Now who's a good boy? You're a good boy, you!

Uh.

When I started assembling my Reptile Hounds I noticed that with a tiny leg swap and a blob of epoxy made one of the hounds look like it was giving the "paw".

As I was painting the trainer at the same time, a weird idea emerged out of nowhere.

So, meet Rufus the Reptile Hound and Nathan, his trainer.

From now on whenever I'm fielding the two of them together, I'll keep a close eye on their performance to see if Rufus has learned any new tricks. Of course not to forget the statistics side of things I'm tallying up the times all of this has happened, too.

When I was thinking how to translate some common dog tricks into Warmachine, I wanted the tricks not to be either too hard or too easy to perform. That's why I ditched my idea of "bark" trick which would've been Rufus using his animus. Way too easy to perform in every single game.

So, the tricks are as follows:

- Fetch! Rufus scores a control point or destroys an objective.

- Roll! Rufus is slammed or thrown, and as a consequence is knocked down.
- Lie down! Rufus is knocked down while just standing still by an attack or effect caused by enemy model, or by a friendly effect that doesn't specifically target Rufus.
- Bite! Nathan uses Ancillary Attack on Rufus (while Rufus has an enemy model in its melee range).
- Kill! Well, pretty self-explanatory. Rufus destroys a model.
- Play dead! Rufus is destroyed or removed from play by an attack or effect caused by enemy model.

And last but not least, an ordinary trick almost every dog learns, but with a little twist from the culture of Skorne:

- Shake paw! Controlling warlock transfers damage to Rufus. Poor Rufus. The road to hell and good intentions and whatnot...