Towercap

Breathe, folks, spite-revs are in. 🙂

Good stuff, I like the different angle on Orruk culture. Kudos!

All sound like excuses for lazy writing to me! 🙂 I'd honestly much rather read at least one story about overcoming cultural (and language!) differences between denizens of two realms than another shallow pulp.

It's about the suspension of disbelief. If that's the explanation they choose to provide for using this (lazy, overused) trope, it's their prerogative. I find it jarring because it goes against what we know about real world linguistics, and it goes about it in such a lazy manner. A language changes all the time. Only dead languages stay the same. English you speak now is drastically different to English spoken a couple of hundred years ago. Unless Sigmar himself talks to you every day to make sure something like the Great Vowel Shift doesn't happen, the "language of the god" explanation is rubbish. Not to mention that, say, Christians don't speak the language their holy text was written in originally.

Each to their own, for sure! Some books handle this well. The Goblin Emperor and Kushiel's Dart come to mind. Tip the hat to having an interpreter or speaking a lingua franca like High Azyrite (pretty sure it's called Celestial, right?), and consider my disbelief suspended. 🙂

Christian missionaries were highly successful in spreading a religion, but they hardly wiped out languages in their wake. The other thing that tends to happen to languages — given time and separation, they'll drift apart. Without constant communication between communities, High Azyrite spoken in one community will eventually become a different dialect to High Azyrite spoken in another community. Add realms and you'll multiply this effect a thousandfold. There's a story in Maledictions I find particularly jarring. It's got an Idoneth Deepkin aelf washing up on strange shores. Of course, when a villager finds him, they're able to have a conversation, as if they're from the same village. 🤦 Again, lazy tropes, personal pet peeves.

It would make perfect sense for High Azyrite (Celestial, IIRC?) to establish itself as a lingua franca. You could even argue it would become prestigious to speak it, since Stormcast Eternals would likely bring jobs with them (builders, cooks, messengers — everything required for army logistics). These jobs would require the knowledge of the language. People would come to associate speaking High Azyrite with greater socioeconomic status. But there's no way SCE, essentially a colonial force, could make every (if any) tribe out there give up their language(s) completely. At best, you'd end up with a thousand High Azyrite dialects that combine elements of the language as it's spoken in Azyr and the regional language of the speakers. Really, that's besides the point. Common language is a lazy fantasy trope that I'm particularly averse to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Personal opinion — BL books are bad. I genuinely tried to get into BL. I read the usual novel recommendations (Spear of Shadows, City of Secrets, Shadespire and others), a few novellas and collections (Code of the Skies, Maledictions, a handful of others) and listened to the first Gotrek audiobook. I'm still trying to get into BL — The Dark Harvest is next on the reading list. I read heaps of fantasy. None of the BL books I've read so far stand up to work by authors like Pratchett, Hobb, Sanderson, Jemisin, etc. Their stories tend to have little to no character growth. They rely on tropes without surprising the reader by subverting them. I've found them tedious and boring. AOS writing's rife with my pet peeve too — with a few cherished exceptions, everyone speaks the same language. In real life, take a trip across a landmass and you'll likely hear dozens of different languages spoken. If you're lucky, in addition to their native language(s), the people will speak a lingua franca (possibly badly). In AOS, you'll travel across entire worlds and speak to people from a different era WITHOUT ANY LANGUAGE BARRIER AT ALL. This bothers me enough to caps. Anyway, given the hype around The Dark Harvest, I'll persevere for at least one more book. 🙂 [EDIT] Oh, I will say that I've thoroughly enjoyed a number of AOS short stories. They tend to zero in on quirky and interesting aspects of the Mortal Realms. There's not enough room to fall into the usual formula of [travel from A to B; fight; travel from B to C; fight; and so on]. He Feasts Forever was a standout for me — a story about ghouls who have been away from their liege for too long and start to regain their senses. I loved some of the Malign Portents stories, too.

Grand Alliance: Death & Taxes.

I'd love to see an FEC warband lead by a varghulf courtier. Varghulf needs a new sculpt badly.

@Eshking This has been posted a few pages ago and identified as a Reddit user's wishlist.

Battlesmith now shows online only. No longer last chance to buy. Mystery solved!

Personally: hard nope. I love the contrast between their imagined and physical realities. I reckon the further they stray outwardly from what they believe inwardly, the more evocative their fluff will be.

I see the FEC argument every now and then, and I think it's rubbish. FEC are deranged, degenerate cannibals. Their current aesthetic matches this perfectly. The fact they have delusions doesn't affect their physical appearance.

Yeah, that's an old Grimgor Ironhide pic. Definitely (and sadly) a fake.

According to Jervis Johnson (and courtesy of SlyRebirth), GW already use a calculator. See here:

Those trees look freestanding, too. That would be a great way to solve the frustrating footprint of the current kit.

Checks out.

Stellar stuff (I'm not sorry)! Love the paint job, and your fluff is on point. Will be watching for future blog entries!