JPjr

funnily enough this has actually revitalised my desire to start a little, quick to paint (kind of), and I have to say fairly cheap, BCR army. 1 Frostlord on Stonehorn/Thundertusk / 420 2 units of Mournfang / 320 1 Icebrow Hunter / 140 1 Icefall Yetis / 120 1000pts. Job done. Or even cheaper and possibly better on the table, lose the Yetis & kick the Frostlord down to a Huskard, and with the remaining points take the Necromancer and Skeleton mercenaries (assuming their points are roughly as they are now) and that means I'll also have a wizard and a unit with some bony bodies in there for claiming objectives, (if that's a thing in these games). 1 Huskard on Thundertusk / 340 2 units of Mournfang / 320 1 Icebrow Hunter / 140 1 Necromancer + 10 Skeletons / 190 990pts. Either way it's only going to knock me back around £100 and it's done. Winner!

Assuming they haven't already thought of this I also need to figure out some home-brew rules for bribing your opponents mercenaries in narrative games, campaigns and certain battleplans. Obviously very rough and just off the top of my head but thinking something like you make specific mercenary companies available and each player blind bids for their service at the start of a game (either straight up with points or some kind of campaign resources) with the truth of their allegiance is only revealed after set up/mid game. Would make for an incredible narrative/cinematic turn of events for defeat to be snatched from the jaws of victory when at the decisive moment that barbarian horde you've tapped up to help subdue the people of the plains, turns on you and becomes the anvil on which the opposing forces hammer your army.

The Gargant mercenaries are up to 3 models, nothing stopping you just taking two of the big boys. It's definitely the excuse I needed to at least add one to my wishlist whilst I try and think of a cool conversion to do with it. A flesh peeling zombie gargant for my necrohorde perhaps or a Rabelaisian Gargantua & Pantagruel to accompany a Slaaneshi procession from the sinful Abbey of Thélème. So many possibilities, but so little talent!

Not me. Last few BL books I’ve read have featured Stormcast fighting alongside vampires, Ogors in Chaos armies, Skaven hiring human spies, human tribes fighting alongside Deathrattle, Kharadron being straight up evil ****** pirates, etc etc but even without that I reckon, with just a couple of exceptions, i could fairly easily come up with some kind of thematically sound backstory for how and why any of these mercenary groups might be working with any other army.

I don't want to be harsh but maybe your lads should have thought about that before eternally dedicating their souls to an insane god of plague and becoming a load of shambling, bloated, puss dripping, pox ridden nightmares.

more info on the mercenary system... https://www.warhammer-community.com/2019/06/10/the-generals-handbook-2019-mercenary-companiesgw-homepage-post-2/ handily for myself I already have a huge blob of skeletons and necromancer, fully painted and with a tasty backstory to boot, that will be getting a run out soon in some other armies and wrecking ****** with 4 attacks each. EDIT: ha just remembered Vanhel's Danse Macabre spell too. Could be fun.

Looks like Fyreslayers are getting a little bonus in the next issue of WD with rules for a new lodge and named Auric Runefather (though it's not a new model before anyone gets excited). https://www.warhammer-community.com/2019/06/07/white-dwarf-preview-junegw-homepage-post-2/ Most exciting, for me, though is seeing them combine Kill Team and Blackstone Fortress, I've already been messing around using the BSF tiles for building tunnels and extra areas for KT, so can't wait to see how they've implemented it. EDIT! Whoops... this was meant to be in the Rumour Thread even though it's not a rumour but hey ho, let's go.

Not exactly sure if this is what @TMS meant but for me, I'm more than happy to chuck €25 at something like a Halfling Blood Bowl team and paint a dozen models which I know are designed to be frankly a bit ****** but with the potential to be lots of fun because it's a small time & money investment and of course it's a quicker, less 'serious' game and then can easily change over to a better team if I wanted. But whilst I have zero interest in running some ultra competitive AoS army I'd be less inclined to spend a several hundred quid and what can feel like months of my life painting an army that is just designed to be outright ******. Saying that I do like and think there's a definite place for more, let'd say, unpredictable armies where they can be totally rubbish and do more damage to themselves most rounds or brutally, apocalyptically destructive and you just to hold on to the edge of your seat and see what happens. My one issue with the new Gloomspite and Skaven books is I feel they could have ramped that up a lot more but small quibble.

It's not every week. What they said/meant was over the summer/next couple of months they would do several Forbidden Powers focused weeks. So the first one we got some more lore, two stories about the battle on Lake Lethis and a Battleplan to go with the story. So I assume in a week or two we'll get the next FP week, again with a couple of stories, some background and related Battleplan, either expanding on the battle going on in Stygxx or I think more likely looking at another Stormvault with different force battling it out.

Is it even that expensive?! I mean sure, objectively speaking from the point of view of someone outside the game looking in, then yeah maybe. But from the inside? €70 for a book, a pretty chunky and intricate piece of terrain and 4 endless spells, 2 of which are pretty massive isn't too bad when for the exact same price I'd get just Skraggrot, a Loonboss on foot and the Fungoid Cave Shaman for my Gloomspite army. 3 models that I guess if you're looking for silver lining at least aren't contributing that much to the disgusting amount of unnecessary plastic that we're destroying this planet with. I'm not saying it's a MUST BUY, absolutely far from it, let's face it nothing here really is, and personally I think they should have included something like one of the sprues from the Timeworn Ruins set, a bit more terrain/scenery in there would have made it look and feel very different. But if you're into the narrative side of the game or just like collecting and painting chunky models then it's a fun addition and keeps the story moving.

GW really need to get a grip on the leaks in their accountancy dept, that everyone on here can speak so authoritatively about the sales figures for a set that came out just 1 and a half weeks ago should be a serious cause for concern for the company.

Personally no because with Nighthaunt it felt like they were expanding and delivering on a concept that had never really had it's fair due and was just a side thought. If you're going to have a DEATH/undead faction then you have several major archetypes to play with, Vampires, Skeletons, Zombies/Ghouls and Ghosts. To have the ghost side of that limited to what? Spirit Hosts, Cairn Wraith and Banshee is obviously doing a disservice to what should be one of the most interesting and prevalent aspects of the undead. So expanding that and giving them their own aesthetic, and of course having them released as an interesting foil to a magic focused Stormcast faction, made a lot of sense. It then helped, of course, that they absolutely nailed it with the Nighthaunt range. And I wouldn't disagree. Now here I'm going totally off on my own thoughts but personally I feel a little too much has been made about AoS being about totally unique, un-copyable concepts. It's hard to explain but to me it feels like, aside from giving things fancy new names, what they're trying to do is in a sense create malleable templates within which people come up with cool interesting stuff. So you have Deepkin, Sylvaneth or Gloomspite etc, which have a somewhat unique (to a small degree) identity and base/generic aesthetic which can then be adjusted to create your own army and look by choosing their realm or the city or whatever that they come from. With an Egyptian themed army you've basically said these guys are from here and this is what they look like, totally fine in a limited smaller environment like the WHFB universe but at odds with what we've seen in AoS. And as I said TKs, like Brets, are so rooted in a specific location and mythology that strip that away and you lose most of their character anyway, you keep it and it just feels like a weird backwards step and I personally worry sets a bad precedent. But as I said if they turned round and released an almost TK army and the models were cool I'd buy them, just like I will if they release a Deathrattle army with cool models. I just feel that DR makes more sense, AT THE MOMENT, in the world that they've been creating.

Infinite space to just go back and do what we've done before sounds like a poor waste of that infinite space to me. I'm honestly torn on Tomb Kings, I have zero emotional attachment to them beyond a vague 'yeah some fun sculpts, I guess', the Egyptian theme was likewise fun but is also so tied to a specific time and location that I can totally see why they jettisoned it when making the unfortunately not particularly clean break with AoS. Exact same point goes for Bretonnia, and honestly I'd be surprised if they wouldn't have joyfully binned the old Empire models too if it hadn't been the main focus/setting of the old world and so you'd ****** off too many players at launch. The rumours are interesting and it does seem pretty clear something Death related is coming down the pipeline but the idea they'll just resurrect/re-release old models seems ludicrous to me, even if they're half decent models (and yes some of them are very cool) it would be such a retrogressive step. And sadly if I'm any judge of character doing that wouldn't appease the loudest % of TK fans anyway, they'd just be incensed they were being fobbed off with old models and message boards would echo to pitiful cries of 'yet another slap in the face'. But then designing a whole new range based on TKs would seem equally fraught, it wouldn't be TK'y enough, or the lore wouldn't be right, there'd be no Settra or some other nonsense, plus we just got a big new Death faction last year, a 2nd one just a year later with enough new models to be a proper release seems a little unlikely. Even worse I suspect it would just empower some people's already galaxy level sense of entitlement and we'd end up with even more whining from the kind of personality black holes that post 'Bring Back Fantasy' under NEARLY EVERY ****** SINGLE Age of Sigmar Instagram post or in comments in hell spaces like BoLS. Most significantly though, for me, the latest new Skeleton models that we've seen, The Sepulchral Guard, have zero TK aesthetic to them and all the Black Library fiction that has explored death forces over the last couple of years (and that's a hell of a lot) has featured a hell of a lot of Deathrattle and Deadwalkers, two existing under-developed armies that are still there and have at least a decent amount of models to start off and build upon. Of course that's not to preclude that an augmented Deathrattle legion of some kind could incorporate a few larger bone constructs as a nod to TKs, hell I'd love that alongside bone/zombie giants and the like but that's probably the extent that I can forsee. Also all the comments about the new scenery being nods to Egypt, never got that myself at all. Raised daises and mini ziggurats don't scream Egypt to me, just nods to obvious classical antiquity. Even the Griff statues feel much more Persian/Babylonian/Mesopotamian to me but still just fairly generic fantasy (in a decent way). BUT for all that I could of course be hugely wrong, and if they did bring back TKs in some way I'd be interested to see how and what they look like, hell I'd no doubt buy a load but a part of me would definitely feel like it was a backwards step at a point when the game is really taking off and the new worlds are being fleshed out.

‘Nagash: The Undying King’ is set in the Age of Chaos. ’Neferata: Mortarch of Blood’ is set in both the Age of Myth & Age of Sigmar.

I've decided to read this as someone explaining how they ended up dedicating their life to becoming the world's number 1 'back of shield' painter.

@HorticulusTGA It was 'Sacrosanct' by C L Werner.

So I’ve just spent about 15 minutes trying to paint the back thighs of an Ad Mech Skitarii Ranger, thighs that are almost impossible to get to or see thanks to its long flowing cloak and the base. Literally you’d need to look at the model at a slightly off angle upside down and from about 2” away to even get a glimpse of those meaty stumps. So, how much time, effort, energy and peace of mind do you waste on trying to make sure every part of a model is painted or are you eminently more sensible and just cover what can obviously be seen?

@PiotrW So... various options open to you... There’s a new General’s Handbook (out next month) that is going to have some kind of revised rules for smaller 1000pts games. Then as you say you have the Skirmish rules (not sure what version you have of those but they published a slightly updated version in this year’s Jan/Feb White Dwarf). Underworlds, as you say, is a thing though rules wise it’s totally removed from the main game (still great though and I personally play it more than AoS and collect all the warbands for the fun of painting them). But finally and most excitingly in late July we’ll have Warcry, which seems to focus on warbands of around 8-10 models, and has been designed from the ground up by people involved in both WH40k:Kill Team & Underworlds. Whilst principally/narratively Warcry will be focused on Chaos, it will come with rules for what seems like a fair % of the other factions. So lots of options really.

Bah. I guess that means it’s another 8 weeks then till Warcry’s released, 😫😩😫 Still on the plus side we can look forward to 7 weeks of complaining about a lack of info on it.

I suggest that this message board unilaterally adopts E-Prime.

Also remember the box is just the start rather than the culmination of FP. Looks like it will be the main non-Warcry focus for AoS throughout the summer with more stories, battle plans and the like to expand upon the narrative/campaign. Anyway just nice to have something that is distinctly narrative play focussed, since outside of internet forums and in the real world I don't know, and have never met a single person that plays "competitively".

@novakai it's Black Library Day/Festival/Live whatever it's called tomorrow so I wouldn't get too excited about seeing lots of reveals there. Of course there could be something but if there is I'd imagine it would be something small/limited and tied in to BL, like the Sevarina Raine model but who knows. Anyway, I really like the crows, interesting dynamic sculpts that don't look like much else so all good as far as I'm concerned, I might have to do them like parrots though... anyway I'm still fully on board for it. I can understand why people would like to have Warcry rules now, I'm just not sure why they'd expect them, even if it's early July release that's still 5 weeks, at least, to go. I imagine we'll start getting more concrete info mid June at the earliest, but let's see. As for the rest pretty much about what I expected to see, well apart form the Blackstone expansion, I thought we'd get 'Traitor Command' before any other reveals there so I'm very happy with that, it looks great. Also should shut up the pathological whiners who were complaining there were no extras for the Servants of the Abyss in KT: Elites. What with contrast and GHB in June, Warcry in July, and August being a bit of a dead holiday month I'm not really expecting much for AoS (Sylvaneth BT/ES excepted) until after summer so would have been a bit weird to preview it in May. Still plenty of time after that I reckon for new battle tomes in Sept, Oct and Nov, throw in a dual release/box set one month and something unexpected and jobs a good 'un.

@EccentricCircle yeah from what I’ve seen elsewhere, the supplementary books will be separate whatever version you opt for.

YE GODS! LOOK AT IT! LOOK AT IT! https://www.cubicle7games.com/wfrp-the-enemy-within-collectors-edition/ Not sure how I'm going to justify, or even just plain afford, blowing £600 on a 30 year old campaign but goddam it I’m going to give it the good old college try... ———————— @Barkanaut not sure if that was aimed at me but if it was then... https://alien-rpg.com/

@Jetengine the full physical set (which looks incredible btw but then all Free League's stuff tends to) wont be out till the end of the year but if you order it now you can download the 'Cinematic Starter Kit' right away. that's about 150 pages in total, gives you the basic rules, background (it's set around 3 years after Alien 3, lots of emphasis on sinister corporations and political blocs engaged in a very Cold War on the frontier of space, seems like lots of scope for characters having secret objectives, all that kind of thing), pre-gen characters (Space truckers, colonists, colonial marines, secret androids etc) and a scenario, 'Chariot of the Gods', to play through. Just started working through it but it looks great (aesthetically that is, the artwork is incredible and so atmospheric) and as I say it seems based on the same system as some of their other games, which really emphasise the roleplaying aspect rather than having to pore through pages of tables to work out what happens every few minutes, with the right players and GM should be a really atmospheric game, going to try and run a session using the starter kit ASAP. I mean try not to get hyped just by this trailer... So anyway yeah if C7 are opting for something more along these lines for AoS then I'm definitely intrigued... Also C7 please give me a job writing adventures. Seriously. Really. Please!