JPjr

Personally I'd ignore Path to Glory for now, hopefully they'll be updating that (or something like it) soon, maybe very soon... Underworlds is very much a board/card game. it's the cheapest game, great fun but mechanically very different (still the models can be used in most other games). I do really like it and would suggest eventually everyone try it but it's not a wargame in the usual sense of the term Warcry is probably my favourite right now, the core system's good, different to the main game but all the models can move from one to the other, it has a nice campaign system, you can start small, build up a couple of little forces and see how you feel. Skirmish is in a weird place, it got some better rules in a White Dwarf but still gets treated like a rented mule Standard AoS - whilst most people will just say play at 2000 its they have done some good stuff in making smaller pts value games work, it's not always totally balanced (some match up very not so) but it's totally playable at smaller levels as you build up. Personally I'd go for Warcry, split a starter set with your mate and you've got not just 2 war bands but importantly a board to play on with some scenery etc, which will stand you in very good stead. There's lots of new releases coming up so it's going to be strongly supported (well as much as any non core game is) for a while yet and everything you get can be used in the main game. And if you fancy trying out a few different factions before you settle, you can dip your toes in to different ones for £30-40. If you end up wanting to run a chaos army then you're really laughing as there's loads of cool Warcry stuff that you can build a Chaos army around (though maybe not the most competitive builds) Anyway that's just my dumb thoughts, others here will probably suggest very different things but welcome to the hobby anyway.

So new Wardokk/Shaman/Prophet in the war band too I guess Nice model anyway, will look good on the untainted pile

Well I bought a load but despite not being able to do anything or go anywhere only actually painted about half a dozen models, 4 of which were 40k ones anyway. FAIL. still I did salvage something from this bonfire of a year and successfully started a magazine about our weird hobbies, issue one of which will finally be finished by the end of this weekend and ready to go to print next week, so hopefully we’ll build on that next year. anyway I haven’t been too active here the past couple of months, what with the magazine and all that but wanted to pop my head in and say happy new year to you all, let’s hope it’s a good one this time, and thanks to all of you for being there as a much needed distraction when it felt like the world was burning down around us all. Sláinte!

Whilst I’d say there’s probably been enough little rules and extra bits and bob’s added to justify a tidy up and a new edition of the core rule book, I honestly would say it has little to do with the system. Soul Wars / Tempest of Souls / Storm Strike will all be 3 years old this sumner, and whilst it’s still a great set of models I imagine the number of people buying them now is a trickle compared to what it was. So new trio of starter sets, along with the attendant marketing hype, and you not only shift a boat load to existing players but you generate a load of interest, press attention and on-board a whole new set of people. And if you’re doing a new starter set then it stands to reason you’d do a new core book, advance the storyline, and tidy up the rules/import any interesting bits that have worked in 40Ks last edition. So in those terms i think a ‘new edition’ every 3 years is about right then, though marketing aside I don’t really think in terms of AoS2/3 etc really anymore, at least for the foreseeable future. it’s more like different seasons of the same game, a constant evolution of the story, each starter set sets the arc for the next few years and fiddles with the rule set without changing it so much it feels like a genuine new game, especially as there’s other routes, Warcry, Underworlds, Quest etc to explore different ideas.

I always have to remind myself Poxwalkers are 40K only, would have been so easy to make them work for both games too, they'd only have had to remove 1 or 2 small details on each one (if that) and would have been great to include

@Beliman funnily enough I was looking at that chap just this weekend, here you go... Have to say i’d love to have been in the GW offices around this time when they sat down to discuss what was the sexiest animal and somehow managed to tie cow & lobster Realm of Chaos - Surf’n’Turf

obviously very hard to say how much truth there is with that BUT from a purely mercenary point of view it would make sense. not that AoS novels don't sell. I imagine they do pretty well compared to a lot of genre fiction but it's no slight on AoS to assume that long running fictional series, in a universe that's both much more established and whose toys sell lots more would be a much more attractive draw to writers working for hire rather than on their own passion projects. a couple of BL authors have said in various places that if you enter the BL submissions you've got a much better chance of getting in with an AoS story just because there's less competition.

So Hadzu doesn’t have any melee attack at all, is there another unit/model like that? and they specifically shout out Vasillac’s shield but then no rules for it. odd. 🤔 Like a similar model, the bro with the bow from the Godsworn Hunt can use his bow to donk people over the head.

Been laughing and freaking out about this for about an hour now it’s like someone went a bit too wild rolling on the Chaos Champion mutation tables from the old Realm of Chaos books Ok so I’ve got... Bestial Face, Cloven Hooves, Furry, Hopper, Irrational Hatred, Long Legs, Powerful Legs, Razor Sharp Claws, Strong & Tail... spawndom awaits Hopefully next time BoK get a battletome we’ll also get Khornegore kangaroos rather than just angry goats

So is our interpretation is correct? no of course its isn't! assuming you're just a standard unit with no funky abilities then if you are within 3" of the enemy to start with you have exactly 2 normal movement options, remain stationary or retreat if you retreat, you can run as well as your normal movement but if you decide to make a move whilst within 3" of an enemy then you must end that move at least 3" away from an enemy so if you announce that you're moving + on top of that running (which is neither here nor there really) then you can't just stay still and gain some advantage you must move away from the enemy units now you could use your normal move to retreat more than 3" away from an enemy, roll a d6 for the run move and not use it, but you still have to have moved at least 3"s away, so you can't stay still

If AoS was a “skirmish” game then that makes this supplement an even bigger waste of money than i already thought it was

gods of moderation please delete this if it's nae appropriate but whilst I have yet to paint any more models I have clambered out of my pit of unemployed despair and done a thing, a magazine about RPGs, wargames & board games to be exact. just launched on Kickstarter this afternoon it features an original short story from our fave BL author Josh Reynolds, interviews with Kieron Gillen (Marvel/Image), Cole Wehrle (Root), Chris Spivey (Call of Cthulhu: Harlem Unbound), Banana Chan (Jiangshi), Themeborne (Escape the Dark Castle) & Johan Nohr (Mork Borg) & several more plus loads of other features including a look back over this hellish year. 80 pages of hot wizard chat. Not quite as much wargames stuff in there as planned (tricky to do with the pandemic & all that though we did sneak a Stormcast onto the cover) but should we make it to next year we've got something very nice & Warhammer themed planned for a future issue. Anyway, there you go that's my been my slightly stressful hobbying.

New rumour engine pic... Going to go out on a rotted, gangrenous limb and suggest it's a deadwalker's club

Good chance the weekends around Christmas will be fairly empty. if anything I can imagine maybe something like a ‘Made To Order’ release. last year there were also things like the Blackstone Fortress Annual & Tome of Champions to fit in. Could see them giving BSF a proper send off with a final annual, there’s a fair few White Dwarf articles from the past year they could repackage there. ——- also the Bugman’s model. It’s GREAT! but calm down people some times a ltd edition Christmas model is just a ltd edition Christmas model, not the ghost of model ranges to come. it’s like if 40k players had feverishly debated whether last year’s Red Gobbo model was the prelude to a new all candy cane Gretchin direction.

looks like a zombie with whatever's grown on top of its grave atop it. and I have to say I am 100% there for that. and when I say 'whatever' I mean a cemetery candle holder/box

RELEASE THE RAGE! https://www.warhammer-community.com/2020/10/30/seven-signs-youre-warhammer-obsessed/

It looks a lot like a Middle Ages European bear/boar spear. Something designed for hunting animals with a cross guard behind the blade to stop the animal pushing up through the blade and ****** you up in its death throws, whilst the serrated blade definitely gives it a 'cruel' vibe. The only extant Order armies that would work would be the more morally ambiguous ones (well more straight up dubious than ambiguous but you know what I mean) like DoK or Idoneth, but it's certainly not an Aelven weapon or at a push CoS and well that would be a turn up. Almost definitely not anything Destruction related, so you can rule them all out. With Chaos, it almost certainly isn't Beasts, Skaven, or any of the Gods' own armies. Slaves to Darkness possibly but I couldn't imagine what, Darkoath would make sense in terms of a monster killing weapon but doesn't match the style. So boringly predictable because it just joins the long line of others we suspect are the same but you have to think it's something along Soulblight/Deathrattle lines. The only other possibility in my head would be a FEC character like Duke Crackmarrow but unlikely.

You’d need to include some kind of rule to represent what a massive ****** idiot he is too. like he has to always be moving towards/attacking the largest enemy on the table, once per game he has to throw away his main weapon, & instead of bravery & a battleshock test, you build up ‘sulking’ points and if you get too many he just takes his ball home and leaves his mates to get endlessly railed by tentacular hellspawn.

In terms of pose there’s a few pics of Sigmar in that kind of leaping pose, and I imagine were they do make a model of him and it not be a more static diorama type then that’s how they’d do him. specifically like in the 2nd pic here of him battling Ymnog, with the kind of geometric, golden halo. As at the end of the day he’d just be like a big Stormcast so something like that would make his model both much larger and more visually unique and impressive. tbh I kinda hope we don’t get a model for him, at least not for a while. There’s this paradox with AoS where it’s supposed to be a smaller model count game than WHFB but we’ve also got more powerful, in lore, models to put down. Much as Nagash, Alarielle, Archaon etc are all great models if you care about narrative it does require some post-hoc, “oh it’s an avatar” etc, logic to explain why they keep getting involved in scraps barely larger than many pub fights, and can get jobbed by a load of Grotz with sticks. You either end up with a model that by rights should be able to one-shot most whole armies or it’s just underwhelming

price changes aside, just from a marketing point of view I think the 'Start Collecting' to 'Combat Patrol' move is a canny one. even with exactly the same figures within one implies 'here's a £70 (or whatever) box that can form the basis of both an army and a ruinously expensive hobby', the other 'here's an army in a box that you can start playing with right away' psychologically I think that's a small but quite compelling change and all other things being equal I imagine GW would prefer people to have four 500 pt armies than one 2000 pt one.

one small thing on releases in November, I fully expected Shadow & Pain and Broken Realms: Morathi to drop together but I did just remember that when the were previewed they said "The story of Shadow and Pain is also a prequel to the next big event to hit the Mortal Realms. Gods will rise, the aelves will march, and the realms will break…" Which whilst not necessarily the case could mean they come out a week or two apart...

I figured having these boxes on my desk would shame me action but instead they just became a towering monument to depression. anyway a small victory for the sullen as after months I was spurred into action today and built them, now they can join their mates in the miserable ‘to be painted’ pile. huzzah

I feel like people are overblowing the importance of this article when really isn't it just GW trying to be nice and throw a bone to the 1% of people in this hobby who play competitively and have to wake up every day burdened with the knowledge that they're playing the game wrong.

@JackStreicher that's the 'bundle' that comes with the novel... I mean 160 ain't great but...

honestly that, to me at least, is one of the best reasons for combining any Malerion faction with DoK.. we already have so many factions (not just Aelves) that if you're not collecting half a dozen armies most people will be waiting years between new models, consolidating several of the smaller ones that make thematic sense means you can bring out new stuff that lots more people can use and so buy and feel good about their life choices. and in my dream, fantasy world it would mean you can do more regular, smaller releases that more people can use. imagine rather than waiting ages for a huge release to come out, every few months they just added 1 or 2 kits to ranges (I know there are very, very very good reasons for GW not to do this but I'd love it). combine Malerion's faction with DoK and suddenly you don't need to do a massive full range at release, they could bring out 5-6 kits of shadow demon types to start with enough for a basic army if needed but when combined with the existing DoK range that's suddenly an interesting sized army (especially if you look at releases like the Warcry war band being an aesthetic middle ground between DoK and shadowy creatures) that can be easily expanded as they go on, and if at some point there's so many units that you need to split them up again that's easily done. essentially what Gloomspite, CoS, Orruks, Ogors all were. and all the better for it. likewise would mean you could introduce Tryion's Aleves, or Kurnothi for sylvanth without needing to do a massive range to start with, a few kits here, a few kits there that all builds up. I'd be all up for them doing more of that, where they can still balance armies at least. I mean easy enough to come up with some story about some stunty dude uniting the the Duardin again, merge Fyreslayers with Kharadron. People that just like one aesthetic can and will stick to that but it also allows people to play with more toys, and you have the tools with things like conditional battleline depending on your general and sub factions abilities to make things still feel distinct within one army. Anyway I'm almost certain it will happen in some cases and not in some but there you go... lunch time aimless ramble over.