The Forge World seminars are always a wonderful source of information and pleasure. Because Forge World are a smaller team, much of their work is planned months in advance and they’re not bound to the same ‘tight lipped’ secrecy that has become synonymous with Games Workshop. I think some of this is because Forge World caters for the slightly more mature hobbyist who accept that release schedules do slip and don’t publicly chastise them for this.
My memory isn’t fantastic, so I’m sure that this isn’t a complete list of everything mentioned!
Forge World plan to ensure that all characters in each book are made before the release of the next book. This means that Book One will have four Primarchs created (including Horus). The other named characters are likely to be released in pairs for the same price as a Primarch (£50). All are going to have a scenic base and are intended to be a nice display piece first and foremost rather than a gaming piece. They are envisaging that they’ll bring out a book roughly every year. The next release will be Abaddon and Loken and after that most likely Fulgrim.
The project/campaign has a starting point of the beginning of the Heresy and they won’t go earlier than this for this project. That means there will be no Ullinor, Murder, Davin etc. They’ve not confirmed if they’ll take it after Horus is killed or not.
They’ve also not decided on a set number of books, only that they wish to cover every major campaign in the Heresy. This includes the split of Mars and the creation of the Dark Mechanium.
The rules for all of the Primarchs have already been generated to ensure that they’re all relative to each other. This includes the ‘demon’ variants of the Traitor Primarchs which will be created in addition to their pre-Chaos variant.
Alan Bligh explained that a Primarch has three general areas that you can think of as a triangle. You have Combat Prowess, Strategic Skill (army buff) and Special Effects (which includes Psychic abilities). Angron is pretty much all Combat, Horus has a good amount of Combat and a lot of Strategy for example. The Primarchs aren’t designed to be balanced on the board, but to reflect the background for that particular Primarch.
In a game, if one side has a Primarch and the other doesn’t, the side without may take a free Fellblade – this puts into perspective just how powerful the Primarchs actually are…
Primarchs are intended to lead their respective Legion and not a combat squad. The rules allow you to do this but you’re never going to get anything approaching an entertaining game.
Forge World intend to fill in a lot of the gaps in the Heresy such as creating troop types for the Mechanium, Imperial Army and such like. However they aren’t going to start writing stories as the Black Library already do that and do so very well. There may be some as yet unknown battles put in too.
The next book will be called “Book Two – Massacre” and cover the drop site massacre of Istvaan V. Due to the size of this battle it is highly likely that the battle will be covered across two books. This book will include Iron Hands, Night Lords, Salamanders and Word Bearers (who Tony Cotrell says are all to blame as they’re so fixated with words 😉
When they eventually reach the scouring of Prospero they will include Adeptus Custodes and Sisters of Silence.
Forge World want to cover everything of the Heresy including the Siege of Terra. They have said that because of this they will most likely be making a model of the Emperor but haven’t confirmed quite how he would work in a game (being the most powerful psyker in the game world). Tony Cotrell also said that nowhere is it written how tall he actually is – it is possible he is a 4ft squat but with a huge glowing aura.
The books have been designed so that they build on the 40k 6th edition rules as a rule system and allow you to field a 30k Space Marine Legion. Although you can technically use a 40k army against a 30k Legion, don’t expect it to be a fair fight or balanced. That said 30k Legions are a lot less flexible than their 40k counterpart so some armies (such as Eldar) can actually use this to their advantage and result in quite a good battle.
Leman Russ may well be smoking a pipe.
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