sandlemad

I think there’s a distinction between characters like Gobsprakk who are released with some genuinely good and interesting background, defined personalities, etc but who get no real development… and narratively empty characters without personality (like most stormcast characters) who also get no development. It’s unfortunate because the former type are basically waiting as good ideas to be used interestingly, while the latter could maybe be made worthwhile with a bit of development, as with Vandus. But either way, there doesn’t seem to be much appetite for it.

Had forgotten that one, was actually thinking of the wing that turned out to be 40k human possessed but still, boooo.

That one rumour engine really does look a lot like bits of the existing jabberslythe…

Some good stuff. The WHU gobbos are beautiful and brilliant and I love them. Deluded knights is borrowing a little from the FEC wheelhouse but it’s fine, it’s fine, they’re goblins, they get a pass. Shroom-trumpet, squigapult, squig-onna-stick, brilliant. The Snarlfangs are good but honestly it’s disappointing to see them feature in Gloomspite, who already have several cavalry units. I know the precedent was set through the WHU gitz but I would prefer to see hobgrot wolf riders appear as a Kruleboys option. Kruleboys cavalry is something that was cried out for from the start and simply by virtue of being more obviously ‘overground’, I think these dudes would have fit. Vashtorr is the standout here, absolutely incredible miniature. Looks like one of those cases where they make a brilliant mini to a general concept (technorganic daemon with a healthy helping of HR Giger and John Blanche) and then work the background to fit. I wouldn’t mind seeing him appear in AoS! Daemons to have crossover potential and if he’s the master of the forge of souls then he has as much place in the AoS background as in 40k, though I get that there’s a risk then of stepping on the toes of Hashut or the Horned Rat. Would be interesting to have another complication for Be’lakor too.

Man that Archaon is an all-timer, absolutely blows the current plastic one out of the water. Just pure iconic plate-and-fur menace.

They're both excellent minis but it's weird to see regular ol' chaos warriors have cloaks and chosen not have them. My brain just defaults to 'seniority = cloaks' so this does not compute.

I dunno, if you can make fanatics work, you could do the same for doom divers at least. Make them blitzed out of their tiny green heads on mushrooms, so they can’t wait to be launched into the sky. I think people are treating that whole horror angle to Gloomspite as somehow mutually exclusive to any humour. They’re meant to have both, that’s pretty core to their identity, a nasty grubby black humour. Do it right and one aspect accentuates the other.

Kind of surprised to see the Direchasm bands released in plastic. Good, though I guess now we know that even in this form they'll only be around for a while.

As bizarre as it seems, this sort of thing is pretty much the only way GW ever ‘reduces’ prices, by bundling stuff together, as per the magmadroth in the old fyreslayers SC box. So… not entirely implausible and actually has a track record with things like the seraphon or BCR start collecting boxes.

Whoa that’s a brutal price for the Brodd kit. Do we have any idea if this outright replaces the older mega-gargant box? If so… SoB were already an extremely harsh army to collect in terms of price but this, oof. Good that the Mancrushers can come in threes now. Still ludicrously expensive but at least it matches their in-game unit size.

Yeah that's definitely a rhinox, though the rider is very much a simple representation of the mournfang rider minis and in size it's closer to that semi-popular conversion from the mournfang kit (as below) than the hulking beasts that were the brilliant old FW minis. It's a shame that it won't get any miniature representation though. Interesting how variable GW is nowadays over representation of minis vs non-minis in art. It's definitely for the better but it does lead to sad visions of what might have been...

I guess this confirms no new butcher and no new yhetees anyway. Fingers crossed about those maneaters though honestly I’m not holding my breath. Perhaps more interesting is that the bloodpelt hunter isn’t a replacement for the icebrow hunter and in fact appears to be a Gutbusters version of the same. Seems… odd. Redundant and a weird roundabout way of doing things. Also note that the cover shows a cool looking rhinox-rider on the right, though it doesn’t appear on the book. A shame.

So this was supposed be out in UK shops last week, anyone see it?

I'm in a similar boat but I think part of it can come down to the different role the hunter plays in the BCR background. In WHFB, the hunter was indeed the cunning folk-hero outsider who yeah, wore more clothes than basically any other ogre in the range bar maneaters and was only ever temporarily part of the tribe. For the BCR, the hunter sits in an honoured role in the alfrostun, right under the leader, and (based on this new dude) shares their half-starving ice age predator background. That sort of 'self-reliant professional' angle from WHFB goes out the window and they become more like a herald, given plenty of leeway to move weeks ahead of the storm, ranging the landscape and coldly sizing up settlements up as meat. Kind of a nastier Silver Surfer/Galactus situation, I guess? It's dark and sinister and I like it a lot but it's definitely very different from the also excellent concept undergirding the OK hunter. So it ends up like 'cool mini, cool idea, shame it's replacing another cool mini/idea in this particular fashion'.

The ogre hunter is interesting. Ogres are my favourite faction and hunters my favourite unit of them. This dude… He’s very different while still being a great mini. Conceptually similar in that he’s a single ogre with a crossbow that hunts beasts but aesthetically distinctly. He drops the whole mountain man feel, the fur clad professional trapper, in favour of something more feral, darker and more shamanistic. Like he wears his prey’s antlers as part of some ice age ritual and blocks off an eye for aim or to see in a different way. It’s apparent in the art too, he steps away from the ‘jolly brute’ style and more towards the ‘’man-eating monster’. I dunno, I like it a lot, it fits the BCR well, but I loved the older look and am sorry to see it go. It’s also just a weird set up, right? Cracking mini that stood the test of time but the old resin hunter already had an AoS replacement in the form of Hrothgorn but then he was never really integrated into AoS properly through a series of missed opportunities and has since been discontinued anyway. Moreover, let’s be honest, a new butcher or yhetees were a much higher priority for replacement. A shame this is probably all Mawtribes will get. I wonder what this means for the current Icebrow rules and unit concept. Probably will be overwritten by this.

More specifically, it’s very similar to the old Gland Warrior mini for the Inquisitor game, which evolved out of that concept art. I think we might see a new version for Kill Team, though something new and Catachan specifically would be cool.

Cool that the monthly minis are now new, though from the look of the rotmire dude GW is still trying to navigate that narrow path of having a nice mini that isn’t so distinctive that folks who can’t get it are very upset or at a game disadvantage. Still a nice mini. Loving that frog lady though, especially the round lil guy on her shoulder.

Really like these dudes. They’re very oldschool ‘Realms of Chaos’ in inspiration, from before the whole plate-armoured Viking look was completely dominant. Strong Ian Miller vibes too, going right back to his brilliant 80s artwork (these are Uruk Hai but you can find similar visual cues in his WHFB chaos work).

Damn this sounds good.

It’s really incredible. Space marines have on several occasions received more than one codex in a single edition but they’ve topped out at ‘only’ two books in two years. To out-marine the marines when it comes to getting all the attention is no mean feat. Imagine being a skaven player and seeing that after getting a single mini while 20+ year old sculpts are still for sale. Or hell, a Lumineth player who didn’t get in any games with their first book due to covid and plausibly barely got in a handful with their second book.

Frankly also a bleak visual of the FS range being just a homogenous mass of identical naked dwarves. Also a third Lumineth book in 2 years is so utterly stupid that it goes from being a bad joke back to being quite funny in its ridiculousness. “New Lumineth books will continue to be released until morale improves”.

I could see there being a bit of a blend in the Horns of Hashut. The more lightly armoured guys have the appearance of foundry menials, with leather aprons and weapons that appear to be repurposed tools. The more elite guys have actual weapons and armour that seems to signify some cultic association. It could be that there’s scope for human slaves/serfs to ‘move up’ from worker to auxiliary soldier. Or overseer. Possibly they’re meant to be the face of their unseen dark masters to the labouring masses, and so are given these bull-masks. Flails, scourges and flamethrowers seem like the kind of gear you’d use to put down a slave revolt. That being said, there’s no doubt in my mind whatever about their own personal buy-in to the cult of Hashut, they would definitely be considered utterly expendable by their chaos dwarf masters, whether as labour force middlemen or as scout auxiliaries/‘pioneer’ troops.

I’m not so sure, the hobgrots have a vaguely Near Eastern feel to my eyes, and the Horns of Hashut bull masks come off as having a fantasy Moloch/Caanan inspiration. I think whatever we get will be more subtle than previous versions but I have faith that there’ll be something of a Mesopotamian flavour.

Honestly those thicc helmets are the highlight of the preview for me, I just get such a brilliant 2000AD/80's British sci-fi vibe from them. These look like exactly the sort of devil-may-care sci-fi miners or oil rig dudes who'd lean into the whole ROCK AND STONE side of things, even more than the non-Necromundan squats. They're brilliant and I love them.

Love the gladiatorial stylings, very sword and sandals. The net, the spear with a built-in sword-breaker, the murmillo helmet, the mail sleeves... It's a brilliant sculpt, proper old school chaos. Doesn't quite work for me as, like, a class of dude or warrior though? As a one-off, as a weirdo veteran mutant who's master of Archaon's fighting pits, an infamous special character, sure. But feels like it suffers a little for being stretched out to a 'generic' type of character, like there's a whole class of relatively similar centaur mutants who are all associated with this gladiator feel and have a role in the legions of chaos. Just a bit too specific for something that, on it's own, is wonderfully characterful.