Dawi not Duardin

You meme, but GW should seriously consider releasing a quasi-rebellious vegan FEC unit which refuses to partake in their ordinary feasts because meat is murder, but instead goes around trying to "liberate" all the enemies' steeds. Or, in other words, has bonuses for killing enemy cavalry and monster riders. Of course, their delusion could be that, analogously to how standard FEC think cannibalism is eating animal meat, the vegan ones could eat animal meat and think that that is vegetables... Those would be some unexpected twists. 🙃

Sorry, I could have been clearer: I meant that the Grungni returns story arc could use a narrative resolution. While this also is likely to bring about some tabletop changes - whether minor like the addition of Grombrindal to the game, as you suggest, or major stuff like the introduction of a third dwarf faction - I didn't mean to open cans of worms like dwarf soup and similar. The factions may still end up looking roughly like they do now in the longer run, though at least hopefully with more unit types, for all we know. But there is, narratively speaking, nevertheless still more to do with the Grungni/Grombrindal storyline. I wanna see where it goes!

This seems plausible to me. In general, both the dwarfs and elves have stories waiting to happen. We need to know what comes out of the Grungni returns story arc and of the Tyrion/Malerion/Slaanesh-breaking-free story arc. This is both for the sake of completing the AoS dwarf/elf contingents and update the Cities of Sigmar range. It is easy to imagine that Grungni returning leading to independent dwarf updates also will see updates to the Cities dwarfs and that Tyrion/Malerion appearing will lead to updated independent elves and Cities elves. In principle, it doesn't matter to me which one of these moves they go with first, but I suspect the Grungni returning arc is easier to resolve. Tyrion and Malerion appearing - and Slaanesh breaking free(?) - are such big picture events that we need more build-up to them than what we've got so far. So it makes sense to go for Chamon first and then a big elf-Slaanesh showdown after the next build-up.

Right, that's possible. I don't recognize the poses and some of the details in the army pic, but it might be my eyes that are not used to these models that deceive me.

A tremendous glow-up for FEC. Extremely impressive looking. It might even be that there is more to come? Look at the upper left corner of this picture. I don't recognize these models from any in-depth reveal. Granted, I am not a FEC player, so I may have missed out on them somewhere else. But they don't look like the current Horrors to me, so maybe they are a new ogre-sized infantry unit?

The Mortarch of Summer, no doubt. Due for winter release. 🙃

I disagree with this. Chaos has never been deterministically destined to win (in the fantasy settings at least, and they are the ones I am the most familiar with). In Storm of Chaos, Grimgor headbutted Archaon to give us the status quo back. In End Times, Order would have won were it not for Mannfred von Carstein. In both cases, what ultimately sealed the fate of the campaigns was the intervention of a neutral joker-style character whose actions could have gone either way. And then in AoS you have the Sigmarite narrative of hope, the Lumineth narrative of harmony, the reappearance of the Seraphon great plan, and even Kharadron techno-progress... The chance factor in WHFB and the good guy progress in AoS to me clearly indicate that Chaos victories are never the sole possible outcomes. Sure, the settings are dark. Sometimes very dark. But it is the idea of standing up against the darkness with clenched teeth and true grit and faith, steel and gunpowder that truly makes Warhammer shine dramatically. You're going in against the odds, and you're surrounded by demons... but somehow you gotta win anyway.

I am not so sure it is impossible to separate the two. What they could say in lore is that there is an infinite number of WHFB worlds, but only with certain probabilities of it developing in one way or another. Then from the perspective of WHFB End Times, you could have the setting branch off in to Chaos wins, Order wins, Orcs win, etc, scenarios depending on those probabilities. That would give you the leeway to fight over the WHFB setting in way where the outcome of your battles still matter, while also allowing AoS to emerge organically in the version(s) of the setting where Chaos wins. This would be my ideal interpretation of having the two systems coexist. (It also helps to make sense of a lot of other things, such as how you can start playing various campaigns where sometimes one side wins and sometimes the other at various points in time, whether on the tabletop or in Total War.) This however seems a little bit unnecesarily dismissive. I get that there still are WHFB fans who think AoS never should have happened. But saying "x is the only setting I have any interest in the other one died, get on with it" just seems to attempt to put people who have other preferences down. Surely it makes sense for GW to try to cater to both tastes? (Just because some people prefer football to athletics, that doesn't mean athletics shouldn't get to matter for those who prefer it.) And also quite a few of us who do enjoy one setting also enjoys the other, meaning that we'd be interested in seeing both developed.

The Vulkyn Flameseekers are here! It is really exciting to see that many of the suggestions we have been speculating about in fact have come to life here. - Female Fyreslayers - Armour - Weapons beyond axes - Minidroths All very tastefully sculpted, too. What are your predictions for future developments based on this warband? I feel we are likely to get units of at least female Fyreslayers and some kind of more organized minidroths now. But what else?

Boring point, but ultimately what lies in the future will depend on what makes GW money. They are a very profit-driven company. I posted this in the rumour thread once and it was not a popular thought. But, as they did not shy away from an End Times before, I could see them End Times-ing AoS if it doesn't prove profitable enough over time. (It doesn't help that other systems I enjoyed way back when, including Warmaster and Mordheim, are gone too.) I think ToW is a bit of a test rocket here. It might well be possible that, in the light of the success of Total War, old-school fantasy proves to be more popular than AoS. Then I wouldn't put it past GW to nuke AoS to return to the old system. But then, that is admittedly a pessimistic possibility. There are also many more positive ones. Perhaps they keep WHFB as a side game to AoS. Perhaps they alternate between which one of them is their main fantasy game. Or perhaps the TOW/WHFB experiment fails and they drop it instead. It is hard to say what will happen. I wish I could have more faith in them as a company, but fundamentally they are so profit-driven that they will just rush after whatever they take the market preferences to be. And where will they go? Good question... What I hope will happen is however that they find some lore way to make WHFB and AoS compatible. In particular I hope they will write them as settings that are part of some sort of eternal cycle of worlds dying and repopulating. (They already hinted at that quite excessively in the End Times lore.) Then you would be able to treat both settings as living as a player, and I could have my classic dwarf shieldwall cake and eat my Kharadron spaceships too, while feeling that both of them are active... ...but then that's an ideal. My more realistic hope is that they at least could be more reliable. The End Times still make it hard for me to invest wholeheartedly in a GW games system, since I don't know if they will nuke it in a few years' time. I wish they would give players better assurances given how much investment the games require.

Adding to this. Some fantasy is of course more real world-inspired than other. Sometimes people find real-life influences and parallells where there are none, and such criticism can be very far-fetched. But the Black Orcs were literally created in lore to be a slave race by the Chorfs. Due to the reference to slavery, it's too in-your-face for criticism to be far-fetched. In general, the WHFB universe is extremely real-world inspired, whereas AoS doesn't have to rely on that kinda stuff. Doing away with places like the Southlands and Araby and Lustria, which GW treated rather ham-fistedly, really helps them to create more novel ideas. For example, it helps that Orcs/Orruks have become Ardboyz, Bonesplitterz and Kruleboyz rather than Greenskins (redskins, anyone?), Black Orcs and Savage Orcs. It helps that Lizardmen have become space-faring Seraphon rather than indigenous Americans. It helps that the most prominent (quasi-)human knights are thunder-infused demigods rather than (quasi-)European crusaders. Etc. These kinds of changes do in fact put AoS in the position where criticism of its internal politics tends to look like it is on the far-fetched side, whereas you easily can argue that many aspects of WHFB were rather problematic. Now, personally I like to think of it as innocently problematic: fundamentally I am sure almost everyone who likes it are nerds who want a good time and a laugh at fantasy-meets-history, not make political points. (40K is a bit different here though!) But still, if you see things you can improve, why not improve them?

I don't think this is incompatible with what I wrote. What I tried to say is that they are trying to modernize on this front, especially in fantasy. Rewriting the savage orcs would be an obvious step in that direction, but that doesn't preclude other steps too. So that puts them at a crossroads. Also, not to come off as dismissive, but I think the orc issue is a more obvious step in that direction than the accents. British accent discrimination is a real thing in the UK - I'm Swedish, not British, but I lived there for 6 years and saw quite a lot of it - but most people globally don't understand the subtleties of it. It's way too local. It's closer to my own Scandinavian annoyance at Norsca being Chaos worshippers in later editions of WHFB. I don't like it, but I'll survive: I'm still very well off on a global scale. Whereas people have raised racial concerns about he portrayal of orcs in all kinds of media since Tolkien.

This is not bad speculation. There are two other reasons to skip the Bonsplitterz too: Models aged and need replacement. Very hard to write them without unfortunate racial implications. It was admittedly even worse back in WHFB when savage orcs often were from the Southlands ("Africa"), did a lot of tribal drumming and dancing, and were... well, less civilized than standard orcs. While the Bonesplitterz are less blatant than that, the memory still lingers - at the same time as it's easy to understand why they got rid of the category "black orcs." In general, GW are attempting to tune in to more modern sensibilities, and maybe that means some of the stereotypical bits from WHFB ought to go. Hence, I guess the Bonesplitterz are in a bit of a Slaanesh situation: either GW has to come up with a way to reinvent them that isn't too offensive, or they might consider dropping them entirely.

Why would you go with Daenerys when you could go with Khal Drogorc?