A Closer Look: Atlantis Guild

Hail and Greetings again!  I've been taking a bit of a breather from playing Mage Knight, not out of a lack of interest but because I have a job with an intensifying workload this time of the year.  Hopefully I can get some more games in soon, and the camera has finally reappeared, so now some pics are incoming soon!


Today I'll be talking about another faction, this time the ruthless, ethnocentric, yet still awesome Atlantis Guild.  This bunch is one of the more original flavor ideas to come into play, combining Roman and Byzantine themes and influences with an interesting aesthetic, magical killbots, and wizards that kill you with mind bullets.  Their whole shtick is expanding and maintaining the gloriously oppressive Empire of Atlantis as founded by Palpatine Tezla, an ambitious combination of original flavor Raistlin Majere and Augustus Caesar.  After pulling all sorts of magic hijinx and proving his midi-chlorian count is over 20,000, he got all his wizarding buddies together and conquered the living crap out of the known world (except for the High Elves). 


His empire ran off Magestone, a crazy-powerful magical ore halfway 50's sci-fi fissile materials and videogame power-ups.   In raw form, it's dangerous, radioactive and ridiculously prone to turning anything higher than plants into a comprehensive overview of the standard fantasy bestiary.  Processed, it can do all sorts of kickass stuff, from guns that shoot lightning to large-scale anti-gravity to powering and controlling all sorts of magical constructs.  After Tezla finally keeled over, the ruling wizards splintered into three main factions centered around a specific type of magic.  Eventually getting sick of both Grandmother Willow horsecrap and dealing with every Spencer's customer cliché rolled together, the Wizarding School of Mind-bullets and Sweet Killbots chucked the Elementals and Necromancers out, creating the Wizard Cold War and just asking for trouble.


Then somebody figured out guns and all hell broke loose.


The figures can be loosely sorted into three major categories


Guardsmen:  The legions of Rome, with loads of cost-effective mooks with basic arms, supported by all sorts of zap guns and led by dudes with magic-powered turkey-carvers from hell.  While fairly prosaic by the game's standards, they tend to be efficient and pretty badass.  Later expansions added scuba divers, sweet magitek bug calvary, and Somali Pirates of The Caribbean.  Never really got a 'generic' unique but later on got some nice named Heroes.  They also got loads of dual-faction elites, including the frighteningly powerful Knights Immortal with deathguns in Uprising.


Magi: Your usual dude in a bathrobe, trading wizard hats for hairstyles right out of Babylon 5.  They can totally wreck enemy lines while ignoring terrain with brain-blasts.  They're fairly fragile, but get around that with all sorts of magic tricks, though magic immune units can totally ruin their day.  Got a fair collection of powerful generic uniques, with later expansions adding different magic gimmicks and mini-Jedi.


Golems:  While every original major faction got a 'signature' golem starting off, the Guild got several right out of the gate.  Varying from decent heavy infantry to lumberjack robots of buzzsaw death to walking howitzers, the Golems of Atlantis would be joined by harpoon golems, flamethrower golems, steampunk waifu golems, and all sorts of clanking awesomeness.  Got lots of generic uniques, usually at least one per expansion.


Up until 2.0 rolled around, the Atlantis Guild also benefited from getting a giant sphinx-tank multi-dial figure, a chariot, and two 'Master Adversary' high-end uniques (meant for the Dungeons spinoff, but very effective in normal games and Conquest).  It was always a bit odd that they never got a titan-class figure, but they made up a lot of the losses by having tons of dual-faction figures and getting a lot of quality models overall.  Fluff-wise, this is still one of the best 'original flavor' factions I've encountered in gaming, combining historical imperialist themes with the best of magitek madness and creating a wonderful visual flavor.


 It's telling that while 'classic' Guild characters are almost universally ambitious, ruthless, and amoral, the open-ended 'head-canon' the game encouraged gave us all sorts of noble-but-pragmatic heroes (plus the actual canon Raydan Marz) so we could play this stuff without feeling evil.  People liked to play these guys that much.


Anyway, All Your Clicky Base Are Belong To Us!

A Closer Look: Black Powder Rebels

Hail and Greetings! 


I've decided to go ahead and go a little more in-depth with the various factions of Mage Knight.  They won't be in any particular order, except for the ones I like getting a bit more priority and (probably) detail.


In this post, I'll be nattering on about one of my personal favorites, the Black Powder Rebels.


As can be gleaned by the name itself, this faction is a collection of revolutionary groups, independent and would-be independent states trying to throw off the yoke of empires, with a specific focus on overthrowing the Atlantean Empire.  Their other signature trait is the use of black powder in firearms, incendiaries and explosives (hence the name).  They are very much the Star Wars Rebel Alliance Wizardpunk edition, though they tend to be the more 'gritty' version seen in the old EU (and Rogue One) than the idealistic archetypes seen on the movies. 


They have a very pragmatic edge, with a lot of BPR willing to get their hands dirty in the name of justice and freedom.  The big event that touched off Mage Knight Rebellion was the assassination of Prophet-Magus (pretty much Evil Wizard Pope) Karrudan, an event that later on would get parallels to the assassination of President Kennedy (complete with an image that's pretty much fantasy JFK Jr. saluting the coffin as is goes by, I'm not kidding) in-universe.  On the other hand, a lot of the motivation is freeing a lot of slaves, including just about every dwarf in the setting from the wonderful magestone mines, with all the joy of death mines combined with raw magestone having properties akin to 50s-fiction fissiles on crack.  So it all winds up for great justice anyway.


Their units tend toward having a lot of ways to send lead and steel downrange, as befits an organization built around guns.  Another interesting thing is that they got a lot of the bigger units in the game, including three titan-sized models (plus a LE version of one, making four), a chariot multidial figure and a very badass-looking tank.  The rank-and-file figures in expansions would stay around the basic concept of "dudes with guns" with occasional specialists to help fill in strategic gaps for players wishing to field a 'pure' BPR army.  They tend towards three types:


Khamsin:  Generic humans with guns.  A ragtag mix of actual rebels, mercenaries and ne'er-do-wells, centered around the city-state of Khamsin.  They tend toward odd-looking but cool helmets, and being very cost-efficient at the price of fragility and few special abilities.  Later on, they'd get Galeshi, sweet desert raiders that went around being dancing buzzsaws of scimitar death.  Oddly enough, we never got a non-named unique from this subgroup, though we got lots of LE's and a few Heroes.


Dwarves:  Standard Dwarves Variant A, with the added wrinkles of having very short natural lifespans (20-30 years) and the vast majority of the population in slavery or just liberated from slavery.  They tend to be tougher than their human counterparts, at the tradeoff of being a bit more expensive to field, plus most dwarf models had Magic Immunity for a lot of their dials, giving you a lot of antimagic if you needed it.  Later expansions would give them chainguns, shotguns, and more melee-oriented, defensive generics.  Their non-named uniques were pretty much Thorin Oakenshield with a big gun and/or steampunk ram.


Amazon:  Xena ripoffs, with a the usual societal misandry expected of Amazons.  Anybody with a Y chromosome was subject to being permanently on roofies if Amazons took a fancy to them, with all the attendant implications and outright declarations fully intact.  Not even straight-up pragmatism or realpolitik really explains what the vehemently anti-slavery BPR is doing with these people (official fluff is that black powder was discovered and subsequently mined near Amazon lands).  My guess is so the Necropolis Sect didn't get a patent on the hot-chicks-in-leather units.  Their generics were usual melee-oriented and expansions on them were fairly sparse, giving just an occasional 'gimmick' unit.  Somebody at WizKids realized that something was really off, so later fluff for this bunch involved a power-mad matriarch making a Faustian bargain and touching off a civil war within the Amazon tribes, in the end moving the group wholesale to the Solonavi in Mage Knight 2.0.


The BPR also had Steam Golems, big ol' walking machines of clanking death.  Think proto-Big Daddies, without the grimdark horsecrap and a giant meat cleaver instead of a harpoon gun.  They're awesome, enough so to get a re-release in Unlimited with just a shiny paintjob (and an LE), and are fairly expensive to find as singles compared to other commons.


The faction would stay very competitive throughout the run of the game, losing only a very small amount of ground in 2.0 (mostly because of arcing fire becoming a thing) and trucking along quite well until the end.  Story tournaments involving the Rebels tended to have them with the most player victories, giving them a leg up in the ongoing fluff.  Having very flexible and inexpensive units helped a lot, especially in a game that was designed around small armies where the player learned how to make do with a couple of boosters.


Stick To Your Guns, and All Your Clicky Base Are Belong To Us!

Limited Utility

Hail and Greetings once again.


The Mage Knight revival is still going well, enough so that I'm still a bit surprised about it.  Today I wanted to talk about a part of the game that's a bit more obscure:  Limited Edition figures.


As I've talked about before, there are four basic rarity tiers for Mage Knight figures, Weak-Standard-Tough 'generic' figures and Unique 'leader' figures, plus some special cases.  But there's also a 'fourth level' for a lot of the game's generics, known as Limited Edition.


The vast majority of these 'LE' figures were given out as tournament prizes or convention exclusives, with prices to match.  But on top of the collectability and bragging rights attached to these elusive warriors, they are also 'named' unique figures that tend to be very much worth including in an army instead of just hiding in a box or sitting on a shelf.  I haven't encountered a game breaking figure, but there is a lot of power to be found if you're willing to put forward the effort to find them.


Just about all of these figures have deeper dials and better base statistics right off the bat (joke generics got joke LEs), plus a special copper (or bronze) paintjob in place of the yellow-blue-red rank indicator paint.  On top of that they also tend to have extra special abilities that can really change the whole dynamic of the figure. 


Take say, the Knight Immortal's Standard Bearer.  The generic is designed to be a fairly wimpy combatant that can give your formations the ability to move an astonishing 12 inches compared to the usual 6 or 8.  The Standard Bearer is a specialist figure with decent combat stats and a shallow dial.  Now take the LE version, Ashell The Driven, that keeps the lovely 12 inch Forced March and adds more better stats, a deeper dial, and Pole Arm.  For the uninitiated that means anybody that moves to base contact with this seemingly fragile figure just got smacked with a flagpole to the tune of a click of damage and losing their action.


Or say, the LE Impaling Golem, Cerberus.  The Impaling Golem is already a really nice figure with good stats and wonderful ranged attack abilities including multi-target attacks and the ability to ignore defensive powers.  Cerberus gets the LE stat bonus, plus Bound, giving you a figure that can either move at double speed or jump around (hence the ability's name) and wreck the enemy with it's nasty range skills.  We wouldn't see something this powerful outside of Unique figures until the advent of Uprising and the 'series end' power level that came with it.


All of this power comes at a price.  If you didn't win these bad boys in a tourney or get them at a convention, your only real hope is online stores, and a lot of these command a premium.  That said, since this is a 'dead' game, the prices are actually very reasonable, especially compared to what these fetched while the game was active and in production.  There are a lot of figures that I'd have sworn would never go for less than $30-$50 on auction that I've nabbed for under $10.  Even a lost game still has its advantages, eh?


Now if Sinister boosters did something similar.  Freakin' chase figures...