The Warrior Priest of Sigmar Hired Sword

The original Sigmarite Warrior Priest was published in TC#28 as part of the ugly encampments article. His rules, such as they are, are found on p. 20 of the magazine.

As written the Warrior Priest is one of the many over-priced Hired Swords. His hire fee is 40 gc and his up-keep is 20 gc. For your money you get a beginning warrior priest from the Witch Hunter warband armed with a "Hammer of Sigmar", a shield and light armor.

He has the special rule Prayers and may take Academic Skills or Prayers when he advances. Unlike most Hired Swords who may cast magic, the Priest has no rule stating that he starts with a prayer or (like other magic using hired swords) even two prayers.

Questions:
What is a Hammer of Sigmar? It is not a weapon listed in any warband list. The most common answer is that it is another way of saying the Sigmarite Warhammer from the Sisters of Sigmar list, sort of like a Hunting Rifle and a Hochland Long Rifle are the same thing in the main rulebook.

Why Academic Skills? What academic skill can the Warrior Priest HS actually use? A lot of HS have access to academic skills but not many can actually be used by HS, so why? (Rhetorical question)

I'm bored so lets take a trip through the rulebook's Academic Skill list:
Skill--Can the Warrior Priest HS use the skill? Yes or No
Battle Tongue--No
Sorcery--No
Streetwise--No
Haggel--No
Arcane Lore--No
Wyrdstone Hunter--No

See the trend? But you can choose skills from the list all campaign long. As far as I can tell the only Academic skill that our priest could use would be Mind Focus. So why not just say so?
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Warrior Priest of Sigmar
Hire Fee: 40 gc to hire, 20 gc upkeep.

May be Hired: Any human or dwarf warband may hire a Warrior Priest of Sigmar except a warband which already has a Warrior Priest of Sigmar or Priestess of Sigmar hero, a Wolf Priest of Ulric hero, or a warband that contains the taint of chaos.

Rating: A Warrior Priest of Sigmar increases your warband rating by +16 plus one point for any experience he has earned.

Priest M4 WS3 BS3 S3 T3 W1 I4 A1 Ld 8
Equipment Sigmarite Warhammer, shield and light armor.

SPECIAL RULES
Prayers:The Warrior Priest of Sigmar begins with two prayers generated at random from the Prayers of Sigmar list.

Skills:The Warrior Priest of Sigmar may choose the Academic Skill Mind Focus, Combat Skills or they may randomly determine a new prayer from the Prayers of Sigmar list.

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Comments and criticism welcome.

I never really liked that HS either. The one you have cooked up makes far more sense indeed. I do think however that, unless there are no Witch-hunters or sisters of Sigmar in the campaign, the HS takes something special from the "Holy" warbands, and give it to the other human crews.

And a small suggestion Rather then writing "Any warband may hire a Warrior Priest of Sigmar except..." wouldn't it make sense to write:

May be Hired: Any Human warband may hire a warrior priest, except Sisters of Sigmar, Witch-hunters , middenheimers and Outlaws.

Agree with Stronzo. Priest is too expensive and weak when compared with other cc HS. For a close combat fighter his stats are average, has one attack and most important his prayers are random. For 40gc (and 20 upkeep) he's a bad deal IMO. So to jutify his outrageous cost I'd add one thing to "errata" work done by von Kurst:

Quote :

Prayers:The Warrior Priest of Sigmar begins with two prayers generated at random/one prayer chosen by player from the Prayers of Sigmar list.

Quick question. Why not just use the Miracle Workers article by Werekin? Okay the Sigmarite is a hero instead of a hired sword but it adds more character to the warband

Thanks for the suggestions. The main reason I'm doing this is the Damned Shall Burn objective from BTB which allows

Quote :

The warband may now hire 0-3 Warrior Priest of Sigmar Hired Swords (see Town Cryer 28, page 20) for a hire fee and upkeep cost of 10 gold crowns.

Stronzo@Thanks for suggesting clearer language.

catachanfrog@Two prayers! Doh! Good call.

aha ok then I understand why you would like to clarify the rules for the priest.

In my opinion your rules looks fair, but only having to pay 30 gcs for three priests might be a bit on the cheap side. Especially against chaotic / undead warbands the benefits can be huge.

Quote :

In my opinion your rules looks fair, but only having to pay 30 gcs for three priests might be a bit on the cheap side. Especially against chaotic / undead warbands the benefits can be huge.

I think huge benefits against chaotic/undead warbands is the point with the BTB rules as it is a campaign with a chaos invasion theme.

In the campaign I am running I replaced the 0-3 choice with the choice of the above HS and/or a Witch Hunter from the Nemesis Crown suplement.

Yeah I guess your right, however noone I play with wants chaos so...

Wait does Black Dwards count as chaos? I guess they do since they are also known as chaos dwarfs, that means some rules have been forgotten

How long were you on vacation?

I never can remember what the name of the Chaos Dwarf warband is supposed to be, but they are definitely chaotics.

For too long apparently