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!
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