The third chapter in the Armageddon Crusade book is Assault on the Fire Wastes. It's about the assault on the Fire Wastes (no surprise there), and marks the end of the Third Armageddon war. This is my review of the chapter and, because this is the final lore chapter, of the narrative portion of the book as a whole. This review does contain spoilers.
In the previous 2 chapters, the war focused on the different commanders and frontlines involved in securing key locations on the 2 major land masses of Armageddon. They leave room for speculation about the reason behind these goals, and I think I see 2 obvious possibilities (which aren't mutually exclusive.)
The story told in this Crusade book is mostly the story of the Space Wolves, Black Templars, Grey Knights, the Astra Militarum, and of course the World Eaters. But the tactical map features several other chapters and factions, so there's lots of room to add an army into the mix, and inventing a narrative around why they're involved.
In this chapter, the story necessarily shifts to the Grey Knights. They're the ones with the sorcery necessary to unbind the gate's ingress into reality. The problem is, the Red Angel's Gate has formed over the Fire Wastes, an environment that's deadly even when there's not a warp breach overhead.
This phase of the war is the final push, and everyone knows it. Some Grey Knights done Dreadknight suits and Terminator armour, and other Space Marine factions move in to support their battle brothers. It's a surprisingly emotional scene when the Grey Knights start chanting their rites as they advance toward the eye of the storm. It's low-hanging fruit, but it works and you can almost hear them as you read. Everybody wants to be a part of a winning team, and in this chapter the Grey Knights are the underdogs.
If it's not enough that cultists and World Eaters are rushing up the mountain to stop the Imperial psykers, they gain enough of an advantage at one point that Angron pops back out of the gate. But by force of magical will, the Grey Knights push against Angron's final (well, final in this book anyway) burst of fury, as Space Wolves and Black Templars provide defence. In a moment of desperation, Styrbjorn Flinteye grapples Angron just long enough to keep him from disrupting the Grey Knights' invocation, and the gate closes. Angron is once again gone, as is the portal, and also Flinteye. The battle has been won by Flinteye's sacrifice, so that the war may yet continue.
I enjoyed the previous chapter, and I have to admit that I found this one equally as gripping. It's a little funny to notice just how many words Games Workshop manages to write about fundamentally the same thing, but sometimes it really really works. This felt like a battle partly because of the details and characters, but it also reads like an analysis of a battle. It makes a lot of logical sense, or maybe it doesn't actually but in that case it fakes it well. I look at the maps, I see the frontlines and troop movement, I read about those details in the text, and it all seems to add up.
I feel like I've gained valuable insight into how wars are waged in the 41st millennium. It's not actually going to change the way I play my wargames, I doubt it's prepared me for realworld combat (and I don't want to find out, anyway), but it's probably influenced the way I'll imagine my games. Maybd I'll see my games differently when I'm planning them, or maybe as I play, or maybe only in retrospect. Whatever the effect, this book has added to the fun of wagaming, and I appreciate that.
If you're interested in make-believe wars (they're much better than the real ones), then this book is a pretty fun look at a fictional battlefront. I know there are some good books out there about pretend wars (the Badab War series is supposed to be really outstanding), and I don't know how this compares. Point is, I enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to playing it.
Next, I'll review the campaign rules provided by this book.
Photo by Freddy Castro on Unsplash and modified by Seth Kenlon.