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Have they shown off Abraxias helmet before?

No not yet. On a side note, I absolutely love the name Gorbolga.

So it looks like to play Skaven you pretty much have to get a set of Gnawhole models. Glad I wasn't planning on keeping the Skaven half of the launch box. I don't like it when certain models are required to play a faction. It's an unnecessary tax. Plus the models are out of stock currently (at least in the US); what are you supposed to do if you can't get the models?

Glad they didn't do Stormcast like that, and I hope that holds true for my Kruleboyz too. Faction terrain should be optional, not required for your army's basic abilities.

What’s worse is terrain may only be temporary. That GSC mining drill model has been oop for years lol

 ZergSmasher wrote:
So it looks like to play Skaven you pretty much have to get a set of Gnawhole models. Glad I wasn't planning on keeping the Skaven half of the launch box. I don't like it when certain models are required to play a faction. It's an unnecessary tax. Plus the models are out of stock currently (at least in the US); what are you supposed to do if you can't get the models?

Glad they didn't do Stormcast like that, and I hope that holds true for my Kruleboyz too. Faction terrain should be optional, not required for your army's basic abilities.

There's no "must" on the Gnawhole abilities, so feel free to avoid them if you feel buying one box is that much of a tax on the army. Sure, you're not then taking advantage of everything, but that's your choice when it comes to tea and the harbour.

Alternatively - while they're out of stock, and outside of official events - try asking nicely and I'm sure someone will confirm the rough dimensions so you can make paper or card markers for them. No ideal, but as models can't end up stood on them the lack of 3D is probably not that much of an issue.

Pretty sure faction terrain has been "soft mandatory" (not prescribed but a free buff so you'd be daft not to take it) since day 1 back in 2nd edition?

Yep ever since they first introduced it.

A few of them are even bound really powerfully into the army design such that you really don't want to leave them out - like the Herdstone or the one the Goblins have.

A few - like the Ossiarch one - I think get left out because freaking heck its huge to put on the table.

Gnawholes I think are an ideal example of terrain. It is small enough to easily fit on the map and its a boon to have, but you can still run an army without it.

gnawholes seem as important to the faction as trees are to sylvaneth— and i think that's fine. it works for sylvaneth, it can work here

It's a good thing Abraxia looks good because her rules suck.

 TalonZahn wrote:
It's a good thing Abraxia looks good because her rules suck.

Good thing they're going to change in the next couple of months.

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:

 CMLR wrote:

Billicus wrote:
Buying the indexes as cards

*Indices

indici

AC/DC

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
On a side note, I absolutely love the name Gorbolga.

Gorbulga

 ZergSmasher wrote:
So it looks like to play Skaven you pretty much have to get a set of Gnawhole models. Glad I wasn't planning on keeping the Skaven half of the launch box. I don't like it when certain models are required to play a faction. It's an unnecessary tax. Plus the models are out of stock currently (at least in the US); what are you supposed to do if you can't get the models?

Glad they didn't do Stormcast like that, and I hope that holds true for my Kruleboyz too. Faction terrain should be optional, not required for your army's basic abilities.

Ol' Trusty soda cans

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:

 TalonZahn wrote:
It's a good thing Abraxia looks good because her rules suck.

Good thing they're going to change in the next couple of months.

* You hope.

 Rihgu wrote:

 kodos wrote:
that was sarcasm

It was not.

When we're not rolling 10,000 dice at a time, statistics barely matters. It can give a general idea of an outcome but we're dealing in a small enough set that outliers are numerous. At the scale of dice rolling we're actually doing, gatekeeper rolls matter - having better chances higher up the chain means you're more likely to get to the next step. 3+/4+ is better than 4+/3+ because you'll usually get to roll more to wound dice in the former.

At an extreme example, 2+ to hit, 2+ to wound, and enemy has a 2+ save is better than 6+ to hit, 2+ to wound, and enemy has a 6+ save, even though they are statistically the same.

Holy gamblers fallacy.

No. That's not how stats work.

The probability of a statistically above average to hit roll where your gatekeeper effect pays off is statistically equal to the probability of a below average to hit roll where the gatekeeper effect doesnt reward you. While you may hit an individual roll where the gatekeeper effect pays off, or have a game where you're rolling hot and you benefit from it multiple times, this will eventually be counterbalanced by rolls that play out in reverse and regress your performance to the mean. Rolling 10,000 dice at a time has nothing to do with it, what dies matter is how many independent dice rolls you make over the course of your "career" - if you're making a dozen to hit rolls per turn, and averaging 3 turns per game, you will hit your hypothetical 10,000 probability event threshold for statistics to matter after about 2.5 years of playing an average of 2 games per week regularly.

So sure, you may have a bunch of rolls/games where stats don't matter and you gatekeeper your way to a win, but unless you barely ever play and have a tendency to roll hot in your too small almost nonexistent sample size of games played, you will eventually have just as many rolls/games where the opposite occurs and you gain no benefit from it whatsoever.

 CMLR wrote:

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:

 CMLR wrote:

Billicus wrote:
Buying the indexes as cards

*Indices

indici

AC/DC

AB/CD

Apologies if this is a stupid question as I haven't followed closely: but are Plague Monks expected to get a new kit with 4.0?

If they weren't on the purge list, then not with the initial release. But I wouldn't be surprised if they came sooner rather than later.

I was surprised to see the Monks stay while the Censer Bearers are to be culled; a logical option seems to combine both into one kit. Which I suppose might still happen, albeit with a gap where Censer Bearers won't be available at all for a while - assuming they won't just be dropped completely.

Possibly a new skaven character teased in the latest WarCom article. The Left Claw

Maybe it’s Ikit? His big claw was his left hand and he is technically alive in aos as Ikrit


edit: apparently it’s just a term for that verminlord

So today Gitz?

Gitz is up now.

Yep, they are now https://www.warhammer-community.com/2024/05/23/warhammer-age-of-sigmar-faction-focus-gloomspite-gitz/

 Marshal Loss wrote:
Apologies if this is a stupid question as I haven't followed closely: but are Plague Monks expected to get a new kit with 4.0?

This was the list posted by the leaker who leaked some starter set model pictures back in March:

The article about The Vermindoom would probably have more impact if I could remember what Aqshy looked like previously. Honestly, the biggest struggle with AoS continues to be that the realms feel so bland.

That’s because the realms are too big. There are living mountains, city sized monsters, floating continents, and a million lost civilizations with god tier weapons that have recently been discovered and everyone wants it

There's literally a map of the area of focus in the article.

Also, we just spend the past year in Aqshy focus, so the whole idea is that you spent all this time there then the impact is because it's fresh.

I think its also because GW hasn't produced as many big landscape images of the realms. It's not like Old World where you could just use the vast mountain of Tolkien/fantasy/medieval artwork and it would cover most regions and inspirations.

The Realms are bonkers insane huge and GW hasn't really created a vast body of artwork that shows the landscape. They show off troops and ruins aplenty, but we don't really see the realms themselves enough. Landscapes, farmscapes, cityscapes and more would be fantastic to see to get more of a flavour.

 Scottywan82 wrote:
The article about The Vermindoom would probably have more impact if I could remember what Aqshy looked like previously. Honestly, the biggest struggle with AoS continues to be that the realms feel so bland.

What's there to know? Aqshy used to be on fire. Now, Aqshy is on fire. The more things change. the more they're just as planned.

 Scottywan82 wrote:
The article about The Vermindoom would probably have more impact if I could remember what Aqshy looked like previously. Honestly, the biggest struggle with AoS continues to be that the realms feel so bland.

This reads like a complaint from someone who hasn't read anything about the game. The great parch map is probably the most detailed and commonly reprinted map in Warhammer except the old world and the 40k galactic map.The great parch map is in the second and third edition core books as well as quite a few battletomes from both editions. The soulbound core book has a full colour version of the great parch map on the inside of the front and back covers.

Also it's pretty traditional on fantasy to not map everything. Middle earth, westeros, etc don't have full maps. Discworld has one now but Terry pratchett said he played fast and loose with geography. The wheel of time world doesn't even have a name. I'm not so familiar with DnD but I'm not sure even that setting has a full map.

The thing is a lot of those fantasy series draw from tropes. Heck Discworld and Westroes draw from Middle Earth.


They also operate on worlds mostly broadly similar to our own. Discworld is the most "out there mad" but even then its more of a twist on the modern world than a full rebuilding.



AoS is different. It has realms where there are lakes of quicksilver, storms of rust, the literal dead walking and unliving beside you; shadows so thick its like living in a permeant smog.

Some realms have living animals that are a fusion of machine and organics.




The realms are super high fantasy and so detatched from our real world and the decades of Middle Earth inspired fantasy that they are harder to envision. IT doesn't help that they are also vast in size; each realm being a flat vast planet of its own (in fact in the very early lore they were almost said to be evergrowing). With the amount of warped strange nature varying over the realm itself.

Each realm has unique wildlife, creatures and challenges. Eg in Dynasty of Monsters you've got a settlement in the Beast Realm (which in general is possibly one of the easier ones to envision) set in a region where you can go to sleep on a plain and awaken on the side of a mountain because the geography changed. In minutes you go from flat land to huge mountains.

Now that's a vast amount of fantasy going on. Even the "City built on pillars to avoid changes" raises huge questions on how it can function. You then get to something like farming - how do you farm any crop when the very land and ecosystem can change in the blink of an eye; heck how to living animals thrive and survive in such an enviornment.

There's an edge to the Mortal Realms of every realm almost being a bit like the Chaos Realm in that its very hard to imagine how they "function". There's so much magic and so much stuff going on its hard to mentally picture the place "working"