blackwolf.scortch:
Hi all,
went to local GW to look at BotB, most likely to buy, but they had sold all stock in 2 days and not sure when they are getting some more. Now trying to decide whether to order or not. So to that end, has anybody got it? And what do they think?
Edit (Nicodemus): Spelling correction to thread title
Zuh-Khinie:
All I know is that it’s a limited edition book apparently… I asked the guys at my local GW to keep one aside for me.
Inside you’ll find rules for hosting campaigns, sieges and ubderground fighting… or so I’ve been told.
nagged:
I’ve picked one up, at first glance didn’t think much of it but then it is competiting with tamurakhan (just got my copy thats why). the book is a campaign based around the mighty empires. the further you go into the book and the campaign the better it gets. the campaign is set in four seasons and once into summer the battles are played on odd shaped boards H an L shaped for example.
the book doesn’t have the modelling articles that the generals compendium but for those with a gaming group who’ll relish a campaign its really good, those that prefer battleline/tournament play it’ll gather dust with storm of magic
ryanamandaanna:
It’s got a lot of good ideas and some new rules, but unless you’re planning on doing a huge campaign or doing some siege/underground battles, it’s not a necessary book.
Hashut’s Blessing:
It is limited run, so get it whilst you can.
First thing to note is that, in my opinion, there’s a little too much reference to how they played the campaign and too much advertising of it being focused on it being a book that follows their campaign. It comes across as a big self hug.
You open it and reead it and it’s not as bad as you’d expect for the self-hugging and if you ignore their few mentions of “OUR campaign”, it’s actually really cool. You can use the siege rules whenever, the underground rules aren’t all that much, but create an interesting twist, there are several scenarios and there is a campaign and various rules that can be applied to your own campaign (the hero wounds carrying over in interesting ways, etc).
Worth the £20.
rabotak:
It is limited run, so get it whilst you can.i agree with mr. blessing here. i liked the read, the additional rules are nice and welcome, for people who like playing campaigns like my group there is quite some output, so worth the 20£....but it still comes across like "we had a nice campaign, we made some pics, hey lets make a book out of it and get some cash!"....
First thing to note is that, in my opinion, there's a little too much reference to how they played the campaign and too much advertising of it being focused on it being a book that follows their campaign. It comes across as a big self hug.
You open it and reead it and it's not as bad as you'd expect for the self-hugging and if you ignore their few mentions of "OUR campaign", it's actually really cool. You can use the siege rules whenever, the underground rules aren't all that much, but create an interesting twist, there are several scenarios and there is a campaign and various rules that can be applied to your own campaign (the hero wounds carrying over in interesting ways, etc).
Worth the £20.
Hashut's Blessing
Admiral:
Limited run? That’s a big shame, since I can’t afford it for quite some time due to studies.
Nicodemus:
I’ve read through much of the Blood in the Badlands book now. It’s full of typos and grammatical mistakes. It really could have used a good proof read. -As a brief aside, modern word processing technology makes document creation and editing a fast process, but maybe it’s a little too fast? It’s relatively easy to crank out a large volume of work, but that same work requires just as much time, if not more, to proof read. I’ve noticed the number of mistakes in gaming and even novels, etc. seems to have steadily increased over the past 2-3 decades. For all it’s typos and similar mistakes, the Throne of Chaos book is so far pretty good compared to a lot of other game books I’ve purchased recently. Blood in the Bandlands seems a little worse off. /End of aside.
A friend and I are starting up a campaign inspired by the Blood in the Badlands book. I’m calling it Blood in the Darklands. We’re basically taking the rules we like and making it our own. Because it’s effectively a two-player version we’re also making tweaks to how the other races work (Night Goblins, Dwarfs, Ogres, Orcs & Goblins, etc.).
Anyway, as you can all imagine, Chaos Dwarfs are not discussed in the Racial Rules. I went through the rules that were there and found some good useful bits, based on the slave-taking habits of the Dark Elves as well as the Dwarfy-ness of the Dwarfs. Here it is, in all its brevity:
Chaos Dwarfs
Chaos Dwarfs capture slaves to toil in their mines, under the control of the over-zealous Hobgoblin taskmasters. For every battle won in the previous turn, a Chaos Dwarf player gains +1 to any rolls on the Mine table. Like their Western kin, the Mines of the Chaos Dwarfs are sturdy and well-defended structures. Chaos Dwarf mines add +1 to the fortification saves of the tile they are in.
The above is effectively taking two sets of racial rules and putting them together, however, the bonus to the mine table rolls is only the first half of the Dark Elf rules, whereas the Dwarf mines add +1 to the fortification saves of the tile they are in as well as all those adjacent. I figured six of one and half-a-dozen of another was a good balance.
Has anyone else been doing anything with Chaos Dwarfs and the Blood in the Badlands book?
~N
wallacer:
I made some underground terrain, which i’ve been using. It works just as well for my Skaven and Goblin armies as it does for my CD, so it’s quite useful.
Nicodemus:
I made some underground terrain, which i've been using. It works just as well for my Skaven and Goblin armies as it does for my CD, so it's quite useful.Got any photos? I was thinking of making something similar as I too have ~2000pts of Night Goblins and Skaven, as well as my copious number of Chaos Dwarfs ;)
wallacer
Baggronor:
I’ll be doing a campaign - it’ll be with my VCs though (new book syndrome).
I like the book, its nice to have this kind of extra fluff stuffs 
Nicodemus:
So a question has come up for us getting our army lists together for our campaign, and we’re a little uncertain what the best house rule might be.
For BitB games, each player chooses three special characters, an overall general and two lieutenants. Each of them gets put into an army list and that army is associated with a marker on the map so that you know who is fighting in a battle. OK, so far so good. For my main general I’d like to take Drazhoath, the Ashen on Cinderbreath, just because I have him. He’s just under 600pts, which means that I’ll need an army list ~2300-2400 pts to fit him in with the 25% allowance (and as the only character to boot!!). While I could choose not to take him these games are supposed to be fun. Now the down side is one of the guys I play against has finally gotten up to ~2000pts of Skaven, plus a few extra characters, but I know he cannot get enough points together to actually make a 2400-ish point list. So should we A) limit the character choice to 500pts max, B) Ignore the Lords/Heroes percentage limit in these games and just stick the other restritions and total army points, or C) force him to buy more stuff so that he can play when he wants to challenge my general’s position on the map?
Option C kind of sucks for him and is unfair in real life to make him buy more stuff. Option A kind of sucks because this will mean we can’t bring in really big Lord choices for the entirity of our campaign (which will comprise all of our Warhammer games for the next 6 months or so). That kind of leaves option B, but does anyone anticipate major balance issues with that option? We’re not playing competitively, it’s just for fun. That being said, if there’s a major disadvantage that I’m overlooking that could detract from the “fun” aspect we’re going for.
Any thoughts would be appreciated!!
~N
P.S. My desired alternative to Drazhoath isn’t any better, but exaggerates the problem even more-so: a Lv 4 Sorcerer-Prophet with Blood of Hashut, Naptha Bombs, 100pts of Magic Items, and a fully upgraded Lv 2 Lammasu is just over 700 pts. In that case my mate is going to have to bump his army up from 2000pts to at least 2800.
Thommy H:
I’d play it as the size of the game you’re playing dictates the characters you’re allowed, just like normal - if you’re playing a 2,000 point battle, you can only spend 500 points on Lords. So don’t take Drazhoath in other words! I don’t think there’s another fair solution. You’ll need a Lord that isn’t ridiculously tooled up, otherwise he’s going to just rampage through everything in your opponent’s (unfairly penalised) army.
I know you’re just playing for fun but, well, if you’re that interested in not being competitive, just leave Drazhoath (or the alternative guy on the Lammasu) at home. If you played a pick-up game with a stranger, you wouldn’t go over the points limits like that, after all.
silentbob27:
Some buddies and i are going to be starting a campaign based on this pretty soon. Only 4 of us though. I will be playing CD’s, so will swipe Nic’s suggestion above. I also have the old Gernerals Compendium and Siege book, so will see what i can add from those.
I was amazed at how much siege equipment i actually had in my siege bitz box.
Bolg:
We start the campaign in about 2 weeks. We made some extra rules: max 2 levels of magic/bound spells, 3 army lists 1500 points with max 50, 40 and 40 points of magic items/runes/special abilities. So back to the basics, and I’m quite looking forward to that (:
I’ll be playing 3 all gobbos armies.
ChungEssence:
I personally think just use Drazhoath in a 2000pt list vs his Skaven. I mean as he’s your only guy and is so expensive you’ll be handicaping yourself a bit also so I think it will work out. Skaven have lots of nasty things to do to him anyway. I mean you fielding Draz means no other characters (per your post) so just see it as Drazhoath’s elite army vs the skaven horde. You’re playing for fun anyway and I think that would make for a very fun game. If you have a few games like that and one side always wins then remove him but why not give it a shot. Definitely don’t make him increase his army size.
Nicodemus:
Turns out there will only be two of us for our campaign - Blood in the Darklands. It’ll be Skaven and Chaos Dwarfs… which sort of necessitates some NPC armies for things like Dwarfs, Goblins, some undead, Ogres, etc. I’m working on some quick and dirty mechanics for operating NPC armies during the campaign phases. There will be the odd game where we change out our regular army for a Night Goblin or Dwarf army (I have enough models) so that we can play some specific elements of the campaign (i.e. one of the armies storming some of the Goblin-controlled Dwarf holds in search of treasure and relics).
Here’s a few screen captures of where I’m at with things (including descriptions for almost all map locations, either copy & pasted from here on CDO, or elsewhere on the 'Net):
Campaign map - Oh yes, and we’re too cheap to buy Might Empires for our map so we’re going to use a large version of this one, with each hex roughly the size of a single infantry model, which we’ll use to represent our armies on the map… using the army’s General makes it easy to know which army it is that’s moving or getting into battle at a glance.
Modification to the campaign turn sequence to include NPC armies and their possible actions, which are randomized. Instead of playing battles to take care of attacking NPC armies I’ve gone with a semi-random system which uses War Council points.
… Oh, and I should mention that we’re not playing with the flying fortress as the main goal. So there’s some other tweaks happening as well (randomly moving region for Storm of Magic, a flying Dwarf Thunderbarge, etc).
~N
ryanamandaanna:
I really like this… how did you generate the map and everything? I have a friend that I play with quite a bit and something like this would be great if you have more details. 
Nicodemus:
I made the map in photoshop. There’s a huge Warhammer map floating around the 'Net that I used for the map. Then I did a google image search for “hex grid” or something to that effect and just resized it until I got something that looked OK in terms of number of hexes for a campaign map for the Darklands. There was a bit of fiddling back and forth with hex size (+/- 20% or so) to try and get it so that each hex had only one special location in it. The tough part is all the Dwarf holds in the Worlds Edge Mountains as some of the Dwarf controlled ones and Goblin controlled ones are very close. In the end I was able to do it so that only the Black Fortress and Flayed Rock are in the same hex… which is OK because the Black Fortress is the real “special location” and Flayed Rock doesn’t really do anything other than be a landmark.
From there I just made a new layer in Photoshop that was the size of the inside of a hex, and shaded that layer as grey and at 50% opacity so that I could shade the edges of the map etc. Then I used Google image again to just look for icons to represent armies in the book (Skaven, Chaos Dwarfs, Dwarfs, Orcs, Night Goblins, etc.).
I made the map locaion descriptions (shown above) so that you could see the central hex that the notes are about, but also the surrounding hexes so that your eye can more quickly marry up what you’re looking at in the campaign book with the campaign map once it’s laid out on the table.
The document uses a lot of GW’s IP and artwork (there’s other things in there besides the map and some banner icons), as well as modifications to the Blood in the Badlands rules (but the gist of the rules are in there) so for those reasons I can’t distribute it to the forum.
~N