There was a brief mention of "Gretchin Kingdoms" in the old Rogue Trader book that talked about whole empires (albeit small ones) of Gretchin in the 40K universe. I based it off a fondness of Gretchin I had. If you want an army with character this is it. In the next few days if I have time I post what I've got so far about the 2nd edition dark elder codex, and if I ever get around to scanning it the Gretchin Codex I made years ago when I was a kid - "Warbands of the great Gobbo: Gretchin Kingdoms and other Small Green Oddities".
Troops in most of our games are a required 50% of the points instead of 25% (I think this was mentioned above).
A level 2 psyker for a 600 point army just feels right. We use one level per 250 points as a rule of thumb. Both players must agree on what level of psyker you can buy and how many of them. The limit on psykers is set before armies are selected. Mission cards are still used for games under 1,000 points but the victory points for meeting the conditions are halved. Strategy cards are only used for games over 1,000 points. We consider anything from the Assassin codex part this ban as well. Special Characters are not allowed unless playing a special scenario type game. You would be amazed at how seldom we see virus and vortex grenades in our games lol. Wargear cards are used by permission only - ie you have to show your opponent the wargear card when picking out your army and ask if you can use it. Seriously why would a farseer show up to lead 200 points of Eldar Guardians? Games under 1,000 points (or even 1,500 sometimes) ignore the requirement of army commanders and you may select any character model to lead the army instead. Anyway this pretty much sums up the list of "house rules" we use to play more balanced games of 2nd edition: Which is what I was wishing for with the 3rd edition of the game before they butchered it by fundamentally changing the entire way Warhammer is played top to bottom. If you just limit the special characters and wargear, and get back to having more basic squads, the game is significantly more balanced. That's why my group of friends and I made some house rules that we felt fixed most of the problems with the game. Having an Imperial Assassin fighting an Eldar Avatar in the middle of the battlefield every game got old after a while. I can see though why GW did what it did with 3rd edition, the game really had become "hero hammer" so to speak. Overwatch, psychic powers, wargear cards, hit locations on vehicles etc. That's the kind of stuff that made the 2nd edition of Warhammer so fun, individual models can determine the outcome of the entire game. and my bigboss promptly jams his gun, my brother and his allies do a running victory dance around the house to celebrate, and me and my team loose. two days of playing Warhammer games and it all comes down to a single roll of the dice. Which would of resulted in my brother and his team loosing the game and me and my team winning. In fact the entire campaign came down to my last Ork Bigboss needing to kill two Chaos cultists with his custom shoota to finish the detachment off. In fact just two weeks ago I had all the guys over for a two day campaign that focused on small battles and taking territory to get points (hard to do when people have kids, jobs etc. Just like before it's the second edition rules. Combine that with the ever skyrocketing GW prices and my brothers and all of our friends just stopped playing.įast forward a few years. ie - buy more crap! Hint hint - We made the game so simple and fast you have to triple the number of models you need to even play! - What a joke. Not to mention how proud of themselves they were that you could suddenly "play an average length game with every model you own at once". Individual units didn't matter anymore, everything was so dumbed down and simplified that the models might of well have been lego men. When 3rd edition came out there just seemed to be something wrong with the game. It was one of the coolest times of my young childhood. Later on when second edition came out we had a pretty big group by then that would play the game regularly with us. Getting mail order boxes from the UK because there was literally no place to buy GW products in the US was pretty cool. then brought the game home with us when we moved back to the US and taught all of our friends. My brothers and I learned to play 40K in the Rogue Trader days in England. Interesting that some other people out there feel like I do about Warhammer. If I get a chance to playtest some of the stuff I have so far I'll post it here I guess. I'm actually in the process of reverse engineering the Dark Eldar codex from 3rd edition to 2nd and found this thread. Glad to see this thread has still been getting some traffic up til now.