Scenery Review: Temple of Skulls, Arcane Ruins, and Urban Barricades

Boy, it sure has been a while since I've posted here. Lot's of medical issues, plus a couple of secret projects that I'm not ready to make public yet. Big thanks to MJ for keeping the home fires burning!

For some reason I got it in my mind recently to spend some money on the scenery that GW has been putting out recently. I'm a HUGE fan of the Moonscape and a firm believer that every single 40k player should own at least one set. (I have two!) The Planetscape-specific version fell a little flat due to the weird decision to use vac-forming instead of injection molding like the Moonscape, but the original is still available and awesome.

So, thanks to a gift certificate to The War Store, I got my hands on The Temple of Skulls. It is really, really cool.

It is marketed as a Fantasy Battle terrain piece, which doesn't make much sense to me. Yes, it has more skulls and less guns, but it is pretty impractical in a game of Fantasy Battle. Only skirmishers, monsters, and individual characters have any chance of making it onto the thing without falling over. The slope on the side is very steep.


It comes in a large box around the size of a starter army set. The base is one single piece and it comes with a great "skull and column" sprue for the three upright skulls and the two columns. I've painted mine in a rough limestone style that I can't keep myself from using. (I think I'll be painting the opposite side of my three 2'x4' table toppers in a similar fashion so they all match.)

The most impressive thing about the Temple is how sturdy it is. Years ago this would have been so flimsy that you wouldn't have been able to put a dragon or Land Raider on the top of it without risking permanent damage. Now, you could safely stand on it. See the following picture of the underside.

It obviously was made as a proof of concept for the design process which made the Realm of Battle boards a possibility. I'm fairly certain if the RoB had kept its rumored $200 price point that a great many more would have sold. If I could have received the internet's normal discount I'm pretty sure that I would have one by now. Having two would have made my in-house Apocalypse game setup much easier, but there's no way I'm dropping that much on it.

I was so pleased with the Temple of Skulls that I picked up the Arcane Ruins set as well. This is another set that will be very difficult to use in a game of Fantasy Battle, in which case it will probably just be impassible to any ranked unit. See below for the 'assembled' version.

Of course, it is a ruin by name and looks even better knocked over.

I've been planning to make a skull-themed table for a while, inspired by the recent battlefields featured in a few recent White Dwarf reports. The Isle of Blood was particularly nasty looking. One of the great and unmentioned things about the Arcane Ruins is that it comes with way more skulls than you could ever use on the piece itself. Below is what I had left over, perfect to be used on my project to tie everything together. That's a lot of skulls!

Even more delighted, I decided to spring for the Urban Barricades set. As you can see below, you get six barricades in the set. I have the unfortunately-discontinued Sandbags set which came pre-painted (looks like a single coat and drybrush) and flocked. I think it is some sort of light resin. This set is also resin, but unpainted. It has a much higher level of detail, though, including a crashed Space Marine bike. Unlike pretty much everything else mentioned in this review, these really need painted before use, especially the one with the bike. There are a wide variety of textures and they don't look very good in the default grey resin.

I painted the bike in a non-descript color, added some metallics and rust here and there, and now they look great.

So, to cut to the rankings: (With a Moonscape at a 10/10.)

• Temple of Skulls: 8. Less useful as a Fantasy Battle terrain piece, but very, very sturdy and nicely detailed.
• Arcane Ruins: 7. Not as nicely detailed as the Temple, but the abundance of extra skull bits helps a lot.
• Urban Barricades: 7. Nice off-the-shelf, impressive if painted.

For the money, the Moonscape is still the best bet. Every player needs a set, and the price is low enough that everyone should have one. If you are thinking about a second Bastion, I'd recommend the Temple of Skulls instead. It might make a good, albeit small Landing Platform (if protected by chaos magics, that is).

Next time, notes about joining in the Biggest Apocalypse Game in the World!

REVIEW: 40k Battle Missions Supplement

Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking at this point, "Sheesh! Not ANOTHER blogger reviewing the new Battle Missions book..."

Yup, that's what you're getting here.

Its funny, for YEARS, I've been saying that Games Workshop needed to do just this - publish a book of missions. Finally, my dream comes true. Since numerous places out there on the interwebs can give you detailed information about the 33 new missions in the book, I'll take a slightly different approach in this review.

THE GOOD

Hands down, I'm happy with this product.

The missions do spice things up a good bit, but none of them really go "way out there" and mess with the basic 40k v5 mechanic; well, maybe with the exception of the Space Marine mission that features a Thunderhawk... Most are based on objectives or some variant of the Kill Point system (with even one or two using a modified v4-ish Victory Points deal).

Many of the missions include one-to-a-handful of "special rules" that add a new dimension to the mission. Yet none of these seems awfully broken or lopsided.
The book contains a small bit of fluff for almost all of the armies out there (the =][= forces being the exception), which provides a nice little break from "reading rules".

And to go beyond the book itself, I believe that this supplement can help one devise their own missions (something we here at DFIR LOVE to do), and can also be used as a springboard to formulate either a campaign or even a good game of Apocalypse.

THE BAD

All is not a rose garden, though.

Did Games Workshop miss a boat here by not supporting the Battle Missions book with more miniatures releases? The past expansions - Cities of Death, Apocalypse, and Apocalypse Reload - all featured quite a number of new model releases and/or splash bundle packages. So why did the new Battle Missions book only come with a handful of new kits for only 3 armies? Got me...

Are there to many new missions in the book? I doubt I'll ever play all of them at least once. Seriously, 30 missions (the other 3 are "special" missions) is A LOT of games to be played. 60 if you consider playing them all from both sides of the fence. Hmmm... quick head math here, at roughly 3 games per month (my average gaming schedule), it'd take me almost 2 years to play all 30 missions from both sides of the equation (ie., once as attacker and once as defender).

Are having the missions arranged by Army types going to make some people shy away from playing many of the missions? I look forward to playing some of my armies using the Daemons missions (for example), but that might not be what everyone is thinking... I think a better way to "organize" the book would have been to do so like some of the older rulebooks, by "mission type". Have raids, breakthroughs/breakouts, assaults/sieges, and etc. This would have also allowed for a more robust "special missions" section including such things as a Kill Team-esque mission, a Combat Patrol mission, a high/low gravity mission, a new Cityfight mission (or two), and even a new Apocalypse style mission (or two).

Finally, I think my last gripe is that maybe the missions are somewhat repetitive in certain elements. Deployment schemes, for example. Why not include some missions with that old "diver down" style deployment where opponents have a triangular-shaped deployment zone? Another example is that all of the missions have the standard variable game length (one includes an 8th turn, and one is "fight til one person is completely annihilated). It would have been nice to see some have a set length, a different take on variable length, or maybe even a set event that would end the game.


SUMMARY

Like I said earlier, "Hands down, I'm happy with this product." My minor gripes above do not detract from my appreciation for the Battle Missions book. If anything, the book will help me (and my fellow DFIR cohorts) springboard into more home-made missions and general "fun times". The product is worth it for the variety it adds to the game, even if you won't play every single mission in it.

In other words, I highly recommend the new Battle Missions book.