18) Necromancer's Revenge: A Dish Cooled Twenty Years

Warhammer was not a well-balanced system. The rules were clumsy, and asymmetrical. Certain armies were very good against certain other armies, and very bad against different ones. Undead were very bad against Bretonnians, and Bretonnians were very good at beating up the undead.

William could beat me with his Chaos dwarves, but no matter how many weekends we spent facing each other across the game table, he could never beat my Brets with his Undead.

Kings of War is a much better, more balanced game system. When you look at the tournament master's standings online, pretty much every army type in the whole game is represented there. It isn't like GW games, where there is always a flavor of the month "build" that all the top players are using.

When we were kids, I knew that William was a better General than me. He carefully planned his moves. He crunched numbers and calculated averages to determine the likelihood of an outcome before committing to it. He borrowed and read the rules codexes for other armies before he played against them. Meanwhile, I was that casual gamer who just shrugged and charged recklessly forward with my knights, because my army list rewarded mindless aggression. I watched Will play against other people, and absolutely stomp them, but time and time again, my Brets just steamrollered his Undead, no matter how he tweaked his army list.

During William's senior year in High School, tragedy struck. A drunk driver broadsided his faithful old Buick Century. During the collision, his trunk popped open, and the repurposed thrift store briefcase containing his beloved Undead army flew into traffic and exploded open. There were tiny skeletons, zombies, mummies, and wights everywhere. Some were crushed. Some were embedded in the tires of passers by. Some were swept away with push brooms by firefighters cleaning up the debris from the accident. Our friends Chris and Brock managed to recover two dozen or so minis from the accident scene, but there wasn't much to salvage. The recovered minis were armored skeletons with halberds, and a few random wights and zombies. It was a bad day. His family's only car was totaled. Thankfully, William himself was generally ok, except for some nasty whiplash.

But losing a miniature wargaming army is more than an inconvenience. It's an injury. An army is something that you build, and design, and paint yourself. It is a piece of your craftsmanship. It is something that you take pride in. It is a piece of your heart. He tried to be a tough guy about it, but we could tell that William's heart was broken.

To add insult to his injury, 6^th edition came out about a month later, and Games Workshop dropped support for the Chaos Dwarves. William's other army was no longer legal or playable. They didn't even have an army list.

Will gave me the few surviving miniatures from his Undead army, and he never rebuilt it.

He completely stepped away from Warhammer Fantasy.

The unit of armored skeletons that he gave me are now the core, the heart, of my own KoW undead army.

For the simplicity of a demo game, I set up the table ahead of time. I picked Bretonnians against the Undead, for nostalgia. On the left center of the Undead line was William's old armored skeleton phalanx. This was it. This was William's chance to finally get the satisfaction of tabling those pesky knights with an undead army. I explained the rules, and pointed out the most important differences between unit movement in Warhammer and KoW. William figured it out in less than three turns. He maneuvered his werewolves into a position where they could flank my knights if my knights charged his skeletons. I found myself in a position where I had no choice but to charge a spear phalanx of skeletons, because the only way to get out of the wolf's charge arc was through the skeletons. Meanwhile, on the other side of the battlefield, Will's army peppered my other unit of knights with crossbow bolts and fireballs.

William's skeleton spear phalanx stubbornly refused to rout (on a roll of double one!) and needless to say, my knights got flanked and eaten by werewolves. The other knights managed to destroy the skeletons, and turned toward the werewolves to avenge their fallen brothers. But William's nimble werewolves retreated into the woods, where my knights would be hindered, and at a disadvantage if they were to charge them. The knights threw caution to the wind, and recklessly charged into the dark, twisted woods. This proved a fatal mistake, as the werewolves leapt upon the overconfident nobles, snatched them from their horses, and tore them to pieces.

The battlefield fell silent, save the crunching of bones from the dark forest to the East of the tower, and the occasional scream of a horse. The two novice necromancers gazed out at the piled corpses, some fresh, some quite ripe. There was lots of work to do. The army of darkness was about to double in size.

William had done it. He'd finally beaten those pesky Brets with an undead army!

It was a great game. William and I are already planning to get together again in August. He thinks he might have a box of Orc minis somewhere in his basement...

They say that time heals all wounds, but I don't think that is true. I think that we heal when we are ready to heal, and that it just takes time for us to be ready. That, and maybe just a little bit of necromancy, and a little bit of help from our friends.