Sception

Hope springs eternal, and the initial release ~does~ seem to have been a lot more positively received than GW was expecting, so we may yet see expansion beyond the limited scope that the game finally launched with. I certainly wouldn't complain if we see a return to something closer to the scope that the Old World was initially previewed with, including entire new ranges for Kislev and maybe even Cathay, and more legacy factions returning to full support as their ranges are slowly replaced or retired from AoS. But even if The Old World persists more or less as it is now, I'm still pretty happy with it.

Rather than a horus heresy type future, I expect more of an eventual middle earth style status quo - a good game that plays well sleepily persisting on a mostly static old model line available exclusively through the online store, seeing rare updates and even rarer new releases, yet well thought of and well appreciated by its players. A game largely unbothered by the constant meta uphevals of regular new army books, editions, and balance patches that the main games get - on the down side lacking the hype that drives new player interest, but on the up side you can buy a unit without worry that its in-game abilities will change dramatically by the time you get it painted. We'll see, though.

not sure on rules interpretation. Otherwise, as a sniper/jezzail leader this hero seems pretty cool, though character sniping is an archetype prone to cause feel-bads at the table. Mainly though, I feel like if this is what 'warlock engineers' are now then they've lost a lot of what made them cool. No connection to other weird skaven warmachines other than jezzails, not a wizard, no weird lightning tech, etc. I like it for what it is, decent rules that fit a cool model, but it's not super satisfying as a 'warlock engineer'.

Yeah, 3e had so many rules that were trying and failing to be 'character just joins a unit'. Short range wholly within auras & buffs, strike-after, bodyguard, look out sir, gallatian champions, and more I'm not thinking of. And we STILL have situations where the hero will charge into battle alone while their loyal bodyguard sits back and watches them die unsupported because one makes a charge roll that the other fails. Especially now that 4e is getting explicit keywords for unit types (infantry, cavalry, etc), I'm sorely disappointed that we're keeping all that garglemess instead of just having a more intuitive small-heroes-can-join-units-of-the-same-unit-type situation that replace all of those awkward rules at once.

It was more than just underestimating initial demand. After the initial release and immediate out of stock, GW scrubbed cursed city from its website as though it never existed. None of the expected announcement of expansions, mixed messaging on whether or not it would ever be back in stock, gw people refused to discuss it when asked, while models that seemed like they were intended to be cursed city expansions were released for AoS directly instead. It was bizarre, and the complete info blackout on Cursed City lasted several months. So long that people who liked the base game gave up on ever seeing official GW expansions and started writing their own, while speculation went wild over what exactly happened. The going rumor for a while was that some part of the cursed city rulebook had been plagiarized from some other game. Eventually the Cursed City box came back in stock, but it was weirdly and way later. And eventually expansions for it were released, though instead of having new models like previous warhammer quest expansions, they were just rules for using models that had already been released for AoS in Cursed City, which only reinforced the impression that some products originally intended for Cursed City had been re-routed to AoS. And given the long, long period with only the base game having been available at all, however briefly, it really didn't help that the base game wasn't very good. I don't know what the actual situation was, but it manifested ~very~ differently from the usual GW struggles to keep a popular product in stock, and absolutely hurt Cursed City far more than, say, Old World or Horus Heresy have been hurt by their constant stock issues.

until the end of whatever edition they're published in, at which point they stop being playable even for casual & narrative due to not being updated to work with the current ruleset. Every previous legends scroll will still have bravery instead of control, for instance, and many already have rules text that makes no sense in 3rd edition, let alone 4th. The stuff going into legends in 4th will be relatively playable until 5th (unless their legends scroll has some unit breaking typo in it that never gets fixed), at which point they'll not really be playable anymore. It's not the end of the world, there's always homebrew, but I don't think there's any spin or purely perception based change that will fix why most players don't care for legends rules and consider their units being shifted to legends the same as if they were removed outright.

Carrion finally went up on pre-order in the US. us$75 is kind of excessive for a chaff unit, but I still went in for a box.

cursed city might have done better but for the bizarre release disaster, though the game being kind of notably less good than similar competitors, including earlier versions of warhammer quest, certainly didn't help.

Converted liche priest on skeletal steed using the priest from the bone dragon kit. not perfect by any means, but I like it more than the official cavalry priest model.

I'm not surprised by splitting ironjaws from kruulboys - they are radically different ranges and simply do not look coherent together. It does feel like we have too many factions in the game though, so I'm not exactly happy about it.

I'm pretty sure there are not 'basic' magic rules, just core rules with no magic, then add the magic module to have any. That was the impression I got from the 'modules' article, though. "So why would I use wizards if I'm not using the magic module" - you wouldn't. "but what about spearhead?" - units will have separate warscrolls for spearhead, presumably wizards in spearhead boxes will get abilities on their spearhead warscrolls emulating their magical abilities - eg extra ranged attacks or the like - without involving rules for spells & such. ....................... Overall I like the look of this, particularly the return of proper spell lores in place of the generic arcane bolt & mystic shield. Especially with my plan to run the Liche's Hand RoR in a Soulblight Gravelords army in order to emulate the old Legion of Sacrament, this should solve the current problem with the Liche's Hand where you're paying for Arkhan, a triple caster, without any spell lore access. ..... Re priests, the main thing I'm not clear on is ritual points on a level 2+ priest. Are ritual points built up separately for each prayer, or cumulatively on the priest? For example, could a level 2 priest chant "unimportant prayer", roll 4 ritual points, then chant "important prayer", roll 5 more ritual points, and then use all 9 ritual points to activate the higher level effect of "important prayer" all in the same Hero phase?

Stormcast in every starter box? What? I'm thinking back, and I'm pretty sure there weren't any stormcast in the 2e starter box already. Do you mean the stormcast pictured on the box cover & rulebook? I did think it was weird that they were pictured so prominently when there weren't any stormcast models in the starter box, plus it was a bit awkward to run demo games with only a single faction in the box. So I guess I'd prefer stormcast in every starter box over that.

yeah nighthaunts will be a pain in the butt with this coherency. Heck, skeletons with their skirts and lowered spears will be a pain. Time to finally break down and get unit trays, I guess. The only way to get units into reliable coherency is to fix them in place relative to each other. Yeah, I think I actively hate the new coherency rules. 3e coherency was bad and a pain, this is somehow worse.

with 1/2 inch double coherency infantry units might as well go back to being ranked up on squares. 1 inch double coherency, or 1/2 inch single coherency is fine, but half inch double, and we're /still/ doing obnoxious wholly within bubbles (albeit fewer of them due to commands not being 'issued' by models with ranges) is just obnoxious. the only bit I havent liked from the 4e previews so far.

I'm one of these, but to be clear I have no complaints about the quality of the product. Would prefer dropper bottles, but otherwise it's perfectly good paint, and for some colors & purposes better than alternatives. If I didn't like the paint I wouldn't use it, convenience be danged.

I mostly use citadel just because I that's the gaming store I most commonly frequent, but I do also use other brands for various things - vallejo metal colors for grey metalids, greenstuff world metal pigments + vallejo metal medium for yellow metals, handful of individual vallejo model color, P3, or army painter speed paints for particular colors here and there, occasional artist inks (usually just white for zenithal undercoats), I recently picked up some oil paints to experiment with oil washes in future projects, etc. I play around with whatever really, but use citadel more than the rest combined, but again mostly just due to the convenience of happening to be at a warhammer store, and because hobby stores tend to have the fully line of GW stuff. the other stuff I use I typically have to get online even when I go to indie stores, because they never maintain a full range like they do for the GW stuff.

In the same handful of posts this "rumor" says TOW is "underperforming against projections" and selling so far above those same expectations that they're bringing back more old factions. It can't even maintain consistency with itself, let alone with reality. It's bologna. A bunch of baseless speculation - if any of it does happen it will be by coincidence only. Ignore it.

I'm just hoping the carrion finally make it across the Atlantic. 😛

Yeah, looking back at wiki lore, Mourngul's are starvation revenants associated with frozen mountaintops and tundra wastelands. Unless someone can think of a particular reason they belong with vampire pirates other than the TWW2 devs saying 'here's an undead unit we haven't used yet', I'm much more inclined to put them elsewhere, probably with the strigoi, as their starvation & cannibalism associations to me line up better with ghouls than anything else. I would say that opens up room for something else on the vampire pirate side, but even without mournguls they already have several units, so maybe not.

maybe have a 'horrors of the deep' entry with three different sizes/profiles, like high elves have their sun, moon, & star dragons? & then you could have three different base sizes as well, maybe even 0-1 of the small size as special, maybe add a howda option w/ crew & character mount to the biggest? maybe that's going too far / trying too much. EDIT: Maybe we do that instead of the Mourngul, and shunt that off to another AoI? Wasn't the Mourngul originally some sort of ghostly spirit of consumption spawned of people who died of starvation - the same situation that leads to cannibalism out of desperation & thus in warhammer world creates ghouls? seems like reason enough to put the Mourngul in a ghoul court AoI, even if its never had any explit lore connection to the strigoi. Ot certainly looks pretty ghoulish.

I mean, what I would have liked to have seen is a scattering of non-humans throughout the mostly human units. Like maybe one of the five cavalry models is an elf, or in a unit of 10 hand gunners there's seven humans, two dwarfs, and a half elf, or maybe one of the cannon crew is a dwarf, etc etc. But again, while it's not my preference, I'm fine enough with the new CoS line as is.

really? That's AoS canon? There are half aelves, and half ogors? See that's a cool concept. That's the kind of thing I'd like to see in game and on the table, even if it's rare enough to be reserved for named characters.

I liked CoS as a mixed fantasy race faction simply because you /never/ see that anywhere else. Every other fantasy game and series and whatever always has the dwarves off in dwarf society, elves in elf society, humans in human society, orcs in orc society. Where they're mixed, it's always one subjugating another and mostly segregated regardless (see elves in dragon age). Sometimes the dwarves/elves/whatever have novel and interesting societies, usually it's the expected cliches. Either way though, you'll have a mix of fantasy races in the protagonist lineup or player party, but in the world everything stays separate. Cities in AoS was a very rare exception, with modern Azyrite society born from refugees of all the realms fleeing chaos, collectively turning to sigmar to protect them as their own gods fell to Archaon or were driven into hiding. What kind of society does that produce? How do people live and work together when their neighbors might have lifetimes far shorter or many times longer than their own? Are all the captains and guild leaders elves out of seniority alone? Or are retirement ages mandatory, with humans living out their last days with their family while dwarves are obligated to take up a second or third career and elves a seventh or eighth? How common are cross-species relationships, do they increase or strain social cohesion, and do they ever produce offspring? I mean, even if not naturally, there are gods are right there, physically present in Azyr, theoretically you can go to their house, knock on their door, and petition for a miraculous exception. Speaking of, Sigmar and Grungni are there, but do the former followers of other gods regret their abandoned faiths, or resent the gods that failed or abandoned them? We know the humans, elves, and dwarves, but are there other, rarer, stranger folk who are also part of Azyrite society? halflings, gnomes, greenskins, faries, sylvaneth? undead, even? Did no vampires or wights escape to Azyr and, with Nagash's apparent demise, pledge themselves to Sigmar? We know Sigmar's stolen the souls of some undead to forge them into stormcast, were none freely offered? And if there are any Sigmarite undead in Azyr, how have things changed for them in the modern age with Nagash back, but now as Sigmar's enemy? I'm not saying these kinds of stories are ~more~ interesting than those you could tell with just humans in azyr, just dwarves in their sky cities, just treelves in their forests. But they are different stories, and ones you just don't get in most settings. I'll live with overwhelmingly or entirely human cities of sigmar, I don't think it'll ruin the game or setting or anything, I don't think it reflects a negative worldview by the creators or whatever. Heck, I don't even play the faction. But I liked what the previous version did for the game and the setting, and even with fantastic new models I can't help but feel the new version is a bit dull by comparison.

Ok, so looking at the Total Warhammer Vampirates unit selection, and ignoring the subfaction-specific stuff, there are several units that translate over from the grand army fairly directly vampire admiral -> vampire count vampire captain -> vampire thrall fell bats -> fell bats scurvy dogs -> dire wolves zombie deck hands -> zombies syreens -> banshees* terrorgheist -> terrorgheist *yes syreens are a unit in Total Warhammer, while banshees are a character in Old World, but these are basically the same thing lore wise and I think it's fine to just say the AoI can take banshees and have done. Maybe compromise with a looser restriction on them than the grand army list? There are also some basic vampire counts units that /aren't/ included in the Total Warhammer vampirates army, but that I think maybe should be available to the army of infamy? These include: bat swarms: with access to medium bats (fell bats) and big bats (terrorgheists), I don't see why vampire pirates would also have plenty of little bats roosting under the deck or amid the rigging. one could imagine a swarm of them blotting out the sun before a vampire pirate crew raids some harbor or attacks a vulnerable vessel at sea. regular skeletons - do they absolutely have to be /zombie/ pirates? some people like skeletons more, I'd rather stay open to that, though I'm open to arguments against. spirit hosts - vampirates aren't without ghostly options, with both syreens and mournguls. I don't see why they wouldn't have the most basic ghostly unit. And again, ghost pirates are also an iconic thing. That leaves the following total warhammer units to consider as potential new units: Gunnery Wight: this is a light armored zombie hero with blackpowder weapons, so regular wight lords & kings don't really translate here. Mourngul Haunter: maybe we keep Mournguls, maybe not, but even if we do I don't think they need a hero version Depth Guard: infantry blood knights. In TW they have two hand weapons or halberds, though in terms of available models and conversions we might want to allow sword & board or great weapon as well, and also might want to come up with a more generic name since we're likely to want to use the same unit again in future projects, eg blood dragon AoI. zombie pirate gunnery mob: too different from regular zombies to port over, we basically need at least one generic undead pirate unit able to wield muskets or something. In game they've got a bunch of ranged weapon options, but I don't want to go overboard on shooting stuff given the base army's complete lack of it, especially since timeline wise blackpowder weapons aren't super common or advanced right now. deck gunners: a zombie pirate with a heavy machine gun, this is the kind of advanced blackpowder weapon that I think we can safely avoid by saying it wouldn't be around yet, at least not in heavy use. deck droppers: fell bats carrying around zombies with handguns or cartoon blackpowder bombs. A neat and funny idea, but potentially awkward conversion. I'm inclined to leave them out on the principle of not adding /too/ much shooting/blackpowder animated hulks: zombie ogres, a classic conversion, I'm inclined to add these. Mournguls: I'm not sure of the justification for attaching these to vampire pirates specifically? But they're there in the game, and there was an official model for them, which hasn't been supported by the core vamp counts factions, so it might be nice to throw these in just so that people who have the old model have somewhere to use it. rotting prometheans/leviathans - giant undead crabs. Cool, but I want there to be easy first party conversion options for all the new units, and there isn't one for this. Unless we re-magined it as a more generic 'any sort of giant undead sea monster' sort of thing, such that people could use like the dark elf Kharibdyss? necrofex colossus: a giant walking shipwreck with a skeleton of torn timbers and muscles of drowned crewman corpses lashed together. An absolutely amazing monster, iconic to the faction, and it kills me to say it but once again I don't think there's an easy enough conversion from mostly first party parts. If we make 'rotting leviathan' a generic undead sea beast concept, maybe these could fit in there, for those willing and able to scratch build them? bloated corpse: exploding zombie giant/big ogre. cool and gross, but I think monsters are kind of over-covered already, and kind of overlaps with the animated hulks cannonade: well, yeah, they're pirates, they should have a cannon mortar: I don't see the harm in mortars as an alternative to cannons? queen bess: a super strong giant cannon. As much as a signature huge cannon is on brand for a pirate faction, and as cool as conversions based on the chaos helcannon or ogre ironblaster would be, I'm inclined to say no here? on the same not wanting to add /too/ much shooting & not wanting to go overboard on blackpowder reasoning. I am open to being argued otherwise though. As important as what gets added are the units dropped. Armies of Infamy are supposed to be relatively narrow themed lists, after all, far more focused in their unit selection than the grand army lists they are drawn from. Here's the grand army stuff I'm inclined to say vampire pirates just don't get: wights: (apart from the 'gunnary wight' above, which is a different sort of thing). No wight kings, No wight lords, no grave guard, no black knights. Wights are raised from their earthen barrows, and while perhaps not magically bound to them the way vampires are to their coffins, they're still creatures of the land rarely found at sea. ghouls: No ghoul kings, no crypt ghouls, no crypt horrors, no varghulf, no vargheists (which the grand army associates with ghouls). while most undead hunger for the living, ghouls alone will starve if they don't feed that hunger. Trapped on a ship for months at sea ghouls would eat the provisions, then the crew, then each other. Plus Ushoran's progeny are subject to terrible sea-sickness, everybody knows that. cavalry/chariots. No black knights, no blood knights, no hexwraiths, no corpse carts, no black coaches. You can take horses on boats, but they don't like it - not even the undead ones. Any vampire worth their salt who lives and fights at sea will tell you it isn't worth the bother. And transporting a chariot by sea is just awkward. Maybe we make an exception for character mounts? Or maybe not? Cairne Wraiths: I don't know, we like banshees here. I can't have fun fluff reasons for everything. necromancers. no master necromancer, no necromantic acolytes. Seawater and rocking waves wreak havoc on fragile paper tomes of arcane lore and careful alchemical mixtures. Yes, that means no level 4 spellcasters for this Army of Infamy, the strongest available spellcaster would be a lv3 vamp count. It wouldn't be the first AoI with no lv4s - Settra's Royal Host is limited to lv2. It also pretty much guarantees that this homebrew AoI won't be outperforming first party content - legacy or otherwise - on tables that allow it. Tentative composition then looks like: Characters (some percentage) 1+ Vampire (must be the general) 0-1 Vampire Count per 1000 points Any number of Vampire Thralls, Drowned Quartermaster (gunnery wight)*, and Banshees note: 1 vampire thrall or drowned quartermaster may be the battle standard bearer for +25 points Core (some percentage) 1+ Drowned Pirate Crew (light armor with options for pistols, handguns, or paired hand weapons)* Any number of Skeleton Warriors, Zombies, Bat Swams, and Dire wolves Special (some percentage) 0-1 unit of Spirit Hosts per banshee Any number of Fell Bats, Drowned Pirate Ogres* 0-2 units per 1000 points chosen from: Drowned Pirate Cannon*, Drowned Pirate Mortar* (basic cannon or mortar but with low BS undead crew) Rare (some percentage) 0-1 Terrorgheist or Mourngul* per 1000 points, Any number of Blood Knight Infantry* Allies: most Armies of Infamy don't get allies, but I feel like Vampire Pirates should Vampire Counts Grand Army Dark Elves Grand Army (or corsair-specific army of infamy, if we link up with a dark elf homebrew project working on one) *new unit, rules to be worked out, name subject to change For the drowned quartermaster, pirated crew, etc, I I know 'Zombie Pirates' is the most firmly established, but I kind of want to leave it open to the player whether to represent/convert them as skeletons, zombies, or ghosts. Maybe fluff them as the drowned crews of sunken ships revived at first as zombies, but if they last long enough the flesh sloughs off without any change in their abilities, and under the light of morslieb they take on the ghostly countenance of the people they once were? Just leaving them as open as possible for hobbying & the most options possible for 3rd party models. That leaves out a lot of fairly cool and iconic vampire coast units - the colossus, the crabs, the deck droppers, etc. It also already has /6/ new units, not counting any special characters, which is a lot for an Army of Infamy, arguably too much already. IMO if we wanted to add more than this, in particular if we wanted to add things like the necrofex colossus, then what we'd be looking at at that point is an entire separate homebrew faction, not an Army of Infamy for an existing one. But maybe trade the Mourngul for a 'rotted leviathan', which could be any big undead sea beast, maybe including the mournghul? The problem there is base size - mournghul wants to be on a 50mm square, would be awkward on a 60x100, and positively drowning on a 100x150. kharibdyss wants to be on a 60x100, won't fit on a 50x50, and would look weird on a 100x150, most of the necrofex colossus conversions I've seen seem like they'd want to be on a 100x60, legs splayed wide knight titan style. most conversions & 3rd party stuff I've seen for giant crab style rotting leviathan look like they wouldn't fit on anything less than a 100 x 150.

So far I've mostly been using 5x5 for skeletons & zombies, 6x4 for tomb/grave guard - but I'm switching those to 7x3 or 8x3, 5x1 for blood knights (though I could see 6x1 or even 7x1 being good for them), 3x1 (or 4x1 with hero) for light chariots & necroknights. 40mm monstrous infantry (ushabti or crypt horrors) I haven't really nailed down, waffling from 3 to 5 wide, 1 or 2 deep. 10 wide melee infantry sounds good but gets too unwieldy, too difficult to wheel around terrain or to fit into a battle line with supporting units, too easy for the enemy to multi-charge, which defeats the point of having so many attacking models by splitting their output between multiple enemy units. If you have some particularly nasty buff it can still be worthwhile, but otherwise even 8 wide is honestly a bit much imo. In terms of units changing formation mid battle - drilled is good in principle, as are other units that let you redress ranks like the sea guard gimmick, but due to the physical realities of movement trays vs. loose models & such I prefer to avoid it altogether and just deploy units in the formation I mean to keep them in for the entire battle. Unless there's an easy way to manage things with multiple smaller trays - like 20 seaguard on 2 5x1 bases that can be put next to each other for 10 wide shooting then shifed to front and back for 5 wide combat.