Harry the Hammer has arrived.
As part of update 3.1.0, Total War: Warhammer 3 has another free legendary hero. Last time it was the Kislevite vampire Ulrika Magdova, and this time it’s a hard counter to undead like her: Harald Hammerstorm, also known as Harry the Hammer, a Chaos Warrior who specializes in killing anything that rises from the grave.
If you didn’t already go through this step to unlock Ulrika, to get Harry in your game you’ll first need to register a CA account and connect it to your platform of choice. Otherwise, you can skip that process. With that done, the hammer-wielding Kurgan will join a Warriors of Chaos army in any campaign after you complete his quest “The Hammerstorm Cometh”, which appears when you get your legendary lord up to level 15. It demands you kill 3,000 enemies in battle, after which he’ll spawn beside your legendary lord on the campaign map. Note that he won’t join any of the Daemons of Chaos factions, just Warriors of Chaos like those led by Valkia the Bloody, Festus the Leechlord, Azazel and so on.
Harald Hammerstorm is a character with a heck of a lineage, going all the way back to the first edition of tabletop game Warhammer Fantasy Battle in 1983. While the Warhammer world didn’t exist at that point, the rules presuming a generic fantasy setting, John Blanche’s cover art depicting a heavily armored warrior twatting a skeleton with a hammer would be referenced in later editions. Nicknamed “Harry the Hammer” by Games Workshop’s staff, he was Warhammer’s first mascot. Though later editions would retroactively make Sigmar’s magic hammer the Warhammer of its title, as designer Graeme Davis has said, “Sigmar was consciously based on [Harry].”
Eventually Harry was inducted into the canon, written up as Harald Hammerstorm. A Norse warrior of the Kurgan tribe, Harald was the slayer of the daemon Mathrag Brainmangler and “bane of the undead” capable of making units normally immune to psychology like zombies and vampires flee in fear while himself immune to their own psychological effects. He, quite literally, ain’t afraid of no Ghorst.
Harald’s Total War stats reflect this, with unique skills that improve the leadership of the army he’s embedded in when fighting against the undead, make them immune to vampiric attrition, and double their experience gain from defeating undead. Recruiting Harry does mean taking a 20-point penalty to your diplomatic relations with Vampire Counts factions, not that a Warriors of Chaos army is likely to play nice with the leeches anyway. He also disables the effects of the Undead attribute on anyone he faces, making them likely to flee just like he did on the tabletop, as well as disabling effects like vampiric healing. Looks like smashing skeletons is still his thing.
The 3.1.0 update also brings a new Immortal Empires endgame crisis related to Chaos Dwarfs called The Will of Hashut, some rebalance tweaks for Bretonnian factions, and more mercenary Regiments of Renown to recruit, like the Boglars of the Mad Marshes, Bandits of the Silver Road, and the Frolickers Bubonic.
According to the Total War: Warhammer 3 roadmap, update 4.0 will arrive in summer with another legendary hero, achievements for Immortal Empires campaigns, and the Shadows of Change DLC to bolster the ranks of Tzeentch, Cathay, and Kislev.
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