sandlemad

Yes, this. A pretty common refrain in 40k circles has been how much creativity has gone into AoS releases vs 40k being marines, marines and more marines, often even just “here’s another bolter-wielding primaris infantry unit that isn’t meaningfully distinguished from its 2-3 predecessors”. Or put Broken Realms against any Psychic Awakening book. Other GW stuff aside, AoS is well served in terms of release quantity and quality.

Small touch but knowing that the gluttonous dude is a sorcerer character is cool. Nice to see some variety there.

Nordic undead whalers would be so incredible that if we don’t get that, I’ve already set myself up for disappointment. On the one hand a draugr “zombies but bigger and better and trademarkable” is a very GW approach. On the other hand, isn’t that already what they did for skellingtons with the Ossiarchs?

Looks like some solar imagery on those Lumineth. Love the cool eastern looking mace and having a cloud-riding whoever is rad. That Slaanesh palanquin is great, easily twice as much creativity and good design work in that one kit as most 40k stuff of the last year. The flunkeys, the pose of the dudes pulling it, that brilliant mask-helm of the big guy on the right. Just fantastic.

I cannot conceive of getting annoyed about - or taking seriously or even getting paranoid about - a best mini of the year contest run by a miniature manufacturer and put open to that miniature manufacturer’s fanbase. The idea is absurd, you do yourself a disservice by taking it seriously. It’s like getting het up about the Goodreads awards. I know we’re between rumours/previews and folks need to speak about something but it’s not worth it.

The riders are incredible. As big a jump between the helstriders/daemonettes and them as between the demigryph knights and the gryph-chargers. Dynamic and incredible detail. Sad there’s no vampires but oh well, these models are great and there’s no point getting too fussed on xmas.

I think that's similar to various bits of Death armour, if not exactly the same as that used on the Black Knights, Wight King and various vampires. Probably something mounted.

Could be but at this stage there’s too much other Death-related stuff in the rumour engines to be entirely reducible to a single warband. Ragged banners, gothic weapons besides the clearly vampiric ones, Hammer horror critters, that one non-rumour engine preview pic with Johann and a zombie. The WHU warband might the only (or most prominent) Soulblight element but there’s more going on than that for Death.

Quite apart from the complexities of list building in AoS vs 40k, it's wild that GW could take something like Azyr in-house and do well, and then only a few years later do such a embarrassingly amateurish job with the 40k equivalent. The technical gulf is huge, goes way beyond things intrinsic to either game system.

Could be an actual new Fell Bat, could be an AoS spiritual successor to Fell Bats, could be a vampiric familiar, could be a beast mode vampire though it's maybe a little on the small side for that. The pose is rather odd, hard to figure out the exact anatomy from it, but it does presage Soulblight. I feel at this stage there's probably enough rumour engine pics and other stuff to suggest an updated LoN/combined vampires + lesser undead AoS army as well as 3-4 fighters for a WHU warband.

Might be a Scion but I’d be leaning more towards a vampire rapier and dagger pair. The Scion’s shtick with those commando daggers is WWII special ops, which doesn’t make me think of fingering the guard like this.

Apart from it being in resin, I think the Slann is practically a perfect model. Great pose, great concept, great detail... I wouldn't want them to change a thing for the eventual plastic conversion, other than maybe let it be built with a slightly different pose or skink attendant or details. There's easily half a dozen lizardmen kits that are in much more desperate need of a remake - saurus, saurus knights, temple guard (less so but still), saurus characters, skink handled monsters, chameleon skinks, kroxigors - which to my mind make them about as desperate for an update as skaven.

It limits the poses but the way they sculpted the shoulder joins on the ogres/ironguts/leadbelchers was amazing for the time and still looks good.

Actually they’re older. Ogres were released in 6th edition, 2005, then the freeguild spearman/halberdiers/swordsmen, handgunners/crossbowmen and I think pistoliers/outriders came out in late 2006 with the 7th ed. empire release. Demigryph knights were then 8th ed. in 2012. They have a particular style and have been technically outpaced by a lot of AoS models but I think even the 7th ed. stuff holds up decently. That said the identity of CoS is a rather different and less obviously cohesive one to Mawtribes so I could get why GW might not necessarily take the dual box route, though I would not say kit age is a factor. Only two years ago they were including the 20+ year old vyper kit in a dual eldar/marine box with exclusive characters.

Cool idea. Having at least a handful of cowed, anaemic mortal followers has always been a cool angle to warhammer vampires in the background, though seldom represented on the tabletop. It wouldn't fit with Nighthaunt, FEC or Ossiarchs (or Chaos or Destruction really) but with a vampire-centric faction there's more room as they both offer a little potential for deviation from Nagash's grand plan and because they're intimately connected to a living underclass in a way that the others are not. Freeguild rules would certainly work well to represent some beaten-down Shyshian serfs roped into battle by their soulblight masters

Interesting, this one's sort of tucked around the side rather than right at the front like on the Black Knights but this is the sort of connection GW sculptors like to make. It does suggest undead and quite possibly something Deathrattle-inspired.

They're losing out to more than competitors, they're even losing out to their own business partners, really. Creative Assembly improved on old designs for minotaurs, carnosaurs, marauders and OOP units for Total War: Warhammer, fans edit the digital models and print them themselves because they're so, so much better than the designs GW still sells. It's not large scale stuff but it's wild to see them leave money on the table and be so outflanked.

It's a pretty big banner and ragged in a way that makes me think 'Death'. The wholes are similar to some of those on Nighthaunt and Ossiarch models, like fabric worn thin rather than torn and shredded. RE: Lost Kingdom models: the top guys are a bit covered in armourial cruft, a bit like the worse excesses of 5th/6th ed. space marine models, but the pegasi and questing knights are fantastic, love all the travelling gear piled up behind the saddle. I also enjoy the Gallic passion the musicians are giving to their craft even in a headlong charge. Their Chaos Dwarfs, Lizardmen and Tomb Kings ranges are spectacular however, much better composed use of high levels of detail for stuff like scales and stonework.

Yeah this is a very mundane hammer by AoS standards. I could believe this belonged to a witch hunter's henchman. Puts some of the previous pistol rumour engine pics in a new light.

One of the caveats there though is that no one who buys e.g. a recast Marienburg Landship or Tamurkhan or various 30k bits or any other of their many, many discontinued products is stealing from those artists. They can't buy these squatted kits officially, why not buy them from a recaster? More generally I really can't imagine the impact from recasters is anything close to the impact of the disastrous mismanagement, poor organisation, and lack of support (in rules but even in marketing) around FW in general and AoS FW specifically.

That was the way my mind was going as well but that the crow has the same style of ruins as the weird and vaguely wolf-like feet pic complicates things. The rat though could be a fake-out. As much as there is some connection between vampires and vermin, that might be intruding on the skaven design space so it could still be Cawdor and have no connection to the crow. A neat trick, two animals with keys but not actually from the same range.

Yeah I know, it ruled. (It did rule but more seriously Nagash hasn't really been obviously doing much himself throughout 2nd ed. after all the Necroquake stuff around Malign Portents. By and large it's been his proxies in the form of Lady Olynder and Katakros acting as the movers and shakers in stuff like Forbidden Power or Wrath of the Everchosen. That's partly a function of them being the new hotness of course and it's perhaps appropriate that Nagash is more of a distant "grand plan" figure but it's surprising how little a direct part he's played since Malign Portents.) That said I am very onboard with skaven as a grand out-of-left-field big Thing, not least because it offers Nagash even more OTT "curse those vile rodents!!!" moments.

That wouldn't surprise me. Since before AoS there's been a ceding of the design/aesthetic space for fleshy/rotting undead to Nurgle (which also saw an increase in tentacles and fungus to distinguish them from undead), and an increased focus on bones and ghosts, and ghouls to a lesser degree. New Deadwalkers or combined Soulblight and Deadwalkers or whatever is GW's chance to reorient the fleshy undead space away from the cues that have been fleshed out (haha) recently with Nurgle - growth, disease, pustules, bloat, feverish life that should be alive, plants, tattered armour and chainmail - in favour of... well, it's not clear but actual ruin and maybe the construct element, i.e. here are zombies that have to have stuff strapped to them so they can walk straight and fight. Bits of wood combined into stuff like the Necrofex Colossus or the Corpse Cart. A slightly more grounded, mundane, gothic peasant feel than what you get with Nurgle.

Nothing makes relations between dwarves and elves look sunny and well-meaning more than relations between elves and other elves.

To my mind that bottle-hanging apparatus looks a little similar to the prodder we saw in November. Similar janky nails and such.