Warhammer Storm of Magic - A Book Review

After much dithering I finally decided to go out and buy the new warhammer supplement 'Storm of Magic'



The book is hardback and full colour throughout (like the new big rulebook and army books).  This is something I approve of even if it does increase the price, I like to keep my books a long time and treasure them, I like the added durabilty of hardback a lot.  The hardcover actually goes all the way round the book as well which is a bit odd, but I think works, the cover is held tight by magnets embedded in the book

The front cover opens out to reveal a magic spinner, which is a lot higher quality than I expected and if you're careful it should last a long time.  The back page has the ever useful reference sheet including stats for all the new monsters.  Throughout the book is the usual lavish artwork you would expect, I was particulary impressed with the two-page spread of the artwork form the 'Caledor' novel.

The book describes all the rules needed to play a storm of magic battle, when the winds of magic surge more powerfully than normal and mighty monsters come from the mountains to join the fray.  It resolves around the control of 'fulcrums' that are both the objective of the game and give wizards the ability to cast new awesomely powerful spells.

The book starts off with a nice background section describing a storm a magic and fitting them into the established background.  It then moves into the rules for the storm of magic scenario including fulcrums, magical flux (the spinner thingy) and the new cataclysm spells (every race gets at least one) and dwarf ancestor runes.  Next is a selection of frankly ridiculous magic items, including a floating watchtower and the dodecahedron of continental drift that allows you to swap over two modules on a modular gaming board, fun but nuts.  Next we get a few pages of pictures of painted wizards and then two other scenarios using the rules in the book.  Next is some rules for different types of sorcerous terrain just in case you wanted a bit more randomness.  And finally the last half of the book is taken up with the monster section.  This contains all the rules you need to add over 45 types of monster to any army and includes dragons and manticores as you'd expect, but also pack of chaos hounds, forgeworld mammoths and giants, and what I really like is they've bought back some older denzins such as great taurus, truthsayers, and even Zoats and Fimirs.  It also allows you to make pacts with undead or daemons and add them into a storm of chaos army.

Theres actually an awful lot of content in this book, and I think the inventive scenario desiger could make a lot out of this without having to go for a full on 'storm of magic' battle.  As for storm of magic itself, it looks a lot of fun, but I wonder how balanced it's is going be and I'm sure that with all the new options there are going to be some broken combinations.  I like the return of unridden monsters and I'm a big fan of objective based battles rather than just trying to wipe out your opponent.  I think its a high quality product with a lot of content.

My Menagerie

With all the beasties in Storm of Magic that can now be feilded in any army I've had a bit of a rumage and seen what I can come up with from my collection that I can bind to my armies, which turns out to be quite a bit, although some of them are very old and the paint jobs are frankly embarrassing.  I think we're going to play a 'Monster Mash' next week which will just be armies of monsters against each other. 

A lone Dragon Ogre, the Dragon Ogres are some of my favorite models in the range and I should really getting round to getting another couple to complete the unit.

A unit of the classic Harpies, I finished painting these just before the current Warriors of Chaos book came out and I couldn't use them any more, which was annoying to say the least.

Two Choas Spawn, painted for the two halves of my Warriors of Chaos army (Slannesh & Khorne).

Two units of Chaos Warhounds

A unit of Mixed Trolls, on the left we have a classice metal River Troll, in the middle is a Zombie Giant from an old board game called village of fear that I use as a troll, and on the right is the plastic troll from the Assault on Black Reach boxed set.

An old warhawk that gets used as a war eagle for my high elf and wood elf armies

This is where the painting quality starts to decrease, this is a classic dogs of war regiment the Giants of Albion

A Gigantic Spider from my small Forest Goblin army.

And finally a Dark Pegasus conversion I did as a kid, it's basically a horse with wings from the Heroquest gargoyle stuck on it, its amazing what I find in my games room sometimes, and that I once thought that this was good.

I've shown the following two before but have included them for completness' shake.

 Lava Dragon

Manticore

A Lone Wanderer

I was having a rumage through my collection yesterday and came across an old D&D board game Dragon Quest.  Its a sort of roleplaying light game crossed with something like heroquest, but what was interesting was that my copy came with 6 metal versions of the heroes as well as the standard plastic ones (I don't know if this was the same for all versions or a limited release sort of thing).  The metal minis are 28mm scale (i.e. warhammer scale) and vary a lot in quality, 3 of them are awful (the elf, dwarf & knight), 2 of them are ok (the rogue and the barbarian) but the last one, a wizard/priest sort of dude I really liked.  I figure he'd make a nice stand in Truthsayer, which have are being rereleased with storm of magic.  I am hoping to pick up the truthsayer and dark emissary in a bit as I was annoyed with myself for not picking them up last time they were out.  Anyway the finished model:

Storm of Magic Unveiled & Warhammer Wizards

Yesterday we finally got the details of Storm of Magic the new Warhammer expansion from GW.  The expansion seems to come in two main parts, magic and monsters.  Wizards can cast even more powerful spells by controling fulcrums (big tower things which GW have released some very impresive models for), which is ok I suppose but I've never been that into magic, what I'm really interested in are the monsters.

What this book allows you to do is add unridden monsters into your armies again.  Way back in 5th ed you could add unridden monsters to any army which added a bit of a random fantasy element to procedings.  I still have some monster models from this era, my dragon (above) and manticore (below) and I'm incredably chuffed that I can use them in my armies again.  It also allows some of the bigger recent cool kits (such as the araknorok spider) to be used by anyone (probably a sales ploy, but a good one).  I'm not sure about game balance, but the modeling and collecting possibilities are excellent, and I'm trying to work out an excuse to add a monster to my dwarf army.  The other great thing is that they've released some fantastic new monster kits (I'm very tempted by the chimera in particular) and are even rereleasing some old classic minis (suprisingly including the Chaos Dwarf Lamasu and Great Taurus monster, although without riders) and reimaginging of monsters long thought gone (e.g. the Cockatrice) this is the part of the release I'm most excited about.  The only problem I see is the price, the kits themselves I think are reasonably priced, but the book is £30, which is a lot, although I'm sure the production will be excellent.  I really want to add monsters to my armies though so I suppose I'll have to get it.

Anyway with all this talk of magic and monsters I've added a few pics of wizards drawn from my collection.

Grey Seer Thanquol & Boneripper.

An ancient Grey Seer and a Night Goblin Shaman from the Battle of Skull Pass boxed set.

 Two Dwarf wizards from way back in 3rd ed.

Two human wizards, on the left the Mordheim special character Nicodemeus and on the right an Empire wizard made from the plastic wizards kit.

And finally my favorite wiazard model, also from the mordheim range an elf wiard, this example is painted for my mordheim elf warband, but I'm also thinking of getting a second one to add to my high elf army.



oooOOOoooo that was unexpected

Well I was going to write today about the new trend in big plastic kits that GW seem to be bringing out with every release (the sphinx, aracknorak, hell pit abomination.. etc) and how I thoroughly approve of this trend.  The main reasons I love this trend is the fact that all these models have been awesome, they add a lot of fun to the game (whilst in my experience not being overpowering, afterall a cannon will still kill almost anything) and the price  for the kits has actually been reasonable.  However the rest of this post has been superceaded by the shock news today that an expansion for warhammer is due out in the summer called 'Storm of Magic'.

Whats Storm of Magic I hear you say.  Well we don't know much yet, but we do know there are gonna be new Terrain, Wizard and Monster kits and new kits are always good.  It seems to be an apocalyse style expansion, but we'll just have to wait and see.

So I've been playing warhammer since 4th ed. and I've seen a lot of changes over the years and 8th ed. was one of the biggest.  Overall I've been pretty chuffed with 8th ed. (full thoughts in a later post) and think the feel of the game has been changed for the better, however the one change I haven't liked has been the magic.  When we play it seems to easy to 6-dice a crucial spell and it will almost always work (who cares if your wizard dies if the spell wins you the game) so I'm not sure more powerful magic is really gonna help.  On the plus side I'm already excited at the prospect of giant new monster kits and hope that means more than just a generic drgaon (though of course that will be cool too).  It might be wishful thinking but I'm also hoping for some cool massive dwarf war machine, maybe an airship, golem or even a land ironclad.  Dwarves are by far my largest army (over 15,000 pts) and whilst I have the anvil of doom and the throne of power they could do with a proper big centerpeice.

All in all I think we're in for an interesting summer as far as Warhammer goes, well done GW.