Warhammer 40,000 is a galaxy full of extremes – extreme violence, extreme suffering, and extremely big weapons. If anything, Titans are the most extreme: 40 metre God-engines carrying enough ordnance to waste an entire city. People love a Titan – mostly at the more manageable epic scale in games like Adeptus Titanicus and the upcoming Legions Imperialis. For some however, scale matters. These are the devotees, proud owners of Forge World Titans – the largest of which is the size and weight of an actual human toddler.
But even without the months of preparation, building, priming, and painting that goes into each one, it’s rare to see a Titan in games of Warhammer 40,000. Even the smallest, a Warhound, clocks in at 1,400 points – and a Warlord costs a cool 3,500. So how do Titan owners get a game with their large resin children? They join the Titan Owners Club.
“We are a group of enthusiasts for the larger engines of the Warhammer 40,000 community. It started because we were very keen not just to game with them but to do them justice,” explains Matthew Wingrove, the club's UK chairman.
You might have encountered Titan Owners Club at Warhammer Fest in April, when more than three dozen assorted Titans were assembled for a Titan Walk – a series of massive demo games of Adeptus Titanicus played at Warhammer 40,000 scale, complete with bespoke giant data terminals, heraldic banners – and a load of huge, painted terrain to complete the experience.
“The goal is to give people a fully immersive, full-scale gaming experience with the engines that they bought. We’ve brought together a group of very diverse people from every background imaginable around the world,” Matt adds. “People can bring these big, beautiful toys onto a titanic battlefield and have a decent game with them.”
Matt and his partner Lauren are (like everyone in the club) obsessed with Titans. With more than a dozen between them under the banner of the Legio Mortis and Legio Vulcanum, even their upcoming wedding will have a Titan theme, with tables named for the most famous Legios.* They prefer to play with Adeptus Titanicus rules, if only because the game runs a little quicker than it would in Warhammer 40,000, but they feel that the new Titan index cards do these God-engines justice with the highest Toughness in the game and literally hundreds of Wounds apiece. That said, it’s pretty difficult to cram more than one or two onto a standard 6’x4’ gaming board. So to mitigate this they have several gigantic custom gaming mats that are more than six times the size.
The club has hundreds of members, with more than 900 Titans registered, named, and assigned to Loyalist or Traitor Legions both in the Era Indomitus and from the time of the Horus Heresy. They host Titan Walks a few times a year, when 50 or more people descend to participate in massive slugfests featuring hundreds of engines in total. These are very welcoming – some attendees will bring a full maniple of Titans, while others turn up with a Warhound and maybe a banner of Knights. The beauty of the event is that everyone can be accommodated; if you’ve only brought a few units, you get to respawn when (inevitably) you take one too many belicosa volcano cannon shots to the head…
“There are people who turn up with five to 10 titans,” says Lauren (who owns the second-ever Mars-pattern Warlord Titan ever manufactured). “So those people are basically paired against other people with a similar titan count. They don’t get to respawn, but people with less than five are allowed them back on at the end of the turn if they are destroyed, or meet the minimum Knight banner count again. It helps people who just want to be part of the community. This is not a buy-in thing!”
It’s a welcoming bunch, and there’s plenty of advice to be had from veteran princeps for those just dipping their toes into the world of Titans. Forge World models, by their resin nature, are often the preserve of experienced modellers, but something this large can be daunting to get into for the first time. Luckily there are regular video calls where members just get together to paint and model, and there’s advice on everything from pinning and posing to airbrush technique and oil buffs – which is a useful trick to shade such massive models.
“Experienced people take about two to three months on each project,” says Lauren. “But if there's a walk coming up I've done mine in four weeks because I just won't sleep… A lot of people tend to use the events as a deadline!”
Between them, the club can muster an enormous force. Matt explains: “We calculated recently that we can get over 400,000 points in Warhammer 40,000 just with our regular attendees’ Titans alone. We're up to over 600,000 including Knights.”
The Titan scene is thriving if you know where to look, and with the plastic Knights Cerastus, Acheron, and Castigator coming to a battlefield near you before long, Warhammer isn’t done with God-engines just yet. So if you’re a Titan fan and you’re looking for a like-minded community of genial fanatics, check out the Titan Owners Club website. It’s a global organisation – there are regular Titan Walks in the UK and the USA, and loads of resources for beginners and experts alike, and xenos fans are also welcome.
Currently Forge World make four sizes of Titan: a Warhound, a Reaver, a Warbringer Nemesis, and a mighty Warlord. If you love Titans but even a dainty little Warhound feels daunting, the upcoming (smaller scaled) Legions Imperialis will scratch your itch very nicely. And if you’re already a Titan owner there’ll be nothing stopping you playing the new game on a larger scale – except perhaps the size of your gaming table!
* Woe betide those placed on the Legio Mortis table…