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As I understand it, Seraphon have been reduced to a real oddity of a faction. They're... 'Order Daemons'. Slaan 'remember them' into existence with their big magic brains and have them wage war. Some Seraphon that are 'remembered into existence' can even remain to live out their lives normally, apparently.

Still, the implication is that the Seraphon exist only because of the Slaan bumbling about in starships between the realms and fighting Chaos with 'remembered' armies, and the few Skink Priests that attend those Slaan.

Since then... have we gotten much lore on them? Do the Slaan interact with the other factions much, if at all? Are the Seraphon doomed to forever be a ghost of a faction, never really 'real'? We've already seen characters like Chakax and Krok'Gar reduced to generic 'oldbloods' and 'sunbloods' and whatever other 'bloods' they can come up with.

Personally, I feel like GW has written themselves into a corner with Seraphon, and it doesn't help that most of their model range is ancient. Only the big dinosaurs really hold up at all. The Cold One Riders, Warriors, Guard, Skinks, Chameleon Skinks, Razordons, Salamanders, Kroxigor, Slaan Mage Priests, and most of the Saurus character/individual models are fething old.

Or, could the giant monster that's sealed in this picture actually be a Seraphon monster waiting to be unleashed and revive the Old One's plan within the new realms?



The band over the creature's head in the background looks awful Seraphon, and it definitely appears like a reptilian creature...

What do you think?

I think the Seraphon are the faction in AoS in most dire need of an update. One that puts them back into the mortal realms in a meaningful way and not as frog-remembered daemon-ghosts.

If you read the Forbidden Power fluff it is clearly not a Seraphon, or even close.

We got a bit more fluff during Malign Portents, and hints at a potential ret-con. TBH I would take any Seraphon fluff with a grain if salt until they do a new battletome, which will probably be either this year or next. At any rate, they still live physical lives on board the world-ships, where they have entire jungles to hunt and do lizardmen-things between battles. They also have spawning pools on them.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
If you read the Forbidden Power fluff it is clearly not a Seraphon, or even close.

We got a bit more fluff during Malign Portents, and hints at a potential ret-con. TBH I would take any Seraphon fluff with a grain if salt until they do a new battletome, which will probably be either this year or next. At any rate, they still live physical lives on board the world-ships, where they have entire jungles to hunt and do lizardmen-things between battles. They also have spawning pools on them.

Well that's lame. They got their battletome way back when AoS first got battletomes and haven't been updated since, right? I really hope they get a big lore update, because chilling up in aztec-themed jungle-biome spaceships seems mighty weak.

There are still factions that have yet to receive a single book yet.

 auticus wrote:
There are still factions that have yet to receive a single book yet.

Which?

Tomb Kings, Brettonia, and Greenskinz don't count. Tomb Kings were, business-wise, one of the reasons Warhammer Fantasy failed. Brettonia are just Knights of the Grail which is very difficult to protect via IP. Greenskinz got a three for one deal, being broken up into Bonesplittaz, Gloompsite, and Ironjaws.

Slaves to Darkness, Darkling Covens, Wanderers, Free Peoples, Dispossessed just to name a small few

Do Battletomes that were just warscrolls and story even really count?

 Eldarain wrote:
Do Battletomes that were just warscrolls and story even really count?

Sort-of. All of those battletomes got GHB allegiances and have/had a strong selection of battalions.

 Kurgash wrote:
Slaves to Darkness, Darkling Covens, Wanderers, Free Peoples, Dispossessed just to name a small few

IOW, the generic Fantasy stuff, right? Yeah, they're done.

If the pattern established from Malign Portents continues, Slaves to Darkness should be the next major update. The rest are just holdovers that will likely get the 40k Inquisition treatment where GW does nothing with them and just Hope's you forget they exist.

Seraphon, however, are in such a weird spot lore wise and model wise.

drbored wrote:

 auticus wrote:
There are still factions that have yet to receive a single book yet.

Which?

Tomb Kings, Brettonia, and Greenskinz don't count. Tomb Kings were, business-wise, one of the reasons Warhammer Fantasy failed. Brettonia are just Knights of the Grail which is very difficult to protect via IP. Greenskinz got a three for one deal, being broken up into Bonesplittaz, Gloompsite, and Ironjaws.

Uhg, blaiming Tomb King for failure of WHFB.

GW gives Tomb Kings bottom tier trash rules for nearly the life of the game, and a similarly themed army (Vampire Counts) top tier OP rules for the life of the game. Amazing TK didn't sell well. Awesome models, but no fun when your cool new models are trash on the battle field.

The fact remains whether one feels they are gone that those have model lines and ghb presence, which means people that dont know any better can still pick them up and find out later how screwed they are.

Hand waiving with “generic fantasy is obviously going to be removed” doesnt help those people or those that have a considerable investment already. Better to just remove them from the website and ghb than tease.

Tomb kings didnt sell in whfb 8th because their rules were garbage. If their rules would have been even middling, let alone fec level busted, theyd have sold just fine. Few people are going yo intentionally invest in a gimp faction. Then you have vampire undead being top tier. No brainer for why tk didnt sell.

Tomb kings were bottom of the barrel in 8th rules wise.

Seraphon are at least viable on the table right now.

Slaves to darkness and mortal chaos has been my primary for 20 odd years and they are mostly hot garbage right now. Id happily trade with seraphon to at least be able to play my favorite faction without knowing im going to get owned every game.

Knights with rubber lances. Units with little damage output. The only thing decent are warriors with shields as tanks but thats not going to save you in the aos world without damage output. The varanguard are beautiful and probably one of the most overpriced garbage units in yhe entire game.

It kills me every time I see somebody claim that 8th edition Tomb Kings sucked. They very much did not. A friend and I broke the book in an afternoon, and since he actually played Tomb Kings (I did not), I watched him stomp every opponent, bar one, into the ground with them. At tournaments. They were very good if you had a semblence of a clue as to what you were doing. Then again, people said the 4th edition 40k Daemon book was a hot turd, and that book was the most hated one in my entire area; and when I took it out to tournaments and talked to other people in the flesh, it was generally agreed it was filthy. So as usual, stick to the truth you see in real life; the random people online you’ll never meet don’t know everything.

AoS has changed a lot from launch and some of the early lore has been soft retconned or just clarified or simply changed as the setting and its product approach has changed. Remembering AoS was basically the last big project of the old Kirby management system and when he left it went through several changes. AoS 2.0 is really where its starts to get proper.


As for Seraphon there are already lore stories out there about small enclaves of living Seraphon. I tihnk we are building toward them having a proper faction settlement and being more than just the warriors empowered to battlefields by powerful Slaan mages whilst the warriors themselves sleep in huge spaceships in space sorta.

Patience is key at present though hopefully for only half a year more for most AoS factions. Far as we are aware the hold up at present is trade issues which have already caught the Sylvanath Tome and release. Meanwhile the summer also has big things in the form of contrast paints, Forbidden Powers, the Generals Handbook and Warcry.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
It kills me every time I see somebody claim that 8th edition Tomb Kings sucked. They very much did not. A friend and I broke the book in an afternoon, and since he actually played Tomb Kings (I did not), I watched him stomp every opponent, bar one, into the ground with them. At tournaments. They were very good if you had a semblence of a clue as to what you were doing. Then again, people said the 4th edition 40k Daemon book was a hot turd, and that book was the most hated one in my entire area; and when I took it out to tournaments and talked to other people in the flesh, it was generally agreed it was filthy. So as usual, stick to the truth you see in real life; the random people online you’ll never meet don’t know everything.

They were never featured in any tournament. They were hard-mode. If they were never featured in any of the big tournaments, that is an indication of where their true power lay. There are people here that claim that FEC aren't that powerful and that kharadron overlords sometimes place in tournaments. That does not mean that FEC aren't that powerful or that kharadron overlords are currently anything other than garbage because a couple people sometimes got lucky in tournament seedings to play exactly who they needed to play or had a streak of hot games with a poor faction and did well one time.

Claiming a local set of tournaments was dominated by a book does not mean that book was hot or cold. It means in that local set of people that the person playing that book was able to beat his local opponents. If that same person went to adepticon or LVO or another GT and did the same thing consistently, there would be an argument to be had that at the tournament level they were a good book.

In 7th edition WHFB it was generally considered that warriors of chaos on foot were garbage, but anecdotally in a local RTT I won it out of 16 players. That doesn't mean warriors of chaos on foot were powerful. It means on that day I got lucky with who I was paired up against .

I like Lizardmen a lot, and they were my first Fantasy Army. Shame the Saurus kit is so old and looks kinda goofy.

Aztec Dinosaur people is a cool concept and something that could definitely have fit into the high fantasy Realms easily, so I was very disappointed to read the background which is kinda...interesting from a certain point of view but very unsatisfying for a wargame where people like to make up stories about their badass generals and so on.

But old Lizardmen had that problem too, with the Saurus and so on being pretty mindless and devoid of character. The high concept "Old One's Plan" stuff was cool, but functionally on the table it made it hard to "get into character" as anyone but a sleepy frog man, since they were the only ones with any agency. I am gonna use the models with my own backstory when or if I ever get around to using them outside of RPGs.

Da Boss - have you read Pestilens? Yes yes its all about the mighty Skaven, but Seraphon appear there and the summoned warriors certainly have some great character to them. Just unhitch the summoning need and the Realm Seraphon could certainly be more than just the character of their mighty toad mages

You only need to play the lizardmen campaing in Total War to see that Lizardmen have always had a ton of personality.

Allright, Skinks most of them, because they are the most rational and civilized, with Kroxxigor being nearly bestial and Saurus being much more single minded.

Haven't read those novels yet Overread, though I will give them a go.

As to the personality, it has always been the case that Skinks have personality. That makes them the most likeable, but sadly your army was rarely lead by a Skink and I enjoy the tradition of wargaming where you role play as your general.

I would rather a more complex and less unified civilisation just because I think that is more interesting for a game protagonist. But I think the way Lizardmen were written used to make sense if you wanted them to primarily be antagonists or "deus ex machina" which also made for cool stories ABOUT lizardmen.

Edit to add: Another part of what made Lizardmen cool was that Lustria was very much a character in and of itself, one of the cooler settings in the Old World, which is probably why so many supplements over the years dealt with it. It was an aesthetic that Warhammer of all games was best able to capture, the Renaissance era gunpowder toting colonialists invading the gold rich jungles across the sea...

 timetowaste85 wrote:
It kills me every time I see somebody claim that 8th edition Tomb Kings sucked. They very much did not. A friend and I broke the book in an afternoon, and since he actually played Tomb Kings (I did not), I watched him stomp every opponent, bar one, into the ground with them. At tournaments. They were very good if you had a semblence of a clue as to what you were doing. Then again, people said the 4th edition 40k Daemon book was a hot turd, and that book was the most hated one in my entire area; and when I took it out to tournaments and talked to other people in the flesh, it was generally agreed it was filthy. So as usual, stick to the truth you see in real life; the random people online you’ll never meet don’t know everything.

It kills me everytime someone uses their local scene of crushing weak opponents as evidence of a factions strengths. TK could do lame "roll 6 dice for a super death spell" as good as any army I guess, but were susceptible to character snipping and costed much more points then their counter part VC models to accomplish the same thing. I had the army and played against it several times so I'll submit my local meta as an example of them not being good, especially compared to VC.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:

 Kurgash wrote:
Slaves to Darkness, Darkling Covens, Wanderers, Free Peoples, Dispossessed just to name a small few

IOW, the generic Fantasy stuff, right? Yeah, they're done.

This is what kills me. Despite the fact that the current strongest armies in the game are just "generic Fantasy stuff", people are still claiming WHFB armies are going to be phased out. How many of the 2.0 tomes have been WHFB army updates now?

 EnTyme wrote:

 JohnHwangDD wrote:

 Kurgash wrote:
Slaves to Darkness, Darkling Covens, Wanderers, Free Peoples, Dispossessed just to name a small few

IOW, the generic Fantasy stuff, right? Yeah, they're done.

This is what kills me. Despite the fact that the current strongest armies in the game are just "generic Fantasy stuff", people are still claiming WHFB armies are going to be phased out. How many of the 2.0 tomes have been WHFB army updates now?

How many haven't had anything at all though?

pm713 wrote:

 EnTyme wrote:

 JohnHwangDD wrote:

 Kurgash wrote:
Slaves to Darkness, Darkling Covens, Wanderers, Free Peoples, Dispossessed just to name a small few

IOW, the generic Fantasy stuff, right? Yeah, they're done.

This is what kills me. Despite the fact that the current strongest armies in the game are just "generic Fantasy stuff", people are still claiming WHFB armies are going to be phased out. How many of the 2.0 tomes have been WHFB army updates now?

How many haven't had anything at all though?

Army Books: High Elves, Dwarfs, Empire, Tomb Kings and Brettonia. Those that have been partially updated are Dark Elves, Wood Elves, Orcs & Goblins, Ogre Kingdoms, and Warriors of Chaos (sort of--they can be taken in any of the four god-specific battletomes). Those that have had a full update are Beastmen, Daemons, Lizardmen, Skaven, and Vampire Counts.

2 armies discontinued, 3 armies that have seen no updates, 5 armies that have seen partial updates, and 5 armies that have been totally updated. Two of the seven battletomes this year have been straight updates of WHFB armies to AoS, four include portions of a WHFB army, and one has been AoS exclusive.

When I talk about "generic Fanasy stuff", you can't count the GW-unique DE Monsters, WE Dryads and O&G Spiders & Squigs - that's GW-unique IP that they created out of thin air.

To imagine that generic HE / WE / DE, generic Dorfs, generic O&G will continue on is basically zero.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Army Books: High Elves, Dwarfs, Empire, Tomb Kings and Brettonia. Those that have been partially updated are Dark Elves, Wood Elves, Orcs & Goblins, Ogre Kingdoms, and Warriors of Chaos (sort of--they can be taken in any of the four god-specific battletomes). Those that have had a full update are Beastmen, Daemons, Lizardmen, Skaven, and Vampire Counts.

2 armies discontinued, 3 armies that have seen no updates, 5 armies that have seen partial updates, and 5 armies that have been totally updated. Two of the seven battletomes this year have been straight updates of WHFB armies to AoS, four include portions of a WHFB army, and one has been AoS exclusive.

This is very valuable information, thank you!

I still don't think that we can really consider Tomb Kings and Brettonia part of the list any more, but I understand if people want to leave them there.

High Elves have been in the rumor engine as being converted to 'Light Elves' just as there are rumors for 'Shadow Elves' and we have gotten Daughters of Khaine and Idoneth Deepkin as additions to the elf faction.

Dwarfs have gotten two brand new factions in AoS, Fyreslayers and Kharadron Overlords. What people mean when they say 'dwarfs' are what are now the 'Dispossessed', which are just.. regular dwarfs.

I just see a lot of the complaints about AoS updates at this point come down to the 'Generic Fantasy Stuff' that JohnHwangDD mentioned. Regular humans, regular dwarves, regular elves, regular orcs. Those things GW can't protect via IP. What GW has done in some of those armies (the ones that have gotten partial updates) is they've taken the aspects of those armies that they can create unique stuff out of and they've run with that. Wood Elves is a perfect example. Yeah you could say they're 'Dryads', but when you put in the lore and design elements that have gone into models like the Kurnoth Hunters, Alarielle the Everqueen, and others, you see a unique force that's not just 'elves in the trees'.

Kharadron Overlords? Yes. Seraphon? Sure. Stormcast Eternals? Absolutely. Putting your hope that the Generic Fantasy Stuff is going to be updated is just setting yourself up for disappointment. It's just like the 40k Indexes. Just because there are datasheets for Apothecaries on Bikes for generic space marines doesn't mean they'll someday get a new kit. It means GW made a concession to allow you to play with your models to ease into AoS.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
When I talk about "generic Fanasy stuff", you can't count the GW-unique DE Monsters, WE Dryads and O&G Spiders & Squigs - that's GW-unique IP that they created out of thin air.

To imagine that generic HE / WE / DE, generic Dorfs, generic O&G will continue on is basically zero.

Yeah; goatmen, tree-people, and scantily clad elf dervishes are totally unique.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
When I talk about "generic Fanasy stuff", you can't count the GW-unique DE Monsters, WE Dryads and O&G Spiders & Squigs - that's GW-unique IP that they created out of thin air.

To imagine that generic HE / WE / DE, generic Dorfs, generic O&G will continue on is basically zero.

Yeah; goatmen, tree-people, and scantily clad elf dervishes are totally unique.

Compared to the rest of what's out there, yes. It's easy to sub in for generic HE/DE Spearmen & Archers, generic armored Dorfs. Dryads & Squigs? Balloon Dorfs? Not so much.

John I think you've got a very odd sense of what is unique within AoS and I think in a way its almost like you're just cherry picking factions for the slot.

You've also kept saying that GW is removing generic whilst at the same time you've never managed to show how things like medusa or winged women warriors or undersea elves are not also generic within the worlds of fantasy and sci-fi.

Dryads are all over the place, there are dozens upon dozens of stories about them in a myriad of forms from green skinned humans all the way to walking trees. Heck Lord of the Rings has walking treemen. Dwarves in airships is so generic that GW did it in Old World several times - one of the major plot points of Gotrek and Felix is a massive dwarven airship whilst Man O War had several airships and there were further several shown in major works of art at the time (along with things like huge animated dwarven statues going to war).

Sure GW is putting a twist on some ideas, but to argue that AoS is a massive move away from the generic is really not the case, about the only step GW has actually taken away from generic is to rename factions from Dwarves to Durdian and Elves to Aelves; medusa to Melusai. These are not even huge stretches from the original words.

AoS itself is really generic, It would as a setting be less generic with some of the more common fantasy trappings.

Looking at The stormcast eternals, They are about as close to generic bland "Good guys" as you can get. And there Race and set up is a great setup for nothing matters and they can be everywhere we need them to be for story without having to think hard about it.
I think they would have been more interesting as Humans in armor, as that is what they are as models. Just bigger scale now.

I think GW is setting stormcast up nicely for a big fall with how they've done reforging the ONE big worry I've got is that GW wants to make Stormcast fall like Spacemarines Fell and thus have a huge "stormcast civil war" followed by "cursed stormcast unique model army".


I honestly think that might well have been the plan at some stage, even though GW already has chaos within the AoS setting.

They could still do the above and just say that Stormcast killed so many chaos warriors before and then fell and became a new generation of chaos warriors - which is a bit predictable, but means GW doesn't have to make another huge stormcast army with spikes on it.



I guess my worry is that GW copycats Space marines too much and ends up creating the same problems 40K has in terms of marines and imperials getting the lions share of models and attention. I think AoS is far stronger and better when there isn't a faction dominating the release system.