sandlemad

That's true... and that one piece of art does also show sky-seaweed. So maybe Grotbag Scuttlers are back on the menu.

It's definitely lashed together rather roughly and in a similar manner to that last bit of wreckage. For that one I thought 'grotbag scuttlers' but this visibly has seaweed and barnacles, strongly suggesting a maritime sort of feel. So... sea grots? Zombie pirates? Hard to imagine Idoneth doing anything like this.

I mean I know there's the whole issue of how to write a genius-level strategist character without actually being a genius-level strategist, which is the constant plague of GW background (and a lot of other fiction, in fairness) but... tricking Sigmar into throwing his hammer into a warp-rift isn't really a masterstroke, more an indictment of Sigmar/the writing. RE: Katakros invading the Eightpoints, isn't part of the matter that Archaon is seldom there, instead being off razing continents? I can easily see a scenario where much is made by the writers of Katakros leading his mass invasion, laying siege to the Varanspire, only to have the real crux of the moment be when Archaon returns to his castle.

Soooo the twitch preview of the Slaves to Darkness battletome just mentioned that each of the four StD subfactions has an associated short story written by none other than Aaron Dempski-Bowden, presumably on the model of the Josh Reynolds stories in the Cities of Sigmar battletome.🙂 I think this is his first AoS stuff but considering he 'gets' chaos so well... I'm excited. Some other notes from twitch: - Warcry warbands not battleline as they're not the majority of the hordes compared to the undifferentiated marauders/warriors, they're still fighting for their place - Archaon has rend -2 - Meant to be varied, could be Archaon, a gaunt summoner and nine varanguard (roughly 2000pts apparently, implying points changes), or like 200 marauders - Varanguard can now pick a mark and be included in Blades of Khorne, etc - Mindstealer Sphyrinx originally from Hysh - Idea was that these new Warcry monsters would fit better into StD whereas things like the cockatrice fit better with Beasts of chaos. If it's in the dark forests, it's with BoC, if it's lurking around the Eightpoints, it's with the StD - Despoilers: all about the gribblies. Daemon princes, spawn, monsters, "poor old Belakor" - Background pulls a lot on old WHFB background, "a love letter to the old Warriors of Chaos and Hordes of Chaos, and right back to the old Realms of Chaos books", "30-odd years of lads in big armour going around and smashing the good guys". Focus is mainly on the path to glory, the road of the champion, as the defining 'thing' of the battle tome. Different directions a champion can go in though, unlike the one-track Maggotkin/Hedonites/etc, so while the champions in an army might still be jostling for position, there's room for more differences, e.g. different gods. - By that same token, the aura mechanic is meant to put the focus on warbands, i.e. here is a champion devoted to this god, their aura will help 'their warriors', the followers who swirl around them and share their mark. A StD army is a mix of these smaller clusters of units/heroes, makes for a lot of synergy and layering up of buffs. - Tried to make sure that StD would integrate with the monogod forces, ruleswise. Even within StD, idea is to be comparable with Cities of Sigmar in that there's supposed to be many varied builds. - Difference between chaos in Aos vs 40k? Idea is that in 40k chaos has always lurked in the EoT, sort of in the margins, denied by the imperium, until the great rift. In AoS, chaos won. They were the normal for centuries, even now push far enough from the fortified cities of order and you'll encounter them. If you were one of the uncounted tribes who were effectively abandoned by Sigmar, why not turn to these gods? You would then be in the effective majority, making a reasonable response to living in the mortal realms.

I think it means slotting the StD units into an existing Blades of Khorne/Maggotkin/Hedonites/Disciples army alongside all their god-specific units vs. taking an entirely StD force and using the allegiance abilities, etc, from those battletomes as you like. Ruleswise it's the same thing but from a marketing or army management POV, i.e. what can you buy, what can you do with these models, I can see how GW wants to make the difference clear. It's answering two different questions really: "can I add these to my existing monogod battletome force?" and "Can I run a fully StD force that uses monogod allegiance abilties?" It's also cool to see that with the Auras, Marks now give StD heroes something more than a keyword change/occasional stat boost.

Cool to see how these four subfactions - Ravagers, Cabalists, Despoilers, Everchosen - seem to represent four broad archtypes rather than four specific in-universe legions/bodies. It's an interesting approach and one that keeps the background pretty open and appropriately... chaotic.

Pretty sure they're also mentioned in the core book, I think in the map of Chamon or Aqshy?

That's the thing though, they can make flexible kits. I think the current approach is perfectly fine for Underworlds and tbh most line infantry for AoS/40k but kits like the Necromunda gang boxes have a lot of versatility in loadout and personality, even with some duplication of broad poses (some are better than others). They don't have absolutely everything you might need for a campaign and the amount of suitable gear can be out of sync with what a player might prefer to use but they're wonderful kits. Now imagine a 10-person set of Mordheim mercenaries done in the same fashion. 5 broad body types, 20 heads (some plausibly Middenheim or Reiklander, etc), a mix of armour plates, half a dozen swords, the same for axes and daggers, maybe four spears/halberd/greatswords, some crossbows and blunderbusses, a pistol or three, a flaming torch... Just like the old Free Company kit, only better.

Can you imagine... Mordheim where warband members are locked into particular weapon loadouts. Where only your leader can advance or change. Where the rules don't incentivise OTT complexity and ludicrous nonsense. Warcry and Kill Team are fun for what they are and Underworlds is fantastic but they're very, very different beasts. The Dave Gallagher art for Shadows Over Hammerhal shows they could still handle the aesthetics, more or less. I think Specialist Games could do it. Modern Necromunda keeps a lot of the old spirit of the game, right down to the frequently haphazard and sloppily written rules. Otherwise, yes, it would be a curse.

That would be insanely good but unfortunately I think the philosophy behind Mordheim's rules is pretty alien to modern GW games with the exception of Necromunda. I'd love it but seeing Mordheim with a clean, simplified ruleset would not be pleasant.

I mean the grain on the wood, the detail of the feathers or the fish scales, the rippled edges to the pauldrons, those aren't mistakes or accidental by-products "left by the hand sculpting", they're deliberate choices by the sculptor. How appropriate or attractive you feel this is is going to be down to personal preference but I can't think of a single GW plastic miniature that has that level of fine detail, 3D sculpted or otherwise. That's not to say there aren't tons of great GW minis with striking design and good aesthethics, some of which even surpass their FW equivalents because of that, but this kind of very intricate detail just isn't a feature in the plastic sculptor's arsenal. At its best, that's one of resin's strengths.

GW's plastic has come on a lot but anyone who thinks that it's superior in terms of detail is way off. Whatever about material cost or casting quality, you're just not going to get fine work like below on a plastic miniature. Or even contrast the fur on the old ogre rhinoxen with basically any GW fur. Not every FW model reaches this kind of detail (e.g. a lot of the dreadful heresy space wolves range) but at its best it reaches heights GW can't touch.

Alright, let me hit you with this: it's the end of a giant piston, mounted on the bottom of a grotbag scuttler airship and meant to slam into the ground, crushing anything below in a fit of insane goblin engineering, the eventual descendant of the piston tech that ran the old snotling pump wagons. Like that big piston tank Mace Windu fought in the Star Wars cartoon: (I may not be entirely serious about this theory, while still loving the idea of cackling goblins deploying this to pulp a stormcast champion directly into the earth)

A gargant or some other big chap seems plausible... but the obvious conclusion is that this is ballast for a grotbag scuttler sky-galleon.

Where was this promised? And why not just shift to 40k, even with AoS's growth in the last ffew years I suspect it's still got a larger play group overall. Or was it just someone locally said this to you?

I'm not sure about need, the 30k knight list was pretty interesting even before they had those, but it could certainly benefit from them. Those could be armiger-sized things or yeah, elves on something like discs of Tzeentch swooping around their giant friends casting spells and linking rituals.

How about an army of stern civilised Hyshian giants that can channel beams of light, giving them a powerful shooting attack? Maybe they can somehow link beams like the old eldar Fire Prism in 40k, fitting into the whole elaborate ritualistic approach of Hysh and making their gameplay about manoeuvre and a specific form of synergy. This is completely spitballing ideas of course and there's no reason to believe GW will take this approach but the point is that there's nothing inherent about an army of half a dozen models - even if they're coming from maybe three fairly customisable kits and getting less attention than imperial knights - that precludes interesting mechanics and creative design, shooting-oriented or otherwise. I am also perfectly willing to admit that this idea came from the spectacle of the Tomb Kings Hierotitan in TW: WH2 (their focus on light and Egyptian aesthetic was always similar to that of Hysh in WHFB and even AoS) striding across the battlefield and just vaporising fools with its eye-lasers.

Surely this is the key thing though, that there were folks who weren’t interested in AoS and hadn’t become interested in it in several years. You’re losing nothing by them actually having a game to play. What’s the alternative here? They weren’t going to play AoS with you. Why is it such a problem/existential threat that they are playing a game instead of sitting at home or doing other things? If current AoS players start playing a little WHFB, they’re not going to throw away their AoS stuff, any more than players who dip into specialist games or Underworlds or similar.

A combination of a high price, models that could not be used in other games/systems at all (hence the emphasis on more recent boxed games having rules or being suitable for AoS/40k), and inflated stock buoyed up on the success of the new Space Hulk released the previous year. SH did sell out rapidly and Dreadfleet numbers unwisely took that into account. It didn't sell out and eventually all unsold copies in GW stores were recalled and its memory more or less buried.

You don't even have to go that far back, you can look at how badly Dreadfleet flopped in 2011. Almost all of GW's business practices for non-core games (Underworlds, Warcry, Blackstone Fortress, etc) can be traced back to a desperate concern not to repeat that. Same applies for their army boxes.

****** GW, why are they releasing Skirmish? They’re only going to split the fan base and start a civil war. AoS is doomed. ****** GW, why are they releasing Underworlds? They’re only going to split the fan base and start a civil war. AoS is doomed. ****** GW, why are they releasing Warcry? They’re only going to split the fan base and start a civil war. AoS is doomed.

I’d really love this, a 28mm mass battle game like the old Warmaster, written with the elegance of AT. I’d actually pick that up, unlike a new WHFB, especially if new WHFB is just a slightly tidied up version of the dreadful 8th ed ruleset. Sticking with that over, say, the cleaner 6th edition rules seems to have hit 9th Age hard from the get go. That said it feels unlikely, just in a preliminary sense. They’re talking about square bases and using the old branding so I would suspect whatever they go with will be closer to WHFB.

You're doing exactly what I said though, wild catastrophising based on almost nothing. This 'civil war' is indistinguishable from that. 30k didn't cannibalise 40k, it offered a game system for folks who weren't interested in the worst excesses of 7th edition, when GW was at its worst, and now even in its reduced state it's another game for folks who aren't pushed about the 8th edition scene. It's both different crowds and people who play both. I almost exclusively play UW and specialist games over AoS nowadays because of time constraints and a preference for smaller games. If those games weren't there, I wouldn't suddenly start buying more AoS, I'd just play/buy less overall. Anyone who is rejoicing over WHFB's return is either someone who wasn't already playing AoS or someone who is playing AoS but also wants a ranked battle game for their old (possibly not viable for matched play) collection.

That's the thing isn't it, it's years away and we have so little information, yet we have multiple people absolutely losing their minds that GW is releasing a game that isn't specifically for them and/or earnestly proclaiming that AoS is being cancelled/squatted because of it. It's a replication of the worst behaviours of the end times and AoS launch.

I could have said the same about Beastmen. Dumb concept, bad models, uninteresting army, every person-hour spend on it could have been better spent on ogres/factions//Underworlds/things that I personally like. Clogged up the schedule, split the resources, delayed Actually Good things. You could do the same with a myopic 40k player bemoaning why there's these worthless AoS releases delaying stuff that they want (god knows you can see that online anywhere else). Or a KO player incensed that other people get other things. Or all these other UW warbands pushing back my precious, precious ogre hunter and cats. But it doesn't work like that and basic decency demands that we accept that not every release is going to be something we personally want, while also accepting that there probably are other folks who do want it.