Goatboy’s Warhammer 40K Hot Mess – Army Specific Terrain Needs Help
Today I want to talk about all of the 40K Hot Mess terrain pieces scattered throughout the Indexes and how they are all – just bad. What do we do with them?
These models are just bad and not worth it. I know we came from a few editions where bringing some of your own terrain would help you win. I remember the days of Planetstrike Bastions hiding all your good units when Flying Circus was the bee’s knees. I know how the Aegis Defense line would be used to hide a few Necron Warriors so your flying Croissants could come out and wreck stuff after turn 2. But nowadays – what’s the point?
Make Army-Specific Terrain Rules Help Armies!
A lot of these models could be utilized as “building” blocks to bring to your army. They could be linchpins designed to help build some kind of cool theme into your list and make it worth it. You could have things like Comms Relay rules in the model to help “hide” more things in reserve. You could have it do some cool weapon strike or let you deep strike near it closer. Heck, you could just let it set up a whole slew of tunnels so your models can jump out all over the place and steal everyone’s candy.
Let the Faction Terrain Do Cool Stuff
Why can’t these things just inspire your army? How about letting it give out some rules to a unit or two with buffs to make them better? I know we had some things to amp up a unit’s power before, so why not go hog wild in that direction? The Ammo dump gives everyone sustain hits 1, Radioactive ammo gives them lethal hits, or some kind of cool drug den for Dark Eldar makes them faster and crazier? The Altar of Khorne drives those Khorne Daemons crazy and lets them become more powerful. Heck, this is how you could pull in some of the AoS stuff into the game a bit and give some cool-looking things for your display board that actually does stuff.
Make Faction Terrain Cheap or Free
I said some of them wouldn’t be used if free, but if you make some of the cheaper terrain options free – maybe they would be used? Or just super cheap? You could use things like the shipping crates to help give extra stuff to your army. Or the Death Guard Stink stacks doing other stuff. What if it was free and it slowly started to expand its stank cloud outwards through the pipes it dug under the ground? What if we had some kind of cool Daemonforge thing that some of your characters could use to change things up and be a part of that character’s kit? A Warpsmith yelling things from an angry-looking mechanical monster and doing neat stuff? Maybe Vashtor would be cool if he had a bunch of free terrain pieces he could rain down?
I just feel like Faction Terrain is really in a weird place in 10th Edition. I don’t know if the pieces did too much before or if there is a bad taste left in GW from the old games and their need to bring things to hide behind. I just really think some of this stuff could be looked at in a new light and just made interesting again for the game. I don’t want the return of the Landing Pad and piles of artillery living on top – silliness.
I just want my Altar of Khorne do something besides sit there in a box and never get used.
