The 40k Lorecast - Warhammer 40K 2nd edition (really 1st edition). What it was, how it played and more

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

Today we are joined by Brian Horton who has been playing the game since the launch of 2nd edition. In a time long long ago, where phones were not mobile, print media was king, and most all TV was boring (not everything is better). Brian joins us to discuss Warhammer 40K 2nd edition, what it was like picking it up, how it played and more.On our first ever episode we discuss what the History of 40K is. what the show will be about, and the topics we plan on discussing. We then do a personal one about our journeys into the game. With a breakdown of how we started the game and what we love about it.PatreonMerchandiseDiscord Link:Our WebsiteRetro RecallOur Sponsors:* Check out BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com* Check out Pebl: https://hellopebl.com* Check out Pebl: https://hipebl.ai* Check out Shopify: https://shopify.com/loreAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to the history of 40K, a 40K lore cast series with John Barsati and Bradchester. This guy. On today's episode, we'll be talking about the second edition of the game. Joining us today is another old person, Brian Horton, who's in playing the game, potentially twice as long as some of you have been alive. Welcome, Brian. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Thanks for making me feel older than I actually am. But we were joking at the story the other day that, one of the young gentleman who is playing is 17 years old. And I was like, oh, you could be my grandkid. It's not fun when you meet people who are younger than possessions that you actually cherish and utilize consistently. That is funny because we did that multiple times at Salt City, which you can still buy tickets to, I think. Absolutely. The Salt City Gt.com.

Well, with last Salt City I went to, I was putting models on the board. And my opponent, and I looked at him, I go, how old are you? And I go, half the stuff of the board currently is older than you are. For those who are new to this, the history of 40K is a biweekly show focusing on the history of the game Warhammer on the tabletop, with a focus on tabletop, video games, movies, et cetera, but primarily we're going to focus on the additions of the game. So with that, before we get going, Brian, why don't you give people a bit more information about yourself, like who you are, how long you've been playing the game, et cetera? So my name is Brian Harden. I am from the central New York area, Syracuse area. I have been playing the game actively since second edition.

I did buy some stuff during the Rogue Trader era, but luckily the shop owner that was there was nice enough to tell me not to invest too heavily into books, because there was a new edition coming up within a few months when I was getting into the game. And the way I honestly got into the game, I was in a comic and hobby shop. I was buying some D&D minis for a campaign that we had going.

I picked up a box of space marines, and a guy at a table went, oh, are you interested? And I was like, I love games. And these models look cool. Come over here and roll some dice with us. And legitimately, I went over to the table. I had no idea what I was doing. They were just pointing saying, if you do this, you could kill that. You need to roll this.

All right. Then you need to do that. And I just went, well, this is fun. And these guys are really cool. I got telephone numbers from all of them to give them calls because we didn't have any other way to get Hold on, hold on. Landline telephone numbers. Absolutely.

Landline telephone numbers. Because we all exchanged numbers like, oh, yeah, you can call me. No, no, no. No, I will flex just a hair that I had my giant 12-pound cell phone in a bag. Power battery, baby. Where I paid, you know, 45 cents a minute to talk to people. But in the good, in the good fun. of things.

My buddy's got me into the game. I'm still friends with a couple of them. Actually, there's three of the original group out of the ten of us that we still actively talk to each other and chat all the time. So as someone will tell you, you will make lifelong friends in this. They are not kidding. Mark, Giovanni, and brain fart right there for a second. For the other one, we've been friends for 35 years and it will not end.

Wow. So as far as play style, Brian, do you play mostly casual, competitive, just paint? Like, where do you spend most of your time? I mean, obviously it usually changes 35 years. I play every style. I have a group of friends that we play lots and lots of competitive with. I've been a judge for 40K for, I don't want to say how many years because I think I've actually lost track at this point.

I really love competitive 40K, but I also like the narrative side of things. I have three friends that we do. We have a crusade game going that we've had going for now for four months. The group of us just play. And I have a friend who only plays guard infantry. So it's been super fun playing with him and setting up a crusade where it's like guard infantry. There's a tank shortage. We're on Von Halah doing all of that.

And I love to paint. I don't get to do that as much as I would really like. But I work inside an art store. so I get some very, some good opportunity to do some painting. I just finished painting a ton of Age of Sigma terrain for the Salt City GT to upgrade all the terrain there. And it's been a super fun time.

I love this hobby. I am what I would consider an all-round rounded hobbyist when it comes to Warhammer, where I like the lore, the hobby, the gaming, and the whole tabletop experience from beginning to end. Now you're just stealing on us. One more important question is, which armies, do you play? And which one do you play the most? So I play Tarynids by

far absolutely 100% the most. I'm waiting to see if you're going to lie to John, you dirty day, master. Yes, he plays Tired it's the most. What armies do you have, Brian? I mean, as you can probably tell from the wall behind me that just has random boxes stapled to it,

I may or may not have a lot of armies. I do have a ton of stuff. At the current point in time, I own something for every army in the game. Some armies are complete armies that I play and do stuff with. Others are I have some cool models for the armies. But I have an unlimited amount of Tiernan models.

I have probably 40,000 points of various space marines. I have a complete Tao army, complete Necroft. Army, complete GSC. So when you say complete for newer people, when you say complete, as in you own every model? As in, I have every model to the extent that you can have it.

I'm going to give you guys this one. No, watch this. One of my favorites that happened fairly recently, Zubes and Brian are looking for something. I don't even know what they were looking for in Brian's stuff. It found

an entire another marine army that happened to be just under some stuff while they were by the way not even the thing they were looking for zoobes just comes out with treasure you have like thousands of points of terminators right it just goes oh yeah cool it just moves on look i fully admit that i have a problem but it's not a problem because i i admit to it right yeah also you're on my wavelength now i like you start i mean to be fair. I own a lot of 40K. I own about 60 something thousand points of 40K. Brian makes that just sound cute. You should have said was luxury. Well, it's like when you're, it's like the multi-millionaire has a yacht and that's me. I'm pointing my yacht. I'm all proud of my yacht.

And then the billionaire comes through with his yacht. That's Horton. It's like, oh, that's an adorable amount of points of Warhammer. Let me to let you know. There are also have to take a direct. count that I have worked in the industry for a long time. I have played the game for a long, long time. So you just kind of amass things. And you made a joke before we started recording about calling me Horton. And it's not wrong. I do have a plethora of stuff. I run GTs and do all that. And you know, you guys who are from, you know, from the lore cast who went, oh, Brian, can you just, you know, show up in Detroit from Syracuse with, you know, 60 tables of terrain. And I went, well, sure, not a problem. What? I thought that there was a perfectly normal ask. What I like,

Brian, though, is it for people don't, maybe people haven't done the math yet because I have, you could theoretically play in a GT against yourself. As in sense, you could actually outfit 80 armies. Oh, I don't think I could outfit 80, but I probably could do 20 to 25. So you can do an RTT. You could actually, you could just build your own RTT, wherever it has to show up and pick and pick up one of Brian's lists. No, I've been to events where I was using your models as well as at least five other people. So I will say there was a GT one time where I had six unique armies that were from different factions in it.

And I was only playing one of them. Yeah. I want to throw a ball, I want to throw us off just a little bit here because I'm going to go into the additions before we move just a second. because first edition wasn't first edition. First edition was Rogue Trader, but First Edition, 40K, was more of a role-playing game. It was very much, Rogue Trader was a skirmish game with a role-playing element. It was not a technical war game to what we know Warhammer to be these days.

It was definitively different, but it was still, it had a lot. of the stuff that currently exist in the game just in different iterations. I mean, I didn't play it, but kind of when I've looked at it, it reminds me of, actually it doesn't remember me of the original D&D, first edition D&D where you were, which is, you had miniatures, you're moving your pieces and it was more of a combat. It was less of a roleplay, more of a combat stuck in, but there was a role play element to it. But yeah, so when we, that's why we're starting on second edition for everybody, because

it's the first one you'd recognize it. We were talking about Rogue Trader, the D&D people were like, hey, this is cool as hell. and all the more aren't players, but I have no idea. I mean, if you're talking about second edition. Yeah. So this is actually the second edition box set right here. And the grim darkest of the future. There is only more.

I also want to point out in that picture, it's not that grim dark. It's just for the record. There's a lot of reds and yellows there. Oh, early. Well, think about this. When did they make the transition to the actual grim dark? Because originally it was super bright.

Everything was yellow. Yeah. Like, you know, just to give, to give some references, as I'm pulling stuff out of a box set that was just sitting here. That's probably even this grim, dark, familiar picture from the old days. Yeah. And, you know, you got, you know, your codex imperialis, which is, you know, definitely, you know, right. Look at that power of this.

I mean, nothing. There is definitely some ridiculousness in this. I mean, if you're, if you're just looking at like the crazy. fork bolters, you know, and everything. It's just so over, over, over, Buck Rogers. I know it is. It's Buck Rogers.

But yeah, let's jump into second edition then. So this is, again, 19, so for people who don't know, 1987 Road Trader comes out. And that's the hybrid version. And this is what we were talking about earlier. It's more of, it's more of D&D. If you were looking at it as a current player, it's more resemble D&D.

Then in 1993, Warhammer's second edition, releases. And this is 1993. So everyone understands there are no cell phones. There is no internet. Your music is cassette tapes and CDs are new. Movies, they're in the theater or on VHS. This is a very different era. And one of the pieces I really wanted to bring Brian into this on is like, it was very, picking things up in this era was different. You had magazines and catalogs. That's how you learn something. We could spend time on Columbia House Records if we want. I'm sure all three of us use that quite a bit.

You know, one of the biggest things is the trip that seemed so wild for back then. Yeah. Because of the fact those cell phones and no internet. And if you found a trick, it was an actual trick. Like right now, somebody finds something and 11 minutes later, it's in everybody's army. Yeah. On the entirety of the U.S. Back then, if you had your super secret tech in Syracuse, New York, it was actually super secret.

Tech in Syracuse, New York. Absolutely. Let's start off what's, how did you actually, so you mentioned earlier, you were in a random story where playing it. What was it like learning it? Like, how did you learn the game back then? So when, so I'm going to, when second edition box that came out,

got it the day that it released and we spent an obscene amount of time over a weekend. We actually, I think there was five of us. One person was kind of being the rules person of the game and kind of GMing it for us.

And we legitimately made 8.7 million mistakes. They started games and tried again. And I will admittedly say that for the first probably two games we played or three games we played, we kind of ignored the close combat phase and tried shooting each other off the board because we didn't understand that at first. I mean, not that I was an idiot, you know, an idiot, you stretch the imagination. but we read it and went, well, that's confusing. And we read it more and more.

And by the end of a weekend in which, I mean, when I say we played, each game took like four to five hours. We started on Friday night. We played all day Saturday, all day Sunday, into a wee hours in the morning. And we finally kind of went with the, I think we have this down kind of sort of. It was a learning experience.

It was very much a new game. You know, the rules, you know, really were, like, this was the rulebook, right? And it wasn't like there's tons and tons of, I mean, there are some graphics and some art in here, but it's pretty limited. And it was, you know, it was probably, you can probably see it, just a lot of rules. And second edition was so wildly, weirdly complex. Also, for everybody that hasn't played, it's like an edition. You didn't show up your six-sideds. No, you used the full rack of dice.

The best way I can do this is I'm going to pull up random data card because everyone is slightly familiar with the data card. So we will grab the space orc battle wagon and throw it right on the floor. Strong. So the space orc battle wagon. So I should give you guys a quick rundown because, you know, it had your crew and it had a RAM value. which was strength 8 D12 damage. It's helpful. Minus 5 years save,

but of course you were making saves on 2D6. And it had different speed. You had a slow speed, combat speed, fast speed. You got to type the vehicle that it was. And of course, when you get to the back of the card, you had your damage tables because when you hit a vehicle, you randomly decided where it got hit. On a one, you caught the wheel,

on a two through four you got the hall on a five of a six you got the passengers because it was an open top I forgot yeah it was this name this open top so you could you could technically at the and each card had its own

like this is the result on the damage table so it was good fun but it was I mean yes your rules were on a card but it was crunchy it was extremely crunchy there was a lot of fun to it and like because things had

D12 damage and different armor penetrations, you know, you could have armor values of like 20. Yeah. Oh, God. And armor values were very much, if you were to equate it to like the toughness of the vehicle. Oh. But when you get into doing all that stuff as I grab second edition stuff out here. And for those of you who still have this and are an ooh and I'm from second edition that I still have this stuff kicking around.

So crazy. Yeah. So I do. And, like, if you look, like, there were, this was the full sheet for, like, close combat weapons. God, I forgot about these. Heavy weapons. Dude, they had so many dice. Melt their head a G20 plus a D8.

Yeah. Yeah. So, like, just to go with, like, a standard blade and saw had strength of the thing plus D6 for armor penetration. But if you had a bone sword, so Tiran has had bone swords, it was D6 plus D12 plus. plus six to get through armor. So you were having some fun and everything was just a little bit interesting. You know, and there were some stuff where it was like armor penetration, special, C main rules. Yeah, that's true.

I do. There was also so many, you were, you're not giving them the full spectrum of the saves, though. Oh, no, that. 2D6. Whoa, whoa, whoa, you didn't put in my Dodge save, my involunt saved, my displacement. you, Perry, or my displacement, if everything went away. We'll do an entire episode and Scatterdice at some point about how awful those were. I mean, they're amazing, but awful.

Yeah, I know you have them. Yeah. Brad and I disagree heavily on templates. I know. I've never liked Scatterdice. I like templates. You and disagree. I hate templates.

He hates them. I love them. Look, and you go back, you know, like this is back to the paper template. They were clear. and you had to determine was a model partially hit fully. That's why I hated them. It was covered. Yeah.

You know, was it in the center hole? Because it was fully in the center hole. That model was gone. Yeah. Full gone. That model doesn't exist anymore. Yeah. And I mean, you know, it was, it was super fun.

I was really hoping I had the paper dreadnought here, but I don't have one close. I forgot about that guy. But, yeah, there was a cart when you got the, the starter set, because the dreadnone was a metal model for the orcs. There was a little cardboard-standy cutout of the dreadnought. I actually think I gave that to a friend not that long ago just because he was a huge orc fan and I want him to have one. I would play with it.

I would be perfectly honest. I would put that in the board and say, look, legal model. GW made it. Legal model. It's my deaf dread. It's good to go. And super fun game.

Big difference. We played 1,500 points. Yeah. which, you know, sounds like nowadays, you're like, wow, that's crazy amount. But I can tell you, my standard list for my turinids was a hive tyrant, two carnifaxes, two units of ternid warriors and a unit of gargoyles and a lictor. Yeah. That was my army. That was the fast back.

Hirety of my army. The games took, once you had the rules down, which that took a little bit to get you down. It took a while. But you can usually get a game done in about two-ish hours. Sometimes faster. It depended on the amount of close combat you were having and what armies were facing each other. But, you know, my favorite memories in this game are from second edition sometimes. I have lots of memories from, you know, again, I've been doing this since the very early 90s.

And I have tons of fantastic memories. One of my favorite memories comes from a second edition. And my buddy, Randy, who has, I swear, he's been using the same D6 dice, by the way, since the 90s. He still owns them. They are, they are, and he swears that he's never going to change him because those are his Dark Angel's dice, and that's what he's using. Chaplin on a bike with a vortex grenade was the bomb-diggity space. They were amazing. Especially for some of us that love the vortex grenade.

It's the best weapon in the game and should come. come back. It deserves, it deserves to come back. The vortex grenade, which I swear I have the card around here somewhere and stuff, but the vortex grenade basically anything it touched just died. Here, I want to get a second opinion on this because I told

John, because he wanted for our tournaments to bring back Let me set it the stage better. So I think the vortex grenade should be a mission again. And I think it should be a mission that's only played in the championship round. of GTs and majors.

Because I want people's... I want people to have to run away. There it is. You got it. I recognize that there. I know that card. I know that card very well. But I think the vortex... But the thing was, to be fair,

like this is when we look at the game today versus the game back then, I argued the game was funnier back then. It wasn't necessarily funner. It wasn't necessarily more fun, but it was funnier because you had crap like this. I like that you used to also have to play on just kind of whatever. Everybody's used to right now playing on this specific terrain and everything.

You can remember that you played on a different table pretty much every game. Well, actually, let's talk about it. So a couple of things I want to get into is second edition. First off, Brian, what factions were available in second edition? So you had blood angels. Well, you had the angels of death, which were blood angels and dark angels. You had ultramarines. and charitots space wolves space wolves um so squats yeah the squats are there you had eldar

yeah uh imperial guard mm-hmm and sisters of battle sisters sisters of battle had a second edition Codex. Really? I did not know that. They came out in metal, a very short time, if I remember correctly, that they were out in second.

Wow. But yeah, sisters had, there was the iconic Canoness standing on the cover with the sword out. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. I thought they were third.

Nope. That would be necrons and tau were third. And so the other question I did want to ask you was, where did the rules come from. So we've got the rules and the rulebook. That's it. Just rulebook and data sheets and White Dwarf. White Dwarf got

ton. Most everything new got introduced in White Dwarf. White Dwarf was not just like, hey, I might pick this up. Yeah. You had to have white dwarf. You have white dwarf. It was one of those things of you bought your white dwarf every month for, you know, five bucks or whatever it was back then. And it normally had like a battle report in it. a scenario probably. Potentially new rules for a model in your army. Or full armies sometimes.

Sisters came out. Yeah, the sister, like in third edition, the sisters came out in the white dwarf before they came. When Tarynids really just got their rules slowly through white dwarf because of Space Hulk, the hunter slayer coming out, which was the precursor to the Termagon. You had Ternan attacks,

which had Ternanid warriors in it, which, you know, were impressive. This is where I'm going to go, just to show you. Second position models. When I say Turington attacks, this was the, now, granted, they were on square bases, backs on ivory base stuff, obviously, and over the years. But this was the long neck warrior, and he was plastic. And then, of course, we upgraded them to metal.

And then you got, you know, your metal Turingian warriors. Look at those hand. Look at claws, dude. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. Redney Clause just looked like he has like our very big gardener gloves. And just to give some concept to this was our hive tyrant. Which looks the same, just small.

I will say the hive tyrant looks about the same. And then if you take them up next to the current hive tyrant, the one may be head and shoulders. This is the rat size. I was waiting for that. There is. There it is. And then of course, you know,

We had what was a lot of people call the iconic, one of the two iconic Terenin models from that is you had the flowerhead Zoanthrop. Yeah. So back when the Zonkers had legs. Yep. You know, little, little legs, giant psychic head. And then a model that people thought didn't exist until sixth edition when the Exocrine came out in plastic. That's not true. In second edition, we had the Exocrine.

The armor cast Exocryxicon. which is a big solid chunk of resin made by a secondary market company, actually. GW did not own armor cast. They made models for Orn. The rules were only in Whitendorf or if you bought the models, there was a sheet inside the box. That was one of the worst things about 40K. No, really, I hated that. So it would come with a printed off rules and it was the worst print ever was all.

Sheated, terrible. It looked like it was written in crayon. We printed that on our dot matrix printer, so you've got to understand. That's what I was going to say. Yeah, exactly. Oh, man. It was super fun edition of the game. How did you play the game then?

The other question is that people want to know was like, okay, so we're setting up you and your friends are going to play in their house. How did that happen? So we would set up a table, right? normally you'd have about six pieces of train on the board, a couple hills, a couple forests, and a couple ruins that, I'm not kidding, like out of the box that the cardboard ruins were yeah big. Oh, God.

Remember, though, it was daughter of war all the time. Just to give you an impression, that's the size length of my finger. That's how tall the ruin was. And then we would shuffle up the mission cards. Yep. And draw a mission. And this is how you played the game, and this is how you won the game. All your missions were in the base rules.

There was, I want to say there was like six missions. There was missions added through Whitdorf, which I clearly. Yeah, I remember that now. That's what it was. Yep. And so you would go through and, like, engage and destroy was, you know, very much, you know, purge the foe of now without secondary cards of, you know, hey, your primary objective, destroy enemy forces wherever possible.

Minimize your own loss, in addition to the normal victory points you gained, which were how many points of your opponent's army you destroyed. That's right. It was a kill game back then. The big thing was you did need to kill your opponent's models, which is what made some of the army's top. Stored points.

You had, you want, look, if you wanted to kill, like, you wanted to get your opponent, they're playing chaos, space Marines,

and they had a possessed demon prince, you know, or demonically, possessed to the Lord, who was, you know, three, four hundred points. You wanted that model gone because you got points for doing that. But on top of that, there was the differential between the two on how many

victory points you scored. Oh, yeah. And then each enemy squad destroyed, you got an additional point. But for each enemy had vehicle you destroyed, you got an additional point. For each enemy character killed, you got another point. And this mission had no secondary mission to it.

It was such a big thing when I give a Depticon props because primary, secondary, tertiary was a mind-blowing event in 40K. It was. Like, no way, you just played just that. To be fair, the reason you had to do it for people who didn't play back then was some armies, you just rock up to a table. It was over because you just couldn't score the points and they could.

Like, there was just some stuff was, it was, and let's talk about that. How balanced was second edition, Brian? Oh, no. It wasn't balanced. Balance. I will use the orc truck as the example of balance. Hey, hey, hey, it was a wonderful rule. So an orc truck could transport as many models as you could fit on it.

But if when you moved it, they fell off, they died. So you would see orc trucks. And I mean, the arc truck was, you know, yay big. It was roughly, it was tiny. comfortably you could fit like 10 guys on there. They would stay on. You could move it around the table. You would see people who like built and modified them with like theater seating.

Yeah. So try to get more stuff on there. And it was absolutely encouraged to modify, have fun with your stuff and do everything because it was a fun game. It was not designed to be competent. Exactly. It was designed to rock out, set up a narrative with your opponent and play a game. Like on a Tuesday night when you guys.

would get together Thursday night, whatever your night of the week was our game club, you would get together. And a lot of times you would set up a scenario ahead of time with your buddy, plan it out, I'm going to do this, we're going to do that, kind of thing.

Or you'd be like, hey, let's just show up and smash face. And I'm bringing 1,500 points. What? I don't know. I'll just bring 1,500 points. But that was how we played.

And, yes, there was definitely people who played it much more competitive than others who would show up, you know, text grenades. Yeah. Two chaplains on bike, sure,

Landrador full of Terminators, and he'd be like, oh, this is going to be a tough game. And then, you know, look, I,

my army for tournaments or events where there was, you know, you know, stuff was, it was two current effects, one with regeneration. So he had an additional save on top of his,

you know, uh, two plus save. And then, you know, a voltage field on the other one. So we had a four up invulnerable save.

It was, it was just kind of the ways that things went. And it was super fun. It was a good time. I mean, gargoyles back in those days had a flamer. Oh, wow.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Also remember the flavors in that open top vehicle hit everyone in the vehicle. Yeah. So, I mean, like, they had this flame, right? Which was the

Flamerant. And then, you know, Marines had the template that was bigger, that was the heavy flavor template. So there was a lot of interesting, and like, just to give people credit, there was also like the very few things that add the little tiny handflamber. So it was a super fun time. And a lot of it was because there was no pre-measuring. Yeah.

Right? Pre-measuring was not a thing. You kind of had to know the board. And you were playing on a six-by format. So, you know, much bigger mat than what we play on now. And by the way, our mats, the vast majority of time, were either cutout felt. Yes. You know, it was, I was young.

We were in our, you know, in our pre-money days of earning actual cash. Yeah. We spent our money on the models and terrain was kind of tertiary. We had cutout felt if you splurged and bought the official GW grass mat, which is basically a big, heavy piece of carpet that was flocked. And, you know, you started learning based upon, like, all right, so my appointment can deploy 12 inches in on the board. He deployed right on the line. I moved six.

I'm this far away. And you became a game of knowing your range because when you declared something, you couldn't go, oh, am I in range? You were like, no, I'm going to shoot my bolter as a 24 inch range. And you measure it and you go, ah, crap, I'm not in range. All right. Well, that guy didn't shoot his bolter. Oh, well. And you, because there was, you had to know your distances.

You had to be able to gauge that. Well, the best is when you shoot the logwoods, though, what, one of my favorites is, John, I'm going to shoot you across the board with my missile launcher. And then you just measure out the 48 inches, but you don't care about that. What you're looking for is how close are the rest of the guns from the next thing? Exactly. So there was, there was ways around everything. And, of course, on top of that, there were gas weapons.

So gas weapons, a lot of it was guard artillery. You would just be like, what's the range on that? Well, as a minimum of 24, so I can't shoot you if you're that close to me. Yep. But the rest of its infant, it's a bass list. What's its range? Infinite. Just could shoot anywhere in the room that I wanted to.

But I have to guess how far it is away. Oh, guest weapons were awesome. And they were. And you had to, and you, if you were good at guess weapons, because typically you were typically a guard player without a doubt. There was a few other gas weapons, but not a ton. You got good at guessing it. Like, all right, I need to guess it.

I need to plan on scattering. Bro. You're your Pythagorean theorem. Yeah. Well, and that's where, like, for me, and this is where I want to talk about the three of us about play experience then. So I did play second edition, but I played, I was playing Floorhammer, you know, in Friends' basements with models

that were sometimes painted, oftentimes not. I mean, pewter, all that stuff. And I loved it. I loved playing it at the casual level. I quit the game because I tried playing it at more of a competitive level. And I was 13, 14 years old at this point. And it was just not, the game was ugly at that level. That was what I always talk about this era is that I think the game was designed to be a fun game

where you've had more of a gentleman's agreement because you're playing with friends. And he was like, hey, we're going to figure this thing out. Not billion takebacks, gentlemen's agreement, but gentlemen's agreement of like, oh, hey, you know, we get some stuff wrong, get some stuff right. When you play with the people

who wanted to rule, it became nightmarish of a game. Oh, absolutely. I can say that this edition of the game, although super fun and I have great nostalgia feelings for it, and I love it. And I still get together with a couple buddies and we play it on occasion.

I'd say probably two or three times a year. And it brings back. a lot of fun feelings, but then I have to remember to flip a switch in my head to go, hey, look, that guy's bringing three tactical squads, a rhino and a unit of Terminators.

I'm not bringing two Carnifaxes, a hive tower, and everything else. I'm going to bring some termagons, to mix the stuff, to balance that power level out. So you have to have that gentleman's agreement. This game, GW had no intention on it being a tournament-based game.

This was beer and pretzels with your buddies on a Tuesday night at a game club, having fun, setting up a narrative based on the, you know, the limited lore that there really was at that time because there wasn't a ton out at that point that you had. It was pretty much, you know, Rogue Trader and the stuff in the box set and the stuff in the codexes and very few, quote unquote, black library books, which were not Black Library books at that time. Yeah, exactly. they were kind of basically a self-published book. And you had to just kind of go with the flow. And there was times where, like, one of the big things in second edition to keep balance in check was you would hear, hey, you can't play named characters.

That was a, if you went to an event, that was a... Oh, I forgot about that. Yes. Because Avedon and all the name characters Eldran, Avidon, nuts, where they were just so good that they could unbalance a game on their own. And rightfully so, because of the, they designed it to be very lore-based. So it was one of those, you know, fun things to do is to go,

all right, you can't bring your name of characters. Now, granted, as a cheer-ded player, I never had that problem. Yeah. Because they didn't have any name of characters. So whenever that cap hit, I went, ah, ha, ha. And they were like, all right, you can only have one of your zero-to-one choices, which were, you know, a hive tyrant you had to have. So you could only have like either the biov or the Zohanthrope,

which were both very, very good. But, you know, and or Lector, I think was the three one choices. And it was super fun. On that note. So that's actually kind of what I want to get, you know, we're going to do some, obviously, as you can imagine, we're going to do a lot more discussion about the individual models, the games and the rules.

But I think what I want to get from Brian for where you kind of get to the end of this is, all right, of the phases of the, game, which was the best and which was the worst? Psychic phase was by far the worst because it was card-based. There was a deck of cards that you used to power your warp powers.

You're going to say that. It would be such a hater. It was just so, it was, there were times that it was just overpowering. It's like, oh, I drew Ultimate Force. You can't stop what's going on here. And that was just a cast, regardless of your opponent couldn't

dispel it or trying to stop it. And to be honest, the best phase of the game was the movement phase because it was so rigid that you couldn't break the rules of movement. It was fantastic. You arch everything, every arc had an amount of movement. It was just,

it was very well put together. It wasn't quite as, I don't want to say willy-nilly as it is now, but that's what I'm going to use for a phrase there. Well, it is. I do remember, like moving today is much easier. The movement phase is just easy.

Back then it was like, well, what's in between you and where you want to be was actually a very key question? Difficult terrain also, all that stuff. And then. What was the terrain where if you try to walk over it, you could die? Dangerous terrain. Dangerous terrain where a space marine could stub his toe and die. No, you slipped and twisted your ankle and fell on a brook.

There is, yeah. Also, you're going to be? The million dollar baby for space Marines. That was fatal terrain. Yeah, no, I think there was terrain that if you got too close to, it attacked you. So if you wanted to have great narrative games, you would put a river of lava on the board. It became impassable and fatal. So if you got too close to it, you could die.

And it was also impassable. So you couldn't go over it. You had to go. And then you could tank shock someone into it. Yeah, you could tank shock someone into it, maybe it fall back. Of course, stormblade, they would just be like, well, I'm going to death or glory you and try and take a tank with me. Yeah, exactly. But there was a lot of, a lot of good fun things.

You know, in retrospect, the hand-to-hand combat was also a difficult part of the game, but it was just because it took a little bit to get it down and get it. It was so brutal, though, back then, too. Oh, yeah. The initiative, which is a stat that modern 40K players, if you've been playing since 8th edition, and that was the only additions you've had going forward, you don't know what the initiative stat is. That used to be a stat where it was like,

okay, who goes first in the combat? Who has the highest initiative? When you were fighting things that had initiative 10, looking at you, the Eldar Avatar, he was a complete badass, because I don't care who you were. He's going first. There was like a very few other,

things in the game that had Initiative 10. It was really. Yeah, but you know, and he didn't have grenades. So if you would hide in difficult terrain, which made him go at Initiative 1. So there was always tactics and ways around initiatives to

game it, but like there was things that just like Harlequins, when you saw them come and you were like, oh, I need to hunker down. Which meant you were giving ground and, you know, hiding and doing a lot of things that weren't as advantageous as you would like in the game. And there weren't objective markers.

There wasn't a lot of that stuff in the game. It was really just beat the crap out of your opponent. That's what you said. I mean, again, I'm a little bit younger than you, not massively, but it was the same thing. It was there was a natural, like, almost like pubescent boy, you know, to it of like, so what are we going to do? Oh, we're going to kill each other.

Oh. This is before, by the way, Mortal Kombat has come out, everybody. Like, this is our first, like, like this pre-day. all of those things. It was this or risk. And risk is, I'm sorry, risk is boring AF,

like compared to Warhammer. Take that back. Compared to Warhammer. Compared to Warhammer. Yeah, I just sell like. Play miniature games at this time. Your choices were Warhammer fantasy.

Yep. And if you weren't a huge fantasy guy or the models didn't appeal to you, whatever the case might be, the only other real game was this. And then historicals, which were in many ways really cool and kind of fun, but they were not thematic.

They didn't have that drive that, you know, hey, look, yeah, we're going to reenact this battle from history. What's the chance that the Texans win the Alamo? None. All right. I'm going to play as a Texan and probably lose, right? 99.9% of the time, but it was always that 0.01% chance that you'd play for something miraculous. I never had it happened when we played the Alamo thing,

which I did probably three or four times at Historicon, but it was always the fun of trying to do it. But Warhammer had, 40K had this just air of kind of a mixture of violence and silliness that was just super fun because every once in a while, you'd throw a vortex grenade. It would scatter back on you. You would die. And then the vortex would be there right next to your army,

and you're like, oh, that gets to move every. Yes, it does. Randomly. It needs to come back. Whatever way that scattered I is facing with the D-10 that it has, and it just goes. And he was just like, oh,

this is not so great. But it was fun. It was a good time. The vortex grenade needs to come back. You love that thing so much. It's because it's such an, because I love things that even the playing field in a weird way.

And that's what it does. So many games that I've, I've spent half the game running away from the Vortex grenade as opposed to running at my opponent. The Vortex grenade would be like picking basketball. It's all basketball games are played in the hockey arena, but they don't convert it over. That's basically what the Vortex grenade does. Like, I'm a very good basketball player. Not now you're not.

It is a hilarious part of the game. Because of where our next episode is going to be, I want to close on one last question for you, Brian. worst unit, best unit, second edition, or model unit, whatever you want to do. So the worst unit that should have not been was a tactical squad for space marines. Yeah, I know. It was just wildly bad.

Yeah. And the demon-possessed Chaos Lord was by far the craziest unit that you could deal with. It was super good. It was also super unreliable at the same time. So it was one of those, there's random things what happened to it from being possessed. So it was good.

It was such a fun addition. It was such a silly time. It was definitely not a competitive game in any way, shape, or form, but it was probably one of the greatest beer of pretzel editions of the game. Would you say it's the best of times and the worst of times? Absolutely. No, no. I'll tell you, it's not because seventh edition was the worst of times.

It might. Yeah, but there was no best of times during seven times. That's true. But I'm saying the best of times, the worst of time, seventh edition has a trophy and no one's ever getting it. Yes. The seventh edition is the heavyweight champion undefeated of being the worst. So it's like.

And going on on that is the other fun thing of this edition is when you played to this game, you won sometimes by silly, you lost sometimes by silly, but it was always fun. Yeah. That's where this edition was. I did quit during the edition, but it's only because I made the mistake of trying to play it with people who were adults and really didn't want to lose to a child. And it got a little ugly. But I think that's a good spot thing to break because in two weeks we're going to come back.

And in two weeks where I wanted to focus with second edition was actually on what we just discussed, the units. I wanted to spend some time talking about how the units, the data cards really did function, spend some time talking about all the ways you save. It was because it wasn't what we have today of like, okay, I hit you. You roll your save. That was the crazy part. Roll which save because it's going to come up a few different times. And what I want to spend some time talking about is like a lot of it, the why behind this? Because the thing about when we look at second edition,

second edition was really written in my opinion to be almost a real thing based on fantasy that GW had to kind of eventually go, all right, fine. I won't pretend does the bullet bounce off the, armor and do this. It's little, like, odd things like that. So I want to spend some time in a couple weeks talking about that more in depth. But before we go, I do want to kind of like pump it a little bit. For those who are new to us, the 40K lore cast is a weekly podcast focusing on the lore of the Warhammer 40K universe available in all streaming platforms. Additionally, we have a YouTube channel that has our older cast for that, along with obviously the history of 40K,

and a new show called Two Old Men and Their Handler, starring Mr. Brian Horton and Brad Chester and their friend David Zuber. You know, I take offense to that it wasn't wildly true. Yes. That will also be available on the network. So you'll be able to see Brian there and Brad there with doing their thing. And then Brian's also, if people are looking to play the game competitively and you're anywhere near the Northeast, play in Brian's events. They're really, really, really, really good.

The Salt City GT.com. You can sign up for an event coming August 1st, 2nd, and 3rd in Syracuse, New York, or we have Warhammer 40K, Warhammer Age of Sigma, and Marvel Crisis Protocol as well. Yep. So, but with that, I just want to thank you all for being there. It's our second show, so it's only going to get better. Tell me how to live my life. All right. See you all next time. Take care. Bye.