The Theatre of Tragedies

Feudal world terrain in a way you've never seen before - Thracia Rex explored in videographic form! We've finally been able to combine our passion in wargaming hobby and cinematography via our YouTube presence and this battlefield feature is a sign of things to come. Be sure to subscribe for more cinematic showcases of miniatures, model terrain and wargaming in general!

Thracia Rex is a feudal world terrain project we produced for the use of our Horus Heresy games, aiming to create a deeply personalized and thematically coherent gaming setting. From the multi-leveled battlefield to the underground catacomb features, each core element has a narrative that has also put a thematic spin to the played scenarios as objectives or special rules. 

We wanted the board to have a bit of a mysterious aura; was the town originally a medieval settlement that was later upgraded with science fiction technology, or the other way around - an advanced society that forgot its ways and deteriorated into primitiveness over centuries? We combined scratchbuilt elements and 3D printed details with plastic and resin parts from Warhammer 40,000, The Horus Heresy, Age of Sigmar, Warhammer Fantasy and more.

Looking back, the entire build between 2020-21 was a pretty mad project, but it's been totally worth it already with all the games and army photoshoots it has provided a setting for! Its value is most importantly in the vibe we still get when we enter our studio space hosting the table - it's the centerpiece for the showroom. Thracia Rex has already set the stage for games of Horus Heresy, Age of Sigmar and Trench Crusade to name a few - who knows what adventures lie ahead!

Latest from Thracia Rex

We've been playing our Feudal World Horus Heresy campaign "The Thracian Insurgency" since 2021 and finally celebrated the finale some time ago! This was by no means the end of the narrative, but the conclusion of the Insurgency story arc which saw the Legion comrades turn against each other and ultimately burn in the fires of Heresy. We had many story hooks to explore in the various campaign episodes and we were able to wrap most of them up in the final battles. Many corners of Thracia Rex were left unexplored however, so there are still secrets to unfold!

Our in-house campaign finale happened simultaneously on four separate tables - the Renegade Governor was trying to escape the town on a separate "Outer Walls" tile, whereas the grand battle was fought on the main Feudal City table. On the countryside board the Loyalists were trying to protect their automated Artillery providing fire support to the cityfighting forces. In the underground tunnels the defenders tried to hold off invaders from reaching their combat-controlling HQ bunker. I really enjoyed putting the Loyalists under pressure and seeing them divide their strength between the different tasks - which part was deemed more important than the other and which units were trusted with which task. Our Traitor forces were almost like NPC adversaries, playing their part in the narrative with Dark Angels and Salamanders in the center of it. This made for good drama and memorable moments, especially when newly-finished surprise reinforcements kept rolling in.

Albeit having their resources stretched thin and suffering losses on all fronts, the Loyalist forces were able to hold their own and keep the emergency beacons transmitting - their only hope was to get the word of Thracia Rex's tragedies off-world and hope for distant reinforcements to arrive. Noa's Salamanders led by Praetor Barbados Khes were the unshakeable anvil all Loyalist efforts leant on, and Eric's Dark Angel elites performed surgical strikes with pinpoint efficiency.

I've been calculating some new World Eater rosters and have a couple of unit builds on the way - the game is in such a good state that it's exciting to add to the playable force. New tournaments are popping up monthly in Finland and the scene is growing, I think a lot of it is due to Horus Heresy hitting that sweet spot of balance between ("historical") gaming and universal hobby appreciation. Cool models don't hurt either!

Noa's Salamanders were always standing where the fighting was fiercest. Glory to Vulkan!

Forward march!

Our Horus Heresy campaign is set in a medieval world that has been influenced by some of humanity's technological developments - a peculiar mix of old and new, superstition and science. Although most battles are fought between the Loyalist and Traitor Legions, their campaign quest originally began as brothers-in-arms, collectively aiming to liberate Thracia Rex from a rebelling Governor and his insurgent forces. However, the timing of the galactic civil war was unfortunate, and the insurgency soon turned into an all-out civil war between humanity's finest.

For the first stages of the campaign all of our participants worked in co-operation against "non-player character" forces, more precisely the Thracian feudal guard as well as their alien and mercenary allies. To represent these detachments we've made dedicated models and vehicles, painted in the same palette and basing theme as our campaign board. We've had a really inspiring and relaxed approach with the militia forces with @wrhd_ollie, as we've just been crafting a unit here and there and completing the paintjob and basing in one sitting. Suddenly we've ended up with a small feudal guard army in our hands!

In the next posts we'll be showing some of the Feudal Guard units on our Instagram - hop on the Heresy train!

+++ Thracia Rex Feudal Guard Facebook Gallery +++

Unearth the Betrayal

It was once again our collective hobby inspiration that sparked the idea for our latest gaming day - Ollie had created the insane Night Lords Apothecary some time ago and we knew the model deserved a proper story arch. Unfortunately the Chief Medicae Consul is quite a rare unit choice and Ollie's scratchbuild is a bit too epic to be run as a regular Apothecary - sadly he hadn't seen any gameplay. Therefore we wrote him a secret narrative of his own, incorporating the villain into Thracian Insurgency as a non-player character.

Since the early days of our gaming table build we'd been toying with the idea of creating some underground features for the terrain. These ambitions were boosted as the final construction took shape and we decided to use Ikea Kallax grid shelves as the legs for the table. These have been holding some of our studio armies and literature, but the shelves would also be perfect for some terrain integration - this way the underground terrain pieces would actually be stored underneath the streets and could be used in gameplay as a separate, modular scenery setup.

Our idea was to write a classic "mad scientist" story for the Night Lords Chief Medicae (now called Dr. Norman Bramm) and have this renegade character lead a clandestine operation from his makeshift underground laboratory. His hideous creations (inspired by both Horus Heresy Raven Guard tragedies as well as Fabius Bile's Enhanced Warriors project) would be too imposing for the Loyalist alliance to ignore and this would result in a subterranean manhunt. At first we discussed with Scott that it would be cool to build a simple dungeon corridor to surprise the other players with, but as per usual, we couldn't stop there...

Check out the entire subterranean terrain build and story arch via War Head Instagram or Facebook Gallery below!

+++ Thracia Rex Underground: Unearth the Betrayal +++

Chronicles of Thracia Rex

Starting to get hyped for our next Horus Heresy campaign day, the third episode in the Thracian Insurgency! A month from now we'll witness some fresh troops march in to experience completely new narrative in the feudal world of Thracia Rex!

In our previous story-driven scenarios we've left several plot devices open and provided many clues to the future events - it's soon time to start tying the strings together. All-out war seems inevitable and the campaign experience points the players have accumulated will be put to the test...

To recap the story so far we'll be posting "Chronicles of Thracia Rex" updates on Instagram and Facebook as we head towards the next campaign adventures in March. Check out what has happened on the feudal world so far!

The Spectres of Nex-Murnau

To continue with the Thracian Insurgency campaign footage, we've just received an image transmission from a foolhardy remembrancer attached to a battlegroup of another traitor legion - the Night Lords!

Ollie's take has been to build a suitably frightening VIII Legion army, steering towards darker themes instead of the mainstream "halloween horror" vibe. This is already evident in the colour scheme with the usual blue replaced with a cold-tinted black, a proper midnight clad.

The Night Lords have been based to match the colours and textures of our Thracia Rex table and their style fits the gloomy surroundings as well! We've been joking that it was fun to spend 15 months creating a 6x4' display board just for Ollie's traitors...

Night Lords FB Army Gallery - The Spectres of Nex-Murnau

The Phoenix Nest

 
Betrayal. Trenches. Vanity. Thematic trinity for our new Horus Heresy Emperor's Children!

The army was created as an undercover lockdown project last year as we started planning our Thracian Insurgency 30K campaign - our crew has long traditions of secret army builds (usually associated with grand reveals in our Civil War tournaments) and here the new force played a narrative part in the story as well. It's a project that I was very inspired to do, a bit smaller "cabinet" force with emphasis on scenic storytelling instead of gameplay practicalities.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about 3D printing making its way to the hobby scene, even without really going into the IP issue. On the other hand it is a wonderful enabler of conversions and gives so much possibilities into creating imaginative concepts, playing with the scale of things and makes some of the crazy ideas more affordable. It's not hard to see that some of the cool concepts that people have produced would not get done without the help of some bits printing.

The other side is what kind of effect printing has on the creative process. I feel that an essential part of making conversions is that one looks at the parts they have available and then combines them in an inspired way or turns those parts into something else. Combining kits or creating alternative builds is awesome and that "forced creativity" having to go with what you have at hand might be spoiled by the endless catalogue of printable conversion bits. This is of course partly (mostly) sentimental nonsense, we're just of the generation that looks at household items to turn into terrain and likes to write their army lists on paper with a pencil... But still, an imaginative conversion of an established model is often much more interesting to see than an alternative third party miniature.

This army was pretty much a personal experiment in the printing realm and my next army project will go with the opposite (and more traditional) kitbashing route.

Emperor's Children FB Army Gallery - The Phoenix Nest

War Head Feudal World: Thracia Rex

Thracia Rex, Imperial Feudal World, Ultima Segmentum, Rebelling, 005.M31.

With our first campaign games played in June our gaming table project of 15 months has finally reached a stage that we can call it finished! This doesn't mean we don't have additions in the works, but these are smaller projects of their own that can be used to modify the existing scenery or to provide narrative details, such as pieces of scatter terrain. I look forward to these more "relaxing" mini projects now that the pressure to finish the terrain for summer gaming has been lifted off our shoulders!

Although I and Ollie have done the heavy lifting, we've had a lot of help and support from our hobby pals crafting and painting details, participating in planning, gifting us parts or just encouraging us to keep ploughing through the tasks. Now we get to enjoy a (hopefully long-lived) narrative gaming spree together!

We've been sharing detail pictures in War Head Instagram and in the Facebook Album, and will continue to do so as we get more gaming footage during our Horus Heresy: Thracian Insurgency campaign.