Gav: Being a Games Developer is one of the most entertaining and rewarding jobs you can have if you’re into playing games. However, it’s not without its challenges. As a Games Developer you face one of the greatest challenges after a game, book or article hits the shelves, because as soon as something is in black and white, that’s it and everyone is going to have a chance to look at it, pick it apart at their leisure and analyse your every decision …

So what do you do when, after a couple of years, it becomes more and more evident that something needs changing? You don’t have a magic wand to make the instant changes everywhere. And you certainly don’t have a magic doo-dah that means that everyone agrees on what the changes are to be. Finally, you don’t have infinite time and resources to make sure that the changes are the right ones to make.

So that’s the heady decision I faced with the Dark Elves revision. Thanks to the players at www.Druchii.net, and feedback from players worldwide at events and through the post, a few common factors became clear. Dark Elves could be a ‘competitive’ army, and showed well at tournaments. However, it became apparent that those armies were not using a sizeable proportion of the beautifully sculpted miniatures range. Therefore, the primary goal of the update was not to increase the power of the army significantly, but to allow players to field a wider selection of their miniatures collection and feel that they were not somehow handicapping themselves by doing so.

The other major part of the update came about from inconsistencies that had developed between the rules and the miniatures. For example, an almost daily clarion call could be heard for Har Ganeth Executioners to have heavy armour – the miniatures certainly have heavy-looking armour.

So after much thought, conversations and exchanged e-mails with the guys at Druchii.net, I had a list of errata (such as the heavy armour thing) and a list of updates. In the end, I chose the simplest, most easily implemented and remembered rules. There were many more fine-tuning ideas but those will have to be saved for when we get back to the Dark Elf Armies book in the future. The last thing I wanted to do with an update was to cause confusion amongst Warhammer players. The update itself is given here, along with a few brief notes from myself on why the particular changes were made.

Since news of the Dark Elf revision has begun to spread, there have been growing voices for us to revisit other Armies books. One in particular, the High Elves, has had a great deal of ideas passed back and forth. However, at the moment I have no plans to revisit any of the other armies until we have the opportunity to do a proper revision by updating the book. I admit that the Dark Elves were a special case, not least because as the author of the book I was growing more unsatisfied with some of the opportunities that had been missed. All-in-all, I’d rather we spent our time making sure that the next army, the Bretonnians, are top notch, that the many variant army lists planned for Storm of Chaos are entertaining and challenging, and that we press on expanding the scope of Warhammer games rather than get bogged down revisiting the past. We constantly strive to improve, but there’s a time and a place for everything, and sometimes that isn’t just yet.

We’ve asked the chaps at Druchii.net for their thoughts on how they went about helping on this project, and what the revisions means to them as Dark Elf players.

Next: Druchii Revisited - Putting it all into Practice.