Neil Arthur Hotep

I would guess that GW probably went all-out in the design phase for Nighthaunt and has a billion unreleased sculpts for units still on file which they chose not to put into production during their first wave. Same for Lumineth, actually.

Or ignore line-of-sight. But hopefully not right, that's an awful mechanic.

Weird preview, in my opinion. The good: All the models that were revealed are cool. The Nighthaunt scribe looks really neat and the crossbow ghosts might help give Nighthaunt a stronger identity among the Death factions. nighthaunt can probably even expect another model when their tome gets updated, judging by rumour engines. Maybe that means more models are possible for Fyreslayers and Idoneth, too? As for the DoK hero: It would not make me feel ashamed if my female friends saw it, and that's an achievement in my book. The bad: Everything is stuck in another battle box, the worst model delivery mechanism GW has to offer. The ugly: No battletome announcements at all. The pace of 3rd edition really feels glacial right now. It's kind of mysterious, too. you would think that books should be the easiest thing for GW to push out.

No, an army with Fyreslayers as spice instead of the main dish would probably look pretty great,

You could set it up as Fyreslayers, KO and whoever else gets to join all still being independent factions lore-wise, but all being open enough to working with each other that you are allowed to combine them if you take a specific sub-faction.

Will my Dwarf Soup call actually pan out? Would be nice, I need a hit to cherry pick after having my OBR and Beasts predictions basically invalidated by the last two Tome Celestials. Although I also called KO not being part of the Dwarf Soup book, so I guess I'm just wrong either way.

Personally, I have some assumptions about how GW decides what tomes to put out. This is all just educated guessing, but I think it's plausible. At least if we don't think that GW just draws faction names out of a hat, in which case all bets are off, anyway. As a basic principle, battletomes are updated in order of age. The oldest battletomes get updated first, perhaps with some variance (second oldest jumps the queue because it's otherwise convenient). Books get updated about every three years in this way. GW seems to do about 3 to 4 large scale kit releases for AoS a year. Maybe that's limited by production capability or maybe it's a marketing thing, but I think that pattern more or less holds up. Those large releases result in exceptions in the otherwise chronological update schedule. Those exceptions can take the form of a book jumping the queue like Orruk Warclans most recently did. Or they can manifest as a delay, when an army is schedules for a large-scale update, but a given year is already seeing too many other releases. In the case of Daughters, I don't see them getting a big model release any time soon. They have one of the newest books, just having received an update with a bunch of support in the beginning of Broken Realms. So I don't know why they would be in line for a new battletome at this stage. I could be wrong, though. Lumineth and Hedonites have shown that it is possible for a faction to get two battletomes only a year or so apart, after all. So another big DoK release might be in the cards. What I would find puzzling, though, if DoK getting only a tome and a model. Because that decision would have had to be made at before the 2021 DoK tome released, and I can't see the reasoning behind it in that case.

For me it's because I was predicting Nighthaunt as an upcoming tome even before the model tease, while I would have previously been fairly sure that we should not expect anything new for Daughters for a few years. So I interpret the Nighthaunt model as their new hero to go with their tome update, but I have no idea what to think of that DoK model. That makes me more open to believe that it could be Cursed City related or some kind of limited anniversary thing.

It looks like the FAQ mostly contains the bug fixes that people were anticipating, except for one battle tactic that was rewritten to be easier to achieve.

It's good, though. It's mostly just bug fixes, but that's what the early FAQ/errata should be.

We will almost certainly see the Deepkin tome announced. I hope we get a combined Dwarf book, but I think a new Fyreslayers book is actually more realistic. EDIT: Going to put my money down and predict combined dwarves. Apart from that, there is a chance of the Nighthaunt book and model being revealed. With all that said, I think we all know what we should really expect: Idoneth endless spells 😎

Personally, I would be surprised if any currently existing army was moved to Legends in its entirety. I can't honestly even think of any candidates for that. I don't really think there is any faction GW would prefer to just completely get rid of. But I do think that souping books together is really likely. Or rather, back together. I think we are going to be trending back towards faction lines more or less as they were in Warhammer Fantasy this edition. Which might be for the best, anyway, now that Grand Alliance armies are no longer really a thing.

They have to announce at least one book though, right? Idoneth has got to be a sure bet. I would say that the new Nighthaunt tome plus that new model are also on the table, since that was already teased over Christmas.

I agree with this. Broken Realms and Dominion were pretty clearly rushed out. Evidence for that is how they announced BR: Kragnos when BR: Belakor was not even out. Without having looked into it too much, I think it's very likely that GW wanted to make sure to release AoS 3 before the end of their fiscal year or something like that. What happened after the release of Dominion suggests shipping or production problems. The Stormcast and Kruleboyz ranges took a while to fully release, with the dragons even being delayed to December. Even the Nurgle release was delayed by two months, and that was just a book and a hero. That suggests that pushing out all those Broken Realms books and Dominion was a sizable commitment for them. It makes sense that they now need to catch up with 40k releases that were pushed back to make it happen. I think it's also very likely that GW still want to keep their hype machine going as usual. That means not announcing new stuff too far in advance and keeping enough stuff in their back pocket for big reveals like the one presumably planned for LVO later this week. It makes little sense from a marketing standpoint for GW to say "The next books will be Fyrslayers, Idoneth, Nighthaunt, Skaven and Gloomspite. No idea when you will get them though." That doesn't get people excited, it just makes them frustrated. We also saw that happen with the hype about dragons diminishing due to the delays with them, and the Nurgle book having basically zero hype surrounding its launch.

The Nexus Syphon and all the other new terrain do not have rules attached, as far as I can tell. They are just supposed to be generic terrain to fill your table with. But they are explicitly supposed to represent a new Dawnbringer settlement, which is why I brought them up.

Looks really cool! I like the contrast between the cool colour scheme and yellow light from the visor. How do you achieve the corrosion effects on the swords and armour?

If I remember correctly they got Ulgu bones from Morathi in a deal to let her into the Eightpoints at the start and got a bunch of Lumineth bones in Hysh later. No info on whether they were melee or shooting bones, though.

I don't really have a lot to add, but I am glad that you are feeling better now. Also, just being who you are should never be considered "too political" to talk about.

It's really hard to say what the Dawnbringer Crusades will amount to at the moment. Might end up being just the new terrain kit we got. I definitely would not expect a battletome in the near future, since Cities only had that Tome Celestial pretty recently. Although I think it's likely that GW is planning to do something with the Dawnbringers eventually, they got all that new art during the edition launch and there was recently that call for Dawnbringer short stories. They seem to be part of the narrative of 3rd, so let's hope that translates to models at some point. There are a few other plot threads from Broken Realms that have also not be resolved yet. The return of Grungni Nagash and Arkhan destroyed and OBR getting a bunch of weird bones Alarielle doing her mega life spell Whatever Malerion is planning I think it's reasonable to assume that all of those will result in models at some point during this edition.

Skaven vs Sylvaneth battle box confirmed!

As someone who is half-skeleton in real life, I am taking that personally.

I think they are decent now that they can get a free attack on VLoZDs and +2 to cast and unbind on Vampire Lords. They play in a similar space as Vyrkos and might situationally be better. They also have the better options for defensive builds.

Nurgle got a subforum because I messaged Gaz about it, haha. This kind of thing is easy for the mods to forget, because it's not part of any kind of regular upkeep you have to do. Just message them and they'll probably make a subfroum for warclans.

I have recently switched to Vallejo Metal Colour paints (Metal Colour is the name of the paint line; it's different from Model Colour, Model Air and Game Colour). They are super interesting, since they behave very differently from other metallic paints that I have used. They are made for airbrushing, so they are very liquid, but they still cover extremely well in even a single coat, and even over white primer. Their biggest selling point might be that they use extremely fine pigment, so they don't produce the kind of glittery finish that other metallics have. They smell like marker pens and give me head aches, but it's still worth it. I have used their steel, silver, copper and gold paints. Steel is very dark and works great as an undercoat for other metallics, even over white. Silver is bright enough to use as a main metallic, and mixed with steel you can achieve pretty much any intermediary shade. The gold and copper paints are as good as the silver and steel, but their colours are kind of weird. Copper is a strange shade of red for what it's supposed to be and gold has a slight green tint to it. However, Vince Venturella has a recipe for gold paint that works super well and uses the two. It's three parts gold to two parts copper, which results in a brown base gold. To that, you add Green Stuff World Pure Metal Pigment Gold (a small amount). That gives you a gold paint with a great colour and most importantly a real metallic luster. The paint also retains all the properties of the metal colour line, covering in a single coat over any other paint. I find that adding gloss artist's medium helps make it even more shiny and can be useful to thicken the mixture for brush painting, because it's otherwise somewhat hard to control. Green Stuff World pigment mixed with gloss medium makes for a great second layer, too, producing a brighter but more transparent paint. This might sound like a lot of effort, but I think it's 100% worth it. The paint you get just stands head and shoulders above anything you can buy pre-mixed. I find it's less of a problem with the grimdark style in general, and more a problem with beginner painters not knowing how to pull it off. Marco Frisoni on youtube has some great example of grimdark miniatures that are still really high contrast and very readable. But I think a lot of beginners make the mistake of trying to paint grimdark by using dark, desaturated colours and then slapping a dark wash over the top of them for more grime, which just ends up looking like a dark, muddy blob on the table most of the time. I certainly made that mistake when starting out. I thought I was so clever making one of my army's main colours black, because then I would be able to just leave black primer showing in those areas. It did not work out well, haha.

As always, the question remains how GW can possibly pull off The Old World without disappointing a lot of people. They make such big promises: You will be able to play your old armies plus new factions like Kislev! But they can't possibly put out new kits for all the Old World armies, or the game will rival AoS in size. Even if they revive all discontinued plastic kits without redesigning them (which would mean a lot of not-so-great looking models coming back, too), I doubt they have the production capability. The only realistic way I can see is to release a Ravening Hordes style compendium to start, and then to slowly update old armies. But even then, that will be a bit of a mess since you just know that there will be at least some models/armies that will be both top-tier competitively and out of production at the same time. I also don't see TOW getting more ressources devoted to it than AoS at this point, so that would mean a pretty glacial pace of updates. I think the way foreward would definitely be to share models between AoS and TOW to an extent. Maybe not all models, but updating some factions in the vein of Gravelords to make them usable in both systems seems workable with a bit of effort. EDIT: Squeaked this post in just after the mod notice, so sorry about that.