You ever have something that you could have sworn you wrote down at some point, and then you go back and try to find it and it’s just…not there?
That’s me with this article.
I think through a variety of Twitter posts, Facebook responses, etc. I’ve created a cobbled together version of this post in my mind. But given 9th edition has been announced, and one of the perennial requests is modernizing Horus Heresy into the new Edition, I’m going to actually write stuff down. Specifically, why I don’t want a “modern” Horus Heresy ruleset.
My Biases
First, let’s lay out my first, and most important bias: I am lukewarm on 8th edition. That was my feeling when it came out, and it’s stuck with me through the entire edition. I realize I’m in the minority here, at least among voices on the internet, but to my mind 8th edition is…just okay. Not good. Not bad. Fine.
I have no doubt, given the likelihood of Games Workshop going for a polished up 8th edition as the core of 9th edition, rather than “We’re sorry Variance Hammer, you’re right, please come to Nottingham and set us all straight” or “We’ve scrapped it all again”, that I will feel better about 9th edition, but I’d hesitate to say that it’ll bring the warm fuzzies. Much of what I’m going to say assumes – I think fairly – that 9th edition is a tuning of 8th and as such many of the elements from 8th will carry over. It’s relative simplicity. It’s lethality.
So that’s the first reason. “Because I don’t like it.” But I believe there are also less subjective reasons to argue in favor of sticking with the Age of Darkness…7th edition-but-kinda-also-6th-and-with-changes ruleset.
Forge World Can’t Handle It
Games Workshop is not actually, when it comes down to it, a big company. Forge World is the art house studio of Games Workshop. Forge World is tiny. And they’ve got a lot on their plate right now, partially because of how well Horus Heresy was received in the first place (I’m guessing). They are good at many things, most notably making cool resin toy soldiers. One thing they are not good at is rapid rules development. You can see this in everything from the pacing of the Horus Heresy book releases, wherein they are ~halfway through their intended arc and Black Library is busy wrapping things up, to the Forge World Index rules for 8th edition which are…not great. And have remained not great for the entirety of 8th edition, to the point of being folded back into GW “proper” for rules development.
The fact of the matter is, in my opinion, “Adapt Age of Darkness to 9th Edition and come up with workable rules for all of your existing units” is, for Forge World, potentially a large enough hurdle to actually kill the game entirely. Certainly to tank sales for awhile while they work on rules for models they’ve already sold, instead of cool new models for the Imperial Fists a broad range of factions. I love Heresy, and I love the Forge World team for working on it, but it’s a game line that takes time.
And given the steady pace of edition releases for 40K, it’s just a problem that will recur later. 9th Edition Heresy isn’t going to feel modern when we’re all talking about how to spend Soul Gems to unlock Enhancement Tactics and how it will effect the 11th ed. meta either.
Decoupling Metas
We’ve talked a lot about the rapid 8th edition meta, aka “The Churn”, and GW’s aggressive FAQ schedule that keeps things from getting too out of hand with a series of sometimes brutal double-tap nerfs. But both early and late in the edition, many of these corrections were generated by edge case lists. A Primarch surrounded by Flyers basking in his bubble. A particular interaction of character and Chapter Tactic rules. Things that made GW go “Okay, clever, but no.”
These are…largely the community’s fault. I’m not going to say that that’s inherently a bad thing – competitive 40K is about finding those weird edge cases and then carrying them forward, but it’s very much a case of “We are why we can’t have nice things.”
But these changes also have casualties. The original “Boots on the Ground” rule hit armies that weren’t at the top of the meta hard. As have the various ways of tinkering with who can deploy what where. By and large, for a single system, this is easy to fix. But if Horus Heresy depends on the current, modern GW ruleset, it’s also being changed at that same pace – and likely without regard to “How will this impact the Heresy players?” as a major concern. Isolating the ruleset allows the Heresy rules designers to focus on the impact of rules to the forces that matter. Is this unbalanced in a setting where 3+ armor is near ubiquitous? And where the formation/detachment/etc. bonuses are considerably lighter in the form of Rites? Does this change the feel of a Heresy battle in an undesirable way?
Heresy is Violent. 8th Ed. is Violent. The Two Together…
One of the most shocking thing for new Heresy players is just how easily Space Marines die. One of the most shocking things for me about 9th Edition when it first came out was how fast everything dies. Those two things aren’t guaranteed to play nicely together, and can add up to “Heresy 9th is a massive bloodletting for two turns. Hope you go first.” That’s the kind of thing that would require the careful rules consideration and balancing that Forge World doesn’t necessarily have the time for, and couldn’t necessary ensure would remain stable as GW tunes the main game.
There Is a Place for Complexity
Horus Heresy is a more complex game – and that’s okay. There’s a tendency to assume because 8th edition is simplified and streamlined that it is inherently better. That’s not necessarily true – and more importantly, it’s not necessarily true all the time. For a fast, casual game against a stranger, or where I actually just want to catch up with friends and move some toy soldiers around, it’s a great game. But for me, it’s lacking something that I’ve come to refer to as “tactical satisfaction”. That feeling of in game (rather than list building) outfoxing of your opponent. It can still happen in 8th edition of course, but I’ve found that the loss of vehicle facing in terms of both fire arcs and armor values has done a number on things like flanking your opponent, hugging terrain, etc.
There’s also a notion I’ve been thinking about called emergent narrative. Basically, the narrative that comes from the game rather than the narrative the game is about – more on this in a later post. I’d argue that the Age of Darkness ruleset is better for this kind of narrative, because it preserves the risk/reward choices like dangerous deep strikes, template scatter and “Danger Close” firing, etc. that have an element of randomness to them. These were dropped from 8th edition for some decent reasons – they slow down the game considerably, and they do funny things to balance. I had one very memorable game back in 3rd or 4th edition where about half my army died to deep strike mishaps. But that may be acceptable in the more narratively focused Horus Heresy community, where the game is, to be frank, subjected to far less competitive pressure than the main 40K game.
Horus Heresy Wasn’t 7th Edition Either
This is something I have noted before. Horus Heresy wasn’t really 7th edition either. It lacked the widespread use of Formations that was behind much of the balancing trouble and rules bloat in 7th, and unless your local scene featured a Thousand Sons player (or if that player didn’t go all in), it also lacked the problems of what happened when one side had an over-abundance of psychic dice. While Carl Tuttle has freely said that Horus Heresy was the best way to play 7th…it wasn’t really 7th. It was sort of…6.5th, with the later formal Age of Darkness rules diverting further from that.
It’s always been a bespoke ruleset. It’s designed around for it. And it’s what the studio can handle.
Keep it that way.
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