Arjac Rockfist’s hammer has a miniature teleporter inside it. I keep getting stuck on the practicalities of that. Somewhere in the body of an enormous thunder hammer, somebody has fitted machinery that can return the whole thing to a particular gauntlet after its owner throws it at somebody’s head. Champions of Fenris, in its Arjac Rockfist entry, actually bothers to explain the mechanism. The weapon’s called Foehammer, with the teleporter keyed to Arjac’s gauntlet.
He’s in the new Champions of Fenris battleforce announced on 19 October, alongside Logan Grimnar and fifteen Wolf Guard Terminators. That’s the complete Space Wolves contents list. The announcement says pre-orders are coming soon; it doesn’t give a price or a date. Arjac already has a plastic miniature, so this is a new bundle containing him.
Seeing his name beside Logan’s sent me back to the older supplement of the same name. I’d remembered the hammer perfectly and forgotten the passage where he’s dragging wounded Marines towards escape pods. I’m an Imperial Fists collector. I ought to be more interested in somebody doing the miserable job that keeps the rest of the force alive, and Arjac’s appointment as champion makes much more sense to me through those rescues.
Arjac Rockfist at the escape pods
The Arjac Rockfist profile in Champions of Fenris describes the Battle of the Weeping Stars in a few lines. His strike cruiser, the Fangs of Fenris, is crippled and burning. Arjac is the last to leave, hauling wounded brothers to the salvation pods. The entry doesn’t give us a casualty list or explain how many journeys he makes. I can’t tell how far he has to carry them through the ship, either.
That leaves a lot for me to picture. A Marine in armour is a considerable thing to drag, especially along a damaged ship’s passageways. Arjac’s size is part of the published description: he was already huge before drinking from the Cup of Wulfen, and the transformation made him larger still. The same entry that establishes his enormous weapons also records him using that strength to move injured packmates. I like having both uses in the same little biography.
The text also places him at the Mirrored Gate on Vhaldon IX, protecting Logan against Hormagaunts. He kills so many that their piled bodies eventually stop the advance. That’s an absurdly extravagant defensive position, even by the standards of the Space Wolves. I’d love a map of the gate. How wide was the approach? At what point do the attackers start climbing? I don’t know what the Mirrored Gate looks like beyond those few lines.
Space Marine strength gets used as a unit of measurement so often that I skim past it. Someone tears a door off, someone punches through a wall, fine. The escape-pod passage held my attention because there’s somebody else attached to the feat. A wounded brother has to get into a pod before the ship goes. I’d happily read a longer account following one of those injured Wolves through the evacuation.
I covered the personal appointment behind the Wolf Guard recently, so I’m resisting the urge to do the whole Chapter organisation again. Arjac occupies a particular place within it: Logan’s personal champion, trusted to fight beside the Great Wolf. His title names another man. That makes every successful evacuation a little awkward for the usual heroic tally, because the people he saves go on to have battles and honours of their own, somewhere beyond the edge of his profile.
An anvil over his head
GW’s Space Wolves pre-order description explicitly recalls Arjac’s former role as an Iron Priest. The new miniature keeps the anvil mounted above his armour. There’s another anvil device on the shield, a heavy chain hanging down the front, and little tools below the hammer hand. On a model already carrying a huge hammer, the sculptors have made his old occupation fairly easy to spot across a table.
Champions of Fenris describes Foehammer as an oversized thunder hammer equipped with that gauntlet-keyed teleporter. His Anvil Shield is also large enough to use as a bludgeon. Neither passage gives dimensions, and I’m happy leaving the weight uncalculated. Once I start trying to work out the mass of a fictional shield, the evening’s painting is probably finished. I’ve lost whole sessions looking up things with much less bearing on the model in front of me.
The returning weapon does invite a silly comparison. Yes, he’s got the throwing hammer. Yes, the bloke’s enormous. You can see where this is going. But I quite like the little technological explanation, the teleporter and the keyed gauntlet. Now I’m wondering who has to check the calibration. Imagine being the Iron Priest asked to investigate an intermittent fault after the hammer’s already gone through a wall.
The official reinforcements reveal confirms the plastic miniature has an optional arm representing the throw. It also describes Arjac duelling enemy commanders in defence of the Chapter’s honour. The kit lets you choose between keeping Foehammer in his grip and showing the instant he’s sent it away. I’ve stared at the throwing version longer, which usually means I’d build the other one because I’m frightened of snapping the interesting part.
During sixth edition I used a spare Assault Terminator as a stand-in for my Imperial Fists captain for several months. I’d put a tiny white paper flag on his base so my opponent could tell which hammer man had the expensive wargear. The flag curled in the damp garage and eventually stuck to his boot. Pete asked whether he’d stepped on a receipt. I kept using him until the paper came off during a game, and then spent a turn checking the wrong Terminator’s wounds. He still has a little square of PVA beside the heel.
I should probably choose the throwing arm. I’ve just spent a paragraph explaining why the thing I find exciting ought to stay in the box, based on a model with a paper flag. Arjac’s equipment gives a painter some lovely individual decisions: the anvil, the wrapped hammer haft, the runes, the metals on that enormous shield. I’d want the face and hammer readable before adding snow. My yellow boys already disappear into their own shoulder trim when I get carried away.
The forge connection also lets the character bring something of his earlier life into the champion’s job. I don’t need to infer a hidden meaning for every tool. GW identifies the old occupation, and the model retains its emblems. That’s enough for me to imagine him being irritatingly particular about somebody else’s maintenance routine. Whether he actually spends his spare hours repairing equipment is beyond what these entries tell me.
Logan gets shot
There’s a longer Arjac scene in Champions of Fenris, under Marked for Death. Logan, Arjac and the surviving Wolf Guard are fighting Necrons in a command chamber. The room gives the enemy too much space, so Logan signals a withdrawal into the tunnels. In the narrower passages, the Terminators can stand shoulder to shoulder and limit how many attackers reach them. The book describes their armour filling the corridor.
A Deathmark shoots through Logan’s shoulder plate. Arjac and two Shieldbrothers immediately move in front of him, raising their shields while Arjac checks the wound. Another shot comes from the opposite direction and hits Logan in the back, where his armour holds. The ambush has firing positions on more than one side. One of the Shieldbrothers then takes a fatal hit to the head.
That death made me pause on the shields. I had to go back and check which of the protectors had been hit, because I was already following Arjac towards the snipers. One of the men who’d moved to cover Logan has just died inside his helmet, within a few sentences of raising his shield. I skimmed over him on the first read. The scene keeps moving while the survivors cover Logan.
Arjac and Logan stand up to take on the snipers. The book has them exchange a glance, relying on their long service together to coordinate. Arjac throws Foehammer down one corridor and destroys a Deathmark; Logan fires his storm bolter into the darkness and brings down two more. I’d absolutely have made the hammer noise while moving the model.
There’s a useful limit to their understanding of each other. The narrative gives us the glance and the coordinated attack. It doesn’t furnish a private conversation or tell us precisely what each man expects the other to do. I can read trust into that exchange without supplying dialogue for them. Writing about Bjorn’s role in the Wolves’ long memory left me curious about who remembers serving alongside whom; I’d enjoy a scene of Arjac and Logan disagreeing over the details of an earlier battle.
The Flayed Ones keep coming while the snipers occupy Logan and Arjac. Once the Deathmarks are dealt with, the Wolf Guard turn back to the close assault. The tunnel lets them hold a wall of storm shields across the approach, striking from behind it until the attackers are down. This is the passage I’d put beside a photograph of a Kingsguard force, preferably taken low enough that the shields obscure some of the men behind them.
The Christmas box’s fifteen Terminators gives you plenty of bodies for such a scene, though that suggestion is my modelling idea. GW’s announcement makes no claim that the battleforce recreates this engagement. The older supplement’s Brethren of the Great Wolf order of battle for Alaric Prime lists named packs, including Gunnar’s Huscarls and Wulftongue’s Shieldbrothers. You could borrow a pack name from that material, then make your own decisions about which individual warriors your models represent.
I’d be tempted to arrange a little corridor board with room for three models abreast and a bend where the rest disappear from view. This is how my hobby projects acquire a second project before the first has primer on it. There’s a perfectly serviceable Space Marine Terminator on my desk already. He needs his base finished, and thinking about building walls around somebody else’s seventeen-model Christmas box is helping him very little.
Marked for Death carries on after the fighting. Logan calls down the Iron Priests, who restore the enormous cannon called the Emperor’s Judgement. Its machinery starts up beneath the ground, ammunition arrives from shielded stores, and augurs locate the Necron vessels overhead. Having survived the ambush, Logan reaches the firing control and brings his fist down on the rune.
Images: Games Workshop / Warhammer Community; earlier miniature image via Wargamer. Arjac artwork by Dean Lettice and Paul Dainton, via Warhammer Art.
