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 Dryaktylus wrote:
AoS is WHF+X. If you put every model or faction that wouldn't fit into the WHF setting to the AoS category - well, why not. Sure, this is AoS. And this? And as we're talking about dead people - the whole Nighthaunt faction would have had a place in the Old World - the Ossiarch Bonereapers rather not (though better than Sky Dwarves and Sigmarines).

Cool. But I thought my meaning was clear.

The new Wight King looks like it walked right out of an old Warhammer Armies: Undead book.

There's none of that fantastical AoS-ness to it.

The new Wight King looks like it walked right out of an old Warhammer Armies: Undead book.

Yeah. An old undead book, not vampire counts. The shield iconography is off the old metal (now resin) mounted wight king, not the current black knights with their weirder shield shapes based on curves and bat wings.

Its properly grim fantastical. And the armor and barding have a real presence on the model, rather than the stick-on shoulder pieces that we've been saddled with for a while.

 rayphoton wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
All this talk of the dead outnumbering the living in this cursed city.

Why are there normal people still living in this city!!!

"Honey! There are dead roaming the streets, the city guard are all skeletons, and the mayor is an evil Vampire. We need to move."
"But dear, the view we have from our house is incredible. And we're so close a great school district."

The devil you know right. Picture this most likely of scenarios

The Smiths have a nice house..multiple generations of Smiths have lived there. The city has been...mostly safe. Chaos shows up to eat everyone. City is ..less safe. Vampire guys shows up..saves city from insane chaos people and the city is safe again...Kinda. Thanks Vamp lord guy. Slowly..city start to get worse. But its cool..we have jobs and our nice house. Plus the wilderness is bad, those insane chaos people live there. City has gotten far worse but your used to it now..you lock your door, arm yourself and ..mostly..everything is ok. City is super now has undead roaming around it. Well crap..lets leave. Pack your things put them in a cart..collect whatever money you have (there is no Credit cards or banks so you take your wealth with you) Maybe make it 2 miles out of the city before night falls and are ripped apart by either
A:chaos
B:undead
C: chaos undead

Hmm..maybe I'll stay in the city were I can lock my door in my nice house where I still (during the day) have a job. City is pretty awful...but at least we know how to survive here

All of this, plus the generic medieval-fantasy ground-state of cultures in Warhammer means that moving to a new town is a horrendous nightmare. First you need to know where one is to go to. Then you have to rely on rumour and hope to determine if you have a chance of making a living there. Moving your household is a practical quagmire too because there’s no such thing as “three men and a cart removals” so you have to save up and probably buy a cart of suitable size, same for your draught animals, learn how to drive them in your spare time (which you don’t have because that also wasn’t really a thing before the industrial revolution) and then pack up everything to move and sell the rest. Which may be difficult if everyone else is also moving out and depressing the market. Plus you probably can’t sell your house for similar reasons, even assuming you actually have legal title to it in the first place, or that the new authorities would respect such a thing. Actually getting anywhere is a trial and a half (well travelled routes have inns and way-stops but they also have bandits, while off-roading takes longer and has a chance of random beast attacks) even assuming your planned route and destination are correct. Then once you get there, having dodged the bandits, escaped that displaced beast, and avoided dying of dysentery on the way, you have to set up from scratch as whatever your trade was before, prove to the locals that you are trustworthy and so on and so forth.

Moving cities today is the most stressful thing you can do and that’s even with the ability to have a guaranteed job at the other end, the assistance of others to actually move, a strong transport system to get you there in days instead of weeks or months, and reliable information about both the route and destination, and banditry at such a low level that your medieval ancestors would be amazed. Take all that away and “you know, mrs von saurkraut is actually a lot less pushy about the rent since she died” starts to seem like a reasonable opinion…

The more I see it, the more I like it. Maybe I will have to buy two copies: one for my personal use and one to sell on ebay later

 zend wrote:
They'd be excellent zombie models if they were just regular zombies without the graves, but GW has to make everything unique and trademarkable. As a result we've got some contrived bs where the zombies are controlled by death energy possessing the graves on their backs as if the graves were a fungus or parasite, but other people have already done fungus and parasite zombies, so GW came up with this instead.

Sculptors I doubt are told to make things that can be a trademark item.
They just sculpt cool things for a boxed game, and this is what they thought were cool.
Because literally any other company could now sculpt zombies with gravestones.

As others have said this really seems more like a thematic choice for this box.

I would imagine the main zombie kit redo (if and when..) will be “slightly” more generic.
I say slightly as yeah sure, it’ll still have it’s aos twist maybe, but I think not as much as this, where the specific story explains why the zombies in this particular place are the way they are.

Yep, the lore behind Cursed City is fully in grim horror Warhammer tales, to me. You can find references to old Mordheim design as well, just more focused on Death being everywhere.

I like it the more I read.

Miniatures have a specific design for the city, it's also clear as well. It's not just mere generic zombies or skeletons. They're zombies from the Corpse-Gardens and skeletons raised from the city's guard. That's what some people here fail to understand.

And yeah, the city is awful and you can ask why they keep living here instead of leaving. Exactly the same question ignorant people ask about other countries where life is awful with war everywhere - most people just can't afford to leave, because of everything they have to leave behind or just are unable to. Situation is even certainly more terrible in a fantasy world in the Realm of Death, where leaving outside the city's wall by yourself without any armed escort is a sure death sentence.

So staying in the city where danger is still there, sure, but you aren't certain of dieing tomorrow is certainly better than going in the wilds and have no chance of survival at all.

Of course, rich people / skilled warriors who could afford to leave / flee the city certainly did so already (we have a glimpse of it with some of the heroes, after all), but that's not the case for the majority of its population who don't have these advantages. Being a random poor / modest guy in Warhammer World is sure a grim fate.

My own personal take on the zombies is that just the custom way of burying people since the old days in the city.

Stacked tru the hearth with the coffin lid and facing down just to be sure it remain dead if the person was afflicted by vampirism or could never dig toward the surface but deeper if turned undead (i remember that was some kind of superstition back in real life transilvania ).

The reason for them walking with the lid on their backs, well look at the Gravekeeper model and you can figure it for yourself.

Voss wrote:

The new Wight King looks like it walked right out of an old Warhammer Armies: Undead book.

Yeah. An old undead book, not vampire counts. The shield iconography is off the old metal (now resin) mounted wight king, not the current black knights with their weirder shield shapes based on curves and bat wings.

Its properly grim fantastical. And the armor and barding have a real presence on the model, rather than the stick-on shoulder pieces that we've been saddled with for a while.

Imagine if they'd do an actual revenant army and not skelletontrademarkis or vampire underlings in that style.

 zend wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I've said it before, but the new mounted Wight King is the most Warhammer Fantasy model GW have made in years and years. It's amazing, and totally not an AoS mini.

Nailed it. I like a bunch AoS minis such as the Idoneth, pretty much all of the new Chaos mortals (spank naming conventions and monopose kits aside), and even the new skeletons within Cursed City, but that Wight King is just top notch and further cements my desire for AoS to return to more grounded, generic designs. Generic fantasy just looks better sometimes.

I kinda agree, he has that goofy 80s cartoon look to him that Old World models usually had. No grimdark or nobledark or whatnot, just whatever the sculptors' kid happened to watch that morning

Blackstone Fortress had the Spindle Drones which were specific to the setting and created just for the game itself. I doubt we'll ever see them again once BSF disappears.

The zombies in this box seem to be the same thing - we're just questioning it because zombies are already an established thing.

 Dryaktylus wrote:
And as we're talking about dead people - the whole Nighthaunt faction would have had a place in the Old World - the Ossiarch Bonereapers rather not

The Bonereapers are just a concept originally visited in the Tomb Kings army books. People often forget, but the Tomb Kings bone giant wasn't the reanimated skeleton of a giant. Rather, it was a gigantic humanoid construct fashioned out of bone. Ushabti were similar, though they had a mix of stone and bone, and had obviously non-human heads. Their forms were inhabited only by the spirits of the greatest warriors. Finally, there were the tomb scorpions. Those were fashioned out of stone. But the animating force for them was a mummified lich priest.

The 8th Edition army book added a number of new constructs. But I'm choosing to ignore them for the time being as they don't really add anything that the three above haven't already provided.

So, sure, the Bonreapers would need a spot on the map opened up for them in the Old World, along with an explanation of who these guys are. But they're basically using elements that the Tomb Kings had already introduced to the lore. The only real difference is the form that the results take, and the sheer volume of what the Bonereapers are doing in comparison to what the Tomb Kings did.

Cronch wrote:

 zend wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I've said it before, but the new mounted Wight King is the most Warhammer Fantasy model GW have made in years and years. It's amazing, and totally not an AoS mini.

Nailed it. I like a bunch AoS minis such as the Idoneth, pretty much all of the new Chaos mortals (spank naming conventions and monopose kits aside), and even the new skeletons within Cursed City, but that Wight King is just top notch and further cements my desire for AoS to return to more grounded, generic designs. Generic fantasy just looks better sometimes.

I kinda agree, he has that goofy 80s cartoon look to him that Old World models usually had. No grimdark or nobledark or whatnot, just whatever the sculptors' kid happened to watch that morning

I'm pretty sure the "Elf Kangaroo Cavalry" fill the "goofy 80s cartoon look" quote a lot more than the previewed Wight King.

Indeed; I think the new elf cavalry is neat,. but its much more he-man than the wight king is.

@People staying in the city despite its state:

The situation outside the city is even worse. Staying put is actually the safest thing to do, that's exactly what makes it so horrible. Not being able to leave is one thing, having to choose staying because it is the better option despite everything...

Now if you were a badass that could seriously fight then yeah, getting out and surviving the trip to another location becomes a realistic option. All those people are already long gone or... 'conscripted' into service.

Carlovonsexron wrote:
Indeed; I think the new elf cavalry is neat,. but its much more he-man than the wight king is.

Kangaroo cav is he-man, Skellylord is Skeleton Warriors.

I'm assuming an Iron Curtain situation here. I mean, there literally is a wall.

Cronch wrote:

Carlovonsexron wrote:
Indeed; I think the new elf cavalry is neat,. but its much more he-man than the wight king is.

Kangaroo cav is he-man, Skellylord is Skeleton Warriors.

Given the generic (though very executed) design of the wight king I don't think of he man when I look at 8t, even if it had parallels there. But the kangaroo cav? The only.exostong franchise I'm aware of to invoke that kind of design is he-man, so its a much stronger connection for me.

Anyone else reckon we’ll be seeing it up for pre-order next weekend, and announced this evening?

I’m getting twitchy!

Very much hoping so, yes. I got a GW voucher on friday and if WHQ doesn't get announced soon I'm terrified it will burn a hole in my wallet.

Having just picked up some back issues of WD, did anyone else catch the namedrop in issue #460 of the Vyrkos Vampires?

Amongst them is Hrunspuul, the Hound of the Cairns, who folklore claims bestowed the curse of unlife upon the first of the ferocious Vyrkos vampires. Though maybe Hunspuul is just another of Nagash's many guises; with godbeasts, it's hard to know where legend begins and ends!

Wonder if we were supposed to see Cursed City last year?

 Kanluwen wrote:
Having just picked up some back issues of WD, did anyone else catch the namedrop in issue #460 of the Vyrkos Vampires?

Amongst them is Hrunspuul, the Hound of the Cairns, who folklore claims bestowed the curse of unlife upon the first of the ferocious Vyrkos vampires. Though maybe Hunspuul is just another of Nagash's many guises; with godbeasts, it's hard to know where legend begins and ends!

Wonder if we were supposed to see Cursed City last year?

GW also just likes teasing future releases. I'm blanking on any good examples, but Sigvald in the mirror was teased a long time before the Hedonites dropped. Kharadron also got a few teases in battle tomes before they debuted. And the goblin sky pirates have appeared so many times in battle tomes, white dwarfs, and even black library stores, I'll be shocked if they don't get an official release

Oh goddamit.

I’m jonesing over here, GW! Just like, release it already.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Oh goddamit.

I’m jonesing over here, GW! Just like, release it already.

You and me both. Really looking forward to this one.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Oh goddamit.

I’m jonesing over here, GW! Just like, release it already.

If not a release, then a rough window. I'm putting off buying stuff for other projects because I don't know if this is coming soon or coming 'you know, whenever.'
And the weird 40k schedule isn't helping either. 'We're going to talk about War Zone whatever.' Great, but... is there other chaos stuff coming with Be'lakor? Do I need to get some 'start collectings' before a price rise? Are there orks before June? Something, anything? Bueller?

I mean, I guess I can keep not spending money just in case this comes out before April. Or in April. Or maybe May.
Let me plan my hobby budget, idiots.

The tiles for this game don't look anywhere near as quality as the shadows over hamerhal ones. Especially as pictured in the article we got today.

I was thinking that, too. The tiles image in last night's preview looks pretty rough. We haven't got enough good pictures of the tiles to make a decent judgement though imo

You guys mean the art work itself?

I'm not sure where this would be in the thread, but do we have any idea when pre-orders start for this?

Nothing yet.

not revealed yet I as far as I know