The Great Crusade: Enemies of the Emperor

Good afternoon all.

After writing my post last week it occurred to me that I'd been a Battle Bunny for nearly a year. I started reflecting on the day I sat down with Kaelo and Drake to discuss projects I was working on that they wanted to have a home on the Battle Bunnies blog, and it occurred to me that after nearly a year I haven't as yet made good on any of those things.

You've seen a lot of Mechanicum from me and some legion but what I'm really interested in is offering a genuine flip side to legion forces to truly make the Great Crusade a feasible gaming experience.

As you know I'd spent a fair few years (almost 10 years ago now) at the forefront of pre-heresy gaming as part of a fringe and moderately exclusive group of gamers, I had lots of fun converting and scratch building models for legion forces (and towards the end Mechanicum forces too) it was after playing several campaign weekends that I started to feel that legion vs legion or human vs human was a little limited in its scope so I began the Enemies of the Emperor project.

The project was an attempt to provide more flavour to heresy era games but to form the main stay of any pre-heresy games set during the Great Crusade era.

Cue the bad guys (or in fact the guys oppressed and destroyed by an invading alien army).

The project initially started with the Laer, I was captivated by how alien they were and how they tied in seemlesley in to the 40k universe. After researching them in the novel Fulgrim and digitally sketching them out I decided to write rules for them which matched the fluffy descriptions of them in the book. From there it snowballed and after about 9 months I had a book of 6 unique alien races, with unique wargear and special rules. The book went through vigorous play testing at my FLGS and I was finally happy to get it saved as a PDF to share around.

The first draft took a while as each new novel presented more races or more info on races previously introduced. I trawled through each book in order to get the rules and descriptions as accurately as possible - as it was also my intention to build a 1000pt force for each of the races in order to play games. Then the inevitable happened - I started book 2. There was such a wealth of character out there in the Heresy novels that 6 races just didn't cover it - so book 2 (and another 6 races were nessecary).

The first book looked at the Laer, The Nurthene, The Nephilim, The Olamic Quietude, The Storm Scions and the Megarachnids. To date I have an army for the Megarachnids, half an army for the Nephilim and sone units made for the other races.

In the new book I'm focusing on The Demiurg, The Keylekid, The Jorgall, The Hrud, The Exodites and the Interex. I've begun models for the Jorgall, Keylekid, Demiurg and Hrud but as you can imagine it's a big job for one man 😊

Here's a line up of some of the models I'm working on. 

(L-R Megarachnid Warrior, Keylekid, Nephilim, Jorgall, Storm Scion Militiaman, Hrud day warrior and an imperial fist space marine - for scale)

What I would like to do is every so often show you the progress that I'm making with each army - and possibly farm out the painting of some to the other Battle Bunnies to paint up for the blog and potential campaigns and one off battle reports.

So if you too would like to build and play an army firmly enshrined in the Great Crusade era that isn't fighting for the Emperor then I'm happy to help where I can - it would be great to see lots of variety out there and who knows there might be events in the future where we can pit aliens against each other and against legion forces.

Here's the link to the Great Crusade Book 1 - Conquest:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7eugwq8pcz1z3db/TheGreatCrusadeConquest%20%281%29.pdf?dl=0

I will be revisiting the book in the near future with amendments to the Nephilim human forces and a few little tweeks but for now it's a completely usable addition to 30K gaming.

Here's some page previews of the new races from Book 2 - Conflict but they are mainly untested as yet so may well change in the future.

Well I hope I've whet your appetite for more Xenos and insurgents in the coming months and look forward to showing you a bit more of the process involved in each respective army along the way.

Remember: if you can't beat em join em.

KF