Pizzaprez

AoS is great with its vagueness! The Great Parch is, if my memory serves correctly, twice the size of the World-that-Was/our Earth. an RTS doesn't need that much space! Make one map, roughly the size of TWW's, but split the continents across a few different Realms. All new locations, new maps, etc. You would get a pretty interesting RTS map, with hotpoints/bottlenecks you'd need to fight over to be able to access the other continents. Finding a Realmgate would be exciting, and taking one would mean two sieges: one for each side of the portal. I think setting some videogames in previously-unseen corners of the Realms would be a great way to get people's foot in the door. Then, they'd get to hit the tabletop game proper, learn about the "main character" continents, see that the events of the game they liked are both canon and maybe important enough to be a footnote here and there. Then they'd get the pleasure of realizing these worlds are so big that they can make up their own places in them: existing alongside the main narrative, the novels, and the videogames. Ever since 1.0, I've thirsted for an Age of Sigmar take on the Space Marine game. Let people feel what it's LIKE to be an eight foot tall knight. Include all the weird and interesting weapons and gear Stormcast are able to use. The game would be so easy to start too; you're a Knight-Questor getting beamed down for a solo mission, or the survivor of a failed first wave. You could even end a chapter (or two) with Your Guy losing only to get reforged and start the next chapter somewhere entirely different and new, or the same location a long time later. I really like the protagonist continents, but I'd love to see other authors and studios getting free reign to pop off in their own little corner. "Little corner," here, could mean a continent easily as large as Australia lobbed somewhere on a map of a realm or sub-realm

Wasn't Boltgun a surprise announcement at one of these? Still need to finish it, but it was a lot of fun and I'd love to see a Heretic-inspired AoS FPS to sit alongside the DOOM-inspired 40k one That aspect of 40k was something that I also struggled with: the galaxy is so big with stakes so high all the time everywhere that "normal farmworld with nothing particularly noteworthy happening" feels like the outlier, which is weird to me. I'd love if 40k focused on, say, eight sectors in space (like the Mortal Realms) to focus a lot of their stories. Leaving the rest of the galaxy as a question mark canvas to play on while hyperfocusing your narrative on Macragge, Terra, the Eye, etc means everyone can have a few planets to fanfiction on. I love how big AoS is: Sigmar could straight up die and you can decide how Your Dudes are impacted by it.

Those are almost certainly stormvermin! With an adjustment to their helmets, too; those should look nice irl if that's how the toys play out Skaven def deserve new Rat Ogres; excited for y'all!

I don't mind life-lengthening stuff in fiction at all: I'm reading the Dune series for the first time and the "geriatric properties of Spice" have come up quite a few times. But in Dune you know how much time passes, and the fact that people are older means something rather than being a handwavey way to let people Soulbond Role Play their way through every AoS current event. It is nice to have that built in, but imo it makes it even more difficult to nail down how much time is passing. If someone can be over 300 years old, there is not really a way to mark the passage of current events in-universe. If they don't want to lose miniatures/warscrolls but want to keep the story rolling on forward they could easily change the first name of the Van Densts and claim that we're focused on their descendants now: they just have some strong genes Despite not wanting to play 4.0, I am very interested in this box! Mainly the Stormcast and whatever terrain might come bundled; if the Skaven half is good enough I might be able to get my friend into wargames. I have some stormcast from the extremis terrain box, so I might try to pick up Dominion in the next couple months providing I can nab a couple of the old-style heroes Yeah I feel like that's been a pattern with a big reveal stream like this: they want to just tease the event rn. If I wanted to let myself down, i'd hype myself up at the fact that the silhouette looks unintentionally like a stormcast duardin

Totally! I think, for me, the very established setting of The World-that-was made making "my dudes" felt like I was shoving them in where there "was hardly any space left." The New World continent was relatively unexplored and left a lot of canvas to play with, but AoS having gargantuan maps where most the planet is blank makes me feel like I can dream up a whole earth-sized series of continents and still have space in the other realms and the GW narrative is so physically far away I can take what I like I do agree with your critiques, though: I think some of the novels I've read have done a good job of making AoS feel like a place but time is something I agree is handled a bit weird. Is it hundreds of years between events? Less than a hundred? Thousands? There have been only a handful of specific "periods" of time and how "long" they lasted. I think having the narrative team sit down, discuss their options, and hammer down a specific timeline with dates and years for events would do a ton. Every battletome has the 15 paragraphs in a row that's just "random cool events" but time is weird. I doubt the behind-the-scenes stuff that had them nuke Broken Realms from orbit helped this much, tbh. The nice part about AoS (to me) is the vagueness of time lets you play with events in a way that makes sense to you. In my head, the Age of Myth was likely thousands of years marked by a slow warhammer-fantasy style societal decline. The Age of Chaos is one of the few things with a specific time period attached: the Age of Chaos lasted roughly 500 years. After the age of chaos, though, it's completely up in the air. "Years" is thrown around a ton as a unit of measurement to the point where it sort of becomes meaningless. For me, I decided it lets me choose the length of things and I decided, in my own head, to stretch stuff a ton. The Mortal Realms are gargantuan and the scope of things like the Realmgate Wars is always more than we see "onscreen." I agree that having no system of dates has made it hard to stay invested in the narrative at times. How long has it been since the Necroquake? Or the Malign Portents? If I had to choose, I personally like having things be "too vague" over trying to look at the Warhammer Fantasy map and timeline and figuring where in what year My Dudes live. In AoS, with how vague timelines are, I just mentally handwave timeline stuff by blanket statement saying "most recent point in the GW narrative took place a few hundred years earlier than we are now." Get all the worldbuilding from the various books with none of the "how is my Freeguild General alive after a questionmark-number of years?" Kruleboyz rock. First Orks outside the heavily-armored ones that clicked for me! I love the scareshields and their whole vibe. I wouldn't complain at all if they got more stuff; hoping for some Hobgoblin calvary! They were the first "common orcs" by GW I've wanted to paint: I never loved the gorilla posture

I'm with you there, tbh. I was fully expecting this wave to have shades of "Grimdark Stormcast," sure, but I figured it'd be served even-handedly with "lightning" and "lightning-ghiest." There has been so much written about "what happens to these guys when they get weird" and, so far, these don't suggest any of that is going to hit the tabletop anytime soon. Like, why do the new winged guys have fire wings? Not feathered like the other new model, not art-deco cyborg enhancements like the old guys... just sort of halfway between and "on fire." Recent Necron models make it painfully clear that GW is more than capable of sculpting great-looking lightning that physically holds up models.... where is that for Stormcast? Part of me wonders if Stormcast are, behind the scenes, torn between what they "should" be in-lore and what they "should" be as "Fantasy Space Marines" that serve as the posterboys of AoS. If people are exploding into lightning, some at GW could feel that limits their appeal as a canvas for beginners: better to make them vanilla "ultramarines" than something "too specific" like blood or dark angels. Despite the fact that stormcast, as a thing, have some very defined aesthetics and themes, we haven't often seen GW double down on those themes. Like you said; we've got Wizards and Hunters and Reboots instead! As it stands now, it seems less like this wave is going to be "cool new ideas about broken stormcast" and "all your favs fought much too hard so now they're getting rebooted into thunderstrike armor." The bit about "ALL the prosecutors fought way too hard or got eaten by the sky so they're all in this chamber now " seems to support this, and paves the way for "ALL the healthy Sacrosanct went back to Azyr, but the over-forged ones are here in new thunderstrike armor to replace them" Which is a way less fun concept than "THE LIGHTNING MAN" I recall them saying as much early on in the AoS days! I feel like every tabletop game should take notes; the Mortal Realms are pretty much a perfect fantasy sandbox for me personally. Two people can have entire maps and countries and continents of stuff on two completely different planets and always have the open excuse to fight someone as "ah man one of us found a hidden Realmgate." In WHF, one usually needed to invent some sort of reason to have the Tomb Kings leave Khemri or the Lizardmen leaving Lustria: in AoS it's "newly discovered portal" and the setting is written in a way that doesn't make that feel silly

That's sick! I think the gargantuan scale of the Realms lend themselves perfectly to that. And, if we wanted to make Our Dudes fight, it is so easy to pretend one of us found a previously hidden realmgate to the other's domain. So cool. From where I was standing, one of the most intriguing parts of Dawnbringers was the general narrative beat of "the cities have become established enough to start colonizing" For me, it was great that not every city needed to be "gargantuan stormcast campaigns to take back a position of strategic importance" to "still exist." The lore has opened more and more ways a city could have got started, and My Dudes having one big city and a net of interconnected dukedoms could exist much later with less mental hoop-jumping. The cult of the wheel is neat; maybe my city has a small enclave somewhere. If I want an aged priestess on a throne, I'll convert her to be a matriarch of my own design rather than the GW character herself

Gryph-wolf is sick; lines up with the creepier gryph-mounts we saw There are two major schools of thought with Warhammer narratives (both Fantasy and Sci Fi) where, with it being a setting in which people are actively encouraged to write up their own fan fiction factions, events, and histories On one hand, you can set the nuclear clock to "ten minutes to midnight" and never touch it. The setting won't move forward, and anything "new" needs to be retconned as somehow "always existing, just hadn't been mentioned yet." This approach has some benefits: the setting is established, you know the apocalypse is coming, and you can pick anywhere in "history" to set Your Dudes. Famously, this approach backfired a few times in 40k. There was a particularly divisive Grey Knights release that invented all sorts of brand-new stuff for them and had to twist things into knots to explain why they suddenly had them. Fantasy sort of played with an "end times" with Storm of Magic, but GW lightly reset the clock there to right before Archaon's invasion again. Short term, "your dudes" are not scrambling to "keep up" with a narrative. Long term, it created a situation where Abbadon was "just about" to go conquer everything in the year 40,000 and Archaon was set to do the same "very soon" in WHF. It was cool at first, but I got bored and after a few retcons of "the same timeline" I just wished the story moved AoS and 40k are now in the opposite ship: both have sliding timelines with Main Characters now. BUT(!) the best way, imo, to engage with stuff like that is to not set your battles in the "protagonist" continents/planets and to not make "your dudes" so important. If you don't get horribly attached to something GW invents, what happens to that place in-canon doesn't really impact things: the stories are GW's characters and places, and your stories can be somewhere else! For my own stuff, I picked a couple untouched corners of a few Realms, claimed they were linked by Realmgates, and set the story to be "after the GW narrative." My made-up city is old and established, My Dudes are very wrapped up in their own issues with their own opponents in their own little corner of the Realms. GW can blow up every city, set chaos ascendant, really mess up the Ghurish Highlands and I can say "wow! cool story and neat toys!" from my "narrative safe space" so far away on Ghyran that it doesn't have to "impact me." I think being able to carve out a chunk of the world/galaxy for yourself is the appeal of these "moving timeline" narratives. I wouldn't personally get too invested in anyone GW invents, because they're GW's characters and they can run over them with a bus if they want to. Each realm is multiple times the size of Earth with extremely long histories: it'd be crazy to think there is just one ghost on a boat mostly into drowning people

The lady Ogre in bloodbowl is great-- she looks like she could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the dudes in the range and I'd be happy to see her body type/vibe be the basis of a more gender-neutral Ogre range. Lots of AoS Ogors are nomadic; it'd make more sense to see members of both genders on the mawpath

Swifthawk Riders also exist in-lore, as do Wanderers, and the Phoenix Temple. Lore is pretty inconsequential at this point, tbh

This is what I'm hoping for: something completely new, still "Chaos + Dwarf" in a similar vein to the Fantasy stuff, but AoS'd into something neat and unique with elements of what came before. Who's to say? If TOW is getting Steam Tanks i doubt AoS is going to get a new "not-steamtank" kit; if they got a new tank it'd probably be something unique and closer to whatever a Cogfort model might wind up being.... and the cogfort is a walker. We've only seen wheels on the new cannon for "actual" cities models. Could be literally anything.

I'm extremely curious as to if GW plans on keeping "land train" as a Chorf staple! It's a relatively new addition to their identity (if 13 years old could still be "relatively recent" ) and covers the cannon/mortar/missile warmachine spread they've had in every major appearance as an "army" it even got a new version of the Whirlwind in the Skullcrusher engine If Dispossesed get nothing, Free Cities are moving from tanks to walkers, Kharadron handle the air, and Fyerslayers focus only on beast handling, an "army on wheels" would actually be entirely unique to the setting. Could also be a good way to immediately build animosity with the Cities if they continue the Cult of the Wheel narrative in any meaningful way. It'd be interesting to see how Train 2.0 would shake out; it didn't exceed expectations enough sales-wise to replace broken moulds the first time around, so I wonder how they might tweak it conceptually or visually for a plastic release. If they want to make it so you can run the new Chorfs in TWW (which would be crazy considering Beasts of Chaos) the army is pretty much locked into being a plastic iteration of the Tamurkhan list

I swear a bundle for just the non-ruined buildings seemed to exist, though the Ruined City of Gondor should give one pretty much all the terrain they could need to start playing wargames. Two would be overkill, and give you a stupid amount of options.... for >$600 The figures displayed are on 28mm bases, though the scale of LotR trends closer to "truescale" stuff like Perry Miniatures' humans rather than the chonky 28 of stuff like steelhelms. Personally I like my human miniatures being a little on the shrimpy side since it makes everything nonhuman look more threatening by comparison, and "short" stuff like goblins still are "short" by comparison. If you're eyeing the staircases and balconies, it'll be a tighter squeeze for some larger-based models. It's all artistic preference; I don't mind humans and their buildings being a bit on the smaller-scale side so I can fit more on a table. Stuff like the older Warhammer Townscape scratch builds hit the scale sweet-spot for me; big enough to look like a building and block LoS, but small and chonky enough that one or two can be "farm" and five or six could be "village" while still having room to move and maneuver. Some prefer the DnD type approach where buildings are to-scale, big enough that things could believably hang out inside. I prefer to do some "gamey" handwaving, treating buildings like representations or set-pieces like they're often handled in RPG or RTS videogames: no one was walking between the buildings of Warcraft 3 cityscapes. All that to say LotR terrain is pretty (and expensive, now that the LakeTown House bundle is gone) and a little small, but the sort of thing I personally look for in Wargames terrain.

I'm still hoping these see a release. The kits designed by Ray Dranfield (when he was still on Twitter to receive credit for his work) have all been bangers, and I was hoping to see a "AoS city" kit in the same vein as his phenomenal LotR output. Had lofty designs of bulking out some scratchbuilt stuff with bits of a scenery kit like this to "tie it all together" Unless it was not a great kit, I'd think "Warhammer Fantasy Cityscape" would be a no-brainer. Based on some of the images, it didn't seem as flexible of a kit as the Gondor kit, but tbh I liked the look of the stuff enough that I was willing to put in some elbow grease if needed. Despite my groaning about prices, I wouldn't be able to resist an AoS city; especially since I swerved the big Gondor bundles in favor of them.

Hate how right this feels. I could see 4th being the edition of "most everything Finecast gets a plastic update or shown the door." This will probably be the edition where Firebellies and Yhettis either get built on or scrapped. If they get scrapped, they might circle back to them later in some way. In an optimistic view, if Firebellies were cut from Ogors, I could see them getting a remix as friends of the Sun Grots. Yhettis are pretty tied to the everwinter, though, and they'd really feel like a loss to me. They occupy a similar niche as Gorgers, though, as "lanky ogor sized infantry" so who knows. I love them; I'd rather see 'em in plastic. NGL, I could see Chorfs getting a Votann styled drop. If they spent a year previewing little snippits of chaos tech or pointed stars, I could see some players getting a bit vexxed if they'd built up an idea of what those things should be for their own chaos armies. I could see one rumor engine of a hat, or a silhouette closer to an announcement, before smacking everyone with a full "first wave" series of previews. Much like the Squats, it'd give people no time to overthink "man they're really going to bring back those guys?" and just get excited about what's new at face-value Or not! If they wind up making them real close to their TWW iteration, I could see them rumor engine'ing bits of semi-familiar stuff to get the ball rolling. All depends; I'm excited for Chorfs! The Lumineth can't stay the only faction in the setting with dumb hats

That could be it- hopefully GW can figure itself out

I genuinely feel like a road map for their two tentpole games should not be outside of their capabilities; this is perfect and I get that 40k is what GW relies on but occasionally things remind me of how GW dropped support for Fantasy and were shocked that it didn't compete with the constantly-updated 40k Crazy how they're not working to put out a roadmap for the game that is getting a new edition this summer when they're trying to build hype by... talking about cutting armies and ramping up costs again

wouldn't mind someone leaking the next year or so of AoS at all, tbh! Otherwise it's going to be a hot minute before I'm anticipating much of anything out of GW! Won't be picking up the 4th edition box unless my friend is extremely enthusiastic about the Skaven in it, and I'm not planning to finish the Dawnbringers series anymore

Yep. Had my eye on the Biophagus as a healer for my Frostgrave warband, but $33 for one dude was a bit much. And that price is going up now? I'm with you that it really is "discount bundles through retailers that offer a discount on top of that" for me, but that's honestly just hitting the ballpark of what GW prices used to be instead of feeling like an actual discount these days. Not to say GW is not making cool products; I still like their stories and miniatures, but with an exorbitant cost and no credit to the underpaid artists in their employ I'm having a harder and harder time staying "in it" each hike. Like, outside of centerpiece models for a couple armies (that I'll push off buying for much longer now) I'm really just hoping for a bundle of new Chaos Dwarfs and I'll cross my fingers for a holiday box with the Sylaneth models I was aiming to grab for my wife. I'd had some designs to maybe kitbash my Perry knights with Cities and Bretonnia stuff, but at this point I'm just going to enjoy them for what they are. I've got enough to build and paint, so it's not huge loss, but it's wild that I was priced out of this in high school and early college, and now I've got a career and I'm hitting my price ceiling again. Could I afford it? Maybe! Should I? Do I want to? Nah. Yeah that's not it: I have not received a 40% increase in pay in that time! This is a hobby and a luxury and I've already been eyeing 3D printers as a new hobby venture and getting more invested in other miniatures company's products. Not saying "I'm just going to 3D print GW IP " more, like, there are so many other pretty models out there that I'm having a hard time justifying not going for them instead. 3D printing is a whole new venture I've avoided the learning curve on, but it's getting to the point where the "best deal!" starter bundles are just about $180 after tax in my state. I'm sorry; that's insane. There was a point in time where GW would've been my first choice for miniatures, with other studio's offers facing an uphill climb to even get me to consider them. I'd like to play D&D and Frostgrave with miniatures for the NPC's. Moving forward, GW has pretty much priced itself out of that for me.

God I hate how that feels true: get something "divisive" out there for people to unreasonably hyperventilate about to help drown out the very valid "my investment is suddenly trash" venting Went from "well I wont play GW games anymore but their models are great" to "well... maybe not even the models" pretty quick. It doesn't feel that long ago that 10 figures cost somewhere between $30 and $35; $50+ for a box of ten core unit figures has crossed a threshold that has me not very interested in starting any new projects from GW. Wanted to get some more Sylvaneth for my wife, but I think I'm going to build absolutely everything else I own beforehand at this point. I like miniatures, and GW has some pretty ones, but outside the things I've already got rolling any other ideas/projects I have in mind are going to get reworked to avoid using GW kits. It's hard to justify >$50 for ten basic infantry when I don't even often buy full-priced videogames anymore. This does speak to the GW push for Spearhead sized games: if the default is "tiny sized" games suddenly everything on the way to 1,000 points is "optional." Fortunately, I'm in a position where I can budget to jump on the "box of new chaos dwarfs" bundle that'll be a comparatively great deal from LGS I really really like seeing 40k get more inclusive: the tweaks to Custodes was a graceful way to handwave the "boys club" narrative

I agree with you completely, and this is a great example of why I loved the older "soup" style army for cities: you could pretty much make whaever you want and find warscrolls to support it Have we seen the leader for the Stormcast half of the new edition box yet? or is that coming later? Loved the art-deco vibe on some of the older stormcast heroes, and im considering grabbing a couple favs while it's still feasible

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.