This post covers
defining certain features of your average blokes in your army and how to make
the interesting and unique to your personal force.
I'm going to leave
this note here just before I begin for those of you that have recently joined
the blog: First of all thank you all for
having an interest in what I have to say; Second you might want to check out some
of the links I have on the right, for instance you might want to check out the
series that I did of designing a planet or Battle Reportification since my
statistics tell me that most people have never even looked at them, you might
find them helpful or at the very least interesting.
With that out of the
way you're going to want me to go on to the actual topic of this post. I suppose I'll oblige you all. For many people the common troopers are the
easiest to define and develop in your army; after all they are the majority of
your army and oftentimes you have a central idea or theme for your army laid
out. For many others though they are
complicated and difficult because people are different and you don't want them
all to be identical; perhaps you want to put more thought into them because you
want to make sure that your desired theme or principle for the army across.
I've mentioned theme
several times in this post as oftentimes when creating an army you have some
core idea or another behind it. The
mechanized fast response force that reinforces positions wherever they are
needed, or the heavy assaulting army that is designed to crash into enemy lines
and obliterate them all while withstanding massive amounts of fire power and
resistance. Maybe you have a more story
based army. No that's not possible, no
one does that. For those imaginary
people that might do this you might have some ideas in mind that I will be
covering later in this series, but some examples for right now could be an
Eldar corsair army that specializes in stealth and swift maneuvers or an
imperial guard force that is most often frequenting trench warfare
battlegrounds. Perhaps the theme that you
have in mind is more of a feeling and not a matter of composition, this could
be something grim, or evil (grim would be an army that is made up of units that
are designed to do their job for instance and do it because it is necessary
despite the harm they are causing, evil would be total suffering or
annihilation while perhaps enjoying it such as Dark Eldar that are supposed to
enjoy what they do like Hellions or wyches, not really wracks or incubi because
they have either no real emotions or are disciplined respectively. Of course wracks could be included depending
on the type of evil you are going for in this case being necromancy and
slaughtering, torturing, and enslaving unwilling subjects to other purposes. I won't go into any more of this now
however). A lot of the time the troops
are the best way to represent your ideas because they compose the most
significant part of your army.
There are generally
two orders for your story. One is that
the story comes after you have written up your army list, the second is the
other way around. They each have their
pros and cons, the story coming second means that you have some guidelines for
direction and can be inspired by that, however you might find that you are
limited by what you an reasonably jump to thematically or you might end up with
an army similar to someone else's if you are taking a common type of list. The theme coming first means that you can do
anything you want and create something really personalized and unique, the
problem is that you might need inspiration, you might find that you can't
incorporate all of your ideas into the list because you have a points
limitation or nothing really fits into that idea you had (of course that is
just a problem of the book not having what you need, and in those situations
you can just take some creative license and say that this represents that or
just change what it is from the perspective of normality, for instance you want
a space marine squad to be devoted to gathering the gene seed of the fallen
comrades and the apothecary isn't enough in your mind, so you commandeer an
assault marine squad to charge in and clear out enemy forces around the bodies
of the fallen and then they gather up the gene seed, keeping the apothecary out
of danger. These could in fact be
vanguard veterans to represent their special training and experience in order
to accomplish this task quickly, efficiently, and correctly. Army wise they would be vanguards, but story
wise they would be a specialist force not seen in any other army).
I just realized that
a bunch of this post was devoted to theme, but in any case it has a lot to do
with the troops any ways so it is not too much of a waste. For the troops in specific you are often
limited by your options, so that is why the theme is so important and what will
make your force unique. Decide whether
or not you want to detail the troops by unit, by platoon or an equivalent
divider, by leaders of a group of squadrons, or some other method. With that in mind you can do what you did for
the elites, heavy gear, or specialists in terms of events, how they got to be
there, etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment