Neil Arthur Hotep

Definitely do. I will be finishing a three adventure mini-campaign this month, and so far it has been great! It's a good system which manages to both be mechanically interesting and fairly managable and fast to use. Plus, the art and writing will really satisfy your desire for cool lore.

I agree that this time line seems plausible, but it would really be pretty bad, right? Their big opening thing for 3rd ed (besides Age of the Beast) was Dawnbringer Crusades. Hodl the SigmarCoin straight to the moon and all that. If the whole edition comes and goes without Dawnbringer Crusades paying off, I think I would consider that a failure of some kind (scheduling? marketing? just plain realization of their plans?).

In addition to the problems that have already been mentioned, a lot of legends warscrolls are also just kinda bad. The power level of warscrolls and faction-internal synergy has definitely risen since those warscrolls were first written. I have looked at them a few times, but I don't really think there are any hidden gems there. At least not for Cities.

I would not be against it. There are at least two things in AoS that would probably require a reset of every faction all at once to effectively change: Bravery/battleshock and mortal wounds/wards. Bravery has been becoming more impactful with recent battletomes, but I think the whole system still does not feel quite right yet. A rework that touches the basic mechanics and updates all the bravery values all at once (possibly to a completely different system) might be worth it. Wards/mortals are a different problem, in so far as they are arguably too common to the point that they devalue saves, rend and regular damage. But updating individual factions to have less access to these mechanics while keeping them at the same power level is tough. More likely than not it will just feel like a nerf. In this case, a do-over game wide would really help. Other than that, the AoS stats blocks are already pretty streamlined. I personally would not want to remove anything from them, or add anything. I know some people would like to see a return to a strength/toughness system, though. I personally believe that is unnecessary, I think the current mechanics are complex enough to get all the nuance you would want if they were utilized properly.

From Sprues and Brews: "The central cache known as Talaxis (named after the Azyrite explorer that first discovered it) is home to treasure and technological wonders that have incredible power such as the ability to return life to the dead, alter time or even change reality itself." So Ven Talax is probably the name of that explorer, and Ven Talax path is probably named after them.

The people vs. Drekki Flynt

The Soulbound Bestiary is a very good book, though. Extremely usable from the perspective of someone running an RPG. In that respect, it is likely a better book than the Old World Bestiary, in my opinion. I especially appreciate the subsections included in the faction overviews about how to use them in your game/in combat. They contain advice about what kinds of stories specific factions are especially suited to tell and how to convey what they are about through the tactics they use on the battlefield. This is super helpful GM support you don't usually see. There is still a good amount of lore in there, and the book still has a "rumours" section for every faction that is written from an in-universe perspective. I imagine the people at Cubicle 7 had a choice to make between including more fluff in the book and getting stats for all the units of AoS in there without splitting the book into two parts. From a quick count, the Soulbound Bestiary seems to contain about double the amount of stat blocks compared to the Old World Bestiary. I can't really fault them for choosing to put out a single book that focusses on playability rather than lore delivery.

The reason I didn't get into Warcry (even though I would love a skirmish game to play with friends) was just that it seemed to me that you needed the core box for the terrain and cards. That turned the whole thing cost prohibitive for me, especially since I didn't particularly want the two core box warbands.

I personally don't hate that, though. I feel like warcry is a good vehicle to introduce a variety of "normal guys" to the setting. That's nice for world building, even though it's not great for game play purposes. Although I would like the variety to be more pronounced most of the time, like the difference between Cypher Lords and Iron Golems.

We probably won't see Tomb Kings in AoS anytime soon (although I would not be surprised if they got reintroduced to the setting at some point), but if models from The Old World get AoS warscrolls at all, there is really no reason most Tomb Kings stuff couldn't just be Deathrattle units for Gravelords.

I remember this question coming up in the contextbof Deathrattle Skeletons as well when new Nagash was released. I think the problems stem from the fact that resurrection is not a unified mechanic in AoS, but the rules guys wanted it to work for all the different implementations if it across all the Death factions, so it's really vague as a result. There definitely seems to be a difference between, for example, the Harvester, where you get a die roll to trigger resurrection and then a die roll to determine how many models get resurrected, and something like Invigorating Aura, where you just get to resurrect/heal D3 wounds. It feels like the trigger roll in the Harvester case should not be rerollable and if you fail it you shoukd not get the option to decide to just resurrect 1 model anyway. But in the case where you do successfully trigger a resurrection ability, and it just fails to work (like trying to resurrect a 4 wound model with a d3 roll), you should get the extra resurrected model. And then there are cases like Deathrattle Skeletons, where it's just one roll that determines whether anything is resurrected, but you build a dice pool of several rolls for any single activation of the ability, which are just completely up to interpretation with regard to how they should work.

I always get whiplash from reading people's perception of Sigmar and his religion in this thread after reading about them Soulbound. Take a lool at the strictures of the Sigmarite church: Strictures - Oppose Chaos in all its forms. - Spread the faith, by any means necessary. -Treat fairly with the servants of other gods. - Uphold the tenets of civilisation and progress. What a hard-liner, this Sigmar guy! Of course, it is possible that Cities takes a 180 into becoming GrimDumb "humans only", but I honestly don't see a reason to assume this. I do think Dawnbringer Crusades will focus pretty much exclusively on the human subfactions within Cities, though.

If this actually happens, I wonder which factions would be good candidates for upgrade sprues. I think Mortek archers could feasibly be an arm swap, although some of the poses would be awkward. Mortek Guard are all modelled in an advancing pose, so maybe as long as an archer upgrade doesn't try to have them actually firing their bows it could work? It kinda did for Tomb Kings. Although I have to say, I would much rather see an upgrade sprue for Stalkers/Immortis guard to turn them into big boy archers. I think that would be much more fun. Soulblight Skeletons could potentially receive an archer upgrade sprue in the same way. However, I think it's more likely that we will see mortal thrills or something Vyrkos related for Warcry. I don't think Cities of Sigmar will see an upgrade sprue. They already announced their intent to completely redo the humans of the realms after all. We have some rumour engines that hint at human pioneers, so I suspect that will be it for CoS Warcry. What could Destruction related upgrade sprues look like? A Troggoth wizard? A make your own maneater kit on the basis of... Ironguts? I don't see anything that really makes sense for Spiderfang, and I sure hope Bonesplitters get new models rather than an upgrade. Chaos might be the best target for upgrade sprues, since their stuff already looks good and is generally pretty new.

Some stuff I noticed about their design: The general look is closer to Jelsen Darrok, the witch hunter from Cursed City, than to the Ven Densts. The warband shares his high collar and angular metal armour. The female member is even standing on a Cursed City pillar. I also noticed that the female member of thr warband comes with a repeating pistol. It seems like that particular bit of Freeguild gear might stick around.

Weirdly seems like it should work, but I personally would clear it with my opponent in friendly games because it seems like an exploit.

Would be nice, I certainly hope the Dawnbringer announcement is not an "Old World" type deal where we will have to wait for years for something concrete to materialize. I'm curious to see whether the witch hunters warband for Underworld we are about to see this weekend will be framed as "a sneak peek at the upcoming Dawnbringer Crusades" or something like that.

Don't forget about the stuff Forgeworld will presumably have to produce for The Old World when that rolls around. I really hope those models get AoS rules, but even if not they are certainly going to be useful as proxies or conversion material.

I already thought the plague claw was pretty solid before at 2d6 damage, rend -2. 135 points for that anywhere on the battlefield works out to you bejng able to just delete a horde unit if you invest into a few of them. Now, they got the ability to get to a 2+/2+ hit/wound by themself and got an extra -1 to bravery compared to before while their points stayd the same. They are still not as good as the best shooting units, but the best shooting units in the game are probably currently too strong, so that seems fine. At least they have a defined role and you don't have to feel bad for playing them. All the Skaven artillery seems decent right now, actually. The big problem I see with making the WARMACHINE keyword significant is that war machines are even more unequally distributed than, for example, priests. At the moment, only Kharadron, Skaven and Cities really have significant access to them. Everyone else just has an odd ballista or catapult. There would probably have to be an "Age of Technology" update before really giving the WARMACHINE keyword upside makes sense. At least it's not purely a downside anymore like it was in 2nd edition, right?

How cool would it be if the warband was actually a reimagining of rat catchers as Skaven hunters, though? That's the kind of thing I would love to see out of the upcoming Dawnbringer Crusades redesign.

If Nagash is involved most people will suspect it to be a pyramid scheme, though. He has a history with those.

Nagash's next big move will be making people believe in weird imaginary riches through Flesh Eater Courts delusions. They will be known as Crypt Currencies and going to the moon will somehow be involved. Also, NFT stands for Neferata.

I hope not, I am pretty sure that I will want to own those Witch Hunters. There is Warhammer meme precedent for owning "a small but vicious dog", however.

Looks a bit like a Kruleboyz detail, but a Kruleboyz wave 2 seems improbable.

I would welcome an unconditional 6+ ward. But only because it's a quality of life improvement. It's really easy to have it basically all the time already with the current rules, but it would be nice not to have to think about it. I fully expect us to just get it in the next book, the rules writers seem pretty good at removing those extra conditions that don't really matter in recent updates.

Let me hook you guys up with a great looking Purple Sun proxy I found 😎