of their usefulness. From clearing enemy upkeeps, setting up strategic rerolls, and adding some extra Focus efficiency, the Withershadow Combine can find a place in almost any Cryx army.
Check out the complete list of Warmachine and Hordes articles here.
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Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve – Book Review
The people of the future no longer live on the ground. In the time between our period, theirs, and the pivotal Sixty Minute War, they’ve moved onto enormous mobile cities known as Traction Cities, which carry them around the world to escape the geological dangers created by the Sixty Minute War…and also away from other cities. For the Traction Cities abide by the code of Municipal Darwinism, in which the bigger, stronger cities keep themselves running by devouring the smaller cities and their resources. As one character says, it’s a “town-eat-town” world.
In the midst of this municipal Survival of the Fittest are our protagonists, Tom Natsworthy, Katherine Valentine, and Hester Shaw. Tom is a third-class apprentice in the Guild of Historians, located on the impressive Traction City of London. Despite the difficulties of his work, he loves London and cheers it on when it chases and captures the smaller city of Salthook. In the course of the following city-wide celebration, he encounters Thaddeus Valentine, the dashing head of the Guild of Historians and a hero among Londoners, Tom included. More importantly, though, he encounters Valentine’s daughter, Katherine, with whom he is immediately smitten. He doesn’t have much time to be smitten, though, for in the flurry of activity, an assassin approaches Valentine with a knife, intending to do exactly what assassins do with knives. However, Tom is not about to let that happen. He rescues Valentine, in the process being knocked off of the London Traction City, and afterward finds that the assassin is actually Hester Shaw, a girl with a hideous scar and a story to tell—one that will change Tom’s impression of his beloved Traction City forever.
There is more plot, but all of it is a spoiler.
Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve is the first in The Mortal Engines Quartet/The Hungry City Chronicles/The Predator Cities series (This is another of those series that gets a new identity every time it’s rereleased), and is among the books that I consider the most perfect examples of steampunk. It has action, adventure, a unique and well-realized setting, political intrigue, character twists and turns galore, and on top of that, a whole city inhabited by airship pilots and all the epicness that ensues when a bunch of airship pilots find something to do battle over (among other awesomeness. There are Traction City pirates, too. And a pet wolf named Dog. And also a thing called MEDUSA which, avoiding spoilers, is terrifying for the characters involved with it, but thrilling to readers who want some exciting steampunk action).
The whole concept of Municipal Darwinism is what gives this novel its strong base. While the idea of a moving city is not original to Mortal Engines, the idea of a city chasing and eating another city is, and brings an interesting level of conflict to the world of the novel. This was one of those settings where, as with many sci-fi settings, my first reaction was “Ooo, I’d totally love to live on a Traction City and travel all over the world and chase other towns!” And then I realized that I live in Spartanburg, which as cities go is not that big, and as Traction Cities go means that it would totally be eaten by one of its many larger surrounding before it could even finish chasing the little towns around it. People who live in Spartanburg are even called Spartanburgers. We sound like food. We’d be doomed from the start. And we’d be doomed while on the run from the earth itself, since one of the results of the pseudo-nuclear Sixty Minute War was unpredictable geological upheaval. You want real stress? Try running from the ground you’re running on.
Of course, to the characters in the novel, all these novelties are old hat. They’re so used to Traction Cities that the whole idea of a static city seems weird and barbaric to them, as does the Anti-Traction League, a group of protected nations determined to maintain their static cities, and who occasionally perpetrate alleged terrorist attacks on Traction Cities…in protest of the activities which the Anti-Traction League finds barbaric. This contributes to what I found to be one of the most satisfying elements of the book. While it has adventure and explosions and everything else that I find entertaining in a novel, it also presents some interesting moral and ethical questions, and explores all sides of every side presented in the novel. Though the story in the novel has a clear set of antagonists, the world of the novel is composed of several different shades of moral gray, many of which change shades over the course of the narrative. Allegiances and animosities that the readers have at the beginning are changed in nearly every chapter when readers happen upon haunting new information. Questions about the world itself arise—how ethical is it, exactly, for a city to eat another city, even when the limited availability of natural resources necessitates it? What are the moral implications of resurrecting the dead as memory-less half-machines (another technology that plays a significant role in the plot)?
This is a novel that makes the reader question everything it presents as awesome in the first few chapters, and for that, I love it. It’s simultaneously a fun adventure novel and a thinking person’s novel. Because of that, I cannot wait to read the remaining three books in The Mortal Engines Quartet(/The Hungry City Chronicles/The Predator Cities).
Top image found here: http://fav.me/d1r6f62
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Beasts of Burden, Volume 1 by Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson – Book Review
In Animal Rites, the first volume of graphic novel series Beasts of Burden, Pugsley, Jack, Ace, Whitey, Rex, and the Orphan are 5 dogs and a cat living fairly normal lives…until they encounter a ghost in Jack’s doghouse, a coven of witches, a werewolf, and several other supernatural oddities. Eventually, they combat so many paranormal dangers that they are invited to become apprentices of the Wise Dog Society, a group of dogs (and now one cat) devoted to defending their territory from paranormal threats.
This description might lead one to think that the story illustrated in the pages of this book is a fun little happy-go-lucky read. I mean, it’s got talking animals in it, right?
True, Beasts of Burden is a talking animal story. But it is not a talking animal story that you want to show your little siblings. Not unless you want them to grow up traumatized, anyway. In which case, go for it. You will succeed dramatically.
This series is billed as horror mystery. It fits that genre quite nicely, and with more originality and skill than many entries in the genre. One would expect a story like the one in the description—the adventures of a bunch of canine paranormal investigators—to be illustrated in a rather fun, cartoony style, and possibly to show up as a Nickelodeon series sometime in the near future. Instead of that rather trite approach, readers are instead given lavish watercolor illustrations to gaze at, not of anthropomorphic, but realistically-rendered creatures, with some liberties taken to allow for facial expression. The art in this book is marvelously expressive, and gorgeous to skim.
Whether it remains so upon a closer look is entirely up to the individual reader, as the art of this book puts the “gore” in “gorgeous.” If you are the sort of animal lover who cries when you see cute puppies in sad situations, you may as well steer clear, because this book will leave you traumatized, too. And if you are a curious animal lover, but iffy about the animal horror content, let me present you with this image from the third story: a pack of zombie dogs getting run over by a truck in vivid, splattery detail, then being left in the road because the drivers don’t want to handle the hassle of cleanup and owner contact. If that makes you uncomfortable, you might as well stay away, too, because the horror only gets worse from there. And for horror readers, this is a treat.
Before you think me an absolutely heartless person for saying so, let me say that I’m the sort of animal lover who can’t go to a pet shop without wanting to adopt all the cats, and then coming up with a list of sad things that might happen to those cats should I not adopt them, and then leaving the pet shop sad because I already have enough cats and they don’t want any friends anyway. So I am a fan of animals. However, I am also a fan of well-done horror, and this book is definitely that. Any artist can illustrate lots of blood and gore and call it horror, but only a skilled artist can make the reader care about the characters that it’s happening to, which is the key to the success of this volume. This book is great horror not because it’s disgusting (which it is) but because it has an emotionally wrenching effect on the reader, largely fueled by the art and its careful juxtaposition of the mundane with the horrible, as well as its well-designed, emotionally sensitive panel progressions. This level of artistry is makes the work one worth appreciating, perhaps even admiring.
This isn’t to say that being able to appreciate the work renders it an easy read. There were moments—many, many moments—when I cringed, or had to take a break from reading, or said to myself, “OMG. Did that really happen on that page? I have to look again. Yep. It totally did. It’s a book about talking animals, and that totally happened. This makes Watership Down look like Peter Rabbit.” (By the way, I have not actually read the Watership Down novel. I have seen the animated film, which is significantly less graphic than this comic, but still contains rabbits killing each other and doing otherwise disturbing things that would have messed me up as a child viewer, but thoroughly entertained me as a giddily morbid high schooler.)
Animal Rites, then, is a graphic novel best appreciated by lovers of well-executed horror, and by readers who can stomach animal tragedy. Everyone else will probably find it too sad or gross to read. Due to the genuinely graphic nature of this graphic novel, I don’t recommend it for younger teens, even precocious ones. Older teens and above who are looking for an intelligent and affecting horror experience, though, will find a rewarding read in this.
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Warmachine Tactics – Cryx: Satyxis Raiders
Infantry may not be the stars of Warmachine, but that doesn’t make them any less important. From screening high priority targets to overwhelming a foe with sheer numbers, infantry plays a critical role, especially in the armies of Cryx. Today, I’m taking a look at the Satyxis Raiders.
IN SHORT: Fast and deadly, Satyxis Raiders will eviscerate enemies hiding behind their shields and fry a warcaster’s brain right through their warjack!
STRENGTHS: Raiders are fast! Smoking fast! With SPD 7 and Advanced Deploy, they can easily be the first line of Cryx infantry to crash into the enemy’s ranks. Reach on their Lacerators gives them a total threat range of 12”, which goes up to 14” with Raider Captain support! Damn!
Raiders are well armed, too. In addition to Reach, their Lacerators come with Chain Weapon, Critical Knockdown, and Feedback. Chain Weapon allows them to ignore Bucklers, Shields, and Shield Wall. Critical Knockdown is a nice bonus if you get lucky, but Feedback is where it’s at.
With Feedback, every time a Raider damages a warjack, its controller suffers 1 point of damage. This is a great tactic for softening up a warcaster for an assassination run or deal the final blow.
Last, but not least, Raiders have Combined Melee for added hitting power and accuracy when they need it. Given that each Raider comes with two attacks, one from the Lacerator and a basic P+S 8 hit from their horns, Raiders can sacrifice non-Lacerator attacks to power-up other Raiders’ Lacerators.
WEAKNESSES: With DEF 14 and ARM 12, Raiders do not take hits well. They have a good chance of hitting first and hitting hard, but that counterattack is going to eat them alive. Add to that their living CMD 8 models, and these girls can break at the worst possible moment.
While fast, Raiders do not have Pathfinder, but their attachment, the Raider Sea Witch, can fix this. In fact, a lot of issues with the Raiders are solved by taking a Raider Sea Witch.
Also, while the Lacerator has great special rules, its hitting power is a mild P+S 9. In order to threaten many warjack targets, Raiders need to use their Combined Melee, get the charge, and/or use Power Swell from their attachment, the Raider Sea Witch.
And speaking of warjacks, Raiders love cutting into warcasters one hit box at a time. Against Hordes armies, the Feedback on their Lacerators is completely useless.
SYNERGIES: Raider. Sea. Witch.
Seriously, this is one awesome unit attachment. For 2 points, the unit gets Pathfinder, Force Barrier (+2 DEF against ranged attack rolls and blast damage immunity), and Power Swell (once per game, get an additional die on melee damage rolls during that activation). For 2 points! Take her. Seriously, just take her. Even the model looks cool.
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The Raider Captain is another option worth considering. Her main synergy is Desperate Pace [Satyxis Raiders]. The Captain targets a Satyxis Raider unit in command range, and that unit gets +2” movement during its activation that turn! Raiders are fast, and the Raider Captain makes them even faster!
Against a Warmachine opponent, Skarre loves taking a group of Satyxis Raiders to double-up the Feedback damage with her spell, Backlash. This can make each damaging hit against a warjack do 2 points instead of 1. With this, even the mightiest warcaster can fall in a hurry!
Lich Lord Asphyxious can use a similar tactic by sending Raiders in to bang up some warjacks. Then, after your opponent has slaughter them, call them back for Feedback seconds!
Asphyxious the Hellbringer also has a neat combo. Raiders with a Sea Witch are DEF 16 against ranged attacks. Add in Ashen Veil, and they’re DEF 18. Now we’re talking!
JUST FOR FUN: Sometimes, just running the Raiders forward can be enough to really mess with an opponent’s plans, engaging their shooters and giving the meat of your army time to close.
So how far into the map can Raiders get right out of the gate?
That’s 6” for Advanced Deploy, 14” from the run, 2” from Reach, and an extra 2” from Desperate Pace. All totaled, that’s 24”! Did I mention Raiders are fast?
SUMMARY: Satyxis Raiders are fast, deadly, and versatile. They’re solid against Hordes and incredible against Warmachine. Raiders are an excellent addition to many Cryx forces. Even better, many of their weaknesses are taken care of with the simple addition of a Raider Sea Witch.
Check out the complete list of Warmachine and Hordes articles here.
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Note: Holo Writing is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and, as such, may earn a small commission from any product purchased through an affiliate link on this blog.
Warhammer 40K: Dark Eldar Army
Presenting my Warhammer 40K Dark Eldar army.
While not being quite as filled with conversions as my other armies, I did enjoy painting this army quite a bit. I’m not a very good painter, but a simple layered drybrush technique served me quite well with this army. I’m particularly happy with how the Incubi capes came out.
As for conversions, I had fun coming up with some substitutes for what was available at the time. Remember this guy?
While a nutty model, it just wasn’t my style. Instead of using the stock model, my kabal had a captured Hive Tyrant and Wraithlord under their command.
The Hive Tyrant used the old-old metal kit. I added some mechanical bits and guns to make it seem like the Dark Eldar had it under control somehow, and also to represent the Talos’ guns. I remember reading a passage in the old codex where Dark Eldar would even capture Tyranid Genestealers, so I figured going a step further made sense. As for why it has screaming faces coming out of it … the old Talos fluff had something in it where victims became a part of it. You can see a guy stuck at the bottom of the turret in the original model. So, yeah, screaming faces on a Hive Tyrant. Not my best idea, but I think it looks cool. 🙂
For the heads, I cut Dark Eldar warrior faces off and molded them to the Hive Tyrant with green stuff. I also added Space Marine missile launcher parts to its legs to give it “thrusters” so it could, with a little imagination, hover around.
The other Talos in my Dark Eldar army is more straightforward. Talos and Eldar Wraithlord stats aren’t too far removed, so I figured a captured and mutilated Wraithlord would work pretty well. I even threw in one of the original Talos arms. The scars are a simple green stuff sculpt.
I also had fun making the sybarites to lead the huge mobs of Warriors. This one is my favorite. The double-blade uses a gun grip with two knife blades glued on to the sides.
Check out the complete list of Warhammer 40K articles here.
Blue Exorcist, Volumes 1-2 by Kazue Kato – Manga Review
Occasionally a manga comes along that makes me squee with glee every time a new volume is released. Though I’ve only read the first two volumes, I can tell that Blue Exorcist is going to be one of those manga.
Volume 1 introduces Rin Okumura, a well-meaning but short-tempered teen who has been raised by Father Fujimoto, a high-ranking exorcist, in place of the father he has never known. When a sharp argument between the two causes Father Fujimoto to drop his spiritual guard, Rin finds out why his father has been so absent: The lapse causes Father Fujimoto to be possessed by the demon lord Satan, who reveals that Rin is, in fact, a son of Satan (skip to the end of the review for more on that), and can possess all the demon powers that come with it when he unsheathes the magic sword that contains them. Generally, it’s not a good thing to be the son of the devil in the presence of exorcists, so Rin finds his life in mortal danger. Rather than run, though, he makes a rather unexpected decision. Feeling himself responsible for Father Fujimoto’s death, and determined to defeat Satan, he decides to become an exorcist. He is thus allowed to enter True Cross Academy, the training ground for exorcists, under the watch of eccentric Academy president Mephisto Pheles, who has plans of his own for Rin’s powers. In Volume 2, Rin meets his classmates and begins preparing for the Exwire Examination, the passing of which is his first step to becoming an exorcist. His successes are varied—He’s not an enthusiastic student, preferring field work to studying, and his snap-quick temper sometimes gets him into trouble with other equally hot-tempered students. However, he does form enough alliances to have help when powerful demons attack the school. Perhaps most importantly, though, he learns of the Blue Night, a night 16 years ago on which powerful exorcists around the world died after exploding into blue flame—the same blue flame that is the mark of Satan, and that identifies Rin as his son.
Blue Exorcist reads like a direct successor of D.Gray-Man and Soul Eater, two other familiar demon-hunting manga. It combines the quirky-cast-of-exorcists model found in the first with the bizarre artistic flair of the second, and then one-ups them both by featuring a surprisingly complex set of character relationships, and stellar art to boot.
The basic story of the series is, unfortunately, very familiar: boy-looking-for-his-place-in-the-world-gains-magic-powers-and-goes-to-school-to-learn-to-use-them. But the abovementioned good points easily make up for this. While the individual character types (for the main characters, at least) are about as familiar as the story type, the ways in which they interact are interestingly plotted. In Volume 1, for example, Rin’s high-powered abilities and his twin brother Yukio’s weakness around bullies would lead readers to expect Rin to be Yukio’s constant protector. (Rin got all of Dad’s demon powers, leaving Yukio with nothing but brains and a cute, squishy face.) However, the story works in such a way that Yukio ends up being Rin’s defender and even his teacher at the Academy…while at the same time knowing that he’ll be responsible for destroying Rin if his demon powers get out of control.
Most of the individually interesting character types are introduced in Volume 2, which sets up most of the supporting cast. These characters are also made of clever combinations of traits, my favorite being Ryuji Suguro, the class muscle who also happens to be a really intelligent student, and another favorite being Izumo Kamiki, an initially manipulative girl who, instead of spending a whole series figuring out that It’s Bad to Manipulate Friends!, learns it early, and then uses the damage caused by her actions as the driving force behind her future choices. For me, the only uninteresting character is Shiemi Moriyama, whose main goal at True Cross Academy seems to be to make friends and be adorably shy while doing it, but even she serves an eventual purpose in Volume 2, which is more than I can say of other manga characters who exist only to be The Cute One. And by the end of the second volume, Shiemi does become legitimately endearing. That said, this is one of the few manga in which I’ve found all of the characters appealing on some level.
Equally as appealing as the characters is the art. Kazue Kato uses a smart balance of simple character-focused frames and immensely detailed setting-focused frames, throwing in the occasional detailed character shot, too, for extra spice. It’s a clever, practical way to produce art that is both dynamic to look at for the readers and turned in on time for the comic’s editor (always a concern for these deadline-driven series), and it works well here. And then there are the covers. Blue Exorcist is a series that I considered buying for the covers alone, even before I read the actual books. Kato has a brilliant sense of color and character design, and when I tried to think of other manga covers to compare these to, I couldn’t. They are truly in a class all their own. The character designs themselves are worth some mention, too, not merely because they’re great, but because they’re also pleasantly varied. The absurd and clownish (and even iconic) design for Mephisto Pheles is one of the most memorable character designs that I’ve seen in recent manga. A series full of character designs like his, though, could have become overwhelming to look at, which is why I consider it a good choice on the part of the artist that most other characters in the series were rendered in fairly normal clothing—normal for a manga, anyway. The variety of face designs is commendable in this series, too. Many manga suffer from having too many characters that are simple variations on one basic character design, rendering them all basically indistinguishable. Everyone in Blue Exorcist is unique and recognizable.
The series’ only real problem, if it can be called one, is this: Some readers may be uncomfortable with the fact that the series’ protagonist is the son of Satan. However, as most anime/manga fans will already know, this isn’t intended to be a religious statement. In anime and manga, priests regularly wield ridiculous guns (Trigun, and virtually every manga involving a priest), nuns blow up things with abandon (Chrono Crusade), bible verses have magical power (Le Chevalier D’Eon and also this series) and the Vatican possesses an airship force and employs vampire-eating-vampires (Trinity Blood). In short, Japan’s take on Christianity, in its comics, at least, is pretty much like America’s take on Greek and Roman Mythology: We entertain ourselves with the parts we like and then add explosions to the rest.
For those who can jump this latter hurdle, Blue Exorcist comes highly recommended. If you like D. Gray-Man, Soul Eater, or shonen manga in general, this is a definite title to try.
The Dragons of Jupiter: Cover Art Complete!
The worst enemy in war is family.
Brothers Kaneda and Ryu Kusanagi once fought side by side to defeat Caesar, a rogue machine intelligence that almost enslaved humanity. They succeeded, but Kaneda was forever changed and began to see all artificial life as dangerous.
Now Kaneda seeks to destroy Matriarch, his creator and the last true thinking machine. He and his Crusaders will stop at nothing to achieve her death even if it means destroying Europa, the moon of Jupiter he once called home.
However, Ryu and his fellow Dragons stand against Kaneda and will do whatever it takes to protect their way of life. The two brothers are set to collide in a battle that will shake the great powers of the solar system and force both men to question what they believe in.
Robert Chew, a.k.a. CrazyAsian1, has completed the cover art. What is there to say? It looks fantastic! The artwork will wrap around the book, providing a fully illustrated front and back.
The cover features a formation of Crusaders, elite heavy infantry that serve as the novel’s antagonists. Don’t they look absolutely badass? Their idea of “light” weaponry is a Gatling gun. 🙂 Robert’s armor and weapon designs are incredible.
A lone Dragon waits on the back cover, outnumbered and outgunned, but fighting to the bitter end. Robert Chew added a cloaking effect to the Dragon, illustrating their impressive stealth abilities.
It won’t be much longer now. The interior layout is proceeding smoothly, and the formatting of the cover text has already started. Once we know the spine’s thickness precisely, we can zero in the design for the cover.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present The Dragons of Jupiter!
Coming soon to Amazon.com in Print and E-Book!
Heck, yeah!
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Warmachine Tactics – Cryx: Bane Knights vs. Bane Thralls
VS.
IN SHORT: Cryx is a faction spoiled for awesome infantry. At the high end of our impressive arsenal sit the Banes. Powerful, feared weapon masters through and through, the Banes can lay waste to enemy armies, and are made even more dangerous when accompanied by Bane Lord Tartarus.
WHY BANES? Banes are weapon masters. With P+S 11 attacks and 4 damage dice on the charge, they hit hard. That by itself is bad enough, but they’re also undead. It doesn’t matter how many casualties they take, they’re going after your opponent until every last Bane has been dropped.
That’s a good thing because they’re not the fastest infantry in the Cryx arsenal. In a faction that often emphasizes speed, the base Bane SPD of 5 can seem underwhelming. However, that SPD 5 is actually misleading because Banes can benefit from the impressive abilities of Bane Lord Tartarus. In fact, Tartarus is a huge reason to take Banes, in and of himself.
All Banes can benefit from Tartarus’s ability to Curse an enemy model or unit. Banes attacking a Cursed model get +2 attack rolls and +2” movement on the charge (including Tartarus himself). Oh, and there’s no roll to hit for Curse. It’s point-and-click simple to use.
Jacob Holo: Tartarus Curses your Gun Mages.
H.P. Holo: Don’t you have to roll to hit or something?
Jacob Holo: Nope.
H.P. Holo: What? This Tartarus guy is a real jerk.
Jacob Holo: He gets that a lot.
That +2” is pretty good by itself, but where it gets absolutely insane is when Tartarus uses Death Toll. When Tartarus kills a living model, he creates a small-based Bane that appears within 3” of him and in unit cohesion of a friendly Bane unit. This can be a unit that has not activated yet. So not only can these new Banes appear right in your enemy’s face, but they can still benefit from Curse AND activate that very same turn! That’s just sick!
On top of that, Bane Lord Tartarus has Thresher and Reach, so he has the capacity crank out quite a few extra models. He’s pricy as a 4 point solo, but you definitely get what you pay for.
There are two types of Banes: Knights and Thralls. Both have strengths and weaknesses. But which is better? Let’s take a look, shall we?
BANE KNIGHT STRENGTHS: Knights are great at bypassing obstacles and penalizing your opponents. Ghostly is a fantastic ability that allows them to speed through terrain, walk through walls, and ignore free strikes. Thralls can’t do that without a warcaster’s support.
Vengeance acts as both an offensive and a defensive ability. Offensively, extra attacks are always nice. Defensively, it discourages piecemeal attacks. Killing one Knight results in all other Knights getting a free 3” move and a free attack. That is not a good exchange for your opponent! When Thralls take casualties, they just take them.
On top of this, Knights have Reach. Reach combined with a Vengeance move can give Knights a 4.5” threat range advantage over Thralls. When factoring in how they ignore terrain, this can be huge!
As a nice little bonus, Knight also have +1 ARM over Thralls, giving them a little extra durability.
BANE THRALL STRENGTHS: Two words, Dark Shroud. I absolutely love this ability! Bane Thralls are walking debuffs. They don’t even have to hit their opponents. Just engaging them in melee drops their ARM by 2, and there is no defense against this ability!
Not only does this make Thralls hit harder than Knights, but it also acts as a force multiplier. Any other model attacking the same target benefits from the Bane’s Dark Shroud. Cryx debuffs make everything better, and Thralls are debuffs.
Bane Thralls also come with Stealth, which helps mitigate their losses on the approach. They can also gain Tough through a powerful unit attachment, granting them even more durability. An opponent may be able to bypass one of these defenses, but probably not both, and not for the whole unit. Even better, the attachment officer has Dead Rise, which will allow knocked down survivors of Tough rolls to stand up for free in the maintenance phase. Overall, Thralls have more staying power than Knights for this reason, even with the Knights’ ARM advantage.
Finally, Thralls are cheaper. Even with a max unit and the attachment, they only cost 1 point more than Knights, and that set up comes with two extra Banes.
VERDICT: It is almost never a bad idea to put Banes in a Cryx army. Both Knights and Thralls can pull a lot of weight in an army list, and both are very valid choices. For me, it comes down to personal taste.
And my preferred choice is … Bane Thralls!
Bane Thralls are my absolute favorite Cryx infantry. They are the go-to models when I’m up against a tough opponent or I want to try something new, but still have a solid fallback. They consistently perform well in game after game after game.
It’s a close call, because both Thralls and Knights are fantastic units. But the Thralls edge out the Knights because of Dark Shroud. I’m a big fan of force multipliers, and Thralls perform that function nicely.
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Foundling by D. M. Cornish – Book Review
Rossamund Bookchild is a foundling boy with a girl’s name. This name was given to him by the paper pinned to his blanket when he was left on the front stoop of Madam Opera’s Estimable Marine Society for Foundling Boys and Girls, and it has tormented him ever since. As the object of frequent jibes and bullying fists, he eagerly looks forward to the day when he can leave the foundlingery and enter the navy, and thus a life full of adventure on the high seas. His dreams are dashed, though, when he is chosen to be a simple lamplighter. The hopelessly boring life that he anticipates, though, ends up being anything but (at least for the moment), as he is abducted, rescued, and then forced into service by one of the most famous monster hunters on the Half-Continent.
Foundling is the first in the interchangeably titled Monster Blood Tattoo/The Foundling’s Tale trilogy by Australian author D. M. Cornish. (This trilogy was titled Monster Blood Tattoo for its first American release but didn’t do very well, which prompted the publishers to change the name to the more benign and significantly less interesting The Foundling’s Tale.) Because of the depth the author has built into its world, the trilogy has been compared to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, a classic renowned (and notorious) for the level of detail put into the cultures that populate the setting. This is a deceptive comparison at first, as there is nothing remotely epic about the storyline, nor any high-stakes goal that has to be reached (nothing on the level of Destroy-This-Ring-or-The-World-Will-End!, anyway). It’s just a kid running into trouble as he travels to a distant city. The deeper into the story one reads, however, the more sense these comparisons begin to make.
Cornish is a detailed creator; his dark, pre-industrial, monster-ridden world of the Half-Continent is among the better-realized in modern YA fantasy. The majority of his detail, though, is devoted to the culture of his monster-hunters and the alchemy-like magic surrounding them. These monster-hunters are not born magicians but people who, for example, employ a violent form of chemistry to dispatch monster threats or even have extra organs sewn inside their bodies to attain near-magical powers. Half the fun of reading this novel is simply relishing in its morbid world-building.
The novel’s main strength, however, ends up causing some of weak points, too. Early on, I felt so overwhelmed by the intricacy of novel’s world that I had to stop reading for a while, just to get it all organized in my head, and even after I picked it back up, there were multiple times when I thought, “GRRRRGH! When is something going to HAPPEN?” So much energy is spent introducing the reader to the mechanics of the world that its plot and pacing suffer significantly, at least at the beginning. Once I hit the middle of the book, I read voraciously to the end and was disappointed to discover that the last hundred pages of my book were actually not story, but appendices about the world of the novel (another similarity shared with Tolkien, who was a huge fan of super-detailed appendices).
All this said, this is not a novel for casual fantasy readers. This is a novel for readers who have read the popular fantasy novels and are ready to graduate to the deeper cuts. This is a novel for the readers who are okay with a little bit of slowness because the setting in which the slowness happens is just that awesome.
Warhammer 40K: Chaos Daemons Tzeentch Pink Horror Conversions
Presenting my Warhammer 40K Chaos Daemons Tzeentch Pink Horror Conversions.
Modeling the Tzeentch pink horrors was the best part of making this army. Every model is unique.
With the plenty of Chaos spawn and space marine parts at my disposal, along with plenty of green stuff, I let my imagination run wild. Wherever possible, I tried to emphasize how this weird, chaotic flesh was bursting out of the space marines. The best part is, no matter how crazy the conversion, it felt right at home in a Chaos Daemons army. I had a lot a fun making these guys.
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Warhammer 40K: Chaos Daemons Tzeentch Herald Conversions
Presenting my Warhammer 40K Chaos Daemons Tzeentch Herald Conversions.
With the chaotic nature of a Chaos Daemons army, it’s hard to go wrong with something absolutely crazy. My Tzeentch heralds are no exception to this. Two of the heralds are basically a lot of spare bits stuck into a central glob of green stuff. Really, nothing too special there in terms of modeling. However, Smiley is a different story.
In order to make Smiley, I started with a rough frame built from pieces of sprue. I then began layering green stuff on top of that until I had the outline of a very chaotic face. Since this is a Tzeentch herald, I decided to add plenty of guns to the model to represent the model’s arcane firepower. It’s teeth are bolters, and its eyes are lascannon barrels. The weapons on the sides came from a dreadnought.
If nothing else, he/she/it certainly gets a lot of comments from my fellow gamers.
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Warhammer 40K: Chaos Daemons Army
Presenting my Warhammer 40K “count as” Chaos Daemons Tzeentch army, with 95% conversions.
My Chaos Daemons army is easily the craziest modeling project I’ve ever embarked upon. All but one model in the entire army have some sort of conversion work, and many involved extensive conversions. The theme behind the army is a space marine force gone horribly wrong. It’s what happens to space marines when they pass their expiration dates. I wanted the chaotic elements to look like they were exploding out of space marine armor, which involved a lot of Chaos spawn kits, as well as a friend’s Dark Angels army.
Yes, that’s right. I purchased a friend’s Dark Angels army for the sole purpose of mutilating them beyond recognition. After dunking them in Pine-Sol, I began plucking off limbs and cutting them up with a hobby saw. Mix in copious amounts of green stuff, and you can clearly see the results.
I purchased 3 daemon princes for this army. The wings went to my Tyranids so that I could have flying hive tyrants. That left me with a lot of spare daemon arms with really cool weapons. But what to do with them? I decided to use them as Khorne bloodletters. The imagery of these giant arms growing out of space marine halves is pretty ridiculous, so it suits me just fine.
The Nurgle plaguebearers were the simpliest conversions. I used mostly-whole space marines with some green slimy tendrils coming out and green fluid leaking out of the armor. And there they were. A pack of plaguebearers. Nothing to it.
With all the Chaos spawn kits I went through, I had a lot of spawn torsos I wasn’t using. I put the torsos on top of inverted Space Marine jump packs and build them into my Tzeentch flamers. Ridiculous, I know, but that’s just how I roll with this army.
My Tzeentch screamers were made with the stock Tzeentch pink horror kits, minus the arms and legs. The only tricky parts here were drilling the holes for the flying bases and filing down a few knobs on the models where the legs are supposed to attach.
But, my favorite parts of the army are the Tzeentch Heralds and the Tzeentch Pink Horrors. I had a lot of fun coming up with some really crazy conversions.
Check out the complete list of Warhammer 40K articles here.