The
Titan Forge
There's no finer moment
in Graham McNeil’s Storm of Iron than the great
charge of the Imperial titans in the maws of the chaos horde. In fact, as a
strict imperial loyalist, there would be no better compliment to my
army than the most awesome machine the Adeptus Mechanicus can
muster: the Warhound Titan.
The time: May 2003; the place: Blantyre, Malawi, standing in my friend
James’ garden, listening to the hyenas and my agent emailed to say that
my first novel had won the
2003
Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. My wife thought we should
celebrate by ordering a titan. Whoot! Now when someone is as
generous as that then I think it's rude to refuse, so titan it would
be. But at the time there were two titans on offer through the
Administratum, both from the forge world of Lucius. I
considered my forces, the enemies my men had to face and tried to
work out, which titan I wanted: Wolf or Jackal.
I consulted armybuidler and checked out the weaponry, which had
names that made multi-laser sound like a pea-shooter:
double Barrelled Turbo-lasers; Plasma Blast Gun;
Inferno Canon; Vulcan Mega-bolter.
The
Plasma Blast Gun looked like it'd be good at deep-frying marines, but I play against tyranids more than anything else
and I wanted to roll a lot of dice.
I
phoned Forge World, got them to leap frog me over the queue and sent the titan
to the house I would be staying at while in London. It was there
waiting for me and a meet ten days later, and after a prize ceremony
and a polite little natter with TS Eliot's widow, me and the titan were heading back
for some serious gaming in Malawi.
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