So as you may well know, we have our preview copy of the new Skaven army book in the store. Well I’ve given it a pretty solid read through and have been able to play three games using their new rules, so I thought I would share some of my thoughts and feelings on them with you all! This will more then likely be a multi-part post, with each entry dealing with one of the army slot selections. So today we will talk about the Lord choices.
As is the current trend in Games-Workshop army books/codexs, Skavens now have a wide selection of named special characters. Fully five of them are lord selections and range from the very affordable low two hundred points to pushing five hundred. An interesting design choice they made was to have two out of the three named casters be only level 3 wizards. So while you get unique rules associated with them, you lose some of the casting potential you would have had if you picked up a Gray Seer instead. Inversely, their casters are also much better suited to getting stuck in melee then most other races.
So in no particular order we’ll start with Lord Skrolk, who can pull from the plague side of spell casting. (More on the spells later) This guy is pretty nuts; a constant cloud of noxious fumes emmenate from him, causing Terror and making any non-plague rat type Skaven hit worse in hand to hand, friend or foe. He also wields a corrupt flail that will tear through lower toughness models without breaking a sweat. Last but not least he has a nice little bound item that can infect nearby enemy units with poxes and plagues.
Deathmaster Snikch makes a glorious return, becoming even more of a monster in hand to hand. He can still hide out in units and pop out on the unsuspecting opponent. He throws out a rather absurd number of attacks and will demolish any character unlucky enough to end up next to him. On the same token, Queek Headtaker is quite burly in hand to hand, but if he runs across any Dwarves his fighting potential gets cranked up to 11.
Throt the Unclean is a severly mutated packmaster, and like Queek is strong in hand to hand, but his speciality lies in taking out larger then man sized targets. Last but not least for the named characters, Thanquol & Boneripper are back after more foiled attempts on Gotrek and Felix and have two full pages set aside for their fluff and list of special rules. Thanquol is the only level four wizard from the named and sucks down warpstone like a crazy man, of which he normally starts with a ton of.
On to the regular Lord choices! First up, the Vermin Lord. While decently expensive, he still is somewhat of a steal when compared to a greater demon point wise, the only downside being he is bought as is, with no upgrade options available to him. That’s easy to forgive though since he moves fast, casts as a level four wizard and is still a beast in hand to hand. He also causes terror, which when combined with is fast movement, can wreck all sorts of havok in your enemies plans if you can get him down a flank.
On the opposite end of the spectrum you have the Warlord. He’s priced less then some other armies fighting heroes, but can be tooled up to be quite solid in hand to hand when given a nice weapon and a swanky mount to ride around on. I really want to convert the war-litter for him, having slaves carry you around on a palanquin while your cadre of trusted storm vermin fight underneath you would look pretty rad.
Last, but definitely not least, the Gray Seer. While the warlord can be burly and the Vermin Lord has a nice mix of casting and hand to hand potential, it’s going to be very hard for me not to take a Gray Seer in any good sized army. They come straight out of the box as level 4 casters, no need to worry about upgrading them, they can take some decent magic items, but nothing that a level 2 caster couldn’t pick up, but they alone can ride in on one of the most characterful ‘mounts’ around, the Screaming Bell! Not only is it quite amusing to chuck the dice each turn and see what random and hopefully beneficial effect you get from smacking the bell, I personally think GW has created their pièce de résistance miniature. Above all else, this points to plastic as being the future for hyper-detailed models with amazing amounts of character.
So there you have the lord options; a bit lengthier then I had first planned, but with such a breadth of choices in this army slot, it probably needed the space. Tune in later for a hopefully quicker rundown of the heroes!