Imperium is a weekly hobby magazine from Hachette Partworks. In this 90-week series, our intrepid magazine-receiver will be reviewing each individual issue, its included models, and gaming materials. A Premium subscription was provided to Goonhammer for review purposes.
Sometimes the best intentions lead to the least pleasant places. Sometimes you go to bed at 9:30pm, hoping for a solid 8-12 hours of sleep, only to wake up after 45 minutes and still find yourself awake at 3am. Then, and only then, will you understand the Mind of a Writer.
The Magazine
This issue is light on narrative content – so light, in fact, that there’s none to speak of! I normally would vamp a bit and wax lyrical about Roboute Guilliman, the subject of this issue, but I already did that last week and can only bear to repeat myself so much.
The Hobby Materials
In lieu of narrative material, our formerly final issue is devoted to a massive tutorial on how to paint the big man himself, Roboute Guilliman. After assembling Ultradad with the components from this and last week’s issues, we break him down into 4 subassemblies, plus whichever head we want. Unlike some tutorials for Guilliman which instruct the hobbyist to paint him gold and fill in the blue, this goes the other way around. I genuinely think they should have supplied a fresh detail brush with this issue, as I guarantee whatever workhorse brush your typical Imperium enjoyer has been using this entire time is, at this point, 90% curlicue. The paint guide continues onward, spanning 16 pages of in-depth tutorializing. Every technique displayed should be familiar to folks who’ve been following along at home, save for painting the Emperor’s Sword itself. It’s wild how good they make it look with just a couple simple glazes, and it’s a hell of a lot easier than most techniques I’ve seen for painting flaming weapons. There’s an air of “making do with what we got” when Tesseract Glow is used for the laurels, but by and large this is a comprehensive tutorial that should get you fantastic results if you follow it. It’s a real victory lap for people who’ve come this far, and I can’t think of a much better model to center it around.
Also, should you wish to follow along with a few methods from Goonhammer, we got you covered there as well.
The Gaming Materials
Predictably, Roboute Guilliman’s Datasheet opens up the rules section this week, detailing his bevvy of special rules, statblock and the like. Tutorials are given for a few of his abilities, as well as the now-defunct Lord of War detachment. That’s not the important bit though.
The meat of the gaming this time is the climactic battle for The Dolmen Gate. The Imperials have broken into the tomb complex and are finally ready to seal away the Necrons on Kjalma’s Skull. The Necrons, however, have one last trick to play, and have sealed the Imperial invaders in the Dolmen Gate’s chamber. The only way out is for the Space Marine Captain to defeat the Necron Overlord in single combat. This is represented at first by a fairly standard multi-objective battlefield, but with one key difference:
The Duel Zone
At the center of the board is a small area that blocks all line of sight, represented by our game mat from the very first issue. Inside this Yu-Gi-Oh! Millennium Puzzle trap, the Primaris Captain and Necron Overlord (who both must be taken this game) duke it out, unaffected by the rest of the battle, until the game ends or one of them dies. To keep things dramatic, each fighter has 25 wounds instead of their usual handful, and the Space Marine Captain gets the Sword of Saint Marcius, an even more master-crafted sword than his typical master-crafted sword. Winning this duel is the secondary objective for both players in this mission, and this 1v1 cagematch in the center of a huge battlefield is one of the most 40k things I’ve ever witnessed.
Final Verdict 80/90:
We broke this down last time, but you’re getting a $70 model for $27.90 with these two issues, and that alone is pretty great. The painting tutorial is likely the most in-depth tutorial for painting Guilliman yet penned outside of the one on Goonhammer, and the mission is, without a doubt, my favorite to ever be included in Imperium.
See you next issue, warhams.
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