Undead for Halloween

Six years ago, I wrote this Halloween themed post, describing all of the Undead troop types in the Warhammer setting (at the time) and thinking about how I could adapt them to Dark Heritage. Most of them are iconic creatures from folklore and horror stories, but a few were original and unique, especially among the Tomb Kings army.

Dark Heritage is now Dark Fantasy X, and the Warhammer setting was blown up and replaced with a much less compelling High Fantasy setting about gods and heroes that has only vague echoes of its Dark Fantasy roots. (I'm not a fan, if you can't tell. I find it incoherent and bizarre, and I actually really kind of liked the original Warhammer setting, so I'm maybe a bit resentful that it was taken away.) Of course, it's not quite as simple as this; even if its out of print, the old Warhammer stuff is still around and not hard to get. The old Warhammer world is the setting of the Total War Warhammer games, and I wonder sometimes if Games Workshop is kicking themselves that they blew up the setting and took it away only to have it be the central element of a popular computer game franchise. But despite my dislike of the Age of Sigmar setting, I do admit that it has some good ideas. (Good ideas that would have been equally good if integrated into the original Warhammer setting. But I promise... I won't mention that again.) I've, over the years, collected a lot of Warhammer army books, even though I don't actually play the game. A lot of them I got either free or cheap; my brother used to play, for instance, and I'd buy them for the fluff in outgoing editions when new editions were on their way out, or at used bookstores, ebay, etc. I have all of the old Undead army books going back to 4th edition, and I have access to the Age of Sigmar army books on Scribd. I decided that for the approaching Halloween season, I'm going to read all of these books and then make a big post over on the new Dark Fantasy X blog about what (if anything) I want to do with that, and what my impressions generally are. I can tell you already that turning Nagash into the God of Death and making him this gigantic mover and shaker in a godlike rather than sorcerer-king like way was a major downgrade in terms of accessibility and interest to the setting. I just don't think Dark Fantasy can have a High Fantasy "Gods Among Us" vibe, and that's the major disconnect that will make the newer books seem inferior to the older, even when they have really great ideas in them. Which many of them, to be fair, seem to do.)

Anyway, I'll update this post as I finish the books, and then make my analysis post over on the other blog. In the meantime, I'll add quick notes after each title as I finish it.

Undead (4e) - A phenomenal book of setting lore. The rules are relatively short, and the lore is well written, fascinating and plentiful. To be fair, much of it was repeated in the old White Dwarf 166 (or whatever exactly issue number that it was) that I read years and years ago, so it's not like it was really new. But it's really good.

Vampire Counts (5e) - The creation of the Vampire Counts (and later Tomb Kings) out of the old Undead army list was a brilliant move, but unfortunately here, the lore is rather light, and most of it is repeated, often literally word for word, from the earlier book. This means that the new vampire bloodlines get almost no lore, just rules, which is disappointing. You do have to go through the army list, though—a decent number of new troop types were added in this book that weren't in the other book, and some lore about each is present in the entries.

Vampire Counts (6e) - This book adds a fair bit more; more of the text is rewritten rather than just replicated (although plenty of that's here too); it adds a lot more lore about the four bloodlines from the 5e book, and introduces a 5th bloodline, the Strigoi Ghoul Kings. It adds another character or two as well. All in all, a good read. It seems to have more rules and modeling advice than the prior book, in spite of its increased lore as well, without being a longer book. I think the lore was written more economically, if less aesthetically. The models, by the way, are often still the same ones that the old 4e Undead era had. By the time 6e rolled around, they were looking very primitive and unsightly. That's one thing I've got to give Warhammer. Whatever else you may or may not think of it today, you've got to admit that the models are really good looking now, especially compared to what they looked like even earlier in the 2000s.

Tomb Kings (6e) - The first pass at the skeletal army of ancient "Egypt," cursed into eternal Undeath by the treachery of Nagash. (As an aside, Nagash is not a name Games Workshop came up with; it's a slightly different spelling of the Hebrew word Nachash, which means serpent and often refers to Satan.) This book adds a fair bit to the lore of the Undead and the Nehekhara region specifically. The army itself, at least at this stage, is a bit anemic, though. The later edition will add more interesting character and monster types to make it more alluring to players.

Vampire Counts (7e) - More of the text is rewritten or added to for this version, although there's still some smaller amount that is still copy/pasted. I should also point out that the art has been evolving as much as the models have; back in the 90s when 4e was coming out, the models were cartoonish and the art was often weird and bizarre, depending on the artist. 5e had a much more "tonal" consistency and looked really good, but most of the art was re-done for 6e. 7e went back to a lot of John Blanche weirdness, which has a certain appeal to grognards, but which I thought was intrinsically much less interesting than that of guys like Adrian Smith. That said, this is easily the best version since the 4e book in terms of text, even if 5e and 6e were probably a bit better in terms of art and visual design.

Vampire Counts (8e) - The first book to be all in color, instead of mostly black and white. It's interesting to see much of the same art as 7e, now in color. Several new troop types and a mostly completely renovated line of miniatures makes this certainly the most attractive of the Old World undead army books. Y'know, except for the bizarrely ugly cover art. Most of the text is very similar to the 7e version, although a few new things were written in here and there. To get the "full" experience, you don't actually need to read all of these books. The 4e Undead plus the 8e Vampire Counts and Tomb Kings will do you for the Old World.

Tomb Kings (8e) - While the original Tomb Kings book for 6e was a bit anemic, lacking very many interesting models, for 8e they obviously made an attempt to give them more. That said, I suspect that the army was never super popular until it became the focus of a DLC for the Total War: Warhammer game series. A real shame, isn't it? Sega, of all people, did more for the Old World setting than Games Workshop remained willing to do, who abandoned it in favor of attempting a new setting that has no gravitas, no resonance, and no coherence. Anyhoo... these 8e books were prettier than the previous editions, no doubt, being among other things, in full color for the first time. That said, other than a few new troop types, this book adds little that the 6e book didn't have already if you'd already read or bought that one. The design and layout is also greatly improved, making it easier to read, however.

Liber Necris - This book is nothing but fluff; from the Black Library, not Games Workshop the main company per se. There was a whole series of these; I have this one, the four Chaos books, and the Skaven book. All are excellent; they're written and presented as if they were actual tomes of lore to be found in the Old World rather than books in our world written about the Old World. After reading all of the army books of all editions of the old Warhammer setting, I thought this a fitting summary of them all before I turned to the End Times Nagash book and start the process of turning the setting from a larger than life dark fantasy with very strong horror undertones to a kind of fake mythological comic book setting. This book is highly recommended as an entertaining setting book read. I'll admit that sometimes the philosophy of souls in the Old World is a bit over-wrought, being that it was supposedly written by Mannfred von Carstein himself, it seems appropriate that he'd obsess over that a bit. And it does include some repeated text from the old 4e army book that still is a running thread through all of these books. I wonder if it predates the 4e book entirely? I don't know; I don't have anything earlier than that.

The End Times: Nagash - While I already disagree with the very premise of this book as something that should be done, the implementation and execution of it is even worse. There's a ridiculous amount of name-dropping of famous Warhammer characters, and much of what happens is bizarrely off-screen (apparently, Kislev, Estalia and Tilea are all destroyed off screen, for instance. Perhaps it happens on screen in the Skaven or Chaos books?) Most egregiously, the tone which was always the Old World's true claim to fame, is completely ignored. Characters don't act anything at all like they used to, and they are converted into comic book superheroes with absurd over-the-top nonsense. To use just two related examples: Mannfredd von Carstein is always portrayed as the most subtle and devious of the von Carstein vampires, yet here he's a chump, easily manipulated over and over again to bring Nagash back. Nagash, who was an interesting villain with a fascinating story told way back in the 4e book (see above) if not even earlier, is now ridiculously overpowered; he goes to Nehekhara, defeats the entire Tomb Kings faction by himself, eats the "Egyptian" god of the dead, even though up to this point nobody has ever suggested that mortals could interact directly with gods at all, and then flies off in his gigantic black pyramid like it's the Stargate alien space ship or something. On top of this kind of nonsense, most of the narratives read like they are poorly written expansions on battle reports of Warhammer games that the staff played against each other.

I suppose that the book did the job it was meant to, however. It destroyed the Tomb Kings faction, folding what still makes sense to use of their units into the now recombined Undead army list, led by the superhero Thanos version of Nagash, got rid of a bunch of famous characters that had been around in the setting for decades but with which the writers had no idea what to do, so throwing them away seemed like a good idea, and mangled the setting so badly that it was adequately set up for destruction, certainly. Even though the event that cascaded into the End Times in the first place was poorly explained, inadequately followed through, and poorly implemented. I really can't recommend this book for any reason at all. Even if you have no vested interest in the setting whatsoever, and don't care if it's destroyed, this is such a poorly done telling of a poorly thought out sequence of events that I can't imagine you'd enjoy it. 

Keep in mind that both the Old World as a setting and the Age of Sigmar that replaced it were both developed as the backstory for a game of miniatures warfare. The movement of armies and stuff was always at the heart of the setting, and although there were some really good Black Library novels that were a bit more traditional fantasy type plots and characters in their execution (I'm especially fond of the Matthias Thulmann witch hunter omnibus, for instance) that was kind of a spin-off or even afterthought to the setting. The same is true of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game, which is a better analog in most respects for what I'm doing than the Fantasy Battles game. So I shouldn't be surprised when the setting does things that aren't optimized for me, because it was developed for a totally different kind of game than what I play. Ironically, that same focus was exactly what led to the better part of three decades of the setting being static; the developers wanted to keep their factions intact so they could still be used as army lists to drive the sales of miniatures. If as a business decision they decided that the old setting was no longer effective for that role, then it makes sense to replace it. But the slapdash, poorly organized way that they did it that took no account of the attributes of the setting itself was phenomenally unsatisfying.

At this point, we move on to the last five books in my series to review, the army books (or Battle Tomes or whatever they call them now) for the Age of Sigmar setting. These are incredibly attractive books; full color, better art than we've seen in the past, better miniatures photography of better sculpts than we've seen in the past, etc. But they also serve a high fantasy setting that I can't seem to really get my arms around, in which Nagash looms in a way that's different than he did in the old setting. Whereas before, it was his historical legacy more than anything else that made him important, now everything has to be his literal creation, forged for a specific purpose for whatever convoluted master 4-D chess plan he's got going on. This is fundamentally a much less compelling concept than the idea of the vampires or the Tomb Kings doing their own things for their own reasons. That said, the books have a ton of fantastic ideas, even if they are wed to a setting that I can't connect to and are part of a vaguely hinted at plot that I don't like. I haven't actually read all of them in advance of this review, but I have read two of the five, so I expect to find plenty to like in these books. Then, over on the Dark Fantasy X blog, as noted above, I'll digest everything that I've read and see how it might apply to the development of Undead in Dark Fantasy X. The rules I have now are basically just carryover from "regular" m20, so they are carryover from D&D. There's a few exceptions, but based in part on my review of how undead are handled by Games Workshop, I may more radically redo the undead in Dark Fantasy X as well.

Legions of Nagash (AoS) - The army list here is nothing at all new. It's basically the 8e Vampire Counts list plus the handful of new troops (elites and heroes, really) and minus the ghouls and Strigoi (which make up the Flesh-eater Courts book) introduced in the End Times rulebook. Seeing them again, without anything new, except divorced from the setting in which they belonged, is kind of jarring. The authors tried to anchor them into the new setting, but this is mostly just offhand references—name dropping—of places that are never explained and about which we never learn anything. I'm hardly suggesting that we know Nehekhara or Sylvania in detail in the Old World, but we do have maps, we have characters, we have plenty of stuff—especially if you aggregate the sources over all of the rulebooks—that grounds the monsters and characters in the setting. Here, they lack that. Plus, Nagash looms over everything; it's like nobody and nothing else is allowed to be interesting. Which, conversely, makes Nagash much less interesting than he used to be. I thought Nagash was a fascinating figure when I read the 4e material way back in the 90s (in the pages of White Dwarf magazine). Here, in spite of the best efforts—or sadly, maybe because of them—of the writers, he comes across as a kind of generic fantasy supervillain. The book is also a good deal more rulesey than most prior army books. There's not even much intent to detail a setting or how they fit into it, and there's a lot more discussion on scenarios, army construction variations, etc. There's also more artwork, or at least bigger artwork that takes up more space, as well as more full-page spreads of photography of painted miniatures. This, of course, makes everything look really cool, and the book is prettier even than the 8e book (even though many of the miniatures are the exact same) but sadly, the content doesn't measure up.

Flesh-eater Courts (AoS) - The army book of the ghouls and Strigoi, basically, who are now combined into a single army of pseudo-Undead. Other debased forms of vampires from previous editions are included, like varghulfs and vargheists, although the latter are now renamed and come in two power levels, normal and advanced. These seem to draw a blurry line between being debased vampires vs enhanced ghouls, and its not quite clear which they are. The crypt horrors are similarly "hulked out" ghouls. The defining feature of these guys is that they are all insane, although they have exactly the same insanity where they are reliving the fantasy that they are the regal court of the first Carrion King, the first Strigoi vampire (well... in the new setting, they never call them that, although a vague handwavy reference to Ushoran is given) and they don't see themselves as horrible carrion eaters but rather as noble knights and soldiers. The terrorgheist and zombie dragon are also associated with this group. There's little here that's new, other than the division of them into this particular army, the madness, the disconnect from their original Strigoi and ghoul links to the Old World, and some fine distinctions being made between power levels of the same kinds of troops. Much like the first pass at the Tomb Kings army back in 6e, this army list feels a bit impoverished, like it needs just a bit more to be a "full" list. I do like the concept of the flesh-eaters as a faction that's associated with the undead without really being strictly speaking, mostly made up of actual undead creatures, and I do like drawing a more explicit line between ghouls and vampires, so as to keep vampires from being too pretty and romanticized, however. 

Nighthaunt (AoS) - The army book for the ghost army. This is one of the first really new armies that AoS came up with that, while borrowing a few items from past Undead armies, is still really a very unique army (according to the "What's Next?" splash page at the back was the next truly new army book for the line, the Little Mermaid elves. Not as cool, even if they did try to put sharks all over them.) There's a lot of good ideas for different kinds of ghosts, phantoms, specters and haunts here. Of course... the essence of a ghost story is not a pitched battle of fantasy armies. The miniatures themselves are awesome. The idea of Nagash being personally behind the tragedy of every single miniature in the army, using them in a vast Soul War where he's fighting the forces of the other gods in the millions to claim the souls that they have is exactly the problem I have with the setting of the Age of Sigmar. Lots of names are dropped in this book, but none of them really do much to develop the setting, because they obviously come up with these names just to be a super high concept off-hand reference. I also find the oppressive, nihilistic attitude trying at times. I'm certainly a fan of dark fantasy and horror, but horror and nihilism are too different things. I find that all too many people can't tell the difference anymore, and just throw nihilism out there expecting it to be horrifying. It's not, really, it's actually kind of banal and petty. One thing that I noticed in rereading this book, which would be obvious if I played Warhammer, of course, is that this army has no monsters really; the closest thing to a monster is the winged nightmare that a couple of the generals ride. Given that that's just a winged spectral horse, that's not really in the same league as the terrorgheist or zombie dragons from the last book in terms of being big, intimidating monsters.

Ossiarch Bonereapers (AoS) - Another unique army, or at least unusual. The Ossiarchs are really almost as much constructs as they are undead, although of course, the Tomb Kings already established the idea that there isn't much difference between them. That said, they only "coincidentally" look like the bodies of dead creatures. Either way, these guys have an alien appearance that is reminiscent of the Undead, but also different. Kind of like their 40k siblings the Necrons, in a way. (Is that still an army in 40K? I'm a bit out of touch with what's going on on that side of the hobby these days.) The biggest issue I have with what is otherwise kind of a cool, or at least new and novel, idea is that, of course, these are really tied very heavily to the war of gods between Sigmar, Nagash and Archaeon. It's a shame that the backstory for these guys has to be so tightly tied to the superhero absurdly over-the-top direction that the game has taken since the end of the "world that was."

Soulblight Gravelords (AoS) - Right away, the name is an issue. What?! What the heck is a soulblight gravelord? Oh, it's just a vampire and this army book is basically the migration of the old Vampire Counts into the new, high level, throw names around randomly setting. That said, it even recreates much of the old vampire bloodlines from the past, although often with new names. The von Carsteins and Lahmians and Blood Knights are all brought back (basically). The Necrarchs get the shaft and don't appear, and Strigoi are already the focus of the Flesh-eater Courts. Two new bloodlines make their appearance, including the Vyrkos werewolf-like vampires (I used that name too, sadly, for a werewolf place in Timischburg. That's what I get for using a name that's just a translation from an Eastern European language for werewolf, I guess). The Avengorii are the newest line, and they are weird bat-like abominations, like the strange model for Lauka Vai. I had said earlier that the vargheists were renamed and adapted to the Flesh-eater courts army, but I was wrong, sorta. The actual models were, but they're still used in this army with a different paint job, different name and different stats. That's possibly even more lame than when Games Workshop releases stats for creatures or troop types but never gets around to releasing miniatures for them, like the Tomb Kings Hierotitan. So lame.