Should The Wraith Fleet be a real thing in AoS? TW Warhammer has undead pirates!

[kenshin620]

Well this is a surprise. The "usually follows the tabletop" game Total War Warhammer has made something a bit more...unique (even Norsca is mostly based off of existing models like marauders and skin wolves). They took the relatively obscure fluff of the Undead Pirates (some might be Sartosa, some may be from other places) and made it into a fully fledged faction with some pretty unique units (one of which is totally based off of that Concept art for that one FW Monstrous Arcanum unit I cannot seem to remember the name of which I kept thinking "holy cow an undead pirate ship robot?).

 

 

 

This got me thinking, should a brand new undead army be The Wraith Fleet (going beyond a GA Death alternative)? A rival to the Deepkin/Scourge Privateers (heck even the KO)?

[Harioch]

14 minutes ago, kenshin620 said:

This got me thinking, should a brand new undead army be The Wraith Fleet (going beyond a GA Death alternative)? A rival to the Deepkin/Scourge Privateers (heck even the KO)?

[deynon]

it's not something new. GW released a campaign and a list related to them some year ago: "armybook" Lustria.

Anyway it's a quite amazing video, full of inspiration^^

That crazy vampire I really missed him^^

[Avatar Rage]

On 10/5/2018 at 8:48 AM, deynon said:

it's not something new. GW released a campaign and a list related to them some year ago: "armybook" Lustria.

Anyway it's a quite amazing video, full of inspiration^^

That crazy vampire I really missed him^^

I don't recall a lot of Vampire info in that book. Wasn't it a lot of Lizardmen and Skaven?

[Honk]

I would really like for G-dubs to add some fluff to AoS...

[Ahn-ket]

Would be extremly nice to have the Option

[Baron Klatz]

It's likely in the cards,  if all the naval focus in the lore, models and obviously the Wraith Fleet is any indication. It's probably just later down the road, if the trend of them doing one naval faction a year keeps up (Kharadron then Deepkin) then we'll probably get the actual pirate wraiths by 2020. (From the Orruk rumors I keep hearing I bet either Ironjaw scrapfleets or pirate Grots next year)

Meanwhile I don't see a conversion army for now being that bad. Wraith Fleet rules + converted Freeguild units painted like ghosts and with Deepkin parts for use as a NightHaunt army.

Chainghasts = geist handgunners

Chainrasps = crewmen spirits

Knight of shrouds = wraith captain (probably should mix together Freeguild and Deepkin hero parts)

Black coach = Ship wreck hauled by undead sea beasts. (I could see the Kharadron gunhauler as the wreck)

And from there keep the reverants but give them water bases and turn all banshees into sea sirens, perhaps with Blood Sister parts.

 

 

 

[deynon]

3 hours ago, Avatar Rage said:

I don't recall a lot of Vampire info in that book. Wasn't it a lot of Lizardmen and Skaven?

There was some. I used to associate it to the pubblication to the WD of May 2005 (at least in Italy) and so on.

[Charlo]

Absolutely awesome.

Would make an incredibly fluffy adversary to the like of Idoneth too!

[kenshin620]

2 hours ago, Charlo said:

Absolutely awesome.

Would make an incredibly fluffy adversary to the like of Idoneth too!

Though I suppose there would be one odd thing. If there were fights underwater, gunpowder wouldn't work. Then again, it could be magic gunpowder!

[christophe]

it's much more WFB than AoS, as it's draw inspiration from real world pirates. If GW makes it, they will have to do it much more Fantasy, it could be super nice, but it will not look like this trailer... It's the problem with a lot of the old beloved faction like Tomb King.  GW could do some Death stuff living on a sandy place, but it shouldn't look too Egyptian... which will took away the  best part of design...

[michu]

I think that undead pirates with giant undead ship golems, enormous cannons, monstrous crabs and gun wielding zombies are enough over-the-top for AoS.

[Lucky Snake Eyes]

I would like to point out that Luthor Harkon became a mortarch before being betrayed by manbaby the traitor. Vlad was also a mortarch before going out like a champ to save his wife. Nagash already brought Vlad back from god induced death once, no reason he can't do it for Luthor or Vlad again. Now is probably the best time for GW to start making and start hyping an AoS successor army to vampire coast and dreadfleet. Plus it would give a lot more style to death other than endless blobs of generic zombies, skeletons and christmas carol reject ghosts

[angrycontra]

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if GW staff have already started some kind of discussion/initial planning of similar faction. Certainly it would be thematically great army to have in AoS.

[deynon]

16 hours ago, kenshin620 said:

Though I suppose there would be one odd thing. If there were fights underwater, gunpowder wouldn't work. Then again, it could be magic gunpowder!

cause it they had the rule that they hit on 6+, and rolling 1 wounding the model shooting^^

[Lucky Snake Eyes]

3 hours ago, deynon said:

cause it they had the rule that they hit on 6+, and rolling 1 wounding the model shooting^^

As i recall white dwarf released rules for if you wanted to convert them? But an official release for AoS would be great. I wouldn't mind 6+ shooting if they hit like trucks or have high volume.

[deynon]

3 hours ago, Lucky Snake Eyes said:

As i recall white dwarf released rules for if you wanted to convert them? But an official release for AoS would be great. I wouldn't mind 6+ shooting if they hit like trucks or have high volume.

Yes,it has done twice or thrice. The thirst is May 2005, then I remember it posted the rules updated with also the Big  Bertha and then another tme with the renew about it. but ofor the last one I don't remmeber the WD to refer to.

[kenshin620]

23 hours ago, christophe said:

it's much more WFB than AoS, as it's draw inspiration from real world pirates. If GW makes it, they will have to do it much more Fantasy, it could be super nice, but it will not look like this trailer... It's the problem with a lot of the old beloved faction like Tomb King.  GW could do some Death stuff living on a sandy place, but it shouldn't look too Egyptian... which will took away the  best part of design...

To be fair Nighthaunt are still mostly ghosts with skeleton faces despite being arguably the first true AoS Death faction. You could put those units back in WFB as another expansion to Vampire Counts and I'm pretty sure no one would have batted an eye. And Legions of Nagash still heavily relies on "generic fantasy medieval" undead.

Heck they're still keeping Free People models around despite them literally being slightly altered Late Medieval/Italian Wars/Renaissance models. I've seen people use Perry Miniatures and Warlord Games to make their own Empire/Free Peoples stuff!

 

Remember that TK got cut at a very...."interesting" time at GW top management. If they continued on with that, I think other factions like Dispossessed and Wanderers wouldn't have gotten reboxed and GHB allegiances.

[Sception]

An undead pirate faction of vampires & zombies & whatever else would be cool.  I'd love to see it, whether with a revived harkon or some one new.  Honestly, new would be better, imo, but that's just me.

[Shroud Of Night]

Saw the unit breakdown for this expansion and just got so excited.  I mean how can you beat Deck Droppers (Fell Bats dropping zombie pirates), Rotting Leviathans (giant crabs with sunken pirate ships on their backs) and Queen Bess (a giant undead manned super cannon). This expansion just oozes flavor.

[Honk]

Maybe they start a test balloon to see, how the fans react to such an army. 

Would be pretty cool as an extra faction and would even be better, if they fix alliances and allies. If they could emulate the 40k detachment/battalion system into AoS, mix and match armies would bring even more diversity to the table instead of „oh, another double dragon list“ or „look, Nagash with 2x40 skellis?! Is that the same guy or do they share the models?“

 

[Lucky Snake Eyes]

5 hours ago, Honk said:

Maybe they start a test balloon to see, how the fans react to such an army. 

Would be pretty cool as an extra faction and would even be better, if they fix alliances and allies. If they could emulate the 40k detachment/battalion system into AoS, mix and match armies would bring even more diversity to the table instead of „oh, another double dragon list“ or „look, Nagash with 2x40 skellis?! Is that the same guy or do they share the models?“

 

I'm not a fan of AoS force org, I much prefer how 40k handles it (even though I'm a tau player and have no allies). It would help incentivise people to bring a larger variety of models to the table, instead of them all being divided into battleline, behemoth, leader and other. They could do say battleline consisting of most infantry, outrider/fast attack being cavalry, chariots and dogs, probably keep behemoth as it's own category, elites for heavy infantry and non-behemoth and non-fast attack monsters, support for non-behemoth sized artillery and support units like corpse carts and keep leaders the same albeit count leaders towards your limits on support and behemoth units. Whether or not each detachment would maintain their allegiance abilities or just one would be up for debate and playtesting but at least it promotes more variety than the 3 battleline and not too many behemoth system we're using now. While 400pts in allies seems fair to me, since the only army I take allies in is my slaves to darkness to toss in a few cheap heroes for fun, adjusting how we take allies would be great since I have settra but can't play him due to him being 60pts over the 400pt ally limit and no official statement on whether TK compendium can ally with anything.

[Honk]

Ooor, they make GA:Death a viable option again... 

I mean I love the different playstyles of LoN, FEC, SB. Can’t say anything about NH, but I‘d love to throw all into a bucket without just killing my lists.

taking 500 points of Legion of night and play it with 1.5k FEC grind that would be a treat

[Lucky Snake Eyes]

8 minutes ago, Honk said:

Ooor, they make GA:Death a viable option again... 

I mean I love the different playstyles of LoN, FEC, SB. Can’t say anything about NH, but I‘d love to throw all into a bucket without just killing my lists.

taking 500 points of Legion of night and play it with 1.5k FEC grind that would be a treat

The problem with that is how do you balance GA's without making them OP? Most allegiances have a specific theme or gimmick their units and rules follow so how do you make an allegiance that includes all those different armies without it's rules either being so overarching that they all suck or overarching to the point that they're objectively better than the specific allegiances within that alliance?

[Undeadly]

2 hours ago, Lucky Snake Eyes said:

I'm not a fan of AoS force org, I much prefer how 40k handles it (even though I'm a tau player and have no allies). It would help incentivise people to bring a larger variety of models to the table, instead of them all being divided into battleline, behemoth, leader and other. They could do say battleline consisting of most infantry, outrider/fast attack being cavalry, chariots and dogs, probably keep behemoth as it's own category, elites for heavy infantry and non-behemoth and non-fast attack monsters, support for non-behemoth sized artillery and support units like corpse carts and keep leaders the same albeit count leaders towards your limits on support and behemoth units. Whether or not each detachment would maintain their allegiance abilities or just one would be up for debate and playtesting but at least it promotes more variety than the 3 battleline and not too many behemoth system we're using now. While 400pts in allies seems fair to me, since the only army I take allies in is my slaves to darkness to toss in a few cheap heroes for fun, adjusting how we take allies would be great since I have settra but can't play him due to him being 60pts over the 400pt ally limit and no official statement on whether TK compendium can ally with anything.

 

8 hours ago, Honk said:

Maybe they start a test balloon to see, how the fans react to such an army. 

Would be pretty cool as an extra faction and would even be better, if they fix alliances and allies. If they could emulate the 40k detachment/battalion system into AoS, mix and match armies would bring even more diversity to the table instead of „oh, another double dragon list“ or „look, Nagash with 2x40 skellis?! Is that the same guy or do they share the models?“

 

Although I know its not really the place to debate, I would like to voice my disagreement; in my opinion, 40k's deattachment system, while allowing for a more dynamic ally system, mostly  devolves into heinous levels of cherry picking, where the best models from several books are used, rather than an actually cohesive army.

But thats neither here nor there; if you'd like, we could have this debate in another thread.

 

As for the Wraith Fleet, I don't know. I don't think any of the Firestorm allegiances will ever get touched upon again. But what I do think could happen is that if GW thinks it could be garner enough intrest, they might put out a revival of the Vampire Coast mini-army, but for AoS. Either it being a few conversion guides, or a full blown release, I have no clue. But I'd love to see Harkon return, with his role as Mortarch of the Deep better realized. Perhaps he is resurected in order to bring war to the IDK?