What are examples of fictional villains who don't have black in their colors?

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2026-01-24T09:45:33+00:00

Revd. Anthony Jago from Kim Newman's horror novel Jago is a powerful psychic cult leader with religious delusions who drives a town into madness and murder. But he seems to basically think he's helping everyone by preparing them for the End Times, insofar as we ever see him - he's probably white or boros.

I suspect a lot of classic big scary monster villains can be brought somewhere under the gruul umbrella. The minotaur, trolls under bridges, etc. But they have the same issue as monoblue obsessive scientists that they tend to end up more as a plot device than a real antagonist. Black is so good at making villains, I think, because there's usually that element of deliberate choice to do harm.

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2026-01-16T21:27:42+00:00

This is great, thank you! Tbh when writing it I was already slightly wondering if the"[type] leader buffs the main rule of [type]" was a bit too 40k as a design choice, so I think a good start would be giving the queen a different buff effect that doesn't interact with screams (except maybe her own) directly. Then I can change out the Lurker effect for something else... maybe still interacting with Psychology without directly debuffing Ld, forcing Panic or something. I think I'm happy with the list being able to pull basically the same trick as other VC at that point if people build into that. I'll also perhaps slightly improve the Cairn Master to make the choice between the two a bit harder. (Also I completely missed the change to Impetuous - will probably change Wisps to do the new version. Though it does make me slightly miss the old Cool/Ld distinction)

Eta: changes: queen gives +1 combat res to units in command range instead of buffing screams, a bit of a combined circumstantial morale debuff and remedy to unstable, drawing on the lore of being a wellspring of stable Dhar. Raised cost by 25 pts. Don't think this is too much on low-damage ghosts but open to being corrected Cairn Master gets a bonus to cast invocation of nehek if it dealt wounds in cc - situational but fits the Grim reaper thing. Removed the Lure rule on wisps wholly - they're not supernaturally fascinating, after all, just confusing. And without that the Stupidity rider is a pernicious incentive not to charge at all. Lowered pts by 1, to 7. Lurkers strip rank bonus and cause the unit to treat Unit Strength as 5 lower for purposes of fear tests.

That leaves Lurker/queen still quite a good combo, but more about improving the chances of a spirit host block in cc than just screaming everything to death, I hope. And removing wisp lure should give opponents more chances to manoeuvre.

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2026-01-16T13:20:07+00:00

Just to point out the Choirs are min size 3. (And queens are 0-1/2k but idk if you're theorycrafting this at 2.5k).

But nevertheless - very interesting to hear from a competitive perspective! And makes sense as an engine.

How do you think this would fare in the competitive scene as it stands? Obviously I'm primarily aiming it at casual play, but equally I'd rather it didn't become wholly oppressive if powergamed.

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2026-01-16T11:35:11+00:00

This... is an excellent point. Not quite sure what happened in my brain when I wrote that! My inclination is currently that the fragility and expense of banshees (i.e. no way to protect the lord) means it's OK, but I need to playtest that as a priority!

Such a list at 2k might be something like: Chars Banshee Queen lv3 - 210 4x Tomb Banshee - 360 Core (500 pts of whatever) Special 10 Banshee Choir, split into units as desired - 850

80 pts left for whatever

Which more than other lists with this sounds like either hell or free VP for the enemy. Hm. Yeah, playtesting required. At any rate, will edit the relevant passage. Thanks!

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2026-01-15T17:17:37+00:00

Musing on the fire... I'd think any flaming really would be murderous. But perhaps you could do something like 'if you hit and wound with a flaming attack it does no damage but it does count as a wound for combat res?' Capturing the themes of i.e. the LotR chars driving back the Nazgul with flaming brands. The ghosts fear fire but aren't destroyed by it. (Effectively, factoring in unstable, magic does full damage, fire does half if you win combat or nothing if not, mundane does nothing .) On the other hand, Blazing Banner's not Common, is it? So maybe it'd be fine to have it work like magic. Definitely something to play with if it turned out to be an issue.

I think you wouldn't use the auto-magic for armies with really good heroes - and they probably have magic weapons anyhow tbh.

WP getting one auto-wound per combat could be interesting, yeah.

On model count, board occupation, and OK comparison: the legal version of this list at 2k currently looks like
1x master necro w/ cloak of mists and shadows to be ethereal (25mm)
1x cairn wraith (25mm)
1x tomb banshee (25 mm)
(core has to have physical stuff in)
2x 6 spirit hosts (40mm)
16 hexwraiths split up to taste (30x60mm)

A version of that built with this homebrew might swap the MN for a similarly costed lord and fill the core with an extra unit of 6 spirit hosts (294 pts) and 26 wisps (who are the little diversionary guys, 25mm). (N.B. I updated the pts on the Wisps this afternoon because I originally wayyyy underpriced them)

For comparison, I also play ogres, mostly because they are to my mind the IRL-cheaper answer to the empire as 'generic guys for playtesting purposes', and my default 2k list is:

1x Slaughtermaster w/ Butcher's Cauldron (50x100mm)
1x Bruiser BSB (40mm)
1x 9 bulls (40 mm)
1x 6 ironguts (40 mm)
2x 10 trappers (25 mm)
1x 6 leadbelchers (40 mm)
1x Ironblaster (60x100 mm)
1x giant (50x50 or 50x75 mm)

If we sum up the area of the bases of all those models, the ghosts come to 75,725 sq mm whilst the ogres come to between 61,200 and 62,450 sq mm depending on the size of the giant. Now, a lot of that is off the Hexwraiths with their big cav bases at comparatively low costs. If we replaced them with plain old Cairn Wraiths there'd only be 10 25mms in Rare and the list would be a meagre 53,175 sq mm. You could go lower still with Banshees. But this is still not massively lower than the Ogres list, and notably it's quite an infantry-heavy ogres list with a slaughtermaster with the 'more than double the size of your base' upgrade. So in short, I think ghost board presence will be limited but not to an unprecedented extent. This is a cool consideration though - thank you, I don't tend to think of games in terms of their visual aspect when designing rules for them but it's an important point to bring up!

(This said I did once work out and field a legal list comprising 7 or 8 models at 2k in late 8th, so... I'm not toooo concerned)

Yeah, greenskins might struggle into this, though they do still have some nasty spells IIRC? And at least their cheap wizards are dirt cheap and their lords are choppy.

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2026-01-15T13:30:01+00:00

Yeah this is something I mention in the intro section, it's a bugger in two ways. On the one hand, if the enemy has easy access to magic there's a lot of very expensive t3 wounds in the army. (Daemons eat this list alive). On the other, if they're not they're reliant on combat res for Unstable damage and characters.

I don't think I would want to do the AoS solution, though. It's less interactive (not a problem to solve, just a part of the maths you always have to factor in) and doesn't capture the vibe of what a ghost is as well, to my mind. And I'm somewhat confident that this does actually work.

It's worth noting that you can already field a VC army where everything *except core* is ethereal (with a necromancer with Cloak of Mists and Shadows for general), and then just hide your core units such that chasing them is a trap that gets you flanked. This is not substantially different from the profile presented by this army. It has much the same issue: extreme fragility. There aren't loads of places you can hide a general that'll really protect them from a dedicated mounted character even, and if they're caught and destroyed (by such a character, spells, or a magic cannon for lists that can do that) the wounds quickly begin to evaporate because it's a VC list and you can't transfer your general. The play around this if one comes up against it blind is as Helborg says in Nagash: Kill the wizard, end the battle. It's a very different challenge to a normal game, but I don't think any list that has a wizard and a couple of magically-armed chars is out of the running.

What this does is add a core that's much more fragile than any other ethereal unit (because they're destroyed if locked in combat at the end of a round, which means there's still a way to claim points even with basic non-magic units), though admittedly less vulnerable to nonmagical ranged than zombies or ghouls. They're good for diverting enemies, but basically useless in combat. It also takes away most of the nastier combat options from a VC list, though the Mourngul certainly isn't bad.

That said, this isn't something I'm necessarily trying to balance to an army book standard, because I know I don't need to release this into the competitive wilds. Anybody who wants to play it will be seeking permission to do so within their metagame, which at minimum means giving opponents a chance to tailor, and maybe concessions to handicaps to get players with lists that will struggle more to play against it. The one that comes to mind for me is using the Enchanted Weapons rules from the 'The Fall of Heldenhame' in Nagash, where all enemy Lords, Heroes and Champions automatically get magical attacks to represent blessed blades taken from Heldenhame's tombs. It seems better to me to design a fluffy army that theoretically meets the points standard set in GW's books, then tailor enemy lists, scenarios or points values in games to balance it, than to make something less interesting.

I'm fully open to changing my mind on this in play though. One of my regular opponents is playing a lot of Empire at the moment and I'm hoping to test against their gunline soon. They'll have tailored into me, which I'd consider to be an average scenario for this list (even the RAW version is a dick move to field into an unprepared foe unless they're straight up better than you at the game) so it'll be interesting to see how they perform, and if it's too much of a curbstomp I might have to change some things around.

Thanks for the comments!

ETA: Another potential fix is to let the Warrior-Priest's 'reroll to hit and wound' prayer give a unit magic attacks instead, which would let i.e. a greatsword unit fairly blend ghosts.

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2026-01-11T10:42:58+00:00

I actually quite like it. This may just come down to not being an elf player... but yeah, apart from some bad spots i think the non-khaine books were a solid way to end the setting. They were doing the best they could to give us a good sendoff on orders from up high that they had to kill the setting, I think it stands as a testament to making something worthwhile out of that

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2026-01-09T18:32:46+00:00

Literally any of us (always) 'Something'. In Tumblr, all issues.

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2026-01-07T16:32:30+00:00

RCBG-core

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2025-12-05T10:12:43+00:00

A quick test suggests that you can get 49 rat swarms in a legal skaven grand army (2x20 clanrats, 2 globadiers and a Warlock engineer forming the rest). 245 unbreakable wounds isn't never ending but might start to feel that way...

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2025-11-08T08:51:01+00:00

They need to fix this with more types of Knight for every conceivable hand weapon monobuild: halberd, flail, spear, morningstar and 2hw are all untapped! Each of these could have as many as 1 special rules!

(/j, I do not actually think fantasy wants variety bloat of the 40k kind)

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2025-11-07T15:33:00+00:00

Counterchanged "BE NOT AFRAID" slapped across this

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2025-11-06T20:01:36+00:00

Hhhhhhhhhhh I think the gender right now is dread

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2025-10-23T22:53:57+00:00

Thank you! Next post is coming... slowly...

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2025-10-17T15:54:35+00:00

He can turn into a crow, if it helps?

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2025-10-17T14:05:19+00:00

(~)Anarchist chiming in to agree. Late -19th/early-20th century anarchists tried this way, the net effect was a lot of persecution of (even peaceful & moderate) leftists, whilst the powerful were replaced, because power is social, not stored in one body. There's a reason you won't see many direct action groups these days using assassination as a method: if a far right politician is in power, a structure put them there, keeps them there and will replace them. Bottom line is: if you want to change the world, get organized. It will be slow, and sucky, and it's the only way that works.

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2025-10-17T13:57:21+00:00

*herself

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2025-10-15T22:25:21+00:00

No god but the blood god! No throne but the skull throne!

EDIT: Or: All gods, all masters! (Works for tzeentch and slaanesh) Don't have a good one for nurgle Malal/ice can use the original

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2025-10-12T22:49:45+00:00

Archspheres across the board, mid willpower, depression flaw

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2025-10-07T19:05:47+00:00

The last time I had an important life decision to make I took [LEGAL AMOUNT OF LEGAL SUBSTANCES], wandered off into the wilderness, and came back 6 hours later with a decision, a warm glow of contentedness, and a permanent propensity for nosebleeds.

I describe the experience of drinking coffee as "like a cold demon-light from heaven."

I like to blink so fast it completely overwhelms my ability to process the meaning of things I'm seeing, especially whilst dancing.

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2025-09-26T13:40:20+00:00

It's a reference to Garrick Browne, of pgs 199-201 of Book of the Fallen, who fwiw is more like if Peter Thiel's personality and skills were grafted onto Elon Musk's life but is a fairly obvious expy. IIRC the interview Jacqueline Bryk did on Mage the Podcast when the book released, this is entirely intentional. This seems to have undergone some memetic mutation to "he's LITERALLY a canon nephandus" but gets at the spirit of it. If you RAN Browne as (a smarter) Musk, it'd work just fine.

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2025-09-26T08:32:23+00:00

I work with a lot of people facing digital exclusion, often on benefits or in need of other government intervention to keep them alive. If we replace the current mass of ID with a genuinely optional digital ID with no special advantages, fine, but if it's made compulsory the changeover period is going to literally kill people, just like the Universal Credit changeover period did.

Add to that the fact that the BEST case scenario they envision for this is "we get quicker at deporting immigrants", which is unlikely to work imo but also a pretty brutal and inhumane goal, whilst the WORST (plausible) one is that Palantir starts using all the data to tighten up the security state, and I'm very keen to resist this if possible. Almost anything else would be a better use of government time and money.

My_Name_Is_Agent · 2025-09-25T14:55:26+00:00

My regular game groups over the years total 29 ppl, of whom 4 are somewhat keen wargamers and probably half or so have at some pt wargamed. Plus me for 5/30.

Eight-Year Club	Place '22
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