Sception

Old Wold lore is a tangle of contradictions and retcons and stories presented first as myth and allegory and later canonized as literal truth only to even later be de-canonized as never having been a thing at all. It was grown over decades by various teams of game designers and novelists none of whom ever had a full picture in their head, and even the most straight forward and fundamental of questions (eg, does Warhammer Fantasy Battle take place in the same universe as Warhammer 40k) returned a different and contradictory answer year to year. Any answer to these sorts of questions you source from the fandom will be a cobbled together web of contradictory lore and headcanons filling the gaps as best as possible, and most of the fans giving you the answer won't even be able to remember which bits came from official sources and which bits were wholly made up just to fit the rest together. I'm not saying that it isn't worth asking or looking into, but if you're looking for a definitive official canon timeline from the Creation to the End Times without major contradictions along the way - especially in those earlier bits - that's not really a thing at the moment. The Old World might provide answers to some of that stuff, but I kind of doubt it, especially with Lizardmen and daemons not being among the supported focus factions.

I am admittedly drawing on older fluff here - primarily the Liber Necris, which is still my favorite source for old world undead lore. "So the soul, as defined by the liche priests of Nehekhara, was called the Akhu and it was the immortal, incorporeal person that was a blend of the Ka, Ab, Ba, Ren and Sekhem bound together and unified for all eternity in an afterlife. Since the time of Settra, the priests of what became the Mortuary Cult knew that the Akhu did not necessarily stay whole and safe after death, as many where the gods and daemons that would seek to consume elements of it, or even the entirety of it. So it was that the liche priests bent all their efforts into finding a way to bind the Akhu to the mortal shell, or Kha, so that it would not disperse or be consumed after death" etc etc. The Liber Necris is rather outdated, though, fair enough. For instance it includes the old Vashanesh lore and positions it as the origin of the Von-Carstein bloodline, and Vashanesh was in his entirety decanonized by later lore, particularly the Nagash novels. And rightfully so - as cool as Vashanesh was, he heavily undercut Neferata's presence and role in the narrative, and as the first Vampire the focus of that part of the story really should have been on her from the start. In addition to being at least partially outdated, the book is also explicitly narrated by Mannfred, whose knowledge of necromancy and the undead is matched only by his unreliability as a narrator. The same book is my source for the decay of Nehekharan culture under its immortality-obsessed kings and increasingly degenerate Mortuary priesthood, so fair to question that too. The newer lore was an improvement in many ways (particularly regarding Neferata, as already mentioned), but I grew up on the old lore and it still has its hooks in me. Standard grognard brainrot, admittedly.

I didn't much care for the Avengori book myself. Which was frustrating, because the premise and set up were actually really good. The city was set up well, its cool mythic fantasy premise, the class stuff, the arrogant belief that they could literally rise above the brutality of Ghur, the Avengori as a literal and metaphorical opposite embracing the monstrosity of ghur while digging into the ground to live in caverns beneath the surface. The set up of the beastmen was lacking, they're not characters at all, just a list of kits you can buy at your local hobby store. But everything else really felt like it was going somewhere, and then it just kind of didn't in the end. Especially the subplot of avengori turning members of the absolute dregs of the city's society - the people even the underclass look down on, those without even the false desperate hope of social advancement, the used up and abandoned. That subplot probably had the very most potential out of anything in the book, and also most clearly differentiated Avengori from other bloodlines who are usually depicted as infiltrating decadent noble classes. Avengori starting from the bottom up instead, forcing forcing a society to confront its sins by giving its lost and forgotten the power to tear down their oppressors was a neat idea - going to those that the rest of society refuses to even acknowledge as human and saying 'if they won't let you be human, you might as well join us and be monsters'. The seeds of an amazing book are there, but they're stamped to pieces in an ending that just degenerates into a bunch of arbitrary battle scenes without any real tension or meaning, while the twist the beginning and middle of the book felt like they were setting up just never materializes, and it all descends into the worst sort of gw novel pandering - this is the avengorii book, so they beat up everybody else without even trying, and it kills the stakes and it renders all the more interesting themes it touches on meaningless since none of it mattered anyway. ... On the other hand, I was a huge fan of Undying King. Nice taste of Nagash, his human worshippers, Neferata, Arkhan, flesh eaters, wights, etc. Kind of wish they'd bring back the main character of that book, though I'm not sure there's really any story left to tell with her.

I mean, necromancy didn't exist to be forbidden until Nagash, and after Nagash it's mostly forbidden on account of the horrible atrocities he committed using necromancy. Nehekharan religion was pretty much wrecked by that point anyway, and its gods were pretty thoroughly cut off. Regardless, it wasn't that long from Nagash's first defeat to the death of the entire civilization anyway.

An interesting note is that in the old world Mummies and Wights are essentially the same things, hence the similarities between tomb guard and grave guard units throughout the editions. Basically, the wealthy nobility among nehekhara would pay the mortuary cult expensive tribute to have their bodies preserved through mummification, but more importantly to have their souls preserved and bound permanently to the bodies. This wasn't undeath, they didn't know how to restore true life to the body or even allow the soul to puppet the corpse around, but the theory was that in time the secret to restoring true life to the dead would be discovered, and the preserved bodies and souls of the nobility would be waiting for them. Of course, that secret was never discovered, and in time the mortuary cult grew decadent and stopped looking, even forgetting how the rituals they practiced actually worked and continuing them out of rote tradition more than anything else. Well in the waning years of Nehekhara, During Nagash's reign and later after Nagash had poisoned the great River of Life, many refugees fled the dying land, including many mortuary priests, and fragments of these traditions spread to the less civilized peoples of the northern lands. The secrets of mummification to preserve the body were lost & forgotten, but the ritual practices to preserve the souls remained, leading to the souls of early warlords and barbarian chieftans being bound to their skeletal remains within their barrow mounds throughout the regions that would later become the Empire, Brettonia, Tilea, etc. The practice even spread to some Chaos worshipping warrior tribes of the far North - Krell was one from of these. When Nagash raised the Tomb Kings - and when the necromancers and vampires that follow raise the dead in the Old World - if the animated body is one where the soul was bound to it in this way then they're more physically powerful for that connection, but more importantly they also retain more of their soul, and with it more of their personality and memory and skills from life, which is what makes mummies & wights so similar to each other, and so different from zombies and skeletons.

And in terms of being evil, even before Nagash Nehekharan society was still an empire that imposed its rule through military force, robbing and enslaving those in the periphery to transfer vast sums of wealth to the imperial core, and thus was pretty baseline evil by default. But even on top of that, thanks to Settra's influence Nehekharan culture was especially death obsessed, devoting all the treasure they stole not to improving the lives of the citizenry of the imperial core, or even to enhancing the comfort and mortal pleasure of its elite rulers, but rather to building vast necropolis structures stuffed with riches and tribute to be enjoyed by their kings only after their supposed elevation to eternal life at some point in the distant future. Even before the undead existed, it was a land where the living were forced to suffer lives of perpetual toil and torment in service to the vanity of the dead, a land ruled by selfish tyrants but where the real power was in a priestly caste who encouraged and demanded ever increasing tributes to the dead because the priests were the only living souls tending the necropoli to enjoy them. The tomb kings aren't a 1 to 1 analogue of the ancient egyptian society with all its nuances and rich humanity, but rather a pop culture parody of the worst traits ascribed to them by pulp fiction writers long after they were gone. You might argue that the brettonians or the empire or the high & wood elves weren't exactly good, but even by those standards the Tomb Kings were still pretty darn evil. Sure, they'd fight against chaos if the only other options were submission or annihilation, but so would the dark elves, and you wouldn't call them good or even neutral either.

Yes, Nagash ruined everything by inventing necromancy, killing the nehekharans, and raising all their dead as the tomb kings, and he is personally responsible for those atrocities. BUT Nagash invented necromancy by combining the mortuary cults study of life extending and soul manipulating rituals with dark magic learned from captive dark elves, and he wouldn't have been able to do that in the first place without having those mortuary cult traditions to build on, which draws a direct line back to Settra, who ordered the creation of the mortuary cults and their elevation over the other priestly orders of nehekhara in an attempt to defy his own death. Without Settra's fear of death there would be no mortuary cult and no Nagash. And it goes further than that - in order to usurp the authority of any who would come after him, Settra ordered that the firstborn of the ruling houses of Nehekhara would no longer inherit rulership, but must instead be given over to the mortuary cult to become priests, with the secondborn inheriting power not as true heirs but as stewerds waiting for Settra's eventual return. Without Settra's selfishness, Nagash would never have been a priest to begin with. Partially because he never would have been born in the first place due to different lines of succession and marriage and what not in a firstborn-inheritance alternate Nehekharan timeline, but even ignoring that Nagash as firstborn would have been king to begin with - still a villain, but never studying the arcane to begin with, and not needing to resort to any extremes to gain power. He simply would have been another tyrannical king of khemri in a long line of similar tyrants, a threat to his people and his neighbors but not to the entire world. So yeah, Nagash is responsible for the ruin of Nehekhara, but Nagash would never have been Nagash had Settra not set his people down the road of defying death in the first place. Nagash is Settra's legacy, the inexorable doom that Settra cursed his Empire to suffer through his selfishness and pride.

I've watched most of it. The dice were very one sided, with bret player wiffing a lot of 2+ hit and wound rolls and tk player rolling remarkably well overall, not just with magic, so it's honestly hard to get a good sense of balance out of it. But yeah, my biggest takeaway is that one wound, one attack knights of the realm is super disappointing, yeah. Yes they have their lance back, and they did win a couple charges against basic skeletons by enough to make you think they'd have a good chance of rolling through bog infantry units that /aren't/ unbreakable undead, but between the dice and the bad match up and the lackluster stats, it just wasn't a very promising showing for the pride of brettonia. ... I also liked 8e more than 6 or 7. not for the core rules, but for some of the wild stuff that was added to individual factions - the sphinxes for tomb kings, mortis engines for vamp counts, etc. There just seemed to be more of an anything goes high fantasy feel to it, a feel that has persisted into AoS and is the main thing I like about that game.

Meanwhile in Ameribux I'm surprised at how reasonable some of the TK prices are. Not the big box, ugh, those skeletons, you couldn't pay me to take them. But $80 for 20 tomb guard is, iirc, the same price per model as when they were last available a decade ago at 10 for $40. Likewise for the sphinx, ushabti, and stalkers/necroknights, not cheap by any stretch but less than I was expecting by a good bit.

Are we /sure/ we're sure that it's an army of renown for the LoB diplomats to Ushoran, and regiments of renown for each mortarch? Could the preview article have maybe gotten that backwards? Because it seems like a regiment of renown would make way more sense for the diplomats (so you could run them alongside FEC army as fits the lore), while armies of renown would make a lot more sense for the mortarchs (ie personal retinues of their own faction, as opposed to running mortarchs cross faction which imo makes way less sense).

I mean, the ridden monsters do have abhorrant healing built in. One could draw a parallel to soulblight, where most of their faction traits are about supporting summonables but their hero monsters are still good enough that double-dragon has been one of the main soulblight builds since zombie spam was nerfed.. Then again, vampire hunger is better than abhorrant healing in magnitude, reliability, and timing, and the vampire heroes riding their zombie dragons hit harder and have better saves than their abhorrant equivalents, and most soulblight subfactions have better artefacts & command traits for powering up their generic monster heroes than FEC have, plus they have a bunch of unique monster heroes like the mortarchs and Vhordrai, and Sure Usoran is great, but what he's mostly great at is anchoring & buffing a bunch of peasants and knights. All in all, it just feels like the torch for undead winged monster mash lists has been passed from FEC to Soulblight, at least for a while.

Once Usoran is released, I expect he'll be filling the 'big monster' slot of most FEC armies that want to bother with a big monster at all. I'm definitely feeling / hearing more excitement about the smaller stuff - lots of knight shenanigans, basic ghouls can put out a ton of attacks, the elite ghouls have a ton of utility baked in, and a bunch of the small heroes seem fantastic. I could definitely see FEC without monsters taking center stage for a while. Kind of depends on points adjustments though.

I understand the wish. I'd pay a frankly embarrassing sum for the STL files of the studio's OBR walls, gate, and tower, and they wouldn't even have to design anything new for that. That's stuff that's just sitting around idle on someone's computer already. But yeah, for the moment I can't imagine GW wants to be putting the idea of 3d printing into the minds of any hobbyists who aren't already thinking about it.

I doubt GW will go the stl route any time soon. Long term it's hard to see it as anything other than the unavoidable future of the industry, but in the short term there's quality (FDM is lousy for minis), safety (resin involves toxic liquids and vapors), and profitability questions (not sure GW can sustain itself on a 'buy the template once then print as many as you want' model, to say nothing of maintaining brick and mortar stores without which the entire hobby withers and dies for lack of a place to gather and play).

The main things on my painting to-do list for 2024 are: AoS: OBR vanguard 40k: Necron Combat Patrol MESBG: Mordor Battleforce TOW: ~500 points custom starter force for tomb kings, ideally based on the old battalion contents, but that only works if I can come up with a GW store legal conversion substitute for the horsemen that I actually like. HH: Raven Guard special terminator unit, for a friend Underworlds: Kainan's Reapers War Cry: some playable warband. Probably misc OBR stuff unless an official OBR warband is released before I get around to them. I'd like to expand the Tomb Kings, Mordor, and especially the OBR forces out into full standard size playable forces w/ matching terrain, maybe make one of them into a proper armies on parade entry, but there's a lot on my plate already, and that's before we get into likely elden ring dlc and silksong releases this year which, if they happen, will distract my attention away from tabletop hobbies.

Where I am all of warhammer fantasy battle became 'oldhammer' pretty much the moment AOS was announced. A LotR style existence is pretty much the midpoint between 'big hit' and 'total failure'. Thinking about it, yeah, that is probably the most likely future trajectory for TOW, and imo wouldn't be a bad thing at all. Sure, MESBG doesn't get the sort of release hype that builds new fans on its own, and some of its models are /really/ showing their age with no hope of first party updates, but if you can put in the work to gather a local scene to play then it remains one of the better games in GW's lineup, and the lack of constant new releases and editions means the game overall is a lot more stable. I don't think there is a future where TOW gets supported the way 40k or AoS is supported, with regular new releases including multiple major model line updates per year. The best that could be hoped for if TOW is super successful is a Horus Heresy type trajectory, where new plastics, including updates of existing models, do sometimes happen, but are mostly tied to relatively infrequent new editions, but new resin character and unit releases aren't terribly uncommon. Even that might be too much of a best case to hope for, since Horus Heresy is like 90%+ a single faction (notably the only one that ever gets plastic releases), and that just won't be the situation for TOW.

IMO there's no clear roadmap because GW is righfully taking a wait and see approach to TOW's success. Right now it looks like GW's plan for TOW is to invest the minimum possible amount of money and effort until they can more accurately gauge interest. And honestly, as much as I do think they should have redone the TK skeletons rather than bothering with the bone dragon, I do think the minimal approach is the correct one, and one more likely to lead to the long term success of TOW then diving in with entire brand new model lines, whether for existing factions like Bretts & TKs or new ones like Kislev or Cathay. I mean, let's be real here, it's still an open question whether there will be a legitimate player base for the Old World at all. Yes, there's been a fair bit of online buzz and interest around the game, but that noise could turn out to be a mirage generated by bitter grognards eager to discuss any oldhammer news but who will never give GW another dollar no matter what they do plus computer gamers who like total warhammer but will bounce off of the inconveniences baked into the hobby aspect of a tabletop minis game no matter what the models looked like. Starting with a minimum viable product like they're doing means the game doesn't have to be an immediate smash hit to justify its continued existence the way it would have needed to with a heftier initial investment. A smash hit is admittedly far less likely this way - oldhammer players with existing Brett and TK armies are unlikely to buy much for this release since there's not really anything new on offer, where as I at least would likely have dropped us$500+ on new minis alone if they had redone the skittles & skittle horses. But on the other hand, a modest hit is ~possible~ in a way that it just wouldn't have been if TOW had needed to justify a major up front investment by GW. If TOW fails on even its currently modest expectations, then we'll likely see nothing else. Just a stand alone ruleset that oldhammer fans can hold onto and play in their basements and local stores for as long as they like. And honestly, I'd be ok with that. That already constitutes more support for the Old World than I'd ever thought we'd see again a decade ago. If on the other hand TOW's initial release is a success, however modest, then I'd expect another wave or two of oldhammer rereleases, with maybe a couple modest resin heroes, every four to six months until the officially supported factions have all made the rounds. By that point GW should know whether the game has legs - in which case I'd expect to see a second edition release with more significant new model support - or not. Personally I'm hoping the game plan for TOW is extra flexible, including possibly re-examining the decision to focus on a specific locked historical timeframe. IMO oldhammer factions changed little enough in their composition over time that they could and should have just opened TOW up to the entire span of the old world's history, letting them zoom in on one major exciting event after another as the seasons and editions roll by, rather than remaining locked in one particular time frame when not much is going on with the idea of slowly ramping up to an interesting event maybe some time in the future.

No question. better choices of what models to do, better execution on those models. If the new FEC stuff weren't so cool, I'd be grabbing up bretts to run counts as FEC in aos.

as for the new tk stuff... Nekaph looks cool, but my loyalties are to Arkhan rather than settra, so I'll probably skip him. Herald looks... ok, but not a huge improvement on the old metal model. maybe a bit more stable for resin with the draping cloth bits touching his body? Regardless, plastic sphynx crew on infantry base converted to carry the big sphynx banner is still a better herald bsb imo, and anyone who makes a royal or necrosphynx will have the bits to make that left over. swarms... Eh. imo they're better than the old lightly textured square tiles, but also a less good implementation of the swirling bits of stuff concept than I would have expected from GW in recent years. Also, swarms were so far down the list of stuff that needed to be redone in the tk line that, like the dragon, I just find the decision to spend studio time and production resources on these baffling. ... Anyway, I'll be getting a box or two of the swarms, digital copies of all the rules, and if the bone dragon is available separately I might get that too, price depending (yes if under us$80, no if over us$160, maybe if inbetween). I also might pick up a couple boxes of black knights/hexwraiths to start replacing the skeletal horses pulling my chariots. the hexwraith steeds are taller than the old plastic tk horses, which will tilt the chariots up a bit, but since I'm also replacing the skeleton crew with the 7th ed vamp count skittles, that'll actually probably work with their forward lean.

The actual tk releases are a bit disappointing to me, but digital format book releases is such positive news (ie, people will be able to get the rulebooks on release and start playing even if the physical books suffer from the usual shipping issues and delays) that overall I'm pretty happy anyway.

If there even are any other new plastics coming, I hope it's new ushabti and not a unit of mummy infantry. That's what tomb guard are for, and the old resin ushabti are awkward plus the melee & bow versions were designed far enough apart that imo they don't look right next to each other in the same army. or maybe a new bone giant / heirotitan. one was rumored to have been fully designed in the latter days of oldhammer, and only didn't release because the decision had been made at that point to scrap the faction along with the old world. Though if they do turn out to have another big plastic centerpiece monster kit on the way, that only makes the decision to do the bone dragon instead of new skeletal infantry and horses all the more frustrating.

That's possible, actually. Shoot. Hadn't thought of that. As for new stuff, I'm trying not to get too hopeful. We've seen some obrish rumour engines, but those could just be a warcry warband. We'll see though. I'm hype for the next dawnbringer book regardless.

hard to say without getting her full write up. At the moment she's the leader of a diplomatic delegation to Summercourt, so in theory if you want an immersive army representing what she's up to *right now*, you take her in whatever her regiment of renown is and add that to a Flesh Eater Courts army with Ushoran. more generally, though, she seems to be Neferata's right hand, so Legion of blood with neferata, some bats & wolves since she seems to like those, maybe a coven throne or blood palanquin since they have a lamianesque feel, or maybe instead a vamp lord on zombie dragon, but converted with a lady vamp rider? Fill out battleline with some black knights & skeleton regiments? Unfortunately the current skeletons feel much more vyrkos or legion of the night than lahmian. if you can get your hands on some of the previous vamp counts skeletons with spears and give them some tomb kings shields, those might fit the desired aesthetic better.

If there were another tomb kings plastic kit coming, I think it would be in the army box. IMO the dragon is the only new plastic kit the tomb kings will get, and anything else new will be individual resin heroes.

The faction overall definitely doesn't, but I'm happy to see a second named hero for Legion of Blood. Long term I'd like to see 2 to 3 named heroes for each soulblight subfaction - though that would require removing as many Vyrkos heroes as get added to the other subfactions combined. Otherwise, I like her. Very distinct. And I've always been a sucker for tall, goofy hats. On the subject of silly hats, what I'm most excited for is the suggestion that Arkhan may be returning to active service. Exciting times! While I would have preferred Armies of Renown for the mortarchs rather than regiments of renown, the latter does allow the Mortarchs to assert the sort of general authority over the undead that they really should have but that the current ally rules don't really allow for. Back in 2nd edition, for instance, we had some Katakros/Olynder team ups that the ally rules never actually allowed for.