Forgive me, gentle reader, should my fingers stumble in the scribing of this missive, because I’m knackered right?
A 5am 6am start (stupid daylight savings time!) saw me heading off to Nottingham to Warhammer World and the Forge World Open Day!
I arrived and was greeted by a huge queue which, once I defeated, lead to yet another queue. Yay! This time however it was the queue to buy ALL OF THE THINGS! I saved that for later and dove straight into the design studio, with the aim of tweeting the hell out of anything new and shiny I might find. And there was some great stuff on show.
Probably the most talked about new model on the day was the Cerastus Knight Lancer:
They also had some rather nice heraldry shields on display:
The new knight model is easily two inches taller than a standard knight and built to stride rapidly across the battlefield. I think we should expect its slightly bulkier brother to make an appearance in the not too distant future as well. The model is a plethora of pose-able pieces, and apparently any purchaser can look forward to positioning each piston individually. It’s definitely more flexible in its assembly than the plastic kit given that the three I saw on the day all looked very different (as you can see from the unpainted vs. painted shots above). There have been some rules doing the rounds now as well given that the third Horus Heresy book was available on the day, which also contains a lovely Mechanicum army list (more on them later).
Speaking of Horus…
There were several painted examples of him on the day, this was my personal favourite. He was on sale as well, would’ve been extremely rude to turn him down, so I didn’t – here’s a little ‘unboxed’ shot. I’ll be doing a more detailed kit review once I start work on painting him up.
There was plenty of evidence of the new Salamanders content and a strong sense running around the design hall that the next primarch release would be at the Horus Heresy weekender in May, and that it would be none other than Monsieur He’stan himself! They did have a work in progress sculpt (looked pretty finished to me!) of the new Fire Drake terminators:
There is some beautiful detail on that shield.
The other main work in progress things that caught my eye were the new Gorgon Terminators, which are very definitely ‘in progress’ given their general lack of all of their necessary appendages:
And last but not least the new Mechanicum models. Man I’ve developed a serious model-crush on these guys. Picked up a bunch of stuff on the day (would’ve been more but the Krios tank had sold out by the time I got to the front of the sales queue), but the general style of these guys really appeals to me. The kind of “Weird War I/II” with a smattering of Victoriana/steam punk is right up my street. The Krios weaponry options have been added to as well, with the Venator sporting an Ordnance 4 (eek!) bombard gun of doom (that is its technical name) and the Lightning Cannon, whilst only having a Strength 7 AP4 main stat-line, also having just about every special rule in the entire world (Shred, Rending, Instant Death, 3″ blast…)
The Mechanicum also receive my (soon to be coveted by absolutely no-one) “most awesome model of the day” award for the rather tasty Thanatar Class Siege Automata:
It’s big. It’s bad-ass. It’s got a cannon on its shoulder that will blow the head off the most well-set pair of shoulders. I want so many of these it hurts (my bank balance, presumably). Here he is with a bunch of his new friends, the combi-weapon toting Thallax and Castellax
Finally (and I can only apologise for the pics of this, the lighting was terrible in this cabinet), the Tyranid hive mind can look forward to something called the “Dimacheron” appearing at some point in the future, looks like it will be almost biotitan sized (those legs are big!) and undoubtedly scary, it has lots of talons, and a sort of Mawloc style head.
There was a smattering of Warhammer Forge stuff there as well, but not much in the way of brand spanking new content, though the Dread Saurian looks very nice in real life!
Finally then, the event-only models, a Minatours heavy bolter and a rather nice Chaos Dwarf Daemonsmith. I didn’t grab either of these myself, though I do now have a nice bright red horus mug to drink my tea out of.
So, despite a hideously early start and some lengthy queues it was a great day. I gorged myself on lots of stunning Forge World models (and stuffed myself on nachos in Bugman’s as well) and would definitely go back again next year. It was also a great opportunity to catch up with a few #warmongers and talk state of the game and Games Workshop. Everyone I spoke to was certainly looking forward to the re-development of Warhammer World and, as would be expected at a GW event, positive about everything the day had to offer.
I’m now even more disappointed I won’t be at the Horus Heresy weekender. I suspect that will be rather special indeed.
And no, I didn’t win the Reaver Titan in the raffle. I am outraged.
