Greetings friends and welcome back to the CollardHammer Special, my increasingly regular hobby blog! This post was supposed to go up earlier this week but unfortunately I’ve been delayed by a variety of events. My laptop screen broke (I am writing this on my phone now!), my mother came to visit over the weekend and my wife and I have been sick ever since, meaning I’ve only just been able to pluck up the energy to write again. I have however managed to play some games and make some hobby progress from the last blog post. Also, I’d like to share some thoughts about what I’d like to happen for Adepta Sororitas in 11th edition and see what you folks think!
On the hobby side, I’ve made progress on both my Emperor’s Children and on the broader project to clear the backlog:
I’ll go into more detail later, but I was very keen to get to the 1k mark for the Emperor’s Children and accomplished this by finishing a unit of Tormentors:
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| The full 1k of Emperor’s Children |
I have also made a start on Fulgrim, although this is proving to be quite slow. It is a fantastically detailed model and I’m really looking forward to getting the finished piece on the table, but I think it will still be a while.
For a palette cleanser after the Tormentors, I slap-chopped a unit of Arco-Flagellants for my Sisters army:
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| Not my finest work, but good enough to be done |
These have been sat on or around my desk for a while (they were in the Christmas battleforce in 2024) and I’ve played with them more than enough times to warrant painting them. They’re an integral part of the penitent host detachment in Sisters, as well as the alternative boarding patrol. That said, they aren’t my favourite models in the range, so I wasn’t keen to put a ton of effort into the unit. I undercoated them with Grey Seer and did the flesh with Cadian Fleshtone, cloth with Corvus Black and most of the metallics with Leadbelcher. I then just washed and drybrushed those areas before picking out the cables and a few more details. Overall, this felt like a good approach and the unit looks cohesive enough for the tabletop.
Speaking of the tabletop, after finishing the Tormentors, I managed to get a couple of games in with the army. Unfortunately, they didn’t really go my way, for a number of reasons. My friend was playing Orks, with their 1k list consisting of Ghazghkull, 20 boys, a pain boy, a Gorkanought and a couple of units of stormboys for chaff. This is basically a nightmare for Coterie, which wants to feed off smaller pieces on turn 1 or 2 to get its buffs going. I also rolled absolutely abysmal dice, which didn’t help, but with my collection in its current state, I really can’t beat a stat check like that. I could’ve possibly tried to just focus down the Ghaz mob, but with the painboy in place and my rolling what it was, I felt pretty doomed from the outset. On the whole, not a great first run out for the Emperor’s Children in fully painted form, but we move on.
Taking the opportunity to move on, I talked about some thoughts for 11th edition as a whole and what I wanted to see for the game moving forward a few posts ago. I thought I’d add to that by discussing some thoughts for Sisters specifically, being the army I’ve played with the most over time. The main elephant-in-the-room (for me, at least) is miracle dice. It’s a powerful mechanic and broadly does fit the flavour of the faction, but it has a number of negative aspects that are worth outlining. Most people in my playgroup are not fans of the mechanic, finding it tends to remove agency and lead to anti-cinematic moments by removing the possibility of survival. This is an understandable position, even if other factions mechanics offer similar reliability in other ways. In addition to the negative play experience, the mechanic doesn’t scale well, getting much more powerful the larger the game is.
The question then becomes, what should be done about it? I think the best way to salvage this mechanic would be to move to a system similar to pain tokens in Drukhari. Instead of cheating dice rolls, the points (acquired in the same way as miracle dice) could be spent to empower units to do their specific roll better. I think this would help with the problem where damage comes out of nowhere, or units survive situations that they typically shouldn’t. Abilities could include extra damage for Repentia and Retributors and extra defence for Battle Sisters and Celestians. Alternatively, I increasingly would prefer miracle dice to be retired in favour of the battle hymn mechanic from 9th edition. This allowed the army to pick (or roll) from a table of abilities at the start of the game that would apply to everything. I enjoyed this because it allowed tuning the army to the strengths and weaknesses of the opponent, as well as giving some more interesting directions to build the army out in. It is also much cleaner than the system above and less frustrating than the current miracle dice system.
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| He may pretend to be an innocent pair of shoes, but he is secretly the terror of the Imperium! |
With that, I am going to wrap up for this week. I was due to play a game this Sunday, but it is currently looking unlikely due to illness. For hobby work, I think I am mostly going to be trying to get Fulgrim done, although I may sneak some general backlog stuff in too, especially as I’m getting quite close to finishing all the Sisters stuff I have. We also had an unfortunate incident where Toffee (the cat) snuck into my work room and decided to have a battle with my heresy White Scars. Suffice to say, the space marines did not win this time and I have quite a lot of repairs to do. Until next time, I hope you have an awesome fortnight of your own hobby!
Much love,
Ben
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