Travis Baumann

In the new Skaven Battletome they state that only Skaven can transverse the gnawholes and live but they do say that after the Necroquake that Nighthaunts came flooding out of open Gnawholes and assaulted Skavenblight.

That looks super cool but odd that the sawfish is attached to the helmet's ponytail. I wonder if the sawfish actually has stats in game or just a decorative piece. I wonder what the dangly lantern in front of his face is supposed to do.

The eels swimming through air reminds me of From Beyond when they build a machine that breaks down the barrier between dimensions and the eels and insects (and head eating Old One) come through. The casters/weavers lay the magical framework to come on land, most likely for short periods. I wonder if there will be a dynamic of taking out those responsible for this magic would render some of these creatures weak/useless/dead. If they hadn't mentioned "Deepkin" however, I could see airborne creatures of this type. We have seen artwork from various sources over the years of sharks that "swim" the skies and have air bladders to keep aloft. Even Barbarella had rays that flew above land that she could ride. The Deepkin are briefly mentioned in LoN that an unknown force is stealing souls but so far even Arkhan and his minions have not been able to identify the source of this soul-theft. We may end up with some aquatic undead at some point to combat them on their own turf as well. In the video, there are shipwrecks and corals and aquatic vegetation on the board, are we sure they are not underwater there?

Looking forward to a Great Unclean One. In the mean time I found a stand in....

I was just going through some old posts because I vaguely remembered some details about future AoS stuff that Vince from Warhammer Weekly was privy to from a designer panel at NOVA. They spoke quite a bit about the next two years being huge for AoS starting with the Deathrattle stuff the other side of Christmas and the big campaign they teased is much bigger than just Death, it should have a lot of stuff to move the entire story along. They hinted that the design team really doesn't know what to do with humans in the AoS world for the long run. Discussion came up that they could actually fit into every grand alliance in some way but at this time that is not planned. It sounded like there would be no Battletomes or big releases this side of Christmas at all but we may get Beasts of Nurgle as the new ones are shown in Deathguard material and Pestigors are spoken about in the fluff in Blightwar but I doubt we will see models prior to a Battletome. Looks like its time to kick back and catch up on some painting as well as get in some Skirmish and AoS games in the mean time. I did not pick up Path to Glory or Firestorm/City thing yet. Not sure if I will for a while. There is plenty to keep me going right now with what I have at the moment.

In one of the unboxing vids the guys doing it explain that your actual drawing deck is 20 cards with no more than 12 of those being upgrade cards so even if you get all 400+ cards they are going to have, you will only be able to assemble a deck of 20 based on your play style (or so it has been said, they did not read the rules outloud, just summarized).

Even if Nurgle sucks competively all the models look really fun to paint. I have already committed some cash to them so I am going to give them a try anyways.

Nico just posted this in another thread but the WH community article sheds some light on Nurgle's not-so-divided forces https://www.warhammer-community.com/2017/09/14/starting-a-nurgle-army-with-blightwar-sep14gw-homepage-post-2/ Going to have some fun putting together different combinations of Decay. I do wish they had put an even 1000 point army in Blightwar though.

I picked up Blightwar and I like it a lot but the book is really sparse. The bit of backstory they give is fun and I like the wheel o' decay but it is hardly even a hold-over for a proper Nurgle Battletome. At the moment, Nurgle have an amazing set of miniatures available (especially as long as those few noted in previous posts do not become unavailable). 40K is seeing a lot of Nurgle love at the moment but I am not sure how that will fully translate over to AoS releases. I feel that Blightwar might have been a roll-over effect for those that play both systems or a bone-thrown for those of us who just play AoS. In terms of miniatures, Nurgle really are only lacking some Pestigors, some Mortal Followers, new Beasts, and the Great Unclean One. Yes, more than that would be awesome... Nurgle engines of war, Calvary beyond Drones, etc. but honestly, their releases are all pretty up to date and great looking (and I still am looking to potentially convert Moratarion as a Demon Prince but his price tag is going to have me hold off for now). What Nurgle really needs however is a new Battletome. Between the new GHB, Blightwar, FW, and FAQ Nurgle has been rendered into nearly four different forces that don't necessarily play well with each other unless using the Grand Alliance. His forces also lack artefacts and while the wheel o' decay is in essence an allegiance ability, it is not exactly the same thing as a hero driven ability (perhaps it will prove better though, I think it will take a few games to get into the cycle and changes that take place each turn). I was not planning on playing Nurgle but I got sucked in by the Blightwar box which not only supplements the Stormcast that I got in the original AoS boxset into a really nice force (loving the griffon charger models, they are really well done) as well as getting me started on a Nurgle force. I really do not want to keep collecting/painting Plague Bearers though. I want to paint Mortal chaos warriors of Nurgle and Pestigors and some of those big guys like the Glotkin.

Not sure if this counts but I don't think the Dwarves other than KO have gotten too big of a role in AoS to date but this is a panel for Disciples of Tzeentch

Based on the video blogs I have seen regarding the designer panels at Nova, we wont be seeing any new Battletomes until after Christmas (and that was not a given on a tome, just something major with Deathrattle coming with the new campaign being teased. I wish they would just do a full Nurgle tome now though. I went in for Blightwar and assembled the snail guy and lady SC and they both look really cool. I did not think I would ever go for a Nurgle force but now I am set on one (at least a moderate one for now). I really need to check out the existing range as some of the things look great even though they may have been out for a while. Some Pestigors and the AoS equivalent of Pox-walkers seem to be in order though as I like the mortal aspect and don't mind some deamonkin but don't want an entire army of Plagebearers by any means.

I hope they do something WAY different than Scourge Privateers.. they had their time in the sun or ocean or whatever. That was a good lore for sea-borne monster collectors with floating citadels but I want something out of left field to usurp the Dark Aelven mythos (Cthulu would be pretty awesome but make it as unique to Fantasy Wargaming as the KO were - just not steampunk or overly technological, more magic based). The Scourge Privateers reek of Drow from Forgotten Realms in a blender with Elric and the Melniboneans from Moorcockverse. LOVE both of those worlds/sagas by the way but the beauty of AoS is the chance to reboot all of these older tropes in unbelievably awesome ways.

I plan on converting Mortarian to a Demon Prince for AoS anyways. Blightwar tomorrow!

The only issue with this is the limited number of leaders available to your army list. They would have to actually be very valuable special characters to take them instead of what is already available in that section of your army build. For example, in my Tzeentch list, would I really sacrifice a Chaos Sorcerer Lord or Herald or Changer of Ways for whatever they come out with for the Chaos group? Perhaps... if the model is amazing and has at least some ability that would warrant that loss of magical fire power. It would be interesting if they actually counted as a unit as they appear in Shadespire and all members were accounted for on a single unit warscroll and could be taken in the "other" section of the army build but it all depends on how powerful they are when ported into AoS mechanics. The Stormcast lady had 4 wounds and I forget what else from watching several demo's... I wonder what her warscroll will look like. I still don't see anything about war-bands being customizable in Shadespire which has me on the fence about it (along with deck building mechanics which I have never liked) but I do have to say that the war-band packs themselves look really good and I would like to see them in Skirmish type AoS engagements if not incorporating them into a larger force.

You guys should watch the demo videos from Adepticon and other conventions out there, it will explain how the mechanics work. Although it had been teased as a deck building game, this is not a CCG. The guys running the demos have been very specific about that, you get all the cards in the box. There are two decks, one is objective cards that correspond to objective markers placed on the board. Each side gets three. The other cards are "ability cards". You randomly draw five at the start of the game... you do not build a deck per say. Some of the abilities cannot be triggered unless certain criteria have been accomplished (for example you have to kill someone for some of the cards to be playable) so you may end up with no playable cards for the entire round if you are unlucky. Cards that I saw used included +1 die in defense, "confusion" where you can swap your model location with an enemy model, "Valiant Attack" where you negate bonuses for defense that your enemy would get for having multiple models in adjacent hexes (teaming up is pretty strong tactic both in terms of assault and defense). Each of these abilities only last for the upcoming activation so they play out very quickly. It was hard to tell in the demo if each faction gets their own deck to draw from or if this was more like a single "generic" action deck that both sides choose from but some of the abilities made sense as a faction specific theme. The game itself is "the best of three" rounds played in rapid succession. Each round is a game in and of itself and lasts only four alternating actions per side so that means some models never get activated in a round at all. The three rounds total means each game consists of only 12 activations per side (playing ability cards that are in your hand do not use an activation, only drawing a new card does). You really will have to make each activation count or not much gets done. I was also surprised by how hard it was to kill anybody in a given round as each model has more than one wound (The female Stormcast has 4). The board comes in two halves, doubled sided and can be placed in various ways (the demos did not go into how board placement was done, just how deployment is). The war-bands appear to be all pre-defined. This is not a customizable build your own force type of game in comparison to many other GW games. It does not appear that the factions come with their own board half.. the pitch can be set up in multiple ways but predominantly there are pre-determined impassible terrain and "spawn locations" for deployment on the board. In the production videos they show the skeletons for example fighting in really cool ruins and stuff but that is not actual game play, it will all be fought on the provided pitch. It is going to be a very fast game and a bit removed from immersion in comparison to other GW games as it is very mechanical which will provide the Magic/X-wing/Boardgame appeal and allow for the tournament style of gaming this is aimed for. I personally wish this was more of a hybrid of Skirmish but as the original post here states, even if I don't love the mechanics and game play, it is going to be good for the models it will produce. I also see this as a break-in game for people who are intimidated by the thought of miniature wargaming as it has a much more controlled board game approach and is more about rolling dice and playing card abilities than list building, moving armies, and battlefield tactics.

I was just looking on the main GW site to see what base sizes things should be for rebasing a unit of Ungors and a unit of Chaos warriors The Ungors are still shipped/listed w/ 20mm squares so I assume 25mm rounds would be ok for them. It listed the CW's w/ 32mm rounds, are we sure they have not already went to 40's? The Stormcasts come w/ big ones in the main box and are not that much bigger/more powerful than CW's. I don't want to rebase them incorrectly. Also noticed what someone else posted above, that unit has different base sizes within it which seems odd. I understand one is just standing with his rifle instead of crouching and bracing but it makes base size seem arbitrary to say the least. Also the main box set has different base sizes for the Lord of Khorne and the Korgoraths than anything else I have seen. Is there really a standardized base size at all at this point?

Thanks guys, it helps very much. I would have a hard time fielding High/Wood Aelves on the same side with Dark Aelves... I know in the AoS world it is supposedly a thing but hard to wrap my head around having loved the Dark ones since I first saw a drawing of a Drow over 30 years ago. The new figures looks so much cooler than the old ones. I have to resist dropping a ton of cash for now until I actually get some games in. My old gaming group broke up and went their separate ways, often on different continents at this point so I have to go check out the local scene and see if I am down to play (from Los Angeles).

This is definitely a useful and welcome thread but it fell off just when it was getting to all the things I have questions on. I played WFB and Rogue Trader in the mid '80's until early 1990, then went to college, picked it back up about five years later and played again until 2000. Have not touched a miniature or game since then and coming back to GW is kind of confusing. I downloaded the free rules and all of the warscrolls in PDF format and then started joining communities like this. The no points thing was super confusing but see that this was addressed in the General's Handbook (which I have not bought yet as there is so much talk of the next one right around the corner). I downloaded the APP which has access to a lot of the warscrolls but a bunch of stuff is locked, it is not all free at all - all the Battalions are locked, all of the Tzeentch stuff is locked, etc. Here are my questions: 1. What do I need to actually make an army and understand it? Do I need General's Handbook + Faction Book + Battle Tome? If so, this sounds exactly like old WFB with Armies books with all of the power creep and Codex trump possibilities of old with whichever army waiting for an updated Tome which brings them for a small window into the current - is that how this works? 2. Where are the "Keywords" discussed? I didn't see them in the main 4 pg rules and don't understand how any of that works 3. How do you find out about Battlions, Synergies, Buffs, Spells, and Magic Items? (playing on Scrollbuilder website is really confusing, it does not really explain anything so somewhere other than the free warscrolls and main rules this stuff must be explained). I am trying to figure out what army to focus on. I have a ton of really really old GW models to start a core Dark Elf army, High Elf Army, and maybe a Skeleton Hord but I know for sure the Dark Elves do not have a Battle Tome yet and their free warscrolls are kind of meh. Are they discussed in any book (somehow they are in Order? Do not understand that) or are they really that handicapped at the moment? Of the new armies I like the Sylvaneth a lot but don't want to invest in a whole new army until I have played a few games and utilized the closet full of GW stuff I already have so I am hoping to be able to put together some sort of force that is both viable and looks cool.

Looks great so far. I was just looking at some photos from the LVO and there were some spectacularly painted Sylvaneth armies that had some really cool basing done, you may want to check them out for inspiration. The link was up on the homepage here.