WFB: The Theme’s The Thing – Part 1: Selection
Want to pump up your game? Making a theme-army may be your salvation!
Creating a strongly themed army is not only great from a hobby perspective, but can also lead to greater creativity in list building and more rewarding play experiences.
On the return journey from Wet Coast GT, in my minivan full of WFB gamers, the conversation turned to creating strongly themed armies, and eventually led to the creation of the Secret Army Project Tournament. Having dived into this project head first, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the pros and cons of a strongly themed army list. There are several aspects to this: on the hobby side, with theme choice, paint scheme and conversions; and on the gaming side, there’s composition, competitiveness and (the biggie) compromise.
What is a Themed Army?
For the purposes of this discussion, a themed army is one in which the army is built using only a subset of units from any given army book in order to create a force which is visually appealing and story-driven. In an ideal world, this army can also be reasonably competitive. Selecting a theme is usually something that’s deeply visceral: something just speaks to you. Not had that experience? Here are a few things that might help get the creative juices flowing:
Sub-races: Some army books are made up of multiple races combined into a single book. Orcs & Goblins are split into about a half-dozen different races, Wood Elves are partially Elves and partially Forest Spirits and Lizardmen broadly fall into Skinks and Saurus (plus dinosaurs). If you interpret race quite loosely, others like Vampire Counts and Tomb Kings can be split as well.
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| Reikland and Reikwald Forest – Home of Demigryphs |
Geography: This one can be a little more subtle, but it’s possible to come up with a strong theme based on something geographic within the fluff. Most often, this is purely aesthetic, but here are a few examples that could be quite restrictive. High Elves have multiple units that are strongly associated with certain parts of Ulthuan (e.g. Lothern gives the Sea Helm, Seaguard, Bolt Throwers and Skycutters), and The Empire fluff talks about how different states within its borders are renowned for different things–for example, Reikwald forest, between Nuln and Reikland, is where all the demigryphs come from.
Alignment: While it’s not really a term used within the game, I’m using it here to describe units that follow a particular god or belief system. The obvious examples are the four Chaos gods for Warriors or Daemons and these are probably the most common themes you’ll see on the battlefield, partially because they also offer competitive builds (more on this later). One other is for Skaven players, who have the opportunity to align to one of the four major clans.
Fluff: Every army book is chock-filled with fluff, and even more so with the advent of the 8th edition hardback releases. That stuff is not just in there to make the books seem thicker (despite what some cynics might say): it’s there to help inspire theme for armies. A great example is the Sethayla army of the Wood Elves. In the 6th Edition Wood Elf army book, there was a small sidebar beside the Warhawk Rider entry, which mentioned the Sethayla Kindred as being one that all rode hawks and eagles, which of course led to people bringing as many flying models to the table in a single army under the Sethayla theme, and ultimately leading to a whole style of play for that army. Read through the fluff of your book if you’re interested in a more thematic army, and something will likely strike you as being particularly cool or noteworthy.
Something else? There are a number of cool armies I’ve seen that have been inspired by something else entirely and converted to Warhammer. Lord of the Rings is an obvious choice Sauron makes for an excellent Daemon Prince, for instance), but you can go further afield: Gobwarts is a Goblin Army inspired by Harry Potter, and this excellent Ogre army by Brandon Palmer got its theme from Monty Python’s Holy Grail movie. However, this type of theme usually only affects the hobby side of the army: composition can end up being pretty much whatever you want, because you’re limited only by your ability to do a good conversion.
In Part 2, I’ll talk more about how army composition is affected by theme, and how it affects the competitiveness of your list. The Night Goblin army featured at the top of the article is by Ricky Fischer, my co-host on the Dimensional Cascade podcast. You can see the whole army in all its glory on his Flickr account.
If you’ve got a themed army, or know someone who has, how did you select the theme? What was your inspiration? And if you have some cool photos, share them!
