Las Vegas Open, and musings on the future

The Las Vegas Open is coming up in 10 days and I just packed up the army for the trip - Here's hoping they survive the passage through the warp. Always a little dicey. For posterity's sake I snapped a quick pic of 'em all laid out:

Not a particularly hardcore army, it's got the standard 20-man tac squad of which any self-respecting heresy army ought to have at least one, and a spectacularly overcosted assault squad for the second troops choice. The cheap-as-chips terminator squad has died to a man foot-slogging in my last few games, but I'm hoping the new Spartan will help get them where they're most useful. The pair of Plasmacutioners have punched far above their weight class in the past, and the Scorpius is just hell on power-armoured troops. A trio of Javelins add some more much-needed anti-tank firepower, and generally harass backfield troops and emplacements. That said, I fully expect to go 0-and-3, laughing all the way! Win or lose, it's all part of TzeentchThe Primordial Creator's grand plan. Hah!

Since FW has yet to publish rules for the Thousand Sons, for the purposes of the LVO they'll be using the Word Bearers legion rules (as suggested on the LVO rules page), which enables any character to take the Burning Lore upgrade granting them psychic master level 1 which I feel is fluffy for the KSons, and the rules for Lorgar Transfigured makes for a passable Magus analog if you squint a bit. I'd kicked around the idea of including some summoned daemons and/or a unit of Flesh Changed (using the Gal Vorbak) rules, but wanted to keep it simple - just using the basic Word Bearers legion rules and restrictions.

While I was putting the LVO painting chart together, I realized that at this point I've painted every single Thousand Sons model I had planned for (and a few more besides). It actually came as a bit of a shock as I went through the units and turned 'em green! This bring me around to the earlier comment about FW not doing rules for them - one of the tidbits of news that came out of the recent Heresy Weekender was that the Prospero book has been delayed again, and isn't likely to be released until 2016. That being the case, I think when I get back from the LVO it's time to put this iteration of the army up on the auction block and use the funds to build an army that is currently being supported and I've been pondering what that's going to be. Let's be perfectly honest though, I think we all know that when FW does finally get around to doing the sons of Magnus, I'm going to be diving right back into my favorite legion! While the 4,000 points of marines will be going on the block, I'm planning to hold on to the Spireguard, they'll be going into deep storage in the Closet of Doom and deployed again with the 3rd iteration of the army...

So what to do for the next project? I was absolutely blown away by some of the new sculpts and concepts they've shown for the Mechanicum (Ordinatus? Oh my yes.), so they're most likely to be the next focus of my attention. I do still have the Geno Five-Two with Alpha Legion allies idea bubbling around in my head as well. The current SA rules don't really lend themselves well to the Geno, though I am interested to see what the upcoming Word Bearers/Ultramarines book has in regards to militia units (as it's rumored to contain). I've also been listening to The First Heretic recently, so the idea of doing a Word Bearers army has some appeal as well... So many choices!