by Patrick Nevan and the Plastic Craic Patreons

Aww Yeah, the Glaive from Krull, no one told them that a Glaive was an actual weapon

Aladdin’s Flying Carpet. The One Ring. The secret suitcase in pulp fiction. The Necronomicon or the Kandarian Dagge from Evil Dead. The Hammer of Thor the Mighty. The Sword forged by, I wanna say Dwarves, to slay a dragon in the Opera I only ever heard of because they use the music in Apocalypse Now. Call them Artefacts, enhancements or magic items they are the cornerstone of story telling from the earliest recorded human myths.

But we aren’t here for the good’s stuff today. We had a bit of a discussion amongst the fine Patreon’s in the Plastic Craic discord about the worst current artefacts in the game. The gang nominated some stinkers and before you can say “shameless clickbaiting tripe” editor Pete tasked me with picking the winner and writing up the article.

The sword is called The Power Sword by the way, a true work of imagination

Now it’s harder than you think to judge what makes an artefact garbage. In the end I narrowed it down to three factors.

Lack of Impact: To be truly worthless an artefact has to be very little even when it does work. There are lots of bizarre once a game situational items* that might conceivably come in handy when the stars align.

text grabs for the article taken from you can guess where, bless them

Your opponent might roll badly, and congratulations you are a hero of the IDK. They’re a terrible item but one day they might be really good.

Useless on it’s own merit: People tend to judge artefacts by the company they keep. If a faction has one or two strong artefacts the remainder will seem useless by comparison. Take the Ironjawz.

Destroyer is the clear pick of the litter and you won’t see many IJ lists without it, the others aren’t bad just shit in comparison. You get a similar effect from factions with terrible artefacts.

The Kruleboyz artefacts are notoriously crap. They are all situational, one use and once a game but individually they don’t reach the heights of uselessness. They just seem more terrible as a group. A useless artefact needs to stand hand and shoulders above the crowd and suck balls on it’s own merits.

Bewilderment: A truly bad artefact should induce a feeling of slack-jawed amazement followed by a series of questions. What is this for? Why did they put this in the book? When is this ever going to be useful? What were they thinking? A terrible artefact has a je ne sais quoi that sets it apart from it’s fellows. Like all great art there is something fundamentally unknowable about them.

Third Place – The Rod of Misrule

Even if you do achieve it, after all the irritating book keeping and remembering to use it at the end of battleshock, you get one depravity point. Talk about a fat chunk of nothing. 1/12th of a Slaanesh Buff, not even a nipple piercing on a Keeper of Secrets. I honestly think this was a typo and it’s meant to be 1d6 depravity.

Slaanesh Players remembering their first glorious Battletome

Either way you just know this one never saw playtesting. It would be higher up the list but maybe one day that point of depravity could, theoretically, get you where you need to be.

Second Place – Frost Talon Shardbolts

Yup one shot at 12 inch range. Pretty miserable stuff. You might be thinking that there must be some janky combo that allows you to increase the range or number of attacks but you’d be wrong.

I’m no master of mathematics but, back of the envelope, you’d need to fire this thing at least four times in a game to get a better than average chance of proccing it’s mortals. All 1d3 of them. That’s before you even consider the chances of an Icebrow surviving long enough withing 12 inches of the enemy to fire four shots.

*

Does this clown even have a Crossbow

The design philosophy behind this one is a puzzler. A fair chunk of the Ogor book seems to have been written on the Friday afternoon before a long weekend but why include this at all. It is a direct port from the last book where it was equally useless. I can only assume that, because Icebrow’s had 3 artefacts in the old battletome they decided to give them one in the new tome and rolled randomly to see which one they would keep.

Yes but it sucks, stick to unlocking battleline you Putz

I’m surprised they didn’t nerf this turd to be mortals instead of regular damage but with mortals in addition you could, on a long enough timeline, do 6 damage with a single shot. This puts it ahead of the winning artefact, but first…

Honorable Mentions

These two had a fair amount of support in the useless artefact stakes. The Amulet of Haste literally does nothing at all in 3rd ed and the Amulet of Silvered Sigmarite has been eased out of the game by the disappearance of rerolls.

While they are both garbage I’m cutting them some slack because they were once ok but aged out of the game. With every passing year I have more sympathy for things that have outlived their usefulness, this category of artefacts gets a break.

First Place – Blade of Fate

First of all it’s a Artefact that can only be used by Deamons of Tzeentch when they are in combat. Which is somewhere they absolutely don’t wont to be in the first place.

It replaces one of the bearers melee weapons. The heralds that can use it have one or two attacks on their melee profiles, a big bird has 4. So it is unlikely to work anyway.

But we only get four attacks, and we don’t go near combat

When it does work you replace an existing Destiny Dice with a six so you have to have Destiny Dice in order for it to do anything at all.

Best of all it works once a game. It would be garbage if it worked whenever you attacked but Once a Game? That’s the sprig of parsley on top of a shit sandwich.

You take the weapon on a Hero that can barely use it, put that hero into a combat that it doesn’t want to be anywhere near in order to improve one of your Destiny Dice once a game. Who thought this was a good idea? Were the designers having a contest to see who could come up with the worst artefact that they could get into print?

Miraculously enough there is a use for this artefact.

1. You are in a situation where you absolutley have to hit and wound something at least once.
2. You have a 6 and a 1 in your Destiny Dice Pool
3. You attack using the 6 for your hit roll activating the once a game artefact to change your other Destiny Dice to a 6
4. You use the 6 to guarantee a wound.
5. Spend the remainder of your days introducing random strangers to the world of AOS so you can brag to them about your genius.

Pull this of in a tourney game and I’ll buy you the shirt

Final Thought

So there you have it, The Blade of Fate. Shout out to Tzeentch for having a master plan cunning enough to include this one. When I had a look across the current game artefacts I found a general trend of improvement in line with the reduced number of artefacts in the new battletomes. The sloppy brain sharts that padded out Malign Sorcery may be a thing of the past. Still we had a good time discussing this one at the Craichouse so we will probably revisit the concept some day.

*The best example of a situational artefact would have to be the Troll’s Purse from the Hobbit. Bilbo tries to steal the purse from a Troll but it’s a sentient item that starts talking, alerting it’s owner, who captures Bilbo. Good stuff but why does a Troll have a Purse in the first place? Is there a shop near his Cave? Do Trolls have much of a role in the cash economy? Are Pick Pockets a major problem in the wilds of Eriador? I bet that Trolls buddies trashed him for his useless artefact choice. I hope he took the time to gloat about hitting a statistical long bomb with a situational artefact before the sunrise killed him.