EccentricCircle

I'm almost working on the opposite at the moment. Half of the folks I game with aren't really interested in GW stuff, but are keen to play Osprey/McCullough style wargames. The other half are too deep in the GW hobby to care that anything else exists. (None of them really play AoS, its 40K with a bit of Warcry mostly, but that's another issue). So what I'm trying to do is write a completely system agnostic campaign and game setting, where you can basically bring whatever models you have, and whatever system you have and we'll play which ever game suits them best or which the other player isn't allergic to. So within the world there will be scope for armies to clash on the open field using Dragon Rampant, Kingdoms can be designed using Oathmark, people can bring old Warhammer fantasy armies, or play AoS. For skirmish gaming, we can have wizards scouting into ruins using frostgrave, or crazy fanatics clashing with Warcry. All can feed into the same narrative campaign, and the influence the player's overall standing in the world, the size of their kingdom, which magical resources they have at their disposal and so on. The challenge has been writing a setting that people's AoS armies can fit into and still feel like themselves, without a) just filing the serial numbers off, and b) not making it too "warhammery" for the AoS haters to want to have their Oathmark kingdoms or frostgrave warbands also fit into that world. I write a lot of RPG settings. So am good at the craft. I know how I want it to look and feel. The question is whether others will buy into that.

I have no particular knowledge of copywrite law, or how it might relate to gaming products. However I can explain how copying and quoting works in academic and journalistic contexts. Making a direct copy, such as photographing or photocopying a page is illegal (that's why pages with character sheets and army rosters usually have a specific disclaimer saying that they can be copied). Sometimes you can get away with copying a small section, such as one article in a journal (if I remember correctly). However you are quite within your rights to read a book at the library and make notes. Rules information in a warhammer book is simple enough that you could make notes on everything you need to play the game, and type it up in your own words. In other words making a cheat sheet for yourself or your friends to use. Finding a library that has the latest battletome would be the challenge. Some games clubs and universities perhaps? I guess if you live in London the British Library might? However, once you've made your cheat sheets, actually publishing that (online or otherwise) for other people to refer to is going to be where things get dodgy. In theory... if you were writing up a "transformative" work that discussed and provided commentary to the rules, then I think you would be within your rights to quote or paraphrase specific sections, so long as you cite the original work, and attribute it correctly. This is what most of the lore wikis do, although I feel that a lot of them go a bit too far, and often have very long quotations which aren't properly attributed or identified as such. When I write a scientific paper, I can quote sections or reproduce a figure from another paper in order to make my point. However the rules for doing that may not be completely transferable to making a website of quick reference warhammer rules. I'm sure I've read that game mechanics themselves can't be copywrited, only the presentation of those rules, but I'd think the games company wouldn't want anyone publishing their rules verbatim.

But the point is that buying things incrementally over several years is more affordable, even if the ultimate cost is the same. The question isn't how much you have to pay for books in total, but rather at what point the increased rate of recycling\updating gets too much. It is entirely possible to play the game using only the free resources. I'm sure most people here play with the rules in the battle tomes, but those aren't actually compulsory. We are the exception, not the rule, and I suspect the vast majority of less fanatical AoS players out in the wild mostly use the free rules or occasionally get the tome for their one army. the release rate only becomes a problem if like many of us you obsess over the new releases. The trouble is that we're a really small fraction of the fan base, so GW's release strategy isn't calibrated for us. They want to sell a couple of books a year to the folks who only buy them occasionally. That means churning out a constant cycle of updated books to catch everyone who might just have one army, or not care about the GHB or the latest campaign. But pretending that books are a compulsory purchase for a few pages of rules is just daft. I remember a few times as kids when the latest campaign was all the rage, but we didn't all rush out to buy a copy. One person had it, and we all used it as a group. We buy books for the lore, the painting guides, the bestiary and the catalogue of minis. The additional special rules are actually only a very small part of the product. Now there is an argument that a lot of that stuff can now be done better on line, but the book is more of a prestige product to inspire and read for its own sake. The trouble is you can't have it both ways. You can't have a pricey full colour hardback that is also marketed as a disposable product that will be erratad a week later and out of date next year.

This thread has also convinced me to finally get some fyreslayers. I've decided that I want to try a darker colour scheme, and make something really not orange to see how that looks. We shall see...

I kind of did the opposite, and gave a magmadroth to my Chaos Dwarves.

Have you considered doing print on demand for the pdf releases? I know its a more involved process, but a book isn't really "real" if it can't sit on the shelf with the others!

Agreed. I'm definitely not advocating more realistic minis, and I agree that the Fyreslayers aren't quite there. I think there is a lot to be said for the more expressive style of the older models.

I don't think its the material per se. Rather as their sculpting technology has advanced, they've been able to do more lifelike models (see the Lord of the Rings line). That has started a general trend away from the more cartoonish style of older warhammer. When you couldn't make a realistic face at that scale, it made sense to make a really exaggerated caricature of one, and make up for detail with expression and character. As they have shifted to digital sculpting, they can work with more realistic faces, and so the art style of the game has changed. It isn't, overall, the kind of realism you get in LOTR where they are making models of specific actors. Rather it has become over the top and exaggerated in different ways, but that means that some of the more realistically proportioned elements end up with a bit of an uncanny valley effect. When everything is a cartoon you don't notice discrepancies in how the faces of the dwarves look. When they are going for something more naturalistic, even a slight lack of expression can make them look a bit dead.

The problem is simple. Troll slayers slay trolls, demon slayers slay demons, dragon slayers slay dragons. If they're going to call them selves fire slayers then they need hose pipes and gas masks! They can keep the axes of course, those will be useful for chopping through collapsing buildings to rescue people. More seriously, I think there should be an option for "maybe" or "not sure" in the poll. I like the idea, and as some of the previous posters have shown, there is a lot you can do with their theme and concept. I like some design elements, but at the end of the day they are the dwarf army I have least of for a reason, there just isn't that much to do with them. I wish they'd taken a more Chaos Dwarf like approach (the true Dawi Zharr!) Masked priests, weird rituals, fantatical cult soldiers. The ghost of it is there, its just executed in a really boring way. I presently just have the magmadroth and the spells for use with my Chaos Dwarves. If I expand on them in future, they will have a very different look to the wave of ginger and skin. Maybe ashen hair, or a more Duergar type look. I'm not sure yet, but we shall see...

Good to know. Thanks!

Anyone know how we actually find out when the store anniversary models come out for our local stores? Is there a list of when all of them are throughout the year, or do we just need to follow them on FB and hope its not until after the plague?

On the contrary. Khorne ate all of the fragments of Khaine except for the heart, so a large part of his divine essence did in fact end up with Chaos.

In some ways, seeing the weird stuff that never got proper support before would be cooler than just another take on the Empire, Chaos etc. The important thing to remember about the warhammer setting, isn't so much that its supposed to be historical, but rather that its a historical parody. The setting's charm is really that it is satirising 16th century europe, but adding fantasy tropes until it becomes ridiculous. That gives it quite a unique flavour among fantasy settings, most of which either do their own thing, or aren't creative enough with the historical elements they do borrow.

Agreed. Given what we know about belief and how gods work, I think that no apotheosis can really be complete until she can convince everyone that she is Khaine. As you say, with Khaine dead, most of that belief goes straight to Khorne, with relatively little being siphoned off from the heart. Now if she can convince her followers that she is Khaine's new Avatar, then more of that belief will go to her naturally. Get enough people to believe the con, and it becomes real.

Ah interesting, in some ways that's actually a better era for VC creativity, since you don't just have to stick with the Canon count, but can have different factions and new characters rather than just the ones we've all been familiar with.

For me this is also going to be a year of painting. I am fairly happy with the range of models in my collection, but far too many projects got put on hold this year. I did though finish painting a small tyranid army for 40k, which I was so happy with that I may have gotten then some friends in the xmas battle forces. I also did well at putting together a comprehensive terrain set, so can now field full tables for desert, jungle and snowy conditions as well as the urban and temperate woods I did last year. I basically have as much fantasy scenery as I'm likely to need, but could maybe do with some for 40k since that's whats mostly played here. We shall see.

Yeah, for Morathi, th is a few chance that a soul might take a message back and be reforged fast enough and whole enough to warn sigmar. Any chance is too great a risk, so she plans against it. For the stormcast they know that it's not a reliable way to send a distress call, so would rather fight their way out and not die. As a last ditch effort in a hopelessly impossible ssituation heroic stormcast have occasionally chisen death in the faint hope of getting a message out, but its not something they plan for. In another note, how many people think Morathi actually became a god, and how many think she just pretended that the ritual worked? Personally I'm not buying it!

I love the dread maw, definitely one of forgeworld's best fantasy models!

Nice, thanks!

All we can really do is be welcoming to other wargamers regardless of which games we all prefer, and set the right example. On a more lore related note, when did the Vampire Counts take over Sylvania? I don't have my books with me at present, but seem to recall Vlad staged a coup by marrying into the previous lords family and turning them to vamps? would that have happened yet, or would it be going on in the timeframe of the game? Really I'm hoping for the return of my beloved tomb kings, and will happily settle for playing Kislev, but vampire counts would be a nice contrast to the more human factions!

I'm expecting Slaanesh, but hoping for Death*, we'll just have to wait and see.a * That came out wrong...

Well... That could solve a few rumour engines couldn't it? 40k space vampires coming back like zoats did it is then!

I'd be up for making homebrew critters and keys rules in the (unlikely surely...) event it doesnt turn out to be a real thing!

Well, that looks like its another creature for Critters and Keys, albeit they've been sneaky and not shown us the key this time. I intend to resolutely believe that that game exists, and that we'll all be playing it in a year or so's time! I would love the sneak peaks to be a set of adventurer models for Soulbound, but that would require GW actually supporting a licensed product line so... Probably just new vampires. (Or I don't know, really rapier obsessed space marines?)

Lexicanum has a lot of stuff listed, but I'm not sure how up to date it is. Ironically older stuff is better documented than the last ten years or so, since there were proper catalogues back then not just an ever changing webstore. I think GWs store pages aren't recorded in the internet archive, so when I've been doing collection projects I've often found that asking people on forums how many campaign books there have been is easier than trying to track down an exhaustive list. Best of luck!