sandlemad

That's the main discussion because TGA is a forum which is overwhelmingly focused on competitive/tournament play over background/hobby/narrative stuff. I think some of the folks who really lose out with the scrapping of new free warscrolls and the deletion of all older ones are the casual newbies. People who aren't even at the stage of asking what army they should play (and being told buy 5 boxes of X and Y and nothing else, make sure you use only this competitive loadout) but who have bought or been gifted e.g. a random box of dudes and want to throw some dice around. Most other companies facilitate this better than GW. Maybe they move on to battletome and dropping £400 on an army but at that stage they're cut out almost entirely by this decision and I suspect they make up a larger customer base overall than hardcore competitive players, if in a sense a more ephemeral one. That's where accessibility comes in. Diversity too, in terms of who is being catered for.

It's true, that was their moment in the sun. They're still around in the background but they're not the focus. Regardless of how much they were taken up by the fanbase, it's probably also worth noting that they (along with terrain) were part of GW's experiment with manufacturing in China for cost reasons and to keep up a pace of some miniatures getting released with every new/updated tome. Given what the last year and a half have been like, that whole project might be dead.

It's not much but see the multipart gutrippas banner with a horned quaking mountain-breaking figure or the explicitly kruleboys-themed effigy on Kraggie's base. The Belcha-Banna too has Kragnos's horns, even if it's the same painted red metal, and lays out a hierarchy of Kragnos above the orks above the hobgrots. There's also the similarity between the broad silhouette of Kragnos's horns and those on many ork helmets, even if those are also call-backs to the old pre-Brian Nelson ork helmets. I completely agree that it is a minor note in the kruleboys aesthetic compared to the major notes of swamp/scrappy weapons/jagged spikes but my point is that it is clearly deliberate and made part of the plastic miniatures rather than purely being a background feature or a case of disparate factions being lumped together ten minutes before release; there's more tying them to the earthquake god than e.g. tying ironbreakers to black ark corsairs. It shows that GW wanted to make at least some connection in the miniatures between Kragnos and their new ork faction imitating him in their own ugly opportunistic way, showing that however appropriate Kragnos's position in Destruction is, it was part of his concept for quite a while in GW's design process. If he was ever associated with BoC, that idea was jettisoned pretty early on. This has been a real surprise, the amount of explicit references to Hashut lately in the background, here and in Soulbound. It's promising, suggests that even AoS-ified dawi zharr will have a fair bit of the old style coming through.

Yeah, it's fun to speculate about but really if there ever was a change from chaos/beastmen centaurpiece to destruction centaurpiece, it happened very early in the process. Way before the mini was sculpted, way before the concept sketches reached any coherence, way before the core idea was even finalised.

Honestly it's neck and neck between MSBG and WHU imo but with that "best-maintained" caveat, WHU is dragged under by being at the vanguard of GW eagerly adopting the shoddy business practices deployed by other games companies (rotations, pay2win, poor availability, pricey expansions, sharp feature bloat), all of which is even worse than MSBG's time in the wilderness. Love 'em both though. I think it can be understood as an extension of GW's age-old practice (sometimes cynically conscious, sometimes just how they do things) of ensuring products have some ability to lure at least some customers into bigger purchases, regardless of how it affects the larger player base. Almost no one will get e.g. cities of sigmar battletome so they can use auxiliaries in their stormcast force but there will still be the odd customer who'll think "I know a guy who will sell me his second hand phoenix guard and a helblaster, and the background is cool, maybe a small allied force wouldn't be such a bad idea, I can afford the thirty quid this month...". That snowballing is exactly what GW builds their strategies around, whether it's AoS/40k army to army, or Kill Team to 40k, or Warcry to AoS. Anyway dropping the free warscrolls, especially in their entirety today, is just rubbish behaviour and I wish they hadn't done it. It's also unfortunately the thing that negative press or even politely worded communications through the survey will sadly do absolutely nothing about. GW knows what they're doing and this is clearly driven by the app and WH+, which is a larger commercial concern and cannot be allowed to fail. This is a much bigger deal than however much ill will they generate, they're not turning around on this one.

Given that a chunk of the Kruleboys' aesthetic identity is intimately linked to him (and writ in plastic) and that he's central to the narrative development of Destruction that's at the core of AoS 3.0, no, probably not.

It has potential! Kind of a weird one because we have sort of two kinds of mutation here chaotic/warp-y mutation, giving us stuff like the grot scutterlings who arrive at their forms from living in the Silver Tower and being exposed to the energies of Tzeentch 'normal' mutations for Spiderfang characters, like the shaman on the araknarok spider growing four eyes, which could be either from worshipping the Spider God or from the sheer amount of weird venoms they consume. Same for the Spiker, dude's got three eyes and like four legs from doing so many Cave Drugs So what we might see is a blend of the two, where the particular hypothetical Warcry dudes are meant to be twisted because of the Varanite but then the same models wind up representing regular ol' greenskin mutants in AoS proper. Spiderfang really could do with a plastic Scuttleboss though. It'd make them a full plastic range and resin/metal really is not set up for spindly multi-legged minis like that giant spider.

Maybe this is a way to do something new-ish with the Spiderfang concept. Not chaos goblins or rebooting the regular spider riders kit or whatever but a Warcry warband which in AoS terms represents, like, an elite unit. An additional warscroll, as distinct from current spiderfang units as the Shadowstalkers are from witch elves. Mutants or spider-centaurs do seem fairly plausible. For Warcry that could be because they live under a mountain of Varanite but for AoS more generally it could be doubling down on the themes of the grot scuttlings, the gobblapalooza spiker, or the multi-eyed spiderfang shamans. Chosen of the Spidergod, etc.

I'd second/third the idea the chaos gods aren't really all that Lovecraftian. Big eldritch entities, yes, and GW have occasionally written them in ways that pull from Cthulhu et al. but they're not alien or unknowable in that chilly cosmic way. They're born out the drives/psychology/subconscious of mortals reflected in the warp/realm of chaos, making them something closer to actively malicious nightmares made real. They're quite un-alien and in a sense are intimately knowable because they're born out of us. They're also rigidly taxonomied because, y'know, gotta make those distinct factions. For something closer to cold, alien, entities in the vein of Lovecraft's old ones, I think you're better off looking to older portrayals of 40k C'tan. Maybe tyranids or the old ones/slaan if you're picking up some of Lovecraft's other stuff.

I dunno, there's different ways you can take it. When folks say they'd enjoy a more Lovecraftian feel to the idoneth I think they just mean an eerie alien feel, strange things rising from the stygian depths of the ocean on a stormy night. More Dagon than Cthulhu and more of an aesthetic than something actually tied into the cosmic horror/unknowable eldritch beings of Lovecraft's work. Honestly I feel like you can get about 80% of the way there with the right paintscheme. The 'Eavy Metal studio idoneth have a rather bright and vibrant tropical feel to them which doesn't exactly match that approach though. Something darker and older feeling would help.

One of the only concrete things we know about Malerion is that he made the Gladiatorium for Sigmar, where stormcast-in-training can be seemingly killed and return unharmed, and which he can spy on constantly. Seems like creepy megastructures might be his jam and Harrowdeep, an undersea "forgotten dungeon where darkness reigns supreme" could be one of his early works, so to speak. Something like the Gladiatorium's ability to return fallen fighters to 'life' might be relevant here too, where illusions and misdirection take the place of Shadespire's weird mirror-reality duplications. Could fill the same broad background pseudo-justification for some of the rules.

It's a funny one, feels like that low-level approach was the plan when Warcry was being designed, with its eight different warbands of random cultist mooks from the realms. The idea was clearly that these were a far cry from the chaos warriors and stormcast of the world, from distinct cultures (like Necromunda houses or Mordheim gangs) and fighting for scraps of territory, food, etc. I think they're still fantastical in a sword & sorcery sort of way, strong shades of Conan the Barbarian and certainly unique to the AoS brand with their realm-theming, but 'lower' fantasy than basically any random 2000pt battle or bit of battletome background. At some point though (I think well before launch, during the design process) GW clearly decided to open things up to include randos from the main factions. Not saying that was necessarily a bad or entirely unjustified - people want to play with the toys they already have - but it does highlight a shift away from that older idea where the gangs/warbands are 'low-level', specific to the location and at least partially distinct from the main AoS factions. And that's happened before; even Mordheim launched with mostly warbands from the WHFB Empire or which were semi-unique to the setting rather than "here's two high elf spearmen and a phoenix guard" before letting a broader range of stuff in down the line. Now, in 2021, it feels like new Kill Team is trying to have another crack at the idea but in reverse, where you start with a whole bunch of available factions but then gradually introduce KT-specific dudes like these veteran guardsman, new ork kommandoes, sisters-in-training, upgraded tau scouts. None of these are quite as low-level or unique to KT as e.g. a Goliath gang is to Necromunda or an Iron Golems warband is to Warcry but still. I do wonder if that's the kind of thing that could find its way back into Warcry. RE: customisation, that's really by design. Rules-wise, old Mordheim and modern Necromunda are just completely out of step with how GW proper makes its games nowadays. Hyper-customisation of fighters and gear, ultra detailed campaigns, very granular/'crunchy' rules for movement/combat/shooting and less for strategies/command points/high-level battle tactics, conversions/kitbashes not just encouraged but necessary, extreme jankiness... That's from a different era and flies in the opposite way to the design philosophy you see in 40k/AoS/Warcry/Kill Team. I wouldn't expect to see any of that come back except in very broad inspiration.

That leak also correctly predicted the existence and rules for the special Black Templars flamer that was previewed, and the semi-leaked primaris Helbrecht. Presumably in the next two days we'll also see if they were accurate about the other BT stuff too. There's a few rumour engines that look a bit dwarfy - the ones with the boots and the floating rocks, one very dwarfy hand holding some sort of power axe/cleaver - and especially this, which is pretty similar in its chunky coils to the old squat bikers.

Definitely full of it. Moreover, with the confirmation of a Sisters Novices vs Tau Pathfinders box for kill team, this pretty much solidifies the B&C rumours as cast-iron reliable re: 40k stuff for the near future. Roll on squats!

Like an understandably damp and put-out Uther.

Harrowdeep hell yeah. This looks good. Neither warband blow me away in the same fashion as Direchasm's Hedonites so I'd agree that the setting is the star but still, they're really quite good. If anything the Brian Froud/Jim Henson influence is even starker than before on e.g. the ork fighter and the gobbos. Looking forward to seeing what the story is with the new rules too and what will become of hunger/primacy/etc.

The flying beasts seem to be Tzeentch furies. Given that from earlier previews we know that Khorne also has his own red furies, it looks like each chaos god will get marked versions of them. That sort of applies to the others too, looks like Tzeentch is getting 'reskinned' warriors, forsaken and spawn, though maybe these will be shaken up a bit more by the time of release. I know the Khorne warriors have their own unique helmets, at least.

Damn, new stormcast preview in advance of GenCon. And they got Lil Nas X on board!😮

@Loyal Son of Khemri There's also some sort of horse-drawn cauldron/warshrine thing and a gunpowder missile unit with pavises. Looks dope.

Looks quite jagged and metallic, pretty distinct from a leaf design. Not much similarity to the woven crosshatch patterns we've seen on the existing Kurnothi.

Yeah, that sword at least has basically nothing in common with anything in the stormcast repertoire. Doesn't even match the two-handed swords we've seen the Thunderstrike crew wield, which I'd expect to feature in the new SC WHU force based on that little bit of art we've seen. It's really very, very soulblight on multiple counts. 'Perfume bottle' pommel, just like those on the Crimson Court, Blood Knights, Kritza, the blood-born and basically all the older vampire counts characters Bat/dragon wing flair on the scabbard, just like basically all new non-Vyrkos vampire minis have for their armour. The shoulderpad looks similary angular Sculpted dragons on the hilt, another classically vampire symbol The ridged grip is new and doesn't exactly match any existing vampire/Death two-handed swords, most of which have a single ridge half way along, but the size and overall shape are similar. The Bladegheist swords have ridges but they're in more of a spiral pattern. Given we just had a Soulblight warband for WHU, I'm expecting this to be part of a Soulblight Warcry force.

Still early-ish days but those leaks are looking increasingly solid in most particulars. And good catch re: this SC fighter.

Looks to me like a dude holding a lantern, one of the key motifs of the Black Templars. I’m thinking this might be a servitor or neophyte for them, maybe even part of the partially-leaked new Helbrecht mini with the big Katakros-style scenic base.

Cool. WHU is the one I'm most interested in but I guess we know what to expect: either a teaser with nothing more than the name of the new season, or possibly an actual/silhouetted preview of the new season box. Maybe we'll get a reasonable amount of detail given that we've seen already seen a member of Da Kunnin' Krew. Kill Team could be this rumoured sisters vs tau box and 40k will almost certainly be deets of the Black Templars. Dunno about Blood Bowl but Necromunda could be moving onto something like Ash Nomads now all the regular houses are done. Warcry though, that's a mysterious one. It's been very quiet on the Warcry front lately bar the (very decent) WHC articles so will be interesting to see what pans out.