sandlemad

Or only some elements - stone and air, maybe - will get attention and then the others appear in future releases. Fits the GW modus operandi and isn’t wildly dissimilar to Stormcast chambers.

It's not a huge surprise but very nice nonetheless, the knight is one of the best models of the last few years. Saves a few bob on even buying it alone on ebay.

I get it though? It's an odd thing to lead with. Not that it's out of bounds or doesn't fit but if you were launching a reboot of the old WHFB setting, it's weird for the first thing you show to be a human unit with magical weapons. Apart from Grail Knights, I can't think of any other examples of human units like that and only a handful of other units. If the point was to make this the semi-low fantasy, historically inspired, 'grounded' alternative to AoS (and I genuinely mean that in a neutral way), why start with these guys? Also weird for it to be Kislev! I love Kislev, Riders of the Dead is the best WHFB novel to my mind and I nearly started a Kislev-modded empire army back in 6th ed, but even as fan favourites they're surely pretty low down the totem pole. They're not even in the Total War games in any major way. Why start with them? Why not Empire or something? Only thing I can think of is that it's meant to indicate that the FW crew are going into the slightly more obscure and historically underrepresented aspects/parts of the background.

As I understand it he was considered difficult to work with, not a great manager, treated designers poorly, and was prone to throwing his weight around. In the context of IP this meant that if he didn't like it personally, it wouldn't go through (e.g. genestealer cults for years), which also caused a lot of headaches for folks working for FFG, BL and inside the studio. Supposedly he tried to have the 40k riptide shelved after it had been designed, at the last stage before it went into production, because he thought it was a bad idea. He was ignored and it went on to sell like gangbusters. A lot of this is really on the level of scuttlebutt but it does seem to be pretty widespread from folks who passed through Nottingham. More specifically he riled a lot of fans by saying that hobbyists' favourite activity was "buying things from Games Workshop", as opposed to painting or collecting or gaming (which neatly dovetailed with Kirby's "jewel-like objects of wonder" line). That was in the context of the GW vs Chapterhouse trial, where he made pretty big and ridiculous claims about the absolute originality of GW products and then after that all went south, was behind the defensive IP-led renaming of things like 'imperial guard' to 'astra militarum'. So while there's some fan grumbling and grudge holding, quite a few aspects of what people don't like about pre-Rountree GW as a workplace and as a company are linked to him.

I think so, yeah. I suspect it's more than just him but he was the one behind the 'no points' push of early AoS and "Top Boss who said he didn’t want a banana" sounds like Merrett's MO (e.g. blocking Genestealer Cults, 40k knights, etc). He's not thought of well by a lot of ex-GW people for a bunch of reasons and Hewitt wouldn't be the first to make the point that even though Kirby gets the blame, the bad culture of 'oldGW' wasn't just him.

https://www.goonhammer.com/the-goonhammer-interview-with-james-hewitt-part-1-age-of-sigmar-and-40k/ There's a good interview on Goonhammer with James M Hewitt of Needy Cat Games, possibly best known in the GW games community as the designer of the excellent Adeptus Titanicus rules. Here he talks about his experience working on the early releases for AoS. There's some fascinating stuff there, he's got a good bit of criticism as someone who has seen how the sausage gets made, even though you'd never characterise him as an AoS-hater or anything. On the 'funny rules' that accompanied the first warscrolls: On how the core rules were designed: On the assumptions behind the core rules only being four pages long: It's well worth reading the whole thing, dude's got some good thoughts on game design and interesting experiences.

Doesn't look very... flamey. Scions of the Flame doesn't seem impossible but I would have expected something on fire or with a burning brazier. Also Spire Tyrants aside, the Warcry warbands tend to avoid large scale explicit chaos iconography like this. Not Sons of Behamat, much too obviously chaotic, even if it was looted. Some new chaos thing certainly. It's pretty low-tech but I could see that working for some sort of traitor guardsman or mutant, maybe an expansion of the dudes they've put out for Blackstone Fortress.

There should be more about 4am GMT, probably relating to Warcry/Kill Team/Underworlds/etc. rather than mainline 40k/AoS.

Do we have any indication from Warhammer Weekly if these rumoured DoK minis are different to the Beastgrave warband we know is coming in the next while?

Even if there are more ridiculous monster armies, this is absolutely the correct attitude to have. "the fundamentally revolutionary character of Stegageddon" indeed.

I think what makes the Seraphon different is that they have both some original Slann with the relevant knowledge of the universe, not just Lustria, and are deeply conservative and backward looking. Skaven don't really do that, daemons live in something like an eternal present, and even folks like Nagash are hazy, or like the mortarchs who have questionable independence (which is an ambiguity I also find fascinating about them, that question of how much are they themselves and how much Nagash). With the Slann there's no mysterious waking up or reincarnating, they literally came to the realms, giving them a much straighter continuity. Moreover depending on the older background you read and what they do with Kroak now, some might not have even been native to the WH world in the first place, instead arriving with the old ones, making them impossibly more ancient than anyone else. The End Times weren;t the first apocalyptic disaster Kroak saw. There's also volume. Rather than just being a handful of lords or some elves basing their culture on what Teclis told them, they came to the realms in great artefact-ships from the world-that-was, as a large scale culture of who knows how many thousands of lizardmen in stasis. Granted most are going to be newly spawned but there's still a depth of connection there and a real ancientness. Combine that with their innate conservatism, how they want to make their bits of the realms like Lustria and some elements of them at least are the closest thing to direct large scale WH transplant to AoS, as opposed to a few scattered callbacks.

Tbh this seems like the seraphon have a much stronger continuity with the world-that-was than basically any other faction. Not completely unbroken but there's a solid cultural throughline. Gives them even more of an ancient resonance.

I'm here for burly, heavily armoured, hammer-wielding elves, their muscles as swole with ridculous gains as their minds are swole with the Zen-like mastery of Teclis's wisdom.

Some sort of geomancer hero then? Lifting themselves up on a column of earth?

Those helms look fantastic in profile. The models in general look fantastic in profile. A lot of great details too. I like how the champion has both his sword and his stowed lance. I like the aristocratic extended index finger on the sword as he signals the charge. Also the line "though formally centre-aligned between the Hyshian gods, a more militaristic, Tyrionic influence is clearly prevalent" is an interesting one, says quite a bit about the thinking going into these dudes. Apart from Teclis himself and maybe Eltharion, everything we've seen for the Lumineth is neither outright Tyrionic nor Teclisian.

Same, I can't think of an UW warband that isn't on par with or superior to their regular AoS infantry counterpart. Tbh in this case though something for bonesplitters would have been nice, I actually prefer the bird mask dude to the one on the cards. Stands out a lot more, really unexpected.

It’s a case of art being made early on, possibly at the concept stage for the minis. You’ll notice that the two handed mace is also shown on a Beastgrave card but in the hands of an ork with a full helm, more armour and no bird skull. Things change and similarities between art and models aren’t as tight for Underworlds as for main AoS because they use freelancers. This sort of difference has happened multiple times already. Hrothgorn, the gnoblars and his cat all appeared strikingly different from the models in some early cards. Best not get your hope up for more new orks. These are them.

I'd still be extremely leery of any reduction of her style to "oh she's a girl, their eyes are like that" when her work is still the result of a lot of effort and craft, there's male painters who work in that same style, and there's prominent female painters whose style is radically different. The chain of 'female painter doing excellent work -> ah, here's a biological reason based on her eyes' seems to me to be a drastic oversimplification of what makes a good painter and what goes into the development of a particular painterly aesthetic. Comes off as a very Just-So story kind of situation. It's also not something anyone would say about a male painter; 'he's a dude, so he can paint like that'.

Love her stuff, even when it's more slightly more toned down (like on night gobbos) it's still recognisably her work and so striking. Tbh I see a similarity between her work and Blanchitsu though. Even if they're polar opposites in terms of style, they're both wildly divergent from the standard semi-naturalistic way GW minis are generally painted in. This is a good spot, the slight curve to the protrusions of trim isn't entirely unprecedented in chaos but combined with the other Evil Sun stuff and the vaguely eastern aesthetic, there's something here. Roll on sun-worshipping steppe gobbos!

Yeah, it's Lumineth. They've teased stuff only a week or two before release in the past and even teased stuff more obviously tied to an already-known release than this, e.g. a lot of the 40k chaos stuff.

Those are some pretty long spears. Cool. Nice as well to see some more of the eastern influence there through the mandalas.

Beyond the AoS/WHFB side of things, it’s worth remembering that Total War games in general have one of the least pleasant and most toxic fanbases around. You’d see a lot of the same behaviours around the historical games: all the petulance and small scale point scoring of folks who know just enough popular history to be irritating combined the broader immaturity and narcissism of self-identified capital-G Gamers.

You: a dwarf, ugly beard, clumsy, swinging a hammer with your hands unstylishly Me: an elf, perfect hair, graceful, elegantly launching hammers from a catapult

I think hammers could work, do them right and they're suitabbly elvish. Axes were hardly a big part of the old High Elf aesthetic but a semi-barbarous take on them with the White Lions worked and still emphasised skill and a certain elegance. In the same vein the dude behind the Dresden Codak webcomic did some sketches of a young Galadriel from LotR wielding a hammer to represent the Noldorian elves' background as craftspeople and blacksmiths. Always thought that looked pretty badass. Making these hammer wielders something like adherents of Vaul (or an AoS recreation of him) would work or make something about how their use of aetherquartz/earth magic means they can wield a colossal hammer with all the grace of a human with a rapier. Give them suitable poses and it could be cool. That being said, the hafts really are spindly. They could be hammers-as-weapons but then they run the risk of looking like comical Harley Quinn-style carnival mallets. As banner toppers though they seem kind of plain and weirdly proportioned as well; I'm struggling to imagine a banner or totem that looks good with a big mallet on top. Some sort of semi-ceremonial hammer-stave for a priest or wizard-type dude would still look a bit odd but might make more sense.

The knights had a sort of slow-grow situation, starting from a codex with one kit and two units/warscrolls/datasheets, moving to an updated kit with five warscrolls in a new codex, and now have a codex with 3-4 kits and ten warscolls. And a sizeable chaos equivalent with an additional kit and two more builds. In that, they followed GW's changing feelings about the viability of a faction built around big guys, from initial caution (a bunch of the model options were left on the table and according to Jes Goodwin then put into development literally weeks after the first IK release, when they saw how good the sales numbers were) to making it a fairly fully fledged faction. Sons of Behemat would not necessarily be starting from a standing position of one kit. To a degree imperial knights have set out the path and proven that big dude armies of a handful of units can work. I wouldn't go in expecting loads of new boxes and I doubt they'd have the same appeal as knights do in 40k but maybe two new kits with multiple builds and a battletome of 5-6 warscrolls . Doesn't seem too much to expect.