Each Bloodline has its own wild and wacky theme force tucked away in a two page spread at the back of the book. All move units around between slots and adjust the numbers you’re allowed to take, and three of them invite in units from other lists. The book does warn you these are in no way as balanced as the main list and it’s not kidding.
I've only played one of these (the Von Carsteins) so I'm not going to dwell on the others at length. What I have played, to death and back, is the Army of Sylvania, and my comments on that will close out the session.
Von Carstein
Lose Master Necromancers and Ghouls, gain 0-2 Bat Swarms, 0-2 Black Coaches, Fell Bats in Core and Sylvanian Levy, aka Empire Free Company, Archers, Crossbowmen and 0-1 Huntsmen.
This is pretty good. Huntsmen are good march blockers and diverters if you don’t expect too much from their actual shots, Crossbowmen add a good solid punch from a distance, Free Company aren’t as mobile or tough as Ghouls but can bait, switch and throw down two attacks in melee well enough. Really benefits from a Battle Standard Bearer with all those living units around. Just don’t forget that you’re an Undead army; your melee blocks should still be Skeletons and Wights.
Necrarch
Lose Master Necromancers and Ghouls, Dire Wolves move into Special, all Heroes can ride Winged Nightmares and unridden Zombie Dragons appear in Rare.
Hot damn, it’s a Vampire flying circus, and a perfect opportunity to use those Zombie Dragon models. Lots of Terror, lots of mobility, lots of eggs in one basket. I haven’t played this one as I don’t have enough monsters to justify it, but it looks like so much fun.
Lahmians
Lose Master Necromancers, Ghouls and Zombies, gain Swains: Heroes from ANY OTHER WARHAMMER ARMIES BOOK, with all their usual options, including mounts, who gain Hatred of the enemy if the Lahmian General, the immortal object of their desire, turns out to be less immortal than planned.
The Swains had better be able to survive and contribute to the game on their own as there are all sorts of rules loopholes around putting them safely in any of your Undead units and life’s too short to spend fiddling about with those.
Blood Dragons
Easier to list what you can take than what you can’t, to be honest. Blood Dragon Vampires of any size. Wight Lords. Black Knights (must have barding), Grave Guard and Skeletons with hand weapons and bows at 10 points each as Core. Regular Skeletons as Special. Black Coach, Banshees, and Dogs of War… unless you want to go off the deep end and let your Black Knights use Lance Formation, and since this list is clearly derived from Bretonnia rather than the Empire I say go hog wild.
Accept that you’ll only be attempting one spell per turn; take those Black Knight lances with a Thrall in the front of each one; fill up on Skeleton Archers and bring a Banshee or two to deflect. Deal with enemy wizards by spitting them upon your lances. Game on.
Strigoi
Only Vampire characters. Core is Ghouls, 0-1 super-Ghouls with WS 4, S4 and Ld7 at 10 points each, 0-1 Bat Swarms, 0-1 Strigany (another set of Empire Free Company). Special is Skeletons, Dire Wolves, Fell Bats and 0-1 Spirit Host. Rare? Banshees and Dogs of War, no Black Coach for you!
Another army where you won’t be casting many spells, but in your defence you won’t need to as the majority of your army isn’t even Undead and doesn’t need the Necromancy boosts so much. Skeletons are there as a bunker option in case your vampires need to hide from shooting for a few turns, everything else is full feral. It’s an interesting idea for a list that might work as a single-character, high-risk high-reward sort of thing. I am more intrigued by this than I should be, but I don’t own the twelve kajillion Ghouls it would take to put together.
Necromancer’s Army
Lose all Vampires, Ghouls, Bat Swarms and the Black Coach. Dire Wolves move into Special. Everything not a Necromancer gets a points break.
Essentially, you’re giving up on the combat potential and cool factor of the Vampire in favour of an absolute barrage of spells and combined arms play to compensate for your lack of really strong heroes. If you must play a Vampire Counts army without Necromancers you may as well do it like this and get a little more bang for your buck, and it’s pretty characterful for Kemmler.
The Army of Sylvania
The Army of Sylvania represents a bizarre extension of the Von Carstein theme force from the regular army book, this time into an army designed to fight on Mannfred’s home turf against the oncoming horde of Vardek Crom.
It worked rather
well, if you happen to like the Von Carsteins and think they were a bit
overshadowed by the other Bloodlines. It does well in Combat Patrol and brilliantly at 3000 points, but tends to struggle in games where a Lord level character isn't allowed - because it has no access to Necromancers.
Instead, the army places two Grave Markers, plus one for each Vampire Lord or Count present, and scatters them 2d6". These are easy to dispel at power level 4, but cast a 2d6 Invocation of Nehek with a reduced range of 6", meaning they need to be Dispelled unless they've scattered somewhere totally irrelevant.
Dire Wolves play a more significant role since they can be raised with Invocations from the General; the new powers also introduce a table-wide malus to enemy spellcasting and Magic Resistance on your Vampires to compensate for losing Dispel dice from the lack of Necromancers.
Multiple Black Coaches (at a
discount!) enable paired charges, hopefully evening out the irregular
odds of good impact hits. Multiple Bat Swarms march block with aplomb. Black Knights move into the Rare slot and you can only take one unit, but they gain access to a magic banner that gives them Magic Resistance 2 and doubles up on any Summon powers used by nearby Vampires.
And then there are the new units, which is where things get silly.
Sylvanian Militia are the quiet stars of the army, adding inaccurate but effective long-ranged shooting. Crossbows are brilliant, especially on a slow and fragile model like a Skeleton, and especially when you can spring new units of them out of the ground on cue. These are the one occasion on which I say it’s worth raising new Skeleton units over Zombies, because the more crossbow bolts you can get in the air the better.
Sylvanian Levy are Zombies, but better. A 5+ save
and S4 (give them halberds) makes for a nice meaty Core block and they
don’t die as easily, meaning they might be worth spending points on for a
change. Spread out over the whole unit, that two point difference
between them and the Militia adds up to an extra rank and that’s really
what you need on your Core infantry. Maaaybe buy these for once.
Drakenhof Guard change the role of Grave Guard
toward what they’d become in later editions. Adding a great weapon and a
point of armour makes them much more adept at causing casualties in
long engagements, meaning the sword and board option is no longer the
most tempting. If my General is hanging out with them they get the Drakenhof Banner, otherwise it's the Banner of Doom.
There are at least two ways to play this army. The first is as a fairly conventional infantry-heavy Vampire Counts army with more resilient Dire Wolf units, less emphasis on Necromancers, and the option of shooting if you feel like it. The other is the Sylvanian Nightmare.
The Sylvanian Nightmare
The Sylvanian Nightmare emphasises speed and attacks from multiple angles. To begin: take the Drakenhof Banner, on a large unit of Black Knights, fronted by two or three Vampire Thralls who all have Summon Wolves and great weapons. This creates… not a Death Star, but a kind of Super Star Destroyer: a very powerful unit which doesn’t actually contain your linchpin General.
The Summoned units are topped up by a free-roaming Vampire Lord or Count with the Wolf Lord power, often on a Winged Nightmare, who can also raise yet more units of the furry blighters or create new Skeleton Crossbowmen to back up the ones being raised by Grave Markers.
The rest of the army comprises Bat Swarms, another unit of Dire Wolves (these ones Scout) and two Black Coaches. It’s very fast, and comes at the enemy from a lot of directions, and it’s horribly aggressive, but it’s not invincible.
Spells that don’t target its units don’t trigger Magic Resistance, and the army can’t generally take any Scrolls as the Vampire Lord has better things to do with that 100 point allowance. Any opponent who can stack bonuses to Dispel rolls can shut the Grave Markers down very easily: Dwarfs in particular can rock up with the Master Rune of Valaya and just put a Dispel die next to each one for the duration.
Finally, big battlefields are an issue: on an 8′ x 4′ table, it’s all too easy to stay away from the single unit of Black Knights and far more likely that the Grave Markers will end up somewhere useless. This can be avoided with a refused flank deployment and focusing your efforts in the area where your Grave Markers have settled, but that ties you down and makes it easy for opponents to corral or avoid you.
Even so, I bloody love it.
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