Hopes and fear for The End Times: Archaon

Last night I pre-ordered The End Times: Archaon from my local GW, standing in line with the same crew that turns out for every End Times book. I'm going to miss that bunch. I'll see them, of course, but there's a certain camaraderie to the queuing experience when you're a nerd among nerds in a dedicated nerd space.

I say this on the assumption this is the last End Times book, which has all but been announced but I could be reading my tea leaves wrong. I do hope its the end because I want to know how this ends so I can get back to telling my stories for my armies in the brave new world that results.

And I do hope its a brave new world full of hope in which the coming darkness has been vanquished because that's how the story is supposed to end, especially as The End Times is as blatant a narrative collapse story as has ever been written.

Restoration of order! Heroic victory! Hope!

NOT a bleak nihilistic ending in which Chaos wins. I really, really don't want that and I am a player who absolutely loves Chaos. I've had Warriors Of Chaos, Chaos Space Marine and Lost And The Damned armies, I love the concept BUT, just to be clear, I don't want them to win on the macro scale because that would end the story.

Then again it isn't like GW doesn't like its nihilism. I just hope they realise that that's what 40k is for: the bleak, nihilistic universe in which progress is impossible whereas Warhammer Fantasy has always been essentially hopeful.

On the smaller scale I really, really want Archaon to die. I feel he's served his purpose and should get a proper death to cap off the story, the sort of closure he didn't receive in the Mark I version of this story back in Storm Of Chaos. 

The End Times army I'd like to see

Okay, this is not so much a wishlist as working out a grudge with Games Workshop. In fairness, though, it is my only grudge. If you're expecting one of those bitter anti-GW rants that inevitably involve the phrase “Games Workshop has ruined my hobby” followed by unnecessary numbers of exclamation marks this is not that. This is a bit of nostalgia that just might come to pass if things are going the way they seem to be.

You see, if there's one thing we can confidently predict about The End Time its that one of the supplements will be about Chaos. GW's basically doing an all-singing all-dancing remake of Storm Of Chaos and you can't really do that without a Chaos supplement of some sort.

And if that's what they're going to do they couldn't do better than resurrecting the Horde Of Chaos method of army building.

The way this worked, for the benefit of the young, is that in the hallowed 6^th edition we had two Chaos army books: Hordes of Chaos and Beasts of Chaos with Chaos Warriors and Daemons lumped together in the former. You chose your general (a Chaos Lord, a Daemon or a Beastlord) and then Core units like him stayed Core and other Core units became Special. So if you had, say, a Great Unclean One as your general then Plaguebearers and other Daemons were Core whilst Chaos Warriors, Marauders and the like became Special.

Specials and Rares stayed as they were, incidentally.

Having read the Empire vs. Nurgle Chaos Horde sections of Nagash it really tickled my sense of nostalgia but also my sense of annoyance. You see, in the Hordes Of Chaos days I loved the idea but all the Daemon models back then were metal and super expensive. These days they're all plastic but they've also been hived off into their own army and because I like to personalise my generals and get inside their head when I write them a pure Daemon army just doesn't grab me. So the army I loved was first too expensive and then not game legal.

I say this might happen because a) a Chaos supplement seems inevitable and b) the Undead Legion was a nostalgia trip to the old Undead Army Book of 5^th edition.

If nothing else, I'm a Bretonnia player and hope comes naturally to me. 

That's Quite Shiny: Morghasts and Spirit Hosts

Its that time of week again and the GW pre-orders are up! After two weeks of single model releases (albeit a very versatile single model last week) this week they're pushing the boat out with two models!

I'm being facetious because both kits are absolutely gorgeousy. To start there are the Morghast Archai/Harbingers, two models for £36 and they're huge by the look of them. They more than fill their chariot bases and those bone wings are fantastic. There are already people online calling this kit the “two for one Nurgle Daemon Prince box” and I won't disagree, seems like a great use for them.

I can't really say more about what I think of them because I haven't actually reached their background in the Nagash books. As such I don't know how well what they look like matches up with what they're meant to represents. That's really the big test of a model as far as I'm concerned.

Perversely it isn't the big winged bone things of awesomeness that are catching my attention this week but the rather more modest Spirit Hosts (3 bases for £16). I've wanted Spirit Hosts for my Vampire Counts for years but the standing miniatures were... well, look at them...

Good in their time, I am sure, but outdated now. If we could just get some decent Fell Bats that would pretty much complete the range. 

The End Times: Character death and product

(Page 190 now, I'm not usually this slow a reader but this is a book I really want to take in rather than rush through and forget. This post, as the title suggests, is about character death so beware THE MOST SERIOUS SPOILERS THIS WEEK though certainly don't expect an exhaustive list because that isn't what this is.)

Even if you set aside the wholesale annihilation of the Border Princes, Estalia, most of Kislev and everything Tilean north of Sartosa, The End Times: Nagash still has an absolutely epic amount of significant deaths in it. I've already held forth on the rubbing out of Heinrich Kemmler but by this point I have to concede that Warhammer's most vintage villain dying is small potatoes.

In a moment of mild cynicism my friend Matt and I wondered how many of these deaths would match up to old or out-of-production models but I'm... not exactly “happy” but shall we say “reassured” that this hasn't been the case. Yes, Kemmler's sculpt is ancient and all the Bretonnian special characters are either dead, missing or so transformed you'd expect a new model when the time comes around. Now I like the Fay Enchantress, King Leoun Leonceour and the Green Knight but they all have chunky, blunt swords and suffer various scaling issues, not least of which is Leoncoeur's Hyppogryph which is minute by the standards of modern monstrous mounts.

Yes, I can see why GW would perhaps want to shift them off the board or relaunch them with new concepts. Yet there are characters who've died that I can't account for with that: Volkmar received a new model two years ago and whilst Thorek and his Anvil Of Doom are old you'd think they'd want to keep the thing around to make a fantastic new centrepiece model someday.

So what I'm saying is that these are not totally cynical deaths motivated by cutting outdated product from the webstore. Some may serve that purpose, might even have been written in for that very reason, but there are others which appear to exist for purely creative reasons. It's a good sign, I feel.

Which all brings us the upcoming Gotrek & Felix novel Kinslayer, which promises to be “Book One of the Doom of Gotrek Gurnisson” and I only have this to say on the subject:

Please, Black Library, please kill him! I like the Gotrek & Felix novels as much as the next fan but this series needs to end. I remember the scene in Shamanslayer where Nathan Long was clearly angling to kill Gotrek and it would have been a fantastic scene, it was so well set up to serve all the characters perfectly. Frankly, the odds that any other death would match up is slim but the time has come to bite the damn bullet and put this franchise to sleep especially as by this point the series timeline is so screwed up in relation to the rest of the Warhammer world.

Gotrek's death is, actually, something to look forward to and since he is a fictional character with a twenty year time jump in his story he can prance forever through the Elysian fields of short stories and nostalgia novels if you so wish.

I am not one to cry “cash grab” at Games Workshop because I'm an adult with some understanding of economics but I do have a problem with marketing through false hope and if I'm promised doom I expect some bloody doom. 

The End Times: Equal opportunity inspiration

(Spoilers here up to the Battle of Skull Chasm section of Nagash Book I)

One thing I greatly appreciate about the way Nagash Book I is written is how none of the armies involved look like chumps. I've just passed the halfway mark and so far Nagash and his various minions have gone into battle against Bretonnia, Skaven, High Elves, Dwarfs, Night Goblins and more I've probably forgotten. All of this is to built up the Undead Legion and the various Mortarch's leading it but at no point does the opposition end up looking like idiots.

It's an easy temptation to fall into. You're marketing a particular faction, there's a natural desire to make them look great and this can spill over into making everyone else look like pushovers before their awesome might. The last Tau Empire book was quite bad for that, bigging up the Tau at the expense of making the Imperium look weak. It's not just unsatisfying if you happen to be an Imperial player, its dramatically unsatisfying. If the army can just sweep their enemies aside then what's the point of the fight?

We're back to Superman again, really. Peril is a generator of drama, invincibility is not.

This book is Nagash's day in the sun (sorry) but at no point does it make the forces the Undead Legion are fighting look like anything other than genuine threats. The undead will win because this is not only their book but the opening phase of The End Times so naturally the bad guys have to sweep the board.

To take an example: there's a section where Neferata and her Lahmian army fight Night Goblins. Neferata has a huge undead horde including her closest vampire handmaidens, ghouls, Tomb Guard and Neferata herself: the oldest vampire in existence. Her opposition are a mismatched collection of Goblin tribes displaced by her advancing army as she passes through the World's Edge Mountains.

This could easily have been a joke. The first vampire and her handmaidens versus a bunch of short, green, mushroom addicted cowards. Instead the chapter is a pacey little number that sets up the Goblin Warboss as a genuine threat who sets an ambush Neferata walks into through pure arrogance. It was a nice read and from a business point of view it might make people think about doing a Goblin army which is no bad thing because Goblin armies are ridiculously fun.

Actually, there's an earlier chapter where Mannfred Von Carstein takes an army into the Under-Empire and fights some Skaven, a chapter that made me want to dust off my old Skaven army before I remembered I'd actually sold it a few years ago.

(And of course there are the Bretonnia chapters which make me more determined than ever to work on that project, as much as the heraldry makes me want to tear my hair out in frustration every time I notice a difference between the two devices on one side of a knight. I do try to temper my perfectionism but with Bretonnia I find it hard.)

One of the main reasons this book exists, I feel, is to provide inspiration. There are a lot of pages given over to short potted backgrounds of individual characters and units involved in the battles. Any little bit of background can provide inspiration: my Tomb Kings army is based around a character who got a comedy box-out in their Army Book and a single line describing a “Legion of Legend” called the Zandri Blackshields. My first Bretonnia army was based on a name and a heraldry design from the Army Book's colour section.

My only problem, and it is far from unique, is keeping the same inspiration for any decent length of time. I've worked out about three different army lists since starting this book (Bretonnia, Skaven and a Lahmian themed Undead Legion, as it happens). I just have to remember that right now my Tomb Kings take priority.

The End Times: I feel like you've just killed an old friend

(Okay, so I've totted up everything I want to discuss about the Nagash set and having got as far as page 125 it looks like this is going to be a theme week. Today: SPOILERS for the Twelfth Battle of La Maisontaal Abbey, so page 65-ish, and tomorrow we'll move on to other, less Bretonnian and consequently less interesting topics. Just kidding, this whole thing is fascinating).

How important was this character? He looks like THAT and
they still remade him in Finecast resin.

Let's talk about narrative collapse and Heinrich Kemmler.

I was fond of Heinrich Kemmler. Okay, the model had a very old school pose which lead me to know him as The Dodgy Watchseller Of Darkness but I rather liked him. I first encountered him in White Dwarf's Return Of The Lichemaster campaign where he was the villain for a fun little series of scenarios pitting him and his undead cohort against Bretonnians and Wood Elves as he plundered barrows near Athel Loren. My own Master Necromancer, Berenice Von Gallenberg, was very consciously designed with Kemmler as a template.

I especially loved that he was a villain with a sidekick: Krell, a Wight King who had been a Chaos Champion in life, bestowed on Kemmler by the Chaos Gods in exchange for his soul. Yes, being a Master Necromancer wasn't evil enough for Kemmler: he also sold his soul to Chaos. They were a fun little team and I was very pleased to see them back together when the Nagash book described the army Arkhan The Black was taking into Bretonnia.

Then, on page 65, Arkhan killed Kemmler.

Kemmler, by the way, is one of the oldest characters in Warhammer and he was introduced in the original Battle of La Maisontaal scenario, the very first narrative scenario written for the game. That's where he was killed, too, in the explosion that destroys the Abbey. Got to love a little circularity.

This is probably the point at which a lot of gamers start throwing their toys out of the pram that a character they love has been removed from the board. Not me. I loved it. I'll miss the greasy old bastard, as the title of the post over-dramatically suggests I have considerable affection for him, but I take it as a good sign.

If one of the oldest characters, created in the oldest scenario, meets his end here in The End Times that's a massive symbolic sacrifice. What we could be dealing with here is nothing less than a complete narrative collapse scenario for the Warhammer World: a threat not to the fictional world but the world of the fiction.

Time to declare a bias: I love narrative collapse stories! Part of this love is that the collapse has to be preventable but the cost of restoring order has to immense, traumatic and permanent in order for it to matter. Joss Whedon is probably the modern master of narrative collapse, just look at any Buffy season finale but my go to is Graduation Day. Buffy can save Angel's life, defeat Faith and survive the Mayor's Ascension but that's only possible if she pays the price for each of those victories: she saves Angel only for him to leave her; without Faith she returns to the loneliness of being the sole Chosen One; and she has to sacrifice the basic premise of the show, its high school setting, in order to take out the Mayor.

To bring this back to The End Times: in the opening stages of this collapse alone we've lost one of the game's oldest villains; countries have been destroyed; kings have fallen in battle; and there are more significant character deaths after the point I'm talking about.

And that's the collapse, we aren't anywhere close to seeing what the restoration of order is going to cost us.

This is a very exciting time to be playing Warhammer.  

The End Times: Bretonnia ain't goin' nowhere

(Those seeking spoilers are not getting them from this post. Okay, maybe one, a little one. I'll be doing a full review of the Nagash books when I've finished them, this is just based on reading the first 80-odd pages of Book One and how I think what's been written affects my most favourite army ever, ever, ever: Bretonnia.)

I'm not one to give credence to the doom and gloom rumours of armies getting “Squatted”. Frankly, the Squats were a long time ago and they were, sorry if this offends, a crap idea. Space Dwarfs on motorbikes were never going to age well, it was very Eighties and one of those mistakes companies make when they think they'll be out of business this time next year. They got dropped more than twenty years ago and its time to get over it. Whilst we're on the subject: Black Templars players (and I am a Black Templars player!) gained more than they lost from being folded into Codex: Space Marines.

Still, the continuing false rumours of a Bretonnia release and the dropping of kit after kit from the webstore have made it hard to keep the faith. May the Lady forgive me, I did start to waver.

Then I opened the Nagash book.

Oh, its grim for Bretonnia just like any other Forces Of Order race right now but I've watched enough wrestling, seen enough faces pounded into the canvas to know where this is going. In this book and probably the next the good guys will get hammered relentlessly but come Wrestlemania (or, y'know, Middenheim or wherever this ends up) the good guys will strike back with faith, steel and gunpowder (less of the last one with Bretonnia but you get my point).

So, yeah, its grim: a major character has been taken off the board; four duchies are in ruins and another one seems to have been eaten by daemons; and La Maisontaal Abbey was destroyed but, frankly, that's just what happens to La Masiontaal Abbey. By this stage La Maisontaal being burnt to the ground is almost a running joke, what you put in an army book's timeline when you want them to have done something in Bretonnia.

But then...

Okay, NO SPECIFIC SPOILERS but the counter-attack is already underway. The book opens with a forty page prologue describing where all the races and nations of Warhammer are at the beginning of the End Times (or is the end of the beginning?). Most of the good guys get a ray of hope, something that they (and their fans) can cling to in the hard times ahead and Bretonnia's is a whopper!

My point is: this is not how GW addresses a concept they're going to junk. They have two strategies they've used in the past. Either they ignore the idea until it fades away (Squats and a lot of Rogue Trader-era background) or they completely, utterly nuke it in a brief piece of background. 80 pages in and this book has the highest mortality rate of any Warhammer supplement I've ever read: background characters and playable special characters with models have been done in, whole cities and small nations have been wiped out including one or two places that did once constituted the basis of an army.

Really, not everyone is going to be happy with who bites the dust including some much-missed old armies but as for Bretonnia (yes, I'm selfish!) they get such a build-up, such a huge revelation-ish (not entirely a surprise but still nice), such advancement from where they were left in Warhammer Armies: Wood Elves and such a huge part in the opening chapter with the whole La Maisontaal affair (and a couple of accompanying scenarios in the rules book) that I cannot believe GW has any plans to drop them.

In fact, I lead myself to hope this means something is coming in the not too distant future. After all: why write whole scenarios requiring a Bretonnia army and not have a Bretonnia army available? Right now the whole metal and finecast range are out of production and there are no knightly character models. 

Like I said, every good guy gets a ray of hope to see them through. 

Nine things to notice about The End Times: Nagash

It was... a dark time.

The End Times: Nagash is on pre-order, the White Dwarf is out and I have pre-ordered the slipcase edition. So what do we know from the various sources available: the magazine, the webstore and so on. This is all publicly available advertising so I'm calling no holds barred on spoilers as you could get most of this out of a £2.40 magazine or for free on the GW website.

Valten

There are, absolutely 100% confirmed in the write-up for the Nagash book, rules for Valten. I've been hoping for Valten to come back into canon since he rated a mention in Ask Grimbrindal a few issues ago. What's more, I checked the GW webstore and Valten's models (there were three) have disappeared. GW is big these days on not putting out rules for a thing unless they're going to produce the model since third parties can take advantage of that loophole so we can hope for a plastic Valten someday very soon.

Vlad

Keeping with the Vs: some of the background outlined in White Dwarf #30 mentions that one of Nagash undead lieutenants (or Mortarchs) is Vlad Von Carstein. Vlad! Von! Carstein! He's back, the big daddy of the Vampire Counts and he's heading for a face-off with Archaon.

Welcome to the Future

A box-out on page 30 pegs the resurrection of Nagash as happening in 2524 (Imperial Reckoning). That's two years after the static dateline Warhammer has maintained since the sixth edition.

Good Lord(s)

Like Storm Of Magic and Triumph & Treachery before them The End Times represents a slightly tweaked core rules set. This time around the big change is that in an End Times game you can take 50% of your army as Lord choices which makes sense since all the great lords and heroes are going to be on the field at a time like this. At 1,000 points that means Nagash can be taken in a bog standard 2,000 points army.

999

He likes nines, does Nagash. Of course there are nine Books Of Nagash, his rules allow him to know nine spells and he has chosen “nine beings of immense power” to be his Mortarchs. So far, from various sources, we know four: Vlad Von Carstein, Mannfred Von Carstein, Neferata (going to love to hear how that happened) and Arkhan the Black. Five more to go and we have to ask: was Konrad too bat-shit insane even for Nagash?

Fair Bretonnia

Call me desperate at this stage but Bretonnia gets a few mentions in the solicitations describing the new background and artwork from the Army Book cover is used in the second teaser video. Since a big civil war was going on last we checked in with them in the Wood Elves timeline where the rebel leader either was undead or in league with them I can hope for positive developments in the near future.

Body issues

Of his whole body, apparently, only Nagash's skull and a bit of spine that makes up his Pharaoh beard are original, the rest comes from “the noble body he possessed to re-enter the mortal realm”. Since this Nagash business is spinning out of last year's Sigmar's Blood campaign book could this be the fate of Volkmar, last seen being kidnapped by Mannfred as he prepared to enact a great ritual (the box-out with the new dateline mentions that it was Mannfred and Arkhan who performed the resurrection ritual).

The Golden Bastion of Balthasar Gelt

Don't know what it is but apparently its protecting the Empire from Archaon's Horde. I am very much looking forward to finding out what this is about.

The Big 1

Looking at the slipcase edition on the webstore the two books have numbers on the spines but the slipcase itself has a great big “1” on its spine. So there are more books to come. The End Times: Archaon next? Karl Franz?