I don’t actually have a clever tie-in for this stupid pun title, but Goonhammer Patron Dnoonan said it and I’d be remiss to look a gift pun in the mouth. Honestly? I’m just mad I didn’t come up with it.
SRM’s Road to the Roadshow: US Open Seattle 2022: Part 3: TEMPLAR OF THE DOG: I DON’T MIND STEALING wins FROM THE MOUTHS OF decadence
I’ll workshop that one more later. (author’s note: I didn’t)
After multiple successful battles with my Templars vs. both Necrons and Dark Eldar, my former personal bogeyman, I was feeling pretty confident. When my friend and coworker said he was bringing along not only his Orks but our hams-curious coworker, I suddenly had a tinge of performance anxiety. I’ve gotta be an ambassador for the game and I can’t totally beef it in this particular battle. Easy, right?
I totally beefed it, y’all.
This game went worse for me than pretty much any game of 9th edition so far. I tried to vary up my secondaries – something of a moot point for this series as it’s ostensibly for a Crusade event – and absolutely whiffed 2/3 of them. My Rhino was caught out of position, causing me to lose it and the 10 loaded for bear vanguard veterans inside at the top of turn 2. My target priority was terrible, focusing on his big stupid Stompa instead of any of the units that actually do stuff. I didn’t keep a plan in mind to stick to, and I forgot to deep strike my Terminators or disembark the Emperor’s Champion from his Repulsor Executioner transport til turn 3. When it came time for the big man to join the fray, he killed 2 Ork boyz and was killed by the remaining 3 and their nob. This was a genuinely mournful showing for the Templars, with the final score going 92-10 in favor of the xenos. The barleywine on an empty stomach probably didn’t help my case.
On the hobby side of things, I’ve been plugging away at some Primaris Sword Brethren. I got them for review purposes back when the codex dropped, so consider this a review within an event article. That’s right, we’re in article inception territory here. No, I won’t call it “articleception” as that is not a word. You’d think nobody had ever taken an English class before.
These models are real dang complicated for Space Marines. I’ve been playing 40k for 17 years now and these are probably the most complex Marine infantry I’ve ever put together. Each took me like 40 minutes to build, and there are roughly 15-20 pieces per model, depending on details. Lining up their shackled wrists and threading sword hilts through chains is tricky but nothing a fairly experienced modeler can’t do. The frustrating part is their capes, which can’t really be left off to be painted separately due to the way they wrap around and under various parts of the model. You also need to line up joins on the cape that really, really don’t want to join and don’t have any strong guides. There are these little divots that theoretically slot over the details on their pauldrons, but said pauldrons have no guides to put them in a specific position. There’s no guarantee you’ll use the exact pauldron it’s asking for, so they’re never going to fit quite right. As a result, I had to use ample amounts of dummy thicc plastic glue to fill the gaps to middling results.
Aside from some of those assembly woes, I do think the kit is extremely cool and full of characterful heads, neat weapons, and great details. There are enough leftover bits that you can really deck out some other units to great effect. I left off all the accessory doodads as these guys are already dripped out in Templar detail and are gonna take forever to paint already.
In-game, they fall between Bladeguard Veterans and Vanguard Veterans. I’ve had decent luck running Vanvets in transports using the classic Sword Brethren models from 4th edition, this most recent game vs. Orks notwithstanding.
These new Sword Bros cost a smidge more points for an extra attack, a dubiously useful exemption to the Passion of their Vow, and a much stricter set of wargear options. I decked mine out with a single set of lightning claws, a single thunder hammer, and a trio of power swords because functionally there’s very little difference between a power sword and power axe or whatever. The hammer and claws also just look cool as hell, and I’d be remiss not to take the coolest looking options in the kit, effectiveness be damned.
I painted these suckers using almost the exact scheme as the Super Sword Bros above, but went for straight red on their capes and straight cream (I hated typing that) on their tabbards. This is opposed to that original scheme, where it’s red inside and cream outside (again, ew). It’s simpler and in my opinion, a more striking scheme overall. My favorite bit, naturally, was painting unique heraldry for each of them, as that’s kind of my thing.
Painting them wasn’t too bad, all things considered, but they sure do have a lot of doodads on em. Fortunately, I really like painting volumetric highlights on their cloth bits, and it obscures a ton of the edges that would require careful line highlighting. I frequently referred back to my own painting article on High Marshal Helbrecht, as that is as close to digitally offloading my memory as current technology allows. William Gibson never could have predicted our cyberpunk future to be so tame.
With that, I will bid you, dear reader, as adieu as I am able. Tune in next week(?) for more regrettable unit choices, mayhaps a game I misplayed horridly, and approximately 1000 words lazily meandering towards a point. I make no promises and you should expect no apologies.
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