AT-43

This article contains something which makes absolutely no logical sense, such as Nazi Zombie Mercenaries, Fucking Space Orangutans, anything written by a certain Irish leper or Robin Crud-ace, or Wizards of the Coast hiring the fucking Pinkertons over a children’s card game. If you proceed, consider yourself warned.

Prior to Rackham having their site shut down, they had a pretty badass tabletop miniature game called AT-43. AT-43 literally means 43 years after UNA, Blok and 'humanity' have encountered Therians. The setting basically detailed the misadventures of a number of different factions kicking the crap out of one another in order to become the dominant one. The games were smaller-scale and ran a bit smoother than Warhammer 40K because the miniatures had handy stat-cards available. The general gist of the factions were as follows:

The Races

The UNA The United Nations of Ava are basically stereotypical space soldiers with guns. They are the USA and UN, In Space, and they kick ass with the best equipment there is.

Red Blok Human Space Communists with awesome power. Intent on kicking every other faction's ass in order to provide glorious communism to the entire galaxy and ensure humanity's survival. They split from the UNA around 200 years before the setting's events.

Therians Killer cyborgs with skeletal, cybernetic troops. They're nasty pieces of work and you are cruising for a beatdown if you let them get close. Also known for Trolling the Universe (they are/were actually humans).

Karmans Motherfucking Space Gorillas with Buddhist Philosophy and Crisis Suits. We're dead serious. This game is instantaneously awesome because Everything's Better With Monkeys.

The Cogs Killer space robots that pack temporal weapons that will fuck your shit up by teleporting you into space. The only true Xeno race in the setting and the oldest one. Even so, while they are formidable, they are not invincible.

The ONI A big corporation that has Mercenaries, Zombies, and Mercenary Zombies. In Space. Founded around 50 years before setting events.

Despite being fun and tongue in cheek with 99% less grimdark than your average 40k fair, these "codices" have a problem: they are very positive about their respective factions and how "they is invincible and righteous". Yet this attitude only really fits the Therians, who are prideful posthuman /b/tards—imagine if Necrons were even lazier and sat at computers all day instead of sleeping. Now, this same problem crops up in the shittier codices of 40k Grey Knights and 5ed Spess Marines specifically, but believe it or not this is almost on that level of marysuedom. You thought Kurdance's Nid codex praised its faction, you ain't seen nothing until you read the smug self-assurance of the Spess Gorilla one.

Inevitable Really

AT-43 miniatures are high-quality and slightly more reasonably priced compared to that of a certain other developer, and come pre-assembled and painted, along with tons of accessories and a terrain piece. This inevitably led to a number of fa/tg/uys to begin modding them to serve as miniatures in other games (most notably Warhammer 40K). Much lulz resulted, especially when using humorous examples (such as modding UNA Walkers to use as Gue'vesa vehicles). The original paint is flat but a wash or dry brushing will bring out some scratches and detail that makes them look good.

The Game

Some parts of the game are fun and simple, the accuracy of shooting decreases with distance in an easy to understand manner rather than the bullets just disappearing at their designated maximum range. Other things were terribly broken, namely the heavy vehicles. Each is armed with a template, which is fine, but the templates are so overpowered that they slaughtered all the other units leaving only two heavy-hitters beating the fuck out of each other for three turns until one goes down. Balance appears to be the issue here. But without the tanks or heavy mechs, the game plays fast and fun. You can probably homebrew something to fix it and for a 1st edition this is somewhat forgivable and could be solved with an FAQ. Too bad there will be no 2ed.

Damn It

Sadly Rackham's site's been down since getting DDOS'd back in December 2010. And the company is going through liquidation. Unless someone picks the line up, there will be no more minis. :(

Update! As of October 2019, the French game company Sans-Detour successfully funded a Kickstarter for a new release of Confrontation. However, there have been zero - ZERO - updates from Sans-Detour since that time. Rumors have abounded that SD dove into the project despite being totally unprepared for how hard it would be to release a new version of a game that had been OOP for 10 years. In any case, this seems to yet another poorly conceived, and quite dead, Kickstarter failure with over 400,000 Euros vanished into thin air.

Update². As of September 2020, SD itself is going through harsh times (including closing its IRL shop and storage), which implies we can all gtfo with any hopes of either Confrontation and AT-43 coming back. Besides, SD has had a history of fucking up other kickstarted projects with reasons that are very near illegal procedures. coughs For example they were supposed to publish a simple-yet-efficient High Fantasy RPG System called Aventures, kickstarter went 10/10 and then they decided to fuck it up by trying to force the actual developer of the system to entirely give away the rights to it.

Not gonna lie, SD getting the IP for Confrontation already smelled bad from the beginning.

Links

at-43.com used to be the official site; it went down as of December 9th, 2010, and now seems to have a JS:Redirector trojan on it.

All (?) the released pdfs are available for personal use here.

Gallery

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  An AT-43 Karman.