Reading 6th Edition - Terrain

Nick speaking,

The terrain section of the book is actually quite large, taking up twenty pages of the book. I am not going to go over everything here, but I do want have a look at some areas of note. The terrain section really does continue the theme of fun that the rest of the book has, giving you lost of options and fun things to try out. I am pretty sure most of it will never be used, but it is there if you want to spice up some of your old terrain you have been using for years...

First, there is a new type of terrain called 'Lethal', it sort of sits between 'Dangerous' and 'Impassable'. Things like lava, acid and the like count as Lethal. It basically follows the same rules as Impassible, but you can never end your move in it, if you do, the model is removed! I like this ideas, and I plan on making a small piece of Lethal terrain for my Necron terrain set.

Next is 'Area' terrain, which uses the Difficult terrain rules, and offers a 5+ cover save as standard. Models in Area terrain that 'Go to Ground' receive a +2 to their cover save instead of +1. They also receive a cover save in Area terrain whether they are 25% obscured or not. There is a small section that notes some terrain types will have random effects, called 'Mysterious' terrain, only finding out what type of terrain it is when a unit enters it.

There are three pages dedicated to buildings (intact), including a Building damage table. They cover rules like Building armour charts, Building sizes, leaping of roofs with 'impact tests' and fire points for buildings and Bunkers, which is great as my buddy has bunkers, but it's been a long time since we have used them. This section also covers Battlements for the terrain GW sells.

Next are ruins, and as I have Cities of Death terrain, is very interesting to me. The basic rules are again, pretty much the same, there is a new 'Jump down' rule so you can get down a building quickly, but you will have to take an 'Impact test', which is slightly worse than a Dangerous terrain test, depending on how far you jumped.

There is a whole page dedicated to Forests, jungles and woods as well as another page dedicated to rivers, lakes and pools. All of these pieces count as 'Mysterious' terrain and have some random terrain abilities listed. Looks like fun as my buddies and I have forests, rivers and lakes that we use already anyway.

'Battlefield Debris' is next and here we can find special rules for things like Defence Lines, Ammo Dumps, Gun Emplacements and all the other bits of terrain GW sell. The best thing here though, are barricades and Walls! Barricades offer a 4+ cover save to any models. So all terrain is not going to be 5+ as we first thought, we have ruin building and barricades in most of our terrain boxes which both grant a 4+ cover save.

There is a page for 'Archeotech Artifacts', Impassible pieces of Artifacts that have up to twelve random results such as, Booby traps, Holy relic and Alien Corpses. Lastly, there are the 'Unique' terrain rules, for 'Spiker'Plants' and 'Psionic Shield Generators'. It is also indicated that there is going to be some extra 'Data Sheets' for 'Unique' terrain, released in the White Dwarf magazines. It's woth noting that there are no specific rules for roads, so I assume they are just counted as open terrain.

So that's it for terrain, and there's a lot of fun stuff there if you want to add a bit more flavour to your 40k games.

Previous Posts:
6th Edition Rule Book Unboxing
Reading 6th Edition - The first few pages
Reading 6th Edition - The movement phase
Reading 6th Edition - The shooting phase
Reading 6th Edition - The assault phase
Reading 6th Edition - Universal Special Rules
Reading 6th Edition - Independent Character
Reading 6th Edition - Unit types
Reading 6th Edition - Weapons 
Reading 6th Edition - Characters & Challenges
Reading 6th Edition - Psykers
Reading 6th Edition - Vehicle basics
Reading 6th Edition - Vehicle types

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