AoS AoS: The Future, campaign book contents (updated)

I thought I'd start a new thread to stop the other getting so bloated, and move on now that AoS is officially up for pre-order.

Emphasis mine.

-So, new rumours: interesting news on getting a "bigger" rule book...

"via one of Gary’s birds 7-5-2015 - Rumours from Faeit 212.

Regarding a “Big Rulebook” for Age of Sigmar:

“I’m hesitant to call it a “Summer Campaign”, because a majority of the bigger stuff will come out after the summer is over, but the big new selling point of AoS is going to be vast narrative campaigns and story arcs. The Realmgate War is going to be the first of these campaigns.

Future campaigns might be more focused, but RGW is primarily going to a walking tour of the new setting. The release pattering is going to be formulaic: Here’s the new world (Sans Azyr and Chaos, we go to them during the final), here’s the evil force that’s making everyone’s life awful, here’s the good force that’s going to liberate them. Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde each get their own named faction, and The Horned Rat and Nagash will each get their respective 15 minutes of fame.

Once all the new factions are introduced, and the war scrolls proper are put up, that’s when we finally get the BrB. Don’t think of this as 9th edition, think of this as the first expansion to Age of Sigmar. It’ll be much smaller than a core rulebook, but larger than a codex, and will look and feel a lot like the Horus Heresy books from FW. There will be rules for list building, missions, campaigns, as well as all the “advanced rules”, more rules for gods, magic, heroes, loot, more terrain abilities, and special rules for games on specific realm. Then there’s going to be a few weeks of 40k, followed by a few weeks to wrap up the Realmgate War. The conclusion will take the form of an actual, factual summer campaign, as the forces of order launch an assault on the forces of chaos undecided on their home turf, all while death and destruction go around making sure everyone’s having a bad day."



-More information on the book via BoLS:

"Via multiple retailers:

WDW077-60 WHITE DWARF WEEKLY 77 (ENGLISH) White Dwarf $4
80-02-60 WARHAMMER: AGE OF SIGMAR BOOK (ENGLISH) Other Book $74
80-02-01 WARHAMMER: AGE OF SIGMAR BOOK (FRENCH) Other Book $74
96-10 STORMCAST ETERNALS LIBERATORS Plastic Box $50
96-15 STORMCAST ETERNALS LORD-CELESTANT Plastic Clam $33
65-10 AGE OF SIGMAR COMBAT GAUGE Hobby Product $33
65-12 STORMCAST ETERNALS DICE SHAKER Hobby Product $40
65-13 KHORNE BLOODBOUND DICE SHAKER Hobby Product $40
– WARHAMMER: AGE OF SIGMAR BOOK LIMITED ED Other Book $130

That last number in bold is the price, in US dollars."

-Further info re: AoS generally:

"via DakkaDakka’s ShaneTB 7-5-2015

“GW had a guy camped out at the Forge World open day whose entire job was to answer questions and talk to people about Age of Sigmar. His entire job is to go to shows and talk to people about the new game. For the first time I think ever they’re taking Age of Sigmar to Gencon, Comic Con, all the major wargames conventions in Europe etc. They’re throwing a considerable amount of money at putting this in front of new audiences who have never played fantasy before. He was also brutally honest and didn’t dodge any questions and answered everything he could. I’ll start with the negative stuff first.

This is it. There categorically will not be a ‘9th’ edition of fantasy. Age of Sigmar is the only thing fantasy related GW will do for the considerable future.

He acknowledges that the ‘funny’ rules are rather silly and don’t make for a great intro to the system for new people. His response was that the armies in the box set don’t have the silly rules. They’re there as kind of a celebration and final send off of the old warhammer armies, and he said you might notice the new armies don’t have the stupid noises or imaginary friends. This is deliberate, its designed that you’ll only generally play the old stuff with your mates since it’s a bit embarrassing to play in a public place.

The new races will look different to the old ones. Ooruks will not look the same as the orcs we currently have. As such, when they get round to releasing Ooruks, the old models will cease production. He did say that you can still use your old models as ooruks, but you won’t be able to buy normal orc boys again.

There will never be points values.

On to the slightly positive stuff then.

They are going to fully support all modes of play, and will be releasing rules to balance armies against each other. There will be narrative campaigns where your forces are picked for you for specific missions, and there will be a system for tournament players to balance lists that isn’t based on model count. He did not know the specifics of this, but said it is definitely coming.

The rules will always be free. He said that they are very very aware that fantasy had a massive buy in for someone to get started, as such the game was designed with the ability to play it with one box of models. There will be army books, but every rule in them will be available, for free, online. The books will just have extra background info and scenarios.

GW really are trying harder than they ever have before to make this work. If you’re at one of the shows go and talk to them. They want to talk to you about this, but especially they want your feedback on it. As he said, this is totally uncharted territory for them and they are totally open to rules revisions as they go.”

-Book contents:



"Some additional (optional) rules for the battlefields:
-Sigmars Storm-
Legion of chaos:
If playing chaos, you can roll 1D6 once per game if your general is
still alive to summon additional units:
1 – D3 Wounds to your general, if he dies he becomes a Spawn
2 – 1 Unit of Daemons, no heroes or monster
3 – 1 Unit of Daemons, no Heroes
4 – 1 Unit fo daemons
5 – D3 units of daemons, 1 hero max and 1 monster max
6 – D6 units of daemons, same as above

Bring down the Tyrant!:
if your general is order or destruction, one per game you can summon
Units from Stormcast Eternals.
Throw an amount of D6 that match the number of turns played.
ex: if you are in turn 3, throw 3D6 in turn 5 throw 5D6.
for every 3+ you can set-up 1 unit with the keyword “stormcast
eternals”, 1 hero and 1 monster max

-Sulfur Archipelago-
when playing on a fire realm battlefield you can use these additional rules:

Missle weapons that are shot from 12″ or more may reroll to-hit rolls of 1
every kind of scenerey blocks Line of Sight



New Age of Sigmar Spells
Wizards can cast Fireballs:
– casting value 5
– 18″
if target unit is 1 model it suffers 1 mortal wound
unit of 2-9 models suffer D3 mortal wounds
units of 10 or more models suffer D6 mortal wounds

Bloodgysier:
place 6 dice on the battlefield (numberd 1-6)
at the start of every herophase roll 1D6 to see wich gysier becomes active.
Units within 6″ of the gysier get D3 mortal wounds.
if you got a model with the keywords Priest and Chaos you can add or
substract 1 to your gysier throw.

– Realm of Life –
when playing on realm of life battlefields you can use these additional
rules:

Spontanious growth:
throw 1D6 at the start of your herophase, on 6 you may place 1 Sylvaneth
Wyldwood anywhere on the battlefield (must be flat surface)
if there are models in you way, remove them, place the wood and place
the models as near as possible to their original location.

Blooming life:
when rolling a 1 during a units battleshock test they dont flee. also
you heal any wounds sufferd for all models of this unit.

Wizards can cast Thornshield:
– casting value 6
– 18″
– until your next herophase all enemy units within 3″ suffer D3 mortal
wounds.

Breeze of Pestilence:
– Nurgle Wizards can cast this spell
– casting value 4
– 12″
– choose 1 friendly unit
– enemy units within 3″ of the chosen friendly unit have -1 to-hit
against that unit.
– you can choose to increase the casting value to a number of your
choice, for every point increased you can choose 1 additional unit

Hidden Foulness:
All scenery has the Hidden Foulness special rule.
during your hero phase throw 1D6 for every unit within 1″ of any
scenery, add +1 if the unit is Nurgle
on 5+ the unit suffer 1 mortal wound, nurgle units heal 1 wound

Father Nurgle, be with me!:
once per game when a Nurgle Hero dies you can throw 1D6
1-2: replace the fallen hero with a chaos spawn
3-4: remove the hero
5-6: the hero doesnt die instead he heals all wounds back to full life.




New Age of Sigmar Battalions:


Stormcast Eternals – Heroes of the Host
1 Lord Celestant (with or without mount)
1 Lord Relictor
1 Lord Castellant
0-1 Gryph Hound units

Special Rules:
add +1 bravery to every Unit of Stormcast Eternals within 6″ of any Hero
from this Battalion
if all 3 heroes are within 3″ of each other, they may cast Wave of Might
during the herophase, throw 1D6 for every enemy Unit within 3″ of this
battalions heroes.
on 4+ the enemy units suffer 1 Mortal Wound and must retreat if possible.

——
other stuff:
Slaanesh:
the book states that the dark prince’s throne is empty because he
dissapeard and his followers are fighting for it

there are artworks in the paint schemata section of Bloodwarrios
wiedling two Axes and Bloodwarriors with double-bladed 2H axes (1 blade
on top and 1 blade on bottom)
maybe we will get a box of bloodwarriors much like the once for
Liberators with different options and special weapons."

-Tzeentch cometh

"via birds in the trees 7-18-2015

– August will focus almost entirely on Chaos

– Look for Chaos themed terrain

– New Khorne boxed sets to build off of what is in the AoS boxed set – basically the Khorne version of the Stormcast Eternal kits we’ve seen these past few weeks.

– Look for Tzeentch to make appearance at the tail end of August

– Tzeentch is said to getting lavish attention this year in both Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40,000. Whispers of the new all plastic Lord of Change abound."

​

 

Ditto here. Somewhat hopeful, but until a better set of riles arrive, its 8th for me. I will admit that the idea of summoning our units onto the table has me intrigued greatly. seems closer to what the Undead used to do with raising skeletons...but with more diverse options.

 

I find myself moderately unamused.

Games Workshop seems to me to operate as if it is a local gaming club, that cobbled together its own rules, and was then writ large as a publicly traded company. It publishes its homebrew rules and continually expects all of us to be grateful for the favour.

This is not written anywhere but that is what it feels like.

That attitude + big corporate (did somebody say that Hasbro? is a major stockholder in GW) asking the little peons at GW to shift their fantasy line to a selling / marketing footing more like MTG may have resulted in this warscrolls business.

As far as what next? This feels like a practice the new rule mechanics (such as they are) and be good little club members phase. Once you have the new turn sequence down and have learned to play properly more will be revealed,... etc. ...etc. ( F&B &epic! )

It feels like we are supposed to play along, learn the GW style, and eagerly. breathlessly await what's next. Rinse repeat.

 

The “advanced rules”, more rules for gods, magic, heroes, loot, more terrain abilities, and special rules for games on specific realm" section should hopefully answer some of the queries about the box-set rules.

For example, why do we have to choose which realm to base our battles in?

Loot sounds interesting - could you thieve magic items/spells etc? I'm most hopeful for a balancing mechanic (too optimistic?) and a more engaging magic/heroes phase.

I don't want to keep suspending my judgement however. If they do include rules for a more involved system for magic/heroes/balancing etc why couldn't they release core mechanics all together? I understand campaigns expand upon certain aspects of the game so new spells, unit, terrains etc. is expected, but if it's there to make a more involved system I feel they should have released it with the "light" rules also - surely it makes sense to satisfy both new and experience players?
The only reason I can think of for doing this would be to A) not to confuse new players by having essentially two rulebooks out, but they could get around this with clear labeling "light rules"/"beginners" or some such, and B) to avoid it sapping revenue from the AoS rules release, but that's free anyway? Is AoS supposed to be a taster/gateway drug to get the attention of new players before offering them something more hardcore?

Questions...
Questions..

 

I like the warscrolls business, in fact it's what I was hoping they'd do for a long time. I think it's a lot better than having the endlessly out of sync core rules and army books, and all the looking up of rules involved. With this system it's so easy for them to release new models and new special rules, equipment, spells, etc whenever they like without needing to update the core rules or army books. There's nothing intrinsic in the system that prevents point values or big lists of spells and equipment, that's a separate issue.

 

- Starting a thread for this comment instead -

 

I had spotted that in the terrain section early on.

It says you need to dice for it, no less. An important decision? with no consequence — for now.

MTG has decks built around different flavors of land I think? ...water decks, ...air decks, fire decks.

 

Isn't that how it's always been? o_o

 

There is that.

 

This isn't really a rumour. I was talking to the manager at my local GW and he said there is the BRB coming out. It will be the same 4 pages of rules but a ton of different game modes, objectives, quests, that kind of thing. To give the game narrative and purpose.

 

Hopefully this will fix all the holes the 4-page rules.

 

Cool. GW did what they felt that they had to do, and they handled it pretty well. But what makes ll of this very interesting is Mantic's timing:

GW releases the rules for free, allowing players to decide whether they like it before buying (chill move, guys).

If not - and thanks to Mantic - players have two options:

Play 8th, or play KoW 2.0. Players can use the same models they've got. It was looking like the old guard would be stuck with 8th, but now they've got a pretty nice, modern system to go by.

Then there are players like me... who will probably do all of the above and enjoy the spoils of War.

 

New book release seems to be confirmed then. I expect official news will come this weekend earliest?

I expect it to cost £45-50 in the UK.

 

New rumours gives hope...to me at least.

 

The info laid out by Slanputin is close to my best case scenario of where this is all could have been going. Therefore it will turn to ashes, and darkness will reign for a thousand years.

Sorry guys.

 

Not from what I've seen. Tis mighty salty.

Do you want extra doom with that darkness? Let me help you half-empty that cup of yours.