Hero Hammer: A way to save money and still play games workshop games

They named it warhammer

It was called Hero Hammer instead

It became Hero Hammer because the liberal rules for building armies. This freedom, as mentioned earlier, offered both inspiration for modeling but also for exploiting the system to “always win, regardless of such lame things like setting background, sportsmanship, friendliness and mutually entertaining afternoons/Friday evenings of miniature wargaming”.

Or that's how some people perceived/experienced the system.

As I said in the Army Book Essay, the fifth edition players had great freedom in selecting their forces for battle. The games designers themselves advised altering the army selection rules if you would think it became a better game by doing so, or for home-brew scenarios.

They did that when they hosted an official tournament:

No special characters

No unridden large monsters

No allies

Wizards are limited to a maximum level of 3, no magic items can improve on this
is that 3 in total or 3 per wizard? I always wondered.

Magic Items with a points value of more than 50 cannot be included

Only one war machine, for each regiment in the army

In fact, Hero Hammer was probably conceived by accident, by starting players who wanted their battles to be as big as possible with the least sensible amount of expensive miniatures (they had spent about 150 euros just on the main box-set, magic system and their army book of choice). So, in a 1500 points battle, you take 2-3 small regiments, some monsters and/or war machines and fill up with big characters to reach the agreed-on points value. It was more an economic solution to have a reasonably sized game with just a few troops. It also meant that players discovered some kick-ass combinations of characters, magic items and elite units to fill out the points in a cost effective way… and stuck with it, even if their collections grew and allowed for more balanced forces. Off course, this meant that no-one left home without a level 4 wizard, the opponent might take one and dominate you in the magic phase (and then you faced elves who took Teclis, being a level 5 dude with cool items). There was a time I always fielded a lord or hero on griffon, just to counter other flying monsters that opponents might take.

I also suspect it’s why the campaign at the games store was with starting forces of 600 points. As 1500 points was the default size for one-of fantasy battles around there and the target size most players had for their armies. Everyone had way too many (special) characters, monsters and war machines to agree on a higher total value for the campaign, as it (like I said earlier) reduced the amount of special awesomeness one could include in an army.

Many fellow hobbyists in the early years bought miniatures for a 1500 point force, and then started a new army or collection. It’s actually quite interesting how a force of 1500 points could still be an example of the Hero Hammer Host, because of the liberal army lists and magic item choices. Some players really made an effort to find some game winning combinations. Such as a Slann mage-priest champion who takes the item that allows him to choose, rather than randomly selects his spells, and uses that to indefinitely cast apotheosis on a skink hero with potion of strength and heart of woe: a deadly combination that can only be described as The Lizardman Skink Suicide Bomber of Extremely Enormous Explosions. It’s one of the prime examples of Hero Hammer Munchkinisms I was on the receiving end of.

The Campaign rules and why they were so nice.

The campaign rules in the battles book greatly limit the player to a regiment-based army. The army must include a general and is limited to one magic item of a maximum point value (50), one war machine, one wizard, one large monster and no allies. Each player then randomly selected a number of territories under his control by rolling a d66 (one d6 for tens, one for units, consult a chart). The awesome special troops and items could be gained with the control of certain territories but army selection still had the regular limitations. Setting the army points value at 600 meant further restricting the possibilities of the most powerful stuff.

A campaign as described in the battle book is a lot of fun, and adds a sense of justification for the inclusion of powerful elements, the player has probably fought hard to obtain or defend the territories where he found them, and it gave you an incentive to try your best to wrest the best ones from your enemy’s hands, driving him into useless wastelands of little utility. If only I had thought about driving the Bretonnians into forest territories, they did not have access to war machines at the time, and that’s what forests gave you.
In addition, it had a simple system for creating veteran units and characters over the course of a campaign, which were omitted from the 6th edition (though it had a similar campaign system), and without doubt, 7th has all but forgotten them. It required the veteran regiments to be appropriately named, very inspirational... and a passionate modeller could have done cool things with that.

Also, these rules could be used for one-off battles. Just agree on a point value and the number of territories each player controls. Roll for the territories and build your army with what you get from the rolls. The territories you rolled are also used as the terrain in the battle.

This set-up brings more thought to selecting your forces. Do you make full use of the resources at hand? Or do you make a balanced list using just some of the options available to you?*

I never used them that way, but it sure would have been interesting.

Even so, it was occasionally a lot of fun to have no-holds barred 3000 points matches and fight epic duels between monster riding heroes…

*Territories that supplied wizards were of limited use to dwarf players, only for magic items and maybe a runepriest (not quite a wizard). In contrast, the Bretonnians and Wood Elves (!) had no use for Forests at all, but these were the dream location for Dwarfs and Empire.

hmm... the uselesness of a forest to a wood elf player is actually quite annoying now I think about it.... still, I stand for my claim, 5th edition needs to be played as campaign!