Aiee! Run From Kelvin's Brainsplurge!

The Horus Heresy, the foundational story and grand tragedy at the heart of Warhammer 40,000, is an excuse.

Back in the grim darkness of 1988 Games Workshop released the first version of its Epic teeny tiny wargames system, Adeptus Titanicus:


Epic battles between giant robots! Ace!

Except all the "giant robots" in that first box were Imperial, so GW needed to come up with a reason why the humans were fighting each other. And so, one back-of-the-napkin later, we get the Horus Heresy, gengineered brother versus gengineered brother, lots of overwrought high drama, about a million tie-in novels, a spinoff tabletop wargame, and soon a role-playing game.

(We're not counting the "3D Roleplay" graphic on the AT box...)


I'm not convinced by this announcement -- what are players going to actually do in this setting? -- but I'm intrigued.

I have the new Epic 2023 box and although I haven't played it yet -- ye gods, teeny tiny multi-part miniatures! How am I supposed to put those together at my age?! -- I have impressions of the first variety.

• In terms of rules, it is pretty much second edition Space Marine/Titan Legions, which is good, as Space Marine 2 is the best wargame Games Workshop ever made. Fact.
• Titans are simplified. I won't miss the aiming minigame, but the old location-based damage charts were fun. You can't blow their arms or legs off any more. (sad face)
• Titans do still have huge reactor meltdowns when they die, and that's ace.
• The terrain rules are new and very weird. They are a mixture of excessive detail (every inch of the board is one of about five different terrain types, which you have to track and have their own rules and modifiers) and odd abstractness (you may be able to draw clear and unobstructed line of sight to a model but if it's "within" certain terrain your models can't see it). There's also what looks like an orphaned reference to roads giving a movement boost, but no associated rules, which may be a case of earlydraughtitis, or just ambiguous writing; who knows?
• Speaking of inches, everything is measured in them. This will make Jacob Rees-Mogg and the Brexiteers happy, and is better than that strange Pentagon-Circle-Triangle-Square thing GW did in Kill Team, but anything other than centimetres for Epic is abhorrent.
• I'm not sure the Space Wombles can legally field all their models in the box, unless I've misunderstood the army building rules, which is very possible.
• The rulebook could have been 100 pages thinner with the exact same content, but I think that's a battle we lost a long time ago.
• The order counters are terrible. They are thin, cheap, and nasty, with none of the hefty girth of the 2e counters. Expect to see a swathe of variants on Etsy within days.

That all may seem overwhelmingly negative, but the core rules of the game are solid, and the miniatures are great, and I am keen to give it a try... as soon as I get someone younger and more nimble to construct the models. More on that if/when it happens.

OH! And drop pods are rubbish now. Back in the 1990s, you would literally drop the markers on to the table and hope for the best. Now they are relegated to a deployment special rule. Cowards.