Warhounds 2 Warmasters

This’ll be my second time at Beachhead, after my blooding in 2025. I’ve been to a fair few narrative and themed campaign weekends, but the 2025 event was my first ‘competitive’ tournament experience – and I’m pleased to say it wasn’t nearly as cutthroat or pernickety as tales might have you believe.

It was a fantastic event – I went down on my own, to my first competitive event, and found a warm, friendly group of gamers, along with some of the most spectacular painting and tables I’ve ever seen at an event. The Adeptus Titanicus crowd and Maximal Fire team certainly know how to stage a good shindig!

Not really knowing what to expect, my army building plan was leaning into my comfort zone of ‘take what you think is cool, and then build around that.‘ If you’ve heard of the War of the False Primarch project, you’ll have some idea that my jam is exploring the background of the 40k universe – I just love squeezing little story notes or Easter eggs into my armies, so the Metalica Maniple below was all based on the GW Studio titans of the 90s. Flick through some old White Dwarf issues and you’ll spot the inspiration for the Iron Skulls Titans below.

The Maniple was deliberately pretty simple. I stuck with Reavers and Warlords in a Fortis maniple (for the uninitiated, that’s a group of Titans that get defensive benefits from being in base-to-base contact) and The results were good – a couple of losses, and couple of wins, but all really fun games. This time I’ve decided to take a Traitor force – or, as we prefer to call it ‘loyal to the Warmaster’ – and have plumped for the Stormlords – Legio Tempestus.

With thanks to Warhounds 2 Warmasters for letting me pontificate on their site, over these articles I’ll share how I go about building a force, and – all being well – getting it painted, ready and tested, so I can make sure to give the other players as good a game as I can.

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Beginnings

Let me make it clear early on that I’m no great army builder or strategist – my main aim is for my force to look good on the table, and hopefully not roll over too quickly!

With that said, I’m not tied to adapting existing models with this force, so I’ve got a lot more freedom with the Stormlords than with the Iron Skulls. That means I’ll be able to play with all the fun new weapons and Titans that have appeared since the 90s.

A big part of the reason for choosing the Stormlords is that I’ve been building them for gaming with my friends – and so I’ve got the core of the Beachhead force built and in the midst of painting.

I’ll be starting off with the versatile Precept Maniple – this makes one order a turn easier for Titans to enact, so the Maniple can work more easily in concert. I always feel reassured to have game mechanics that make ‘normal stuff’ easier, or more reliable: anything that helps mitigate the inevitable bad luck that dice inevitably throw up is a good thing to my mind.

The list thus far is made up of a Warlord; two Reavers; a Warbringer and a Warhound; adding up to around 1,850pts. I’ll have a chance to take them for a spin at Warhammer World in a couple of weeks, so will report back on how they get on – and then look to see how I can tweak the lists for the larger Beachhead games.

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