EccentricCircle

Now, I know news of a new space marine doesn't really excite us Age of Sigmar players, but lets think of the 40K crowd for once! After all, they've not had any news space marines since... *checks notes* Every other week forever... What was I saying?

Its very hard to predict what old plastics are worth. Metal models hold their value a lot better on the collector's market. Multi part plastics tend to depreciate, as the ones on sale are often built in bad poses, or not assembled very well. Single pose plastics hold up better, but aren't likely to fetch as good prices as the metals. Broken models can bring the price down, even though quite a lot of us are more than happy to repair and convert. Looking on Ebay is your best bet, as skull pass sets do come up from time to time. The models used to be in quite high demand among chaos dwarf fans, as you could convert the dwarves into chaos dwarves and the goblins into hobgoblins to get a workable army.

As ever your campaign sounds amazing!

All the ideas posted so far in this thread sound amazing! Its always great to see how much creativity everyone has. As far as input on mortal Nehekharans goes, I think there are a few good options for making this a reality. A few years back I built a middle eastern style cities army using a mix of historical minis and fantasy ones from assorted manufacturers. Doing an older, more ancient egyptian style force is definitely on my ideas list too. I'd check out the Reaper "nefsokar" line. Their backstory is of a mortal kingdom which is dedicated to the ancient egyptian gods, and while there is an undead aspect as you might expect there are lots of units for desert nomads and assorted warriors in the guises of the various gods. The models are metal, but many are single cast making them quite easy to work with. Reaper models are generally a delight to paint, and unlike a lot of the historical options for new kingdom egypt they are in a 32 mm heroic scale, so look more in scale to warhammer models. There are some great historical figures out there, but they will look a bit titchy next to a GW figure. Another good option to check out is the Desert of the Dead range from TT combat. I backed the kickstarter, so am not sure when/if the models are getting a general release, but along with the customary undead, they also did various desert nomad type units, and a full Desert Elves army, which basically has the entire classic Dark Elf roster, but with an ancient egyptian vibe. The troops are mostly monopose resin, but some are multi part. I've not built many of them yet, but the quality seems ok for kickstarter style resin. You'll have to clean a lot of flash, but the sculpts themselves are nice. I think there is also a line called crocodile games or something of that sort which i've seen a couple of times, but I never picked any of those up, so don't have any first hand experience of whether they are any good. I seem to recall that each faction was dedicated to a different egyptian god, but couldn't tell you more than that. Despite the Tomb King apocalypse, there are still plenty of undead ancient egyptians out there which are ripe for kitbashing too! My "some day" project is a dragon mounted army. I know that technically you can now do that in canon AoS, but I have much grander designs than a few stormcast on dragonback. Basically I want to kitbash and convert a bunch of toy and miniature dragons of different scales, to get a range of different troop types. First there are the dragon knights themselves, relatively heavily armored with heraldry and fancy armour. they would carry lances and ride medium sized dragons. If they weren't over sized the stormcast could be a good base for this, but I'm not sure the riders swap out easily enough. Then you have lightly armoured dragon scouts on smaller wyrms, they act as the rangers and recon, moving ahead of the army, and skirmishing. The riders use mechanical wings to fly along side their dragon mounts, so that they can separate in mid air to outflank opponents and become a whirling dance of blades, claws and fire. These are backed up by the Dragon Dragoons. They consist of much larger dragons carrying howdahs full of warriors. Some would fight from dragon back, but most are basically heavily armed paratroopers. They have mechanical wings like the scouts, but they don't stay aloft, rather dropping behind enemy lines to outflank their troops. On the ground is a support system made up of squires, men at arms and assorted siege engines which can all be moved on flying ships pulled by the bigger dragons. I like the idea that pseudo dragons are also in use, in much the same way that hunting hawks are in real life. You could also have drake handlers, and all manner of cool units. The main thing I've yet to see is a range of good winged warrior types. I did some designs using heroforge, such as this one for a dragon scout. However, it would be prohibitively expensive to use that for a whole army, even with 3d printing. If anyone knows of a good range of, I don't know, winged valkeries or something like that I would like to hear about it!

I love this idea. You could do so much with a kit like that. The big box of skulls looks great, but as a long time tomb kings player I have enough skulls in my bits box to last for years. Gw do seem overly fond of them for basing, and the old realm of battle boards contain fissures in tje ground, revealing an entire archaeological stratum of skulls. Where the rest of the bones went remains a mystery!

I really don't think there is anything to worry about. The first half the year was amazing for AoS releases, then a new edition came out. Ok, so its the 40K season at the moment, but the wheel will turn and fantasy will come around again. The two people who have finished painting all their models, have everything they are ever going to want for the armies they collect, and hate all other factions they might play, can moan about there being no new releases for a while. For the rest of us, lets be patient and paint our models!

Awesome. Keep up the good work. Sadly I only have 40, so no competition from me!

How many clanrats do you have these days?

Night Goblins were the army I never quite got around to starting during WFB, so when the Gloomspite range came out I was over the (Bad) Moon, and now have a somewhat ridiculous number of half painted goblins whom I really must get back to once I get a bit further with the chaos project!

I put Seraphon, because the main AoS project I've started this year is building Kroak, the Underworlds warband and converting the blood bowl team into a new contingent for my already massive lizardmen army. I also finally painted up the Dread Saurian, which is a fantastic behemoth of epic proportions! Other than that, I've really not been doing much AoS stuff. Favourite newly released army is definitely Gravelords, but I'm not getting into them any time soon, as I already have a pretty big vampire counts force, so don't really need many new models. I'm thus less excited about them than I am about the Lizzies right now. I guess that makes sense though. No matter how into a new army I get, I'll always swing back to obsessing over Lizardmen, Tomb Kings, and Dwarfs (both regular and chaos themed) sooner or later. Those were my OG fantasy armies for a reason. The other big project I've been doing is a warcry themed chaos army, but while I've been having great fun developing the lore for them, I've not gotten much done on the models themselves!

Wow, £130 is too dear for me. The gradual upwards creep on these big boxed sets has been annoying, but they just aren't value for money any more. Its rare that I want absolutely everything in one of these sets. Generally that wasn't too much of an issue but this time around none of the AoS boxes are a good pick at that price point. If I were starting one of those armies then sure, but to expand on what i have they just don't help. I kind of like the Necron one for 40K, as its almost all stuff I want... but I don't really need two walkers, and already have as many Necron warriors as I'm ever going to need. I kind of already did before indomitus; a horde army they are not. So I'm not convinced its actually a better deal this year than buying all those individual components from a shop with a high discount, especially if there is a reduced discount on the actual boxed set!

I get that product recalls are important, but I also found it amusing, given that the probably should have expected squigs to prove dangerous. If its the pom poms though, then surely its just as easy to remove the pom poms and render it safe, as it is to destroy its tail and render it unusable? I feel like warhammer fans are all pretty handy with craft tools, and could do that? Seems very wasteful to just dispose of an entire run of toys. They really should have designed it better in the first place, especially as most people I've seen taljung about it would have preferred a non christmas themed squig to start with!

Speaking as quite a bad player, I would say that a good player is one who has a solid ability to think both tactically, and strategically. They are good because they use all of their resources to the fullest. Some if this comes in optimising a good list as part of the metagame for sure. However the best list in the world won't save you if you don't understand why ut is good, and can't use it effectively in game. You need to know what all the synergies are and how and when to best employ them. Then by planning ahead, strategically, in how you place and utilitise those units to maximise your gain. But the killer, which I've never been able to do really, is to know how to do that for your opponents army too, so that you can figure out their strategy, and why they are putting things where they are. Then you can most effectively counter their plays. Intellectually I know how to do all this, but I can't hold that many rules in my head, so always end playing quite reactively. I suspect this is obvious to a skilled opponent who sees I don't have a plan beyond this turn and presses the advantage. Thus I'm very much on the side of thinking that variations un ability is more important than balance if units and armies, and that learning to play better is more useful than chasing the meta. The new army may be the best, but you still need to do the work to use it well.

The first rule of rumour thread is that we barely talk about rumours?

The headline made it sound as though warhammer world had fallen through a gnawhole unto the dank sewer dimension of the skaven, i'm almost disappointed that it's just because a road is closed due to leaking pipes!

I always think that they release the battleforces too late. In theory they would make great Christmas presents, but they are always released so close before Christmas that no one I know asks for them/buys them as gifts. Basically all the gift buying has to be done around now, which is too early for the boxed sets. Unless a lot more people leave things to the last minute than it seems, 18th of December would be ridiculously late to guarantee anything!

Amazing kitbash!

Thankfully none of those boxes are too appealing so I don't think I'll be getting and AoS one this year. The vampires one has stuff I'd use, but I really don't need that many skeletons and zombies, as I already have entire armies of Tomb Kings and Vampire counts. If it had the wolves, bats and blood knight's I'd have been more interested. The 40k ones look a lot more appealing, necrons and admech specifically.

Yeah, Lumineth/ Slaanesh/ Ossiarchs is just the safest bet possible. Destruction is harder to call, but non Kruleboy warclans makes sense for sure. I am though going to bet Fyreslayers just because, come on, it has to happen eventually! Edit: Proven wrong about the Fyreslayers literally at the moment I posted my guess, shucks!

GW may have called it "25" or 28 mm respectively, but none of their i models have been true 25mm for decades. Newer models don't really keep to a proper scale, but are more in the 32mm range. From at least the mid 90s wfb models were "Heroic" scale and bulky for 28mm models. Lord of the Rings is closer to 25mm and that was specifically to distinguish the models from warhammer, so that they wouldn't be compatible. So while scale creep is certainly a thing, there wasn't some massive shift when aos came out, it was just the continuation of what had already been going on.

Hmm, That all sounds ok, but it also seems like a pretty safe guess more than inside info. Some of it (such as which editions it will take after), should eventually be falsifiable, but by that time its proved true or false I don't think there is much else in there which we'll care about. Interesting though.

I think AoS has the quite big advantage that complete novelty is a possibility. They could showcase just about anything vaguely fantasy themed, tell us how it will fit into the realms and we'll go "Cool! makes sense". So long as it doesn't get too sci fi, or contradict something existing its basically all good (and even Kharadrons are pretty sci fi really). Conversely 40K is very established, and when they do bring out new factions is almost always with a view to expanding on some small facet of lore like the genestealers, or the various imperial ordos which are now their own thing. We would ironically like a bit more of that every so often! But then you come to Tyranids, and I love them to bits, but really what more do they need? They could bring out plastic lictors and biovores, get rid of the last of the resin. That would be good. But the basic troops, while ancient are fine for what they are. Its a horde army, and I don't want to have to paint dozens of ultra-detailed, really dynamic, monopose hormagaunts. The present kits are all nicely designed, clear and not overly cluttered. They might be a bit lacking in imagination, but that isn't something the army needs. Given the kind of range updates GW do, its better for them to go all out on the genestealers, who have a lot more variety and a lot more potential for all the fiddly little details and gems, and ornate guns that GW loves so much. They may not be "expanded tyranids" but they expand on the tyranids in a new and valuable way, adding another aspect to the game. It would be good to get similar kind of updates for AoS, maybe update the clunkier lizardmen, but I argue frequently that most of them are fine. If you are after a horde of naked lizard people, there is only so much design space to explore there, and making them to detailed makes it harder to paint up a big army. But suppose they were to bring out a new Slann servitor race, for sake of the argument Amazons are probably the closest equivalent to Genestealers vs Nids. Could they do more with making humanoid aztec inspired slann cultists than they could actually trying to think of new lizardmen to fill some niche which the Seraphon are presently missing? This is why I hope that we get the Kurnothi as their own faction, rather than part of Sylvaneth. We don't need to dillute the visual integrity of the Sylvaneth. We can have an independant faction which can freely ally with them, which has its own design space. Just think how good Fyreslayers or Daughters could be if they got the Genestealer cults treatment. That's what I'd like to see rather than total refreshes for ranges which are still mostly good. (Skaven get a pass, since they are in dire straights)

Thank you! I'd not thought about Slaaneshi pretenders, that could be another interesting angle to explore. I might need to finally read the Slaanesh battletome. At the moment I only have vague ideas of how my friend's armies will fit into the campaign if I'm honest. We've not started playing yet, so hopefully once everyone is developing lore, it will all intertwine nicely. I like your shared continent for sure. I think these sorts of games work well when there is a real sense of place and history to a campaign. I've never gotten to play a game where the roll of the dice determined whether a city would stand or fall yet, or been able to explore the larger scale ramifications of games as the narrative unfolds. Hopefully if my warcry campaign goes down well I can get my folks into doing something like that. I like the idea that some of your folks turned to chaos, and those who stayed loyal to sigmar were reforged. That's a great narrative hook, and I'd think it would make for some really dramatic battles when the two forces clash! I also really like your take on Morghur, that definitely fits with my idea that things rise and fall within the Warp. Morghur might exist as a sort of twisted and misshapen manifestation, but if the beastmen become ascendant and their faith shapes the realm of chaos more than that of the humans who follow Khorne then maybe he could become a genuine threat to the other, more established gods. Something which the big four definitely would want to avoid by stamping out the worship of "lesser" chaos gods whenever they can. Your diagram of how the gods fit together is also really cool. I'm sure I've seen a similar write up of a wheel of chaos before, maybe on Chaos Dwarfs online. I don't know whether that was you, I feel like it had them in a different order and had malal at the center of the wheel?

Wow. As a pure xenos player and fan of tyranids this s crazy. That said, its clear that GW consider the different colours of space marines to be different factions with their own books and models (albeit with a lot of crossover potential). Should we not thus consider spin off factions on the Xenos side as well. So it would be more fair to consider all Eldar together for example. For this comparison I think they consider new stuff for Genestealer cults to be as much a tyranid expansion as Space Wolves are a Space Marine one. To bring things back to AoS this does put the glut of stormcast in. Perspective at least. Of course the advantage of our more varied range is more variety, but the disadvantage is that there are more old ranges to languish.

Thanks! Yes, I figure that the Iron Golems are the most Hashut aligned of the warcry factions (though I don't actually have any of them yet. Some day...) I'm conceptualising my army as being based around the "other" four chaos gods. So there are Chaos Dwarves representing Hashut, Beastmen representing Zuvassin the god of destruction, and then my Cypher Lords, are the "Apostates of Necoho" representing his role as god of atheism. Most of the rest of the army is made up of unaligned barbarians and the other warcry bands, who I will align with Malal, unless something in the warband's lore really points it at another faction! I have a small contingent of skaven, though I've yet to decide whether they (and by extension the horned rat) are actually wholehearted supporters of the plot, or are just mercenary and opportunists. I think the latter, partly because it fits the Skaven character, and partly because it keeps the symbolism of four gods vs four gods. I figure that Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeentch and Slaanesh weren't always the dominant chaos gods in the warp, but over the aeons different entities wax and wane as the warp reflects the whims of the different realities it touches. The only "major" god who is represented in my army is of course Tzeentch, since naturally He is the god you can count on to be lending his support to every plot, even one to depose his own chosen one! The basic philosophy is that Archaon, by his very nature is a heretic. He is supposed to be the greatest warrior of Chaos, but that is a lie. If you claim to be the Everchosen for thousands of years, presiding over a tyranical empire in the name of "Chaos", then all you are really doing is leading to stagnation and in a strange sense order. My warriors have decided that for Chaos to truly reign, Archaon must die, and the cycle must be allowed to begin again. In short if Chaos is not allowed to destroy itself then it is not truly Chaos. Thus must a new Everchosen rise to replace the old, and Chaos be renewed. It even kind of goes back to the conspiracy theory about what Archaon actually read in the prophecy in the Inqusition's vaults all those millennia ago when he was still a sigmarite templar. There is at least one theory I've seen which states that what he learned wasn't that he couldn't defeat chaos and should turn to darkness in despair, but rather that the way to kill the Chaos Gods was to destroy the world, and rob them of their worship. Clearly that failed. Even when the old world burned the Chaos Gods were sustained by the worship given to them in every other dimension (most notably 40K). But maybe Archaon is still secretly working against them, and has found a new way to stymie chaos and lock it into an eternal decline. Certainly that's what my warriors believe, and why they seek to depose him. To this end my Darkoath Warqueen Elsar Ragnarsdottir has declared herself Everchosen and has embarked upon a great quest across the realms to assemble the missing fragments to the Crown of Chaos, which I'm planning to run as a narrative play warcry campaign in our gaming group. All the factions will compete to gain the fragments of the crown. Long ago, just before the breaking of the old world, Archaon used fell necromancy to hide his soul in a phylactery, so that he could never truly die. Thus he would rob the Chaos Gods of their prize in a final act of spite. But Be'lakor stole the phylactery, and sealed it in the Anarchives, an ancient repository of dark lore hidden within the winding pathways of the Realm of Chaos. He sealed the library, using his own crown as key, before shattering it and scattering the fragments across the Realms (and maybe beyond, I like the idea that the campaign will actually take us back in time to the old world at one point, and maybe even into the 40K dimension, perhaps a shard is kept in the black library of the Eldar!) So now warbands seek the crown of the First Daemon Prince, either to steal Archaon's soul, return it to him, or destroy it. My queen wants to set herself in his place as I've said. My friend's stormcast want to destroy it, and my other friend's nighthaunt want to offer the soul of the Everchosen to Nagash as the ultimate prize. I'm not sure who else will be playing, but hopefully there will be some more "loyalist" chaos factions. We'll see how the campaign goes, and what happens. Hopefully it will run through out next year.