Time for Change!

It’s well and truly Tzaanuary, with this week’s pre-orders up on the Games Workshop website! There is a lot of amazing stuff coming out over the next few weeks, it seems, which has once more gotten me excited to see the evolution of the Warhammer Age of Sigmar game and setting!

The new Battletome sounds like it has a lot of awesome stuff within its pages, not least the new lore that is set after the Realmgate Wars that we have been in for the last eighteen months. Following the triumph of Order in last summer’s global campaign, it sounds like the mortal realms have begun to settle down into something resembling normal life once more, with the rise of cities and so forth. However, the insidious forces of Tzeentch have taken a hold, which is going to be explored in the new novel, City of Secrets.

Something that really struck me about this novel is just how much it sounds like the Warhammer of years gone by – for instance, take a look at the abstract from the Black Library website:

Excelsis is the city of secrets, a grand and imposing bastion of civilisation in the savage Realm of Beasts. Within its winding streets and shadowy back alleys, merchants deal in raw prophecy mined from an ancient fragment of the World That Was, and even the poorest man may earn a glimpse of the future. Yet not all such prophecies can be trusted. When Corporal Armand Callis of the city guard stumbles upon a dark secret, he finds himself on the run from his former comrades, framed for a crime he did not commit. Only the Witch Hunter Hanniver Toll knows the truth of his innocence. Together the pair must race against time to save Excelsis from a cataclysm that would drown the city in madness and fear.

With its talk of city guards, witch hunters and even the mention of shadowy back alleys, it sounds like a story set in Altdorf or Middenheim that we’d come to expect as being a part of the Old World setting. Of all of the Age of Sigmar fiction that has come out to date, this is probably the story that sounds the most likely to appeal to fans of the old setting. £15 is still expensive for what I fear will be another slim volume, but I think I might well go for this, anyway…

Of course, there are plenty of miniatures on the roster for this week, including many of those from Warhammer Quest Silver Tower, which came out back in May last year, though it seems that the Kairic Acolytes have undergone quite the change in becoming a multipart plastic kit…

These guys do look amazing, and are certainly a step up from their incarnation in the boxed game. I’ve not really been following the rules for them, but based on appearances alone, I am sorely tempted to get myself some!

We’ve got a couple of champion-types, but the big stuff looks to be set for next week and beyond: the new Tzaangors, Changeling, Blue Horrors, and of course, the “miniature” that everybody’s talking about, the new plastic Lord of Change / Kairos Fateweaver, himself!

While the long-rumoured plastic Lord of Change is therefore real, let’s hope the similarly long-lived rumours of a plastic Keeper of Secrets can come true soon enough, as well!