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

I think cutting down on the named character nobodies is probably going to happen, but I don’t think they’ll cut out the UW warbands. The farstriders got a rerelease a couple months ago and the only UW warscrolls we’ve ever seen dropped from a battletome is the new FEC randomly throwing out theirs, despite other recent tomes keeping much older warbands

I’m seeing people say that looks like the Sigmarabulum, the big orbital ring around the core of the old world that all stormcast reforging is done in, in the sky behind the freeguild fighting a hell pit abomination. I don’t really think that looks much like the other depictions or really much like a flying ring around a planet rather than just the background of a city they’re fighting in front of, but I guess that could be what it is, we’re working with smudges

I imagine it depends on the darkoath tribe in question, darkoath isn’t a specific culture as much as just a way of living that a lot of tribal peoples from across all the mortal realms participate in, the intricacies of that are different for all of them. You see a bunch of the faces the chaos gods wear in random bits of fluff (like Khorne being the Great Kraken to seafaring marauders in ghur, who sacrifice the skulls of their plundered victims to the seas) and in stuff like the Rotmire Creed knowing Nurgle only as the Plaguefather, or the Jade Obelisks worshipping a tzeentchian daemon that trapped them in a devils bargain rather than tzeentch himself. Same is true for some of the Warcry cultists, where a bunch of them worship their own gods that exist on some level of ambiguity as to whether they’re faces worn by a chaos god, a particularly powerful daemon, or even a minor chaos diety of some description. Others like the Tarantulos Brood just worship chaos itself, seeing the amorphous collection of gods and power as just part of a great eight-legged whole. I think darkoaths probably have the same variance, especially since monogod marked darkoath have existed pretty prominently before and even been mechanically possible throughout 2nd and 3rd Ed, prior to the latest book.

She does seem to be an immortal lich that drains the lifeforce of her followers to exist, but she is also a Sigmar-worshipping priest at the head of a religious cult in the cities of sigmar, she doesn’t seem to have much connection to death as like an organized faction or anything. She’s not a skeleton revived by necromancy or anything, it seems like a weirder faith-based thing where the “living” zenestra is her main body she interacts with the world using, even though it’s a projection that attacks pass right through and the skeleton is her original body. In the end times the sword of Khaine lost all its power after Tyrion (who’d become kind of the mortal host of Khaine) was killed and it was kind of just discarded as ulthuan sank immediately after that death. The only known shard of Khaine in the mortal realms is his heart (the only piece khorne couldn’t destroy and melt down) that Morathi has, with all other rumored ones being things she made up to send troublesome DoK on fruitless chases after. It definitely could survive and hold some of his power still though, or the concept of it could be seen to continue with the weapons Khorne’s favored bloodthirsters got, which were made from Khaine’s melted down body.

There’s a picture of him where he looks like a vaguely draconic shadow being that made people spawn a rumor that he fused with his dragon for some reason, but his dragon died like four seconds into the end times and he looks more demonic (in like a sterotypical way, rather than a Warhammer daemon one) than half-dragon. In all his depictions since then he’s more of an amorphous shadow that whisps around and takes on whatever form he desires it to, though I don’t think we know a whole lot about Malerion though, he’s been around in the sense we know he’s a present force in the setting and that he’s an aelf supremacist who’s poking Tyrion’s defences while looking for a way into their realm (because he can’t enter hysh and the twins can’t enter ulgu without the opposite realm energies destroying them), and we know the aelf client states under his rule are called the Ulgurothi Legions, but not really anything else about him.

The thing with those squatted WHFB holdover kits, like with Slaves and Seraphon, is that they were either replaced in the refresh or (in CoS’ unique case) kind of orphaned and on the way out to begin with, coming from microfactions that didn’t necessarily have much support in the army or particularly playable rules. Cutting down model bloat or refreshing a line by replacing models with equivalents isn’t really the same as entierly axing an entire faction who’s recently had new models, has had a developing narrative in the current edition, and has had a substantial longstanding presence in the setting. I don’t necessarily think there’s anything about having the current number of chaos factions that prevents adding chorfs either, setting the max at seven is kind of odd

I think the model for a human woman who’s a member of the Varanguard is probably pretty unlikely to have been a BoC character they changed up at the last minute or something, the models get designed years in advance. I’m still pretty suspect on the idea of BoC being squatted too, I know whitefang liked that post of the guy saying “they’re going to be put in legacy and squatted next edition so they can be in TOW” but this coming a little more than a year after they got a new battletome and model (which would then just.. cease to exist, I guess? Go out of production a year after it was created?) is such a deranged decision to me, cutting a faction out of a preexisting mainline game and dropping all its presence in the world of that game so you can sell less of those models in a specialist side game, feels like an impossibly bad business decision with no real reason to do it. I could see them getting a refresh, they’re one of the factions left who need it, but the idea of going “this faction that’s been in the game for the last three editions? It’s gone now, enjoy” basically arbitrarily is not something that makes any sense to me

Imo that would make everything even weirder, considering how much focus the centaur and faun aelves have gotten and the way they’re tied so heavily to Belthanos. The imagery used recently with the art from the WD short story and the stuff in dawnbringers/the warcom short story probably blends the aesthetic better than Skaeth’s stuff, they’re depicted with like wooden antlers cracking out of their skin and wounds being healed over by bark flesh to give them wooden claw arms or patches of moss and bark across their skin, but they’re all still non-sylvaneth being transformed by into Skaeth style kurnothi by the power of the wild hunt & Ghyran magic that flows through it. Focusing so heavily on that stuff and then going “here’s Questor Soulsworn but Kurnoth Hunters” when we get kurnothi models would be strange

What are the odds we get kurnothi in Warcry? That seems like kind of the best fit for how they’ve been described, and it’s extremely weird we got one as the POV character in a dawnbringers story and had them be the bulk of Belthanos’ forces in the actual dawnbringers book he appears in, but still have no models for them (Belthanos’ dawnbringer box even comes with spiteriders for some reason, despite them not appearing in his lore or the dawnbringer book they’re supposed to tie into, which feels so odd)

I’d kind of hope GW learned from 3E that focusing in on one particular realm for a whole edition is pretty boring and limited given the nature of the setting, rather than just shifting the focus to a different realm