Oh So Many Wasted Pages… Death From The Skies

From the moment it was announced (and before), Death From The Skies sparked controversy.

All the fuss about not getting the book in stores, needing to buy a 20,- quid FAQ, etc.. is only made worse by the fact that Death From The Skies is – truly – a very bad product.

I believe (though I might be wrong) that I tend to look rather more gently on Games Workshop’s premium and exclusive products – be it Limited Edition Codexes or the controversial Crusade of Fire. Even with good intentions though, it’s hard to not feel cheated with Death From The Skies.

#1 – The Contents

As you likely (hopefully!) know already, Death From The Skies is a 72 page soft-cover book. Inside you get:

• 2 pages – Contents & Introduction
• 16 pages – The Battle For Cardrim: A sample, three-way campaign featuring White Scars, Necrons and Orks – 16 pages (incl. double-page spreads for each of the three armies)
• 8 pages – 4 Air War Missions, which emphasize flyers (though you don’t need them) and tie in loosely with the Battle For Cardrim campaign
• 12 pages – Burning Skies and Fighter Aces, taken (almost) directly from Crusade of Fire
• 12 pages – “Showcase” – 12 pages
• 17 pages – Codex entries, army list and reference page

These admittedly don’t add up to 72 pages yet. There are a few half-page dividers with GW-studio miniatures and a double-page center-fold with a schematic of an Ork Burna-bommer.

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#2 – (The Good) The Battle For Cardrim

Not everything is bad in this book. Let’s start with the one silver lining.

I was positively surprised by the little campaign they present (along with 4 alternative missions) at the start of the book. If follows a similar template to the campaign in Crusade of Fire (though without the Planetary-Empires-style rules). Yet there are 3 differences that make me like The Battle for Caradrim even a tiny bit more than the Crusade of Fire campaign.

1. Easy to re-play: Crusade of Fire was very ambitious. Most people, I recon, will not be able to play Crusade of Fire as presented, seeing as most people lack things such as a full table of Zone Mortalis or a healthy selection of Titans. The Battle for Cardrim is much more down-to-earth. If you have three (or more) players, you can easily re-play this one. 
2. Fluffy armies: It presents sample-armies (see pic above), as Crusade of Fire did. Unlike Crusade of Fire, it doesn’t tie them to some studio-guy. Instead, they present background-snippets for each unit in these armies. Some of them are a bit groan-worthy (e.g. the Ork pilot “Krimson Barun”). Others are quite intriguing (e.g. the White Scars Dread in a Chapter known to loathe Dreads). Overall, it was nice to see some fluffy armies on display.
3. Better Layout:  The Crusade of Fire missions were all over the book. Here, you get the 4 missions in a concise, easy to use sub-chapter, complete with a little roll-off table if you simply want to play one of those missions outside the campaign. As said, they are also closer to a basic game of Warhammer 40K and far easier to play “straight-from-the-book” than the more involved and exotic Crusade of Fire missions.

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#3 – Burning Skies

What follows are the Burning Skies and Fighter Aces rules as seen in Crusade of Fire. They are 99% identical. There are some minor changes however. Chaos Space Marines, for example, now get a Fighter Ace (though Sisters are still without one). If you are playing these with Crusade of Fire and Death From The Skies on the table, you might want to watch out for minor differences.

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#4 – (The Ugly) Showcase

I was expecting this. It still pisses me off.

Throughout the book (even in parts such as the Air War missions), the pictures take up far more space than the text. It’s the format you should be familiar if you read a recent White Dwarf. Moreover, between the chapters, there are one-page or double-page “filler” pictures.

But even that is not enough. No!

Halfway into the book (72 pages total, remember), there is a 12 page (!) “showcase” section giving you essentially printed shots of the flyers kits as they appear in the Games Workshop online store.

There aren’t even attempts to place them into some terrain, surround them with an army or any other kind of dressing. If you click on the sample pics for the Ork flyers, Necron Scythes or the Razorwing on the GW-homepage, you will see the pictures you get in this 12 page “showcase”.

Pathetic!

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#5 – (The Bad) The Army List

Finally, the last 17 pages in the book hold the reason many people will feel compelled to buy the book (really, you shouldn’t. Just wing it, no pun intended): the Army Lists.

This consists of Codex-style entries for all the fliers. In many cases, they are the exact entries taken from the Codex (e.g. Necron Scythes) or previous White Dwarf publications (e.g. Ork Fighters).

In other cases there are slight updates and changes (Storm Talon, Valkyrie) that correspond with recent FAQ-changes.

There is also a 3 page armory that repeats the various weapons (e.g. the Death Ray for Necrons) and a one-page reference, again similar to the ones at the end of each Warhammer 40K Codex.

For all the effort to have all flyers in one place, I still find it odd that they chose to repeat the full (fluff and artwork) Codex entries.

Take the example of Necrons. There are no changes to the Scythes over the Necron Codex. However, the entries here couldn’t be used without the Necron Codex either, as you would be missing crucial rules (e.g. “living metal”). Yet if you have the Necron codex, what is the point of repeating the whole codex-entry (and the rules for.. say Death Rays) again in this book?

While I can see the point in getting hard-to-get White Dwarf rules and updated profiles into the book, some of the entries (Necrons, Dark Eldar) smack again of stretching the already scarce page-count for the sake of getting to the point where you have a “publishable” book.

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#6 – Why?

Death From The Skies is not only pathetically thin. Almost every part of the book feels like they were struggling to feel even those few 72 pages to make it something worth publishing.

I don’t understand why.

• Assuming you don’t want to provide free rules-updates on the web…
• Assuming you don’t want to “give away” things like the Battle for Cardrim campaign/Burning Skies in a White Dwarf…
• Assuming you want to sell a flyer supplement…

… there would’ve been a million ways to make this one “worth its money”!

• Why not include a flyer-themed short story or two from Black Library (you’re selling 1000 word eBook-things all the time, don’t you)?
• Why not include painting-guides and tutorials?
• Why not include a battle-report to show off the campaign “in game”?

Anything, really, would have been better to “fill” this book than the lazy filler they did include.

As it stands, this is one of Games Workshop poorest showings in a long time.

Z.