Who has Rising Powers? This guy!

Who didn't find out about the 50% off sale until the day after Rising Powers arrived? Yeah this guy. Oh well.

So I've had it for a couple of days now and while I was hanging out with Sasha at werk I spent some serious quality time with it. So I kinda wanna do all sorts of things. Right now I want to form the canadian order of masochists. Of course I don't really know who to see about that, so I am going to go back to this blog entry. Yay!

So lets get some general impressions out of the way.

Winners:

Ramos: For all intents and purposes Ramos is the Arcanists. Personally I think they should just take Rasputina, Marcus, and Colette and make them into a new fraction and just let Ramos do his own thing. The henchmen is specifically attuned to Ramos, two of the new guild constructs can be hired by him, a ballin horseman, and all sorts of new toys that are a part of his faction. Of all the masters old and new he got by far the most love.

Neverborn Faction: Man oh man the whole neverborn faction won out. Just about all the nightmares pull double duty as Woes giving Pandora quite a stylized boost. Lillith's crew in no way what so ever lacked power. However, now in the new book he crew gains some much needed personality. This is great because as a master I LOVE Lillith bot conceptually and stat wise but...well you know generic demon things. Now, or well as soon as the damn things are released I will totally be grabbing her.

Gremlins: They weren't paticularly viable in the main book. There were certain senarios they excelled at and then there were many senatios they couldn't hope to win. That's all different now. This is the section I haven't read very much of, because it frankly doesn't quite interest me. However, I am glad they got the boost they deserve.

The Encounter System: The game exploded from 5 possible encounters to 13. That is awesome. The Schemes though, now that is where it is at. Every faction gets a new specific scheme and every master gets a specific scheme. Therefore there is now no excuse what so ever for us to be in a situation there I am choosing the same schemes as my opponent. What's better is that if we happen to choose the same encounter then the encounter itself changes which means there are closer to 26 encounters. Also unpopular encounters/schemes have been tweeked specifically both Slaughter and Assasinate which is something that gets a pretty damn joyous hooray from me.


Loosers:

Nothing is perfect.

Marcus: Poor Marcus. He has some new options to choose from but none of them are specifically his, they are all things that are lying around in other factions. Also, most of the new beasts are kinda crappy. The Guild Hound is a totem, the rouge necromancy just doesn't seem to fit well and I think he would honestly be better off just getting another tiger, and the Raptor isn't to great. I like Marcus too. He doesn't quite have the same wiz bang explosive coolness as a lot of the other masters and I really hopped that he would of gotten a much needed shot in the arm. The Shikome is nice though. Thous things look amazing and I think they would be brilliant if used in pairs.

The Viktorias: Man the thing that used to make the Viktorias viable is the fact that they were so manuverable. They could get that alpha strike off and then retreat leaving a puddle of dead enemies in their wake. Now though? I mean Colette can run circles around her, Kirai can run circles around them, and there are just generally more tools to catch them. This would be fine but they didn't really get any fun tools to compensate for that which is lame :(.

The Awesome:

Lord Chompy Bits is made of win and victory.

Lucius Governor's Secretary is made of win and awesome. Seriously, I love everything about this guy from his background, to his crew, to his concept art. I want him in the worst way. I even want to dress like him, powdered wig and all, and I can't wait to use the lawyers. Also there really needs to be a scheme that involves killing all the lawyers but that is mostly...holy crap as a neverborn I could kidnap them. That's even better! Seriously, though want.

Unexplained Connection. There is a Neverbourn model named Coppelius. He steals eyeballs, which he then uses for all sorts of things. He is kind of awesome. He can spawn lil smaller nightmare thingies called Alps, and he can Paralyze with his melee strike and he has melee expert. In short he is awesome and scary, and is one of the most alien figgures they have come up with. The Unexplained connection rule states that he can be hired by the new guild master named C Hoffman. I haven't read all of the fluff yet but in the superficial description of Coppelius or Hoffman there is not even a clue as to why this connection exists.

This is awesome to me. This is awesome on the same basic scale of the old warhammer 40k "red makes it go fasta rule". It is one of the most favor filled things I have seen in a long time. Malifaux is a world of mysteries and strange wonders. This is just one of those things, and that is exciting. I mean Coppelius and Hoffman don't seem to have any synergism what so ever between them. I kind of want to get Hoffman just so that I can exparament with Coppelius. I love this game.


So now then Wyrd certainly ratcheted up the complexity of the rules. I mean two of the four masters, I have no idea how I would even start to go about playing them. Holy shit Colette only barely makes sense she doesn't have a weapon she is all spells and hope. I am really looking froward to plunking her down on the battle field just to see what will happen. At the moment I am positive that I am going to be suffering more than a few crushing defeats before I figgure out how to use her correctly. She also seems to be super unforgiving, at only 6 wounds most of the figures in the game can kill her in one hit. Fortunatly she seems to spam soulstones, still it is something I need to actually just sit down and play before I am going to be able to figgure out what the hell it is I am doing with her.

Kirai wasn't even someone I was paticularly interested in playing until I found the 50
% off sale thanks to James. Ergo I now have to deal with the fact that I have a Kirai boxed set incoming. Oh well, at first I am pretty sure that I'll just be letting Jame's use my extra Senchin for awhile. The more I look into her though the more interested I become. Spirits are just plain old hard to hit let alone kill, so with that in mind I am becoming more and more interested in playing her.

Moving on a bit I wanna talk about the Henchmen a bit. Three of the 5 henchmen have pretty fleshed out, solid crews, specifically, the guild, the arcanists, and the outcasts. The guild henchman I already wrote about and I am very specifically interested in playing him. SO COOL. Then there is Kaeris who actually has a huge set of options when it comes to a crew including the mighty Joss. I mean with Kaeris and Joss you really don't need a crew those two will mop up all on their own. I don't really have a whole lot of interest in her as a figgure but I have a feeling I am going to be seeing her placed across from me quite a bit because she is pretty metal. Then lastly there is Von Schill. Von Schill has by far the largest potential crew of any of the henchmen. He can hire any mercinaries he wants which means Ronin, bishop, and Misaki, as well as his own Freikorps. I like the Freikops conceptually and I LOVE Von Schill as a character but he looks rather dull. His crew is shooty in nature, far more shootyer than stabbity, he can hire all sorts of snipers which saddens me as they are almost as good as hans, and the specialist and librarians are interesting but nothing really jumps out at me. I might pick them up and use them with my Viktorias but in a world of undead hookers, demonic teddy bears, leviticus, and coffin surfing cowboys the Freikorps just seem a bit to average.

I love Von Schill as a charecter though and at the very least I will be grabbing him and swaping him out with Bishop.

The remaining two Henchmen Collodi and Molly don't really have fleshed out crews. Collodi does seem like he would be lots and lots of fun in a Zorida list, and I am postive Lord Chompy Bits could make use of him which is cool. However, I think once his crew gets properly fleshed out he is going to see a fuckton of play cause he really is cool as shit.

Molly, is a henchman but I don't really know why. I kinda wish she was just her own person like Sybelle or some of the others. Though when it comes to a support character you can't go wrong with Molly and if you are running a fear bomb type list with Seamus she is positively an asset. I am truely excited to see what they have instore for her crew, and I can't wait to watch her antics on the battle field. I know they couldn't fit everything into one book and I am okay with that. I really am. It is just that the two henchmen I am most excited about got themselves the short stick. Oh well I am going home.