sandlemad

I’d be sorry to see some of the units go but it would purely be from a thematic and variation basis. The yhetees and gorgers really are some of the ugliest models around. They were early 90s-looking when they were released. I’d like to see new yhetees but i’m not holding my breath. Gorgers on the other hand don’t really feel like they offer as much when pulled out of the WHFB context of the mountains of mourne. And for the sabretusks, all they need to do is release the fenrisian wolves kit in AoS packaging and call the warscroll “Frostsnarl Lopers” or whatever garbage name they go with. Hardly anyone uses the cat models as cats because they’re ugly and ludicrously expensive for what they are. Just go with existing plastics and make a note in the background that “some hunters are accompanied by great tusked mountain cats while others tame silent-running wolves” to leave it obviously open to existing players. The butcher also really needs an update but the hunter, the fire belly, and the man eaters are all excellent models.

As expected, a focus on the boxed games. That's minimum two rumour engines solved, the Kurnothi hunting horn and the ungor spear. I like the variation in ungor body types, some have pot bellies, some are buff. The Kurnothi are interesting, though it's hard for me to look at their legs/poses and not find them a little wonky. Wild Hunt themed elves (or elvish creatures) feel like they have some room to grow. I suppose they could carry over the old Wild Riders but as bsharitt said, there's no gurantee considering previous examples (gyrocopters/kharadron, scourge privateers/idoneth, slayers/fyreslayers). More importantly though, how about those Blood Bowl lizardmen. The saurus are wearing mouthguards! And look how cute the skinks are!

Beastgrave and Warcry seem pretty plausible for GenCon, more so than AoS. Their focus last year was on licensed games and the non-core stuff, namely Lord of the Rings and Adeptus Titanicus.

That looks pretty Hyshite, the candles make it like the old empire light wizards and the rays make it seem like the Cypher Lords' headdresses. I think this could plausibly be associated with Light Elves. Anyone want to have a crack at the runes? I see three elven looking runes, I start thinking Tyrion, Teclis and Hysh itself, though I can't quite get them to match any existing high elf examples even as closely as the Idoneth rune matches nastirr.

The similarity in style certainly isn't an indicator that it's one of the katophranes, just that it's exactly the same kind of icon/visual element as was used for both Shadespire and Nightvault. I would be very surprised if this isn't what we'll see on the cover of the Beastgrave rulebook or on the generic Beastgrave cards. It's not an ogre and it's probably not a new army.

Dang that tyrant is brilliant. A colossal spear! Proportionate tusks on the gutplate! The old metal tyrant is still an incredible model but this guy rules. I'm digging out my ogres, that's it But do you know what's best about all this? "The Mawtribes hunger." Mawtribes. A new faction name. "Gutbusters" was hands down the stupidest name GW has ever come up with for anything. Whether Mawtribes is the replacement name or the term for an overarching Beastclaw/regular ogres battletome, anything which minimises Gutbusters as a term is genuinely more than I hoped for. And yes, I can easily see 'The Feast of Bones' being a battle between ogres (tyrant and then some combination of bulls, leadbelchers and the ironblaster/scraplauncher) vs... legions of Nagash, maybe, with some sort of new hero? There are a handful of bony rumour engines still to be solved.

Warcry isn’t a boxed or specialist game though and GW has already committed to 8 new plastic kits minimum. It’s kill team, only more so. re: allocating resources, I know a lot of people who have zero interest in AoS as a mass battle game and who couldn’t give two figs about a random new battletome but who are going in on Warcry. Sometimes that’s because of game size, sometimes because of the models and background. Really, anyone can make an argument based on ‘why didn’t they just’. I would’ve rathered they squatted beastmen and put the development effort into something interesting rather than a battletome which does nothing other factions don’t do in a more compelling fashion, but clearly they have some appeal.

The early modern HRE look of the old Empire range is unique and offers a good contrast with the rest of the high fantasy AoS range. The honest infantrymen with halberds propped against whatever comes against their city-state. I'm glad they stuck with that rather than churning out some generic fantasy humans.

holy moly cities or sigmar and a merged bonesplitters/ironjawz out of left field. And keeping that good good landsknecht look! Faith, steel and gunpowder against the worst monsters a high fantasy world can set against them. A plausible scenario is that there could be an ogre vs whoever battlebox with a battletome further down the line (and not previewed here). As was the case with almost every battlebox.

The agony is real. I want to see those damn ogres.

That's a big boy. Christ I hope it's a plastic tyrant.

You know, this might stop the (entirely justified) disappointment some event-goers have had where they find out about the new stuff on their phones while standing in the queues for the actual events...

I feel like the caveat here is that it's only been a month since the GHB2 was released. I don't think much inference can be reasonably drawn from activity or inactivity of threads or channels over such a short time, particularly in the summer. It's also worth remembering that these avenues of discussion represent a pretty small proportion of the overall hobbyist population.

Beast Hunt from Necromunda but with multiple warbands working together to take down a raging chimera and just itching to betray each other.

Exactly, a disparate bunch of warriors who might not even speak the same language but are welded together by a chaos lord or emissary of the Varanspire. To be honest I think it would work even if it wasn't full armies for each, just that these were clusters of units within the Darkoath faction. I don't think all of them could individually stand up to being expanded into AoS armies proper but saying 'here are my Iron Legionaries, here are my Iron Golem Breacher Ogres', etc would be cool.

Thinking about how the Warcry warbands would work in AoS, I was originally not too keen on it, thought it was more of its own (more interesting tbh) thing and one which would not really pass on to the tabletop. Minimal visual and themtic coherence compared to most of the other AoS forces, which its fair to say are pretty visually homogenous in a way that WHFB armies usually weren't by virtue of how they tunnel down into a particular old subfaction or focus on exploring a particular theme. Why not just have a core of Darkoath marauders, horsemen, skirmishers, archers, etc? But I was rereading Rob Sanders' Archaon novels and it struck me that they show a greater and weirder diversity of mortal forces in the chaos hordes than we ever saw on the tabletop. Eastern armoured pikemen, cannibal ogre-worshippers, mutated maggot-men with one mother, steppe horsemasters, a warrior-cult of mirrored knights. That's cool as heck and shows a lot of variation quite distinct from the traditional axes of mortal/beast/daemon or khorne/nurgle/tzeentch/slaanesh. It's the kind of encyclopedic listing off of different groups that you see in Herodotus when he's listing off the different backgrounds of Xerxes's forces or, to use a more recent and probably more appropriate example, like in GRR Martin's books where Jon Snow sees the different distinct tribes of wildlings. Could most of this variation be represented by, say, marauders with a variant paint scheme? Probably, rule-wise, but it does lead to a kind of smoothening out of the sheer amount of weirdness. If a new Chaos Hordes book consisted of Everchosen, Slaves to Darkness and Darkoath, the latter could be the opportunity to show the huge range of tribes and peoples that follow chaos in one way or another. Folks from all over the realms that have come to the Varanspire and then left again as part of the hordes of chaos, keeping their fighting styles. So you could have a core of 'generic' darkoath marauders, horsemen, characters to represent those tribes who maybe don't deviate from the mean so much and to establish a slightly more normal core. Then you have a small phalanx of heavily armoured breachers from Chamon, a band or two of crow-masked skirmishers from Ulgu, fanatic shock troops from Shyish... Lots of visual contrast and variety, nothing else quite like it in AoS, united with a common colour scheme or banner or warpaint or base style. All the chaotic (eh? eh?) variety of a barbarian horde under a stern-faced brute in black armour, bearing the sigil of the Everchosen. Like, if GW had spent the same amount of energy (as though this sort of thing can be easily transferred) developing a single battletome, there's no way it would ever have as much weird diversity and creativity as these 6-8 warbands. In a certain light it's like Warcry is an excuse to get 6-8 new boxes of unique marauders. Obviously it's not, GW is pushing this hard enough that they clearly want an AoS kill team but as a side effect that has the potential to make mortal undivided chaos more than muscleboys on parade, it's pretty cool. I think it's more meaningful than the simple and kind of halfassed way GW has incorporated the Shadespire warbands into the codices.

It's a problem, I agree. Maybe they could change the weapon options for the thralls? In the AoS rules they all just carry their namarti blades but they could have made a rules distinction between glaives, swords, and axes. Warcry looks like it has quite a bit of detail in the rules, it could be a way to diversify the choices.

Considering as well that he then jokes about being instantly converted to WAAAGHcry, it's definitely got no nastiness to it. That list of units looks pretty plausible. If it's real, I'm glad that the stormcast involvement is limited to the vanguard units, more thematically appropriate to the Eightpoints. Not 100% on the Akhelian though, feels a bit odd for their floaty magic to work in the heart of the Eightpoints and for them to be the only real (squigs don't count) cavalry in the game. You know, you could pick up a decent nighthaunt warband on ebay for not much more than £10, I think. Bits and pieces of soul wars, a few glaivewraiths and reapers. It's tempting.

If anyone hasn't already, you should listen to the latest Stormcast podcast. It's an interview with Maxime Pastourel where he discusses the ideas, background and concept work behind Warcry. Some of the rules too, vaguely. Lots of very interesting stuff, for example some broad thoughts about how these guys relate to the chaos gods and their more obvious followers (visually and culturally) and how the Eightpoints 'work' as a home of roving warbands, shanty towns, shrines and camps. In this case it's some thought on how all these different warbands from all over the realms, all feeling the call of Archaon, interact outside of combat in those tense neutral zones or temporary peaces, e.g. the Iron Golems make the most prized weapons,, the Untamed Beasts provide the meat, the Corvus Cabal act as spies, etc.

I'm looking forward to seeing how many weapon options we're actually getting with each warband and which bodies they fit to. The Necromunda kits come with a fair few spares, albeit rarely with quite the variety players really want. The 10-person Orlock box came with something like enough weapons for 20 dudes, though these by no means fit every model without some conversion.

So this is all incredible and there are so many inspired details to pick up on - the use of the cog-toothed Cawdor hoods is brilliant - but I want to note in particular how great the use of the term "The Weld" is. It somehow gives them a real grimy northern English industrial feel just from the sound of it.

Looking at some of the art in the video, looks like vanguard-hunters will be an option for stormcast (unsurprisingly) and grimghast reapers for nighthaunt.

Gotta be the Crow Boys. Fleet-footed shinobi in bird masks with brilliant weapons and excellent poses on every model. Their champion and the bird-person/shaman/avatar are the standouts but they're all wonderful.

You know now that you mention it it kind of makes the start kit matchup seem off. True, you have the metal vs flesh but they’re both warbands of big burly dudes. Matching up one or the other with the Crow Boys or the Unmade would be an interesting contrast between that big burly look and a very different spindly sort of aesthetic.

It's distressing, no infantry unit should cost £50 for a minium unit of five models, especially when they're old human-sized monopose sculpts. Particularly when they are a fairly basic skaven that die like flies. I get what people are saying about them formerly being an elite unit in WHFB but even if they stayed in that role and weren't shifted to battleline, that's still an ludicrous price. That's Sisters of Battle cost but for a 60 point unit. There's a reason there are so many folks converting these guys and I'd recommend that you do the same. Frankly you shouldn't have to for a battleline unit but there it is. Is there any other unit that's got as extreme a monetary cost/points cost ratio? I mean there's some price changes which can be grudgingly put up with in an already insanely expensive hobby but this is a joke.