Blackstone Fortress: GW Unboxing und Previews

Auf der Warhammer-Community wurde das kommende Brettspiel Warhammer Quest: Blackstone Fortress ausgepackt und es gibt weitere Vorschauen.

Blackstone Fortress: Unboxed!

Warhammer Quest: Blackstone Fortress is only a week away from pre-order, offering you the chance to explore the darkest corners of the 41st Millennium as you’ve never seen them before. This week, we’ll be previewing the set in detail, starting today with an in-depth look at just what you’ll find in the box.

Warhammer Quest: Blackstone Fortress is packed with models. Seriously, you could take out the rules, dice and boards and still be getting a pretty cracking deal on the miniatures alone. Every single model in a completely new sculpt, and push fit, meaning you’ll be able to assemble them without glue!

 

In your adventures, you’ll choose from one of the eight explorers included – those daring, foolish or insane enough to brave the depths of the Blackstone Fortress. Each explorer is a distinct character with their own backstory, motivations, and models. These are the kinds of characters you’ve read about for years in the background but are rarely seen on the tabletop – like Imperial Navigator Espern Locarno, or mighty robot UR-025.

Of course, these champions won’t be unopposed – Blackstone Fortress features a host of brand-new hostiles for you to battle.

First and foremost amongst these are a trio of magnificent Chaos Space Marines sculpted in the baroque and terrifying splendour such characters have always deserved:

As well as reinventing some classics, the set features a host of Chaos worshippers never-before realised in plastic (if at all), including Traitor Guardsmen, Rogue Psykers, Chaos Beastmen and the Negavolt Cultists.

There’s also a pack of Ur-Ghuls – vile dark-dwelling creatures who’ll already be familiar to Drukhari players. Updated from Finecast resin, these new Ur-Ghuls look truly horrifying:

Perhaps most intriguing among the residents of the Blackstone Fortress are the Spindle Drones – previously unseen xenos constructs that seem to be native to the fortress. Quite what these defenders want, or who created them, is a mystery but they feature a radically different aesthetic from anything we’ve ever seen in Warhammer 40,000 before:

To make referencing your various rules super easy, Blackstone Fortress is split across 5 booklets, each dealing with a different aspect of the set.

In the Rules booklet, you’ll learn how to set up and play Blackstone Fortress, with introductory guides and an outline of your aims on the Blackstone Fortress, as well as a quick-reference guide for getting key information at a glance.

In the Combat booklet, you’ll learn how to battle your foes, with a look at combat, encounters and the other events that’ll dog your explorers as they battle through the Blackstone Fortress.

In the Precipice booklet, you’ll plan out your future expeditions and prepare for your next journey into the Blackstone Fortress. Each session of Blackstone Fortress takes about 2-3 hours and can be linked with other sessions to form a longer campaign where your characters trade archeotech and their adventure changes. Additionally, this booklet contains a guide to each Stronghold – special encounters that must be cleared to win the game.

In the Background booklet, you’ll get to follow the story of the Blackstone Fortress, with background on just where it comes from and the various forces fighting to conquer it, setting the stage for your own adventures.

Finally, the Datasheets booklet contains new datasheets for every model in the set that’ll let you add your favourites to your Warhammer 40,000 army, complete with matched play points. We’ll have an in-depth preview of just how the various units in the box work in Warhammer 40,000 later in the week.

In your games, you’ll be able to bring the Blackstone Fortress to life with a series of boards made up of hexagonal tiles. You’ll be able to combine these to create all manner of twisting labyrinths for your explorers to venture into.

The set also includes the Precipice boards and six double-sided spacecraft that your explorers will be able to trade with throughout the game.

Finally, you’ll get a combat track – used to determine the order in which each explorer and group of hostiles fights during combat – and a line-of-sight ruler for keeping track of your battles:

Cards are crucial to Blackstone Fortress – that’s why there are 234 of them in the set! Blackstone Fortress is designed to run itself – in fact, you could even play it solo if you wanted to. The Discovery, Encounter and Hostile decks are designed to generate a range of scenarios for your explorers to tackle, with millions of possible combinations:

Explorer and Hostile cards, meanwhile, provide characteristics for your models, while the latter have behaviour tables that determine how they act in the game.

Cards can be used to create persisting effects between your games, from the Legacy cards, which offer unique challenges in each campaign playthrough, to a range of upgrades, weapons and other useful equipment.

To help you keep track of your games, you’ll find 70 counters and markers, representing everything from wounds to booby traps and force barriers.

Of course, what would a Warhammer game be without dice? Blackstone Fortress features no fewer than 28 of them, including D8s, D12s and a D20 – we’re going full tabletop-RPG with this one!

As we’ve said, Blackstone Fortress is designed to be played over several sessions, with your characters and the fortress itself evolving as your adventure progresses. Between games, you’ll be able to keep your characters and cards safe in the stasis chambers and databank:

Blackstone Fortress is, at its heart, a game about mystery and discovery – and so, inside every set, you’ll find a hidden vault envelope:

This is your reward for completing the game – you’ll have to play it yourself to find out what lies inside…

You’ll be able to pre-order your own copy of Blackstone Fortress and crack it open yourself very soon. In the meantime, keep an eye on Warhammer Community this week for more previews…

Blackstone Fortress: Setting the Scene

Warhammer Quest: Blackstone Fortress is available to pre-order this weekend – and, for the next couple of weeks, we’re exploring what’s in the set. Yesterday, we unboxed the contents, while today, we’re diving into the dark new lore that you’ll get to explore in your copy….

Time, space and reality are coming apart at the seams, as the Warp – a hellish dimension of raw, formless energy  – seeps into realspace. The Imperium of Man – the cruel and bloody regime that claims control of the galaxy – is on the brink of collapse, split in two by a colossal rift. Wars rage across hundreds of thousands of worlds.

And things might be about to get even worse.

Blackstone Fortresses are colossal spaceborne citadels of unknown origin valued for their terrifying and strange abilities. Many have suggested that they were built by the mysterious precursor race known as the Old Ones, though none know for sure. Once, the Imperium possessed six of these towering fortresses – each reinforced by the ingenuity of the Adeptus Mechanicus and used to fortify the frontiers of the Imperium.

In Abaddon’s Twelfth Black Crusade, all six were lost, with two captured by Chaos and four destroyed utterly. Both captured fortresses would prove devastating during the early engagements of the 13th Black Crusade – one was used to secure the services of legendary renegade Huron Blackheart, while the other was eventually hurled into the surface of Cadia, resulting in warp-storms and physical devastation that utterly obliterated the planet.

And for a time, that was that.

The galaxy is a vast and lonely place. For every sector abuzz with life, there are countless more that are dead zones. Even as wars reach into every corner of the galaxy, great swathes still lie silent, untouched and empty.

It was in one such silent sector in the galactic west that a new Blackstone Fortress appeared. In the furthest reaches of the Segmentum Pacificus, it sits amid a graveyard of starships that stretches more than a million miles across.

This latest Blackstone Fortress is a key tactical asset for any who might suborn it to their will. Even a single one of these star-citadels can turn the tide of the most apocalyptic space battles, armed with weapons of unparalleled power.

The Blackstone Fortress is more than just a weapon, however, it is a cache of archeotech and artefacts from bygone ages. Relics of countless species lie abandoned in its halls – a technological treasure trove that would prove utterly irresistible for any who seek to collect, study or leverage technology in their wars. But unlike any other Blackstone Fortress found before, this citadel is not inert, but seems to act, and even react, of its own accord. Quite what this means is one of the most puzzling aspects of this Blackstone Fortress.

More mysterious still are the “hidden vaults”. None can say what lies within – but given the other secrets possessed by the fortress, the treasures inside must be priceless.

That’s where you come in. In Blackstone Fortress, you’ll take the role of one of the explorers hunting to unlock the secrets of this forgotten and terrible place, discovering more of the story and finding just what lies within the hidden vault as you play – provided your explorers survive…

You’ll be able to explore the Blackstone Fortress yourself very soon – make sure to pre-order your copy of the game this weekend…

Quelle: Warhammer Community