Sception

I like her a lot, but I've always been a sucker for tall silly hats.

I'm still waffling on green vs. black gems for my OBR. Here's the Mortek Guard unit command with the current green gems, and a quick photoshop for how they might look with black gems. Opinions?

Almost certainly not. Possible, but very unlikely. For one the current model is in plastic and still holds up. For two, it's a multi-kit with Mannfred and Neferata, so unlikely to change until they do as well. I expect that will happen eventually, but I don't expect so now. It's possible, I just don't expect it. That said, a more classically minded Arkhan model putting him back on his old flying four skeleton-horse chariot packaged with both round and square bases to run in either AoS or TOW would be incredibly cool, and such a model could be mounted on the same oval base as the current arkhan allowing people to keep using their existing arkhan model. Still, though, almost certainly not happening right now. ... As a big fan of each of the mortarchs, I really hope these Regiments of Renown stay matched play legal in 4th edition, as I would like to have the time to collect, paint, and play with each of them. Probably not going to happen, but still. This certainly increases the priority on my Arkhan repaint, I was going to save that till the summer (and maybe test some stripping and repainting methods on my soulmason first), but now.... I did finish the first unit in my new OBR paint scheme: I'm pretty happy with them overall, though I do wonder with the overall brighter scheme whether canon-compliant black soulgems would be a better fit than the glowy necron green gems I used here. My room mate says the green gems pop nicely from across the table and I'm just overthinking things, but I'm not so sure. Maybe I should do some more test models....

From Warcom's article about the new named Lahmian Vampire: "The Mad King Rises also contains plenty more for Death armies, including six Regiments of Renown – one for each Mortarch! Check back in the new year for more coverage." Arkhan's back, tell your friends.

what really ticks me off is that the tomb kings *have* plastic kits that still hold up reasonably well. the tomb guard, necroknights, stalkers, sphinxes. /None/ of those are in this box. Instead we have 90+ of some of the worst plastic models that were left in the oldhammer range, already hopelessly outdated to the point of being outright embarrassing when the game died going on two decades ago! The tomb kings line had two big problems - skeleton humans and skeleton horses. Even the chariots hold up well enough if you replace the skelletons pulling & crewing them. Just Two Sprues could have revitalized the entire range. That's less than went into the bone dragon, and the tomb kings already had impressive large monster centerpieces. but no, not only did they not update the models that needed it most, they didn't even try to mitigate the misery with any of the halfway decent kits they already have! Talk about putting your absolute worst foot forward. A mistep so bad their shin burst from their leg to impale their head from below. It's like they /want/ this game to fail. I'm big salty abt it.

I've already resigned myself to re-rebasing my tomb kings. I'd just like to get the official word on what the new base sizes are so I could start working on them to have some hope of being ready to play when the game releases.

30mm x 60mm for the base size, eh? Do we think all cavalry will be on that size, or will there be smaller cav still on 25 x 50s, sort of like in AoS there are 65mm ovals and 75mm ovals? Do you think it's safe to extrapolate further from that? 30 x 30 square bases for larger infantry that used to be on 25mm squares? 60 x 120mm the new size for chariot bases & things like sphinxes & necroknights?

I just hope the stormcast stuff is new models for existing units. SC getting an entire army's worth of new units and heros added to their army each edition has already made their faction unweildy to the point of being actively unfun to collect & listbuild for.

Fair suggestions, but tbh I've kind of been itching for an excuse to mess with Arkhan some anyway. I've felt for a while that my paint job didn't quite do justice to my conversion work on that one.

Test models done for my revised obr color scheme. Keeps the blackened bone outer skin & bleached white bone trim from my previous scheme, but with a variety of bone colors for the internal body structure to add a bit of variety. green glowy magic bits & black-to-green cloth bits to fit with my nighthaunt. Purple nadirite armor & weapons with gold seals of office are the biggest break away from my prior 'green and green alone' scheme, chosen for the royal connotations for Nagash's most favored faction, and also to emulate some of my favorite obr artwork: Thankfully I never made much progress with the old scheme, so there's not too much to repaint. Unfortunately, one of the few things I did paint in the old scheme is my precious Arkhan conversion, and just painting overtop won't be an option, at least not on arkhan himself, as that model suffered a varnish frosting disaster that I painted over once already. I'll have to strip paint from at least parts of that model, & I'm not looking forward to it.

Yup. Yet another reason why the mortarchs tend to be the way to go. I heard somebody was doing well with an Arkhan list featuring two reinforced units of Archai. That's something I'd like to try out, though it doesn't leave room for much else.

No firm rumours that I've heard yet. If you're worried about it, then I'd just hold off on the Archregent for now. Its not going anywhere.

I personally hope they don't pin an entire edition to a single realm again. I vastly prefer 2e's approach, taking a wider hollistic view of the realms and letting individual battletomes, campaign books, and matched play seasons focus in on whatever interesting is going on regardless of what realm its ins. Let the attention shift at least on a yearly basis along with the matched play season, and put out a new game board & terrain box (including reprints of oldhammer and 1e terrain as appropriate, some of that stuff still holds up) each year to match. Just try to line up the matched play, narrative campaign, and war-cry focus so the same terrain fits everything, and have them all switch to the same new realm/location each year.

If you trade deathriders for a soulmason instead of trading the liege that does come with a couple of drawbacks. First, you drop below minimum battleline, so you'll need to either find room for another battleline elsewhere (maybe trade the crawler), or else split the 30 morteks into 20 and 10 (in which case drop the spears for swords). Alternatively, you could make one of the mortisans the general instead of the liege, and trade the archai for either immortis or stalkers. Probably immortis to help shield that soulmason from getting sniped out by early shooting. You'll also add a drop, going from 1 to 2, since the above list is already maxing out hero slots on the ossiarch cohort. ... Going for null myriad with the soulmason with hoarfrost is definitely a strong choice, particularly with the big spear block, but I'd be inclined to swap out the liege instead of one of the kav units, to keep the single drop and not have to mess with the other units. But I'm no expert, so I could easily be wrong there. The main thing is that there's reasonable options to tinker and play with even if you don't want to field any mortarchs. Doing so might not be optimal, but I do think it's viable.

I mean, they're both pretty expensive, and we have other good units and heroes to get instead. If you're going to and hoping to win tournaments then yeah I think you should be building around one of our mortarchs, but if you're mostly playing pick up games in a local scene or just hoping to win more games than you lose at events then non-mortarch OBR can still make good use of a liege or mortisan boss plus an extra 200 or 300 points of dudes. The extra unit or two you could fit in would certainly make your relentless discipline more reliable. Typical OBR lists with Arkhan or Katakros will often start losing bonus command points after a single unit goes down - though admittedly it takes a lot of effort to bring a single unit down with katakros around. Still, I think you could make a decent go of it with something like: Allegiance: Ossiarch Bonereapers - Legion: Mortis Praetorians - Mortal Realm: Shyish - Grand Strategy: Overshadow - Triumphs: Inspired Liege-Kavalos (180)* - General - Command Trait: Mighty Archaeossian - Artefact: Lode of Saturation Mortisan Boneshaper (140)* - Lore of Ossian Sorcery: Drain Vitality Mortisan Ossifector (120)* - Lore of Ossian Sorcery: Empower Nadirite Weapons 30 x Mortek Guard (390)* - Nadirite Spear and Shield - Reinforced x 2 5 x Kavalos Deathriders (190)* - Nadirite Blade and Shield 5 x Kavalos Deathriders (190)* - Nadirite Blade and Shield 4 x Morghast Archai (440)* - Spirit Halberds - Reinforced x 1 Gothizzar Harvester (160)* - Weapon: Soulcrusher Bludgeons Mortek Crawler (180)* Bone-Tithe Nexus *Ossiarch Cohort Total: 1990 / 2000 Reinforced Units: 3 / 4 Allies: 0 / 400 Wounds: 123 Drops: 1 And there's a lot of fenangling you could do with even just the enhancements on the heroes. Like, I made the liege the general and gave him the artifact for that super difficult to kill jammer liege set up because it seems like a particularly solid tactical option, but both the mortisans have very good signature artefacts. You could give one of them an artifact and go for a more supportive command trait on the liege - say diversionary tactics or aura of sterility - though you'd have to play more conservatively with it then. Or you could swap it out for yet another mortisan, maybe a Soulmason with dark acolyte, and use the points saved to pick up a cheap endless spell like a malevolent maelstrom or suffocating gravetide. You also might swap the more aggressive reinforced archai for a more defensive unit of immortis guard to help keep the soulmason healthy. If you do that, then instead of the endless spell you might swap the ossifector for another bone-shaper. If you do swap the liege for another mortisan, then maybe swap subfactions to Null Myriad for the magic protection. There are options to tinker with is the point. Regardless, you get a huge and intimidating Mortek Block with character and harvester support to overwhelm the middle. multiple kav units plus maybe a liege to claim objectives, score some tactics, & block enemy advances. A big monstrous infantry hammer unit to break enemy formations (the anti-CA ability of morghasts is particularly disruptive these days). Even a catapult to keep the opponent honest, and all as a one-drop. And, I mean, aesthetically, that's a lot of visual variety, plus enough dudes to look like an actual army, which you don't often get from lists with Arkhan or especially Katakros. .... Again, this sort of army isn't as strong as lists you could build with one of the mortarchs, but imo it's perfectly playable, especially if you aren't making serious runs at tournament top tables. I'd happily run an army like this myself, if my biz were painted anyway.

I'd like narrative games to be more in the stye of the end times books, or old forgeworld campaigns. Like there's a canon story, and the book tells that story along with the battles and what characters and units were involved, and then there's scenarios to recreate those battles yourself, along with ideas for changing the scenarios up if you want to stray from the canon by changing the factions involved or the like. Dawnbringers, at least after the first book, have been a bit closer to this in that there's at least been a canon narrative instead of just an open ended 'tell your own story' set up with no follow through, so I'm looking foward to seeing whether this sort of direction continues in 4e. I think the stories and battles could be a bit more detailed, but mostly the main change I want now is for the GHB matched play season and the narrative campaign stuff to be linked - ie with the same setting and story focus, instead of completely isolated from one another. Like, what's actually going on in Andtor? Does anyone care? Will there be any sort of fallout from that that matters to the wider setting? Nah, cus that's matched play, which in 3e seems to mean its divorced from the game narrative and just doesn't matter.

Technically possibly but highly unlikely, as that's the sort of thing that would usually be highlighted as part of the reveal.

IMO Dawnbringers and FEC effectively are new armies, plus the Dawnbringers series is bringing significant mini updates to several existing factions. There are new armies I would like to see - the shadow elves (possibly as an expansion to DoK), Kurnothi elves (possibly as an expansion to sylvaneth), chaos dwarves, etc, but at this point I'd rather they wait for the new edition rather than disrupting the momentum that the game finally has after feeling a bit stagnant through much of 3rd edition.

I'd prefer year long GHB seasons with both narrative campaign and matched play rules in different sections of the same book, or separate books released together. Each new yearly season would also see a box release with a table board, a few pieces of matching terrain (at least one new piece, but the rest could bring back some of the better older stuff to save dev time), and seasonal gimmick models if any. Like the thondia box, only not quite as many pieces and at a slightly lower price point. That way there's always a terrain box available that matches the theme of the current season for new players to build up their tables. The same box could serve a matching war cry season. Let seasons jump around so over time we eventually get boards & terrain for all the realms.

They really are knocking it out of the park with this fec release. The lore, the art, the models, the flavor & tone, just really great work all around. I suppose they could still drop the ball on the rules, but even if they did it would hardly matter, as we're due for a new edition update soon anyway and faction rules & points get tweaked multiple times a year these days.

Oh ho! You're completely right! I did forget the herald, since he's not in the app. Kind of surprising that he's not there, since he's been around for a couple months now. That means between existing units and new we're actually one over on the total number of units, and I'm pretty sure the herald is sticking around since he's specifically mentioned in the new FEC lore article today. So that means at least one unit is getting dropped or folded into another scroll. Hard to say what I hope for most. Sadly -1 scroll isn't enough to get rid of all three generic courtiers (I was hoping they'd be downgraded to unit champs so we could stop splitting boxes). Likely options include: 1. folding Duke Crackmarrow into the Grymwatch 2. merging infantry Ghoul Kings and Archregents. 3. dropping just the generic ghoul courtier to be replaced by the herald, who can fill the 'ghoul courtier' roll while having a bespoke model and a more coherent identity. EDIT: Battle report confirms they're not dropping the bone throne

I was hoping that would be the case, but based on the warscroll count it seems unlikely.

I hope so. The old world has a long, long timeline full of exciting events. The elven civil wars, the chaos incursions, the vampire wars, plenty of smaller but perfectly compelling engagements. I always thought it was a mistake to firmly ground the game in a time period when, frankly, nothing much was happening, with the idea of slowly building up to the great chaos war. Why slowly build up to something cool happening, when you could have instead dived straight into the cool bit for maximum hype and excitement, and then next season / year / edition moved on to another cool bit featuring another 2 to 3 returning (or, if engagement and sales justify it, new) armies?

There's a trade off to it. On the one hand, yeah, if you don't remember what 'terror' does you need to look it up separately (though in practice you'll likely be looking at the unit entry in some sort of app or 3rd party army builder or wahapedia page where the word "terror" will either have the terror rules printed next to it or will be a link to what the rule terror does. The benefit of the trade is that the terror rule will work the same for every terrifying unit. You won't have one concept with half a dozen different subtly different rules implementations across various units in different factions. If there's a core bodyguard rule, for instance, you won't have to remember that this one works on mortal wounds and that one doesn't, or that this one works on a 2+ and that one works on a 4+, & so on. If a unit causes fear, then that fear will work the same as all other fear, you won't have one unit's fear that imposes a bravery penalty (non stacking) vs. another that imposes a bravery penalty (does stack) vs a third units fear (no bravery penalty, but extra casualties if a battleshock test fails) vs. a fourth units fear (none of that other stuff but prevents inspiring presence), and so on and so on. In a keyword special rules system it's possible to actually memorize how all the special rules work, at which point you only need to know which special rules a unit has. In a bespoke special rules system there's no way to memorize how everything in the game works, so you have to take the time to carefully read what each of your opponents units does each game. ... I'm not saying the keyword route is better - I personally prefer bespoke special rules for the extra uniqueness and specificity they allow. But there are enough tradeoffs that I'm not upset that TOW is going back to the keyword system.

Ah, but then you have an incomplete beast-flayers unit, so you're back at the same problem. This also doesn't help with the horror or flayer courtiers.