Extremely Vague Teasers from the Las Vegas Open

[ashdevon]

Trans dryads. Don't care what the game or system they look awesome. Sold.

[YellowStreak]

The tree elves warband for Shadespire, which is extremely beautiful and rockets right up to the top of the queue for my "Shadespire warbands I want" list.

They're pretty...but what are they? Tree spirits? Elf ghosts haunting/possessing trees? I don't understand the design concept....

The AoS "closest analogue to Wood Elves in a full faction" faction, Sylvaneth, are indeed basically elf ghosts (lots of the wood elves who died when the World that Was got nuked, in fact) possessing trees, fighting alongside treemen, dryads and the like.

(There are also still actual living Wood Elves, now known as Wanderers, in the lore too - descendants of those who managed to escape full-on descruction.)

Thanks for the lore update!

[The Other Dave]

They've been doing interesting things with the AoS lore - my recent favorite, for example, is the "Flesh-Eater Courts," which is the new Strygoi / Ghoul army. Only they're not just mindless ghouls and ghoul-adjacents, they've got a contagious madness that makes them think they're high-class lords and ladies doing high-class lord and lady things (while actually being ghouls) - so, like, one would imagine finding a treasure chest and picking out a beautiful chain and bauble for his lover, while it's actually a corpse and a chain of viscera. They have great feasts and hunts and fight evil monsters (in their heads) all the time!

For news, piggybacking on this thread I'll share the stuff teased at the 2019 Toy Fair - like last year (when they announced the easy-version blood bowl and the marines-vs-necrons game) it's all pretty introductory stuff, but most of it does have direct tie-ins with games I play, so I at least am interested, heh.

First was "Combat Arena," which looks like Shadespire-lite in the 40K universe - hex-based combat with cards and such - and while it might turn out to be a good game I'm mostly keen on the miniatures, and the fact that they say they'll all get a release for Blackstone in an adventure pack:





AdMech seemed under-represented in Blackstone's initial release to me, so an Enginseer and servitor are cool, the primaris psyker kicks ass, and new rogue traders are always cool - this makes the third in a year, I think?

Next is Dreadfane, which seems like a one-board intro version of Underworlds, interesting because it is billed as a full part of the Underworlds line (so may not be as rules-lite as all that) and apparently the two warbands in it are completely legal in the main game.

It's two sets that have been out for a bit: the easy-build Sequitors, which are very cool models, and the easy-build banshees, which are likewise cool but will suffer (I think) in UW for being extremely self-similar. But oh well!

[Primarch]

They've been doing interesting things with the AoS lore - my recent favorite, for example, is the "Flesh-Eater Courts," which is the new Strygoi / Ghoul army. Only they're not just mindless ghouls and ghoul-adjacents, they've got a contagious madness that makes them think they're high-class lords and ladies doing high-class lord and lady things (while actually being ghouls) - so, like, one would imagine finding a treasure chest and picking out a beautiful chain and bauble for his lover, while it's actually a corpse and a chain of viscera. They have great feasts and hunts and fight evil monsters (in their heads) all the time!

Have you read this article over on BoLS?
http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2019/02/ ... ndead.html

I'm liking the new 40K characters. The servitor looks aces.

[The Other Dave]

The only of those 40K characters I'm indifferent to is the Crusader, although lots of folks seem to dig him.

Re: Ghoul Chat, I hadn't seen that article, but yeah, that's been a pretty blatant subtext under the Flesh-eater Courts basically since they were reinvisioned for AoS. Putting fleur-de-lis on things has been the most obvious thing I think they've done yet, but the fluff has always presented them as at least "ghouls who think they're something very much like what Bretonnians were" if not necessarily "debased descendants of Bretonnians".

[The Other Dave]

A bit more info on that WarCry game from the GAMA trade show:

https://www.warhammer-community.com/201 ... from-gama/

Specifically, it looks like it's a free-movement (i.e. not hex-based like Shadespire) skirmish game, focusing on chaos warbands smashing face to gain favor with their gods. Apparently it'll have new mechanics and is aimed at (like SS / KT) "lunch-break" length games. Cool models too:







They look to have a fairly wide variety of different-looking armies, while still sticking to the "chaos marauder" aesthetic broadly. It looks like 6 different warbands out of the gate, and "chaos warbands competing for the gods' attention" is an evergreen concept if ever there was one, going all the way back to the Lost and the Damned books.

That said, it'll be a hard sell for me, as it seems like it might occupy a middle ground between Shadespire, with its strictly-controlled warbands and laser-focused bespoke ruleset, and AoS Skirmish, with its total freedom in army selection and a ruleset that is basically "a page of guidelines for how to use the core rules for small model count games". It's good that GW seems to be committed to living up to the actual meaning of their company name, though!