Sception

The thing is, I regretted not getting the broken realms books. Big, important, setting-changing events happened in each of them that are still relevant now. The Dawnbringers books really haven't been like that, though.

I'm stopping with book four, and regret purchasing books 2 and 3. In retrospect I should have only gotten book one (with the path to glory campaign rules) and four (with at least some stuff for factions I already play). The overall narrative hasn't been terrible, at least compared to what we've had for the rest of 3e, but also very much isn't worth us$300, if not more.

I was really hoping for more Undead releases from the Dawnbringers campaign. I know, I know, the entire new FEC range, but that's more of a normal faction release/refresh with a new battletome, and the exciting aspect of Dawnbringers was the opportunity to release new models that didn't have to be tied to a faction release. And there are so many notable gaps in the undead ranges in AoS - Grave Guard, Cavalry vamp lord, faction terrain, and endless spells for soulblight. Faction terrain & monster for nighthaunts - along with updates to the painfully dated Cairne Wraith, Tomb Banshee, and Hexwraiths. that rumour engined new morghast for OBR that now probably isn't coming out for another year or two, not to mention the long wished for mortek archers But it looks like the only undead release for dawnbringers outside of the fec release (which, again, was very impressive, but also is a normal and frankly long overdue faction update with book, not something that required dawnbringers to happen), is ~yet another~ named vampire foot hero. A fairly cool one sure, but still literally the last thing the game needed. Eh, maybe I'm just feeling excessively negative since I really was expecting the morghast from this preview and it didn't happen. It's not like there weren't any undead previews tonight, the side game models looked cool at least. I should go back to sleep.

Yeah, those seem like unreasonable expectations. AoS 4 is still pretty far out to be pushing skaven previews, and while I get that some people think the old world faction line up means AoS is getting chaos dwarfs at some point, I think they're forgetting that Chaos Dwarfs were always a red-headed step child faction and it's entirely possible they won't be a supported faction for either game system. Even if they do get an AoS faction release, I'd be shocked if it were this year, so while I could sort of get why people might have thought we'd see skaven, chaos dwarf expectations were totally unrealistic.

No new morghast in the LVO preview. Which imo means it's probably not coming in Dawnbringers 4, and that fits with the OBR role in the narrative previews we've seen being pretty minimal. In turn, that means it's probably one of those long haul rumor engines that doesn't show up for like a year or three. Hopefully I'm wrong and we see it in a warcom article in the next week or two, but we're running out of time before dawnbringers 4 is out, and they were already pushing dawnbringers 5 in the lvo preview, so the chances of any new AoS undead releases that we haven't already seen are getting pretty slim.

Does anyone remember the early dawnbringer books that came with multiple exciting new units for multiple factions, not just like a hero, or a box of random heroes as a cartoon tie in? Seems so long ago.

No proper undead for AoS, just side game stuff. Pretty disappointing for me, as I was really hoping for that new morghast. Starting to think the only new model we're getting for Dawnbringer 4 is the LoBlood lady with the snake - that and the FEC stuff we've already seen, but I consider that to be a regular faction release, not a dawnbringer thing.

I just want that rumored morghast hero. Anything else undead is gravy.

I was never in danger of starting Stormcast, being an all undead only undead player myself, but the constant stream of new stormcast models and rules and redundant infantry beatstick heroes is just exhausting. Not even in an 'I wish my faction got some of that attention' sort of way, just in a 'how could anybody keep up with this?' kind of way. If my faction got an entire separate faction's worth of new units each edition - sometimes even multiple times per edition, with everything I already owned or invested in emotionally getting shoved into the afterthought bin like yesterday's news, I'd lose interest in the hobby altogether.

An aggressive schedule getting all nine 'supported' factions out in 2024 would in some ways be ideal - especially for players looking to start those armies. On the other hand, that's a heck of a lot of time and attention in the release schedule dedicated to a side game, so it seems unlikely to me. Personally, I also hope their a bit slower than that if only because GW dragging their feet would give the indie tournament scene for TOW more time to establish itself before 'official' GW events start sucking the air out of the room, and since the indie scene is more likely to allow the 'legacy' pdf factions I would like them to have time to entrench themselves as the defacto standard instead of GW's weird internal politics and game system faction ghettos.

I am suddenly tempted to pick up an entirely new casket of souls, despite already owning one in metal. The third carrion is also very nice

Let me know if this isn't the right subforum for this... ... ok, so none of us have seen the pdf rules yet. they're supposed to be 'as detailed' and as play tested as the core faction rules (not counting arcane journal additions), but that leaves some questions up in the air, including: 1) will there be bloodline rules? 2) will ghoul kings be an option/variant for vampire heroes & lords, or will they be fully separate unit entries? Some things are reliable though. For instance, the pdfs won't include special characters. The pdfs will as include a single muster/roster/army list that covers the army as broadly as possible - ie, the expected units will be core, special, rare & so on. It'll be up to the community to write and settle on an arcane journal, and while the official ones aren't out yet, they've been previewed & reviewed enough to get a sense of what's expected from them: 1. a few special characters 2. exactly two 'army of infamy' variant muster/roster/lists 3. some variant units tied the armies of infamy 4. faction specific magic items, some of which are tied to the armies of infamy. For a hypothetical homebrew vamp count arcane journal, obviously we would want to include bloodline rules if they aren't in the pdf already, though again there's an open question there in terms of whether ghoul kings should be generic vamp heroes with strigoi bloodline rules layered on top or if they should be separate units sltogether due to the more extreme differences in stats, mount, and equipment options. That's something that'll be answered for us by the PDF, not really something that can be anticipated in advance. For special characters, the obvious choices are Kemmler, Krell, and the Von Carsteins - they had the most recent official models after all. But that's already maybe too many, and also I would argue that since none of the named Von Carsteins were active in the official time period of tOW, that instead of going in the arcane journal they should go in a separate homebrew 'historical campaign' supplement covering the Vampire Wars specifically. If we leave the Von Carstein crew out, they we could just go with Kemmler & Krell. Two special characters is plenty, and as non-vampires they have the appeal ot being equally playable regardless of your bloodline. However, it is a little odd to have a vampire arcane journal with no named vampires in it. Do we just start off with the big vamps in Abhorash, Neferata, & Ushoran, despite the lack of clear rules & models to draw from in previous editions? Is Melchior still kicking around, or has he been replaced by Nicodemus at this point? ... That's special characters, but what about the 'armies of infamy'? Again, I'd be inclined to leave Von Carstein stuff for a Vampire Wars campaign supplement, but even without them we still have the Lahmia, Blood Dragon, Necrarch bloodlines, and Strigoi which might be a bloodline and might be separate units altogether, all of which would like to have their own armies of infamy, though some might need them more than others. Potentially multiple bloodlines could be covered by a single 'vampire covens' army of infamy centering vampire units & downplaying lesser undead. I could see both Blood Dragons and Lahmians working with core blood knights. There's also potentially room for a necromancer or wight king led 'no vampires' variant. That's something that people always want, and if the core vampire count pdf centers vampires then a no-vampire variant list might outright require an army of infamy. We could break with convention & simply have more armies of infamy than official arcane journals, but imo that makes general community acceptance less likely. If I had to pick exactly two armies of infamy for the arcane journal and we *weren't* segregating all Von Carstein biz to a separate supplement, then I'd say the two Armies of Infamy should be Von Carstein citizen levy with a mix of living and undead empire troops, plus a no-vampires at all Necromancers & Wights undead horde. If we *are* putting Von Carstein stuff in a campaign book, then personally I'd trade their AoI out for a dedicated Strigoi / Ghoul King RoI, as they're probably the most deviant from the core vampire counts army and thus most in need of a separate muster. Plus there's lots of room for expanding them with extra units borrowed from AoS. But going with Strigoi and Necromancers as the variant armies, like going with just Kemmler & Krell for special characters, would mean a vampire counts arcane journal where the actual vampires aren't getting much attention or focus. Apart from maybe bloodline rules, but those might be in the pdf already. .......... So what are you all thinking so far? Is splitting off the von carsteins into a separate 'historical campaign' book a good idea or not? how many and which armies of infamy do you think a homebrew vc arcane journal should include? Which special characters? Should the focus be doubling down on the vampires themselves, or should it be extending rules support to the non-vampire armies that will probably be the least supported by the core VC pdf rules?

She can be a lot more than /just/ Nagash's tool. Being Mortarch prevents her from directly defying Nagash's word, but with Nagash temporarily out of the picture that's not a huge restriction on her own plots and schemes, and whether she's advancing Nagash's agenda or her own, she should still be a competent actor with more Ws than Ls. I recommend the Dominion of Bones novel for one of the rare cases where she's allowed to be properly competent, though admittedly it goes a bit far in the other direction. Again, my complaint is less how Ushoran gets one over on her in this one specific narrative and more how it fits into a pattern going back to first edition, where Arkhan and Mannfred were portrayed as dangerous and competent, always working successfully toward hidden agendas, where Neferata, supposedly the most subtle and manipulative of the mortarchs, was always working towards a blunt, obvious goal that rarely succeeded and almost never knew what was actually going on behind the scenes.

I just ordered a bunch of plain bases and unit trays from https://covetedforge.com/ to re-base my tomb kings with. Hopefully the quality is good, will post brief review either way.

I *hope we're freaking done* with single realm editions. It was a total mistake that wasted the entirety of third edition, and things are only getting better now with the dawnbringer books in large part thanks to not being locked down to a single realm. Also a starter box set in the realm of shadow that doesn't feature daughters of khain or Malereon's shadow elves would be a pretty big waste.

The Ushoran stuff is great, and really propels him into a position as an important and unpredictable player in the core narrative going forward. At the same time, I'm disappointed by the limited presence of the Ossiarchs and non-presence of the Nighthaunts - though maybe they play a bigger role in the Aqshy side of the story this time around. A bit more significantly, I'm frustrated to see Neferata once again playing the jobber. She's been stuck in that roll too much over the course of AoS, and it does undermine her ability to be taken seriously as the threat that she should be in the overall narrative. But that's more a complaint about a trend going back to 1e, more so than this specific instance.

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.