Age of Sigmar - Slaanesh Replaced? plus big book, stormcast archers, dismounted celestan

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**JohnHwangDD**

If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen. I've sat out of WFB for years, not a big deal.

However, if you do want to play, when the new edition hits, the near Army Book / Codex is released, buy it and built to it.

Or, have a mass of stuff, and simply play out of the pile you own.

Right now, we know that WFB is changing over, but the last time GW did this, armies were still playable.

You guys are blowing things way out of proportion.

**theHandofGork**

JohnHwangDD wrote:

Right now, we know that WFB is changing over, but the last time GW did this, armies were still playable.

GW is a very different company now than they were when the last major change happened with WFB. Rick, Andy, Alessio, and the others involved in the last major changes to 40k and WFB are all gone. I don't think it makes sense to use what happened 15+ years ago as an indicator of what is happening now.

That being said, it is too early to panic. Let's see what AoS is (and isn't) and go from there. But thinking this will be another ravening hordes seems beyond optimistic.

**HobbyBox**

I'm not panicking at all. I am actually quite interested and excited to see how this all shakes out. For me personally, I wanted something a bit different than what 8th Ed became (especially with ET), especially if they scale it back a bit.

**Bharring**

Bang out a whole army in a month?

I might finish a 10-man unit, or possibly two, in a month.

Some people take a long time to put together an army. And that's only tabletop quality, at best.

So if I start an army now, it probably won't be fully built and painted any time soon....

**JohnHwangDD**

An army over a few months.

Back when I was really into GW, I knocked out multiple 2,000 point armies in a matter of months (each). I would finish a tabletop quality unit of a dozen-ish minis a week, building and painting a couple hours a night watching TV.

**NAVARRO**

JohnHwangDD wrote:
If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen. I've sat out of WFB for years, not a big deal.

However, if you do want to play, when the new edition hits, the near Army Book / Codex is released, buy it and built to it.

Or, have a mass of stuff, and simply play out of the pile you own.

Right now, we know that WFB is changing over, but the last time GW did this, armies were still playable.

You guys are blowing things way out of proportion.

To follow your analogy... We can handle all the heat, after all we have been in the kitchen for 20 years now, we just find poor taste that the chef decided to change the menu completely and does not even have the decency to tell us whats in the oven.

No one is stressing out, people are just being pragmatic while you seem to be on chill pills overdose, maybe the fact that your NOT into WFB explains your absolute relaxation.

**Wehrkind**

JohnHwangDD wrote:
If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen. I've sat out of WFB for years, not a big deal.

However, if you do want to play, when the new edition hits, the near Army Book / Codex is released, buy it and built to it.

Or, have a mass of stuff, and simply play out of the pile you own.

Right now, we know that WFB is changing over, but the last time GW did this, armies were still playable.

You guys are blowing things way out of proportion.

See John, I think people get irritated with you because you don't lead with that. If you just said upfront "GW always pulls this crap, so don't get too attached to them" people would be fine. If you said "I don't play WHFB because I can't trust GW" people would agree.

Suggesting that people are wrong for being upset with GW for messing up the game they are invested in, then later admitting yourself that you don't play the game, right before stating that other than buying new stuff frequently your only option is to just have a huge library of models to play with, that gets people upset. The fact that a player's army is likely to be relegated to a shelf for most of its existence in favor of whatever new things the rules, or play-ability, require at random intervals is what irritates the hell out of players. The fact that those armies might not even function at all in the near future is even more worrisome and problematic.

In other words, you write that people should stop complaining that they are getting bitten by their dog, when what you are really saying is "Look, this dog is a prick and will bite you. Pet him at your own risk." If you mean to say "GW sucks as a company; don't expect a good long term relationship" just say it. Otherwise you are engaging in some strange version of telling people they are wrong to want better behavior from GW, then falling back on "which GW won't provide" when pressed, which is irksome.

**Azreal13**

I suspect the nature and qualities of John's posts is directly proportional to his boredom level and how confrontational he feels.

**JohnHwangDD**

I think I've said that quite a few times, that GW is what it is and we shouldn't expect them to change.

Navarro, GW has been doing this for years, and sure, you've got that old loyalty card, but you're still sitting at the lunch counter, ordering the daily special...

Wehrkind, I think I've been upfront that I really didn't like 8E and sat it out after the first few games. I also stopped buying GW during 40k 6E. Plus, my sig shows pretty clearly how vast my collection is.

Over the years, watching from the sideline, things have become a lot clearer about how I should approach GW, and the recent 9E / Eldar Codex kerfulffle has only helped crystalize things. It's now clear to me how GW works, and I'm now OK with GW.

It's my choice to play, or not, and I'm very comfortable either way. It's not like I don't have other choices...

Feeling like I *have* to invest effort into something that I don't enjoy? Nope. If I don't like it, I don't do it - I just step back or walk away. Easy.

ETA: Right now, the only "big" issue I'm grappling with is whether I should even bother holding on to so much of the "old" GW stuff that I'm not actively using, simply to declutter and clear space. However, as it's all mothballed, it's not actually that big of a deal.
____

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Azreal13 wrote:
I suspect the nature and qualities of John's posts is directly proportional to his boredom level and how confrontational he feels.

Busted.

**Boss Salvage**

Wehrkind wrote:
On the other hand, claiming that "a few months" is not a large amount of time to get an army ready to play, an amount of time large enough to be worrisome to waste in the face of effectively regime change from GW, that I can't quite understand. It is quite possible to start an WHFB, spend 2-4 months getting it painted and together, only to find that it is entirely unworkable due to a rules change, or just miserable to play. That's a really, really high cost of entry, even beyond the dollar cost, with a fairly high possibility that the cost will get you nothing within a few months. Unless you are the sort of person that loves painting models, many very similar, just for the joy of painting models, that's a pretty big thing to just write off. Most people probably can expect to spend a lot of time and effort preparing an army that may never be fun to game with.

Wehr, it occurs to me that your beautiful WoC army, which was built for 7E and then bashed in the face by 8E, may well become a thing again. And should you need to custom cast up some round bases to rebase their tiny-ankled bodies onto, well then you're certainly all set for it.

- Salvage

**Do_I_Not_Like_That**

I'm in the fortunate position of having no fantasy minis at all, having sold off all my armies 2 years ago, but my heart goes out to people who have heavily invested both money, and more importantly, precious time into fantasy, only to see their armies getting cluster fethed!

I hope I'm wrong, I hope there's a ravening hordes or a WD army lists to get people by, but I just don't see it happening.

**Hive City Dweller**

Via Natfka:

http://natfka.blogspot.com/2015/06/uncovering-the-age-of-sigmar.html

I had the chance to spend about 20 minutes with the upcoming book Age of Sigmar by A. Lanning (a novel, not the game) that deals with the aftermath of the end times. The prologue makes it very clear that Sigmar survives and the whole plot takes place after the end times. Nothing that I have read suggests that there is any time travel involved. It is just a continuation of the story on a much broader scale. I think it is safe to say that the game of the same name follows the story of book and doesn't establish a totally different setting.

In the prologue Sigmar survives and pulls the winds of magics through the gap into the warp. In the process the pure untouched currents of the warp are tainted with the personifications of the winds - the Incarnates. This is the birth of eight new minor gods.

But most of the book is not about sigmar or the incarnate gods directly, only three chapters as far as I could see were written from their perspective. The rest of the book is an ordinary fantasy adventure story. The book follows Martellus Mann, a reikguard quartermaster who was slain in the end times, but is reborn in Sigmarshall, the domain of Sigmar.

I then skipped some hundred pages forward so I don't know what happened in the aftermath, but in the middle of the book, he has gathered a large party of heroes from many realms and realities in a quest for something called the spirit mill or soul mill or something like this. I know for sure that there are several worlds and that the protagonist can travel from one to the other but I didn't read a chapter where this was described in person and I don't know if this is part of the game world.

In the middle of the books there is a huge betrayal, sigmarshall is under siege by the armies of the chaos gods. incarnate fights against incarnate and all are cast out from the warp. Mann starts a search for sigmar in the believe that he was reborn somewhere. The second half of the book is set on a world called Regalia. And here it gets interesting: Regalia is the only area/realm/world that has a map in the book. Regalia looks like the old world or earth and has very familiar regions and city names, etc. But there are some huge alterations: there is no Ulthuan, but a huge landbridge that connects Canada with Scandinavia.

There are no elven or dwarven sounding cities or lands but strange sounding names in the Americas and Africa that don't fit any race of the old setting. There is no empire, but lots of different states in Europe and Asia - Nuln, Middenheim, etc are there, but Altdorf is not. There are more things you can deduce from the map if you assume that it represents the setting of the game, which I strongly think it does. Mann finally arrives in the city Heldenheim that is build in the Worlds Edge Mountains just in time to visit the crowning of emperor Karl Franz where he announces his plan to conquer the whole world. Mann thinks that he has found Sigmar and the book jumps to the epilog.

Sigmar is chained somewhere and starts to dwindle, but then he smiles and proclaims that his great work to eliminate the chaos once and for all has only started. He vows to conquer the warp.

I think it is pretty obvious that the game will be set in this new world. Why would they establish all this in the book when the game doesn’t use it at all, but I haven't seen any actual game material (though there is a slim chance that I get a glimpse this weekend - fingers crossed), so take this into account.+

Sounds salty but alarmingly detailed.

**Kanluwen**

That was posted yesterday.

I'm still calling nonsense on it.

**pretre**

Was posted here a couple pages back.

**Hive City Dweller**

oops...

**Wehrkind**

Boss Salvage wrote:
Wehrkind wrote:
On the other hand, claiming that "a few months" is not a large amount of time to get an army ready to play, an amount of time large enough to be worrisome to waste in the face of effectively regime change from GW, that I can't quite understand. It is quite possible to start an WHFB, spend 2-4 months getting it painted and together, only to find that it is entirely unworkable due to a rules change, or just miserable to play. That's a really, really high cost of entry, even beyond the dollar cost, with a fairly high possibility that the cost will get you nothing within a few months. Unless you are the sort of person that loves painting models, many very similar, just for the joy of painting models, that's a pretty big thing to just write off. Most people probably can expect to spend a lot of time and effort preparing an army that may never be fun to game with.
Wehr, it occurs to me that your beautiful WoC army, which was built for 7E and then bashed in the face by 8E, may well become a thing again. And should you need to custom cast up some round bases to rebase their tiny-ankled bodies onto, well then you're certainly all set for it.

- Salvage

Yea, I have to admit that I am following this thread mostly because I am interested to see if I can get some use out of that large pile of metal. Tiny, beautiful metal :(
I haven't given 40k a glance in probably 6 years, but WHFB still could do some good by me if this 9th/AoS thing pans out well.

Then again, if anyone asked, I would say to avoid GW like the plague, doing nothing more than getting some rules and planning on doing counts-as for everything. Any other advice just seems irresponsible, like telling someone to invest all of their retirement money in helping Nigerian Princes.

**Boss Salvage**

Wehrkind wrote:
Then again, if anyone asked, I would say to avoid GW like the plague, doing nothing more than getting some rules and planning on doing counts-as for everything.

I'm actually quite excited to do up a 9E army using Croc Games minis, something I've wanted to do since around the time 8E hit, but wasn't really feasible in that edition. Round bases would just make it look cooler. But until GW gives me some rules to work my Counts As Fu on, I'll just keep quietly amassing Malifaux

- Salvage

**bbb**

mikhaila wrote:
Lots and lots of differences in the demise of TSR and where GW is today. Although their might be some similarities we also don't know about yet.

I'd love to know certain things about Black Libraries book distribution and it's liabilities. That cause a major hit to TSR when they shot themselves in the foot by announcing self distribution of paperbacks and triggering millions of dollars of returns of unlold books.

And on WFB sales: Mine are totally unaffected by the announcement of AOS. My stores have barely sold WFB since the 2nd yer of 8th. Maybe 2% of 40k sales. So not selling anything is normal. Endtimes was actually a huge bump over the usual nothing.

Mike what would you say was the high point for WFB sales? 6th edition? 7th edition? earlier/later? What would you say brought the sales down for 8th edition, lack of players, inability to carry all the range, something else?

**JohnHwangDD**

@bbb - 6E should have been the height of WFB. The reduced points value per model and streamlined rules allowed for vast expansion of armies, and ease of recruiting new players. Well-varied scenarios and Border Princes campaign made the games interesting and meaningful. Plus, no Warmachine / Hordes as competition.

**timetowaste85**

6th was amazing. That may have been partly due to amazingly solid rules (unless you cried about Knights), but it was probably also because we didn't have 10000000 armchair generals online talking about the only list in this army to run is X. "Play this way, or don't bother" is very common online. Attitude has definitely gotten more cynical, and we partially have the Internet to blame. Of course, GW writing worse rules each edition doesn't help either.

I say this having played with multiple people who went to GTs and placed high. Never won, but placed high. None of them gave auto-lists of what must be taken, or else forget about winning. They would offer advice how best to use units, but largely helped people run lists they wanted. And none of those guys ran net style lists themselves. Even now, they all do their own thing and laugh at the poor generals who have to steal ideas online from others. Pla the army YOU want to win with. Playing somebody else's list doesn't mean you'll play it the same exact way they would. So you'll lose.

**TheAuldGrump**

Kosake wrote:
His Master's Voice wrote:
I like the concept of Mordheim, but it was never going to work as an introduction to WFB on a relevant scale. The gap between model counts and general mechanics (urban comabt vs open battlefield) was just too big.

The game also lived and died when WFB was still going strong and GW had no desire to offer a cheaper alternative.

In general, it takes more than just low model count and the same setting for a game to be an effective gateway drug. The models and rules have to be highly compatible. Take Necromunda and 40k. Pretty much nothing from that awesome game transitions to 40k, unless as a "counts as". Now think about a Kill Team game with Deathwatch, Ork Freebooterz, Gene Cults and an some Eldar Aspect Rave Party with BBQ and Music as your starter forces. Let the top model count go as high as 30 for the Orks. Heck, go 40. Then add relevant entries for those "warbands" in the respective big game codex books, preferably as Troops.

There, you can now light your fireplace with 100$ bills.

Not to contradict you, but I like kill-team as it is quite well. Though if you go for a 40+ cultist group, it becomes ridiculously imballanced against any unprepared foe.
I think kill-team as it is now is a decent gateway drug, except hardly anyone even knows about it. I've talked to quite a number of veteran players with huge armies who reacted along the lines of "huh? never heard of it... sounds kinda interesting... is that new?"

And given that I have introduced people to Warhammer Fantasy Battle with Mordheim... that claim is demonstrably untrue.

That said - the scale of Warhammer has changed over the years - becoming more and bigger figures crammed into the same space, at an ever increasing price.

My group no longer plays Warhammer - Kings of War has replaced it. (And, ironically, can handle larger battles more easily.)

My group still plays Mordheim.

So, the game that GW kicked to the curb is the game still seeing play....

They also still play Necromunda - but several of the players have sold off their WH40K armies. (Not coincidentally - those armies were mostly Space Wolves....)

Though there is a game that is cutting into the Necromunda group - Deadzone - it seems that there are other companies that see value in ideas that GW has cast aside....

The Auld Grump

**Boss Salvage**

timetowaste85 wrote:
6th was amazing.

I wish I could weigh in on 6E, but it was the edition I skipped. I painstakingly built up 1000 points of O&G, played a few games, had my entire army run away in all of them thanks to chain panics, then bought 40k 3E

- Salvage

**statu**

I'll admit I've skimmed a lot of this, so if something along these lines has been posted already, I apologise. Also I'm aware everyone has no reason to believe a word I say, but figured it was worth putting this out there any way. After they removed the books from the shelves last week, my local GW sold more of the books over that weekend than they have in a long time. I also happened to be in store when their latest delivery came in, and this may just be GW trying to sell what they can, but every book they sold, including the end times book that went, Archaeon I think, was completely restocked, which suggested to us that the books are going to stay

**timetowaste85**

You missed out then. Best player I know ran 95% of his games as O&G and won almost all of them. Lots of toys and gimmicks.

**His Master's Voice**

TheAuldGrump wrote:
And given that I have introduced people to Warhammer Fantasy Battle with Mordheim... that claim is demonstrably untrue.

Good thing I never claimed no one ever picked up Warhammer as a result of playing Mordheim.

**TheAuldGrump**

His Master's Voice wrote:
TheAuldGrump wrote:
And given that I have introduced people to Warhammer Fantasy Battle with Mordheim... that claim is demonstrably untrue.

Good thing I never claimed no one ever picked up Warhammer as a result of playing Mordheim.

Gee, that's funny - the first part of the quote had you saying pretty much that....

It was the gateway for a lot of gamers in my are - so... yeah. I disagree with the 'I like the concept of Mordheim, but it was never going to work as an introduction to WFB on a relevant scale. The gap between model counts and general mechanics (urban comabt vs open battlefield) was just too big.'

Orc players, Empire players, Skaven players, and Dwarf players all got their start in Warhammer as a result of Mordheim.

In my local area that is maybe fifty people over the course of several years. So, yeah, it is a 'relevant scale'. A majority of the Warhammer players in the area at the time.

I used Mordheim in classes at a summer program - and quite a few of those kids also went on to have Warhammer armies. (Including a student that trounced me with her Orc warband....)

But, as [i\I[/i] mentioned - the scale of Warhammer was smaller when Mordheim was released. It was an easier hobby to get into, and the Mordheim warbands were used as either units characters in the larger game.

Mostly, GW believed that Mordheim was cannibalizing sales from Warhammer....

On the plus side, most of the Mordheim players are now using figures from pretty much every company that isn't GW. (Reaper, Avatars of War, and Heresy seem to be most popular.) So, now that GW has dropped Mordheim, it really is eating their sales!

The Auld Grump

**His Master's Voice**

TheAuldGrump wrote:
Gee, that's funny - the first part of the quote had you saying pretty much that....

No, it didn't. You even quoted the relevant part. I'm going to assume you can understand the difference between an event occurring seldom enough to not be relevant and an event not occurring at all.

What you consider relevant scale is statistical error for me. Don't play Gotcha! with me using your casual evidence, because I have my own, and I understand how irrelevant it is to the subject at hand.

Mordheim is a poor introduction to WFB, for objective reasons not related to your personal success story with the game. Had it been better, your fifty could have been a hundred. Or two hundred.

**SinaLeibniz**

Hive City Dweller wrote:
Via Natfka:

http://natfka.blogspot.com/2015/06/uncovering-the-age-of-sigmar.html

Sounds salty but alarmingly detailed.

That's not from naftka, but from me. Naftka posted it as their own drek.

Charles Rampant wrote:
(simply taking a photograph of the map would surely have been enough to prove his point, but obviously nobody has any kind of portable camera on them these days).

Let me be clear: it doesn't matter if you believe me or not. My point here is solely that the notion, that anything without a photo attached to it can be discarded without further thought, is really stupid. Imagine a friend of yours shows you something interesting, but makes it clear that he is normally not allowed to do that but does it anyway because you are his friend. So you sit down and look at that thing and your friend is grinning because it is very obvious that you are excited like a child on christmas eve. But what would happen if you take your iphone out and made photos of everything. Do you really believe he would be ok with that? That would be very unlikely. The moment you take a picture you are making it very clear that your intention is not to consume for your own pleasure but to share with someone else. Have people like harry or hastings that have reliably kept their sources ever posted a picture to prove their point? In times where blogs like faeit lie and lie again about their insider knowledge, it is very wise to be careful and critical. But the argument that anyone who has the luck to get her hands on some unreleased material should be able to provide photos is stupid. Photos put sources in peril and posting them without consent is a greater breach of trust than paraphrasing some paragraphs. I don't know why I am so mad about this, but I am.

Thargrim wrote:
Lol sarcasm i'm hoping, 90% of people I know how a little something called a cellphone which most modern ones are capable of taking very crisp images. The fact that people supposedly get their hands on this stuff, and don't take images leaves me with the impression they are either brain dead or don't care to be taken seriously.

The only one who is apparently brain dead is you (see above).

unmercifulconker wrote:
So guys I read the upcoming book and got a good glimpse of the parts which are essentially the rumours we have at the moment but sorry guys I skipped all the important bits in the middle which explains the story lol my bad.

What would you do if you had a huge novel in front of you choke full of interesting things but only a very small time frame to get to all the juicy stuff. You don't know where the pivotal events are. Where do you start, which passages do you skip? All while pretending to be mildly interested instead of frantically trying to absorb the full scope. That's the situation I was in and given the circumstances I could have done a worse job. The obvious first step is to look at the beginning and the last chapter and this is exactly what I have done. I recognized that the first and last chapters were unlike the rest from sigmars perspective. I leafed through the book and found the Sigmar POV interlude and the map. The tiny rest of the time I spent reading more or less random fragments. I'd like to see how you would fare under these circumstances. Maybe we can come back in some weeks when we have read the novel and judge in earnest how good a job I have done.

**Desubot**

Oh man da drama bomb.

Naftka was really claiming it rather than "unnamed source?" edit: NVM page loaded and saw from reader on naftka

**Howard A Treesong**

I don't understand this idea that the smaller games don't introduce people to the larger. When Necromunda and Gorkamorka were first released the rules very much mirrored the version of 40k at the time meaning that transition was fairly easy