The Road to 7th Edition

Episode #3: The Army of Rat-Ho-Tep

WARNING: This article and the associated articles are not directly related to Warhammer Online, and are instead more geared towards Warhammer Fantasy Battles. So if you are not a fan of Warhammer Fantasy Battles, this may not be the article for you. Of course you’re still going to read it… come on… chicken…

I have to apologize for the long delay between issues.  Between the release of the new Mythic newsletter and the fact that I’ve been involved in a recent move across the I’ve been rather busy lately.  Anyways, on to this week’s edition of The Road to 7th Edition!

My Choice

So I’ve made my decision and if you hadn’t guessed by the title of this week’s entry I will be starting an army of Tomb Kings.  I’ve had a few pieces of Tomb Kings stuff scattered about my house which I found while I was preparing for the move, so that only added to the craziness of my new plan.

The decision to pick Tomb Kings came while sitting about my local game store when I was pondering over available army books and models.  Personally I’ve always been a fan of the Tomb Guard unit and even had picked up a box several months ago at a local game auction along with the army book.  Having almost completely forgotten about them until recently, it was nice to pull that box out and dust it off.

Discussing the new edition I came to find that I really liked the idea of the Tomb Kings and how they couldn’t miscast spells and that their incantations were quite powerful now.  Beyond that I had always liked the name character Khalida; the Tomb Queen, and was looking at doing an army based off of her.  With this as a base I thought about doing a Tomb Kings army with an asp/snake feel to it.  Since the manager of my local game store is also a professional miniature sculptor, he kept feeding me bad ideas…

What I Have So Far

Skeleton Warriors (36):  The core unit of the Tomb Kings army is the Skeletal Warriors that make up its basic shock troopers.  Initially equipped with a bow and hand weapon there are several choices that can be made with this unit in terms of swapping equipment.  As I currently have a standard box of Skeletons from the Vampire counts range and a unit of Tomb Kings Skeletons I am considering making two units of ten, one armed with bows and the other armed with a more traditional hand weapon/shield combination.

Skeleton Horsemen (8):  Coming with only eight models it is hard to make any sort of “useful” unit with the initial Tomb Kings horsemen box.  My initial thought is to go with the standard unit of Light Horsemen that will give me a decent fast cavalry unit armed with bows.  Nothing quite like undead fast cavalry to make things difficult on the enemy.

Tomb Guard(13):  A box of ten Tomb Guard teamed with a command blister makes up my basic unit at this point.  I’ll need another box to bring them up to a desired size, but right now I am content with just giving the models a dry test run and seeing what they are capable of.  Personally I just love the idea of a unit capable of dealing Killing Blows and the option of a magical banner of up to 50 points.  Quite a nice combination of evil methinks…

Hierophant:  This bad kid on the block does all the spell casting for my army, and thus is the one who lets my army move around the table and perform standard ‘killingsmanship’.  I’m still debating what I want to arm him with in terms of magical equipment, but I am quite fond of the model and might convert it a bit more to my likings.

Icon Bearer:  I’m really debating what to do with this one.  As the Battle Standard bearer I want some mobility so he will either have to go on a horse or a chariot.  The blister comes with a horse mounted version to put him on, but I like doing things differently so I might have to put him on a Chariot.  Just to be mean!

What To Do?

So for now I’m going to stick with what I have and try to go off of that.  My army still needs a few more infantry and a Tomb Prince before it can actually be game legal, and I am debating converting up a Tomb Prince from all the extra skeleton stuff I’ll have left over from the batch I have right now.

I am looking at building a Tomb King army that relies less on chariots and more on cavalry and strong block units of infantry.  Thus as a theme I am considering only mounting my characters on chariots for mobility (see Icon Bearer description above), and teaming some of the Tomb Kings magic items with chariots is just something that begs to be done.

My desired lack of chariots is actually based around another Tomb Kings army I was witness to…  our own Ralph’ had his Tomb Kings army that consisted of nothing but chariots, and chariots, and I even think he fit in some more chariots somehow.  Thus wanting to be different then our illustrious techie leader, I have decided to go for a much more infantry/cavalry mix of an army.

In the future I intend to pick up some Tomb Spiders & Tomb Swarms to get some poison in the army to get ready for the Khalida theme I want to get going once I pick up her model and start work on a 2000 point army.  Poison has always been a fun ability in Warhammer and with an army who’s shooting only hits on a 5 or 6, that means half of my hits should be poison.  SWEET!

Always Open To Suggestions

If you have any ideas on what you think I should do with this army; such as dirty tricks, evil weapon combinations, effective units, etc, etc, then I implore you to email me or better yet post in our own forums with your discussed tactics!