Warhammer 40K 7th Edition Imagineering

Rumor mongers are out in force and ready to tell you over and over what...you already know...from reading two pages from a White Dwarf.  Its very relevant information.  But we wanted to attack it from the imaginative standpoint and think through how it might practically impact things.  Maybe a little wish listing went into it too.

At thedarkcity.net, we kind of role played through what the magic system would look like in 7th.  After all, some of us have played using the Fantasy Magic System and we understood from the White Dwarf article floating around how the powers are generated and extrapolated from what we already know about things.

We deduced  there will be target numbers for the Psyker powers and one of the strategies will be whether you REALLY want to expend your attempts to augment Deny the Witch with your Psyker dice or just keep them for offense.  This is a resource management component that is largely lacking from 40K strategy.  Since it will be given its OWN phase as it probably needed to have, it may eliminate some things as well.  For example as the Psyker phase is very likely to be before the movement phase, that also means that shooting psychic powers may well happen in this same phase!  That necessarily means that Orders and other non-psychic effects may not apply in time for the Psyker powers to be boosted by them.  So even a Witchfire power may now NOT be able to have Ignores cover granted by a Tau Battlesuit, and so on.

As game play went it was only slightly more complicated to do than it is now but the layer to the game it adds is really worth that.  The fact that Psykers are much more likely to fail or...alternately....  are going to expend a lot of extra dice and will find casting too many powers a bit difficult is a built in sort of limitation on Psyker powers which are pretty much universally blamed for some peoples misery during games (see 2++ saves and other indignities for details).  That misery is likely to continue into 7th edition BUT, perhaps less frequently as the Eldar player decides if its more important to have Fortune or Guide that turn, knowing he may get neither.

We also discussed the new Pandoras Box lists (They call them Unbound).  Since they still obey the Allies Matrix, and the Matrix is changing, my guess is that Tyranids may be big winners here.  After all as an Unbound list, they can pretty much take whatever they want from their codex and even perhaps ally with themselves!

What we spent a lot of time talking about was whether the bonus to Battle Forged lists will be significant enough to matter to them.  The Matrix applies to both Unbound armies and "Battle Forged"(normal) armies so that being equal, the bonus to the more restrained list would be what?  One thought we came up with was something that hails back to 40K in 40 Minutes.  Essentially in that system the enemy could take more points but it allowed you to buy special advantages (Lets use Shred for example).  So if the enemy is Unbound there might be a chart of things like Shred that the 'Forged army could choose from or roll for.

Warlord Traits was another bonus possibility.  Perhaps the 'Forged armies get two rolls and take the best?  We even wondered if their superior coordination of units might allow the 'Forged forces a re-roll on reserves.  We rejected the idea that the enemy would get bonus points to spend because that's a bit unpractical in tourney play.

Whatever the "mysterious bonus" will be, it better be good in order to encourage people to bother with Battle Forged armies.

Theres' crazy talk by embittered Blood Angels that they want to be able to charge after they Deep Strike.  I said hell no.  BUT...  I do think a shoot+run ability only as they land would make sense.  Parachutists never land that precisely anyways. Templates and blasts are kinda horrifying to Deep Strikers and Intercept makes it worse.  Allowing them to perhaps make a spreading move after they land would allow them a little more survivability without going to the extreme of offering them charges afterwards, which I certainly hope they do not.

Many in the discussion thought that assaulting from normal reserves does make sense.  It was possibly in other editions but not 6E.  Hopefully 7E can ameliorate that, because the prohibition on it has never really made sense to me.  If the troops are THERE lurking, and suddenly burst forth, why would they suddenly stop?  It is very odd.  If they allow charges from reserve the Webway portals will actually be worth trying to use.  they are a little clumsy in the way they work, but at least it would make them useful again and Dark Eldar would regain some of their flavor.

Anyways it's fun to imagine what the changes could mean.  There are other elements to this leak we could talk about and so feel free to post comments here about it.  Thus far I have seen nothing that really turns me off except the idea of everyone summoning Daemons.  That is just weird and will bear more scrutiny as more information comes out.