The "mortals redesign" Discussion

[Arathorn185]

On 5/6/2022 at 9:52 AM, CommissarRotke said:

This is less true for AOS and the rays of hope that are allowed to shine in AOS seem to be a reason that a LOT of us prefer it to 40k or even WHFB. 

If GW wants AOS to stand apart as its own high fantasy IP, something needs to be different. And being without the fantasy speciesism of their other two GIANT IPs will set Age of Sigmar as its own nobledark standard.

I think there's a misunderstanding here: those of us who want the Cities redesign to include non-humans, want that because it would mean direct synergies and less/no redundant units.

Yeah I agree Commissar, I just don’t agree with the concept or argument as the book is written as now that their is some harmonious crossover/intergratiom with subfactions

[CommissarRotke]

29 minutes ago, Arathorn185 said:

Yeah I agree Commissar, I just don’t agree with the concept or argument as the book is written as now that their is some harmonious crossover/intergratiom with subfactions

Rules wise you mean? I wonder if it's more because they wanted to make completely distinct Cities in the first book, where the old kits have synergy within a city but not between other cities.

[Arathorn185]

Yeah that what I mean Commissar. I’d love for cities rulewise to represwnt whay they are…they just don’t right now

[CommissarRotke]

Here's hoping that is possible with the next book then 😢 

[RyantheFett]

My pessimism is kicking in, but funny enough I was just thinking about how the crusader aspect could be used to rebuild the entire faction from the ground up without destroying all the lore.

GW don't like the mix races, repeating old units, city abilities, placeholder faction, only want to do a human faction, etc. You can't really change the lore at this point because that would ruin a ****** ton of books. So instead you make a religious crusade that pulls only the humans out of the cities. 

Best example of having their cake and eating it too. GW gets to keep the diverse city lore for past and future books, remake the all the rules, and keep the army having a very unified design.

Edited May 11, 2022 by RyantheFett

[zilberfrid]

18 minutes ago, RyantheFett said:

My pessimism is kicking in, but funny enough I was just thinking about how the crusader aspect could be used to rebuild the entire faction from the ground up without destroying all the lore.

GW don't like the mix races, repeating old units, city abilities, placeholder faction, only want to do a human faction, etc. You can't really change the lore at this point because that would ruin a ****** ton of books. So instead you make a religious crusade that pulls only the humans out of the cities. 

Best example of having their cake and eating it too. GW gets to keep the diverse city lore for past and future books and remake the entire army without too much backlash.

I don't see the players having that cake.

[Warboss Gorbolg]

I think that GW is leading with the Crusades because it is the easiest to design and deliver. Basically builds upon old world priests and flaggellants updated with Stormcast inspirations.

GW says in the article that introducing new mortals is a huge undertaking and this is just the beginning. From a theme perspective, I think that the Crusades can get away with ignoring realm/city specific influences more easily than trying to introduce new swordsmen, war machines, etc.

I wouldn’t extrapolate from the Crusades to the rest of the mortals designs. Again, I just think that the Crusades might have been the low-hanging fruit and easily separated and therefore designed for.

Edited May 11, 2022 by Warboss Gorbolg

[Asbestress]

Made a bit of a recap of what we know so far. I have taken our holy harbringer Whitefang's word as gospel, just because they have been quite reliable thus far.

[RyantheFett]

I could see them working thought each race in Cities and pretty much giving them their own identity and sub faction one at a time. Would explain the "biggest undertaking" line and why the timeframe is sooooooooo long. That would be pretty cool.

[Snorri Nelriksson]

5 minutes ago, RyantheFett said:

I could see them working thought each race in Cities and pretty much giving them their own identity and sub faction one at a time. Would explain the "biggest undertaking" line and why the timeframe is sooooooooo long. That would be pretty cool.

I could see the other way around and them trying to unifies the whole idea of Cos having the various species in every "subgroup" tbh,so freeguild with duardin and elves alike and so on.

[zilberfrid]

8 minutes ago, Snorri Nelriksson said:

I could see the other way around and them trying to unifies the whole idea of Cos having the various species in every "subgroup" tbh,so freeguild with duardin and elves alike and so on.

I'm afraid GW likes segregation a bit too much for that.

[Warboss Gorbolg]

23 minutes ago, RyantheFett said:

I could see them working thought each race in Cities and pretty much giving them their own identity and sub faction one at a time. Would explain the "biggest undertaking" line and why the timeframe is sooooooooo long. That would be pretty cool.

I was thinking that it ends up more like Chaos, except instead of god specific armies we’ll get 3-4 realm influenced ones over several years.

sort of hope I’m wrong as I’d go broke.

[novakai]

25 minutes ago, zilberfrid said:

I'm afraid GW likes segregation a bit too much for that.

It more apparent in this edition with how coalition rules turn out and the pitch battle profile limitations

at least from what I got from the stream was that they where giving normal humans their own army, since that been a major complaint of AoS

Edited May 11, 2022 by novakai

[Arathorn185]

All I want to know can I play my Shadowblades

[zilberfrid]

5 hours ago, novakai said:

It more apparent in this edition with how coalition rules turn out and the pitch battle profile limitations

at least from what I got from the stream was that they where giving normal humans their own army, since that been a major complaint of AoS

That is fine and all, but it would take out a vast chunk of Cities, because I don't see GW put units in multiple armies to that degree.

I also just don't like the idea that "regular humans" must be religious fanatics. Hell, I already stripped "of Sigmar" from the faction.

[novakai]

well religious zeal seems to be a common trope and theme within Warhammer in general. GW just like using the themes and it has been built into both settings over the years. acting like AoS is different and diverge from that path seems a little naive considering that even this setting is basically Worshipers fighting each other in their Gods name/agenda in a vast fantasy land.

[zilberfrid]

2 hours ago, novakai said:

well religious zeal seems to be a common trope and theme within Warhammer in general. GW just like using the themes and it has been built into both settings over the years. acting like AoS is different and diverge from that path seems a little naive considering that even this setting is basically Worshipers fighting each other in their Gods name/agenda in a vast fantasy land.

Yeah, and I hate that.

Freeguild and Ironweld are not described as fundamentalist. Disposessed and Kharadron are godless, and I like all those factions.

GW apparently can't leave anything untainted by gods because they don't know how to write something else.

Edited May 12, 2022 by zilberfrid

[Kadeton]

3 hours ago, zilberfrid said:

GW apparently can't leave anything untainted by gods because they don't know how to write something else.

To me, that seems symptomatic of a setting so completely unmoored from the normal passage of time. Things jump around in the fiction by hundreds or thousands of years, and the only way you can have characters "persist" and have an ongoing impact in that framework is by making them immortal - otherwise, they're probably long dead by the time you turn the page.

If I had to guess, I'd say a lot of the effort going into "making mortals relevant again" will have to go towards having a more coherent and reasonable time scale, focusing in on a particular set of events (presumably the Dawnbringer Crusades) which occur over a relatively short period. It will be interesting to see whether they can pull that off.

[Marcvs]

32 minutes ago, Kadeton said:

To me, that seems symptomatic of a setting so completely unmoored from the normal passage of time. Things jump around in the fiction by hundreds or thousands of years

Off topic but yes, this is annoying. When trying to think about the story of my City, I often wonder: how much time has passaed since it has been liberated? (or, before that, conquered by the Chaos forces). Anyone knows if there's some part of the lore which at least gives a order of magnitude for the time frame?

[pnkdth]

4 hours ago, zilberfrid said:

Yeah, and I hate that.

Freeguild and Ironweld are not described as fundamentalist. Disposessed and Kharadron are godless, and I like all those factions.

GW apparently can't leave anything untainted by gods because they don't know how to write something else.

To be fair, the gods are very real and present in AoS. Combine that with a grim setting where you almost get the vibe of a funeral procession when a CoS expedition move outs to combat chaos or death factions and you'd probably develop a culture with a close relationship to the death and afterlife. Even when you look at the old rather morbid looking models with skulls and skeletons it wasn't really a rabid worship but an acceptance of death and respect for Morr. 

In that regard, I hope there will be room made for a bigger pantheon, not just Sigmar, Sigmar, aaaaaand... Sigmar. However, AoS has this Avengers/Greek mythology thing going with hands on and physical gods rather than WHFB with the gods as guiding presences rather than guiding hands.

In some ways, AoS have fallen into the Marvel trope of always having some giant death beam to the sky which will end the universe yet for some reason half of the factions are fine with/indifferent to what is going on. Basically, if everything all the time is high stakes and epic then it'll start to feel tiring and anything but epic while the 'high stakes' become mundane.

GW have expanded a lot on Guard heroes in 40k which despite the imperium's supposed unity have different ideas and perspectives. This could very well be it, a mix of hardened veterans and zealots trying their best to make sense of life in the realms. Maybe we'll even get some more interesting characters to follow?

 

[Beliman]

1 hour ago, Kadeton said:

To me, that seems symptomatic of a setting so completely unmoored from the normal passage of time. Things jump around in the fiction by hundreds or thousands of years, and the only way you can have characters "persist" and have an ongoing impact in that framework is by making them immortal - otherwise, they're probably long dead by the time you turn the page.

Maybe I'm the only one but I don't have a problem with characters that are not alive. I can still play with them (maybe not in some narrative games, but that's not the point) even if they died some time ago.

[xking]

Disposessed and Kharadron are not godless by the way. Especially true for the Disposessed, who want to reunite with Grungni and reclaim the holds.

Edited May 12, 2022 by xking

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

I want to say a little bit about this line from the preview:

Quote

We’ve even managed to procure a sneaky peek at some of the early miniature renders that the studio is working on right now. These are some of the insignia, emblems, and symbols that will come with your models to demonstrate their rather macabre dedication to the God-King.

Quite a few people have really latched on to this and concluded from it not just that the Dawnbringer Crusades will have a religious theme (which, honestly, they should have if we take the setting of AoS seriously), but that they will somehow be significantly more religious than the Freeguild is right now or the Empire has been in the past. To the point of being described as fundamentalists or fanatics, even.

The thing is, the only substantial bit of design we have seen so far does not really cash that out for me. Here are all the new bits they previewed:

Spoiler

A general theme of skulls, hammers, twin-tailed comets and the cool S of Sigmar.

The thing is, all that stuff is already found on the current models, especially on the biggest and newest kits where they had the technology to add a bunch of gubbins:

Spoiler

Even more so, this seems to be true for some of the older kits that were lost with the first Cities book. The current Freeguild general is not especially bedecked with Sigmarite imagery, but several that are no longer being produced certainly were:

Spoiler

Personally, I would not characterize the Old World empire as a religious fundamentalist or fanatical faction. Religion was definitely one of themes they had, but by no means the only one or the most important. Reading that people don't want the Sigmarite religion in their models or don't like the gothic imagery being added to them kind of leaves me scratching my head. Both of those things are already on the current models, and were even more present on the old Empire stuff. The religious theme is already there, it's just not the main thing about the human AoS models.

[xking]

59 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

I want to say a little bit about this line from the preview:

Quite a few people have really latched on to this and concluded from it not just that the Dawnbringer Crusades will have a religious theme (which, honestly, they should have if we take the setting of AoS seriously), but that they will somehow be significantly more religious than the Freeguild is right now or the Empire has been in the past. To the point of being described as fundamentalists or fanatics, even.

The thing is, the only substantial bit of design we have seen so far does not really cash that out for me. Here are all the new bits they previewed:

  Reveal hidden contents

A general theme of skulls, hammers, twin-tailed comets and the cool S of Sigmar.

The thing is, all that stuff is already found on the current models, especially on the biggest and newest kits where they had the technology to add a bunch of gubbins:

  Reveal hidden contents

Even more so, this seems to be true for some of the older kits that were lost with the first Cities book. The current Freeguild general is not especially bedecked with Sigmarite imagery, but several that are no longer being produced certainly were:

  Reveal hidden contents

Personally, I would not characterize the Old World empire as a religious fundamentalist or fanatical faction. Religion was definitely one of themes they had, but by no means the only one or the most important. Reading that people don't want the Sigmarite religion in their models or don't like the gothic imagery being added to them kind of leaves me scratching my head. Both of those things are already on the current models, and were even more present on the old Empire stuff. The religious theme is already there, it's just not the main thing about the human AoS models.

I find it strange that someone will be upset that the people in the 'Cities of Sigmar' are religious worshippers of Sigmar in the game called Age of Sigmar.  But more seriously, not everyone in the cities worship just Sigmar, they also worship the other gods of order. Sigmar is just more successful because he is constantly attempting to establish new cities and support them. He is also very much not a racist and is constantly seeking to establish new alliances and ties with those who side with order, hearing petitions etc

[RyantheFett]

As someone who is still gluing and painting his Freeguild and Stormcast stuff right now I thought the stuff they showed looked very in line with the faction should be and is pretty cool. Hell, I would even call some of it a bit too safe, but these are only teasers so can't really judge one way or another.

I think the fear is that the army turns into fantasy Space Marines with the removal of other races and a even stronger focus on the brutal lives and strong faith. With the info they gave us so far the similarities almost feel like a joke.

Of course their talk of how massive this plan is and how long it will take sort of implies something bigger then just a humans rework? Which then loops back around to other races already having representation in the game and what can they really do with them?