Goatboy’s Warhammer 40K Hot Mess – Chaos Maulerfiend
The CSM Maulerfiend is a hot mess of a model that should be as awesome as it is in my dreams. Let’s brew up some ways to make it better.
Talking with my buddy about what Hot Mess I should talk about while we sit in our LVO Hotel room. His first instinct was to say the Maulerfiend even though I corrected him about them hitting on 3+ right now. Still – it is a hot mess of a model that should be as awesome as it is in my dreams. With that – let’s brew up some ways to make it better.
The Maulerfiend is a weird kit in that initially it was a Kool-aid man of a surprise model that rushed through a wall due to some weird rules and punched something in the face. I would use it to quickly rush a model and start the pressure on my opponent. I loved how goofy it was and most of the time it would clumsily “maul” something for me – then die.
Nowadays it’s a kit that people bring out from time to time to pressure you in a kind of “fat model in the way” sort of thing. It isn’t bad per se. But it just doesn’t feel right. It should be a crazy giant robot doom machine that brings fear and destruction to all of those in the way. The gnashing of the Daemon engine as the mechanical beast breaks against the walls of reality as it blends flesh and metal into doom.
Make the Maulerfiend Scary
Will start with the simple bits to make it scary. First we have to make it truly fast. It needs to advance and charge plus ignore terrain in some way. Maybe it phases in and out of reality or it just runs over the wall. It might just wreck thru buildings like it was some kind of super Hulk in a Marvel movie. It just needs to get where it needs to go quickly and bring some fists into the equation.
From there it needs to do a lot of damage if it charges you. There should be more charging causes mortal wounds in this game – that isn’t just a Stratagem you use. Make it do more stuff to Infantry or do different damage profiles to Vehicles. Heck make hit a unit and cause it to move as it replaces your bulk with its bulk. This sort of damage option lets it act like a bull of damage and helps bring its dreams of destruction to reality.
Push Up the Biomechanical Warp Weirdness
I always thought that Daemon engines shouldn’t just be a 5+ save and instead just be a 5+ save versus any damage it takes. Like a weird FNP that rends and warps reality to repair its wounds. These sorts of things makes the biomechanical monsters interesting and a good reason why Chaos should take a ton of them. Healing a single wound a turn is cool. But when you get blasted by a Votann’s rail cannon off of their Mini-moon-bus that single wound doesn’t feel nearly as exciting.
Let Maulerfiends Take Marks!
Oh let the monster get marks. It makes no sense that whatever daemon gets shoved into the brain matrix of these monsters doesn’t affect how the monster works. How it flows thru the warp should matter so you should let it get marks. The Soul Grinders get upgrades based on what god they worship so why not these guys? Make the marks interesting too and not just copies of the Daemons or matching the CSM marks themselves. It feels like a very easy upgrade and a few extra lines of rules to really amp up daemon engines into something interesting.
I won’t lie I have 3 Maulerfiend at home and would love to be able to take them again. Just the idea of a bunch of roving monsters that cruise the battlefield looking to cause trouble makes me happy inside the dark place that is my hobby soul. I want them to wreck thru buildings, shove aside infantry like they are kids toys, and just become true pains in the butt they were always meant to be.
Death to the False Emperor!
