Togetak

I’d be kind of baffled if CoS went from “metropolitan alliance of Everyman human/duardin/aelf” to “Humans + 1 Ogor” model over the course of two editions, but I guess anything’s possible. Aelves are the ones most anchored to the line by convenience (sharing a kit with a DoK unit), but the latest city tome having a bunch of new dwarf art and emphasizing them as a part of things doesn’t make me super confident GW has decided on a vision for the faction that’s too far removed from the core identity they started with. I’d hope they wouldn’t introduce city ogors as an extension of the multi-racial thing and then completely dumpster the concept right afterwards, at least

I feel like the prince maesa BL novel is pretty different to a new character being introduced and prominent in the end of edition narrative, then the starting narrative of the new edition tying into a bunch of stuff, as well as continued presence of a bunch of different narrative threads across the battletomes and stuff like that. Morghur being hyped up and connected to that character is also kind of suspect, and the way it all vanished and BoC ceased to be mentioned anywhere around the middle of the edition feels like it's telling of something I find the "kragnos was supposed to be a BoC" stuff kind of silly, he looks nothing like ogroids or the centaurion, he's got kruleboyz stuff on his base, and the kruleboyz as a whole are full of visual references to him, including the murknob banner just being a stylistic picture his face. The WD interview that talks about the Kruleboyz design process mentions a bunch of stuff that was purposefully tied into him, too. Kragnos was even vaguely hinted towards way back in the wrath of the everchosen stuff, which didn't depict it as a chaos thing

You can definitely see there was an abrupt change to things, they had a huge amount of lingering plot threads that seemed to be leading up to something across late 3e and early 4e. They even had it intertwine with the Thondia narrative and Incarnates early into the edition, with Ghorraghan Khai appearing in both (and having some lingering implications in the battletome he was supposed to be even more important) and setting himself up as a big character. Then all that abruptly vanished in the middle of the edition, which feels pretty direct

This is a niche enough hobby that a loud enough fuss actually does get results, whether they’re quiet ones that alter things in the pipeline or shallower but more visible shifts like with the CoS marketing stuff. Even still, I don’t have to care about Beasts as a faction I want to play to care about the idea of completely randomly squatting a mostly plastic army four editions into the game, a year after they got a new miniature and following an edition that gave them a bunch of relevancy and fluff in elements of the narrative, supposedly so the same minis from the army (minus the one they just got) could continue to be sold at almost certainly a higher price in a sidegame.

I don’t really know how I take that whitefang2 message, especially in the context of all this stuff, but even assuming they’re right I feel like the appropriate reaction is to be loud and obstinate about it being dumb, like people were about the initial CoS refresh marketing implying a full cut of non-human elements that ended up causing a language shift avoiding that in response, rather than the really weird passive acceptance/justification of it that’s been floating around instead. It’s not particuarly good for the game to have a playable plastic faction cut for what appears to be no tangible reason that makes sense to anyone

That’s not an index, though? Honestly it kind of feels like people have gone insane about this stuff and squatting any plastic that could possibly be WHFB era. The start of 3e didn’t have people doomsaying all the slaves to darkness kits that got refreshed or anything like that

At least it explicitly confirms Beasts of Chaos are not being squatted/moved to legends/Renamed/souped into Slaves or whatever. Every faction is getting an index

It’s probably more metaphoric than anything else, but i guess it could be referring to how it’s usually visible in the night skies of the realms. Hysh is the realm that serves as the sun (with ulgu’s “orbit” eclipsing it to cause night in a realm) but azyr’s kind of more stationary in that sense, given it’s fixture in the night sky as kind of a North Star type thing, though the realms have a lot of “stars” that float beyond and between them. Some of those are balls of azyr realmstone, some are giant old ones artifacts that (those two are why divination of the stars work, being divination realmstone and giant unknowable constructs respectively) while others are just animals that live in the aetheric void and look like floating balls of fire, which the Seraphon sometimes befriend and have travel alongside their ships.

Likely Abraxia and her lizard mount, with the tree being the everspring swathe and the nest being phoenicium

I think this is likely to happen over the course of 4th edition, inbetween updating of the ranges that still have old resin stuff. Sylvaneth got their sort of wave 2 recently (and hopefully have a little more coming soon, kurnothi my beloved...) while the current Warcry push seems to be eventually giving every faction something, which should tide some of them over for a while if they're as good as the Vulkyn Flameseekers were for Fyreslayers (which i hope is signposting the new visual direction for what they might).

I think it's doing well for a sidegame, but i don't think it's anywhere near as successful as a mainline game. It sells out quick because it's being made in very limited batches, not because there's a huge stock being exhausted by huge demand

I feel like that's got to be a CoS unit of some kind, the arms feel way too thin for stormcast

If these are from the same model as the wings, I wonder if it’s a new Celestant Prime. The armor seems pretty similar, and the flowy weapons would fit. For the armor color, his whole thing used to be that his armor would change to match whatever stormhost he’s fighting alongside because hes just a vessel for sigmar’s will, but recent lore has had him frequently stuck in the colours of the Anvils of the Heldenhammer after his defeat by Lady Olynder during the soul wars. That reforging left him increasingly with his own dire mood that matched with those of that stormhost, and having his own personal thoughts and feelings weigh heavily on him. That’s started to distress him because he WANTS to be a truly neutral vessel for sigmar’s will and commands to flow through, which is maybe the most interesting thing they’ve ever done with the character, despite not exploring it at all so far.

The baron I_oyd rumors are weird, since basically everything in it is stuff people already expected or previous leaks/rumors had implied, and if you go back and check the time stamps it was posted on this forum by a newly made account like twelve hours after it got posted on 4chan. It lines up with everything enough-ish that it’s not hard to believe, it’s just weird

I think it’s worth noting that the GHR’s domain in the realm of chaos is called Ruin