Pizzaprez

I've had this same experience; even when I walk in, verbally display my familiarity with the games, settings, armies, hobby, etc, they've not left me free to browse for more than about a sixty second minute. I once walked in specifically to buy a Bloodthirster for a Khorne player as a gift and had to convince the staff member standing in front of the khorne display that "no, I do not want to buy a Belakor despite the fact that he IS newer and COULD be used" we talked in circles for much longer than I'd have liked until my wife finally asked "are we, like, not allowed to buy the Bloodthirster?" Whether I went in for a few paints or a couple miniature kits, they simply refused to let me say "no I already have an army, I don't want to buy the newest release, i just want what I came here for" and browse for a minute or two. Once, I shipped to store and got a lecture about how I should have called the store ahead of time and let them know I was making an order from the site. Started with "ah! I didn't realize the scope of the shipping problems y'all are having; I'll touch base in the future." but the dude had like an essay he had to vent and I had to stand at the register and hear him out before I could retrieve my purchase.

I feel like that's a pretty graceful solution if the issue is truly "we simply want to track how good the games are selling!" If I navigate to "squig riders" via the TOW part of the site, there is no reason that the kit couldn't look identical to me but have a different SKU on their end! I'm with you on Malerion and Chorfs!! GW makes such great models these days that I think the decades-long wait for Chorfs might pan out into something cool! Also everything hinted about Malerion is sick; demon moons, crazy calvary guys in the art, lots to love and run with there! I'm hoping the wait for Malerion is bc they're cooking something pretty insane! If they printed two barcodes on the back of each box and begged people to scan the relevant one, it could work; tracking that sort of sale from a third party seller could be challenging, but also right now an extremely decent chunk of TOW stuff is GW-site exclusive, so they do still have some time if that was something they were interested in.

I'd love an extended interview with that one dude because whatever their justification is I don't think it's reasonable tbh. It feels out of step with everything they are doing the time period of the first two AoS editions If the Scaremonger does succeed in putting the fear of the sun into the night goblins via a mask and hallucinations... Would the sungrots bully the cavegrots? Make fun of 'em for living in dank basements and eating junk food? Could be a fun dynamic if daygrots were jock bullies; that's a dynamic mostly present in the Orks and Grots of 40k and fantasy O&G but pretty absent in AoS. It'd be fun to have the Grots bullying each other for a change

Aaaaah I've never seen this art before; how cool! Stuff like this and the grot tanks from 40k is the vibe. The realms are so big and insane that they could do absolutely anything with the concept of a "daytime goblin" and if TOW is going to bogart whole races and factions I doubt they're going to just do "common goblins" which is sorta cool Dispossessed are a placeholder as far as I'm concerned. They're rereleasing the old night goblin kits because the idea of having *any* cross system models makes some GW dude sweat through his shirt. If they survive a substantial "not Fyerslayers or Kharadron" Duardin wave I'll be genuinely shocked.

If we're talking gitmob, im going to build on your anti-gloomspite wavelength and suggest that Gitmob would be a great place to see the Grotbag Scuttlers that were mentioned a handful of times Get real weird with it; more weird than "Kharadron scraps held aloft by squig balloons" If Gloomspite is "below" emphasize that Gitmob is "above!" I'd love to see air and land vehicles, calvary like Snarlfangs, and unique goblin troops now that the "vanilla" goblins are firmly a TOW thing. I'd love a fantasy goblin Evil Sunz Clan/Kult of Speed. Spin it out of captured Gholem/Kharadron fortresses and make a destruction "weird science" faction to compete with the Skaven and Chorfs! With all their antagonists taking their respective slice of the "crazy machinery!" pie, surely Gholems and Dispossessed would need to respond with their own toys!

I agree! Gives some weight to my hopes that Gholemkind may hit the tabletop eventually! I almost wish they wouldn't have given him specific rules at all in this case, and released him purely as a hobbyist item. He is very pretty, makes sense to be limited edition, but getting hit with "get-you-by" rules after so much buildup does sort of feel silly. I get that having two "cross-faction dwarf hero fighters" might seem a bit redundant, and I have wondered for awhile why Gotrek was placed into that role instead of Grombrindal, when it's been Grombrindal's thing for a very long time. For what it's worth, it looks like Grombrindal is on a similarly sized/height base as Gotrek, so he does have a counts-as opportunity if you wanted to build a project around him for a GW game. Grombrindal is also a rare case of a character who you could probably use as any dwarf character with some light customization and it'd be in line with how he acts when he isn't projecting his god-aura and making himself thirty feet tall I suppose it speaks to a desire within GW to keep Grombrindal on the sidelines and margins instead of becoming a "face character" in AoS. Maybe, then, he'll pop up in TOW too! Maybe TOW is why he isn't getting a permanent AoS spot... Regardless, his being a solo limited edition mini with legends rules suggests, unless they do something substantially different with him in AoS as to make him unrecognizable, flags (to me) that he will not be leading a duardin soup nor will he be leading a "new" dwarf faction. Maybe the dispossessed will stick with Cities? Maybe Fyerslayers will gain a heavily-armored troop option instead? I feel like Gholemkin is more likely than a "combined" duardin army now, in any case. Which is great, as far as im concerned! I'd like to see more dwarfs, not less!

Grombrindal is gorgeous! I'll have to kitbash him with the Blood Bowl one that looks substantially more nuts Also- I've been assuming that a Grombrindal model could herald a "united Duardin" tome if they went that way; him being Legends out the gate makes that much less likely to me!

If they ever did a Vashtorr range I'd have to buy it just to paint; he's too sick. I'd be beyond stoked if Chaos Duardin looked anything like that Yessss I bought some of the old Reaper Mancubi from Doom it'd be fun to have friends for em

Gah I forgot about that, I couldn't decide if I was excited for 3.0 or let down by Broken Realms when that happened. And I liked Kragnos and that arc! Just sort of petered out with "and then Alarielle cast a gargantuan life spell so big it needed heralds to spread it" and I was like "cool! now what?" Well probably it would have woke up the Incarnates in-universe in the last leg of a Broken Realms book focused on Alarielle and setting up the major confrontation that would have spanned the Seasons of War. Season of War sure does sound like something pretty tied to Alarielle, actually. AoS had a ton of narrative momentum up until that point, and (in my opinion) has been scrambling to get back to the Malgin Portents -> Necroquake pacing since. Story arcs and whole armies being shredded in the background fits some of the weirdness of 3.0 quite well. Broken Realms being a kickoff to a beastmen-focused Season of War sure would've made this feel like the Era of the Beast edit: Broken Realms Kragnos was 2021; that's more than enough time for GW to internally realize 3.0 was going to be messy narratively

From where I'm sitting, that narrative had to eventually introduce Morghur to the setting and have some pretty big fallout for the Realms as a whole. The incarnates seemed to be something important, that were going to be built on, in a similar way to how Endless Spells helped to emphasize some aspects of the setting. GW deciding to drop beasts had to have been something they planned for for awhile internally; likely around when they were nailing down TOW's ruleset. Timeline-wise, this shaking out about two years ago feels right. That narrative just sort of faded away when I was expecting/anticipating at least one sequel. If it was a multi-book story about how the Incarnates started showing up and the Beastmen began to corrupt them into/for Morghur, snowballing into the AoS Beastmen reboot, I could see why someone saying "yo AoS team, you're losing beastmen" would result in the entire narrative getting axed. Alarielle has also been pretty quiet since the Rite of Life, which (to me) supports the perspective her and the beasts would have finally had a narrative arc focused on the Alarielle/Morghur mud wrestling match that ive been thirsting for since 2003

I agree! I feel like the Realmgates really really open up what the "scale" of these stories could be. The Malign Portents and Necroquake arcs, this big "Blight City directly invades" arc, even Alarielle's rite of Life that was sort of glossed over all could/should result in stories that could take place anywhere or in brand-new locations we've never heard of! I think it could also play nicely with the hype/anticipation cycle GW likes; have lots of short stories in between each book! Play with cliffhangers or foreshadow cool ideas that'll pan out in the upcoming book with the narrative hooks they did on Warhammer Community more often in the earlier editions 3.0 could have opened with the Dawnbringer Crusades, and they could have really leaned hard into those stories for years! With their initial terrain ideas, having the narrative entirely focused on crusades for the whole edition wouldve worked great! The initial half of the edition wouldve been buildings under construction while the Dawnbringer books are focused on foundation-setting and outposts, and you could have paired the "finished building" terrain kits with a "alright now we have some new cities, here's where things are going south" in the second half. We'll see how 4.0 shakes out narratively; it seems like stuff internally had Broken Realms get axed before it really got rolling in favor of reshuffling stuff ahead of Dawnbringers.

I'd love something like this; The current "Blight City Incursion" event in the narrative would be a great vehicle for that style of release, and they could even make most of the books self-contained stories that maybe cross over at the end: like how you got snapshots of factions that all met up for the Malign Portent in-canon fight at Nagash's Black Pyramid A book or two a year, focusing on a handful of armies at a specific crossroads due to the overarching problem. You could even just break it up by Realm and focus on a small slice of each! Have a bunch of the protagonists meet in the last book like a crossover comic to fight the Big Bad and usher in the new edition. Looking down the barrel of $150 in books in the next couple months, I wouldn't have minded doing Broken Realms or Dawnbrinders and had a much slower pace for the books

NGL, that would be an extremely fun roadmap if each encounter with the skaven worked to add some to both sides; skaven would get four or five waves of miniatures, and they have so much going on as a faction that I bet you could get a masterclan/pestilines/moulder/skyre/eshin each in a small wave and you wouldn't see much overlap.

Ah! I must have houseruled that so hard that I completely forgot it was 1" in 2.0, ahahaha

Totally fair! Treating it like a rank & flank game with some wiggle room is def the intent GW is going for, but I think I still prefer the older way. I do agree that movement trays are phenomenal for big units, but I prefer the view of more elite units having space between 'em