Overread

No rumours at all. In general they might be abandoned or they might come back or something similar might come back but no one save GW knows and such things might not even be on the radar for years. Fantasy near the end was bleeding out money. It was costing money to produce and stock, but it was not selling. This caused GW at the time to shift a lot of material direct order only to cut down on the amount needed to be produced to stock retailers. However as fantasy sales continued to go down they also started to drop models from their range. Many (not all) were finecast (a material GW had production quality issues with anyway thus resulting in an increase in returns due to misscasting). So a lot of fantasy ranges lost models as GW pulled them off sale. Right now they are the last chance to buy in truth. Some might return, but its totally unknown; others might never ever come back in any form; plus the time scales could be in years or even decades. I think if you are interested in any get them now whilst you can; they will only go up in value (most times) on ebay once GW stops production of them.

GW can't make a hero a one-time purchase only; it's rather mean to fans who can't make it on the day or who start being gamers the day after or who are not currently collecting nighthaunt, but do so in the near future.

In good news I've now got a hydra sitting on the table; core of the body is built, I just need to build up time and the guts to chop the necks up to try and attach a cold one head to it! The jaw area is quite thick on the neck, much thicker than a cold one head, so I've got to remove a large lump before attempting to attach. I'll probably use one of the middle heads that splits in two necks, that way if I mess up I can at least fall back on messing around with the alternate neck section for its other form. After that I've got 30 Witch Aelves sitting in a pile of bits ready to slowly be made into more sisters. And I've finally found a blood cauldron cauldron bit so I can now start working on my converted Blood Cauldron.

Also the new carry case for Shadspire looks very neat - everything you need in one handy case that looks like it would slip into most bags very easily. A nice way to carry an all-in-one set to throw down on the table. It also looks like (for some possibly not all) it can hold two parties not just one; so you could carry different forces to use or to do a demo game with someone where you've brought all the parts to play.

As its a unique model I'd wager its going to be just an alternate model for a regular trooper rather than a hero. So something epic for your squad leader

That is a very cool model and honestly better looking than the Marine! Glad to see its not Stormcast too - it shows that GW isn't quite ready to fall into the trap that 40K is in whereby nearly every promotional model/item is focused around one single army

Yeah I'm expecting Slaanesh in the new year - possibly tied to a big AoS release and story advance too - or at least a focus on that area of the Realms if there isn't story advance (they can easily focus on the growing power of Slaanesh woreshippers kicking up a fuss in the shadow realms - the story reveal could come later with the Devil Aelf faction getting an unveiling as they march in to tackle the issue that Morathi's forces have only held off).

Part of me thinks GW is waiting to flesh out more factions before pushing Skirmish, just like how Killteam came out after GW had updated the vast bulk of 40K armies to new Codex releases. It would be foolish for GW to really push skirmish right now when so many factions are tiny and not complete; don't have battletomes and are not ready to entice people with skirmish and then have them expand into full AoS armies. Skirmish is the alternate and gateway game for many and it will only work like that if the range itself has solid armies to expand from.

@alghero81 Right now there's Orktober going on which basically means the big release for this month is going to be the Ork codex for 40K. After that we know that Genestealer Cultists also require a codex, however there's been no firm news on if that is coming this year or not. It could easily fit into November or the very start of December. Adepticus Titanicus has warhounds coming this weekend for pre-order and there are also plastic weapon options for the Knights and Warlords to come in the future; one hopes they might at least get Warlord options out before Christmas, a one sprue release though makes it a smaller release not a major one. There's also the Demon double army kit of Slaanesh and Khorne that was shown earlier in a preview (and for which one fiend of Slaanesh escaped the confines of the GW studios into the wild a few days ago). So chances are that will be coming end of this year as well as a fairly major release (esp as its likely to have four or so new kits at least). Finally Shadspire Underworld is likely to get one or two more releases as GW pushes out the new battle groups for that game as that game thrives on fast releases of those battlegroups So that's already quite a few big things to come that we are mostly sort of aware of and which have a high possibility of appearing. Remembering also that December tends to slow things down as GW heads into the Christmas period so that month might be totally lost for new releases and instead could focus on christmas bundle kits and GW generally producing stock for the christmas sales. So on that score we've Orktober and then November as release months. I'd wager its not highly likely that we will see a new AoS battletome this year. It would be fantastic to see and could be possible if GW did another like Beasts of Chaos where its mostly just combining existing model small armies into a single functional larger force - along with one or two new plastic kits and a Battletome. I'd not expect a vast number of new kits or a new faction style release.

Honestly I think most just use Shadspire models as leaders/alternate sculpts in their army. There's no great need to have them all as heroic characters when the full game has its own roster of heroes.

The key is that Underworld/shadspire is the ideal side game to many armies; which means many people just aren't "interested" until their army is represented. This gives added weight ot GW getting the models out there sooner so that they can push the game forward faster. The more races they add the larger the player pool is.

It's a very good place to put an eye for perfect eye-hand coordination if you're hunting fairies (as anyone who has seen the fantastic films - Pan's Labyrinth - can attest too)

If they are doing a big launch of new Slaanesh stuff then I'd wager we will only get fiends and herald now with more to come later - not forgetting that of the 4 gods Slaanesh has the smallest current model range.

Oh where have they been previewed? I know there's one or two for Shadspire and the like, but I don't recall seeing the hounds in plastic as a full kit

Currently the Hounds of Khorne, Herald of Khorne, Fiends of Slaanesh and Herald of Slaanesh are in resin finecast. So it would make most sense that they would form part of the core of the new boxed set and all be re-done in plastic in one big go. Now they could put bloodcrushers instead for Khorne, but my gut feeling is that they will want to give both gods a new model option and those would be the most comparable and most suitable to change. GW is steadily cleaning house of finecast bit by bit where they can. So it would make sense that those would be the new sculpts at the very least. We could see others; they might add something new or even change one of the existing plastic kits so there's always potential for more. That said I'd wager after hounds and fiends we'll see one or two blocks of basic troops

GW Staffer - so what you want us to do an old infomircial type show GW Staffer 2 - yeah so just throw in a bunch of oldtimy timestops and stuff into the video GW Staffer 1 - want them to be relevant to anything coming up? GW Staffer 2 - oh gods no they've already got one early leak. But it will be fun watching them try to come up with insane theories for what they could be for the next X months

Well they've got all the trained staff, tools and editing equipment and it came out well after 5pm (normal GW closing time) so I'd wager it could have been done in a day. Perhaps they already had some of the concept planned for something else later and just put it into action for this and then a couple of staff burned the evening oils to get it edited and put up. Time and money well spent as they've taken control of the leak and earned themselves big points in community relations at the same time

On interesting thing of note is that if you wanted to custom craft it all male or all female the way the chest area is designed it might not be too hard a conversion to achieve since both sides are fairly open access and easily modified. I also love the way they've done the head and legs, really added a lot and I think it looks far more sleek and deadly than the older model which had more of a charger horse feel with its hooflike leg ends.

Aye very true, just surprising that a sprue would be entering into that so soon - then again I'm sure review sites and stores that get hold of advanced release copies might well dump a lot of sprues early too and that this was just one example where something slipped through the net.

OOOOOOOOH the Chaos Dragon at last arises!

On advice I've removed the direct link, but as its an ebay listing there isn't much hiding of this info going on ?

*link removed to hide auction name* Appears to be the source - an ebaylisting! Also on the ebay page which shows two sprue segments, it would appear to my eye that the chest is half male-female.

They look far more dynamic and moving whilst the old ones were very straight (to be fair part of that was the need for them to stand rank and file beside each other). They remind me of the earlier seekers a little bit, more sleek and thin and lithe and deadly. Thing is if there are new seekers could this also mean a totally new chariot as well!

YAY!

One thing to keep in mind is that whilst Hag Queens are great as a support model, they are not "as" great on their own. When people use them they are using them primarily as a support unit for other models rather than running them alone into blocks of enemy infantry. So that might be one reason why and adjustment might be slight rather than wholesale - they do a lot, but then again they require another few hundred points of models in order to provide that support to a target. Another aspect is that a lot of Daughter's units are already quite expensive in points, barring the witches and hag queen, a lot of the rest are quite expensive. Doomfires, Cauldrons and snakes are all rather on the expensive side; khinerai are also rather expensive for such a fragile unit. So when one takes into account the pricing not just of one unit, but the army as a whole, it makes sense that there are a few viable cheaper options for Daughters to have access too. I think in the end the real question is if hags and witches is a powerful combo or a brokenly powerful combo. I'd wager its sort of sitting in the middle of the two - its strong, but its not horrifically brokenly strong.