The Deliverance Unto Lorgar was being finished for the March Goonhammer Open Horus Heresy Narrative Event: The Sack of Tallarn, a two day narrative event run by the Goonhammer crew at De Montfort University. This was the third such event I attended (and the fifth being run), and as the name might suggest to those who know their heresy lore was a tank-centric event. Three thousand points, four games, 48 players and some of the best event organisers in the coutnry, it’s a recipe for a great event.
This post is going to be in three parts: the games, the problem of “alignment”, and the hobby side of the event.
The Games
The format for the Sack of Tallarn was four games, with players split into Loyalist and Traitor teams, with 24 themed boards. Some were jungle, some city, some ruins, some seige walls. All lovely high-concept terrain. Each of the four rounds had a specific mission which advanced the overall plot, and after each game Zach (one of the two event organisers) gave an update on how each side had faired.
We all had to submit lists beforehand, which were vetted by the organisers in case they contained something that was likely to be unfun to play against. And this was taken seriously: at least two players were asked to make material changes to their lists. I’ll cover more about this in the alignment section, but I think this is a key part of what makes the goonhammer format work.
My own list was driven by two major factors: I wanted to play a list built around a single very large model and since the constiuent parts to built the model I wanted to make for my Mechanicum weren’t available in time, it was a no-brainer to pick my Word Bearers. And I already owned a lot of what I needed from the first foray into it at the start of 2nd edition. To that end I took:
Lord Eridu – Burning Lore Praetor with Tainted Blade and Archeotech Pistol
Valik, Herald of the Gal Vorbak – Herald with Tainted Blade and Bolt Pistol
Eridu’s Vanguard – 10 Gal VorbakEridu’s Chosen – 2 x 10 Inductii Despoilers with a Tainted Blade Sergeant
Deliverance Unto Lorgar – Legion Mastodon with 2x Lascannon Sponsons
67th Tactical Squads 1 and 2 – 2x 10 Tacticals with Plasma Pistol and Power Axe, mounted in Land Raiders with hull Lascannons and pintle Multimeltas
67th Heavy Support – 5 Lascannon Heavy Support Marines, mounted in a Rhino with a pintle Multimelta
67th Armoured Support – 2 Neutron Blaster Sabres with hull Heavy Bolters
This amounts to six tanks. The average was nine tanks per player. The Mastodon, whilst it carries 42 troops, is over seven hundred points and does not supply enough firepower to make it worth it. I’ll cover this more in the second section though.
My first game was against Salamanders, and the mission was to control four objecitves placed evenly on the compass points of the table with infantry, and to have vehicles in each board quarter with no enemy vehicles. The mastodon absolutely wrecked face against my opponent’s back line, but in the end his concentrated fire killed my vehicles and he cleaned up with 6 points in the final two turns, cementing a well earned 9-6 victory.
Game two was against a loyalist Death Guard army, with the absolutely brutal Creeping Death rite of war significantly limiting my mobility. She also had brutal efficiency with target prioritisation and cut the Mastodon down to a single hull point before the end of turn one. Despite this, I managed to claw back and through playing the objectives (holding moving objective markers with infantry for two points, or stationary objectives with vehicles for one point) I scraped a 13-8 victory for the traitors. Phyrric as it was, with only two models remaining at the end of the game, a win is a win and this event didn’t have a victory condition for models remaining!
Game three was facing off against millitia with allied Imperial Fists. An interesting matchup, my opponent was a friend from Rollmodels, and he took ten militia Leman Russ tanks, which are cheap and cheerful but have the Third Line special rule that makes them especially fragile. Weight of fire won the day, with the discovery that it doesn’t matter if you explode to a light wind if you can dish out three Brutal(2) strength 11 pie plates a turn. This turned the Gal Vorbak (who could mince their way through a squadron of tanks in close combat without any real fear) into so much paste. Combined with some god awful rolls, the Fists scored a well earned 19-5 victory in a mission that rewarded a vehicle within 6″ of an objective with 2VP. He just had more vehicles than I could kill, and demolished my main mechanism of killing them back. This game was also notable for having, to my knowledge, the GHO’s first building kill as my heavy support squad took refuge in the building and the baneblade took that personally.
Game four was fought against a lovely White Scars with allied Solar Auxillia list from a man from Sweden, with a beautiful multi-scheme jetbike army for the White Scars portion. Lovely until it ate the Mastodon for breakfast. This mission had us select a single vehicle to be our “spearhead” which gained immunity to immobilised results, a 6+ invulnerable save and 5+ feel no pain, and rewarded us with 6VP if it survived to reach the opposing player’s deployement zone, or 2VP if it got as far as their board half. The Mastodon died just short of the deployment zone, but through skillful driving Land Raider #2 pushed his Typhon back into his deployment zone. I paid dearly though, and through a lack of board control lost 12-4.
Despite some rocky starts (high point value heresy has a very decisive first turn advantage), I really enjoyed all four of my games. My opponents were all lovely, their lists were not oppressive, mine was just bad, and they were all incredible sportspeople with lovely armies.
The Problem of Alignment
Horus Heresy is a game that has some god damn swings to it. Some units are so expensive and struggle to earn their points back under ideal conditions, many units have remarkably complex or obscure rules that make trying to figure out how to deploy them incredibly difficult, and there’s a good chunk whose power scaling is so far out of whack it knocks the entire game out of alignment: think dreadnoughts, custodes, stone gauntlet, the combo that lets you make sisters of silence almost immune to attack.
There was a long period around 2016 to 2018 where I played pickup games of 40k, Age of Sigmar and even 7th edition Horus Heresy once or twice a week, either at my local Games Workshop or at my local gaming club in Southeast London. With the occational “skew” list, you could generally expect that any one “take all comers” list could and should be able to fight any other, and both players should have a reasonable chance of winning. This is not the case for Heresy 2nd edition.
A brief digression on naming editions of Horus Heresy
The Horus Heresy began life as an expansion for 6th edition Warhammer 40,000, published as “The Horus Heresy – Book 1: Betrayal”. These books, affectionately dubbed the “Black Books”, were written in the style of the now discontinued Imperial Armour series and incrementally built up both the mechanics and lore of the heresy and weren’t afraid to rework elements that weren’t working as intended (going as far as to rewrite Mechanicum twice, and release reworked versions of the initial Thousand Sons and Custodes lists in the book after their initial debut.
By book 4, it had moved along to Warhammer 40k’s 7th edition, but when Games Workshop released the 8th edition of Warhammer 40k which radically remade the game’s core mechanics, Heresy stayed behind. To bridge the gap, they released a standalone Horus Heresy rulebook, which integrated some small changes and some FAQs from 7th edition, but was largely unchanged.
This is now generally referred to as “first edition”, against the backdrop of the 2022 release of Horus Heresy 2nd Edition rulebook, which is actually the fourth significant rules change of the game.
This can make playing a game of Horus Heresy with a stranger a fraught experience, and for reasonas that are unknown to all mankind, people are bad at having a sensible conversation about what experience they’d like to have. Too many people see the games rules as explicit permission, and will throw a fit if asked not to take six dreadnoughts to a casual matchup on the basis that the text of the rules doesn’t forbid it.
Conversely, it’s all too easy to build a list that will just fail against a regular opponent. Imperial Knights, the poster child for low model count hyper elite lists, has suffered so badly with the halfway house HH2e has adopted between the 40k 6th ethos of vehicles and the 8th edition “everything has toughness” that a standard Questoris knight loses in a fist fight against a bog standard contemptor dreadnought and probably doesn’t survive to get into combat against a reasonably well piloted leviathan.
Demons and militia contain both absolute dogshit and some of the most disgusting options known to the thirty-first millenium. Mechanicum has so many rules interactions it requries a completed doctoral thesis on ludonarrative concordance to figure out what’s going to kill your opponent and what’s going to kill your own desire to keep playing (ursurax my beloved, one day you’ll see the table).
One of the worst victims of this are superheavy vehicles. Largely left un-tuned from their 7th/1st edition outings, the kinds of damage output required to fight the newly buffed dreadnoughts and terminators shred them and there are way more efficient uses of your points. Sure a mastodon as 12 hull points, but it is outgunned by two spartans for roughly the same cost, which can take flare shields for not that many more points, and you still get 40+ transport capacity. Or, you could take one spartan and one predator squadron for more hull points in health, more guns and frankly a better time.
The same applies to the fellblade variants, and even more to the baneblades. And don’t get me started on the titans. Only the Warhound ever really sees play, at 750pts you can fit it into a 3000pts game but it dies to a stiff heavy support squad. Only really the Acastus Knights do enough for their points, with the Porphyrion being nicknamed “the friendmaker” because its rules are frankly absurd.
This is why the Goonhammer open vets lists. I went into the event knowing it was going to be an uphill battle mechanically, with ample warning that I was coming at a significant disadvantage with my mere six tanks to the average of nine. I do kind of wish in retrospect that I had taken a different list, but honestly when am I going to get another chance to run it through a line of SIX tanks, melting my way through hull after hull again?
The Hobby
Honestly I did not attend this event to win games. I went to put Deliverance Unto Lorgar on the table, roll dice, and see the incredible standard of hobby on display. And by goodness, what a standard. Heresy might be a Bad Game™️ but it’s a beautiful spectacle. The event had over 420 tanks, titans and flyers in attendance, including two warhounds, a thunderhawk and my own mastodon.
I can’t stress enough how beautiful the games were: almost without fail everyone who attended had poured their heart and soul into their armies and it showed. In addition to the prizes for best loyalist and best traitor, the event had two other contests: best single miniature (vehicle) and best overall army. Best vehicle was voted on on Saturday lunchtime, whilst best army was voted on Sunday lunchtime.
Dear reader, I went into the event with muted hope. I’d poured effort into this army, but also the majority of it had been painted beween the 22nd of Feburary and the 18th of March. That’s twenty-two days!
Wait what do you mean the majority?
The sabres and the mastodon were entirely painted between the 22nd of Feb and the 12th of March, the land raiders were initially primed and given their first red coat in 2023, but majority painted in the same period. The rhino was mostly painted in 2022, but had its detail redone in that period.
Five of the Gal Vorbak and ten tactical marines were painted in 2022/2023, the other ten tacticals, the heavy support squad and the other five Gal Vorbak were base coated red and black in 2022, but the despoilers and the characters were entirely built this year and all were painted between the 13th and 18th of March, and many still need final highlights and weathering.
Typing this makes me realise how much of a mad dash it all was. Do not follow my lead here, submit lists that contain models you already own.
You can see how much energy and effort was poured into the armies on display, so I was floored when at the end of the event it was revealed that I had won both best miniature and third place for best overall army!
I walked away with a £20 Element Games voucher, an Artist Opus brush set (very handy to restock) and two very snazzy glass trophies.
The Mastodon is currently living on the titan shelf whilst additional display cabinets are being built to hold more stuff, but I look forward to displaying the whole army alongside their awards.
It’s only six weeks until the next Goonhammer Open, and I have more tanks to paint. Oh, that one isn’t tank focused, I just like tanks and Games Workshop have been so kind as to release mechanicum tanks, too late for me to take to the tank event. So I must do my patriotic duty as a good citizen of Mars and make people fear the Krios as the omnisiah intended.
Tl;dr: Goonhammer Opens good, Heresy bad game, Heresy good spectacle, resin child brick won awards.