Sception

and it's a good thing they don't, because I'm not convinced that the GW bases (especially the chariot base) are particularly close to their supposed official dimensions. I haven't gotten my hands on one to measure yet, but just looking at the pictures those aren't 1x2 proportions, which means we're probably on old base molds for everything except the brand new 30x30 and 30x60s, which means several of the official bases will be noticeably off their official sizes. Anyway, as far as I've heard most of the people talking about hosting events are currently leaning towards 'the game is too new to expect people to have rebased entire armies, so oldhammer base sizes or aos bases ranked up on rectangular unit trays are good enough, even if the footprint isn't quite right. Of course, we'll have to wait until actual event packs are published to say, and I'm sure going forward proper base sizes (or at least proper unit footprints) will be required eventually. This is still early days though, the important thing is that games are played and events happen, it's not the time to get hung up in the fussy details. As for Legacy armies not being legal in competitive events, I'm still of the opinion that whoever is trying to impose that bit is deluding themselves. How could official events imposing both 'supported factions only' and 'gw models only' even happen when half or more of the 'supported' factions won't be available to collect from GW in the first year or more of this game? "Welcome to the Old World official GT, where the faction options are Bretts, Tomb Kings, Beastmen, Warriors of Chaos, and nothing else unless you happen to have an un-burned old fantasy army in your closet and/or are willing to drop us2k+ on ugly, out of print models on ebay!" That doesn't sound like a fun event to me. In fact, it sounds like an event that would be too embarrassing to even host, so either there just won't be official tOW events until there are 6+ faction rereleases, and that'll be what, a year from now? Two? Or else there will be official events, but they'll be bad and poorly attended and just won't have the same impact on the meta as indie events. By the time halfway decent official GW events are even really possible the indie scene will be well established, with Legacy armies fully included, and even then official events will still just be ~worse~ for the reduced variety in cool opponents to encounter. So yeah, imo GW really isn't going to have a say in what is or isn't legal in the competitive scene for tOW, and it was silly of them to pretend they would. They're going to be too far behind the curve.

I'm fine with the transition from vanguard to spearhead, but disappointed that we're not seeing any dawnbringer 4 previews today. Are they saving them for LVO?

My list of gaps is meant to be archetypes rather than specific units. Morteks with bows, crossbows, or handguns (using bonedust enchanted with explosive spells as gunpowder*), or even units of minor sorcerers hurling magic missles would all count as 'Mortek Archers' for my purposes. That said, we've already seen one literal Mortek Archer in the underworlds warband, and most OBR types seemed pretty happy with that design. Likewise, 'chariots' wouldn't be literal chariots but rather hideous bonemold amalgamations of horses, cart, and rider into a single nightmare creation of trampling hooves and crushing wheels. Or maybe just elite kavalos riding larger, more monstrous steeds - the equivalent of stormcast dracoths in size and function. Or really anything that fills the niche/roll/concept of a heavier support piece to add a bit of punch to the tanky but not particularly killy deathriders in cavalry leaning OBR armies. I mean, OBR has an entire cavalry themed subfaction, but they're a little hard to get excited about when their list of on theme units is exactly one squad of knights and one mounted hero** who's honestly more effective at supporting the infantry. *The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of OBR with guns. Imagining some sort of gattling gun weapon emplacement/warmachine firing thousands of teeth or the like. Unlikely to happen, but still. **no, the guy in the chair doesn't count - he's cool but too slow to keep pace with the kavalos and thematically more closely associated with other subfactions regardless.

I hope we're done with whole editions set in a single realm. It was a bad idea in third that directly contributed to how little interesting development the game's narrative has had since second edition. Seriously, what significant narrative advancement has there been since broken realms? I asked in another thread a month or two back and nobody could name anything. Not one single development that mattered from the end of broken realms all the way until the dawnbringer crusades. Story-wise 3rd edition in its entirety might as well not have even happened. Go back to the paradigm from late 1e through the end of 2e: ie there are Eight mortal realms, each of which has active divine forces, all of whom are pushing their own plots and schemes, so interesting stuff can happen anywhere. Yes, 2e started with a lot of focus on Shyish, coming from Malign portents into the Necroquake and the seige of Lethis, but as the edition went on new battletomes and campaigns were allowed to happen wherever the devs had an interesting idea for them. Let's have that again. Let us pick which realms our factions are from and where they're fighting a given game and let that matter again - maybe not with rules as overbearing as they were in 2e, but still. The AoS setting has grown into a large, impressive mosaic, but all its rich complexity is lost if you look at it exclusively from three inches away, studying the individual stones rather than the picture they make as a whole.

IMO we're likely to see them in 4th edition, but not in the starter box since that's pretty much confirmed to be stormcast vs. skaven. Skaven in particular should be seeing a major range refresh, which means we probably won't see anything as dramatic as a brand new faction for the rest of 2024, so I'd guess Shadow Elves in 2025, probably as a new faction, though I could see them getting added to Daughters of Khaine as a combined dark elf faction with two different divine figureheads leading two distinctly themed subfactions between them, sort of like what I expect the Lumineth to become once Tyrion is introduced. That's all pure speculation, though.

I hope so. I've been starving for new OBR stuff basically since their initial release wave like four years ago now. The underworlds group was cool, but mostly just made me crave Mortek Archers harder, while the variant boneshaper model that they sold as a new unit because they didn't have anything else ready for the battletome release was, if anything, /worse/ than nothing. As in, I would have been more excited for the exact same model if it had been literally just a variant model for the boneshaper. Plenty of lists want to run two boneshapers, and we really didn't need another foot mortisan glutting up the warscroll selection, especially when there are so many obvious gapes (foot liege, morghast hero, cavalry mortisan (no the chair doesn't count), stalker/immortis hero, foot archers, cavalry archers, chariot-constructs, big tough slow bonesphinx centerpiece monster with option for either heroes or a howda of guys on top, and for the love of all that is dead please let me buy those bone fortress walls and gate!). Yes, a lot of that is stolen from Tomb Kings, but OBR begging for a second wave and as the spiritual successor faction to the tomb kings it's hard not to see that low hanging fruit, especially with the tomb kings themselves back on the table in tOW. And that's just the obvious stuff, this is a faction of neverborn bone constructs straight from the fever dreams of nagash, there's so much room for wild and bizarre arcane contraptions of twisted bone and screaming bound spirits.

There seems to have maybe been a decision to separate AoS and tOW ranges? Maybe? Beastmen and Chaos Mortals kind of contradict that, at least for now, but if that's the case it could explain why no vamp counts in tOW. Regardless of the reason, it's sad, because an awful lot of TK players would love to be able to buy up some of those seventh edition vampire counts skeletons if they were made available again. That said, I wouldn't make too much of the decision to exclude the legacy factions. It wouldn't surprise me if it takes 2 to 3 years just to get all the arcane tomes out for the supported factions, and that's long enough for GW to change their minds. After all, it was only about a decade ago that GW told us that the old world was gone forever and rank and flank square base fantasy would never ever come back, and here we are. I remember when settra was on 'last chance to buy' and you were never going to be able to get that model again, they were tossing the molds, forget about it, and then a couple years later I bought one on a limited one time made-to-order and yesterday the very same model was up for pre-order again. Even decisions that are set in stone can erode with time, and stupid decisions tend to erode faster. The more we play with the legacy factions and post instagram pics of the armies and youtube videos with them in battle reports and host tournaments that allow them, the more and sooner legacy factions will be officially back. Maybe not all of them at once, and maybe which faction lines are available to buy will have to go into a rotating cycle, because 20+ factions ~is~ kind of too much for a specialist game, regardless of the stated or implicit decisions around which factions were kept and which were kicked to legends. Warehousing products costs money - maybe the entire game will have to go on 'made to order', and 6 to 12 months waits for minis to arrive, with an ever-present possibility of cancellation, will have to be the standard. But yeah, as long as the Old World doesn't just shrivel up and die I doubt oldhammer staples like dark elves, lizardmen, skaven, and vamp counts are gone forever, regardless of the current plans of GW execs and studio devs.

This doesn't really answer my question. The question isn't 'what are the official sizes' but rather 'do the actual bases match those sizes'. warhammer fantasy cav bases were listed as '25x50' back in the day, but in reality they were a fair bit thinner than that, which you had to take into account when buying third party bases and buying or making unit trays if you wanted everything to match up. Same with the old chariot bases, which were a fair bit thinner than the listed 50x100. I'm asking whether tOW uses new 25x50 and 50x100 bases that actually are those sizes (and thus won't fit unit trays made for the old bases), or whether they're just reprinting the same old slightly wonk size bases as before.

speaking of bases, with the influencer boxes out and unboxing videos going life, to we yet have an official answer on whether the old world's 25mm x 50mm bases are actually 25mm x 50mm, or are they the same as the oldhammer cavalry bases - ie closer to 23.5 mm wide? Similar question for the 50*100 bases, are they actually the old chariot bases, which were closer to 48mm wide? Judging by the pictures of the official base sizes, it looks like they maybe fixed the cav bases, but not the chariot bases. Hard to say for sure without someone just physically measuring them.

Seriously. I have a converted liche priest that I really like (island of blood elf mage + warshpinx crew bits), and when I was ordering stuff at the store I thought 'resin kind of sucks, I'll make do with the priest I've already got', only to realize later that this guy is being printed in metal! for us$15! At that price, in that material, I'd love to have one as a low level priest to run alongside my converted high priest. Again though, oh well. I'll live for now.

I realized far, far too late that I actually did want one of those basic resin lich priests on foot. Oh, well, will have to keep an eye on my email to see when/if they come back in stock.

Legacy factions won't be legal in official tournaments run by GW. So we'll just have to organize our own tournaments that DO allow the legacy factions.

Whelp. Underestimating demand for a new game is better than overestimating ig, even if it's still not good. At least the rules will be available in epub form if I can't get the physical books. honestly, I'm ok with ebooks so I'll just go with that and not risk taking a physical book that might have been the difference in another player getting into the game. Hopefully they're able to get a second production wave through faster than they did for horus heresy, and the delay doesn't kill too many people's interest in the mean time. Preorders haven't even gone live here in the states. Will I be able to get some tomb guard and bowshabti? Have those been going out of stock elsewhere?

I'm just want more info on the next dawnbringer book. I'm so starved for new OBR content.

We think that, and yet Beastmen is still the same army and same miniatures range in both games, and there's significant overlap between AoS Slaves to Darkness and TOW Warriors of Chaos. I don't really see a consistent logic between what factions were included or not other than 'we don't think the customer base exists to support all the old factions, so we're only going to keep like half of them, and these are the half we currently feel like keeping.' I wouldn't read too much into the official model line up either way though, both in terms of the dropped factions (ongoing community effort has seen dropped factions revived in the past) OR the supported ones (imo there's a solid chance this game fails entirely and gets cancelled before all of the 'officially supported' factions get arcane tomes & model re-releases).

So find a skaven community online and work on updating the rules yourselves. Or just be mad. IMO a big part of why TOW is such a minimal product on its final release is exactly because there's a good chance that the majority of interest in the game is coming from oldhammer grognards so hard burned in the past that they were always going to take the least charitable interpretation of every official move by GW, people for whom at this point the hobby isn't modelling or painting or gaming so much as complaining about GW. That's not to say you owe GW fealty or money or the benefit of the doubt. Far from it. GW f'd up the old warhammer fantasy game, f'd up bigger with the end times & initial AoS release, and imo that guy who literally burned his massive dark elf army on youtube and swore off GW forever wasn't at all in the wrong. But while I still think there are mistakes in this release (was a mistake to commit to a particular time period, to commit to particular factions, to spend studio resources on the bone dragon instead of new skeletons, etc), IMO it would have been an even bigger mistake to sink a ton of resources into entire new model lines and massive commitments for a game that in all likelyhood has a smaller potential player (and more importantly customer) pool than Middle Earth does at this point. Again, GW dumped chaos dwarves in the past, and the chaos dwarf community kept up the faction on their own, did such a good and consistent job of it that independent tournaments treated their homebrew army book as official content, and eventually GW came around and put out the FW chorf line. If the community makes the game our own then eventually GW will follow behind.

Pretty much. I had been working on a homebrew update to the AoS TK rules and I've abandoned that due to cross-compatibility basing issues, but it won't be long before I start working on tOW homebrew projects. The first one will probably be a supplement to the TK arcane tome to cover TK armies whose loyalties lie with Nagash, including at least rules for Arkhan the Black and a separate muster, possibly also including alternate spells and magic items. And that will be a warm up to a proper Vampire Counts arcane tome, though I wouldn't be surprised if someone else with more experience and resources has already staked a claim to that, at which point maybe I can contribute to that, or supplement it with a Vampire Wars campaign supplement.

The big adjustment that Oldhammer Vets will need to make going into The Old World if tOW is to be successful is that tOW is NOT a main line game. We are a specialist game - like middle earth has become, like Horus Heresy used to be /before/ they started getting gw plastic kits, like Mordheim and Necromunda and so on. These games get less support from GW, so if the community wants something extra we have to provide it ourselves. If we want Dark Elf or Vamp Count or Lizardmen arcane tomes, we have to organize and write and update and promote them ourselves. If we want campaign supplements to cover grand battles and wars outside of the core time period of tOW, we'll have to make them ourselves. If the core game scenarios and victory conditions kind of suck, we'll have to fix them ourselves, and promote battle packs that indie tournaments can maybe adopt. Like early days Age of Sigmar, we'll need the community to lead, and if the community does a good job then GW might follow after. This isn't even new to fantasy battle. Do you remember when the dark elf army book in 6th edition was kind of a mess, and the druchii.net forum base brainstormed and play tested a set of fixes then polished and promoted them until indie tournaments started using them, leading them to eventually being canonized by GW in white dwarf? Do you remember when Chaos Dwarf rules were squatted long before the end times, so the Chaos Dwarf player community made their own unofficial army book which they promoted and got indie tournaments to allow, a years long show of community support and interest despite radio silence from GW that eventually led to Forgeworlds revised chorf line and army rules? Remember how Mordheim persists today basically entirely on the strength of its fan community, with nothing from GW at all? TOW's launch is very clearly a super conservative, super reserved toe in the water minimum viable product, and that's perfectly fair because GW can't be confident that there's a real market here. Oldhammer was canned for poor sales, and while there's clearly an interest in rank and flank fantasy games, none of the would be replacements for oldhammer has managed to really catch on. We kind of have to meet them halfway here. More than half way.

In terms of 40k and Fantasy being in the same universe, there's tons of parallels, but the main thing getting in the way is the timelines involved. Iirc n 40k the War In Heaven / fall of the old ones coincides with the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, 60+ million years before humanity existed. In Fantasy, those events predate human civilization by tens of thousands of years rather than tens of millions. Also in 40k the Old Ones collapse was followed by an incursion of chaos daemons as we currently know them, lesser and greater daemons aligned to the four chaos gods. In 40k, the collapse of the Old One civilization was followed by an incursion from the warp, but the invaders were puppeteers, not the familiar aligned daemons, because the chaos gods and their daemonic legions did not exist yet. Khorne, the first of the chaos gods, wasn't born in 40k universe until humans had already evolved, and it was the birth of Khorne and later Tzeentch that inspired centuries of war and invention that pushed humanity into the industrialized age and eventually the Age of Technology, in the process devastating earth's environment and both enabling and motivating humanity's initial stellar diaspora. Its tempting to try to force the timelines to fit, both because of how closely the overall shape of the histories fit (old one collapse -> chaos incursion -> modern elf/human/etc civilizations... though 40k needs a lot more time during and inbetween those steps) and because of the handful of direct references to 40k that were introduced to fantasy during the periods when 'same universe' was sort-of-cannon, and you can sort of do so since the warp allows for timey-wimey shenanigans. Maybe the polar gate disaster hurled the old world forward through time, or trapped it in a warpstorm where time flows differently. It would still require some non-canon-compliant alterations to the narrative - eg, in the canon fantasy timeline the Old Ones created early humanity, but in a combined timeline humans would have had to find their way to the planet later, maybe a crashed explorer ship from that initial colonization wave during the Age of Technology. The crossover framework that I prefer (when I want to justify crossovers at all) is that 40k and fantasy take place in different, spatially and chronologically disconnected universes, but that they are connected to the same warp. Ie Khorne is the same Khorne, Nurgle is the same Nurgle, the daemons are the same daemons, but the Old Ones aren't the same old ones, the eldar aren't the same elves, the humans aren't the same humans. Rather these elements are repeated because the the universes are echoing each other through the shared warpspace, with potentially countless other worlds and universes out there with their own variations on the same themes.

They already do, with the most notable options off the top of my head being Litko (link) and coveted forge (link). while round-to-square conversion movement trays work great for 25mm infantry, however, things get more difficult when you consider that 32mm rounds don't translate to 30mm squares so evenly, and things get much worse when you start looking at cavalry and monster bases. I was hoping to preserve AOS compatibility for my tomb kings using adapters and unit trays like this, and eventually decided that it would be too much trouble so I'll just be rebasing.

I feel the same. I think GW is right to be taking a more cautious, minimum viable product style approach to the old world, but that means if we want it to succeed that's going to require a lot of community investment. The more people we can get to start, the more chances of getting the kind of effortful people who will put in extra work needed. Because yeah, this game is going to need community work, from better/more fun scenarios and mission objectives to rules updates for legacy factions that GW are unlikely to touch after the pdfs are published, not even to provide necessary updates to future core rule changes if Warhammer Legacy is any precedent. Recall how bad a shape Age of Sigmar was in when it launched and how much work the community had to put in to turn that game around, with GW slowly getting dragged along behind them. So it will be for ToW, though thankfully the game doesn't look to be launching in quite that bad a state.

Perhaps. But we do already have precedent for heirotitan being rolled into the colossus. Even if tOW is more lax about rules without models, I doubt the heirotitan will make it in. EDIT: Then again, that unit filler article, promoting kit bashing and, effectively, proxying to reduce cost of units, really does show a different attitude with respect to this game than we've seen from games workshop in ages. I wonder if I still have my old arcane ruin unit fillers.... oh, wait, those were made to fit on units of 20mm square infantry, they wouldn't fit the new units... hrm...

there will be no heirotitan. I don't need any leaks to know that. GW no longer publish rules for models they don't make, and if there were a new plastic bone giant kit coming out that covered both units we'd have seen it by now. The official line, if hierotitans are mentioned at all, will be 'run it as a colossus', same as with the TK compendium from 1e AoS. Likewise there won't be rules for Arkhan, if anything just a note to run him as a high lich priest on foot, or maybe as a high priest on bone draggon if you've modeled him on his old flying four horse chariot.

is there a confirmed base size for the tomb kings sphinxes? are they on 50 x 100, or 60 x 100? is the casket of souls coming back? if so, what base size? it would look ridiculous on a massive 100x150, but it's too wide for any of the smaller official base sizes that were listed. it really wants to be on, like, an 80x80 square, but that doesn't seem to be an option. are the 25x50 mm cavalry bases /actually/ 25mm wide now, or are they using the old gw cav bases that were closer to like 23.5 mm wide, a difference that becomes rather obnoxious on unit trays that don't account for it?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Again, the Liber Necris is narrated by Mannfred, who is about as unreliable as they come, but he does know his stuff when it comes to necromancy, so I've always been inclined to take his description of the arcane mechanics of necromancy and how all the various undead types are distinguished as accurate, and in particular that mummy/wight connection had game mechanic follow through in parallel rules for tomb guard & grave guard and sometimes also tomb kings & wight kings that continued all the way into the early days of Age of Sigmar. But yeah, when it comes to tomb kings culture Mannfred's speaking from shaky research, tomes of questionable veracity, and personal interactions and interviews with ancient vampires and liches, most of whom were half insane by that point and none of whom liked him or had any particular motivation to tell him the truth, and its easy to write off contradictions with later lore as either 'Mannfred was misinformed' or 'Mannfred was crunching down a thousand year civilization into a single narrative that served the story he wanted to tell,' one where the history of the undead is a river of fate flowing down a single path leading from Settra to Nagash to Vashanesh and finally to himself as the ultimate culmination of all that came before. Even the inclusion of Vashanesh could be taken not as later decanonized lore but rather as an apocryphal story that Mannfred heard somewhere as a mythical account of the origins of vampire weaknesses. A story he would latch onto, expand, and promoted specifically because he could tie Vlad to it - making Vlad the best and most important vampire that ever was, when he was probably just some random Kislevite raider turned a few decades before Mannfred himself by some offshoot of an offshoot of a no name vampire clan. That wouldn't serve Mannfred's ego though, so instead it's "have you ever heard of Vashanesh? He was the best and most important vampire ever and he was totally real and by way did I mention that he was MY sire AND I killed him which makes ME even better than he was?" Meanwhile Neferata, Abhorash, Arkhan et al are thinking "Vasha-who now?" Anyway, the Liber Necris version of TK culture sticks with me more than later stuff due to how coherent it was and how neatly it built on the lore from the 4th ed Warhammer Undead army book. There was a period of Vamp Count and Tomb Kings army book lore following the split when it felt like the writers were trying to excise Nagash. In the TK case maybe that was a deliberate parody of Egyptian kings occasionally trying to scrub all history of a previous king or dynasty who's existence or legacy had become inconvenient. If so, kudos to them on the clever gimmick, but it went right over my head. I was mostly frustrated at the seeming decision to remove the most important character in warhammer undead history from the lore, and as a result hardly absorbed any of the new lore introduced at the time.