Reorganization for the Brotherhood of the Green Abyss... Oh, wait.

This is the rare, mid-month update a bare week after the last one. What could possibly be going on?

Well, it goes like this. Ran over to Augusta again to get in a pair of games. A good time was had by all. Then stood in the parking lot for a while chewing the fat... like you do. One of the guys I was talking to said something (well actually he'd said it a couple hours before, but this is when it kind of hit me) that got me thinking. The comment was to the effect of, "The Abyssal Dwarves were a terrible abyssal dwarf army but the best Abyssal army because you never saw any dwarves on the field - just tons of gargoyles."

On the drive back somewhere, I started cogitating on that. I'm not sure of the exact order of my thoughts - I kind of suspect it bounced around quite a bit, but the gist was. There just has to be some Abyssal Dwarf builds that focus on dwarves and are also pretty good. Maybe not super-top tier, but good. It's be fun to try that, after all, I've never tried dwarves in any game I've ever played. Just never been a fan really. But I had briefly thought it might be interesting to try them as an army. Very briefly, in WFB back in the 1980's my firend's brother had them and complained about them and I'd though they might be fun to try. Again when I first looked at KoW. And I have some surplus models (the human part of my former Rhordia collection) that maybe I could trade or sell and get some Abyssal Dwarves. After all the basic troopers should be plentiful enough and or comparitively cheap.

So I got home and pulled all my non-halfling Rhordia models off their dusty shelf and looked at them. Sent a message to a friend asking if he know of a good site or place to sell/trade them. He replied that he did a lot of trading and would be happy to trade some with me. In the course of talking about it, I mentioned that I had Forces of Nature. He took that as meaning I had some to trade and said he was interested in them. I hadn't been thinking about that at all, but now I was. How much did I really like FoN really? I liked Druids. I had basically given the naiads and the wyrmriders to my girlfriend and split the salamanders to my Salamander army. What I had left was a lot of Reaper metal models - elementa;s, hydras, chimeras, centaurs, ents, and so forth. Was I willing to give them up?

So the next day, I painted up Larry the Lekelidon (pictured above) and thought about this some more. I decided I was willing to give up the FoN.

However, this did something very dangerous for me. It got me looking at armies in the rulebook. There is a reason I have so many armies consisting of two to three units painted up and a couple shelves of unpinted, unassembled, minis in boxes. I have a lot of difficulty sticking with an army, and I love the excitement of new armies. At least this was talking about getting rid of two armies (well parts of two armies). In looking at the rulebook (and listening to a podcast too I think), I found another army that I also really wanted to try Brotherhood: Order of the Green Lady. I don't know why, but I kind of fell in love with them. They are a very board-control, alpha-strike, maneuver army that's all about threat projection and surgical attacks. I liked these aspects of my Dark Eldar and expected to like them here as well. Moreover, I already had a whole ton of the pieces!!! Druids? Check, from FoN. Knights and Men-at-Arms? Check, from Rhordia. Beasts of Nature? Stuff to kitbash Order of the Forsaken? Elementals? Unicrons? Pegagsi? Check. Check. Check. So not much more to buy at all and that's a good thing. Better to repurpose after all. And a lot of what I need like Pegasus Knights, Albions, and more men-at-arms all comes very economically from Fireforge.

Of course, this ate into what I had to trade away, but *shrugs*. Then, in the last few days, I've been eyeing my Elves. (I have elves because it was the last army left from my brief flirtation with WFB. Some Seaguard, some spearmenn, some archers, a bunch of Gladestalkers, a regiment of Silverbreeze, a regiment of Palace Guard, two bolt throwers, five chariots, and a dragon. I haven't really wanted to expand it because it's always been a placeholder for me. It was what I had models to put (mostly) into the field when I picked up the KoW 2E rulesbook. Only two chariots and the dragon are painted. It's not balanced nor designed in terms of list selection and I doubt it's very competitive. Certainly no Drakon Riders. I had been doing them as Southern (desert) elves because of the chariots - all purple and tan on red sands. But how enthused was I really about playing them. Not very. Trade them? But I love the two models I painted for them. The dragon is one of the best I've ever done. If I give up my elves, it's not likely to ever see the tabletop again. That's a hard pill to swallow. But the army? I'm actually meh on the army. I think.

Where does that leave me?

I am still happily painting Salamanders and still love them. I also really want to play some Order of the Green Lady. I want to try my hand at non-cheesy Abyssal Dwarves with a dwarf-centric build (call it 60% dwarves depending on what you think ar the "dwarves" in the list - I consider halfbreeds dwarves for example). And I still love my Westfalia Halflings. All humans that I can't use in my OGL are departing as are the residual parts of the FoN. Elves are living under the Sword of Damoclese, but I haven't pulled the trigger on them. Still, if I'm really pulling in two new armies, I really need to get rid of them. Four is more than enough armies.

I also like the differences I see between the armies, because that will make playing them more interesting. Salamanders are excellent at balanced all-comers lists and also good grinders. Abyssal Dwarves are slower with lots of artillery. As dwarves I would expect them to be good grinders and they are infamous for being good shooters. But I think I'm probably going to try for balanced all-comers as well since that's where I think a dwarf-focused list is to be found. Still, they will be different, feel different, from the Salamanders. For one thing, the Salamanders will feel positively speedy after the dwarves. OGL contrasts well as a fast, alpha-strike list with great hammers. I think it can also do healing fairly well and you could do a grindy earth elemental list if you wanted. I think it will feel very different from the other two which will be nice. I would miss the speed of my elves (a lot), but if I never play them anyway... And I have no idea what "feel" the Halflings have. I have actually have another post planned to talk about how I feel about the new Mantic models so I'll leave more on that until then.

All-in-all, I think this is a good change since it has the potential to clear out things I'm not suprer excited about for different things I am excited about. The key though is that I have to keep painting. Two hours a day whenever possible.

Edit: The boys left to happier homes today, even the elves. Actually, I kept my painted chariot regiment and my dragon - they can be allies for both the Salamanders and the OGL. And now I have two boxes of Abyssal Dwarves to sort through - my first evil army. Thanks for reading!