Geez that was a big weekend. Bendigo VIC punches well above its weight in Warhammer terms – if you’re not from the Great State of Victoria but you have heard of Bendigo, chances are it’s either because of an Age of Sigmar GT or an old Rick and Morty bit.

October is Springtime in Australia, and that means Bush Bash GT time in Bendigo – a healthy 26 players signed up for this one, not bad for an event in the Australian bush, and with our friends from Adelaide sending a strong contingent in their Vengabus.

I went undefeated on Day 1 with my Sons of Behemat at this event before I bailed on Day 2 – and I’ll come back to that. But all of my opponents were experienced players with a bunch of 4-1s and 5-0s on their resumés, so I’m happy to take it as proof of concept that the list works as intended.

I’ll do a full write-up on the event including a celebration of the winners, the Coolest Army and some big moments and learning points from my own games. But first things first, today we’ll run through my KBS list which felt pretty durn good on the tabletop. I’ll give a briefing on how it plays, then introduce each Mega in turn.

The List

I wanted a low-stress army for a low-stress weekend. Four Megas felt about right, and I wanted to play them aggro. I tried Takers Tribe first with all the violent options: that Sandals thing you always take on the Warstomper, the +1 to Hit aura and the extra attacks Heroic Trait. It didn’t feel quite right but after a pivot to the King Brodd’s Stomp Army of Renown, I was in business.

You’re still going all-in on smashing stuff – there’s a couple of ways to stack up extra attacks:

Where if felt a lot better than fighting in Sons allegiance though was the mortal wounds. If you roll hot in this army, they can go absolutely Richter. The big one is hucking terrain around on both players’ turns:

This is fuggin’ nuts. It doesn’t even matter if you’re in combat – you just have to roll that 3+. As an edge case, it even gets around the Gitmob Shaman’s “No-Shoot” aura because that only affects shooting attacks (which this ain’t). Seriously, if an Aelf army could do this, I’d be pissing and moaning about it like nobody’s business.

The other Rampages you get are some Artefact thievery, an anti-horde thing that is really an anti-elite thing, and one of those Stonehorn tippy-toes 3D6 moves after charging. They all have plenty of use:

Watch This is usually good for about 3 damage into Monsters, and it can really help the maths a lot if you’re looking at splitting attacks between say a foot hero and a combat unit. The dream scenario is a big unit on good saves, like reinforced Chorfs or Ardboyz which are both around right now. That expensive 3+ save infantry is already a good matchup for you with all the Anti-Infantry rend you have on your melee profiles: you turn that 3+ save into a 6+ in the blink of an eye, and that’s before you even think about the mortal damage that oozes out of this army.

What you lose

In exchange you lose all the standard Sons of Behemat Rampages. The biggest things you give up are Roar to switch off Commands (I really missed Roar, since it’s usually as good as +1 Rend in effect) and the Suplex, which is amazing in the mirror match but just generally super fun.

All in all it feels like a good trade. That 3+ D6 mechanic might look like a turbo-charged Shitty D3, but in practice it feels so much better. The explosive upside makes it feel much less painful when your cornerstone ability does nothing whatsoever all those other times, and every one of these rolls is an exciting moment for both players.

In any given game you’ll have a couple of times where you roll a 2 and get nothing and it’s your opponent who will get a little lift: in my last practice game, across four shooting phases I rolled 2-2-2-6 for example. And all of them were memorable.

It’s really elegant design – harking back to the FW Chorf Magma Cannons for those with long memories, which I always thought were quite neat when I played against them. It creates stories for both players and it always feels epic¹.

Some notes on playing the army effectively

Needless to say you’ll be allocating one CP to praying with Brodd every turn. The “Points builder” prayer is a Gorksend for him, and once you’ve had +2 attacks on that big Obelisk you’ll find it hard to go back.

As pointed out by the great Hayden McMurray – with KBS you need to plan your movement around terrain. You need to move and charge intentionally, so that you always end up with your base near terrain when it needs to be; it’s like snapping to cover in Gears of War. You usually want to end up within 3″ of terrain so you can access various mortal-dealing abilities, and you need to survey the table accordingly. Don’t just wander around the board aimlessly, then measure up at the start of the combat phase and realise you ended up 3.5″ away and feel sad about it.

The good news is that terrain placement is very dependable in the modern era of terrain maps, and you have big 130mm bases. I have never, ever had a problem getting a toe onto an objective and still tagging terrain within 3″ unless I was dumb enough to forget. I’d suggest dropping a combat gauge down around terrain pieces before you deploy or start your move, as a reminder to yourself.

The second major strength of this AOR is that your damage is spread across a few phases, which makes you much feel like much less of a sitting duck. Hucking rocks in the shooting phase and stamping on shit at the start of the combat phase – even before Strike First units get to fight – can take a pretty sizeable bite out of your opponent’s hammer before they get to swing. Even the shitty D3 from the Gatebreaker ability can strike lucky, and hits multiple units at once – it’s dicey AF but it’s not a Rampage, so it’s additional to your other sources:

For that reason I leaned into double Gatebreakers in this list with their useful shooting attack. There’s a few combos of various Megas you can run, and Beast-smashers are great, but I value that damage outside of the combat phase pretty highly in this army. The only problem with this shooting profile – as any SOB player can confirm – is that rolling a 2+ to Wound on a single dice is the hardest roll in the game.

Planning the Heist

King Brodd

My King Brodd is Mucklegeet from Heresy Miniatures. To me it feels like a better model for the big lad because unlike the official mini, it has a noticeably bigger stature than a standard Mega (while still fitting perfectly on that 130mm base). He also has massive feet.

The lil monk running away in tribute to Johann is from Minifigs.

Slim Jim the Warstomper

Slim Jim doesn’t have a small appetite – the trouble is that he once at a Troggoth Hag who disagreed with him, and continues to rumble away in his stomach. Ever since then he’s struggled to keep the weight on – you definitely don’t want to be the Freeguild Steelhelm standing underneath that bomb hatch when it opens.

Slim Jim is based on a Mantic Giant torso, reposed, pinned and Miliputted with a bunch of spare Warstomper bits to make it clear which Mega he is.

Kaman-Hul the Gatebreaker

Kaman-Hul was painted in orange and black at the request of The Redoubtable Mr Jennings.

It’s the first time I really painted anything in orange and black, but I like how it turned out. One thing I tried to do was to keep the orange panels away from the skin, separated by black panels, so it didn’t clash with the skin tones.

Cousin Eddie (Gatebreaker)

Calvin said “That looks like a wrestling belt”, and so black and gold it was.

This Gatebreaker is Papworth the Pillager by Mierce Miniatures. His little Executioner mate is another one from Minifigs, and he goes by Colin. Colin Wood.

Whenever I attempt the Hillbilly Smash, it’s usually with Cousin Eddie.

What’s Next?

I’ll be back later in the week with a run-down on all three games. I’ll aim to keep it punchy: focusing on key moments and cool things that happened, the overall flow of the game and any illustrations or learning points that came up.

What we won’t do is get bogged down with “Then I did this, and then I did this”.

We’ll also take a look at what happened elsewhere at the event, so as a taster, here’s the coolest list I reckon I’ve ever seen:

And I’ll sign off with a photo of Luke Doman and Joel McGrath giving it buggery at The Vine on the Saturday night. Catch you on Friday for part two 🤟

If you’d like to help us continue our work, we’d love to have your support. All Patreon Tiers include Discord access, exclusive articles and regular contests. Our Tiers are priced to be within everyone’s reach, so please click here to join us today!

1. Much better than those “Roll a dice to roll another dice” stuff that so often bog down GW games. ↩︎