Dawi not Duardin

All in favour of having some dwarfs and elves in non-order factions. Just some minor nitpicking here, though: WHFB Empire in fact was pretty cosmopolitan, with ogre, halfling, and dwarf units in early editions alongside the humans. And then there was Dogs of War which was even more so. So having multi-species good guy humanoid factions isn't new for AoS.

On the lost in translation theme. It's also very easy to imagine that the Dominion leaker might have confused the new Gitmob Wolf Riders with Hobgoblins. They look rather similar to the Hobgobla Khan Wolf Riders from Dogs of War back in WHFB. It's even conceivable that they were planned to be Hobgoblins at first but they later got put in Gitmob when someone realized that the Grot tome needed more attention. Moreover, it is also conceivable that someone would have confused the new Gloomspite grot hero with a squig with a Gitmob grot hero before seeing the model. I guess we should remember that rumours/leaks can be approximately true even if they don't get all the details right. Which is just what you say.

It's not clear to me why book-souping would be the real debate while faction-souping would not be. As I see it, there are two background assumptions that don't seem warranted. These are: (1) One faction = one tome. (2) The more subfactions you have in each tome, the less space they get. It's not beyond the realm of possibility to deny (1). Historically, some factions (like WHFB Chaos) have been split in several army books. And it'd also be quite possible to deny (2). For there is no necessary min- or max-length to a tome. You could easily have mega-tomes that copy and paste several mini-tomes together. These are just information packaging units. Length and amount of content are not set in stone. Fundamentally what is at issue here is not the number of tomes, it is how different factions are systematically connected in the structure of the game. There could probably be more than 4 fundamental ones, or Order, Destruction, Death, and Chaos. For example, a lot of people think Beastmen are kind of inbetween Chaos and Destruction, and Ogres and Gargants are kind of in between Destruction and most others. Perhaps that means the overarching alliances could be something like: Sigmarites, Seraphon, Aelvenkind, Duardin, Brutes (Ogres & Gargants & Kragnos... and why not add a Troggoth faction?), Orcs & Goblins, Beasts (Beastmen & Beasts of Chaos), Skaven, Undead, and Big 4 Chaos. Then they could have many more subfactions and tomes. That'd be a system where they all would be 'souped' as bigger factions but could contain lots of subfactions each (e.g. the Sigmarite faction could have Stormcast and Cities, Seraphon would have what they have now but you could expand Saurus, Skinks, and dinos into full sub-factions too, Aelvenkind would be all factions with the suffix -eth, etc). I think that'd look like a much more intuitive classification system than the current four grand alliances, allowing for both thematic disambiguations and factions that all are big enough to compete with each other. And they could all be expanded both in depth and by adding more subfactions with new tomes.

I'm not so sure how it is different other than in terminology. For example, let's say there are four factions (Free Peoples, Undead, Destruction, and Chaos). They could still have several battletomes each (e.g. Free Peoples: Aelves, Free Peoples: Cities of Sigmar, Free Peoples: Duardin, etc), for faction-souping need not entail battletome souping. You could expand them pretty much infinitely either by introducing new subfactions or making older ones more fine-grained. Though I would also want the more fine-grained divisions to be of roughly equal size: I don't like that some armies (e.g. Stormcast) have much more unit choice than others, as that gives them far more versatility. But it doesn't make a difference if you call these four factions 'factions' with several sub-factions or grand alliances with several factions, IMO. You could also expand my hypothetical Undead faction example like that. Having mortal units in there is nothing new: necromancers, bats and ghouls always were. But call the faction Death or Legions of Nagash or something instead if that works better. The point is that you want a unified core entity, which is the main faction or alliance depending on your terminology, and then can split it in more fine-grained details.

This is interesting because I am pro-soup for exactly the same reason. I agree with these distinctions, except what you call grand alliances are what I would call factions, and what you call factions I would call sub-factions. For example, I have a reasonably strong preference for having just one Undead faction (in my terminology), but with millions of possibilities rather than the distinct factions we have now. So maybe this debate is to some extent terminological?

Well I admit I am very much driven by nostalgia (hint in the name, as well as in most of my posts here!). This is why I don't feel a connection to FS or KO per se but rather to Dwarfs as a faction. Does that make me a hopeless grumbler? Yes, but I'll buy that, it's par for the dwarf course. But nostalgia aside, I do think there is something to be said for taking the easy way out here for GW though, and that's realism. I think in principle it'd be great to have two fully fleshed-out Duardin factions. But would that be an investment worth the money for GW? I don't know, but it's quite possible that it wouldn't be. And then at least I'd .be happier with one full faction rather than two half-baked ones (ok, KO are more like 80% baked already - they are a great concept - but you get what I mean). I suspect what happened with AoS dwarfs is that they were split into several factions back at a time when GW didn't even intend to develop full-scale armies for AoS. That's, in particular, how the Fyreslayers were introduced. You had plenty of small-scale factions back then that were kind of like "breakouts" from older ones, like Ironjawz and Pestilens. But as AoS has matured and become more centred around full armies again, they have got unified back into the fold with their main factions. I'd be happy to see that with several others too, such as Malerion/Morathi aelves. But, in particular, if that's what you need to get the dwarf factions up to full strength, I'm all for it.

I know the forum has been through this before and a lot of people don't like the idea, but IMO the obvious way to go is to soup them with Kharadron. Kharadron need infantry. Fyreslayers need artillery and missile units. Win-win. Also, conceptually, they are both offfshoots of the classic Dwarfs, representing the rational engineer's guild side on the one hand and the more esoteric slayer/runesmith side on the other. Throw in a couple of unifying units - Grombrindal, a dwarf feminist cult of Valaya that swears allegiance neither to the code nor Grungni/Grimnir (why not even a High Queen?!), mini-magmadroth cavalry with aetherguns, or an airborne 'chariot'-style unit with Fyreslayers on a ship rushing towards close combat, you name it - and a unified force would be classic Dwarfs on steroids. I'd be all over that.

Hold on, does this mean Sigmar's name always was a pun on Herohammer? 😬

Very much in favour of this. Honestly I think Age of Chaos or Mortal Realms would have been better names for the setting than AoS. That would have opened it up to look more weird and wonderful.

A bit unrelated to everything: Does anyone have any clue about when the new Gotrek novel is coming out in audiobook format? Looking at a number of sites, it seems like that is expected to be released, but I can't find any dates... I've really enjoyed listening to the last few on long walks, but perhaps I will buy this one to read instead of to audiobook if it doesn't drop soon.

Yes, that's right. I'm a native Swedish speaker and we use the Å/å (pronouned like "oh" in "Oh, I see") as well as the Ä/ä (pronounced like "ai" in "Claire"), whereas English obviously doesn't. The letters are also sometimes anglicized as "Aa" in the "Å" case or "Ae" in the "Ä" case. This is actually a key part of why it bugs me: it doesn't fit the English context of Misthaven. ("Håv" in Swedish actually means "fishing net", but that is obviously not what they are going for.) I guess if they had spelled it "Misthäven" it would have made more sense pronounciation-wise, since the "a" in "haven" actually sounds a bit like the "ai" in "Claire". Or they could have gone down the anglicized spelling route to get Misthaaven or Misthaeven (or why not even Mistheaven for extra Sigmarite?). Whereas with the "å" you get a random fishing net in the middle of the word. Side note: if you compare this to rock bands of decades past that used umlauts, Motörhead used it very skilfully because there it doesn't really change the pronounciation - you could even have written Motrhead and it would have sounded roughly the same - whereas Mötley Crue basically looks unintelligible to Scandinavians. It took me decades to understand that it meant "motley crew" and what that was. I guess Misthåvn is in Mötley Crue territory rather than Motörhead territory. --- I think all things considered it would have been very easy for them to use a more fantastic names for trademarking purposes than odd English. The difference between names like Kharadron Overlords and Idoneth Deepkin on the one hand, hand Fyreslayers and Misthåvn on the other is immense. Why not stick with developing the in-world languages? They even do that in 40k now, so it comes off as a bit lazy and... well, cartoonish, to not do it here.

I'll just answer this bit because I'm happy to agree on the rest. One background issue here is that people might have different preferences for mythology contra explanations - for me it's not enough that GW says that something happens, in some way, but you want a plausible in-universe explanation of how the things hang together. (Tolkien was exceptionally good at providing this, btw, and I think that's why his universe has survived the test of time so well.) So when it comes to the Stormcast reforging, I think there is a fundamental problem with a Stormcast soul growing a body, and that problem appears both when the soul is taken up to Sigmar the first time and when it is reforged again. It seems to break the division between mind and matter which GW relies on very often in their storytelling. Though admittedly this is a problem in metaphysics/philosophy of mind/cognitive science/psychology that most people people were happy to ignore for ages in real life too, so I realize I have very stringent demands for explanations whereas others might be happier to move past this. I actually posted a thread about that topic recently. I think we made some progress in that thread, but it's not quite enough because I would like something more explicit from GW than fan theorizing to fill in the dots. The thread is here:

This is a very good topic. I was one of the old WHFB players who originally lost interest in the settings with The End Times, so I have a lot of opinions on this. In fact, the situation is worse than me losing interest with The End Times - I originally stopped with WHFB back in like 2004, got interested in WHFB again with The End Times as something finally was happening to that setting... and then they nuked the entire thing. It wasn't until I found I found myself with too much time on my hands in recent years - such as with Corona - that I started having a look at this again and started to reevaluate a bit. Here are some negatives in AoS: A lot of big picture metaphysical/natural-historical things aren't well-worked out, which makes me lose immersion. A pet peeve of mine is how Stormcast are reforged. It is unclear to me how their souls can grow new bodies. But there are also other big questions. Who built the realmgates? Which civilizations were there before Sigmar arrived (and why were there Dragon Ogres, of all things, there battling Drogrukh and Draconiths)? Is Dracothion Sotek? Why were the other gods imprisoned in various ways? There's too much myth and too little natural history. It's unfortunately not just metaphysical or natural-historical things that aren't worked out completely, but the same is true for many factions. This is the source of relatability worries for me. I am not particularly concerned with relating to a "human perspective"- it's easy to identify with elves, dwarfs, halflings, orcs, vampires, or whatever if they are reasonably fleshed out - but the problem is that they often are not fleshed-out enough to relate to. Here's where a more Tolkien-style world history, including languages, descriptions of cultural stuff that does not bear on war per se, timelines, maps, etc, works well. You can start to place characters in a history, so things make sense for them, and then things can start to make sense for you as a player. Here I think WHB had a massive advantage over AoS because it often was based on real history. Then you get a lot of the cultural signifiers, timelines, values, etc, for free. You even get languages like the quasi-fake-German of the Empire as a bonus. Relatedly, you often see the argument that AoS is good because it allows you to create "your dudes" factions. To me this looks like a figleaf excuse for "we haven't bothered to work out enough creative detail for you to built satisfactory factions, so we'll leave the job to you." Analogy: It is very hard to write a good song without any knowledge of music genres, music theories, instruments, etc, but AoS doesn't give you very much of that kind of knowledge. Tolkien (or WHFB) are much better settings than AoS just because they do provide you with background material to create stories. On the other hand, what AoS gives often gets a bit cartoonish. Example 1: I think you could write the equivalent of realmgates reasonably interestingly - Robert Jordan has a version of that in the Wheel of Time - but the AoS ones come off a lot like those you used in kids' platform games like Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon to jump between various levels. They are too deus ex machina-ish, seemingly aimed to let factions and players jump between "levels" just to give them an excuse to pop up everywhere. Example 2: There are so many gods and superheroes that never die, fighting with armies as backdrops, rather than the other way around. I remember when Herohammer was a complaint against WHFB - and AoS is basically Superherohammer. Example 3: Naming conventions. AoS suffers from not working with well-developed internal languages. The German of the WHFB Empire, the Khazalid of the WHFB Dwarfs, etc, have systematicity and meaningfulness to them, but AoS has little of that. Why the Latin "Excelsis" in the middle of mostly English names? Why was "Anvilgard" not spelled "Anvil Guard"? Why the super-oddly spelled "Misthåvn" (with a very odd umlaut)? Why are "Fyreslayers" spelled with a "y"? Often poor use of WHFB throwbacks. Sometimes it isn't similar enough to the WHFB world, but sometimes it is too similar to it. What I mean with that is that it fails to be similar to it in the regards where the WHFB setting was very immersive and appealing, but instead there are lot of redundant character callbacks. What made the WHFB world strong was that it was a melting pot of an awful lot of cool things with well-established histories sprinkled with a fair bit of very British humour (did you know that "Felix Jaeger" translates to "Happy Hunter"?). But AoS is more esoteric and therefore harder to engage with - instead of the familiar tropes that built WHFB, we see the return of a lot of B-league characters that very much could have stayed dead with the old world, such as Sigvald, Eltharion, or Drycha, or desperate attempts to rationalize why WHFB miniatures with very specific lore should still be usable in this setting where that lore doesn't exist (such as with the dwarfs and elves in CoS). On the other hand, where AoS is at it's best, it's still intriguing enough to invite me back in. It's a post-apocalyptic WHFB, after all, so it makes sense that you would have a bunch of very Mad Max-like factions. I originally thought that it would be best to put a post-apocalyptic WHFB 50 years into the future in the classic WHFB world setting after Chaos had won, with the good guys serving as guerillas, but then again I understand why they may have wanted to start afresh. There were lots of bits of WHFB that you may want to do away with, including the eurocentrism of the good guy factions combined with the racist undertones aimed at some of the other factions: black orcs, aztec lizardmen, eastern steppe chaos marauders, etc... Sure, Warhammer was never about political correctness, but a lot of these concepts are very awkward, so I can absolutely see a reason to move into more fantastic territory. I actually like the cosmic and supernatural scale of AoS as a fundamental concept. It's very Lovecraftian in that sense: there's much more going on than what you have on one planet. When it is at its best, it reminds me a lot of stuff like The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, where the narrator meets all kinds of creatures (including friendly ghouls!). You can develop very fantastic civilizations and ideas against that backdrop. And I think they have done well with most of the individual factions of AoS here (except Cities of Sigmar, which they fortunately seem to be redeveloping). Sometimes they also integrate WHFB with AoS very tastefully. Gotrek, Morathi, Alarielle, Nagash, and some others (the A-leaguers, if you will) are exactly the types of characters that you would expect to see in a post-apocalyptic setting, and they do very well there. Honestly, just following Gotrek alone has been the biggest draw for me to come back into AoS... So, all in all, it's not a very good setting. But it's ok. And it's improving. Slowly.

Really appreciate the optimism regarding the Fyreslayers and KO here. Old grognards from Bugman's Brewery like me (and IIRC also you?) remember what it was like to wait like 20 years for monopose Hammerers to be replaced with new monopose Hammerers. True Dawi back then were made of sturdier stuff than these new-fangled Duardin. Those were the days: forums were forums and the potato phone cam hadn't been invented yet... All jokes aside. I think a lot of the optimism could be extended to the Skaven too. One thing people don't mention so often is that they actually got a new wave of stuff around The End Times which clearly was designed with AoS in mind (e.g. the new Stormfiends). So in that sense they have at least some models that are reasonably up-to-date. What they would benefit from model-wise is a core range refresh. But I think they would also benefit from some lore updates. As of now each of their four great clans are largely the size of a smaller AoS force like Fyreslayers or IDK. Why not say there's a civil war with the conclusion that Pestilens joins Nurgle and Moulder merges with Skryre - both are thematically reasonable choices - and then invent a new clan to take their place?

You're very welcome - that's really flattering!

To be fair, that's Hysh elves, no? Nothing about them precludes a more Egyptian-styled human Hysh civilization. You could even have a cool contrast here between the black pyramid in Shyish and a pyramid of light in Hysh.

I'd like to see gnoblars replaced with halflings in a proper Mawtribes book. Gnoblars are really just another kind of goblin, but big hungry humanoids and little hungry humanoids would make a cohesive theme. Also I love the thought of nasty, brutish halflings rather than the overly cutesy Tolkien style. It'd be a bit like their dark elf/chaos dwarf equivalent. In fact, thinking about it, I might even convert this army at some point even if they never release it... 🤔

Old-school dwarf player's perspective: I think this is great and in fact much needed. The current CoS army lacks thematic depth and cohesion - in fact much more so than other armies that survived from WHFB, such as Lizardman or Skaven. There are good lore reasons for why they would look roughly the same as they did back then, as their civilizations actually didn't end with the world-that-was. But the human, elf and dwarf civilizations (mostly) did, so I think it is very odd that the same units would reappear in this new setting. For example, why would dwarfs form units of Hammerers as opposed to Axers or Macers in AoS? There was a lore reason back in WHFB - it was tradition that the royal guard of each hold would be armed with hammers - but that tradition was literally in another setting. But with a revamp of this army, we see important opportunities, not just for the humans but also for the dwarfs. (Elf players will have to forgive me for focusing on them here, but I presume similar considerations apply for them!). IMO The Disposessed is probably the most boring Dwarf concept GW ever has used.. They're boring lore-wise as they're more than anything else sheltering survivors, and Sigmar is too human a God for them when Grungni and Grombrindal are active in the setting. And they're boring model-wise as the last update of WHFB dwarfs lacked a lot of the character of the earlier metal models. If you compare the 6th edition metal Longbeards to the plastic ones that still are used, there is not much competition. But a revamp could give us all kinds of opportunities. Perhaps they get their own army. Or they get their own Grudgebringer Crusade as part of an Orruk Warclans-style book. Or they get combined with some other Dwarf army, somehow. Either way, they'd start to have some reason to go out and retake the realms, Thorgrim-style. That's so much more interesting than whatever they are doing now. Of course, this does not say that there shouldn't be any Sigmar-worshipping dwarfs or that they couldn't live in the cities too. As some others have mentioned, if you go back to really old-school WHFB Empire army books, there were dwarfs living there too, and sometimes they would fight for The Empire. Nothing wrong with that, but I think I speak for many when I would want that to be the exception rather than the rule: much like the Lumineth are the new High Elves or SBGL are the new Vampire Counts, etc, I want a traditional Dawi force that can stand for itself.

Thanks for the long response! I'll just quote this bit, though - this is exactly what prompted the thread. From a seed of starlight and lightning sprouts a web of nerves and nerve endings, etc. I find that bit very hard to make sense of. I presume the seed is the soul, but all the questions above are really brought about by this. Sprouting is too metaphorical because souls aren't plants. So it needs to be fleshed out (heh...). Hence the discussion here.

This is literally what The End Times felt like for me as an old-school Dwarf fan.

Hmm. That's kind of neo-Platonic, isn't it, in the sense that 'the One' has the greatest being and everything else emanates from it? Except now it'd be 'the Eight (winds of magic)' instead. I can see that. One thing that confuses me about that though is that I thought, from back in WHFB, that the winds of magic were distilled from Chaos or something like that. But I gather that's not AoS lore anymore? And anyway disattaching the winds from Chaos does make sense because the Old Ones/Slann are supposed to be masters of it as welll as creatures of order.

Thanks, that's helpful! I thought of the Aristotelian idea too at first but I don't think that's very AoS. The reason for that is that the souls do seem to be some kind of spirit-stuff rather than essences in the sense of just some property that makes things into what they are. You can imagine an AoS dwarf (well, Duardin... but actually dwarf) still being a dwarf but with their soul having left them, but that seems impossible on the soul-as-essence view. AoS's metaphysics seems more standard Western Christian than that - though admittedly not *just* that as there's, as you say, souls of the realms and natural entities and magic stuff and now also incarnates rather than a straighforward kind of mind-matter dualism. However, you're right that you could try to look at less mainstream - or out there - metaphysical ideas to iron out details. Playing around with causation is one option here, but what you want is something that allows souls to become increasingly concrete or material... but ideally they would also do that for some understandable reason. "It's magic!" and "it's a miracle beyond the laws of nature (of the mortal realms)" both feel a bit cheap IMO. You want something that makes consistent sense in the setting. Now I'm starting to think out loud, so bear with me: One possibility, I guess, would be to say that reforging works by hooking up a soul with a new body. It's not clear how that would work, but then that's something every dualist will have to say can happen in one way or another. (It has to happen when kids are conceived, for example.) The problem here is that it does seem like the Stormcast literally grow out of their souls when they are being reforged rather than are such that they acquire new bodies made from scratch. But I could see Grungni building bodies that could be linked up with souls flying around in an immaterial realm - it seems similar to classic WHFB dwarf runecraft that connects items with winds of magic flying around in some immaterial realm - so it's a pity they haven't explored this option more. Another possibility would be that there can be degrees of reality, somehow, so being material is to be in some sense coalesced to a high degree, whereas being immaterial is to be coalesced to a lesser degree, but there's no real line between them. Maybe it's even possible to have a mixed view where there's both matter (without soul) and soul-stuff and soul-stuff is such that it can be made more coalesced to the extent that it approximates matter even if it is not made from matter - or less so when it is more abstract, such as among ghosts. This should work well to explain how demons work, and also stuff like realmstone, which is increasingly concentrated coalesced stuff of the realms. If Stormcast are this, that means that their physical forms were originally material, but then they souls got taken away from matter, and then reshaped into the Stormcast because the souls can be reshaped and be made more or less concrete. I like that as it can explain why they seem a bit supernatural even though they are physical humans. Hmm. I hadn't thought of these possibilities before but maybe the last one could in fact solve the problem? It seems to fit what at least I have read about the reforging process well *and* makes at least some kind of sense. What do you think?

So, I know AoS is high(-ish) fantasy and "it's magic" and all... But one of the things that always has felt the oddest to me about AoS is the reforging process. It's an immersion-breaking issue for me. The background reason is the famous mind-body problem in philosophy: or, that it seems extremely hard to explain how mind (or in this case souls) interacts with matter, because they seem to be very different sorts of things that do not stand in a causal relationship with each other. In real psychology or philosophy of mind, people have developed more materialist or physicalist theories of mind to try to get around this (with varying degrees of success!), but that doesn't help in AoS because souls are very real in AoS. With that problem in the back of my head, I can't understand how Stormcast get new bodies. I get how there can be disembodied souls or spirits in AoS lore. I get how they can be altered or recombined, like the Ossiarchs or Idoneth do, because presumably you can play around with material of one kind while working with material of only that kind. I also get how there could, in theory, be bodies without souls. Even daemons that are supposed to be some form of magical entities get a free pass because chaos - the very point of chaos is that ordinary rules don't apply to it. What I don't understand, howevver, is how a human soul can acquire a new body in the reforging process. It seems to develop from one category of thing to another one. But how is that possible? Does anyone have any lore-based input on this?

They need to release this with a bunch of gobbo/grot musicians and call it Red Zeppelin.

Even more confirmation of my pet theory from before. Daenerys Targaryen Yndraees Ta-rgaryen the Mother of Dragons vs. Khal Drogo Kragnos Drogrukh the Stallion Who Mounts the World is likely to end up an epic clash. Or possibly alliance again, at some point.