sandlemad

I think this is part of the point, that just like the marines line, the Stormcast have a huge amount of redundancy, even if the (high) quantity doesn't stretch to the complete dominance marines has over the 40k line. Something can be not-great without stretching to the out-of-control level you see in 40k. I think it's completely fair for non-SC players to look at the SC's 4th or 5th respective line infantry unit (or basic missile infantry, or monstrous cavalry), most of which have relatively minor differences between them in terms of role, and feel left behind. So too when the call is to release a visual update for some of these kits, when other ranges have barely a handful of units. Like, it's weird to me that people are concerned about tiny AoS ranges potentially getting bloated or doubling up when that's already the case with Stormcast, several times over. You could comfortably amalgamate a quarter to a third of their warscrolls without any meaningful effect.

Not completely sold but I guess in that light, this new rumour engine looks a little like some of the kroot ammo cartridges.

Probably just the WHC team grabbing for photos from the pile? Given that plastic treelord/treeman was a WHFB mini.

This is spot on, there’s something about them that calls back to that even more than WHFB.

****** those are good minis. Amazing presence and posing.

Tbh I think you can point to large parts of the Death ranges and identify how buzzed GW designers were about Dark Souls. Not even in a superficial way but as though the games got the creative juices flowing. Same for Mad Max: Fury Road and a lot of ork/necromunda stuff, and, I think, Wayne Barlowe's work inspiring the Ossiarch range.

From the WHC article with the Marrowscroll Herald: @These scabrous delegates somehow act as vectors for the madness of the carrion kingdoms, spreading and magnifying the delusions that drive them. Rumours abound that the morbid messengers may even serve an ominous, higher power…" Hints at the Carrion King returning, perhaps? Separately, while the Maw-Grunta looks brilliant, I'm not wild about the sidecars. Cool concept but the brutes are just sort of standing there? Very static poses, at odds with the sense of motion you get from the rest of the mini.

The old Harbinger was one of the best Nurgle minis and this is a fine update. It's impressive that they've actually managed to make him more Frank Frazetta-ish.

That Fyreslayer hero is great. A super-saiyan dwarf. Whatever about how much FS need another hero, I think he's evidence that a lot of the problems with the FS range are down to same-iness and poor execution. Pull it off well and you get this fantastic dude.

The offal hounds for the new FEC warband remind me of some of the designs in Pat Mills’ comic Requiem Chevalier Vampire. That weird confluence of vampires, ghouls and horrible, wide-eyed baboon monsters. Great designs. Not 100% sold on the Flaymaster’s hand bone kneepad-piercings but good to see some new designs.

Nighthaunt range remains all killer. This is the fourth WHU warband but in fairness they’ve all been quite distinct in terms of playstyle and these dudes look great.

I really like how they managed to keep the ‘bald old man with sideburns’ look for the screamer killer.

I do think there's something interesting about their faces, something not quite naturalistic. Still a living creature but the shape of the head is like a stylised Mesoamerican sculpture in flesh. Same with the head-crest and there's a glimmer of it in the carnosaur mini. In-universe it's a cool subtle way to emphasise that these aren't entirely 'natural' evolved creatures but permeated with heavenly star-magic and the influence of the Slann. Out of universe, it's just cool design and makes them more than just a dinosaur stand-in, even with the nods towards accuracy and modern depictions of theropods.

Cooool. Island of Blood holds up exceptionally, with those rat ogres being vastly better sculpts than the shoddy (older!) ones used in the AoS range. Skull Pass, the gobbos are all perfect, single-piece versions of the normal moonclan kit but the dwarves are unfortunately pretty tired. The miners, cannon and grudge-pony are good but the lord and warriors are low detail chunks of plastic and the dragonslayer is… I don’t know, even for the time that was a weird sculpt.

EDIT: double post

Same. I have to say, the meticulously measuring and remeasuring units against different auras/bubbles was one of my least favourite features of AoS. I was playing Khorne damnit!

I quite like the mix of Latin names and 'naturalist observer/troop catchphrase names'. This Von Ryan's Leaper is a great one. The real issue comes (or came, around 6th ed) when the designers/writers just sort of bodged the names together, so you wound up with species terms with no real depth or connection to anything. Tyrannocyte, neurothrope, venomthrope, tyrannofex, toxicrene... None of these feel like the writers knew what they were doing with the Latin. The punniness behind HG Wells' morlocks/mawlocs wasn't great either. RE: thematic redundancy, that's kind of characteristic of starter kit forces in both AoS and 40k. You had it with nighthaunt and necrons, and most definitely with stormcast and marines. Moreover it's a feature of tyranids, you have a small and large versions for most roles: the biovore and the exocrine. Ravener and trygon/mawloc. Zoanthrope, neurothrope, maleceptor (and now the new psychic thing from the trailer). Carnifex and hierodule (and now screamer-killer, as a distinct species). So too the lictor and the von ryan's leaper as a smaller pack-hunter version. It's not ideal but they're somewhat distinct roles. It's nowhere near as bad as the 4-5 near identical bolter marines types or (to a lesser extent) four very similar basic stormcast infantry units.

I think it’s both. James Hewitt, one of the designers behind the newer Necromunda, Blood Bowl and Adeptus Titanicus, was open about GW both underpaying (while playing the whole “you have to be soooo passionate to work here” card) and being haphazard and clumsy at best, actively pretty bad at worst in how it treats its staff.

Tbh I’ve yet to encounter ex-GW employees - retail, studio or community - with much positive to say about the company. Most are lukewarm at best, particularly when it comes to how things are run. From the community side, Peachy was fairly blunt about it (“People don’t leave jobs, they leave managers”) and Rob Symes was more sharply critical. Add to that the others who’ve left in only a few years. Sorry to see Louise go but sounds like she’s better off, both in terms of what doing this sort of thing independently is like and in terms of leaving what sounds like a bad workplace. Moreover from the stuff she’s put on instagram, honestly? She was wasted at GW, she’s too creative to be hemmed in by their house style.

This is true but the context that the battletome provides is to note that while the Tithe is superficially reasonable, it’s always a rigged game when considered on a scale beyond a mortal’s lifespan. It might ‘work out’ in a grim sort of way for generations, only becoming slightly more onerous in amount or specificity over time, but it’s intentionally set up to eventually become unsustainable for the living. It’s both a resource gathering instrument and a means of slowly, systematically weakening the living in a controlled way. Eventually they can’t pay and then the Ossiarch forces swoops in to make a new necropolis, more silent lands for Nagash. It’s lawful alright, certainly coldly legalistic, and also a consciously unfair tool of empire, and I love how awful it is. That said, the OBR do have enough autonomy to run these things in different ways so I can see individual satraps or legion commanders taking different approach, maybe stretching out or maintaining the ‘bone farming’ phase for as long as they can.

Excellent set of reveals overall, with the Lion comfortably stealing the show. Lizzies look good! Tbh when I saw the kroxigors my heart sank a little because as good as they were, they didn’t have the crocodilian heads we know and love… only for those to be revealed next in the alt-build. Which is a nice feature, as with the new cold ones it’s really cool how the designers didn’t just replicate dinosaurs. Those aggrodons aren’t simply scaled up raptors (good as the dark eldar ones are), there’s a fair bit of chunky iguana there too. The Ossiarch and vampire characters feel like missed opportunities. The Mortisian is fine but the range could have done better with a generic version of the WHU dude or a generic infantry captain. The vampire is a truly excellent sculpt - that axe! Those feet! - but hey, there’s already 5 Vyrkos special characters. A generic mounted vampire lord would have been a better call to a fairy complete (bordering on somewhat overstuffed with redundancies) range.

Ah gotcha, I was misled by the second set of fireborn concept art being so close to the text about the destroyer. Cheers!

Huh, the concept art for the K’daai Destroyer in the dev blog is pretty different to (what I thought was) the K’Daai Destroyer in the original trailer. This one’s roughly anthropomorphic/genie-shaped whereas that was like the never-released bull-shaped meta monster. I haven’t been following the videos and such in detail though, maybe this is accounted for somewhere.

I could believe that, the presence of 3+ different classes of skink wizard really feels like an artefact of the WHFB/AoS transition. That said, they do seem to be emphasising the hierarchy in the background so who knows.

@Baron Klatz Ah that’s unfortunate with Shar’tor and tbh a bit awkward. He was clearly sculpted for WHFB and then just not released for ages because of the transition to AoS. A bit like how the k’daii destroyer mini was reworked to become that khorogath mini. It feels like an unfortunately literal approach, when otherwise CA have been ok about taking stuff from AoS that makes sense in WHFB: greater daemons and so forth.