Dawnbringers 4 Discussion Thread

[The Lost Sigmarite]

5 minutes ago, Ejecutor said:

All these leaks are about the Ghyran crusade. Now that we are close to the ending....

What do you expect for the Aqshy side?

What do you expect from the Ushoran guests?

Which one do we think is going to be the surviving one?

Still think the Ghyran crusade will fail and the Aqshy one will succeed. The Aqshy crusade has the benefit of having named CoS characters within it (Vedra and Zenestra) since the start, that gives them plot armour. All the Ghyran crusade leaders don't have dedicated miniatures, meaning they can be killed off with little problems...

Edited January 14 by The Lost Sigmarite

[Ejecutor]

1 minute ago, The Lost Sigmarite said:

Still think the Ghyran crusade will fail and the Aqshy one will succeed. The Aqshy crusade has the benefit of having named CoS characters within it (Vedra and Zenestra) since the start, that gives them plot armour. All the Ghyran crusade leaders don't have dedicated miniatures, meaning they can be killed off with little problems...

I think that's where the plot twist would come. Maybe the Aqshy one is the one failing and the named characters and some more minions would survive somehow, while the Ghyran one would be the surviving. This way they can tweak what everyone expects.

[The Lost Sigmarite]

On 1/11/2024 at 10:47 AM, Sarges said:

The fortress was weakened by Alarielle's Rite of Life, so between the Ironweld artillery, Dispossed clans and the life magic of Iscilla Thorian, the Dawners are able to break down the fortress and move into New Summercourt.!<

Forgot to say it,, but glad to see dwarfs are still around and kicking in CoS. The release 2 months ago was definitely very human centric, it's nice to see the Cities dwarfs are still important in the lore. Here's hoping to their refresh, or at least their current continuation in CoS, rather than being dumped in TOW with no replacements. 

Edited January 14 by The Lost Sigmarite

[Hollow]

23 hours ago, The Lost Sigmarite said:

The Aqshy crusade has the benefit of having named CoS characters within it (Vedra and Zenestra) since the start, that gives them plot armour.

Whilst I suspect you might be right, I really hope that AoS doesn't paint itself into a corner by never killing characters with current models. 

Edited January 15 by Hollow

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

13 hours ago, Hollow said:

Whilst I suspect you might be right, I really hope that AoS doesn't paint itself into a corner by never killing characters with models current models. 

Zenestra is excused, she has a bunch of "how is this ancient woman still alive?" stuff written into her fluff from the start. For Tahlia Vedra, I agree in principle, but let's give it a few editions before we kill her off, at least.

[Ejecutor]

3 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

Zenestra is excused, she has a bunch of "how is this ancient woman still alive?" stuff written into her fluff from the start. For Tahlia Vedra, I agree in principle, but let's give it a few editions before we kill her off, at least.

But Tahlia moved out, she is not at risk, so it could be another case of "How is Zenestra alive" and the crusade falling on that side.

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

Just now, Ejecutor said:

But Tahlia moved out, she is not at risk, so it could be another case of "How is Zenestra alive" and the crusade falling on that side.

Would work with her fluff: We see her die as part of the Dawnbringers narrative and then she just shows up in Hammerhal again as if nothing happened in the aftermath.

[flying_dutchman]

On 1/14/2024 at 5:52 PM, Hollow said:

Whilst I suspect you might be right, I really hope that AoS doesn't paint itself into a corner by never killing characters with current models. 

It's double sided.  Gw has a habit of squatting named characters when they die.  Id be pretty pissed if I bought a $100 dollar centerpiece model.  Then spent weeks building and painting it.  Just to see it get squatted not even 6 months later.  Remember the lore is secondary to selling models.

[Marcvs]

1 hour ago, flying_dutchman said:

It's double sided.  Gw has a habit of squatting named characters when they die.  Id be pretty pissed if I bought a $100 dollar centerpiece model.  Then spent weeks building and painting it.  Just to see it get squatted not even 6 months later.  Remember the lore is secondary to selling models.

There's a relatively straightforward solution to that: once the named character dies and gets removed from the rules, the mini can just be used as a generic version of the hero. It would also be a nice way to add "seasonal" rules to armies through said "temporary" named characters

[Rachmani]

I think we can all agree that *new* named characters won't get killed off just yet.
I'm all for killing them off at certain points in time and their models becoming generic versions of themselves, but basically within the same release cycle? Never gonna happen. They first have to actually *do* something in the world, the living story, so to speak.

[Rachmani]

On the same note, I'm in favor of Nagash dying btw. He's a relic of Ages past. Let the "Council of Mortarchs" rule death for a while, before some new God of Death emerges. 

Edited January 17 by Rachmani

[Pizzaprez]

On 1/14/2024 at 8:58 AM, The Lost Sigmarite said:

Still think the Ghyran crusade will fail and the Aqshy one will succeed. The Aqshy crusade has the benefit of having named CoS characters within it (Vedra and Zenestra) since the start, that gives them plot armour. All the Ghyran crusade leaders don't have dedicated miniatures, meaning they can be killed off with little problems...

I'm in the camp that I could see this as a misdirect: Zenestra is "real weird!" and I could see her getting a chapter in which we're told exactly how she "dies" but "the wheel must ever turn" or something and she just rolls in to Hammerhall later to explain that they failed in person. I could see her continuing to be important alongside a flagellant refresh!

Vedra isn't going away: Hammerhall is the protagonist city and she is now the main human character from it. She might lose, might get injured, but she's sticking around for a bit. 

Death characters, like Nagash and Arkhan, often have had multiple ways of cheating death even before their most recent demise. Nagash has evolved to something terrifying, even before his death, and I could see GW keeping him "dead" and rewriting his god miniature to be a puppet or avatar instead. Arkhan as "skeleton with hat" is probably actually dead forever, and will almost certainly eventually get a new Ossiarch body. He'll probably be member of the Null Myriad; the legion he is in charge of who also happen to be black like Arkhan's title

[The Lost Sigmarite]

On 1/17/2024 at 3:14 PM, Rachmani said:

On the same note, I'm in favor of Nagash dying btw. He's a relic of Ages past. Let the "Council of Mortarchs" rule death for a while, before some new God of Death emerges. 

So you can later bring him back as a new centerpiece model to sell to players and collectors ? Clever, real clever...

[Chikout]

Here's the contents page from Dawnbringers 4. Taken from the 'this week on Warhammer' video. 

[Ejecutor]

7 minutes ago, Chikout said:

Here's the contents page from Dawnbringers 4. Taken from the 'this week on Warhammer' video. 

[BarakUrbaz]

Higher quality image. Looks like really nothing apart from the Nulahmian AOR and the Mortarch RORs. 

EDIT: Looks like this shrinks photos I upload, so hopefully this cropping should work. 

 

Edited January 29 by BarakUrbaz

[Chikout]

3 hours ago, Ejecutor said:

Oops. Sorry the screenshot I took was legible. 

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

With all these armies and regiments of renown, plus all those battleplans and triumph and treachery, this book might be the first one I buy. That's a lot of interesting content. 

[Sception]

On 1/17/2024 at 9:14 AM, Rachmani said:

On the same note, I'm in favor of Nagash dying btw. He's a relic of Ages past. Let the "Council of Mortarchs" rule death for a while, before some new God of Death emerges. 

I like that he's off the table (in terms of narrative) for the moment, letting the Mortarchs follow their own fun little plots and squabbles, but I wouldn't want him gone permanently.  Partially because I just don't think the GW lore writers are capable of coming up with a 'lord of the undead' style character who would be at all better or even meaningfully different from Nagash, but also because Nagash is just active and dynamic in ways that have fun impacts on the narrative even if you don't think much of him as a personality.  Like I said, I'm glad that he's in time out, but let's be real, Age of Sigmar's narrative was never as active - the story changes never as big or coming as fast - as when Nagash was in the ascendancy.

It didn't have to be this way, there were plenty of dangling threads left by Broken Realms and there are plenty of characters in the game who could have been doing stuff.  And yet it seems that without Nagash around to Make Stuff Happen, stuff just Does Not Happen in this setting, and for that alone he's the best and most important character in Age of Sigmar and I hope GW never ever gets rid of him - at least not permanently.

[Ejecutor]

Narrative spoilers posted by @CommissarRotke over the rumour thread:
 

 

 

[CommissarRotke]

yes thank you!! i got a bit too excited and figured the Whitefang fans might want more breadcrumbs

[Beliman]

Still reading the book, but it seems that it has a bit more going on than the previous ones. At least, it feels more "immersive".

[Sception]

13 hours ago, Beliman said:

Still reading the book, but it seems that it has a bit more going on than the previous ones. At least, it feels more "immersive".

I kind of regret buying the last two, but not this one, because yeah.  It does feel like more is going on, with consequences reaching farther than just the fate of these two crusades.  Plus the Triumph & Treachery stuff feels like a meaningful bit of content that the previous couple books didn't have.

Then again, I play death factions exclusively, so that might just be bias based on my factions featuring more heavily this time.

[NinthMusketeer]

To add a couple critical points to the Ghyran-side spoilers from page 1;

-Some of the Crusaders do survive to leave Summercourt, after Gormayne calls a truce and says that for their aid in purging the Nulahmian agents legal precedent gives them leniency (albeit limited). Additionally only a small portion of the overall Crusade went in originally, and some of those who didn't also survive.

-While certainly not sane Ushoran is far more self-aware than other characters realized; in addition to intentionally playing the fool to Sekhar's manipulations he *allows* himself to be shot and acts as if the wound is more significant than it really is for the purpose of his followers. This is elaborated on with the recent short story on WarCom, heavily implying that he is also aware Gormayne was a conspirator.
-As a sidenote to the above, at least one of his personalities seems to believe he is in control of the delusion ("I control this" the only line where he refers to himself as "I" instead of "we") though how much control remains to be seen.

 

Speaking on the Aqshy side;

-Zenestra was sketchy from the start, but that is pushed to a new order of magnitude in this book. It is all but explicitly stated that she has power outside of Sigmar ("Eyes aglow with amethyst flame, Zenestra rumbled intonations that had never darkened an Azyrheim cathedral; they were akin to a funeral chant, symbolically reversed as if to reverse the aqualith's macabre polarity in turn.") Personal theory atm is that she is a former death god that escaped absolute destruction by Nagash, though that's speculation on my part.

 

On epilogue notes;

-Khul is called out as a threat but not much detail is given other than wanting a showdown with Vandus.

-In attempting to loot knowledge from Arkhan's holdings while the liche is gone, Mannfred encounters signs of Skaven though like the above it doesn't get into details.

-Katakros has "sensed something and chose not to share" and issued an empire-wide commandment that the Ossiarchs are to halt all advance and shore up defenses.

[NinthMusketeer]

On 1/31/2024 at 2:25 PM, Sception said:

I like that he's off the table (in terms of narrative) for the moment, letting the Mortarchs follow their own fun little plots and squabbles, but I wouldn't want him gone permanently.  Partially because I just don't think the GW lore writers are capable of coming up with a 'lord of the undead' style character who would be at all better or even meaningfully different from Nagash, but also because Nagash is just active and dynamic in ways that have fun impacts on the narrative even if you don't think much of him as a personality.

Agreed, though I would caveat that (IMO) Josh Reynolds' version of Nagash is a far superior character to what we have gotten since he left GW. Reynolds' Nagash has a great deal of nuance whereas GWs Nagash seems to be not a whole lot more than 'competent Skeletor'.

Edited February 26 by NinthMusketeer