General Issue

[Munkey]

So our general has to be a magic user with the Law of Vampires but the Rule book states general must be the model with the highest leadership.

My question is this. If you have a vampire lord with shadow magic and a master necromancer with law of Vampires, who is the general? The Vamp Lord has leadership 10 but the Master Necro has the Law of Vampires. I would like to have Law of Shadows in my force but can't afford 2 vamp lords at 2400 points...

 

[GhoulKing505]

The rule states that if the general can take a magic lore he has to take lore of vampires. Since your general has to be the character with the highest leadership (and also a wizard for vampire counts) your vampire lord has to take lore of vampires. That's how almost everyone is playing it. At least that's the gist I got from other threads on this forum.

 

[Munkey]

Hmmm I thought it might be the case. So how are peeps getting lvl 4 Shadow Lore Vamps? 2x lords. 1 lvl 1 Law of Vamps, tooled for fighting. The second a lvl 4 Shadow Vamp Lord? Is it possible to get a lvl 4 Shadow @ 2400 points with only 600 on lords?

 

[Gojira]

Haven't done the math, but a second lvl 4 vamp lord is a misnomer as your first vamp lord can be a lvl 1 with vamps and be general. No need to be lvl 4 at all. It's probably doable but not much room for gear or powers I think.

 

[Aramoro]

With no other Equipment etc it would cost 545 points to have a Lvl 4 Shadow Lord, so doable but ill advised.

 

[Mad 'At]

Couldn't you read it like this:

First you make your armylist, including things such as lore etc.

When it comes to selecting your general (which I believe is done right before the battle?) you look at the character in your army with the highest leadership. For that guy to become the general he must for fill certain criteria.
Other armies must ask him the following questions:

1. Dose he carry the battle standard (Slanns are an exception)?

2. Dose he carry any equipment/upgrade that forbids him from being the general (for example Virtue of the Ideal)?

If the answer to both is no then he is the general. If not then move on the the character with the second highest leadership.

We VC players must ask the following additional questions:

3. Is he a wizard?

4. Dose he use the lore of Vampires?

If the answer to both is yes then he is the general. If not then move on the the character with the second highest leadership.


I'm not sure how good the rules support this, but it makes sense to me.

 

[Guidebot]

Couldn't you read it like this:

First you make your armylist, including things such as lore etc.

When it comes to selecting your general (which I believe is done right before the battle?) you look at the character in your army with the highest leadership. For that guy to become the general he must for fill certain criteria.
Other armies must ask him the following questions:

1. Dose he carry the battle standard (Slanns are an exception)?

2. Dose he carry any equipment/upgrade that forbids him from being the general (for example Virtue of the Ideal)?

If the answer to both is no then he is the general. If not then move on the the character with the second highest leadership.

We VC players must ask the following additional questions:

3. Is he a wizard?

4. Dose he use the lore of Vampires?

If the answer to both is yes then he is the general. If not then move on the the character with the second highest leadership.


I'm not sure how good the rules support this, but it makes sense to me.

They key issue is, if 3 = yes, does 4 have to be?

 

[Aramoro]

Selecting your General is done at some ephemeral time in list writing, bringing your army to the table. It's not really defined that well. There is an assumption made that your army will be legal, which if you selected general at deployment time it might not be.

 

[Mad 'At]

Good points...

Lets scratch my previous post.

Reading the rules again I find this: If he is able to choose a spell lore, he must use the lore of vampires.

Now that sentence is odd. The sentence before that one states that the general must be a wizard, this makes the first part of this sentence weird. Since he is a wizard he can obviously choose a spell lore. The only exception would be if he is wearing the wizarding hat.
The second part of the sentence states the he must use the lore of vampires. It doesn’t say he has to use it if able. This means that even if he didn't have the option to choose the lore of vampires (but still has options to choose other lores) he must use (note: use, not choose) the lore of vampires.
A vampire with wizarding hat can't choose a lore (although the hat dose say "randomly chosen lore" o.o) and thus must not use lore of vampires, but he can still be the general. A vampire with Forbidden lore might not be able to choose lore of vampires (it isn't specified if he can only select from the BRB of if he keeps all his old options for lore), but since he can choose a lore he must still use lore of vampires, if he has the highest Ld.

So as a conclusion: The vampire with the highest leadership can only ever use another lore if he has the Wizarding Hat.

Though it is all written quite fuzzy, lets hope for a FaQ.

 

[Smogg]

I have to say the wizard hat idea is funny, and I would tend to think you are right. You could field your Vampire with a wizard hat. He would have the highest leadership, be a wizard and thus the general but end up with a random lore and no option to pick lore of vampires.

A counter argument could be that being forced to choose lore of vampire also extend to not limiting yourself from Lore of Vampires when buying equipment, or that its implied that you must have Lore of Vampire to be general. Though I will buy your logic for sure.

I cannot imagine GW putting this in a FAQ. Would anyone in their right mind actually do this for any other reason than to be goofy and prove a loophole in the rules?
I mean sure, you could have an unlikely vampire lord general with lore of life and suffering stupidity... I doubt it will be overpowered in any way for the points.

 

[Mad 'At]

With FaQ I was more hoping for more clear rules we determining who is the general in a VC army, because they are written quite weird now and no one likes them. I really hope that our vampire lord can use other lores than lore of vampire.

But it would be cool with a FaQ clarifying the use of the wizarding hat on vampire generals, and frankly not that unlikely. Gw sometimes focuses on the wrong thing entirely.

 

[Aramoro]

We have the same restriction as Tomb Kings and that is not going to change, our General will always have the Lore of Vampires.

 

[Mad 'At]

Not really, they have an hierophant who isn't necessary the general. The hierophant is the guy with the highest magic level, and that guy must use the Lore of Nehekhara.

Our generals must always use the lore of vampire, that won't change. I only hope that we can appoint a thrall or necro to act as then general so that our vampire lord can take another lore. This would be interesting gamewise.

 

[Smogg]

The more i think about Wizard's hat the more I feel its just really unclear what happens if its worn by a wizard.
What happens if you have wizards hat and:
- The wizard was level 3? (downgrades him to level 2?)
- The wizard was level 1 and bought +1 level upgrade? (does it make him level 3?)
- already has a lore? (does it give him a second or does he loose it)
- Is lore master because of another upgrade? (does he get to choose his lore master lore after rolling random lore?)
- The wizard was level 4 vampire and then the hat was destroyed? (does he revert back to level 4 and gain new spells? Did he have them all along?)

With a price of 100 pts, i don't think GW even considered that someone would buy this for their wizard lord. Of course its possible, but I think we have to accept that the rules for that are real tricky.

 

[damian]

Posted by Aramoro - 03-06-2012 01:51 PM
Selecting your General is done at some ephemeral time in list writing, bringing your army to the table. It's not really defined that well. There is an assumption made that your army will be legal, which if you selected general at deployment time it might not be.

I'm not sure this is actually the case, WHFB pg.107 says you choose the genereal prior to deploying your army, this will be after army list writing. As far as I'm aware you could potentially choose a different general for your army for every round in a multi-round torunament for example, although obviously most armies are written with the intention of having 1 specific character as the army general.

If this is indeed the case then the rule in the VC army book must mean that your army general is selected from those characters in the army that are wizards, have the lore of vampires spell list and have the highest available leadership from those characters that meet the first two criteria.

Certainly this does not contravene any of the RAW.

If you are going to insist that a vampire lord must retroactively take the lore of vampires so as to be the army general then in future I'm going to scrap vampire lords entirely and take wight kings as my army generals as they become lvl 1 wizards by that logic.......

D

 

[Tawg]

If you are going to insist that a vampire lord must retroactively take the lore of vampires so as to be the army general then in future I'm going to scrap vampire lords entirely and take wight kings as my army generals as they become lvl 1 wizards by that logic.......

D

Actually, if you made a list with no wizards, I think that'd just mean you'd start crumbling on first turn :skull:

It really doesn't seem complicated honestly.

BRB says:

The General is the character in your army with the highest Leadership.

Then Vampire book adds the criteria that:

Your army's general must be a wizard. If he is able to choose a spell lore, he must use Lore of Vampires.

Pretty cut and dry. The highest Leadership character, who happens to be a wizard, is the general. He automatically chooses Lore of Vampires, as per our restrictions. I think it's implied heavily that your highest leadership character will end up taking Lore of Vampires; Otherwise you could potentially end up with a Lord choice following a Hero choice as a general? That seems slightly wrong to me (Although potentially fluff-y, as a highly powerful warrior/non-vampire mage is following a fledgling ruler into battle? Sounds legit). Even so, I don't think it allows wriggle room for choosing an off-lore to down-grade a High LD model into being not general.

It'll always be the highest Ld, which is a mage. The book auto-chooses Lore of Vamps for him, it's not really retroactive.

I guess you can look at it both ways, Lores in general have to be declared before bringing the army to table, or rather 'Noted' and rolled for at the 'Start of the game'.

I know the FLGS around here that has rather large Warhammer tournaments makes you roll for spells upon entering the tournament, and you write those down and keep them the entire tournament. Which makes me think they would also ask that you declare your general once and use only that general the entire tournament, despite what the book says about picking a general on page 107. I believe that is just to clarify you don't have two generals if the criteria is met by multiple models.

Also as far as the 'If able to choose' part for the lore of Vampires I think clears up the Wizard-Hat rules. If the item forces you to random then he takes a random lore. Although I believe that clause was put there to alleviate the ruling when you took a special character who just Lore-mastered one or two lores (I believe all of our special characters have Vampire by default) instead of being able to choose. Wizard-hat rulings I would leave to friendly games and agreements with your opponent though, because there are plenty of ways you could go with that (Counts as Two wizards as per KoS? Add levels, possibly add extra lores known?).

 

[Lynks]

I think the FAQ on the hierophant helps to set some kind of precedence here.

Q: If I have two or more Nehekaharan Undead Wizards in my
army of the same level, can I choose one that has not taken the Lore of
Nehekhara to be the Hierophant forcing him to swap Lores? (p28)
A: No, you cannot force a change of Lore onto a Wizard by
making him your Hierophant. At least one of the highest level
Nehekharan Undead Wizards in your army must be noted on
your army list as taking the Lore of Nehekhara.

Our general still has to conform to the other restrictions of being the general (must have highest leadership) however there is the additional restriction that they must be a wizard and that they must take lore of vampires, so you have to incorporate that into your list writing, having at least one character with the highest leadership using lore of vampires. As you must take a hero or lord to be the general, (page 134 BRB) you have to incorporate a chacter who is eligible.

On the topic of the wizarding hat it says that "the wearer is treated as being a level 2 wizard who CAN use a randomly chosen spell lore" it doesn't say you MUST randomly generate, which means you still ahve the choice of lore of vampires and thus must choose it. What you are paying for in essence is a very expensive level 2 with inbuilt stupidity. It would be pretty great if there was a wight lord who could take it though because then he could become the general (albeit a very unconventional one)

 

[Dead Rat]

While I respect your reputation 5, if someone in my gaming group said they could pick the lore/spell generated by the wizard hat I would punch them in the thyroid.

 

[VonDookie]

I think that it's all pretty cut and dry... I don't know what the fuss is about...

Our General must (satisfy these requirements):

Be a wizard.

Use the lore of vampires.

Be the character with the highest leadership.

That pretty much sums it up... There aren't loopholes to exploit here.

 

[Lynks]

While I respect your reputation 5, if someone in my gaming group said they could pick the lore/spell generated by the wizard hat I would punch them in the thyroid.

That's not what i was saying. I was saying you either pick lore of vampires normally or you randomly generate through the hat. Sorry if that seemed unclear.

 

[Dead Rat]

Oh, sorry. I misunderstood.

It seems like a wizarding hat would be a waste of points on a model that is already a wizard.

 

[Hutobega]

Personally I.read all these rules and use them this way. Our general must use lore of vamps. Lets say you have a level 4 vamp with shadows a level 4 master necro with lore of vamp and a level 2 vampire hero with lore of vamp. The necromancer master has the highest leadership WITH lore of vampires. Were not forced to take lore of vamp with our level 4 vampire. That's how I thought this complication worked...highest leadership with lore of vampire...

 

[maxtoreador]

It's either erroneously bad or near spot on but still bad wording on GW's part depending on what they intended.

It's either:

• The highest leadership wizard MUST use lore of vamps and MUST be General.
• The highest leadership lore of vamps wizard MUST be General.

As much as I don't want to admit it GW seems to be trying (but failing) to steer towards simpler rules, and 2 conditions forcing two variables is simpler than 3 forcing one. AKA "Who has the highest Ld?, If he's a wizard then he MUST be Lore of Vamps and the General. EoS"

 

[Dead Rat]

The highest ld must be the general as per BrB rules.

The general must be a wizard and must choose the lore of vamps as per VC rule book.

Seems pretty easy.