madmac

I can't see us getting a new centaur race in the near future, but at least GW is seeding the possibility here. I think the short term consequences will more just be breaking up the Kragnos/KB alliance and likely even Kragnos being temporarily removed or incapacitated much like Nagash was as part of bringing the Age of Beasts to an end.

Neither. It basically goes: 1. Dwarf jumps on Truggs back and lands a deathblow on his neck 2. Slips and falls into the portal while it's channeling gold magic 3. Afterwards he hits the ground and hears Truggs body impact immediately after, so it seems he wasn't transported anywhere, just his body was transmuted. He passes out, confident that he's alive and Trugg is not. 4. Much later, after Ulgu (Night) has fallen, the portal channels jade magic into Trugg and brings him back to life. He gets up and wanders off, not seeing any living creature around him, which suggests Bael has already left at that point. Maybe, but it also talks about the gold magic burning at his stumps, you don't have to read too far into that to understand where this is going. Keep in mind, if they wanted to just replace Bael-Grimnyr it would have been easy to write this story in such a way to kill him off. Having him being transmuted by the magic of Chamon instead only makes sense if they are going somewhere with all this and that direction is definitely a new model. He's always been the Fyreslayer's faction leader in the fluff but he didn't have his own model, (or rules, except for a very short lived WD writeup) much like our boy Ionus used to just be a generic Lord-Relictor until dawnbringers 3 now where he has a sweet new dragon model.

Re-reading the end of the story, it's actually more clear to me what happens. Bael-Grimnyr passes through Truggs portal while it's channeling the magic of chamon, this burns off his limbs and already starts to replace them with metal. So it's a done deal really, he will be back and he'll have cool metal limbs to show for it, 100%

I'm gonna be greedy, his daughter takes over the lodge and he gets a sick new foot hero model with replaced limbs.

It's far more likely he steps aside for his heir that was set up all the way back in early 2E, but still, this is Warhammer. I'm sure Grimnir's priests could rebuild him if GW wanted to go that route. They have the technology, and more gold than anyone dwarf knows what to do with.

With the default Fyreslayer faction leader coming out of that battle so badly maimed, it definitely feels like GW is setting something up. He might get rebuilt with a new model, or pass the torch to his Grand-daughter but either way it smells like a new centerpiece model and that's big news for Fyreslayers.

Skulls with horns and chaos runes fits better with beastmen than anything else, honestly. Granted the last definitely beastmen RE ended up being Warcry terrain, but BoC getting a Dawnbringer hero doesn't feel impossible.

Runestone is definitely a Darkoath thing, but since it reads as a war trophy in this case that doesn't necessarily mean the model is Darkoath. Could be FEC, could be a lot of things.

They just absolutely don't want to sell a separate sprue for the Order characters for some reason.

They've still been releasing pre-orders every week, even if some of them are very slim, like this weeks "two-dwarfs-for-necromunda". It's just that every pre-order takes two weeks to release instead of one.

His unfortunate face aside, I think the Kragnos model looks great. I love the celtic stylings with his armor in particular. He doesn't fit with destruction at all visually, unforunately, but that doesn't make him unsalvageable. Bring on more centaurs, I say.

Sure, on a long enough timeline all AoS models will be AoS models, I don't think anyone disputes that. And yet I don't see Night Goblins getting yanked out of AoS so they can go back to TOW anytime soon, for example. It's not even slightly feasible that there will be a sudden mass exodus of all WHFB models out of AoS in the next year or two to support a side game of questionable long-term viability. I think of placeholder models in terms of holding unto the idea for future use, mostly. Seraphon just got a huge new wave of models that was mostly just updates of existing sculpts, as did STD before them, etc etc. Ironjawz got a nice cluster of new units and an upgrade of Ardboyz all at the same time. In the same way I see factions or subfactions like Bonesplitters or Dispossessed or Mawtribes as largely being placeholders for what eventually will be a revamp of some kind, or possibly a full re-imaging ala LRL or Fyreslayers or so on. It's possible some things may be cut in the future, but it won't be primarily in service to TOW of all things.

It's more like GW just doesn't just cut things for no reason. They cut High Elves because LRL were coming. They probably cut Wanderers because Kurnothi are coming(slowly). They cut Empire models to replace them with new human models, but kept the ones they didn't have a rough replacement ready for. They didn't finish off Dwarfs or replace Dark Elves yet because Malerion and GW finally doing anything with Dispossessed are both a long ways off yet.

If they wanted to drop dwarfs the best chance to do it would be with the CoS tome that just released. That fact that they left them alone IMO just means that GW doesn't plan to do anything with them for a while yet, same as Dark Elves.

Yes, and it's designed to fit with the new direction of COS and not the old empire models, which is my point. Really it's more of a half-way point between the two but that is typical of underworlds, it's basically all prototype models and always has been.

People say this a lot, but the fact is Underworld has not produced any models for cut factions in all the years it has been around. There are no Greenskin, Wanderers, High Elf, Freeguild, etc models. It was very noticeable for CoS in particular because they didn't get a single warband until the new human aesthetic was figured out. Suggesting that GW took the time to create new Savage Orc designs for no purpose at all just a few years ago is not a convincing argument, imo. If they are planning to remove Bonesplitters now they would have known before that warband was green lit.

Yeah Ironjawz getting their own battletome supplement and AoR in Dawnbringers 2 is not exactly making Big Waaagh stronger as a concept in my mind. In general I think people are getting way too carried away with the whole "TOW is going to steal every WHFB model" craze, just like how everyone was soup crazy for a while in late 2nd edition and it didn't turn into anything. They are loads and loads of WHFB models in AoS still, it would take GW years to try and replace them all, I don't think even all of 4th edition is enough. What we're seeing is just the TOW team capitalizing on armies that are easy layups, either because they were completely replaced with something else in AoS, or because 3/4ths of their original model line was taken out of production and can be spun up easily enough to get things moving for them.

It's been kind of a mess for quite a while. Some warbands come with their rules in boxsets, some of them get printed in white dwarf, some get released as free pdfs. It's enough of a headache to put me off trying to actively keep up with Warcry as a game.

Kurnothi are a weird case, since they've been extensively referenced in AoS and BL lore since late 2019 when Beastgrave came out with Skaeths wild hunt. There are multiple black library short stories centered on Kurnothi characters, even. It's the slowest of slow roll-outs, punctuated by a trickle of actual models and constant but slow development of Kurnouth as a god that gets increasing focus in Sylvaneth lore and models. But yes, this whole short story is definitely describing a particular model. I won't be surprised to see a centaur with one arm replaced by wood/vines even.

I think that was the consensus from the beginning, the named CoS characters and a bunch of other heavy hitters are the ones fighting for the Aqashy crusade while the Ghyran crusade is being led by a basically a rando straight into the big FEC threat that was hinted at from the first dawnbringer book. We could always get a curveball though, and personally I would rather get a new Ghyran city than an Aqashy one.

So looking over the story again for hints, yeaaaaaaah. Hooves are obviously for centaurs, or also fauns I suppose. Wood-coated claws are tradtional sylvaneth, (even revenants don't have feet!) and feet, well...that would be for characters like Qualthis. So it's covering all bases there. If we get a warband, I'm kinda hoping it's more in the vein of Gorgers or Chameleons, basically a coherent unit that's made to be played in AoS as much as warcry, instead of a kitchen sink of Kurnothi types, because frankly I'm greedy and I want multiple Kurnothi units with this just being the first teaser. Give me a centaur warband with maybe a pet or two and then some infantry kits down the line.

It's the next thing on the roadmap for Warcry, so it's being shown at all in November then definitely.

Well in theory, an all elf-centaur warband vs an all-mounted (or all centaur constructs?) OBR warband would be a fitting matchup, but yeah I doubt it. Warcry hasn't ventured into Cav units at all yet, much less two all-mounted bands, and there's not enough information to say one way or the other yet.

That's what I was thinking. They spent a lot of time focusing on the details of this otherwise one-off centaur lady that doesn't have a model yet, even referencing her bow and cyclestone knife, which doesn't match up with Skaeth.

I forget the name of the novel, it's the BL story collection for the first underworlds location set in Ulgu, but there's a quick reference to halflings in describing a crowd of onlookers in one of them. That's the kind of thing that could have easily just slipped past an editor though, there's no solid lore references to halflings that I'm aware of.