Hadn't posted for a while, so while I'm grinding away at completing a full army, I figure'd I'd bring out some models I'd painted a few years ago and have since been bringing around as show pieces.
These are my Tzeentch-themed Accursed Cultists, and they remain some of my favorites for flesh and gore.
These are a gitz warband from Underworlds, which still contains some of my favorite collection of goblins and Squigs, the patented Poking Squig still being one of my favorite bits of flavor in all of AoS as a setting.
A really popular one because of the dogs, and a real fun one to do, this group was more an experiment in material weathering, trying to get metal, leather, and cloth looking realistically worn with rust, wear, and staining, with a little bit of a more organic attempt with the two puppers. While there's still places I feel I can improve on this group, especially with lighting, I still really like how they turned out, and they are also quite fun to play.
I don't know I'm not done talking about it. It's insane that I can't just uninstall Edge or Copilot. That websites require my phone number to sign up. That people share their contacts to find their friends on social media.
I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.
Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.
I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.
I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.
Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.
I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.
My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.
I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?
No more!!!!! I love my iPod with so much storage and FLAC files. I love having all my fics on my harddrive. I love having USBs and backups. I love running scripts to gut suck stuff out of my Windows computer I don't want that spies on me. I love having forums. I love sending letters. I love neocities and webpages and webrings. I will not be scanning QR codes. Please hand me a physical menu. If I didn't need a smartphone for work I'd get a "dumb" phone so fast. I want things to have buttons. I want to use a mouse. I want replaceable batteries. I want the right to repair. I grew up online and I won't forget how it was!
guy who is burnt out beyond recognition and can barely get through the workday just to collapse into bed when he gets home voice: I have got to make art again. it will heal me
This is not an Age of Sigmar blog and I frankly could not care less about whether the setting gets nuked again, but I think that if the recent rumors are true then it speaks to the fundamental defect in sunsetting Warhammer Fantasy Battle in the first place.
(For those of you that don't know or don't care, the rumors are swirling that the final draft of AoS v.5 has been submitted and it's going to rehash End Times to upend the setting and launch something "new" when it drops next summer)
A break because this is a long one.
First, a history lesson: Age of Sigmar launched in 2015 after years of declining performance from the Warhammer Fantasy Battle brand, which had become too bloated and too dependent on huge blocks of infantry, sold in boxes of too few models for too many dollars, to perform effectively as a core game. The barrier to entry was too high, even a small game required more models than what was packaged in a battalion box, and for some bizarre reason the most recent starter set featured Skaven - the premier trash infantry horde army. On top of all that, there was the perception that "modern" gamers weren't interested in slow-playing regimental combat rules with its emphasis on positioning and movement, which had been Warhammer's bread and butter for thirty years.
So rather than try to address any of these issues, lower prices or increase value, GW leadership at the time decided to blow up the setting in the end-of-edition campaign to end all end-of-edition campaigns - the End Times. The Warhammer World became the World-that-Was and in its place, the Mortal Realms became a vast, empty cosmology to be filled in, in a haphazard and slapdash fashion one battletome at a time.
Anecdotally, there's a widespread perception that there was an intent to do precisely the same thing to 40k but that backlash against Age of Sigmar forced a last-minute course correction that changed Gathering Storm to a galaxy-shaking event rather than a universe-obliterating one. I've never had this confirmed to my satisfaction, though, and it remains, in my opinion, one of the comforting lies of Warhammer oral history like the Blizzard Divorce.
But on the heels of this massive rebranding came an entirely expected and easily foreseen problem. Games Workshop still had licensed Warhammer Fantasy Battle projects in development, and Creative Assembly held the first presser for Total War: Warhammer a month to the day before Age of Sigmar launched, and less than a year later it was released to widespread critical praise and commercial success.
So after destroying the setting, Warhammer Fantasy Battle never really left the public consciousness, and Age of Sigmar with its He-Man-like cosmic fantasy never broke out of its tabletop niche. Warhammer grognards performatively destroyed their armies and competitors like Mantic stepped in to capitalize on GW's exit from the traditional rank-and-file fantasy wargame segment with games like Kings of War offering a place to put those armies to use, for those that hadn't. Some players even switched to Age of Sigmar because some game is better than no game at all, and eventually, AoS even started to resemble something like a real setting with its own identity instead of the kludge of rehashed concepts and recycled miniatures that it was. I'm told that people were generally positive towards the Kharadron Overlords, anyway, and some have even convinced themselves that Idoneth Deepkin were the long rumored but never realized Sea Elves.
And then, it what remains the biggest vote of no confidence in an active product line I've ever witnessed, Games Workshop announced that Warhammer Fantasy Battle would be coming back because the Old World was in development… at the beginning of Old World's development, four years ahead of release.
And the shitstorm that unleashed inside the company, I can't even tell you. I don't believe half the things I've been told, and I have no reason to distrust the people that told me. Suffice to say, there are names you might recognize that were either extremely pro- or extremely anti-Old World, and there are still sore feelings about it today.
So, yeah, I'm not surprised that ten years into the AoS project, Games Workshop is ready to reboot it again. I don't expect that they'll put a period on it like they did with WFB, but I can easily believe that on the precipice of Return to Armageddon, with the knowledge that the Eye of Terror do-over that was Gathering Storm reinvigorated Warhammer 40,000 after the malaise of 7th Edition, that they're willing to give End Times another go and remake the World-that-Was with contrived copyrightable brand names like Stormcast Eternals and Ossiarch Bonereapers instead of a badly drawn map of Europe with the "elfs," "dwarfs" and "orcs" scribbled in. These sort of setting-wide self-immolations are great for attention but rarely seem to materially improve the game, as evidenced by 40k's ongoing pivot back towards 5th edition characters and designs effectively ending the Primaris rebrand.
But maybe it's a massive psyop meant to drive views to Warhammer influencers' social media. Time will tell.
