Three New Army Sets Compliment Age Of Sigmar & The Firestorm Campaign
September 23, 2017 by brennon
Games Workshop, as you'll know from our 'What's Inside?' article which is now live, are currently opening up pre-orders for Season Of War: Firestorm, their new Campaign Set for Age of Sigmar.
You can find a big rundown of my initial thoughts about the set as well as more chatter about it on The Weekender as well. But, one of the big things about this set is that it continues to do some world building for the Great Cities of the Mortal Realms.
Allies In Arms
Three of the Great Cities have been focused on with these releases and they show off a great way to smash together both the Stormcast with some of their allies from the forces of Order. Leading the way we have Anvilgard.
These Stormcast Eternals have joined forces with the Aelf Corsairs that monitor the seas and make sure that trade is regulated...with an iron fist and plenty of daggers. It's interesting to have these darker souls hanging around with some decidedly dour Stormcast to give you an alternative take on the forces of 'good'.
As well as Anvilgard we also have Tempest's Eye.
Tempest's Eye matches together forces of the Stormcast Eternals with the Duardin and the Dispossessed of the Mortal Realms. High in the mountains, this band of warriors patrol the peaks and keep a watchful eye on the lands below.
Finally, for this selection of three themed sets, we have Hammerhal which you might know from the second Warhammer Quest adventure.
Here is where we get to meet the forces of the Freeguild, normal men and women who fight alongside the Stormcast Eternals in an effort to preserve some piece of humanity in this chaotic and bloodsoaked landscape.
Each of these forces comes with rules for using them as a themed army on the tabletop, and there's MUCH more inside the book for Firestorm where it goes into detail about alliances for Chaos, Death and Destruction as well.
Will you be picking up one of these themed forces and attempting to control the Flamescar Plateau?
Drop your thoughts below?
"Each of these forces comes with rules for using them as a themed army on the tabletop..."
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If only they could make more sets with Stormcast in them…
I know right ……*sigh* … we’ll just have to get them individually … *sigh
i like the sleek black boxes. always had a thing for dark elves, still throws me a little seeing them hanging with the good guys though.
At risk of sounding ignorant… (oh wait…):
Anvilgard? ANVIL guard? With Elves? At sea??
@beardragon14 is there perhaps something… unusual… about that name??
I know, I know, I already have that down as the faction that I won’t be looking at, although when I first saw the name I thought , Hello , hello this is your faction , but alas aelves (bleeerch)
I don’t like that all of those have Sigmarines in them. If you don’t want them and you only care about some of other races that are included to one of those boxed sets then you are out of luck with those boxed sets. GW is determined to push Sigmarines down everyone’s throats.
To me it looks like GW is only happy when everyone plays these guys. I don’t like to be forced to do something the way someoneelse thinks is the only way.
But maybe the Sigmarines don’t sell well enough so GW has to get rid of all the produced sprues.
Am I the only one who thinks “Firestorm” is not the most inventive name for a campaign system? *looks at Battlefront*
The box sets are quite disturbing, but maybe one could see them as two player boxes. One takes the Sigmarites and one the other included race…
Brits are obsessed with the word. Firestorm Armada, Firestorm Season, TY:Firestorm…
By my estimates assuming you buy from Dark Sphere, Tripple Helix – or Wayland:
Warriors of the Great Cities: Tempest’s Eye (Dwarf and Stormcast)
Retail Savings: £69.50 (spend £100)
Actual Savings: £50 (spend £75)
Warriors of the Great Cities: Anvilgard (Dark Elf and Stormcast)
Retail Savings: £63.50 (spend £100)
Actual Savings: £47.60 (spend £75)
Warriors of the Great Cities: Hammerhal (Empire and Stormcast)
Retail Savings: £75.50 (spend £100)
Actual Savings: £56.62 (spend £75)
(I realise Wayland’s GW discount is 20% rather than 25% and some items in these boxes are GW exclusives, but still… so you get an idea of how amazing the value is).
Really wish these were just Start Collecting Dark Elf, Dwarf and Empire box sets…
And while we’re at it I wish they’d stop putting solo “only ever need one” HQ models in their Start Collecting. They never learn.
It’d make sense, but then I can see why they dont want to make them too popular. When the inevitable fully-AOS’d replacement comes out, they don’t want to piss off too many people.
It’d be nice to see GW paint up the old Warhammer minis in new colour schemes, they are in a whole new(ish) setting after all.
I’d settle for being able to get a few more of the old Bretonnian and Empire knights. Blows me away that something as iconic as a knight on horseback has gone OOP. They were cheap enough when AoS came out and everyone was dumping their fantasy armies (paid $1.00 ea. for most models) but now $10.00 a model seems the going rate for rank and file figures on Ebay… too much to pay for bulk troops.
You can get any number of cheap medieval knights from Fireforge Games or Perry. Which is why GW canned Bretonia too I bet- they were barely fantasy to begin with, being Perry’s pet project from back iin the day.
I own most of the Fireforge range @poks . They are 11th century, and therefore kitted out in chainmail, rather than articulated plate armour. I therefore use their Teutonic and Templar knight models as ‘medium’ cav. Same goes for the Perry stuff: it is 28mm, but not heroic, so the size is similar but the heft of a heavy warhorse just isn’t there.
I liked the GW knights, both Empire and Bretonnian, because they were reasonably priced, had a lot of options, and the caparison yielded a lot of real estate for freehand designs.
@cpauls1
Without trying to take a dig at AoS (I haven’t read enough of the fluff to decide if I like the setting yet) I really do miss the more ‘classic’ leaning fantasy stuff. Recently I’ve started to lay the foundations for my gaming group to get into Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and a big reason for that is to revisit The Old World.
@irredeemable Same. I wonder if GW ever stopped to consider that people used their models for systems other than Warhammer or Son of Warhammer. None of their current range of cluttered fat models suits my purposes in that regard. I’ve got about 150 of the Bretonnian/Empire figures, and while that may seem a lot, there are four factions in my game world that use heavy cav/knights, so they’re still spread thin. I guess I’ll keep preying on unsuspecting or disgruntled gamers on EBay to flesh out my armies… although I’ve gone totally to Gamezone these days for knight command groups.… Read more »
GW has long since ceased to be interested in occasional/non-GW sales. Why cater to people who want generic fantasy with individual kits, when you can sell whole armies to people collecting WFB/AoS specifically? And Kharadrons prove the point I guess- apparently they were a stunning success despite people complaining how non-fantasy they looked. I’d love to have elves done in similar style instead of the scalemail and heart-gems stuff they have from WFB.
It’s nice to see starter sets (or whatever the heck these are supposed to be) that aren’t just a single race and their standard allies.
However I do hope they are doing a few that don’t include the sigmarines for once.
It’ll be interesting what the equivalents for the other alliances will be like.
Because they can’t stop with just the ‘good’ guys, right ?
And can we please get something similar for 40k ?
Space marines + imperial guard perhaps ?
I do like the dwarfs.
Don’t we all mate …. (Oops sorry … i keep forgetting about , the “not-quite-right-in-the head” amoungst us that will probably fancy the elves ….. *sigh* … the poor devils)
what’s wrong with liking both ?
But I think we can all agree that the sigmarines are worse … 😉
Yeah … I don’t mind stormcasts… we could have some releases for other armies though ……. like another death army , a goblin army, a clan Moulder army, another Ogre army, hell, maybe even some unique units for the free cities, or even my dream release ” A Root King” army (for those who haven’t been keeping up with the lore they are the reclusive Tree Dwarfs from the Plane of Life) ……and some people would probably like some elf releases too ………. there really is no accounting for taste.
These sets look great! Love the graphic design on the box art too!
Yeas now if only Romain’s freehand lessons had sunk through my thick head enough so I could successfully paint them on shields to unify the army …. I mean colour is a good start .. but i’m not quite up to those really cool designs. If anyone from GW is reading (as on their twitch channel someone admitted they lurk) … Transfer sheets please ……
I like these a lot. And to play the devil’s advocate, I think they need the Sigmarites in them. These sets are about more than just shifting stock through attractively-priced army deals. If that was all they wanted to do, they could release single faction boxes. Arguably they’d make more sense as they’d be more likely to appeal to people who just wanted that faction. Multi-faction boxes aren’t going to appeal to anyone who doesn’t want all of the factions. Part of it is no doubt trying to encourage people to start collecting a new army / faction by giving… Read more »
I’m with you @angelicdespot . If you read the some of the stories that are now set within AoS all of the cities have Stormcast forces stationed in them. The City of Excelsis has 3.
A lot of the battles now have a mix of human, Duaradin and stormcast on the front lines. in the latest book ‘Spear of shadows’ they are almost in trench warfare with the Skaven.