Forge your very own tyrannical Helsmiths of Hashut hero on the Anvil of Apotheosis

As has no doubt been hammered into you by now by the servants of the Bullfather themselves, the Helsmiths of Hashut live for domination. Their tyranny knows no bounds, and the forces of each ziggurat inevitably fall under the command of a handful of venerated elders – be they War Despots, Daemonsmiths, or Ashen Elders – who hold onto their positions with fearsome tenacity.

Healthy competition is useful to keep the Zharrdron top brass from getting complacent, with up-and-coming smiths, priests, and minor tyrants all eyeing the top spots with envious eyes, each working out how to exploit their way to the top. In the narrative play of Path to Glory, you can create your own Hashutite overachiever and demonstrate their ruthless ambition with new Anvil of Apotheosis rules.

Every battletome comes with its own Anvil of Apotheosis section, and the arrival of a new faction and a fresh influx of players feels like a great time to revisit the format. You start off with a basic but respectable Helsmiths of Hashut Hero warscroll, and three tiers of destiny points to spend: Cruel Overlord, Hashutite Tyrant, or Honoured of the Dark Conclave. We’re going to stay modest and pick option number two, giving us 30 points to play with.

You start by choosing whether your hero is a Warlord, Infernal Sorcerer, or Scorched Acolyte. The first two get an enhanced Hashutite Blade with Crit (Mortal) and two extra attacks, with the Sorcerer gaining Wizard (1). The Scorched Acolyte, on the other hand, gets Priest (1) and the ability to earn a ritual point while contesting a Place of Power or terrain feature with a friendly desolation. We’re making a wizard, because we love chucking spells about.

Now for the fun part – your origins and flaws. You can pick one of each, with flaws giving you back some destiny points. Power Through Dark Pacts is a nice way of temporarily boosting the power of our hero, as long as we can make those clutch 4+ rolls. Otherwise they’re taking wounds, or sacrificing a nearby unit.

There’s also Purveyor of Dark Mechanisms, which lets us heal a war machine in each of our hero phases, and Ruthless Industrialist, which helps a hero ascend their chosen path by hitting milestones of desolation tokens created across games.

We’re here for the flaws, though. We’re keeping up the theme of letting dice decide our fate, giving our sorcerer the Creeping Petrification flaw. For the cost of subtracting 2 from run and charge rolls, we get a refund of four destiny points, and the chance to turn to stone forever if we’re unlucky. Hopefully Hashut looks upon us favourably! Another fun choice is Rigid and Unmoving, which denies your army the use of the Redeploy command while your hero is on the field – Zharrdron should only march forward!

Any Helsmiths leader worth their salt will have their pick of the Taurus statues that stand sentinel atop the ziggurats, and we can pick between an Infernal Taurus for 14 destiny points, or a Venerable Taurus with more health for 18. We’re going to settle for the Infernal Taurus, which nets us the Daemonic Resilience found on the vanilla version of the warscroll.

A choice of five different mount upgrades lets you improve upon sculpted perfection – we’re torn between giving our Taurus a gnarly Flesh-melting Aura, because of how cool it sounds, and a Body of Hardened Obsidian, which makes it even tougher by causing Daemonic Resilience to act as if it always has one more daemonic power point allocated to it than it does. Sticking with our tough and resilient theme, we’re making our Taurus obsidian, plus we get free power! 

We’ve got a little greedy there, leaving ourselves only nine destiny points to play with for the final page of upgrades. These are split between a series of simple boosts to statistics, such as adding 1 to the Control characteristic or improving the Hashutite Blade by giving it better hit and wound rolls or new weapon abilities. 

Hitting on a 3+ is fine, but we’d like to wound on a 3+ as well, so that will cost us three points for Malignant Brawn. If we weren’t building a spellcaster we could go all in with Foe-seeking Hexes and Rigorously Trained to get to 2+ hit and a fairly nasty 7 attacks for three and five destiny points respectively. Instead, we’re going to enlist an enthusiastic Hobgrot Advisor to accompany our sorcerer. 

That gives us a token which lets us add 3 to the control scores of nearby friendly Helsmiths of Hashut units, though his commitment to the role does mean he’ll throw himself in front of the first attack that bypasses our armour save. Thankfully we can always pick up another before the next battle…

Voila, now we’ve got our very own despotic hero with some custom abilities, ready to lead our budding Helsmiths of Hashut force to victory in a Path to Glory campaign. Picking the Body of Hardened Obsidian for the Taurus gives us a nice excuse to paint them up in a striking black scheme, and we’ve got plans to source a spare Hobgrot Vandal for our snivelling, er, trusty, acolyte. 

Battletome: Helsmiths of Hashut is available to pre-order on Saturday, alongside the whole range of miniatures, including everything you need to build or kitbash your very own Path to Glory hero for narrative battles.