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A lot of this stuff doesn't do it for me, but that's mainly because it's not aimed at me - I actually quite liked the more sinister turn Gobbos took in WHFB, while these are firmly aimed at fans of the 110% whacky oldschool style.

The squigs and herders remain lovely, and the basic squig hoppers are great. Some of the character models are awesome(I want that chubby head from the Brewgit). The trolls are OK, but I'll need to see their actual size and what they look like with a less cartoony paintjob. Don't care for the manglers, but I didn't particularly care for the FW version either - give me a plain old Giant Squig any day.

It's a solid execution of the concept and I'm happy folk who play something other than Stormcast in AoS are getting a full-scale army release.

I knew big daddy troll reminded me of something...

Agreed with yohdrin that they are a bit too goofy and not sinister enough, but fhe release is still pretty great. Shame about the diving fanatic though. I really like the redesigned fanatics but this one pose is so idiotic that it makes me like the kit a lot less

Feeling overwhelmed.
That was a lot more gobbo and troll goodness than I was expecting.

I even like the new mangler squig.


What a way to kick off a year. Shockingly well done.

Magnificent, GW fantasy coming to life.

I wonder if other Gobbo stuff will be in this battletome, too. Things like the Wolf Riders are suddenly unavailable online, and I cant believe they'd be Squatting them?

 AegisGrimm wrote:
I wonder if other Gobbo stuff will be in this battletome, too. Things like the Wolf Riders are suddenly unavailable online, and I cant believe they'd be Squatting them?

Wolf chariot, nasty skulkers, snotling pump wagon.. all are no longer availeable... curious..


Do you imagine that the next renovation is pirate goblins with the normal goblins?

Yeah its a crazy idea.. but.. this year they renewed 2 elves followed..

Personally I wouldn't be surprised to see the 'classic' Orcs and Goblins rolled into one battletome.

 Ghaz wrote:
Personally I wouldn't be surprised to see the 'classic' Orcs and Goblins rolled into one battletome.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see them put most of the classic kits out to pasture. They had a good run.

Only the Zombie kit is immune to the passage of time, apparently.

Just one thing; the regular orruk boar boyz and the dual model Warboss kit still hold up well. So I would hope that they could find a home somewhere.

If they were going to discontinue the 'classic' Orcs and Goblins altogether, why did they only discontinue certain kits?

I was curious about the ‘common’ goblins as well. The pump wagon & doom diver seem like they’d fit well into the Gloomspite army, but they seem to have not carried over stuff like the wolf riders & spear chukka. Hopefully the latter two can continue to stay with their hobgoblin cousins in a chaos dwarf army reboot. But since the evil stuntys are living in the middle of an ocean apparently, I’m guessing they’ll go for more of a demonic-war machine pirates theme instead.

Either way, these new grots are fabulous! I really hope you can field entire units of grot sorcerers, I want all those new ones, but I have so many old RT metal ones, it would be amazing to see them all fielded as a unit.

Anyone know if the FW troggoth hag will be usable with these grots? She’s big enough to be a troll boss I’d guess?

New podcast:

Oh nice bottle episode!

 Ghaz wrote:
If they were going to discontinue the 'classic' Orcs and Goblins altogether, why did they only discontinue certain kits?

Different levels of stock, perhaps. Certain kits were produced in greater quantities and are taking longer to sell out.

Just speculation, though.

 Ghaz wrote:
Personally I wouldn't be surprised to see the 'classic' Orcs and Goblins rolled into one battletome.

I'd think it more likely to see them added to Ironjawz to be honest.

 nels1031 wrote:

 Ghaz wrote:
If they were going to discontinue the 'classic' Orcs and Goblins altogether, why did they only discontinue certain kits?

Different levels of stock, perhaps. Certain kits were produced in greater quantities and are taking longer to sell out.

Just speculation, though.

Then there's also the 'Last Chance to Buy' category for kits that they know are being discontinued. Currently only the 40K 30th Anniversary Intercessor Sergeant is in that category.

Would it be fitting to post a run down on AoS Skirmish in here? I did so already in the WD one but thought might be more relevent and more people would be interested here.

GenRifDrake wrote:
Would it be fitting to post a run down on AoS Skirmish in here? I did so already in the WD one but thought might be more relevent and more people would be interested here.

Yes please

I’d like to see regular goblins change their emphasis to focus on their contraptions, maybe rolling in that sky-pirate business hinted at in the Kharadron book too…
Imagine a Snotling pump-skiff, sailing across the battlefield, powered by the wind blowing into the sail from the giant fan cranked by the snots?
Doom divers as boarders and modified harpoon chukkas to reel in the enemy vessels?
Plus all of that can be dismounted to serve on the battlefield easily enough.

zamerion wrote:

GenRifDrake wrote:
Would it be fitting to post a run down on AoS Skirmish in here? I did so already in the WD one but thought might be more relevent and more people would be interested here.

Yes please

Alrighty, well to copy and paste from my post in the WD:

To give a brief run down on Skirmish, it's basically rules for playing AoS in the 250-500 points/Reknown or so mark, you can go for more or less but that's about the range they recommend. It uses same rules as AoS just there are some adjustments for Warscrolls and points cost or what they call Reknown. To find a unit's Reknown you basically work out the cost of what 1 model would be, so min unit size cost divided by min unit size. There is a restriction that each Warscroll can only be included once in a Warband, but you are free to ignore Min unit sizes, and also you can mix and match any wargear and upgrade options that Warscroll has, though still sticking to any "every 1 in 5" etc rules. You must also take a minimum of 3 Warscrolls and at the very least 1 of them must be a Hero, as you are still required to bring a General. Also each model in Skirmish is it's own individual unit and do not have any coherency rules. So despite you might buy say add 10 Chainrasp to your Nighthaunt Warband as part of taking on a Chainrasp Horde Warscroll choice, they do not function as a 10 man unit but are 10 individual units/models now and are all free to function individually from what I gathered.

You must have at least 1 Hero unit and pick one of your Hero units to be your general as stated earlier, but you ignore battletome Command Trait and Artifact tables. Instead everyone must use these new Skirmish Command Trait and Artifact choices for Skirmish games and you ignore any Allegiance abilities too, there is instead one generic Allegiance ability for each Grand Alliance you choose. CP and Command Abilities function as normal. In addition there is no Endless Spells allowed either and any abilities/spells/traits etc that add models or new units to your warband cannot be used once the battle begins also.

The WD has 7 missions for you to play around with, but that is the basic run down, skipping out on a lot of other details but that should be enough to give a general idea how it'll play out? They said next issue will have rules for playing AoS: Skirmish Campaigns too.

The basic rules are as they were in the original Skirmish supplement, with a couple of significant changes (some of which have already been summarised):

- Leaders of units get the CHAMPION keyword, which is used in some other rules, scenarios, etc.
- You get an allegiance ability based on your grand alliance (Chaos models that die can attack again on a 6+, Death models get Deathless Minions but don't need to be near a HERO to trigger it, Destruction can pick another model to fight on a 5+ at the end of the combat phase and Order can re-roll battleshock)
- There's a list of special command traits and artefacts and these are the only ones you can use
- The rules clarify that command abilities and command points work as they do normally, except that you can't use any command ability that affects battleshock tests in any way
- The biggest change is to the way Renown works; instead of a specific list derived from an opaque formula, they just give you the maths and it's points/model based on the points/unit in the General's Handbook (or, presumably, the battletome, but oddly it does specifically mention the GHB...)
- Models from a warscroll with a specific upgrade (and CHAMPIONS) have a flat increase to their Renown
- 7 new battleplans

Campaign rules are coming next issue. Given the length of this article, I'd expect them to be fairly detailed compared to the ones in the original supplement.

You can still freely mix and match warscrolls within the Grand Alliance, right?

I'd imagine so yep, all it says is when making your Warband you must choose a Grand Alliance for it to hail from, and all your warscrolls must come from that Grand Alliance.

Yep mix and match away
*starts working out renown values for the ETB kits and Shadespire warbands*

Yep, only limit is by Grand Alliance. No other allegiance abilities can be used, so there's no reason to restrict by faction.

Time to assemble the human/aelf/duardin adventuring party of my dreams...

I'm doing similar, with some Duardin. I bought a two pack of the Rune Golems from Runewars, and I plan on using them as a pair of counts-as Kurnoth Hunters (with Greatswords) in a warband otherwise made of primarily Ironbreakers and Irondrakes led by a Runelord. The Kurnoth warscroll seemed to fit such big stone golems the best as they fit right onto 50mm bases. I think they look awesomely Dwarven, and should give my Duardin some cool monsters for Skirmish.



The only bummer to the WD Skirmish rules is requiring the GHB to figure out Renown costs, as it's yet another purchase for me just to play skirmish when I don't have any intention of playing AoS at full-scale, so as far as I can tell the GHB is otherwise useless to me (personally). I wonder, as I will primarily be playing games with friends who don't even have the Skirmish rules, if I just use the awesome full list using original-style renown costs from the Grand Alliance forums, but otherwise use the WD rules for everything else, as it sounds like the new formula just uses the way to calculate renown, but stopping short of dividing by five.

I wonder how much of the new rules were written or collaborated with Bottle from Hinterlands? The new way to calculate values already sounds like the "gold coins" value from Hinterlands, and the generic allegiance abilities also sound like what warbands would use from Hinterlands. Hopefully the campaign rules also have Hinterlands-styles injury/advancement for models.

I like the sound of Champions and/or specialists costing a bit more than generic troopers, as it just plain makes sense.

So the game-breaking balance issues were not addressed at all?

For example; when the leader of a Kharadron Thunderer unit is charged he rolls a dice and on a 2+ does a mortal wound to the charger. Since every model is its own unit, 5/6 models to charge him will suffer a mortal wound. He can also retreat instead of fighting in melee so only one model will be able to attack him before he runs away unless he is completely surrounded, and he shoots 4 shots a turn. So basically this one unit champion can solo entire warbands by himself, minus the enemy hero.

Or a plague monk unit champion that has an item with a 1/game use that rolls a dice for every unit within 13" dealing a mortal wound on a 4+ (Nurgle units only affected on a 6) so a single unit champion can wipe out a huge chunk of an enemy warband with little effort.

Or a Grimwrath Berzerker, who upon suffering a wound or mortal wound rolls a dice and adds one for each enemy unit within 3" and ignores it on a 6+ (so have 5 models in range and he now cannot be slain except by instant death effects).

Or a Knight-Azyros who has a once per game ability that does an automatic d3 mortal wounds to each enemy unit within 8".

I could go on for some time, but the point is that there is a plentiful amount of completely game-breaking options with how the skirmish rules are currently designed and I am really hoping they did something about that for the new skirmish else it will die almost as fast as the first.

 AegisGrimm wrote:

The only bummer to the WD Skirmish rules is requiring the GHB to figure out Renown costs, as it's yet another purchase for me just to play skirmish when I don't have any intention of playing AoS at full-scale.

All Aos points are available for free on warscrolls builder, which you can find on the warhammer community site, so you don't need to buy the ghb.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
So the game-breaking balance issues were not addressed at all?

For example; when the leader of a Kharadron Thunderer unit is charged he rolls a dice and on a 2+ does a mortal wound to the charger. Since every model is its own unit, 5/6 models to charge him will suffer a mortal wound. He can also retreat instead of fighting in melee so only one model will be able to attack him before he runs away unless he is completely surrounded, and he shoots 4 shots a turn. So basically this one unit champion can solo entire warbands by himself, minus the enemy hero.

Or a plague monk unit champion that has an item with a 1/game use that rolls a dice for every unit within 13" dealing a mortal wound on a 4+ (Nurgle units only affected on a 6) so a single unit champion can wipe out a huge chunk of an enemy warband with little effort.

Or a Grimwrath Berzerker, who upon suffering a wound or mortal wound rolls a dice and adds one for each enemy unit within 3" and ignores it on a 6+ (so have 5 models in range and he now cannot be slain except by instant death effects).

Or a Knight-Azyros who has a once per game ability that does an automatic d3 mortal wounds to each enemy unit within 8".

I could go on for some time, but the point is that there is a plentiful amount of completely game-breaking options with how the skirmish rules are currently designed and I am really hoping they did something about that for the new skirmish else it will die almost as fast as the first.

Maybe it has the rule like both Hinterlands and Forgotten Heroes (two fan expansions) where a model can only do 3 mortal wounds in a turn, with the rest becoming 1 wound with "-" Rend. Both also have/had a rule where a unit's attack or special ability can't be targetted against more than 3 models- the rest are lost. Massively balances the examples above.

@Chikout: Thanks for the info on points. I hadn't checked out the builder yet. I'm a bit behind when it comes to technology instead of books, lol. *After checking it out, hopefully they expand the selection of available Skirmish units when/if they update renown to eliminate having to do all the renown conversions manually.