I had to express my feelings on Age of Sigmar, and they're mostly relief. Maybe I should've just waited for everything to come out and THEN weighed in, rather than obsessively reading Warseer and joining in on all the "End of the World!" speculation. But with rules in hand, I can honestly say that I don't think it's as bad as some people are making it out to be, at least from my perspective.
The biggest relief for me is that my Undead Legions models are in no way invalidated. In retrospect, I think I was probably worried for no reason. Of COURSE GW is still going to be selling all those huge plastic kits we've come to know and love recently. But the fact that with the warscrolls, it looks like just about everything they've ever made still has a place in AoS is a huge relief for me. I recently bought Nagash and the Mortarch kit in a sudden case of "Get it now before it's gone forever," which turns out to be untrue. But GW thrives on this kind of marketing ploy, and I can admit it... they got me. But they're great kits, and I'm very happy that I can still use them should I choose to play AoS. If they're going to a more "limited-time release, and then it disappears" model in the future, then sure, the warscrolls system makes perfect sense. And I really like that GW is making rules available for free. It's a huge departure for them as a company, and quite surprising. And looking at the HUGE new Sigmarine models, on their HUGE bases... it's obvious that GW has been moving in this direction behind the scenes for a while now. Even with the advances in plastic in the past few years, the industry had reached a point of diminishing returns on how much detail you could put into a model. Even if you managed to somehow get more detail into them, it would be so small that you couldn't paint it. Models like the chaos warriors, Forge World Empire command, etc, were practically BURSTING off their bases, to the point where people were forced to put them on slabs of cork just to get them to rank up. I'm okay with GW scaling everything up a bit, and since base sizes no longer matter, I think that's sensible. I'm still REALLY hoping that they finally get around to making horses that are a bit more in-scale with the humans, and really do our equine friends justice. I think the new basing system is a great excuse to do that.
But NO, I'm absolutely NOT rebasing my whole frickin' army, I JUST got 'em all magnetized!
As far as the other aspect goes, the gameplay... I have to admit that looking at the first warscroll, I was actually surprised by how LITTLE had changed. For all the talk about how the game was going to be "vastly simplified" for "little children," we've still got a profile with ten stats, half of which are specific to the weapon, and with a model like Nagash he's got FOUR weapons... for a total of 28 stats in his profile. Uh... this doesn't look in any way "simplified" to me. Keep in mind, I own the rulebooks to no less than FOUR different versions of Warhammer, and I've probably played ten games in my lifetime. I've always been a modeller first and a gamer second, so I am in no way an authority where game mechanics are concerned. But since I usually get about two units painted every two years, and then when I finally get around to playing a game, I've got to learn the rules all over again... I'm not really sweating Age of Sigmar. It's just another rules change, albeit a significant one. I hope that once I've managed to process it, it'll be just like any other new edition of Warhammer, with the sweeping changes to the meta game that everyone has to deal with.
Some of the rumblings I've heard sound pretty neat, though... keep a line of skeletons in front of Nagash to keep him out of combat, and he can fight back through them? Sweet! I still can't help but feel like there is either going to be a HUGE amount of errata coming in the next year, or that some sort of points system is in the works... I just can't imagine how victory points or levelling will make games fair going forward. I hope that GW has done a lot of playtesting behind the scenes and that they know what they're doing. I'm not willing to write them off just yet. We'll see.
For now, I'm going back to assembling Nagash. Happy gaming!
While looking for inspiration for my Warhammer army, I decided to pick up a few of the old novels and see if the background was still as exciting as I remembered. The first was the one that stuck out most to me in the background... The Brother's War. I was pleasantly surprised that the book was just as good, if not better than I remembered. Jeff Grubb does a great job setting up the relationship between the brothers and making it plausible that two people who loved each other so dearly in their youth would end up leading opposing armies against each other. It was interesting to note how little of the book was devoted to the actual war, which seems to take up only a few chapters at the end. Most of the book is spent getting to know the characters and their motivations.
After The Brothers' War, which spent a good bit of time pondering ancient Thran artifacts and the culture that created them, I immediately had to reach for the novel that dealt with that culture, suitably titled "The Thran." I was less impressed with this novel. While it was interesting seeing the birth of Phyrexia and the man who created that artificial plane, Yawgmoth, the novel just didn't seem as enthralling to me. Maybe it's because of the overwhelming theme of politics in the novel, but it didn't seem as exciting to me. The motivations of the character on the cover, Rebbec, also seemed confusing to me, as did the concept of the power stones making people sick. Do they still have that effect? Was it all lies on the part of Yawgmoth? Are the intricacies of pseudo-grecian politics really that fun to read about if you're a twelve year old male in 1995? The answer to the last one is, "probably not." The heavy-handed scheming and persecution themes are interspersed with some big battle scenes which would probably make a good movie, but something about this one left me wanting more. Also, "Yawgmoth" is clearly an evil, evil name... probably oughtta call him something a bit more neutral sounding at the beginning of this novel if you don't want to telegraph that he's eventually going to turn evil. Maybe I'm missing the point.
A quick trip to the trusty ol' storage space reminded me that I had a couple mid-90's M:TG comic books done by Armada, an Acclaim imprint. (Wait, Acclaim the video game company? They had a comic division? Ah, the 90's.) So I grabbed them and have been trying to crank through them in the past few days, since I have SO MUCH to do lately and I really can't afford another distraction. Anyway the Antiquities War and Fallen Empires series left a bit to be desired. The artwork didn't impress me and the writing didn't hold my interest. Also whoever they got to do the letter was an amateur at best and downright terrible at worst. But I was pleasantly surprised by the Homelands comic. I've been scanning the MTG Salvation wiki lately, looking for connections between different parts of the fiction and trying to keep characters straight, and the site does not have a glowing opinion of the Homelands card set. It is described as a low point in game design for MTG, but a high point of background and storytelling, which seems appropriate given the comic. The brothers Hildebrandt did the cover, which I found interesting, but it's one of my pet peeves that the interior artwork looks nothing like the cover, which I've always found to be false advertising. Fortunately the interior art is by Rebecca Guay, and is PHENOMENAL, if you can get past her particular painterly style. It makes everything sort of mushy and watercolory, but is very beautiful, I think. The writing is also a high point of this one. All of the comics so far have jumped around in time and place, which from reading the editorial notes sounds like a conscious decision to allow Armada to "stake a claim" to all of the various settings in Magic's multiverse. It makes the books feel a bit rushed, as they introduce you to a character, kill them off, then move a hundred years into the future to show the results of said character's demise. While it made the Antiquities War series seem like more of a "highlight reel" of the events that take place in Grubb's "Brothers' War" novel, the Homelands comic seems to be working with a smaller universe and cast of characters that makes the chronological leaps feel more logical. The whole thing has a beginning, middle and end that leaves you wanting more, but there's a feeling of completeness to the story that I found refreshing after the Fallen Empires and Ice Age comics. Did I mention Rebecca Guay's art is FREAKIN' BEAUTIFUL?
