We have a lot of old Codices and Armybooks lying around that are filled with a plethora of long dead or indeed forgotten special characters. Most of them are probably now considered completely unusable on the tabletop but who says so? Why don’t we crack them out and give them a go once more…

A lot of us have Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 books on the shelf and these would be somewhere I'd look to bring out those legends. All you have to do is grab it, open up the back and choose one of these old special characters. Pop him or indeed her down as part of your updated army and tweak the rules a bit to see if he or she can still hold their own!

Using The Dynamic Duo

For example let's talk Gotrek & Felix. They haven't been usable for a while now and it's such a shame considering how much of an influence they are having on the End Times with their current books which run in tandem to the events of the main battle game. You can find the rules for them in your 5th Edition Dwarfs Armybook and go from there! It would be awesome to see what some of their old rules do on the battlefields of today!

Let's take a closer look at Gotrek & Felix for a moment and see how they'd work in the new version of the rules and if it would really be so bad to have them here despite the jump in edition! Gotrek's Axe isn't really broken in any sense of the word and functions much like Thorgrim's allowing him to wound anything on a 2+ and giving him the added benefit of multiple wounds on both normal enemies (D3) and daemons/dragons (D6). He also applies -3 to the armour save of anyone he swats with the axe effectively making him a killing machine, as he should be.

Stat line wise they aren't too worse for wear either with both Gotrek & Felix being pretty good at fighting but with a reasonably low wound count. The real boon for them, and something that could easily annoy your opponent (but be quite fun in the mean time), is that they have the Gotrek's Doom special rule. This allows them, on the roll of a 4+ to ignore a spell cast on them or a wound suffered. Basically this isn't Gotrek's day to die so Felix is spared thanks to his good luck (or bad luck from the mindset of a Slayer). It's effectively having a nice ward save that also helps against spells as a whole being cast on them.

I think they'd be a perfect pair to use in modern Warhammer Fantasy and wouldn't cause too much of an issue, especially if used in End Times games where the characters are the big focus. They come in at a combined cost of 477 points so you're not going to see them in small games either!

Rummage In Your Library!

Delve through Armybooks, Sourcebooks, Codices, Supplements and more where you’ll find plenty of characters AND units actually that you could try and get back onto the battlefield.

If you’re a fan of Warhammer Fantasy then you might have some Dogs of War lying around or even the Ravening Hordes book which bridged the gap between two editions - all of these are full of interesting characters and units that could find a place on a new battlefield.

Of course most of the time things aren’t going to be balanced and a character and/or unit might end up walking through all of your foes or just dying after a few tentative steps. Either way it shouldn’t take much to drop a few interesting rules their way, tweak old ones, or even up their stats or drop them in places.

One of the other great aspects of giving this a go is it means that you have ample opportunity to do some customisation and tweaking to existing models in your collection or just go crazy and start kit bashing together some epic old heroes for your new armies.

Just because a character is dropped into the past doesn’t mean they're gone forever. Warhammer 40,000 has been a lot better about keeping special characters alive of late but there are still those who have faded away. With this however we say live long and prosper the Chaos Space Marine Doomrider!

Have you tried this before?