Express yourself
You can’t be wrong
When something’s good
It’s never gone

~ New Order, World in Motion

Whether it’s a favourite character from a Black Library novel that you need to see represented on the tabletop, or that girl you knew in your 20s that you still regularly bang one out over, we’ve all got “the one that got away”. So today we’re launching into a joint project with our friends at Woehammer to bring those missing characters to life with custom warscrolls!

Here’s the premise:

• We confered with our Patrons for their character nominations and votes
• We came up with the Plastic Craic Top 3 Wishlist, and Woehammer did the same
• We swapped our lists of warscrolls, and set each other to work

So now the next steps will be for us to write and refine the warscrolls that Woehammer assigned to us, and hand them back across, while they do the same. We’ll publish the results on both sites, invite your feedback and hopefully post a couple of batreps too. So let’s take a look at what made the cut.

The selected warscrolls

Our assignment from the Woehammer team is to wrap our heads around this lot:

• Grom the Paunch
• Gotrek and Felix Regiment of Renown
• Khorgos Khul

And meanwhile our own Patrons nominated and voted for the following, which Woehammer will get to work on:

• Nakai
• Grungni
• Khorgos Khul

Interesting to see Khorgos Khul make both lists – he certainly is popular.

Honourable Mentions

A couple of characters who came close to making our list were Hamilcar Bear-eater (very popular in our nominations process, but then somehow attracted fewer votes than nominations) and Frost King Braggoth (of Braggoth’s Beast-Hammer fame).

As for the ones who did make the cut: I’d never even heard of Nakai, but apparently Total War has boosted his profile? I’ll have to take that on advice, since I don’t play it. Grom the Paunch was a pretty big WHFB character back in his day but is also prominent in Total War, so I guess that hasn’t hurt his popularity.

Grungni seems like a tough gig, so good luck with that one guys! If you make him literally God tier he’ll be OP, and yet anything short of God tier will be underdone. I’m glad that’s Woehammer’s quandry to resolve and not ours, but our own puzzle is what to do with Gotrek and Felix, since the former has already had warscrolls in AOS. So let’s take a look at some initial ideas for how we might address these units.

Design Notes

We’ll be thrashing these out together in the Craichouse Discord, but here’s a few early ideas I had for the list Woehammer gave us to work on.

Grom the Paunch

The Tubby Legend is easily my own favourite WHFB character, and I’d be using this warscroll to settle a few scores.

Grievance number one: it pisses me off something chronic that so many chariots and chariot-adjacents in this game have gigantic blades attached, that smash into you at maximum velocity, and apparently do nothing whatsoever.

So: Grom the Paunch has scythed wheels, and those scythed wheels will do charge mortals. It was good enough for a cheap-ass Stormcast Chariot and it’s good enough for him. The proper Stonehorn 4+ mortals too, thank you very much; it averages 3.5 damage just the same as rolling a D6, but it’s way cooler.

Grievance Number Two: I’m sick of frontline heroes who can’t fight worth a damn. Grom’s axe is famous for striking down bigger opponents with a single blow, so he should be able to scrap a bit and probably have Crit Mortal on that weapon profile.

Grom’s main schtick and the reason behind that big belly is that he ate Troggoth flesh, which is now locked in a rolling battle with his mighty gut as it continuously regenerates inside him. So he has Troggoth-style healing. Grom’s little pal has got a lucky banner with him, and in the past that’s given him a 5++ ward, but the combination of that ward and the charge mortals is way too close to the classic Stonehorn package; so let’s cook up some other way for a lucky banner to have an impact. There should be no shortage of ways that “being lucky” can be represented in a wargame.

Most importantly he needs his own Grom’s Waaagh Once-per-Game army-wide buff. There’s loads of formats that could take, and I’ll leave that up to the brains trust.

Gotrek and Felix ROR

In my own Top 100 Priorities for this game, another Gotrek warscroll would have been number 101, but democracy produces some baffling outcomes and we’re here to give the people what they want. There’s no point whatsoever in doing another Gotrek that plods around the board slowly and cracks out infinite damage, but with a human dickhead following him around this time.

The bloke can fight, no doubt about it, but so can most Black Library characters. What really separates Gotrek is that he’s seeking a glorious death, and I would also point out that despite his AOS “No Teleports” rules, he’s actually known for finding secret passages. So here’s a few ideas to put some daylight between this all-new Gotrek and the classic warscroll, while honouring him as a character:

• Significantly lower output than the old Warscroll, opening up room to explore other thematic rules.
• Secret Passages: Can teleport around the board, from terrain piece to terrain piece.
• When Gotrek dies: on a 3+, no he doesn’t, because the poor bugger just can’t catch a break (replaces his Ward, or at least that’s heavily weakened).
• Felix likewise does not die on a 3+ (since he’s believed to have some form of immortality).
• Once per game: Felix can 3D6 charge, but must complete that charge in combat with a Monster, otherwise he stays put. He’s big on fighting them.
• Each model can take the other with them on their terrain teleport / 3D6 charge, because they’re a duo.
• And here’s the big one: If and when Gotrek actually dies, he scores you VPs (with a bonus VP kicker if Felix is there to record it for history).

I think this would give Gotrek and Felix a really unique purpose in the game and reflect their story in the game mechanics. Winning does look different to Gotrek, so why not feed that directly into your actual win condition? You’d get some really interesting decisions and play patterns too, where you want to keep Felix alive long enough to record Gotrek’s glorious death, and those 3+ rolls can fuck you in both directions.

Maybe “Just Won’t Die” is on a 3+, maybe it’s a 4+, let’s discuss that; and we’d still have a lot of work to do on the finer details of the warscroll and how you price in bonus VPs. But I think that would be a cool way to go. And if you want to sing a little song at the table like an IRL bard when Gotrek dies at just the right moment, then I’m not going to stop you.

Khorgos Khul

Old mate is certainly popular. Other than a string of second-place finishes, I think there are a few things that really define Khul as a character:

• Has a Reality-Splitting Axe that insta-jibs opponents on a 5+. Much like The Destroyer artefact from Orruk Warclans, this is an iconic rule that GW keeps giving him and taking away again, as if they hate their players having fun.
• We know he’s recently ascended to become a Daemon Prince.
• He has a little doggy with him, called Grizzlemaw. Woggud boy yessheiz yessheiz!

So my outline plan would be a jacked-up Daemon Prince warscroll (first requirement: 8 attacks on his big weapon) with a jacked-up ascended hellhound Companion too. And Reality-Splitting Axe is back.

One idea I did have was that given he’s new to Deamonhood, maybe his physical manifestation is unstable: you have to start him off the board, and when he appears you roll a bunch of D3 and assign them to certain characteristics (Move, Attacks, Rend, maybe you can park one for a charge roll). Build your own ass-kicker, boosting his stats in a way of your choosing. Anyway, I’m happy to defer to the Chaos guys if they wanted to go a different way here.

Let’s see if this is harder than it looks

One of life’s little pleasures is seeing some overconfident (or just overlubricated) flog running their mouth at a public performance – most often a comedy show – and seeing them get their arse handed to them on a platter by the professional on stage. Well the good news for anyone hate-reading our blog is that could soon be us!

We’ll head back to the Craichouse, pull up a stained mattress and get to work on these ideas. Once we’ve got a consensus warscroll and points cost, we’ll throw them out there for people to try in their games: I’ll be happy to give Grom a hitout in my Gloomspite for example. We’ll report back in a batrep on how it went, and if he’s disastrously overpowered I’ll take my medicine; and if he’s weak as piss on arrival, well then he’ll fit right in with the rest of Gitmob.

I’m really looking forward to getting to work on this, and if you want to join in on the project: you know what to do.

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