Warhammer Fantasy for the 40K Player

Like... well, rather a lot of you, I am first and foremost a Warhammer 40,000 player. Although I do play other systems, I can only count my understanding of them to be cursory at best. This is despite the fact that the systems are, by and large, identical. 40K, Fantasy, Necromunda, and Mordheim all use essentially the same systems for everything but movement and magic/psychics. While 40K has moved away from modifiers to hit in the past couple editions, the connections between them are still strong enough that profiles can be translated directly across with only some minor hiccups.

However, this similarity is extremely deceptive, as the games are played very, very differently. For those 40K fans who have been looking to get into Fantasy, or perhaps are struggling to wrap your brains around it, here are some major rules and army differences that may help you more clearly understand how Fantasy breaks down.

Mordheim Part II - Dwarvies and also Beastmen Raiders!

Alrighty, so after Taak grilled my last Dawi warband, I changed it up a bit to include some of the better Dwarf things, namely Gromril hammers and a suit of Gromril armour.

I still don't like the idea of only starting with 3 guys and having lots of weapons and armour in the vault, and then simply voluntarily routing the first few games. Perhaps its just me, but I like to have a balance in my warband. Taaks idea of 3 guys and banking with armour and weapons would seem to me, the unbalanced approach to starting a warband. In order to progress, they will start out fairly imbalanced, having only 3 guys and not full heroes, like I suggested. You will have to tank a few early games but then the warband will be tough with armour and nice weapons. So anywho, here is my updated Dawi warband:

Dwarf Treasure Hunters in Mordheim

So the Dwarvies! Short, tough and drunken bastards looking for Wyrdstone. A nice warband to start with due to high Ld against Routs and some tough, skilled Heroes. The Thunderers can fight well too. One problem with Dwarvies is they can only start with 4 heroes and not 5 but they have some special rules which allows them to get +1 wyrdstone at the end of games so this isn’t a huge burden.

Cons: Expensive, MV 3, Low initiative and the Slayers cannot pack long missile weapons and cannot have armour.

Pros: Toughness 4 and Hard to kill, coupled with armour means they will last on the table for ages, Heavy Armour and shield will not slow them down, +1 shard of wyrdstone, long ranged missile weapons (especially with the Engineer!), Nice special skills, Good LD.

Dwarvies have the ‘hard to kill’ special rule which means that they will only be put out of action on a 6 instead of a 5 or a 6 and coupled with the toughness 4 across the warband, will mean that the stunties are hard to take out and hard to rout as well. These little bastards ignore getting knocked out by maces, clubs, et al and so this means that most of the weapons that other warbands take early in a campaign will be less effective against the Dwarvies.