sandlemad

Likewise, I was looking at it like Gorechosen, some decent models with the game as an afterthought but having watched that, the deckbuilding side of things actually seems surprisingly fun! I was afraid it was going to be simplistic in the extreme but combos like the thunder cloud and charging with a souped-up Oberyn are pretty neat.

I guess those prices make sense but they don't seem to address the underlying ridiculous costs for some. The Daughters of Khaine set, for example, saves you a lot over buying the witch elves and cauldron separately but you're still paying more for a single 10-man unit and a hero platform than for almost any start collecting box. I like the spider one though. Two of those and you've basically got a 1000 pt army for less than most equivalents.

Speaking of novels, an extract of Eight Lamentations: Spear of Shadows is downloadable on the BL website. Get a look at Grungni in his forge.

Dual kit: one Vulkite Chariot bearing 3 ferocious berzerkers with fyrejavelins or one Zharrgrim Chariot bearing a Lodge-Priestess of Valaya singing the Runesong, 20" buff of some sort. It writes itself, GW gimme a job. But, uh, back to rumours. Four mournfangs in the SC box is killer if true, gets you the big beastie for £10 at GW retail price. How many magmadroths do people typically run with? The SC Seraphon is decent even if you get more than one because it lets you pad out common units, get further non-duplicate heroes and the troglodon isn't bad. Besides getting affordable vulkites/hearthguard, would further magmadroths with characters be useful?

How about a sturdy dwarven chariot pulled by a (pair of?) mini-magmadroth or some other sort of volcanic-reptile? Heavy iron, lots of runes, flaming torches, not that fast but will wreck face when it hits. A driver and 1/2 fyreslayers hurling javelins like the runeson. Fits with the Hellenic/Wagnerian naked hero feel the fyreslayers have.

The carnosaur seems like a bit of a different case. It was released 8 years ago and has probably made its development costs back so it's less of a 'hit' to include it in an SC box for a refurbished faction than to include a year and a half-old centrepiece model like the magmadroth, even if the similarity of costs makes it seem feasible. I'm not saying this is guaranteed to dictate GW's approach but it's a slightly different situation and the carnosaur/lizardmen SC box isn't a perfect comparison. I wouldn't be too surprised if the magmadroth didn't make an appearance.

I've been waiting for a beastclaw SC box literally since they came out, excellent. Would be very surprising if it contained anything other than a big beast and 2 mournfangs.

Is there any particular book/story you'd recommend reading to get some lead-in/background on this? Already read the Black Rift of Klaxus books and Nagash: the Undying King is a little out of my reach...

Huh, along with the skeleton repackage. Could we perhaps be seeing a handful of round-base AoS repackages without any accompanying battletome? Maybe to tide us over during the early days of the new 40k 8th ed release.

I think generalising a shift from sword-and-sorcery to a more historical look for all armies isn't really supportable. For the Empire (and Bretonnia), have to agree with Double Misfire that they were peak-historical in 4th/5th ed. and were progressivley fantasy-ised in 6th-8th ed. For Bretonnia this involved adding reliquaries and such, while for the Empire they had more griffons, more pointy noses, more skulls, more Blanche on the armour plates. This didn't really make them Conan-style sword and sorcery though. For Chaos, it's tricky. Those wonderful Liber Chaotica designs weren't isolated though, they were all over the BL and 6th/7th ed. army book art and fit perfectly with the Norscan/Kurgan barbarian look, not the earlier 4th/5th ed or earlier styles. You have absolutely correctly identified that these are only truly coming through in the models now (though the fur around the shoulders became omnipresent in 6th ed.) but I think another explanation for this would be that a lot of these elements are god-specific and until now there was minimal capacity for creating lots of god-specific miniatures. Chaos warriors, marauders, even the warshrine to a degree all had to cater for four relatively distinct looks and so were 'watered-down' somewhat in the production. There's also a technological issue; a lot of the mutated designs in the Liber Chaotica art just wouldn't work on minis until now, think of the awful plastic mutation sprue. GW is clearly going back to these designs (along with some much earlier stuff for Tzeentch and Nurgle in particular), I agree, but these are designs from 6th/7th edition that just never found their way into sculpted work. For skellies, I whole-heartedly agree with the move to a sword-and-sorcery look, if we're thinking of sword-and-sorcery as a 1930's Conan style. I would caveat that though by saying that this look was already present in the 8th ed. plastics. There's a particular lineage going on, where the plastic grave guard/black knights/wight king/skellies draw inspiration from the older metal mounted wight king and a few others. They tend towards a sort of mish-mash 1930's iron age cairn-dwellers look, exactly the kind of guys Conan would've cut in two. I'm not sure there's a name for this visual style but it's definitely distinct from the old vampiric dragonwing stuff and, as you put across in your other post, the bony VC/TK fusion elements that Nagash and the undead aristocracy have.

Some primo skellies, very spooky. Nothing wildly unexpected but good and dynamic, and with that sword-and-sorcery look. In the old WHFB background they used the idea of the pre-Sigmar iron-age inhabitants of the Empire to justify the unified aesthetic of their skeletons being cairn burials and similar. It's a great look. EDIT: You know what I really like the designers' notes on these guys. Bizarrely it makes them more relatable than inhuman stormcast or half-mad reavers; just some hard-working skellies, outclassed physically, needing to keep their wits about them in an arena of monsters and superhumans.

Prices for this dude on ebay are frightful, he's a model I sorely wish I hadn't missed during the old WHFB clearout. Maybe the exisiting scourge privateers could represent the 'public face' of this new faction? Sea dragon cloaks aren't that creepy and we know they show up in the Hammerhal docks. Possibly they're outriders or envoys for the really weird lamprey/nautilus related guys. That said it may well turn out that this is like the Kharadron and the existing gyrocopters/engineers, where the old models are not part of a new faction but rather a conceptual 'ancestor' for something fresh.

More and better Kharadron images from WD on Atia's blog: https://war-of-sigmar.herokuapp.com/bloggings/1844 Looking increasingly likely that those tentacles are some sort of sky-kraken rather than anything cthulhu-elf-related. Grundcorps is about the funniest name GW's come up with for anything.

*throws up a little*

So the music in the video is just perfect. Soaring, romantic, proper stirring sky-pirate stuff, makes you think about swing through the rigging and aim at the horizon. On the whole, not just steampunk but vaguely Miyazaki-esque in certain ways. Not quite my cup of tea but very nice, definitely a lot of character with the brass and leather, and details like the robo-parrot. Background-wise, I'm hoping that these guys are ruthless piratical hyper-capitalists, like 19th century industrialist barons or the East India Company. All about that gold. Order, and not psychopaths, but not by any means pleasant. EDIT: Anyone thing we'll get the gyrocopter/gyrobomber shanghaied into the new faction? Nothing in the new range has the same kind of rotors but the pilots have the same leather jacket kind of aesthetic as some of the new guys.

Those are some good designs for Hammerhal, some good work by (I think) Dave Gallagher, very old world looking. Makes me think of Piranesi's carceri etchings.

Slambo's a rad name but yeah, out of nowhere. Isn't he a bit of an End Times meme character in certain online circles though? Might be a response from an increasingly aware GW or someone's being gently wound up... Never noticed but it's pretty apparent that this dude (an old enough model himself) is a remake of Slambo. The helm, the axes, the cuirass, the rondels.

I guess it probably depends on stock and sales of the overall line. The Start Collecting box with the newest models is the Deathwatch one that came out after christmas and there was talk that this was down to Deathwatch being a big seller in 2016. It may be that they don't have a huge stock of fyreslayers, bonesplitters or beastclaw to offload, and their sales don't justify pushing an SC box. Yet. Maybe it's down to having a sufficient range of plastic models to pack a £50 out? I would love a Beastclaw SC box with 4 mournfang riders and a stonehorn - fits with the others in terms of price and savings - but not sure if it would happen.

That is an extremely skeptical and aristocratic looking bird-monster. It's wonderfully ungainly, got a real Blanchian look to it, loads of character. I love it for its weirdness. Looks like a different breed from the normal cavalry unit's mounts though, larger and lankier.

They're all pretty much identical to current heroes... The nurgle guy looks like he's based off of the foremost blightking here, right down to the spikes on his pauldron. We only get a glimpse of the guy just above him fighting the fleetmaster but based on the naked back and the curved shield, looks like he may be a Kairic acolyte.

Ooh. There are two different size of the image, if anyone's poring over them, with slightly differing coverage. One in the article, one on the main WHC page. Looks like the Lord Castelant, Loremaster, Black Ark Fleetmaster and Cogsmith are down as heroes. They look to be fighting a blightking on the left but you can also see the head of a chaos sorceror lord's staff on the far right. Not sure who the guy just to right of the fleetmaster is... red armour and a two-handed axe might mean a slaughterpriest.

Gotta be honest though, Exoatl would be a far better name for former lizardmen than Seraphon.