Holding out for a Hero… Or Wizard

One of the things that Warhammer Fantasy Battle 3ed is remembered for is the ranking System. While I get pretty rusty going back too far, I know Warhammer 2nd had a bit of a system and we will start from there.

In WFB 2nd, each of the main races had a basic profile for a standard ‘person’, then you have a Champion, a Minor Hero, a Major Hero, a Wizard Level 1, Wizard Level 2 and Wizard Level 3. This basically gave you a structure for special characters. Your leader could be a well known hero to his people and be a Major Hero, or have a tin-pot spell caster with only level 1 compared to his masters who were level 3. Often the points were very different. Taking a quick look at an Orc here, a Level 1 Wizard compared to a Level 3… The differences are a Level 1 had 1 wound and Initiative of 1, a leader ship of 7, intelligence of 5, Cool of 7, Will power of 8 and 10 casting points. They cost 57 1/2 points each. If you go to level 3, it now costs 360, with the only difference in stats being 3 wounds, Initiative of 5, Leadership of 9, Intelligence of 7, Cool of 9 and Will power of 10, also 30 Casting points (Am I remembering the magic points right as casting points? damn… rechecked, nope.. Constitution points, but pretty much does the same thing). Was the stat increase worth all them extra points? maybe. But as you can see, you can probably class these into two camps.. Hero and Wizard. A Hero had the levels Champion, Minor Hero and Major Hero, where the Wizard only had 1,2,3 levels… not as fancy with the naming there…

Come 3ed and WHOA the Ranks really filled out. They decided to give up fancy names but now a hero could be level 5, 10, 15, 20, or 25 (why a big jump in-between? no clue). Wizards did the same with the same level jumps. Again, looking at Orcs.. a 2ed Level 1 Wizard was … a bit lower then a level 5 3ed wizard (now 63 pts), and a level 3 2ed wizard is equal to probably around a level 15 3ed wizard (at 163 pts).

Having more then 3 ranks, (going up to 5) gave a bit more space for advancement and making up your own characters and is probably why it’s soo well remembered and liked.

In SOME army types, they did give special names to this types. I’ll go with Skaven instead of Orcs cause I collect Skaven so are more familiar with them. While it depended on the troop type, for a standard Skaven, a Level 5 Hero was a Clan Chieftain, level 10 was a Clan Warlord, Level 15 was a Vermin Lord, Level 20 was a Sewer Tyrant, and level 25 was a Lord of Decay. For Wizards, you had the Seers at level 5, Warpweavers at level 10, Warpsquealers at level 15, White Skaven at level 20 and Grey Seer at level 25.

There were still champions, but Champions were now.. kinda just a name for a Hero between level 5 and 15 who lead a unit. So you could have a Champion who was a Clan Warlord..

Come 4ed and there were big changes… but maybe not quite as much as some people believe. Gone was the hero types in such a way, and replaced by Special Characters which were pre-made. Though many of these were in fact inspired by ones made by the staff in 3ed rules.

But there were still Hero ranks.. just renamed.. and in fact, returned closer to 2ed for some reason. For Skaven, you had a Level 1 Hero which was called a Champion. a level 2 which was a Chieftain and a Level 3 which was a Warlord. For Wizards, you have the Warlock Engineer as Level 1, Warlock Champion as level 2, Warlock Master as level 3 and the Grey Seer as Level 4.

They also did some ‘lore’ changes in a way. You didn’t (and basically couldn’t) have a Lord of Decay on the field now as a level 25 Hero. there were only 12 Lords of Decay and they pretty much stayed out of the way in the council of 13 (the 13th being the empty seat of the Horned Rat). A Vermin Lord was now a Lesser (and only) Dæmon of the Horned Rat, which showed their more Chaos Roots (Hey, Skaven were Chaos Ratman. They were a sub-sect of Chaos. the Horned Rat was a minor Chaos God, and had his own Demons.. though the Vermin Lord was the only one released). They also kinda scrapped all the other Wizards apart from making them into Warlocks which.. is kinda weird. a Warlock fused the magic of Warpstone with basic technology in wild and often very much accident prone ways, and as such, had access to Magic at levels lower then a Grey Seer, but clearly in the ranking.

Why the decided to scale back on the Hero and Wizard System isn’t really known to me atleast. Maybe after scaling it up for 3ed, they decided to scale it back down to just slightly above 2nd version, But the rankings were still there and when it came to heroes, seamed to go back to the more fancy names they once had.

If you wanted to build up your own special character, that was still an option using the Hero and Wizard rankings. That said, pre-made Special characters normally came with the option for using pre-made magic items. But depending on who you played against, you could make your own magic items…