Sception

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.

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.