Iron Winter write up: Session 2 (part 2)

Camp Aquila Flying low over Ullanor, the squad got their first glimpse of the scale of the Triumph. Smoke on the horizon was the first sign, but as they approached they saw an army of servitors, slaves and mechanised terraforming machines covering the ground like a carpet as they carved a causeway into the planet….

Iron Winter write up: Session 2 (part 1)

Phanacon IV was compliant and the Ork menace in the system gone. Back with the fleet, word began to flood in from all over the sector of similar crushing defeats for the Orks and whole swathes of new systems being brought into the Imperium.  There was a jubilant mood across the fleet. Everyone seemed to…

Iron Winter write up: Session 1

The player characters (PCs) have been recruited into the X Legiones Astartes: the Iron Hands after their feral world was brought into compliance by the Crusade Fleets during the Great Crusade.  6 years of hypno-indoctrination, brutal training regimens and invasive surgeries to awaken their latent astartes organs have passed.  The recruits from the planet Jord…

Iron Winter part 4: A Sense of Scale

One of the problems I ran into early on when developing this campaign was the sense of power or scale. I wanted the characters to grow throughout the story from competent adolescents to full-blown Angels of Death. Like I mentioned in my first post, I wanted to stick with the Cypher System for the second…

Iron Winter part 3: Cyphers

As the name suggests, the Cypher System revolves around the idea that the characters have access to cyphers. These one-use items have a huge variety of effects from healing injured PCs, blasting fire at bad guys, creating impassable walls, flight or even teleportation. The GM should really think of these as character abilites rather than…

Iron Winter part 2: Weapons

The two things which I probably spent the most time on when prepping and designing this campaign were the weapons and the cyphers. Weapons are an integral part of a Space Marine’s life so not doing this area justice would have let the campaign down I feel. Cyphers are also fundamental to the mechanics of…

Iron Winter part 1: Background

‘Iron Winter’ is a Horus Heresy roleplaying campaign I run for my local gaming group (which includes several Synod members). Chapter 1 concluded in 2018 and we are due to restart the campaign with chapter 2 on August 16th 2019. **WARNING – Spoilers ahead!** If you are a player in the campaign or are following…

Ha-Mashchi – Blood Angels Destroyers.

Within the spheres of the Blood Angels, there exist outsider elements. Marines so damaged by war or those who are unable to work within the reformed tenets of the Principia Belicosa, that they may only find refuge in their own, unstable kind. These are not the formations of the Angels Tears, those who commit acts…

Hobby Hindsight: Secret Servitor 2018

This blog post is going to be the first of an ad-hoc series I’m dubbing ‘Hobby Hindsights’. For this series I will be looking back at a project from the past and talking about the influences behind it or how it is still relevent today. For this first Hobby Hindsight, I will be looking back…

Review: Byzantine Cataphracts from V&V Miniatures

When I first started planning my Eastern Roman (Byzantine) army for Saga, I knew I had to have a unit of Cataphracts (or Klibanophoroi) in my force. They are the quintessential Byzantine unit and they were what originally captured my imagination about the empire way back when I first encountered them in Age of Empires…