EccentricCircle

Those are really cool. Great for D&D too. I think that confirms that 2021 is going to be a Lord of the Rings year for me. There are a few projects which I've been tinkering with for a while, and with my AoS armies kind of where I want them, its the perfect time to jump back into Middle Earth.

That meme is how I feel about a very large number of step by step painting "tutorials". So many of GWs feel like thinly veiled paint adverts. There is so much more to good painting than just telling people what order to highlight things in, and that, by the way, they should thin their paints...

So, I definitely don't like the faces, but I 100% think that that's the point, and that they are supposed to be disturbing. I think they are precisely what they were intended to be, so the fact that I find them creepy in all the wrong ways and don't like them paradoxically means that they are great! But then I don't collect Slaanesh, so I don't have to paint any. If they were for one of my armies then I would be put off, however thematically appropriate the aesthetic was. I can thus understand people who were hoping to like them being put off. I guess that's why I prefer pretty models to grotesque ones in general.

Normally I'd be the first to jump on the bandwagon of wanting plastic Chaos Dwarves, but for now I'm just glad that nothing in the AoS preview has caught my eye this time. i think I'm going to be a bit busy with Lord of the Rings...

LotR is harder to predict than AoS at present, but not impossible. They've basically covered every theatre of battle from the War of the Ring that usually gets much attention (Rohan, Gondor, the black gate, the shire, the fellowship). They could expand beyond that, either rehashing some of their classic books like ruin of Arnor and Shadow and flame, or the could give the Hobbit another go and do either Thorin's quest, or a proper Battle of the Five Armies book. Ether way there will be a nice hardback, and a couple of characters will get plastic kits. A few older kits might return to support the theme, and mkst excitingly for AoS fans there might be new or returning terrain kits. As far as tomb kings vs ossiarchs... Yeah the ossiarchs are clearly the spiritual successor faction and we can really hope for anything more. That said they don't really do much to scratch the actual Tomb King fan's itch. There are no mummies, no chariots, no actual skeletons, the aesthetic is watered down and confused. What appealed to me so much with TK is entirely lacking in ossiarchs. they are a perfectly fine faction, and stand on their own merits but they aren't a good replacement od expansion like other recent reboots have been!

There you go.

One thing the book has gotten me pondering about is what exactly Varanite is. Clearly the idea that it is the blood of Khaine is just Morathi's propaganda. However, the exact way it fits into the pattern of the other Realmstones seems a little ill defined. Warpstone is already a mutative element, formed of congealed Dhar (Dark Magic), and containing the power of the realm of chaos. Varanite seems to just be warpstone plus, but it's also said to be corrupted by blood magic, rather than in its natural state perhaps? In theory, one could suppose that the realmstone of the allpoints should be the mineral form of Qhaysh, or High Magic. That would fit with the other nine realmstones, eight of which embody one of the winds, and the ninth being of the Realm of Chaos. However the description of its powers and properties seems to very much contradict that hypothesis. Surely the chaos control of the allpoints could have had that much of an effect on a font of high magic? Plenty to speculate upon anyway!

I've ordered one to go with my dwarfs. Looking forward to putting him next to the original Bugman model!

Yeah, the current darkling sorceress on foot. She is absolutely fantastic (just generally not just in terms of sexiness). One further thought regarding Katakros the Undefeated and his codpiece... Its always been a little odd that that's his epithet, when his background so far is all about people repeatedly defeating him. But we've all been assuming it refers to the battlefield and not the bedroom... Just a though.

For a chainmail bikini contest it's a toss up between the Daughters of Khaine, and the various girls of warcry. I love the look of the melusai and khinerai, and the hag queen is a great model. On the chaos side I think the cypher lords are great, as is the Dark oath warqueen. It all depends whether you prefer lithe elven beauty or muscular human physiques. My favourite though has to be the darkling sorceress. She was the first of the more scantily clad models which was actually attractive, nit not just half naked. At some point in the last decade or so GWs sculpters went from basically not being abled to do women very well to being quite good at them, I think she really marks that turning point. for more elegant lookers, I'm very fond of a lot of the elven ladies. The floating wanderer or wood elf sorceresses are great, as is the new Scinari cathallir, and the tidecaster. I'm also quite fond of the vampires from the coven throne. as far as blokes go, there can be no contest. Nothing else can compare to Katakros' codpiece.

I tend to think, how quickly could I a) afford to get something and b) actually build and paint it. If as is the case here there is likely to be a box sooner than I'd actually be likely to mak progress on the project, then its best to be patient, wit and see. There is nothing more frustrating in the hobby than rushing to buy something, and then seeing it cheaper while its still sat on the sprue waiting to be built.

Pretty much from the start I'd say. We should really all have our tinfoil hats at the ready!

It will be worth the wait. I'm really enjoying it so far. I held off reading the pdf, since I spend so much time reading stuff on screens that I want my fun reading to be actually sitting with a book. I've thus had months of watching other people rave, while I waited to get my copy. Its well worth it though!

UK

My copy of soulbound has arrived, It looks fantastic!

SO long as we can get: Broken Realms: Settra, I'm in. (or actually Khalida, Apophas, or one of the others might be more interesting...)

Does anyone know what kind of margin stores do get when buying from GW for trade? if it's 30% and they offer a 25% discount that's very different to if its say 60%. since the physical products are pretty cheap to manufacture it wouldn't surprise me if the margins are pretty high.

That is kind of my point. By not having to have a rapid fire battletome release schedule every three years, they have more space to release updated material. That's why I'd have two campaign events each year, each of which comes with a medium update relevant to it: so bigger than what we got with the tomes in most cases, and then one really big update a year, which is basically a new tome long before the new edition. I think that would give us more than enough to keep things exciting, without being overwhelming, which it certainly is now. In other words I think we basicaly agree, but just worded things differently. As to putting warscroll cards in the box... they do? There is a warscroll at the end of almost every instruction booklet, and they're all free online. While tournament players would likely disagree, the Battletome doesn't actually contain anything which is essential to playing a game with an army. Its just a source of optional rules and extras to make that army feel more thematic. Clearly they also boost the power level of the army, so anyone playing competitively doesn't really consider them optional. But as far as the architecture of the system goes that's 100% what they are. Everything you can't play without is free.

I think the problem, for me st least isn't so much the campaign books, but the shortness of the edition cycle itself. We were delighted that they very quickly got every faction it's tome, but once it's all updated, that really only leaves them a few options. They can just focus on new stuff, focus on campaign books, or start re-releasing and updating the existing stuff again. what they won't do, but probably should, is slow down once the initial wave of tomes is out the door. I can't see them doing that though. I think I'd be perfectly happy with a rapid fire release of codexes for a year, followed by four or five years of slower support. I'd suggest a campaign book or two in Q1 to set the story for the year, with a minor update to one GA, a new army in Q2 to enter the fray and continue the story, a second campaign book or series in Q3 to tie things up, leading to a big-ish update to an old faction in Q4, as fallout from the campaign. So maybe six books in a year if you buy everything. Then the next year's campaign begins, and they cycle through like that for a good long time before having to update the core rules and every battle tome. A year of intense codex releases followed by an equally intense year of campaign releases, then repeat just isn't sustainable. I'd run out of shelf space.

Well, that seems like a really mistimed promotion. Since England goes into lock down tomorrow, and unless I'm mistaken Wales and Scotland already are, I'm not quite sure how anyone in the UK can actually take advantage of it until almost the end of November? I was under the impression that much of Europe was in a similar boat, at the very least. Were the shops going to be open, I wonder what the cheapest free-witch-elf-pub-crawl route would look like, and how easily you could get an entire box of witches for a single rail fare...

Yeah, at this point I'd wonder how much is a production bottleneck and how much is a shipping bottleneck. At least in the UK it more or less feels as though they'd gotten things back to normal. Webstore stock isn't perfect, but isn't far off where it was, and all the 3rd party stores I shop with have seemed ok? But I can well believe that in other countries, further from the wellspring of all Warhammer that things might be very different indeed. I've certainly not seen the apocalyptic picture which some folks here are reporting.

I always find it hilarious how much of Warhammer was straight up "borrowed" from other sources. The whole idea that Games Workshop considers Chaos to be some sort of hallowed product identify is crazy when it was basically stolen wholesale from Michael Moorcock's novels (right down to the iconography)! Khorne is Crom, Nurgle is a corruption of the Babylonian death god Nergal, and basically early warhammer lore was just an exercise in throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck. The answer was most of the fantasy kitchen sink!

Hero! I've been wishing I'd saved some of them when they were still online.

I also received an email that the physical books are being shipped as we speak. Maybe they want to fulfil the preorders first before making it generally available for sale. C7 is a really small company compared to GW it sounds as though they are run off their feet just getting everything shipped.

I mean, Cadia fell in 40K, and the Imperium still seems to have an unlimited supply of Cadians, so you're Anvilguard troops will probably be fine even if the city isn't!