Happy Friday everyone!
Today we are examining the Seraphon and their White Dwarf Path to Glory rules. These space lizards will likely be getting a new book soon, so let’s see if we can guess what things GW will keep and what it will discard!
Army Ability and Quest:
The Seraphon get a very weird set of army rules. You must first declare if your army is Coalesced or Starborne. If you are Coalesced, you pretty much ignore all of these rules, save the new quests. If you are Starborne, you use the following rules: Rather than keep a normal roster you instead accrue Astromatrix Arcane points through acquiring and expanding territories. In order to include a non-hero unit on your order of battle, you need to pay the number of AA points indicated in the rules. Additionally, after you have your roster you roll a D6 for each AA point spent. For every roll of a 4+ you can allocate a veteran ability to one of your eligible units. Thus you don’t need to worry about units taking casualties (except heroes) which does simply a lot of problems. At the same time the rules are vague as to whether you can include non-hero units at all if you don’t have AA points or if you don’t roll for veteran traits if you don’t use your AA points?
The Seraphon quests allows you to add a mount trait. Your bog-standard easy quest. Which is good as you will spend your remaining brain cells deciphering the Starborne rules.
Upgrade Table and Territories:
For upgrade tables, the Seraphon get two options:
- Saurus: +1 rend on Powerful Jaws
- Skink: +1 to hit against an enemy unit
The Seraphon also only get two faction-specific territories:
- Stormvault: No effect until upgraded.
- Coalesced Armies: Roll a D6 on a 1-2: your character gets an injury, 3-4 nothing happens, 5: get an injury and an artifact, 6: get an artifact.
- Starborne: +5 AA points
- Ruined Temple City
- Coalesced Armies: the cost of upgrading your stronghold is -10 GP. When upgraded, re-roll 1 injury or casualty roll.
- Starborne: +3 AA points. When upgraded, re-roll 1 injury or casualty roll.
Conclusion:
What a very weird set of rules. The Starborne army rules are a very fluffy way of trying to encapsulate the weirdness of the Seraphon in the Path to Glory system. However, they are rather vague and will leave you at the mercy of RNG. The territory options are kinda bad as well as for coalesced armies, you have a 50% chance of injuring your hero on each dive. I guess you could include a sacrifice skink whose only job is to “take one for the team” but it feels a bit off.
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