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Soulblight Gravelords News, Rumours and Speculation


Neil Arthur Hotep

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I've been looking at the new mother of nightmare model, but I think she's not quite as big as some seem to think. That looks like a 60mm base at most. They cleverly hid the base and put it up higher, but when you compare her base with the 40mm base and 25mm bases in front of her, there's no way that's she's on a 100mm base. 


nHm8Wcy.jpg
Just a small thing I noticed... This isn't going to be a mortarch sized character, let alone a Nagash sized one. 

Edited by Elmir
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37 minutes ago, Elmir said:

I've been looking at the new mother of nightmare model, but I think she's not quite as big as some seem to think. That looks like a 60mm base at most. They cleverly hid the base and put it up higher, but when you compare her base with the 40mm base and 25mm bases in front of her, there's no way that's she's on a 100mm base. 


nHm8Wcy.jpg
Just a small thing I noticed... This isn't going to be a mortarch sized character, let alone a Nagash sized one. 

Yea definitely not THAT big, she's definitely an oddly large vampire attached to the centaur thing though... the vampire lord in the foreground is closer to the camera and still her upper torso/head appears quite small compared to the mother of nightmares who is further from the camera, so should also appear smaller.

Imo definitely not mortarch sized but quite big, like a demon prince or slightly larger/taller.

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36 minutes ago, Sharklone said:

anyone else scouring the net every few hours looking for rules leaks haha?

Borderline obsessed :p. I am working some overtime just to justify buying a SBGL army and a Kragnos/AOS 3rd new destruction faction and scouring waaaaay too much. I can feel the beard on my neck growing at an increased pace.

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6 hours ago, Lich King said:

It’s been an issue with Aos for a while - and there was a thread on it not too long ago, but to me it’s always about the “living dead” and varied troops in general. I’m not a fan of the Spam same box theme going on so I hope we can build a cohesive and competitive-ish force around multiple different boxes without going into one subtraction.

That's part of why I want the writer to have focused on the classic warhammer undead build first, as all the units in the book have a potential role there.

assuming all the units are competent at their msin job (a stretch given gw rules writiing consistency and general lack of playtesting, but lets give them the benefit of the doubt), a 'classic undead horde' type list based on cirrent points values might look something like this:

Vengorian Lord - support hero / hammer

Vampire Lord - support hero

Necromancer - support hero

30 grave guard - core battleline

40 skeletons - core battleline

60 zombies - core battleline

5 blood knights - hammer

15 dire woves - screen for knights

corpse cart - support zombies & necromancer

...

guessing the vengorian to weigh in at around 300 points, that makes for a 2000 point list that covers the basic elements of multiple blocks of infantry hoard, character support, fast hammer elements, without doubling up on any units, though admittedly large unit sizes will still have you painting a lot of the same models.

and through substitution you can swap any unit in the faction in there somewhere, slbeit making adjustments for points.  Maybe you take some vargheists, or black knights with a mounted wight king, or a terrorgheost instead of the blood knights.  Maybe you shuffle points to make room to trade the cart for an engine, or to trade the vengorian for a throne, palanquin, mortarch, vlozd, or the beast instead of the vengabus.  maybe you take some dire bats in place of some of the wolves.  maybe you drop just one of the infantry blocks, or downgrade the grave guard or zombie block to cheaper skittles, in order to fit more heroes, or more fast harassment and hammer units, or to buff out the wolves to objective contesting size to make a flank of your army play out the core strategy but in fast forward.  Maybe trade some hammer & hero points for volga and the beast for a thematic Vyrkos list.

Optimized lists will still tend more towards spam.  One of the core blocks will be most efficient, same with the hammers, same with the fast screens.  Subfaction or support hero choice will buff this unit and not that unit, etc.  But as long as everything is at least reasonably competent, you can run at least a unit or two of whatever you like, including entire chimeric mutt lists.

Every unit in the list potentially has a role in the classic archetype, where they can be good and do work even if they're not good enough to carry an entire build on their backs.  Blood Knights only have to be 'ok' for a single unit of them to work as a hammer unit within a classic undead horde, where as they have to be /amazing/ for a build predominantly based on vampire knights to be viable.

even if classic infantry hoard is the only viable build, you can still probably find a functional role for you favorite unit in there somewhere no matter what it is.  But if 'vampire cavalry stampede' is the only viable build and your favorite unit is, say, grave guard?  Then you're out of luck.

Edited by Sception
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3 hours ago, Elmir said:

I've been looking at the new mother of nightmare model, but I think she's not quite as big as some seem to think. That looks like a 60mm base at most. They cleverly hid the base and put it up higher, but when you compare her base with the 40mm base and 25mm bases in front of her, there's no way that's she's on a 100mm base. 


nHm8Wcy.jpg
Just a small thing I noticed... This isn't going to be a mortarch sized character, let alone a Nagash sized one. 

You forget that she’s staying in the back! Objectives more in the back automatically look smaller as they are. So looking at your picture, you have to take the measurement from Mini which has the Same distance.

D6FDBC16-13AD-49DF-9AD6-D2623EF81D42.jpeg

Edited by Erdemo86
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Re: Belladamma / the Beast not looking like they fit in the faction, I personally think they look alright if you avoid other vampires and make heavy use of the new skeletons, wolves, bats, & zombies.  That said, if they had pushed the feral appearance of the beast and the bloodborn a bit more, the Vyrkos might have fit better as part of FEC, provided fell bats & dire wolves would be shared like dragons and tgs.  it would be a move towards giving the FEC more of a distinct visual personality apart from just monstrous ghouls.  You might think Belladamma seems to fancy & proper for FEC, but imagine the narrative possibilities of a single sane ghoul queen matron travelling from one charnel kingdom to another riding atop her noble (slavering, zombified) steed, soothing their madness and giving direction to their crusades, worshipped like a goddess or prophetess, the FEC equivalent of the Fey Enchantress and the Ladybof the Lake rolled into one, viewing all the abhorrants as her children, and the mordants as her grandchildren.

heck, is FEC had been rolled in....

aah, well.  The Vyrkos are still cool as a new and distinctive soulblight dynasty.  I guess I'm just actually kind of disappointed that FEC were'nt rolled into the gravelords, even though that wasn't even something I thought I wanted.  I guess I just want GW to do /something/ with the FEC, as a model line, as a meaningful and potentially comoelling aspect if the AiS setting and lore.  'Crazy monsters who think they're noble knights' is a neat idea, but two tomes in and there's just no flesh on the bones, let alone compelling fashions to adorn the flesh that isn't there.

bah, I'm rambling off topic now.  I need to go to bed.  Just something that occured to me while I looked at how the bloodborn on the beasts base are looking up at him and tending to him in an almost worshipful kind of way despite their vestial features & feral movements & posing, which is exactly the kind of contrast between the reverent and the monsterous that I'd want to see conveyed in the FEC line, if they're ever graced with a release wave of their own.

 

Again though, I'm stumbling far off topic for the Gravelord thread.

Edited by Sception
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20 minutes ago, Mandzak-Miniatures said:

EC74C387-07C2-4496-A383-A02A4FCAD9E1.jpeg

And ghouls.  And ossiarchs.  You really going to begrudge other undead factions existing?

the book is also confirmed to include rules for grand alliance death allegiance, so if you want vamps and ghosts without resorting to the ally rules, there will be an allegiance for that.

probably not a viable or even terribly functional rule set, but still.

Edited by Sception
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20 minutes ago, Sception said:

And ghouls.  And ossiarchs.  You really going to begrudge other undead factions existing?

the book is also confirmed to include rules for grand alliance death allegiance, so if you want vamps and ghosts without resorting to the ally rules, there will be an allegiance for that.

probably not a viable or even terribly functional rule set, but still.

The point I am making is that vampires classically always have had spirit hosts, black coach (reviving vampire and transport), wraith and banshee.

By that logic all things not bat or werewolf-vampire heros should be moved to their own books ie zombie or skeleton.

obr is its own thing. Fec and nh are a product of splitting up VC because it was in vogue to make a ton at the start of AoS. FeC is now the defunct strigoi.

im not saying VC should have all of it. I’m just saying classically they have had the basics.

we all know things baked in are always better than alliances.

anyone remember when TK came out? Yeah, VC also had non Egyptian mummies. But hey I just want some basic ghosts action

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5 hours ago, Sception said:

The Vyrkos are still cool as a new and distinctive soulblight dynasty. 

Inclusion of the Blood-bourne Thralls for the Vyrkos would have been great. That would have added a „complete“ feral gang from the kislev outbacks...

like both models a lot and the direction/fluff they hind at. Since at least  the old Legion of Blood seems confirmed as „old style VC“ and the missing bedsheets could be allied in from NH, I‘m pretty satisfied and now the real question: rulez for good games or rules for boring games? 🧐🤔🧐

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4 hours ago, Sception said:

And ghouls.  And ossiarchs.  You really going to begrudge other undead factions existing?

the book is also confirmed to include rules for grand alliance death allegiance, so if you want vamps and ghosts without resorting to the ally rules, there will be an allegiance for that.

probably not a viable or even terribly functional rule set, but still.

No need to get on his case for that. VC have classically always had ghosts in them, it'll be a bit jarring for most of us not to have any now. 

As for horde lists - frankly yes, a Soulblight Gravelords army should be viable as a horde. But they'll be doing a great disservice to the faction if that's the only viable list type. Perhaps one of the allegiances/subfactions/dynasties will work better for hordes but it shouldn't be at the expense of hybrid lists at least. 

I for one despise taking ~150 models to a game, I much more enjoy playing in the 80 ish range where I might take one large unit of skeletons/zombies/Grave Guard but the other units are more elite and aren't at full size. We have a lot of special, quirky units and it shouldn't be the case that every SG army takes the same 3-4 full blocks of the same core units and then maybe sprinkles in one elite unit for flavour. 

This is kind of what I meant earlier - I can see why we wouldn't be viable without a large unit of skeles/zombies/GG in the army, if you just used the  (to use the whfb terms) Special and Rare sections of the book then yeah, the army doesn't have to be viable for that. But, the army should definitely be viable for taking some large units and plenty of elites. 

At this point I am tired of the classic undead trope of hordes all the time where the only thing viable are many large blocks of dudes buffed by a hero. It doesn't need to be just that. We're not just "vanilla undead", generic fantasy undead that you'd see in any fantasy setting. We are the Vampire faction and yes, we have skeletons and zombies but we also have vampire knights, mutated vampiric monstrosities, a weird chariot/palenquin thing. We have massive bats and even a huge-chonker-ohlawdhecomin-bat. 

We are not the same undead as you see in Mantic's Kings of War (even if they did start as a VC ripoff ;) ), there is a reason why we don't have the typical skeleton archers and undead catapult. 

There is nothing more boring they could do with SG than make it "Generic Undead" and purely that. That should be one possible list/subfaction but not the whole thing. 

In short, I agree with you that yes, hordes should be one viable aspect of our army. However, I don't think that if they only get that right then it's a good book. In my eyes it will be a failure if that's the only viable list. Something like the hybrid list I mentioned above should also be viable and then probably a speed list (knights, knights and wolves/bats with Vengorian/VLoZD or something). If they can't make that work then they have made a "Generic Warhammer Undead" faction but not "Vampire Counts" or "Soulblight Gravelords". 

 

 

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I suggest to ignore everything about Fantasy.

I know that AoS take a lot of inspiration (and miniatures, and characters, and stories, etc...) but that doesn't mean that Fantasy are shackles (for AoS), that means that Fantasy is just a base to build and transform things to have their own personality.

Sometimes you lose (ghouls'n ghosts, pun intended), sometimes you win (a bunch of feral-vampirs and vamptaurs).

Btw, I'm 100% with @Aren73, I hate to play with (and against) units with more than 20 models. I can understand an Horde of 30 (or even 40 for Skavens or something like that), but two blobs... or even 60 models...

I'm really biased with that, but I hope to see an editon when elites just come with 5-10 models, normal models with 10-20 models and Hordes with 10-30 models (min-max).

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I hope batswarms make the cut as they are one of my favorite old school vampire units. In favor of them making it I would point to the fact that rat swarms survived the transition to the AOS skaven tome. Also, while they are gone from the webstore for now they are also not listed in the "no longer available" category like the units that we know are being replaced/removed...they are just gone entirely.

If I had to guess, I would speculate that they were planning on replacing them with bats from cursed city released in a cursed city expansion on a separate sprue but since they seem to have dropped the idea of expanding cursed city I would assume we will see the same goofy old bats return.

I believe if they were dropping bats, mortis engine, and the necromancer that we would have more of an indication of that by now.

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10 hours ago, Erdemo86 said:

You forget that she’s staying in the back! Objectives more in the back automatically look smaller as they are. So looking at your picture, you have to take the measurement from Mini which has the Same distance.

D6FDBC16-13AD-49DF-9AD6-D2623EF81D42.jpeg

Yeah, those are fairly far away compared to the models in the front. How can I tell? The camera focus doesn't have that deep a depth of field. 

If you want to push this further, compare the basesize of Lauka Val to the terrorgheist in the back on a 130mm round base. There is NO WAY the 130mm all the way in the back can be anything near the "supposedly 100mm base" in the front. 

This is all photography manipulation, I don't think this model is going to be as big as people think it is. All tricks in the book are applied to make it seem larger than it really is. This model is going to leave me with a "Volturnos/Ossiarch bonereapers" effect. The previews all made those look larger than they really were. 

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34 minutes ago, Elmir said:

Yeah, those are fairly far away compared to the models in the front. How can I tell? The camera focus doesn't have that deep a depth of field. 

If you want to push this further, compare the basesize of Lauka Val to the terrorgheist in the back on a 130mm round base. There is NO WAY the 130mm all the way in the back can be anything near the "supposedly 100mm base" in the front. 

This is all photography manipulation, I don't think this model is going to be as big as people think it is. All tricks in the book are applied to make it seem larger than it really is. This model is going to leave me with a "Volturnos/Ossiarch bonereapers" effect. The previews all made those look larger than they really were. 

I would not put any effort in trying to reason the base size bases on an army shot. GW‘s Army shots (like the one you posted) are usually photoshop compositions of several images. This means the sizes aren‘t visually correct.

I don‘t mean this as an offense, just as an info since I know what you mean by this: the depth of field is the whole area that‘s depicted sharply in the image. The image above has a large depth of field from what I can tell :) interestingly: We could calculate the base size of we knew what camera (sensor size), the crude distance to the model and the focal length GW uses :D

 

Overall I assume you are right: she isn‘t as big as we might think. I‘d assume her lower half is about as big as one of the Mortarch‘s dread Abyssal 


 

82AC1A66-182D-4E73-B22C-672A4EB98C3A.jpeg.bc55f250f869070b6de9942259f667d3.jpeg

AoS uses a storey height of about 3“ iirc we can assume the base to have about ~1,4 * 3“ = 4,2“ (*25,4)= 106,6mm

so 100mm seems plausible

cheers

Jack

 

Edited by JackStreicher
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I'd be kind of happy if that model is on the smaller side, likely means a smaller price tag.  I'm thinking a little bit bigger than an Akhelian king/volturnos.  If the price is under $70 US I'm getting two :) 

Edited by Mikosan
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1 hour ago, Elmir said:

This is all photography manipulation, I don't think this model is going to be as big as people think it is.

I feel we are missing the actual big boys of the army, though. Look at the size of those Fell Bats next to the Terrorgheist. The true Age of Bigmar starts here.

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On a completely different note to all this - I recently ran a poll on an fb Soublight group about this release. Options being:
Was the reveal: As expected, better than expected or worse than expected?

The split is sitting around 35%, 34%, 31%, for expected, better, worse respectively. 

This tells me the community is surprisingly non-extreme on this release, with most people thinking it's "alright". I thought based on some reactions that we'd get a lot more people being extreme one way or the other. Something more like a 20:40:40 split or even more skewed. It also tells me that GW didn't blow many people away with this release, it's not one of those cases where they've massively overdelivered. But they also didn't drop the ball majorly, they didn't betray the fanbase so to speak. 

No idea what to do with that data...it's nice that people online aren't as extreme as one might think? 

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21 minutes ago, Aren73 said:

On a completely different note to all this - I recently ran a poll on an fb Soublight group about this release. Options being:
Was the reveal: As expected, better than expected or worse than expected?

The split is sitting around 35%, 34%, 31%, for expected, better, worse respectively. 

This tells me the community is surprisingly non-extreme on this release, with most people thinking it's "alright". I thought based on some reactions that we'd get a lot more people being extreme one way or the other. Something more like a 20:40:40 split or even more skewed. It also tells me that GW didn't blow many people away with this release, it's not one of those cases where they've massively overdelivered. But they also didn't drop the ball majorly, they didn't betray the fanbase so to speak. 

No idea what to do with that data...it's nice that people online aren't as extreme as one might think? 

Could you please link the Facebook group? :)

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23 minutes ago, Aren73 said:

On a completely different note to all this - I recently ran a poll on an fb Soublight group about this release. Options being:
Was the reveal: As expected, better than expected or worse than expected?

The split is sitting around 35%, 34%, 31%, for expected, better, worse respectively. 

This tells me the community is surprisingly non-extreme on this release, with most people thinking it's "alright". I thought based on some reactions that we'd get a lot more people being extreme one way or the other. Something more like a 20:40:40 split or even more skewed. It also tells me that GW didn't blow many people away with this release, it's not one of those cases where they've massively overdelivered. But they also didn't drop the ball majorly, they didn't betray the fanbase so to speak. 

No idea what to do with that data...it's nice that people online aren't as extreme as one might think? 

Yes I was a little surprised by the poll results too. However when you think about it, nothing other than the Lauka Val is crazy extreme. I suppose the werewolf style is a little bit of a change but it is something I am not shocked to see in a Gravelords book. The other models, like Dire Wolves, Skeletons, Zombies, Fell Bats, etc are all what one would expect for a "new model upgrade" 

1 minute ago, JackStreicher said:

Could you please link the Facebook group? :)

https://www.facebook.com/groups/447428583100905

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@BaylorCorvette - I suppose no matter how people may complain or praise this release, it's quite a safe release. Mostly resculpts and some decent looking special characters. 

Thanks for linking btw, I'm new here didn't know if it was against forum rules or not. 

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